Feb. 28, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| We have so many little legal battles that we have to fight on an ongoing basis that people never hear about. | ||
| The issue becomes when you can no longer actually do your work or run your business. | ||
| And with Facebook, this has been going on for a long time. | ||
| A lot of back and forth. | ||
| And then the biggest independent election stream ever, you know, in this election that we were doing, 15 million people watching. | ||
| That's not including whatever numbers on Facebook that Vanished, um, was removed. | ||
| And by the way, it's still up on YouTube. | ||
| there isn't even a soft copyright claim and Facebook never gave us any reason. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a comedian, a podcaster and host of Louder with Crowder | ||
| on Blaze TV, stay tuned. | ||
| Steven Crowder, welcome back to the Rubin Report for the first time since April of 2016. | ||
| April, 2016. | ||
| Well, I've had you on my show way more times than that. | ||
| So, thanks. | ||
| I've been on your show dozens of times, but somehow, literally, I mean, this is almost five years, man. | ||
| Well, I think you always wanted me to do it. | ||
| You always wanted to have people physically in studio. | ||
| And now with the COVID, you'll take what you can get. | ||
| And so thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| Yeah, it is good to have you. | ||
| You are doing a first here on the Rubin Report. | ||
| I have never had a guest on the show before who requested to come on the show with their lawyer. | ||
| And if I'm not mistaken, that is your Asian lawyer sitting right next to you, Bill Richardson. | ||
| Why did you bring your lawyer? | ||
| No, hold on a second. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| First, he's half Asian. | ||
| And Bill Richardson is the governor of New Mexico. | ||
| This is a half Asian Bill Richmond, but close enough. | ||
| Oh, Bill Richmond. | ||
| Wait, did I say Bill Richardson? | ||
| And actually, there is a little bit of a resemblance. | ||
| So, there is a little bit of a resemblance, one. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| The shape of the head! | ||
| I mean, sometimes my wife even mistakes me and calls me Bill Richardson if I eat a little bit too much Chipotle, so I get it. | ||
| No, I just had him on because, well, A, he's on the show quite a bit, and so it's different from having, you know, a lawyer on just saying, don't say that, can't say that, since he often acts like a co-host, and also to make sure that I don't screw up, since what we're talking about is, you know, we've talked about this, a lot of conservatives out there sort of, there's a little bit of sometimes crying wolf, where a post was removed, and so, oh, I'm gonna go to war with Facebook, but since this is an actual suit filed that could prove to be a landmark situation, you make sure that, you know, I don't just fly by the seat of my pants. | ||
| Okay, well, half Asian Bill Richmond, it's good to have you here. | ||
| And you know what, Crowder, I was gonna do some personal stuff with you, but let's shove it. | ||
| Let's just dive right into this thing, because the big tech censorship thing, I mean, this is the issue of the day. | ||
| It's like, it's not a issue, it is the issue, because it's our only way to communicate, at least right now. | ||
| And you're not happy with YouTube, you're not thrilled with Twitter, but you're really not happy with Facebook, huh? | ||
| Well, you know what's funny is actually, probably, obviously the people with who I would have the most grievances would be YouTube, right? | ||
| Sorry, guys, about the Vox Apocalypse. | ||
| I didn't intend for that. | ||
| Yeah, thanks for that, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Guilty. | ||
| But Facebook has been going on for a long time, and here's the thing. | ||
| I just want to do my show. | ||
| I just want to do my work. | ||
| Bill knows this. | ||
| He's been on retainer for a long time. | ||
| We have so many little legal battles that we have to fight on an ongoing basis that people never hear about. | ||
| The issue becomes when you can no longer actually do your work or run your business. | ||
| And with Facebook, this has been going on for a long time, a lot of back and forth. | ||
| And then the biggest independent election stream ever, you know, in this election that we were doing, 15 million people watching, that's not including whatever numbers on Facebook that vanished, was removed. | ||
| And by the way, it's still up on YouTube. | ||
| There isn't even a soft copyright claim, and Facebook never gave us any reason. | ||
| And then after that started throttling the page, saying that this page can only be viewed by your fans, and never gave us any reason. | ||
| And this is a long time coming, because To give you an idea, this dates back to, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. | ||
| I mean, when people talk about folks out there who do this for their money, you can go back in 2009 where I was doing videos on YouTube with a blue bed sheet. | ||
| There was no money. | ||
| There were no conservatives online. | ||
| It was really just sort of me out in the middle of the desert. | ||
| And I was very unlikable, very punchable face, rightfully so. | ||
| Jason Priestley sideburns. | ||
| People can go back and see it. | ||
| But Facebook early on, you know, I always, they approached me about advertising on Facebook. | ||
| And so we always spent a little bit of money to run ads on Facebook early on, to kind of grow the page. | ||
| And we established a business relationship. | ||
| And then at one point, for some reason, out of the blue, they said that I hadn't paid Facebook for two weeks worth of ads, that I was delinquent on payment. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| They continued accepting money for ads every week thereafter. | ||
| So they accepted money for ads all the way up until this two-week period. | ||
| said I didn't pay and then still had the same method of payment, the same card and bank | ||
| account on file and took money after that. | ||
| And so this is actually where Half-Faithion Pill comes in. | ||
| Then there was this article that came out in Engadget about, this was a Facebook whistleblower, | ||
| Gizmodo, I always forget them, Gizmodo, The Verge, Engadget, whatever, you know another | ||
| site where they claim to be tech sites but they write about how men can have periods | ||
| too, one of those sites. | ||
| So it was talking about how pages were being throttled by Facebook and they had this sort | ||
| of screen grab from behind the scenes and it included Ted Cruz, her president, Chris | ||
| Kyle Foundation, Breitbart and yours truly. | ||
| And I thought I wonder if this relates to something going on behind the scenes with | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| I sent Phil my chats, you know, your customer service chats with Facebook, you know. | ||
| Not only were they saying that my account could be removed in my payment, actually, so I could be in delinquency. | ||
| They'd potentially send this to creditors. | ||
| But what had happened was I sent a physical check, finally. | ||
| Payable to Facebook in Palo Alto? | ||
| One of those places. | ||
| They deposited it. | ||
| I had the receipt of them depositing the check and they were going to remove my page that week and potentially send this to creditors and still claiming that I hadn't made the payment. | ||
| The only way to remedy the situation and it just happened to coincide Gizmodo or Engadget? | ||
| Gizmodo. | ||
| Gizmodo was to have my lawyer reach out to them. | ||
| There was no other way. | ||
| I didn't want to do it. | ||
| I sent a check by snail mail, which they deposited, and they still were going to try and pipe me. | ||
| So that's how we met. | ||
| So before we get too into the weeds on all of the, no, well, there's a lot of interesting stuff here. | ||
| And I've been saying, and we've talked about it many times, that you have to fight the big tech front in many ways. | ||
| You have to fight it by building tech. | ||
| You have to fight it by legal means. | ||
| Whatever way you can fight it, I think you have to fight it. | ||
| But Bill, when you get the call from Crowder, and he's like, all right, let's do this. | ||
| Let's do this with Facebook, with any of these other companies. | ||
| I think a lot of lawyers would be like, no. | ||
| I just don't wanna deal with the headache. | ||
| I don't wanna deal with the massive amounts of lawyers that they have, the millions and millions and, it's not even millions and millions, it's just the endless amount of money that they have to fight me. | ||
| So what is it? | ||
| You're undershooting that a little bit. | ||
| I mean, Zuckerberg hasn't seen a million in probably a decade and a half. | ||
| You're talking about many, many billions. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So what is it about you that makes you wanna work with a guy like this and get into the fight? | ||
| You're crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's a combination of one being crazy, but also being convicted of the values that go into when businesses need to treat people right. | ||
| So when Steve and I first met, we had never had a conversation before. | ||
| We'd never talked about anything on any point whatsoever. | ||
| A mutual connection brought us together. | ||
| They had tried to reach out to other lawyers about trying to get this to happen back in 2016 when this originally occurred. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure you thought I was full of shit. | ||
| I definitely thought it was spam or craziness or, you know, you get a lot of calls as a lawyer about certain cases and you're just not sure about whether they're any good. | ||
| But when you started to put together these facts, it was at first, hey, you know, I wonder what's going on with this check. | ||
