Speaker | Time | Text |
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I want to be really clear because there are a lot of people who sort of, you know, get by on social media drama and there's a throttling and there's a counterclaim. | ||
Look, we've had false copyright claims. | ||
We've never lost on those. | ||
I'm a half-Asian lawyer, Bill Richmond. | ||
We've filed counterclaims. | ||
We've had to file petitions of information in the past. | ||
This is very different. | ||
This is the big one. | ||
We filed an official notice that we are filing a lawsuit with YouTube and an immediate motion for an injunction, injunctive relief, because we have two strikes in our account right now. | ||
And we have good reason to believe that there may be a third one that they're looking for. | ||
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a man on YouTube, I think, kinda, maybe? | ||
Steven Crowder, welcome back! | ||
Yeah, no, it depends on when this is exactly running. | ||
Two-week suspension from YouTube, right from the second hard strike. | ||
So, not on YouTube right now, but you know, once upon a time, the biggest right-leaning channel ever in the history of the platform. | ||
Okay, so let's be clear about what's going on here. | ||
This is an emergency meeting of the Rubin, Crowder, because you could be booted. | ||
You now have two strikes on your channel. | ||
I'll let you go into why you got the strikes. | ||
But in essence, if you get one more strike, if you even sniff near Susan Wojcicki, that's it. | ||
Your entire channel, your catalog, the entire thing, your business, gone. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
The business, the 12 to 15 people that I employ, gone. | ||
And by the way, that means within only a series of a few months, you and all other right-leaning people as well, because let's be clear here. | ||
I talked about Michael Knowles with this. | ||
I'm basic bitch pumpkin spice conservatism. | ||
I mean, you know, it's not like anything that I really believe is all that radical. | ||
I do always think of you as basic bitch. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I really am. | ||
And it's okay. | ||
It's a moniker that I wear proudly. | ||
Nothing about me is very radical. | ||
I'm pro second amendment. | ||
I'm pro first amendment. | ||
I'm pro ending the drug war. | ||
I believe in things like heartbeat bills with abortion. | ||
It's pretty conservative Christian who advocated that people not have sex until they're married. | ||
I know! | ||
Crazy! | ||
Keep me away from the kids! | ||
But I want to be really clear because there are a lot of people who sort of, you know, get by on social media drama and there's a throttling and there's a counterclaim. | ||
Look, we've had false copyright claims. | ||
We've never lost on those. | ||
I'm a half-Asian lawyer, Bill Richman. | ||
We've filed counterclaims. | ||
We've had to file petitions of information in the past. | ||
This is very different. | ||
This is the big one. | ||
We filed an official notice that we are filing a lawsuit with YouTube and an immediate motion for an injunction, injunctive relief, because we have two strikes in our account right now. | ||
And we have good reason to believe that there may be a third one that they're looking for. | ||
How do I know this? | ||
They're just waiting. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
And because it's not very clear, I should say, it is very clear that we didn't violate specific policies. | ||
Uh, and so they said, well, maybe the totality of it in tandem. | ||
So if people want to know, and by the way, people can still watch us, uh, we're available at Mug Club, you know, and BlazeLoudEarthCutter.com slash Mug Club. | ||
And we always recommend that people join anyways, because there's an hour worth of extra content every day, but we're still making sure that the free content is available on Apple, on Android, Spotify, and right now on Rumble, though we can't stream live. | ||
It's a little glitchy. | ||
We're working with them. | ||
But, um, you know, the, the issue here with YouTube, to give you an idea on a couple of strikes, the first one that came in was, A warning, though it was supposed to be a heart strike, on voter fraud. | ||
Now, I have never said that Donald Trump won the election that the ghost of Hugo Chavez, you know, rigged Smartmatic and whisked away Wisconsin. | ||
But just like Amy Klobuchar, just like Elizabeth Warren, just like Jimmy Carter, I have said that individual voter fraud does occur. | ||
And of course, as they said, it occurs far more with mass mail-in voting, just because there are fewer checks and balances. | ||
There are fewer ways to sort of verify. | ||
And so the segment that we did was almost comical in us saying, not that there's anything wrong with that, saying, not that there's any vote fraud, but we cross-referenced voter rolls with addresses that didn't exist on Google Earth, sent interns with a copy of that day's paper in an empty lot, on camera, live, to say, look, we know that it occurs, I think it might have been 30 or 40 addresses. | ||