| And then when the Gizmodo article hit, you really realize that this is something much larger than just a accounting snafu or a company deciding that they don't particularly like a certain creator. | ||
| It becomes much more nefarious than that. | ||
| To the point of, even with regards to that Gizmodo article, there were Senate investigations and other things. | ||
| And this is back in 2016, before everything that we're hearing in the last couple of years and especially the last couple of months regarding Section 230 and really the new rally and war path that Facebook has been on against creators. | ||
| Bill, what would you say to the people that would say, hey, they're private companies, they can do whatever they want, they can work with whoever they want, if they want to cut you off, if they want to shut you down, they have every right to do it. | ||
| I say, you're right, and they're still wrong. | ||
| Because we're pro-business but anti-fraud. | ||
| America has been built on having companies and people, individually. | ||
| You can contract with someone, and you can say, hey, we're going to do certain things. | ||
| Operate cleanly. | ||
| You have statutes in almost every state that protect against anti-competitive behavior and unfair and deceptive trade practices. | ||
| And what you have from Facebook is exactly that. | ||
| Because what they're trying to do, and what they have been doing, is saying, hey, go create for us. | ||
| Create content. | ||
| We don't know how to create content, but we need you to create that content. | ||
| Bring your people, bring your followers, and with them comes the most valuable thing. | ||
| It's not really the eyeballs and ears. | ||
| Those are a byproduct. | ||
| It's the data. | ||
| It's the data points that they can use to sell the advertising. | ||
| Everyone knows that. | ||
| You know when you sign on for the free product, you're the product. | ||
| But in this part, that's where the fraud is. | ||
| Because they're saying that we have a platform where we uniformly and non-discriminatorily and without political bias enforce our policies. | ||
| They even said that back in 2016 in defense to the Senate letter. | ||
| They said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We never engage in political viewpoint discrimination despite what this whistleblower employee has said. | ||
| Despite what our written handbook says about these particular names. | ||
| And they sit in front of Congress as recently as last year saying, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We do not engage in that. | ||
| But when you look at the actual pattern and practice of who's getting shut down, who's getting throttled, despite the popularity of that content, despite the fact that we have a country who's craving certain values and viewpoints, even if they disagree, to at least hear them and disagree with them, you know that that's what's happening. | ||
| This isn't about saying, oh, I don't want to, I don't want you as a business owner to control who comes into your business or who uses your platform. | ||
| It's about saying that if you promise a product that says it's going to be open, that it's going to be enforced in a certain way, and you You just have to stick by them. | ||
| Yeah, and I think something, too, is... Crowder, what would... Go ahead. | ||
| I think something, too, is, you know, Bill's always known that I approach this as a business owner. | ||
| You know, when people see me complain about something publicly, you know, we do a deplatform this campaign or something like that, that's because the fight has come to my doorstep. | ||
| I want to be able to run my program and run my business. | ||
| And we even said, look, look, if you have different rules from what we've been told, tell us what they are. | ||
| Now that's one thing that happened at least at that time of the Vox apocalypse where they | ||
| said, "Okay, these videos need to be removed. | ||
| You need to change your shirt in your merch store," which was different. | ||
| They added guidelines. | ||
| Again, sorry because I hadn't violated any, but then I said, "Okay, your sandbox, your | ||
| rules understood." | ||
| With Facebook, they still haven't given an answer. | ||
| There's no answer, no reply, no reason for removing the biggest election stream that's | ||
| ever taken place in an online platform. | ||
| By the way, more people were watching, and I don't say this to brag, I mean, you know, we've talked about this for a long time. | ||
| A lot of people go out there and try and tout their numbers. | ||
| I want the content to speak for itself. | ||
| More people were watching us than Brian Williams and CNN combined, and Facebook gave no reason, to this day, zero justification for it. | ||
| At a certain point, you have to know what the rules are. | ||
| Didn't they just, was it Friday? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now they just totally demonetized the page, which is fine. | ||
| What was the reason listed? | ||
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unidentified
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None. | |
| None. | ||
| Whatsoever. | ||
| I've invested over the years since 2009. | ||
| We're talking about millions of dollars into growing a business. | ||
| I mean, if you build a building for whatever it is, a coffee shop, a pizza parlor, and then someone comes in and says, by the way, we're taking back the foundation. | ||
| No, I paid for that. | ||
| And we agreed to that. | ||
| And if you change the rules, well, first off, there's some legality there. | ||
| Tell me what the new rules are. | ||
| Do I need to pay for updates to the foundation? | ||
| What, do you have to corner the building? | ||
| Um, they haven't given us any answers. | ||
| So this is the only option available to me, not the first. | ||
| What would you guys say to all of the Media Matters people and the Vox people and the Daily Beast people who no doubt will be watching this, and they will say, but wait a minute, Crowder and your half-Asian lawyer. | ||
| When we look at the top 10 drivers of traffic to Facebook pages, usually four out of 10 have something to do with Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Three of them are the blaze, and then there's one lefty thing. | ||
| How could that then be the censorship of conservative voices? | ||
| That's actually, that's in spite of Facebook's policy. | ||
| Now, we don't know because we don't have access to the information and algorithms which are kept more secret than the Coke formula, or was it the 52 herbs and spices to the Colonel's chicken? | ||
| But I will say this, you know, people used to use this argument a lot about Michael Phelps. | ||
| They would say, well, he eats three Big Macs every day and he used to eat a bunch of McDonald's and this kind of stuff. | ||
| And people say, so therefore that must be the diet of champions. | ||
| No, he has the wingspan of an albatross and a size 19 triple wide shoe. | ||
| And so he can get away with eating McDonald's and still being the best swimmer in the world because of God-given athletic capabilities. | ||
| I would say, as it relates to conservative content, listen, The left has had all of Maine, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, really up until recently being the only one, New York Times, Washington Post, everything, right? | ||
| Places you just mentioned, Daily Beast, Vox, right? | ||
| And these places are all owned by multinational media conglomerates, like we've been in tussles with Disney, NBC, is it then, or is it Disney, ABC, NBCUniversal, Turner? | ||
| Viacom. | ||
| Viacom, all of them, never lost any of them. | ||
| And so I think that a lot of people go online, for the same reason this show has been as successful as it is, for something that is an alternative point of view. | ||
| Alternative to what? | ||
| Everything else. | ||
| And so the fact that people are craving truth and information that they cannot find anywhere on their television dial, That, conservatives shouldn't be faulted for that, it's | ||
| just that the left, listen, they've had every other platform and they're not nearly as | ||
| competitive here on Facebook right now. | ||
| So just because they're more successful doesn't mean that that's because Facebook's favoring | ||
| them. | ||
| And there's two, so to jump off of that Dave real quick is, is really what it comes down | ||
| to is that the in spite of argument is very true. | ||
| It's not about how much is actually being shown. | ||
| It's how much would have otherwise been shown if you had enforced your policies correctly. | ||
| And if at the end, Facebook's, one of their arguments, one of their defenses might be our platform sucks. | ||
| People don't like it. | ||
| That's why we're not getting that much views. | ||
| That's why the streams aren't doing as well. | ||
| Uh, you know, our, our stuff just broke down. | ||
| We have no reason. | ||
| Like it's just, we're actually really bad at what we do. | ||
| That might be one of their defenses. | ||
| So, but ultimately it's about what should have been, not about what they're actually providing. | ||
| Despite the fact that there are numerous conservative platforms and voices that are getting good traction despite the policies, it nonetheless doesn't speak to the second point, which is the individual question about certain voices. | ||
| There are certain voices that have gotten more attention in a bad way from the powers that be, whether it's YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, and Steven is one of those. | ||
| When you looked back at the 2016 Gizmodo article, that example there was based on only having four names of all the conservative voices out there at the time. | ||
| You had Rush, you had Daily Wire, you had Shapiro, you had all these other names that were out there. | ||