They said that's a violation of the election fraud policy. | ||
Okay, the second one was... Wait, wait, can I pause you there? | ||
Because I think you sort of philosophically, and I don't want to get myself booted now too, but we're not even addressing the philosophic issue, which is should you be allowed to just say what you want to say in a free country on, you know, a supposedly open platform and everything else. | ||
I mean, it's just worth mentioning that, that you're saying you didn't break the rules, but the question really is, are the rules just completely insane? | ||
No, absolutely. | ||
And by the way, we were never told that we were wrong, too, to be clear. | ||
No one has proven... As a matter of fact, we got fact-checked and some people said that we were wrong when really the fact-check ended up being they changed the voter rolls the next night to a new address that didn't exist. | ||
That was one that was part of a series. | ||
So I don't want to get too off into the weeds there, but these were things where we did our due diligence to a comical degree. | ||
That was the point of the segment. | ||
The first actual strike, I believe, I don't remember the exact sequence, was COVID, 15 days to flatten the curve, a one-year anniversary. | ||
Now, what did we do? | ||
We showed them CDC saying don't wear masks, say wear masks, don't wear double masks, wear double masks, we won't have a vaccine in a year, I wouldn't take the vaccine if it was done in a year, take the vaccine, all of this stuff, right? | ||
Which is really tough to navigate as an American. | ||
From what I understand, the statement that was a violation was something to the effect of, because I don't want you to get booted, something to the effect of the COVID is significantly more lethal to old people. | ||
We know that. | ||
We need to figure out how to protect the most vulnerable. | ||
But for some reason, due to the immune response, according to the CDC, and we always list our references available on our website, young people are significantly less at risk of death from COVID than the flu. | ||
For some reason, young, but old people, it's way more deadly. | ||
We use the CDC mortality tables. | ||
We haven't been given a specific reason as to what the violation is, but the time code that I believe we were given was where that statement was made, and people can, we're the only show I know of, if you go to loudearthcrowder.com, every single episode has a page with the references. | ||
The references for that statement were the CDC and World Health Organization. | ||
Now, some people can say, well, you're making it seem like it's not as big of a, people may not take it seriously. | ||
Well, A, that's not what I'm saying, and B, if we're going to follow the science, It's important to understand how different immune systems respond to a novel virus. | ||
It's important that you don't tell people, shut up if they have a problem with a two-year-old wearing a mask, if you say, well, hold on a second, we don't have two or four-year-olds wear a mask for the flu, where there are significantly more deaths for younger people. | ||
It is significantly deadlier for older people or the immunocompromised. | ||
You're not allowed to discuss that. | ||
The most recent one, this is the second strike here, and this is why there's a lawsuit. | ||
Which I really didn't want this to have to come to. | ||
I just want to do the show, uh, is when I was recently celebrating, actually praising the officer who saved that young girl's life who was about to be stabbed by Mackay Bryant. | ||
I said, not only is that justified shooting from the police, I believe it's necessary because if the police cannot shoot someone who is in the process of attempting to stab you, then we might as well not have police, and I believe that we should have police. | ||
That was considered bullying and harassment. | ||
But not technically, but the totality may be over time indicative of bullying, harassing by supporting the police. | ||
Exactly. | ||
Who were you bullying? | ||
Who were you bullying by saying that you supported the cop saving a woman's life who was about to be decapitated? | ||
Who was that bullying? | ||
Apparently it might be considered reveling in the death of Mackay Bryant. | ||
I don't know. | ||
We don't have an official answer, and we can't get these official answers from people at YouTube. | ||
But let me just be really clear with people out there. | ||
This is tantamount to saying to everyone out there... | ||
If you're conservative, we don't want you. | ||
Look, if they are saying, hey, look, you cannot discuss the mortality rates of COVID. | ||
You cannot point out that the CDC has been inconsistent and confusing, which has made it harder for Americans to stay safe. | ||
You are not allowed to say that voter fraud has ever occurred to any degree, and you are not allowed to support police if they save someone's life mid-stabbing If the person committing the stabbing happens to be a girl of color. | ||
That is saying you are not welcome on this platform if you hold these views. | ||
Now if they say that, that's fine. | ||
The issue there is I'm pro-business, I'm anti-fraud. | ||
YouTube says all views are welcome. | ||
Those strikes without description tell us otherwise. | ||
We need to know the rule book because people's livelihoods depend on it. | ||
Well, Crowder, you know, last week I put up an interview with David Horowitz. | ||
I'm sure you know David Horowitz. | ||
And I've never, in all of my years of doing this show, I've never edited for content except one time, I had a guest come on who was drunk and stoned and we ended up editing just to basically save this person's career. | ||
It's the only time we've edited for content. | ||
I did that once too. | ||
We can compare notes off air. | ||
This person was doing crack in the laundry room. | ||
No joke. | ||
He was probably the same person. | ||
But last week, for the first time, we edited for content because David Horowitz, a free man in what I thought was a free country, dared to say two sentences that I knew my channel could be deleted. | ||
Like that. | ||
So we censored it on YouTube. | ||
I mean, simple as that. | ||
I put it up in my locals community, but now I'm having you, you crazy right-wing maniac. | ||
Well, you're such a tease. | ||
Now I want to hear the two sentences. | ||
And that's the issue, right? | ||
What's going to happen is all people want to hear are the sentences. | ||
And they assume, it's like not seeing the monster in a scary movie, you assume that it's worse than it is. | ||
That's how you radicalize people. | ||
When you see these New York Times articles saying, hey, radicalization, and it has a picture with me next to Philip DeFranco. | ||
And then, by the way... Hey, hey, hey, give me a little credit. | ||
I was in there. | ||
Come on. | ||
Were you in there too? | ||
Yeah, I was in there. | ||
That's right. | ||
Yeah, I just, you know, again, I would never imagine that you would be in there radicalizing people, Dave Rubin. | ||
Creditors do, man. | ||
But what happens is then they complain about echo chambers. | ||
unidentified
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Right? | |
Well look, what's more radical? | ||
A view of someone who believes, what, the guy who believes in a flat tax? | ||
Or the people who believe in 90% income tax? | ||
The guy who believes that police need to be demilitarized to a degree, but that they also need to be able to do their job and they should wear body cams? | ||
Or the people who believe we should have no police whatsoever, we should have no prisons whatsoever, like Rashida Tlaib, like AOC, like these people believe? | ||
This is not a radical point of view. | ||
This, the reason for this lawsuit is Look, you know, could I at some point sail off into the sunset with support from people at Mug Club? | ||
I don't know, but at some point I could. | ||
But what about the next kid who wants to start a business? | ||
I started this in 2009, maybe 2008, with a blue bed sheet behind me. | ||
I don't see a world in which their point of view is even allowed to be expressed. | ||
And we talk about othering people. | ||
YouTube is othering an entire half of the country. | ||
And by the way, More than 80% of black people, while we're talking about the Makai Bryant and that officer situation, more than 80% of black people want at least as much of a police presence as exists now, if not more. | ||
And because that isn't a view that is permissible on, we silence these minorities too. | ||
We host people under, look, if the guy who did Change My Mind, which was antithetical to the, you know, sort of 24 hour news cycle, if it bleeds, it leads. | ||
If that's removed as impermissible, No conservative viewpoint is permissible on YouTube. | ||
Well, I think you know Crowder. | ||
I don't think I'm enlightening you when I tell you that you know that what this really of course is about is that you are changing minds. | ||
You have an absolutely extraordinarily huge channel. | ||
How many people did you have on election night before they took you down? | ||
How many people were watching? | ||
Gosh, I don't know. | ||
It was at any given point something like 600,000. | ||
It was like 16 million. | ||
And look, I hate doing this because you know that we've had people... No, it's important to do. | ||
I get it. | ||
It's not just blowing you up, but the point is... Yeah, we're talking about billions of planes today. | ||
Why are they always trying to take out Tucker? | ||
I mean, we know why. | ||
It's not about Tucker. | ||
It's about the people. | ||
Yeah, it's about billions of plays. | ||