| You were out there, one of the names that was out there. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Fully in the conservative sphere at that point, but when you have all those names and only a few are targeted, you have to ask the question of why. | ||
| And so our lawsuit is not about saying that there's this widespread, top to bottom, every single person is there saying they hate conservatives. | ||
| What it's about is saying, if you can bend the rules without giving full business disclosure, if you can commit fraud that is anti-competitive, one media company Complaining to another media company. | ||
| To shut down a third media company. | ||
| If all of that is legal, then you don't have laws anymore. | ||
| You don't have an equal playing field that the law guarantees. | ||
| We're not saying that we want to change the rules. | ||
| We're saying enforce the rules as you have stated them. | ||
| And if not, be honest about what the real rules are. | ||
| Tell us what you're doing. | ||
| Tell us how you're enforcing it. | ||
| Don't wait until it's a Senate inquiry or a Facebook whistleblower. | ||
| Though I will tell you, people are coming out of the woodwork to talk about what's going on, and it's only getting worse. | ||
| Yeah, Crowder, as a guy that's been doing this forever, don't you kind of admire the elegance of their evil in a certain way? | ||
| Like, I have no doubt that you see the same things that I see. | ||
| Like, there are certain weeks when they let my videos be seen. | ||
| Like, you're out there, we're getting the normal numbers. | ||
| Or Twitter, you know, suddenly I can get thousands of retweets on everything and then there's suddenly a week where I'm purging followers and I get five retweets on something. | ||
| Like, that, sort of elegance by design of just keeping us all on our toes constantly so that we can't be like oh there's the smoking gun because every freaking week something else happens yeah uh no game has to respect game when you look at me like okay kind of like right now with the Merrick Garland like remember me i'm like | ||
| That's one for you, Biden. | ||
| Okay, all right, fair play. | ||
| No, you're absolutely right. | ||
| I mean, listen, the reason that we haven't been hurt on YouTube, for example, with traffic, so this is separate from Facebook, is because we know that you can be beholden to algorithms, to search, to browse, to suggest it. | ||
| And so we plug every time we do a show, look, just tune in Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. | ||
| Eastern. | ||
| We've set a schedule. | ||
| That's not something that's really typical of online content, doing it live at a set time. | ||
| A good portion of our traffic comes from people just bookmarking the page, so that we aren't in Matt Drudge, before he went, you know, who Matt Drudge is today. | ||
| He said, don't be beholden to these social media ghettos. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that everybody else has had to come up with contingency plan over contingency plan for their business model, but we have. | ||
| We've always had to try and look around those corners. | ||
| So, the fact that we have, for example, the fact that we have, you know, millions of people tuning into these shows on YouTube, That's not necessarily because we're showing up in browser-suggested all the time. | ||
| It's because we have planned for this scenario where we are never suggested, and so we've had to act accordingly. | ||
| And listen, that makes us more competitive. | ||
| And I think that conservatives in general are pretty industrious. | ||
| I don't know about the top ten, but I can tell you what traffic we were getting at Facebook once upon a time versus now. | ||
| I can tell you how often we were trending versus now. | ||
| I can only tell you about my experience, and then I'd like to compare notes with Facebook, but they don't answer at all, ever, period. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, well, Google, I mean, forget us, right? | ||
| Like, forget us, the guys that do this for a living, but if the average person had a problem with their Gmail account, who are you gonna call, right? | ||
| Like, there's no phone number. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure nobody you can call. | ||
| Wojcicki will get right on that. | ||
| Yeah, she'll be all over it. | ||
| Does any of this just seem like the obvious end game of where all of the kind of social justice lunacy that you and I have been screaming about for years was gonna go? | ||
| In other words, that these companies have chosen the social justice ideology. | ||
| They've chosen the equity ideology. | ||
| They've chosen to have, you know, their board have a certain amount of trans people and gay people. | ||
| And guys like you and I, we rail against this stuff. | ||
| So it's like, this shouldn't surprise us, right? | ||
| That they would try to go after someone like you. | ||
| No, it doesn't surprise me. | ||
| I've always sort of had a target on my back. | ||
| That doesn't surprise me. | ||
| What does surprise me is the flagrant disregard for, like Bill was laying out, just basic honest business practices. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If you change the rules, let us know. | ||
| I don't think we violated any rules with the election stream. | ||
| I mean, you know. | ||
| So Bill, what if they're just like, okay, so like the lawsuit moves forward, there's a little bit of discovery, and they're like, oh yeah, it turns out, you know, some random engineer did actually click a switch, but we're not gonna do that anymore. | ||
| Is that enough for you guys? | ||
| Like what's the goal of the lawsuit? | ||
| And a random guy at accounts payable, and a random guy at legal counsel who doesn't answer. | ||
| There's a lot of random guys over there, you know? | ||
| That's a thing. | ||
| It would have to be, you know, 30 different strange coincidences all the way across many years and across many different departments. | ||
| You would have to have just literally had every single person screw up continuously, which is why I said, again, one of their ultimate defenses might just be, we're really, really bad at everything that we do, which would completely be against everything they say in their quarterly stockholder statements. | ||
| You know, when you're talking to your shareholders and you're telling them about what your company is and how you do it, all we're asking for are these types of disclosures. | ||
| And really, when it comes down to the relief, the first thing is, stop doing what you're doing. | ||
| Stop saying that your policies are A, and then actually enforcing B. And if they say, well, we're not doing that, we point all the way back to 2016 of the pattern. | ||
| And here's one of the things that's really interesting. | ||
| It's not something that is different from what they have done in other ways. | ||
| They've done it with app creators, where they've said, "Come, come and join us. | ||
| Come and look at our platform. | ||
| Come make these things, create your games, create your apps." | ||
| Now, people are gonna be very, very excited about it. | ||
| We'll give you all of this data. | ||
| Then all of a sudden they decide, cut the data stream, charge more. | ||
| Make you buy ads. | ||
| Again, all of that is what it comes down to as a bait and switch. | ||
| If you've got a platform and you've got a business, just be open about it. | ||
| But if your business model is premised on tricking creators into putting content on your system to get their followers to come and then you shuttle those followers to the ads using the data that you got from them under a false premise, consumers and creators are all being duped. | ||
| And I will say this, look, one thing that I'll stand by is, I'm not the most talented guy in the world, but everyone kind of knows that I have a reputation in this industry of being a Clydesdale more than a show horse. | ||
| I really do work really hard, and I've always tried to stay on top of understanding how these platforms work, and I've really had to learn how these algorithms work. | ||
| And when it's based on performances, look, there's a reason that these people approached me and assigned a one-to-one person to manage the accounts and say, hey, we'd like you to run these ads. | ||
| When YouTube, sorry, when Facebook launched, this is a funny story, you tell me if I'm saying anything that I can't say. | ||
| Facebook launched show pages for a while, right, where it was like show pages because they wanted people to be, they wanted, because they wanted to compete with YouTube. | ||
| And you remember this, a lot of people out there outside of the industry don't know this. | ||
| If you post a YouTube link on Facebook, it doesn't get seen. | ||
| It really has to bust through, because that's competitive to Facebook. | ||
| They have their video player. | ||
| And we were there. | ||
| We saw when that changed. | ||
| So at one point, they were creating show pages, where they were saying, OK, which video content is doing | ||
| really well, where we just sort of want to draft in and claim | ||
| success for these successful video endeavors? | ||
| And they wanted to then put these videos-- | ||
| they wanted to format Facebook so that these show pages would | ||
| show up in timelines, kind of give it favorability. | ||
| Well, they reached out to me directly. | ||
| And we had several conversations. | ||
| We're like, well, look, we see, look, the numbers are impressive. | ||
| And we really like how you're showing. | ||
| And then the second they watched the content, they said, oh, yeah, no, you're not eligible for a show page. | ||
| So when it was just based on numbers on paper, they wanted me to do a show page. | ||
| Same thing with YouTube advertising, where they've come and they've set up account managers to say, hey, we want to come in and show you how to advertise, and you know what? | ||
| Could you teach us? | ||
| Because we don't know how you're getting these kinds of interaction rates. | ||