Billions of plays across our platform, and if you include my... It's one of those things, and I say it on my knees. | ||
I'm so grateful for it, and I know that all this could go away, and I could annoy people, and they don't want to watch the show. | ||
That's fine, but it needs to occur on an honest platform. | ||
An important thing, too, a lot of people think this doesn't affect them. | ||
They go, well, he's a dick. | ||
Guilty. | ||
However, if you're a business owner, you want to conduct business now in the 21st century. | ||
This is a town square. | ||
230, not even withstanding. | ||
But you know this. | ||
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, they go to business owners, they come to us and say, advertise with us. | ||
You get to keep the subscribers you gain if you advertise. | ||
You get to keep the followers that you gain, right? | ||
If you want to open up a shop and you don't advertise online, you haven't got a shot. | ||
And this is an issue of dishonest business practices. | ||
If they are choosing, not only politically, winners and losers as it relates to business, they can do this with anyone. | ||
I'm pro-business. | ||
I'm anti-fraud. | ||
And with YouTube right now, here's the issue. | ||
You have what? | ||
You have community guidelines. | ||
Okay, that's one set of rules. | ||
That's set by YouTube. | ||
YouTube says advertiser-friendly guidelines are set by sponsors. | ||
Well, I've tried to be a sponsor, and I've advertised. | ||
I've never once been requested, hey, where would you like to advertise your content? | ||
Matter of fact, they've precluded me from doing it, and I've been a content creator, where I can't accept certain sponsors. | ||
And then they have a third category, which no one really knows, isn't defined, which is borderline. | ||
We don't know who determines that. | ||
They're all determined by YouTube at the end of the day. | ||
Yes, ah yes, borderline. | ||
Dave Rubin, the radicalization, the Third Reich, Mr. Rubin. | ||
You know, the funny thing about that article in the New York Times about the radicalization to the far right is, yeah, you and DeFranco and Jordan Peterson and Milton Friedman, who's a real nutbag, you guys were all on the cover of the print one. | ||
You had to open to page three to get my picture, except it was a huge picture of my face under something like, leading them to the alt-right. | ||
My dad had no idea, my dad had no idea. | ||
But wait, putting aside the specifics of the politics, and I get it, people know that you don't want the government involved and they get the difference between platform and publisher and all that stuff. | ||
Just on the pure like you're suing YouTube side of this, it can't be that much fun. | ||
I think I sort of asked you about that last time. | ||
Like the idea that you're going up against Goliath, it's not like a great pleasure. | ||
No, it's not something that I want to do at all, and I wish it could be settled, and I wish that we could have had answers. | ||
And look, I just want to do my show. | ||
Unlike, you know, with Joe Rogan, for example, on Spotify. | ||
Something like 40-something episodes were removed, and it was done in the dead of night. | ||
Look, this is why we have Mug Club. | ||
You didn't let them do it, though, just for the record. | ||
I mean... Right. | ||
Not to be clear, what happened with the Vox Apocalypse... | ||
There were conversations behind the scenes, which hopefully I have to be careful as to what I discuss, what I don't, but we were very public. | ||
We said, look, we have to remove 30-something videos from YouTube because they may be borderline, even though they're not violating policy. | ||
These are available at Mug Club. | ||
Didn't want to do it. | ||
It wasn't a violation of policies, but I was saying, hey, this is an act of good faith. | ||
It's YouTube sandbox. | ||
They can determine the rules. | ||
And we were transparent about saying off platform at Mug Club. | ||
And, you know, these might've been radical views, like life begins at, you know, conception or something. | ||
Something like that. | ||
Something that should never be permissible on YouTube. | ||
We were very straightforward with it. | ||
Our entire catalog has been audited. | ||
At great length. | ||
And now these are new, potential violations that may or may not exist. | ||
Look, we've had to reinvent, and this is why I say, I'm about to be a father of two. | ||
I employ, I think it's fourteen people right now. | ||
And you know this, these are the first people I think of when I get up, and the last people I think of when I go to sleep. | ||
They don't have the control that I do in fighting YouTube and making these decisions. | ||
My decisions affect them. | ||
We've had to fundamentally change our business model. | ||
And we figured out, oh wait, if you search Steven Crowder changed my mind abortion, you find an old PBS video with 400 views. | ||