| Literally, interaction rates. | ||
| And I just say, you know what it is? | ||
| It's content that people want to see. | ||
| There's no trick. | ||
| I don't have any tricks to advertising. | ||
| It's just getting it in front of people. | ||
| Look, when content like this, and a lot of conservative content I would imagine, gets in front of people, it wins. | ||
| We have an interaction rate on Google, to give you an idea, where when you can skip an ad, you know, on YouTube before a video, all we ever did was just run my videos as pre-roll ads. | ||
| No advertising. | ||
| We have an interaction rate of over 50%, meaning 50% didn't click skip ad. | ||
| That blew my mind. | ||
| I click skip ad, even if it's a movie trailer for a film I want to watch, just out of muscle memory or principle, I still don't know the answer. | ||
| And they go, can you tell us what you're doing? | ||
| Because they'd never seen it. | ||
| That shows you the power of the ideas. | ||
| And when I, or when the Loud Earth Crackers show, has just been a number on a piece of paper, or on their computer, no one really uses paper anymore. | ||
| Maybe they do, I have no idea. | ||
| Seems like they like killing trees. | ||
| But they say, okay, let's look at the pages that are doing the best so that we can claim success for this endeavor with our new show page, or with our advertising sort of targeting. | ||
| They've always reached out to me. | ||
| When they find out what I'm about, Line goes quiet. | ||
| This, Dave, is actually not just limited to Steven. | ||
| I mean, any page, you know, maybe folks who aren't as big as a Dave Rudman have, they're doing it personally. | ||
| They're getting the email from the ad account folks and the show page folks that are saying, hey, come create more content. | ||
| Hey, spend some money on ads. | ||
| This is how the ads are going to work. | ||
| This is how you're going to reach people. | ||
| If you do these things, you're going to get it. | ||
| And all we're saying is that Facebook is putting a thumb on the scale, but not telling you that the thumb is there. | ||
| That's what it was in 2016, that's what it's been in 2018, '19, and '20, | ||
| and that's what we're seeing today. | ||
| So Bill, you hit something before that I think might be the answer here | ||
| that I'm sure you're working on, which is that if you could just get the shareholders | ||
| or the board, but I guess the shareholders more, to see this stuff and go, | ||
| "Whoa, actually, our shares are worth less "because we're discriminating against or suppressing," | ||
| whatever you wanna call it, guys like Crowder, and that hurts our bottom line | ||
| 'cause those are clicks with ad dollars associated, that it's almost like you need the shareholders | ||
| to turn on the company. | ||
| Is that part of the strategy? | ||
| That's certainly something that's important. | ||
| It's not part of our direct strategy, but it's one where the more eyeballs and ears that are seeing what's going on behind the scenes, anyone who has an interest in Facebook is going to go, why are you limiting this particular content? | ||
| But one of the reasons that might be a financial reason is because of the fact that there are so many media companies that are these ad buyers. | ||
| They're the ones that are actually paying Facebook and generating all the revenues. | ||
| Where are those companies based? | ||
| Where are your NBC Universal's based? | ||
| Where are your Viacom's based? | ||
| Where are your Disney's based? | ||
| And who are the type of people making decisions there? | ||
| And that gets back to a point that you made about whether or not the wokeness lunacy that's going on and all of the different social justice warrior issues, if that's the pressure. | ||
| It is highly ironic that companies that often rail against capitalism will use capitalism to force other companies to hurt smaller companies. | ||
| That's really what's happening here, and that's the media company telling another media company, hurt another media company because we don't like them. | ||
| And I think it's never, like Bill has said, it's never been a plan of this strategy. | ||
| It sort of was accidental with the Vox Apocalypse, though. | ||
| Remember, we found out afterwards, we're like, why aren't they reaching out to us? | ||
| Turns out that Alphabet took a nosedive of their stock after the Vox Apocalypse, because a lot of people were upset. | ||
| And, you know, sometimes the market puts people between a rock and a hard place, where it's, OK, either appease the people who work, in your Northern California offices, or piss off half of the most powerful nation on Earth. | ||
| And that's where they often find themselves. | ||
| Crowder, when that adpocalypse thing happened, and it had a lot to do with you got into a little skirmish with this Carlos Maza guy from Vox, who happened to be the same guy who lobbied Pete Buttigieg to not do my show, and runs around calling everyone white supremacists, And the rest of it. | ||
| Does that asymmetry drive you nuts? | ||
| They can say whatever they want about us all the time, we know that, and they can do whatever damage they want to our businesses, but then, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he's like a privileged partner, or whatever they call it, on YouTube. | ||
| While he can say whatever he wants about us, but if we were to do the same with him, you lost your ad rev for what, a year on YouTube? | ||
| More than a year, right? | ||
| I don't know exactly what it was. | ||
| I will tell you this though, to be fair, I never really focused on that guy, and I hate to correct you, but really, this was just one of, or several videos in a series of criticisms of Vox. | ||
| You know, Vox would do their Explained series. | ||
| So we criticized Vox All the time, just like we do with John Oliver, just like we do with Vice, just like we would do with Slate, and this was really kind of edited out of context. | ||
| What it was for me, my problem there, was NBCUniversal, Vox, one of the most powerful companies in the world, who also happen to have a lot of advertising dollars that they spend with a company like YouTube, trying to get the independent content creator removed. | ||
| And by the way, also they co-produce a show, YouTube and Vox, | ||
| along with there's licensing agreements with Netflix. | ||
| So for me, it was really important. | ||
| And I think this resonated with people as opposed to individuals. | ||
| It was a David versus Goliath, where it's like, look, it's easy to say, | ||
| hey, we have a big following and a big show, but we've built this over years. | ||
| And NBC, Universal, Vox is trying to take that away because they were late to the party. | ||
| They wanted to keep everything off of YouTube. | ||
| We were there when they were copyright claiming everything and not putting anything on YouTube, and then they wanted to compete. | ||
| And not to, you know, listen, I hate to do this with Fox News, but I was at Fox News for four and a half years. | ||
| My own interviews that I would do on Fox News, at this point I maybe had 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, were removed when I would ask, hey, can I upload them? | ||
| I said, sure. | ||
| And they said, you know what? | ||
| We actually don't want these things going on YouTube because we don't think it has a longevity. | ||
| And now, of course, you see it's one of the very few conservative outlets that's consistently featured on YouTube because they have that buying power. | ||
| And they're trying to play catch up. | ||
| This is really about legacy media being behind the eight ball and making up for it with dollars. | ||
| And what I would like to see, this doesn't relate to our legal case, but this relates to the ecosystem. | ||
| Look, YouTube will never be Netflix. | ||
| And if they want to understand their business model and how they survive, it's not by letting legacy media try and corporatize YouTube, right? | ||
| It's by focusing on and supporting their content creators. | ||
| But... | ||
| All of these, you know, Turner, NBCUniversal, Disney, ABC, there's really about five companies. | ||
| They will do anything they can to remove competition. | ||
| What's Brian Stelter gonna do? | ||
| Compete with you? | ||
| Compete with me? | ||
| Honestly, I still want to know what that guy did to get a show. | ||
| Chris Cuomo, I get. | ||
| His brother's governor? | ||
| Good-looking guy. | ||
| Brian Stelter is untalented, unattractive, and uninformed, and he gets a show with no experience? | ||
| Well, what's he gonna... That's why that guy, more aggressively than any other on-air host, lobbies to have people removed and deplatformed on a regular basis. | ||
| It's because they're afraid of competition. | ||
| So do you think you could ever get to the point of popularity, numbers, monetization, whatever you wanna call it, that you would just be like, all right, I don't wanna do the legal route anymore, or we're not getting anywhere, or it's a strain and stress and everything else, and I'm just gonna be free, meaning I'll be on the blaze, or whatever else there might be, and just not deal with this nonsense? | ||
| I could probably do that now in the sense that if we were just talking about surviving and keeping my people employed, I could probably do that now because we have a lot of people who support us and who join up with Mug Club. | ||
| But we've always said that we want to make sure that the supported content is what allows the free content. | ||
| For me, my goal is always to have as many people out there Who at least are, whether or not they're conservative, free speech advocates. | ||
| You know, for me, I'm a simple guy. | ||
| I'm pretty right-wing, but First Amendment, Second Amendment, especially coming from a country that has neither, Canada, are pretty important to me. | ||
| To give you an analogy, you know, I've always talked about this where I'm big into firearms, but I'm not a collector. | ||