We can no longer rely on search or browse. | ||
Okay, we're gonna focus on not just subscriptions, but notifications. | ||
Wait, notifications no longer really work. | ||
So we moved to a live show. | ||
We can't edit because we go live. | ||
And we just tell people, and it still isn't Mug Club, weekdays at 10 a.m. | ||
Eastern. | ||
To the point where it doesn't matter if we don't show up in search, it doesn't matter if we don't show up in browse, it doesn't matter if subscriptions or notifications work, we have a baseline of millions of viewers who will tune in every day and we're always at the top of the YouTube live page, right? | ||
They can't control it because it's more popular than other programs. | ||
I think this is sort of the last decision they can make considering that we've consistently adapted to rules that are not applied to anyone else. | ||
I am so I am such a pacifist. | ||
I so am a conflict avoider. | ||
But my belief is you avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid. | ||
And then if you have to engage in a conflict, you make it as swift and effective as you possibly can. | ||
And I wish that we hadn't crossed that line. | ||
I wish that YouTube hadn't. | ||
I hope they do the right thing. | ||
And I don't want to do this, but we will. | ||
Have you ever met Susan, the CEO of YouTube? | ||
Have you ever met her? | ||
Never, which is bizarre when you see her mentioning me by name at the Recode conference with someone who works for Vox interviewing her. | ||
It's surreal, it really is. | ||
Was that the interview where they said Dave Rubin is the gateway drug to guys like Steven Crowder? | ||
I think that might've been it. | ||
Is that one? | ||
I'm not kidding, I'm not kidding. | ||
There was one talk, I don't know if it was that one. | ||
You were the Molly to my MDMA? | ||
I don't know, maybe. | ||
It could be, but it's bizarre for me. | ||
Is that how you do Molly first? | ||
Honestly, I don't know. | ||
Basic bitch, like I said, I don't know. | ||
Let me ask you one more thing, because we're just doing this quick, because I just wanted to get word out about this, because it's important. | ||
Thank you, I appreciate it. | ||
The truth is, I mean, we're friends, but the truth is if you go down, then you're right. | ||
It's the floodgates on everybody. | ||
So let me just ask you this to finish. | ||
Do you sort of feel like this with you and YouTube is just directly connected to everything going on in society right now, which is that all the things that guys like us have been screaming about and warning against, it's all here. | ||
It's at the doorstep. | ||
That's sort of what you were saying. | ||
Like, it's just like, it's all just arrived. | ||
And whether it's Crowder being taken off YouTube or attacking people in the streets or changing every norm in our political discourse, it's all here. | ||
Look, people need to understand the world that we live. | ||
Laws are being suspended. | ||
What do I mean? | ||
Right now you have people complaining like there are laws in Florida that it'll just make it easy for you to run over protesters. | ||
I go, hold on a second, hold on a second. | ||
We're talking about a riot. | ||
We're talking about people being dragged out of their cars. | ||
Hold on. | ||
Is it illegal to congregate in the middle of a freeway? | ||
It is! | ||
It's illegal. | ||
But we've just decided we don't enforce those laws. | ||
So we've decided to suspend the law and instead turn Americans into criminals. | ||
Americans with vehicles. | ||
Americans who legally purchase firearms. | ||
We've decided to turn them into criminals. | ||
Now maybe Americans who speak out against policies. | ||
Turn them into criminals. | ||
I will say this, look, with YouTube, you know, to go back to the idea of publisher platform, I don't think it's ever been more clear than, to use Twitter as an example, I mean, Donald, President Donald Trump wasn't really on YouTube. | ||
They remove a sitting president. | ||
for saying fight like hell. | ||
And look, I don't care. | ||
I don't even think it's controversial. | ||
Anyone who acts as a fight like hell has not been a phrase that has been used | ||
as a colloquialism for, is being intellectually dishonest. | ||
That's why we sell the fight like hell shirt at Crowder Shop. | ||
Pretty sure Maxine Waters has said worse. | ||
Yes, she has said worse and she's done worse. | ||
Look at the size of those pupils. | ||
So he was removed though. | ||
Twitter said that's a bridge too far. | ||
Okay. | ||
The Ayatollah Khomeini is still on Twitter. | ||
Hamas is still on Twitter, who a part of their charter is not, by the way, not just the eradication of Israel, all Jews! | ||
And we're talking about anti-Semitic hate crimes that could potentially be inspired by Donald Trump here at home? | ||
Look, that is an editorial decision. | ||