| I'm not a maven. | ||
| What I would rather see out there are 50 people with one firearm than one person with 50. | ||
| I want more people comfortable around firearms. | ||
| Those who've taken basic firearm safety courses, who understand how firearms work, because once that happens, you know, you can no longer have Joe Biden go up and say an AR-14 is a machine gun. | ||
| First off, you meant AR-15, not 14, and it's not a machine gun. | ||
| It's a semi-automatic just like any other handgun. | ||
| So for me, it's really important to be on YouTube and be on Facebook and be on Twitter to reach new people and to create New free speech advocates and new firearm owners, new conservatives, people who will understand what this country was founded on and continue those values forward. | ||
| So could I leave, take my ball and go home and make enough to live comfortably with the people who will support us? | ||
| Probably, but we're not going to be reaching any new hearts and minds. | ||
| So for as long as I can be on those platforms, and even if I'm just a thorn in their side, that's a good thing. | ||
| That tells me that we're reaching a lot of folks. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| Bill, what about just the culture of fear around lawyers? | ||
| I sort of hit on this earlier, but just when you're talking to your colleagues or other people at your firm, or just when you're talking to Crowder's fans, I mean, you gotta be somewhat afraid that they're gonna bust into all of your emails and whatever else we can think they can do, and probably what's worse is the stuff that we can't imagine they can do. | ||
| There's certainly a concern about that. | ||
| I do get a lot of communications from folks. | ||
| I think the ones that are the most damning of where we've come as a culture is when I get emails from law schools across the country from law students and I get Instagram messages and tweets and sometimes calls and they're just like, wow, I can't say anything about this. | ||
| I can't remotely show that I'm conservative. | ||
| There are few that are willing to do it and they pay the price for it. | ||
| I'm just going to get my degree, work quietly, and move along. | ||
| The number of folks who, you know, I show up and they go, oh wow, they sent me an email. | ||
| I go, I didn't even realize that you were conservative. | ||
| You just never came up in committee meetings or organization meetings or at a, you know, bar function or whatnot. | ||
| And because of that culture of fear, and to a certain extent, you just have to say, it's okay. | ||
| I'm going to accept whatever might come down that pike. | ||
| Deal with it, because you know when you're dealing with these companies, that's certainly going to happen. | ||
| You know, fortunately for me, we've got a broad base of different clients and different folks who are supportive and really just say, great lawyers. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Let's hire them. | ||
| Let's go get it done. | ||
| I think the folks like Steven have to really step out on a limb and have, along with other folks who are even willing to talk about these types of things, knowing that all of the strings are controlled out of Menlo Park in Palo Alto. | ||
| And you know what, on that note, for example, Gina Carano, I can say this now because it's public. | ||
| Look, I've known this for a very long time about Gina Carano. | ||
| Gina Carano has followed me, we've invited Gina Carano on the show, and she has watched the show. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| So now I think we'll probably have her on the show. | ||
| And by the way, she decided to appear on Ben Shapiro's show, but one thing Ben Shapiro can't claim is an actual teenage crush on Gina Carano is a brown belt in jujitsu. | ||
| People know I come by it honestly, and I used to watch every single Gina Carano fight, including her getting manhandled by Cyborg, who tested positive for steroids, where effectively Gina Carano was fighting a man not named Fallon Fox. | ||
| But I digress. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Hold on, hold on. | ||
| You're saying Ben Shapiro was not a brown belt in jujitsu when he was a kid? | ||
| I'm saying Ben Shapiro didn't know Gina Carano until this happened, unless he's a Star Wars nerd. | ||
| I followed Gina Carano when she was fighting in the theater leagues. | ||
| I gotcha, I gotcha. | ||
| But I can tell you right now, Off the top of my head, I could give you another eight to 10 Gina Carano's. | ||
| Actually, and some other people, including people in the sport of MMA, including people who would be current top 10 paid in Hollywood, who would never come out, and I would never out them. | ||
| They're still out there, but I can tell you Gina Carano was one of them, and I certainly hope that we have her on the show. | ||
| But that's so sad to me, because the thing about Gina Carano, I think this was a bigger story than people even realized, because yeah, you have a lot of people who've been deplatformed, but there are a lot of sort of conservatives who, guilty, abrasive and they're easier to hate. I think when | ||
| people actually tune into what we do they understand that people sort of go, "Oh, | ||
| well this is actually basic bitch conservatism. The heart in this is | ||
| really not malicious at all." But Gina Carano was the first example of someone who | ||
| was not really outwardly political and nothing she said in any capacity | ||
| could be interpreted as There was no malice to any of it. | ||
| As a matter of fact, and I think that generally speaking, Holocaust or Hitler comparisons are ill-advised, I think she was as thoughtful and as tactful with that post as one could be, because she wasn't saying, it's like being a Jew, being a conservative in Hollywood, which she was saying is, it started by having your neighbors snitch on neighbors. | ||
| And I think that's the important thing. | ||
| People use this term sort of cancel culture. | ||
| And it didn't exist, by the way. | ||
| I pitched the book for Change My Mind. | ||
| I've talked about this many times to conservative publishers. | ||
| And there was no cancel culture, so I had these. | ||
| But I described SJWs. | ||
| I described leftist activists. | ||
| And I described people who were sort of liberal by default. | ||
| And sort of what ended up becoming the alt-right. | ||
| But I just had different words for it. | ||
| And every single publisher turned it down and said, this book is silly. | ||
| No one will ever want to do a Change My Mind book. | ||
| What's so crazy about this, I don't want to say crazy, what really makes me sad is when people say, good, good for Gina Carano being removed, and you look at the content of what it is that she said, that's people saying, good, I hope you never have the ability to provide for your family again. | ||
| This is desensitizing people. | ||
| This could easily be desensitizing people towards something much more sinister. | ||
| Not saying it is, not saying that's part of some conspiracy plan, but when people are saying, cancel that person, they're supporting it. | ||
| They're supporting the ending of people's livelihoods, which by the way, is exactly what they're doing with COVID lockdowns in businesses and saying, how much is your life worth? | ||
| Hold on a second, you're talking about a 0.17% whatever-it-is death rate, which by the way is the exact number that those California doctors were banned for communicating on Facebook and YouTube because at that point it was the Imperial College of London saying it was a 2-4% death rate? | ||
| Hold on a second, you're saying how much is my life worth? | ||
| Because we have 60% of businesses now that will be open in April that won't be open in September. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| How much is a livelihood worth? | ||
| People right now are so quick to go along with removing someone's ability to provide for their family forever. | ||
| And if you get people okay with that, I don't think it's that much of a leap to say that you get desensitized to dehumanizing people to any degree. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I actually, I was away when the whole Gina Carano thing happened last week, so I didn't address it on the show, but I'm completely with you, just for the record, Crowder. | ||
| Like, there was nothing remotely anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish or anything like that that she said. | ||
| She was actually making a pretty thoughtful point. | ||
| And the irony, of course, is the people that were trying to destroy her, they call everybody Nazis, which would be a far worse cultural appropriation or labeling than anything she did. | ||
| Bill, go ahead. | ||
| There's a little bit of a frog in hot water, right? | ||
| The whole analogy, if you throw the frog into hot water, he'll jump out. | ||
| But if you just turn the heat up, you desensitize the frog, he'll stay in there and boil to death. | ||
| And that's what we're looking at right now. | ||
| A couple episodes, you talked about a CNN reporter who was able to say, oh, well, under the First Amendment, you can't lie. | ||
| And you eviscerated. | ||
| You had a great argument about why that was wrong. | ||
| But you made a really good point. | ||
| You actually made two points, one expressly and one implicitly. | ||
| You said, "She's wrong. | ||
| We should let her know that she's wrong. | ||
| Now I'm not saying cancel her," or anything like that. | ||
| And that's the way you engage in a respectful communication. | ||
| You can be harsh and critical about someone saying something incorrect, especially a legal | ||
| correspondent on a national news network, but you can also say, "That doesn't mean we're | ||
| erasing her from her business, from her livelihood," or anything like that. | ||
| You made that subconsciously. | ||
| It's built into your value system to say, I'm not going to engage in cancel culture, but calling people out is the important part. | ||
| And that's part of what the important part of staying on YouTube and being able to call these, these platforms out about what they're doing and how they've converted themselves into publishers, how they've converted themselves into being editors and content creators themselves. | ||
| And gotten all the way around two thirties to be able to say, Hey, We have other voices and people want to hear those other voices. | ||
| Just play by the rules. | ||
| Right, and when they say these rules are being enforced equally, they say regardless of political viewpoint. | ||
| That's a really clever thing, right? | ||
| They just did this recently with, to use a non-political example, PewDiePie and what's that kid's channel? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| In other words, it was a selective enforcement of satire. | ||
| It was a diss track on YouTube aimed at a kid's channel. | ||
| And they said, do we believe that this violates our guidelines? | ||
| When they say these are applied equally regardless of point of view, well, hold on a second. | ||
| When you say that these are applied equally, and by the way, if you say that you believe people can't change their biological sex, which is a medical fact, we're not talking about gender here, gender theory, Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, they say, well that's a violation of our guidelines. | ||
| There is no way to apply that equally because you've eliminated anyone who has an opinion different from yours. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| We, for example, we had one video on YouTube where I was doing a change my mind, And there was a male to female trans person, very newly male to female trans person by the way, meaning like that day, who assaulted me and threw a homeless man's lunchbox at me. | ||
| And then we did a play-by-play and we laughed. | ||
| At the way this trans male to female ran away in Z's high heels because it was funny. | ||
| And that was considered more offensive than stealing a homeless man's lunchbox and throwing it at me. | ||
| And by the way, I don't even think I was talking about genders at that point. | ||
| I think I was talking about male privilege. | ||
| So this is, to say that that's applied equally, there's no way to apply that equally. | ||
| The deck is stacked from the get-go with those rules. | ||
| And then you go a step further where, with Facebook, they haven't even clarified what the rules are or what the violation is. | ||
| So we know that based on the publicly available guidelines with companies like YouTube, and I would say they do a better job than Facebook to give them credit there, that it's not really applied equally. | ||
| And then when you don't have them publicly available and they don't give any rationalization for removing content, look, maybe you're out there and you think that Facebook is right. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| We don't know if we think they're right. | ||
| We can't know what the justification is. | ||
| Right, so that gets to my point earlier about how social justice, critical race theory, all of these bad ideas that have now infected all of these companies, they're in direct combat or conflict with reality. | ||
| So when you say that there are biological differences between men and women, which everyone knows to be true, every biologist knows that to be true, but that doesn't fit in with the SJW thing that these companies have now put into their terms of service, they've put into the way they behave with their boards and everywhere else. | ||
| It's almost like this is a totally intractable problem because their reality actually is different than the reality that we've known for thousands of years. | ||
| You know what's funny, though, is actually, I will say this, and people say, well, why do you focus on the trans issue so much? | ||
| Well, I will say this, because as a Christian conservative, I believe when you say that there is no fundamental difference at all between men and women, that men and women are completely interchangeable, I think that's a real problem for our civilization. | ||
| I think it's a real problem if we're not saying that, hey, there are moms, there are dads, there are boys, there are girls, because you raise them differently. | ||
| Not only that, you support them differently. | ||
| As a community, you find out how to help them differently. | ||
| But I will say this, there is something kind of funny, we were talking about this earlier on my program this morning, about how things that you would say would be considered toxically masculine or patriarchal or | ||
| be considered anti-woman unless it's trans. So for example, you know, the 55 year | ||
| old, the 50 year old man who's playing college basketball in the girls league or | ||
| Fallon Fox who lived as a man and fathered children into his 30s and then, you know, | ||
| beat up women identifying as a female. When you read their stories what | ||
| they say is, "You know what? When I came..." | ||
| When I came out to my teammates, you're 6'8", 245 pounds, by the way. | ||
| I think they deserve an Academy Award if you think you were coming out. | ||
| But they said, my teammates never knew this. | ||
| I was just reading this today on air. | ||
| My teammates never knew this because my level of endurance, strength, my lung capacity, I was the same as other women. | ||
| Well, hold on a second. | ||
| What are you implying there? | ||
| Or if you look at a lot of times what a trans male to female is, well, it's really perpetuation of these unrealistic beauty standards. | ||
| It's usually someone dressing like a Barbie with a blonde wig and over-the-top makeup, right? | ||
| And usually they end up getting breast implants. | ||
| These are things that are thought of as toxic masculine stereotypes until you say, Well, I'm trans and people didn't know because I'm weaker, I'm smaller, I'm slower, I don't have the same lung capacity, but look at my blonde wig and makeup, right? | ||
| That's what a woman is. | ||
| It distills both sexes to the stereotypes that we're supposed to reject, only now we have to embrace as a part of this very, very new, by the way, sort of gender experiment. | ||
| And I think that that's also really important as it relates to the speech guidelines online. | ||
| Because when you effectively are saying that half of the medical community are not allowed to voice an opinion, that your rules are being applied equally, then I just disagree as to what equally means. | ||
| And then, of course, we get back to the idea of Facebook, where they don't even say what it is. | ||
| We still have no... What happened with the stream? | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| Just give me an answer! | ||
| And Dave, on that point, I mean, when you look at the rules themselves and the way they've been set out, even the very basic statement of saying, you know, we won't allow hate or harassment based on race, religion, political ideology, and you say, okay, so you're not allowed to make fun of white male Christians. | ||
| Okay, got it. | ||
| All right, is that... Wait, do they say political ideology? | ||
| I'd be shocked if that's in there. | ||
| So they used to say political ideology, and then in 2016 they actually gave statements to the Senate saying, we don't actually do it. | ||
| And that was the thing that they trumpeted everywhere because it wasn't in their particular rules, but they were being called out about it. | ||
| And they said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| In case anyone is concerned, we do not do that. | ||
| I mean, it's in the response letter. | ||
| It's in their articles. | ||
| Multiple spokespersons said, we do not do that. | ||
| And that is the thing that they have advertised ever since. | ||
| And they even say it now. | ||
| You have Mark Zuckerberg saying, no, Senator, we do not engage in any kind of ideological considerations. | ||
| We do not suppress conservatives. | ||
| And I'm not saying they suppress every single conservative. | ||
|
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No. | |
| That's not a hill anyone needs to die on. | ||
| It's a question about individual voices and what they're doing and the rules as they have them. | ||
| But how do you define these things? | ||
| They can't define them. | ||
| And yet, in the end, the creators are the ones that are abused because of it. | ||
| And by the way, this is just as much for liberals as it is for conservatives. | ||
| I mean, keep in mind, look, this is something also to consider. | ||
| When people said Donald Trump was anti-press... | ||
| He had the power of the executive. | ||
| I was actually disappointed that Donald Trump didn't do more on Section 230. | ||
| Didn't do anything to actually get anybody. | ||
| Oh, he revoked some people's press pass because they asked some dishonest questions for a day and a half? | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| I don't want, if there's a Republican in power, I want that potential tyranny regardless of who's wielding that power to have some checks and balances. | ||
| This is just as much for future liberals because I don't want them to be removed from the platform. | ||
| Outside of criminality, meaning actually calling for violence or physical harm to people, right? | ||
| These are things that we have laws for these things. | ||
| This is just as much for liberals as it is for conservatives. | ||
| It's just really hard for liberals right now to see that because even though Donald Trump was president for four years and even during that time, they see themselves as the ones in power because you have really three to five companies who are more powerful than any national government that has ever existed in the world before today. | ||
| And that's Facebook, Twitter, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon. | ||