In other words, if Twitter says, this is too far for Donald Trump to be on Twitter or YouTube or Facebook, that means that they are consciously saying, Hamas is not too far. | ||
The Ayatollah not too far. | ||
And that cannot come with the same legal protections of a platform like AT&T or Verizon. | ||
That is an editorial decision, just like the New York Times, just like the Washington Post, and just like YouTube saying you can't praise an officer for saving a girl's life from being stabbed. | ||
We can't allow it. | ||
Can't allow that to go on. | ||
Isn't it a weird position that for guys like us, like I do think about it often where I'm like, man, if YouTube servers blew up, but I think about it usually more related to Twitter, if Twitter just ceased to exist tomorrow and all the data was destroyed, all of the followings, all of that stuff, like it feels to me, and I actually don't mean this on the YouTube side, on the Twitter side specifically, like the world would be better. | ||
That's a very weird thing. | ||
For guys like us to think. | ||
Yeah, I know, but you know, I don't know about YouTube because where would people find their hardcore pornography? | ||
We have found, by the way, just so people know. | ||
Hardcore porn on YouTube? | ||
Yes, yes. | ||
And there's also guys who play, listen, we've done this on the show, Dick or Dildo. | ||
It's two homosexual gentlemen who put up a sheet and play Dick or Dildo where the guy is facing the camera. | ||
And he has to guess if it's a dick or a dildo. | ||
By the way, the answer is always dick! | ||
It's never dildo. | ||
This is on YouTube, and it's not even age-restricted. | ||
Now, I will say this. | ||
I know, look, and people know that I'm not trying to shock people. | ||
When we cite facts, when we give out references, they're all publicly available on the website. | ||
I don't know any other show that does that. | ||
You're talking about, on average, anywhere from 40 to 60 per day. | ||
We make a joke. | ||
It may offend people. | ||
You may not find it funny, you may not like it, but you have to acknowledge that it's a joke. | ||
And the standard can't be, does it offend you? | ||
The standard that YouTube has to apply, and I'm going to use some language here because I'm quoting directly Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee, is, did Stephen Crowder say anything more offensive than referring to a sitting president's mouth? | ||
As Putin's cockholster. | ||
Did he bully anyone worse than Samantha Bee with a national platform on television referring to the First Lady as a feckless cunt? | ||
Nope! | ||
That's the standard that has to be applied equally, not if it offends somebody. | ||
And because that's not the kind of language or spirit of the comedy that I would ever use, facts and information notwithstanding. | ||
Well, Crowder, I just want to say that it's been nice knowing you. | ||
And Susan, if you're watching, I didn't want to do this. | ||
I was forced into it because Crowder is very influential and threatened me. | ||
And this has been a hostage situation. | ||
And I'm so sorry to have this discussion about free speech and open discourse. | ||
Crowder, final word. | ||
Should have never given me access to your iCloud. | ||
So they're going to expect many more of these interviews if I'm deplatformed. | ||
I'll be lording over that you forever. | ||
No, look, I appreciate it. | ||
And like I said, if I thought it was just about our channel, it wouldn't be that big a deal. | ||
I really do. | ||
I'm afraid that there won't be these opportunities for anybody else out there who have an alternative point of view. | ||
When we talk about the young kid who's bullied, I think of the young kid right now who grew up in this pandemic era where their parents are punished if they even speak out with an alternative opinion, let alone what they see on social media and people's lives destroyed. | ||
And now as a matter of potentially official policy, Combined with a culture that is designed to completely remove the idea of right and wrong, but only seeing the general through the lens of the oppressed and the oppressor and turn everyone into good little rule followers without questioning whether the rules are just or if they're applied justly. | ||
I'm really scared for that and that's why we're doing, that's why we filed this official notification of a lawsuit. | ||
I don't want to do it, but I just don't see any other way unless they get their butt in gear. | ||
Crowder, joking aside, you know I'm completely with you on this. | ||
I will support you in any way I can. | ||
Thank you. | ||
We are proxies for a lot of people in this crazy thing, and you're huge right now, and they want to make an example of you. | ||
I will fight with you till the end, man. | ||
Thank you, sir. | ||
But I have to go now, because what was the other YouTube channel? | ||
Dick or dildo? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Okay. | ||
All right. |