| So does that worry you or does that push your libertarian stuff to the end? | ||
| Because I mean, you know, I agree with you on that. | ||
| And it's like, if you're breaking the laws of the United States, then you got a bigger problem than the platforms, because then the government's going to go after you. | ||
| So that should clean up most of that. | ||
| But you hear, you know, there were all these conservatives saying, oh, Trump had to do something, Trump had to do something. | ||
| And now I still hear some of them saying it, but it's like, wait a minute, I thought you hate Biden, so now you want the government involved, even though it's not your guy anymore? | ||
| Like, it sort of just basically flipped everybody's beliefs on top of themselves. | ||
| My position has always been very consistent, whereas I just want the first step is them deciding. | ||
| I want them to publicly declare if they're a platform, if they want to be treated as such, or a publisher. | ||
| Because they're kind of benefiting from both sets of rules right now, and you have to pick one. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Either you are liable for the kind of content on your platform, in which case you can take these actions, which they take, which act beyond the law. | ||
| And in some cases, by the way, don't even follow the law because there's a different set of online law. | ||
| To give you an idea here, you know, we had for a long time in this country, okay, an idea of what investigative journalism was. | ||
| That no longer exists. | ||
| It no longer exists because, first off, we have single-party consent laws. | ||
| YouTube and Facebook don't necessarily follow those laws. | ||
| So you can say, okay, we're finding someone who's a corrupt member of Congress or, you know, a senator or running for president, for example, and we're in a single-party consent state, which means that legally I have the right to record this conversation, and I catch them in an act that is deliberately harmful, right, that is deliberately manipulative, something like that. | ||
| I mean, for example, the Access Hollywood tape. | ||
| You can follow all these laws. | ||
| And it can be removed, because YouTube says they want to. | ||
| It can be removed, as we've seen, on the same day, from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, even though you've followed the laws, and then, if you've broken the laws, it can be allowed to stay up. | ||
| That is a very, very scary thing. | ||
| We've had this happen, where we've interviewed people on the street, right? | ||
| And we were already in single-party consent states, where we had the right to interview people, but had them sign release forms to be on air with these questions. | ||
| And then YouTube said, actually, someone said this was a violation of privacy. | ||
| We said, well, this is a public protest. | ||
| Well, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy. | ||
| And by the way, we have them, if we want us to send you the form, we have them on camera confirming and consenting. | ||
| They say, doesn't matter, because now the rule is, if anyone ever regrets being on camera, We're going to remove it. | ||
| Well, how wonderful that would have been for Nixon. | ||
| How wonderful for Anthony Weiner. | ||
| Investigative journalism doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| And that is scary because these people can effectively create the laws. | ||
| And that determines what you can and can't see. | ||
| And it determines who and who is never held accountable. | ||
| Yeah, Bill, is there anything you can do or look into on the moving goalposts portion of that? | ||
| So for example, you know, after 2016, basically every lefty YouTube channel ran for four years and not just them, CNN, everybody ran with, you know, Russian collusion. | ||
| He's a fake president. | ||
| Hillary Clinton said he's illegitimate, the whole thing. | ||
| But you guys know that if we were to even discuss anything about this last election, that both of us could, you could probably get booted for being my guest right now. | ||
| Is there anything you can look into on that? | ||
| Well, it's certainly something that we're going to be looking at very closely because | ||
| of the fact that this case involves fraud. | ||
| It's a question of are you taking policies and enforcing them one way depending on the | ||
| speaker versus the other. | ||
| Now, folks on the left will say that's exactly what you're supposed to do. | ||
| If someone who has one skin color says something and someone who has a different skin color | ||
| You have to view them as very and completely different, right? | ||
| That's actually a fundamental value of certain groups in the country who tend to be lobbying these platforms and publishers about how they're actually engaging in their business. | ||
| But what we're saying is, no. | ||
| Your rules say you will not treat the speaker differently based on who the speaker is or their characteristic, and that's the rule that we're trying to say. | ||
| So of course we're going to be looking at saying, well, why did you decide to let this content stay up, but yet you took this other content down because you said that it was hateful or harassing or going against a certain race or religion or whatever it may be, or you thought that it was not speaking, uh, Exactly how you should speak about COVID or wasn't parroting the current version this week about what the WHO is saying the rules are on masks or vaccines. | ||
| And you go and you find those hypocritical examples. | ||
| Every one of those is absolutely relevant to not only our lawsuit, but it's very relevant to all of the state governors and attorney generals who are going after Google, Facebook, and the other platforms based on their anti-competitive, anti-trust lawsuits that are going out there right now. | ||
| Bill, let me ask you something else before I let Stephen jump back in. | ||
| On the legal side, I mean, I'm a firm believer at this point. | ||
| You know, I'm in crazy LA, California right now. | ||
| We don't know for how much longer, but at least as we're recording this, that lawsuits are gonna be what actually turns this country around, which I hate to say, although it probably sounds good as a lawyer, that it will ultimately be suing Gavin Newsom. | ||
| It will be suing Andrew Cuomo And getting all of the stuff on Discovery that will show that there was no science behind lockdowns and the arbitrary decisions they made, and it was much more about politics than everything else. | ||
| Do you see that as the way that we get out of this endless half state of lockdown that we're in? | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's going to be that way. | ||
| It's going to be your investigations of Cuomo. | ||
| It's going to be your investigations in a variety of different states. | ||
| It's looking into what was said publicly. | ||
| And this cuts both ways. | ||
| I mean, this is really important to say. | ||
| We're talking about universal principles here that cut across all ideologies. | ||
| Being pro-business, but being anti-fraud. | ||
| Requiring businesses to give adequate disclosures. | ||
| When you're a politician, saying the truth based on the information you have. | ||
| Maybe you're mistaken. | ||
| People get mistakes all the time. | ||
| Governments make mistakes all the time. | ||
| Biden didn't mean to say the N-word, E-R, clear as day, but he did it! | ||
| And you own up to those mistakes, right? | ||
| And then you live with the consequences. | ||
| Fortunately, we do live in a country that says that we will allow this to happen. | ||
| However, there is a dangerous precedent being set right now. | ||
| And you kind of talked about it earlier, which is a canceled culture as it relates to even the legal field, right? | ||
| Whether or not certain lawyers or law firms should not be allowed to do it because of who they voted for or the positions that they espoused. | ||
| And again, we're not talking about crazy policies. | ||
| We already have laws in place. | ||
| We already have disciplinary rules. | ||
| in place that have worked for decades and decades and decades. | ||
| But to now say, well, wait a minute, I don't really like their voting record. | ||
| I don't really like the policies that they're talking about. | ||
| So now they can't even bring a lawsuit. | ||
| Now they can't even show up in court. | ||
| Who is going to represent the individuals who are saying, wait a minute, these companies | ||
| need to do something different? | ||
| Look, we have no qualms about the fact that there's going to be an uphill battle between | ||
| California federal court, a California-based court of appeals, and eventually having to | ||
| California federal court, a California-based court of appeals, and eventually having to get to the | ||
| get to the Supreme Court. | ||
| Supreme Court. | ||
| We know that that's going to be the case. | ||
| We know that that's going to be the case. | ||
| We know that the misinterpretation of Section 230, which is titled "Good Samaritan," it | ||
| We know that the misinterpretation of section 230, which is titled Good Samaritan, it says | ||
| says you have to have a good faith basis for removing the content in order to have liability, | ||
|
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you have to have a good faith basis for removing the that there's going to be an uphill battle between a | |
| not a complete blanket of saying, "Well, we woke up today and we decided to just cancel | ||
| this entire page." | ||
| That's how it's being interpreted right now. | ||
| And we know that this is the only way that it's going to happen. | ||
| I still have full confidence in exercising the legal remedies that we have in this system | ||
| if for some reason, and I'm guessing right now it's not going to happen, that the legislature | ||
| doesn't get something, Congress doesn't get something done to change it. | ||
| Whether it's Biden, whether it's Trump, whether it's the candidate in 2024, whether it's any | ||
| candidate in any Congress, whether it's the Senator of the House, everyone needs to come | ||
| down with these universal values of saying that businesses need to be held liable when | ||
| they're violating laws, not have blanket protection like 230 is currently being interpreted, and | ||
| simply can't engage in rampant, ongoing fraud of every person who's on these platforms. | ||
| Sorry, I was going to say, what are those? | ||
| Are those caiman? | ||
|
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What are those boots? | |
| Those shoes? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Stamp leather? | ||
| He's wearing some spiffy shoes. | ||
| Sorry, Dave. | ||
| I got distracted by his shoes. | ||
| I have two points to make, but I want you to go first. | ||
| Well, I was going to say that as you were laying that out, Bill, it reminds me of years ago when all of the nonsense started with YouTube very early on and I finally got a contact. | ||
| I'm sure, Crowder, you remember at first when you finally get a human being there somehow. | ||
| And I get somebody. - We all sign. | ||
| Yeah, and you finally get an email address and somebody actually said, | ||
| whoever the YouTube partner manager was, whatever you wanna call him, said, | ||
| because I kept saying, "Hey, you know, I'm getting these emails every day | ||
| and hundreds of tweets every day. | ||
| People are being unsubscribed from my channel." | ||
| So they said in an email, I still have the email, they said, "Oh, well, after weeks, we looked into it | ||
| and there is a bug on your channel and we're gonna see what we can do." | ||
| Now, then, of course, I don't hear from them for a month or two. | ||
| Finally, right back, and then I got a form letter email saying, this person no longer works in this department, and you can do everything through the, you know, just like the manual submission thing, and that was it. | ||
| So, Bill, that gets to your point about, you know, how they decide, okay, you got a human, now you got a robot. | ||
| Crowder, take it away. | ||
| Bring us home here, Crowder. | ||
| I was going to say a couple of things here. | ||
| First off, I understand your point as a libertarian. | ||
| I have a little bit of a different point of view on lawsuits. | ||
| I do think that we're an overly litigious country, but I think there's a difference between being an actual ambulance chaser who's cheating on your wife on her deathbed with a pregnant woman like John Edwards, versus, I just found this out yesterday. | ||
| My uncle Raymond, Jean-Guy Tremblay, is largely based on Raymond. | ||
| I'm French-Canadian. | ||
| I just found out yesterday that he has pretty advanced kidney cancer. | ||
| He's going to have to have it removed, but he's had it since July. | ||
| Do you know why they didn't tell him? | ||
| His papers fell between the desk. | ||
| This is Quebec socialized healthcare. | ||
| Now tell me that's not, that's not a lawsuit that's legitimate at that point. | ||
| You're talking about seven months of cancer advancing because you dropped the papers between the desk. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| And there is really no recourse in Canada. | ||
| And of course the quality of care is nowhere near as it is here. | ||
| So is, you know, the actual mortality rates are higher to begin with. | ||
| So I do think that, you know, lawsuits are, are a form of checks and balances that are important in this country. | ||
| I also think it's important for people to understand, you know, Yeah. | ||
| the burden and where was our where was our disagreement on that though cuz I'm with you | ||
| on that. No, I know, but I know you were saying that as a libertarian, you know, you don't | ||
| you'd hate to say that, you know, the solutions are with lawsuits. I know where you're coming | ||
| from, because I think that, you know, we probably support things like tort reform. And I think | ||
| that there are a lot of lawsuits out there where the system is abused. But I do think | ||
| coming from Canada, where really, there are often very few legal recourses as it relates | ||
| to business that I actually see that as a wonderful thing when applied appropriately | ||
| here in the United States. I think something else that's important. You talked about the | ||
| election. As far as I know these are YouTube's... | ||
| Not as far as I know, I've read them in depth. | ||
| YouTube's guidelines are you can talk about voter fraud. | ||
| Well, thank God, because otherwise Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar would be banned from YouTube, so would Jimmy Carter. | ||
| You can say that there's even been voter fraud to large levels. | ||
| What you cannot say is that it in any way affected the outcome of this election. | ||
| To give you an idea as to the burden of proof requirement that is put on conservatives at this point, because there have been a lot of people who have been banned simply for talking about the election. | ||
| Um, I have gone on air, and Half Asian Bill knows this, I have only made claims about things that I've actually gone through voter rolls. | ||
| When I say that there are addresses in this election, for example in Nevada, in Michigan, from people who don't actually exist or addresses that weren't there, I actually had to send my staff, or myself, go there and take pictures at the empty lot under an overpass. | ||
| These are addresses where people voted from. | ||
| Or on a construction site with a picture of today's newspaper. | ||
| And we'll have a video coming out. | ||
| So when I say I make these claims under penalty of perjury, what does the New York Times have to say? | ||
| What do the Young Turks have to say? | ||
| They just say, there's no evidence of voter fraud. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What due diligence have you done? | ||
| And that's the issue right there. | ||
| It's when you require me to fly on my own dime or send an intern on my own dime to go take pictures with today's newspaper just so that I can make a claim that we know is verifiably true and there is no requirement for research, sources, due diligence on any of the leftists. | ||
| You show me any of these programs at ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, any of the online ones like Young Turks who list All of their sources as we do any day with every single show. | ||
| You may disagree with me. | ||
| Every now and then you may say, you know what? | ||
| That's not the best source. | ||
| That's actually not the best study that comes from PubMed. | ||
| I have a more effective meta-analysis. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But it's not even asked of the left to do that work. | ||
| That's not a level playing field. | ||
| Crowder, I know everyone knows where to find it. | ||
| We'll include the links down below. | ||
| If people want to help you guys, or if they have any insider info, or they're whistleblowers, or whatever else there is, is there anywhere that they can contact you? | ||
| Bill, I'm sure you want to hear from all of my YouTube commenters, all the stuff that they know. | ||
| Whistleblowers, contact Chelsea underscore Manning at louderwithcrowder.com and we have them sorting through... No, actually, you can always join Mug Club, louderwithcrowder.com slash Mug Club and people can obviously watch us there in the blaze. | ||
| I think we have Fight Like Hell as a promo code. | ||
| People get $30 off. | ||
| Where is the best place for if there's someone with whistleblowers information? | ||
| So we have a lot of folks who are coming in through the Life Advice email and lifeadvice at louderwithcrowder.com. | ||
| And look, this is an important kind of perhaps final point, which is The necessary evil that it comes with lawyers, right? | ||
| If people were just good to each other, if businesses didn't commit fraud, you wouldn't need the large amount of lawyers that you have today. | ||
| And that's unfortunate that we have to rely on that, because the government and the Congress hasn't stepped in to fix Section 230. | ||
| The courts haven't done what they needed to do to interpret that in the correct way, and it is a thing that we have to do. | ||
| But ultimately, one of the most important things that is going to change is people who are deciding to move with their eyeballs and ears to different platforms. | ||
| It's these other nascent platforms that are growing that ultimately folks are going to go, wait a minute, those shareholders we talked about earlier are going to go, why is everyone leaving? | ||
| Why can't we just be an open platform? | ||
| Why do we have policies that no one understands and that we enforce discriminately? | ||
| That's going to maybe be the thing that changes it faster than a four year slog to the Supreme Court back down and years and years of discovery. | ||
| These companies have the money to be able to do that. | ||
| But if the country wants to go in the right direction, the consumers have to do something and the government has to as well. | ||
| I think it goes without saying, I'm in the fight with you guys. | ||
| So anything I can do, let me know. | ||
| Bill Richmond, thanks for being on the show. | ||
| And Crowder, it was April, 2016. | ||
| That's four years and 10 months. | ||
| I'm thinking we'll do the next one four years, eight months. | ||
| I felt like you brought it today. | ||
| That's fair enough. | ||
| That's fair enough. | ||
| I hate myself too, Dave. | ||
| All right, thanks guys. | ||
|
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Good luck. | |
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about comedy instead of the nonstop yelling you get everywhere else, check out our comedy playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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