July 9, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, people of the internet, welcome to another Rubin Report Friday round table | ||
| extravaganza. | ||
| Today we're gonna be talking about Trump's lawsuit against big tech, Tucker Carlson accusing the NSA of spying on him, and critical race theory. | ||
| You didn't think we could do a day without critical race theory. | ||
| Now fully infiltrating public schools in America, my three guests. | ||
| Writer of Up in the Air, Thumbsucker, and Blood Will Out, Walter Kern, the world's most famous knitting Trump supporter, Dr. Karlyn Borysenko, and my favorite Canadian lawyer-turned-YouTuber, Viva Frey. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report, everybody. | ||
| How's it going, Dave? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It is going well. | ||
| It's good to be with you guys. | ||
| I'm looking forward to this panel. | ||
| Let's get right into it. | ||
| Trump is suing the Twitter and the YouTube and the Google and the whole damn thing. | ||
| Since we're streaming this on YouTube right now, I feel like that should be the lead story. | ||
| Let's take a look at what Donald Trump has got to say. | ||
| I just want to say that I stand before you this morning to Announce a very important and very beautiful, I think, development for our freedom and our freedom of speech. | ||
| And that goes to all Americans. | ||
| Today, in conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I'm filing, as the lead class representative, a major class action lawsuit against the big tech giants, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. | ||
| As well as their CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey. | ||
| Three real nice guys. | ||
| We're asking the U.S. | ||
| District Court for the Southern District of Florida to order an immediate halt to social media companies' illegal, shameful censorship of the American people. | ||
| And that's exactly what they are doing. | ||
| All right, class action lawsuit with Trump at the head of this thing. | ||
| Viva, you're the lawyer. | ||
| I know you're Canadian, but you have a good handle on what's happening here in America. | ||
| I mean, does he have a chance with this thing? | ||
| So I preface that by the fact that I'm a Canadian lawyer, so what I have learned from the American law is self-taught and also learned from the best minds in American law, Dershowitz, Barnes, Brody, the other YouTube lawyers. | ||
| I want this lawsuit to succeed, but I am exquisitely skeptical that it is going to as drafted. | ||
| Basically, the argument that Trump is raising, at the very least against Twitter, is that they have become basically de facto state actors because of their working in concert or at the direction of or under the coercion of state actors. | ||
| The problem is just as a pure matter of fact, as drafted, the allegations, the factual allegations to support that argument seem thin at best. | ||
| And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's lawsuit against Facebook, which alleged a similar sort of state actor coercion working in tandem, just failed as well. | ||
| So this is probably going to fail at the lower levels and maybe succeed at the higher levels. | ||
| But I'm still skeptical, despite all the optimism I want to hold in my heart. | ||
| That's interesting because I actually saw an interview with Dershowitz yesterday on Newsmax, and he had a similar take. | ||
| Basically, he was like, look, this actually might be the biggest free speech lawsuit in modern times, but it may not work at the lower courts, but he thinks this thing could get to the Supreme Court. | ||
| Walter, you usually have a good sort of blue sky, broad view of what's going on in the country. | ||
| What do you make of this thing? | ||
| Is this publicity by Trump? | ||
| Do you think there's some real teeth to it? | ||
| Well, Trump sues people probably five times a day, and he does it for all kinds of things. | ||
| He doesn't necessarily do it to win. | ||
| He does it to raise issues. | ||
| And it's all important, whether this succeeds or not, to realize that Twitter has gained near monopoly power on a certain kind of online live conversation. | ||
| They've privatized online conversation, and then they've fenced it around with rules that are impossible to understand. | ||
| Trump was kicked off for supposedly inciting violence. | ||
| They don't tell you what inciting is. | ||
| It reminds me, Twitter reminds me of one of those towns that has a thousand laws that it only enforces when they don't like you. | ||
| And so, you know, he's bringing up a fact that might not be a matter of law, but is a real one. | ||
| Where are we to converse? | ||
| They take out the other apps. | ||
| They make it almost impossible for a Twitter competitor to really be robust. | ||
| So whether he wins or not doesn't matter to me. | ||
| Americans need to see that these places are not going to be the final arbiters of how | ||
| we speak, and especially about public issues. | ||
| If Trump was a porn star, you know, and was, well, if he was a porn star, he'd still be on there. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Carlin. | ||
| That is the irony. | ||
| Sorry, Dave, go ahead. | ||
| No, no, Viva, go ahead. | ||
| I was just going to say, that is the irony. | ||
| One of the issues that Trump raises in the lawsuit, which in my view has nothing to do with the lawsuit, is the explicit child exploitation content that is still on Twitter. | ||
| So they ban Trump for talking about peaceful protests because it incites violence, and then they allow A bunch of other objectively unconscionable, if not outright illegal content to remain up there. | ||
| He is starting a discussion and we'll see where the discussion goes. | ||
| Right, I think that's the key part here, which is what Walter's hitting on, that it may not be about the lawsuit. | ||
| He sues an awful lot of people and he loses plenty of lawsuits. | ||
| I mean, he lost the election lawsuits, but what could be unearthed maybe in discovery, if these guys have to open up some of the books and show some of the policies and the inconsistencies and everything else, even if the lawsuit doesn't work, Just bringing the attention to it might be good. | ||
| Carlin, you've, like the rest of us, you've been shadow banned, you've lost followers. | ||
| I think you've been temporarily suspended from things at times and had Facebook things disappear. | ||
| I assume you basically like the idea, at least, of what Trump's doing here, right? | ||
| Well, I actually really like the idea. | ||
| And actually, this is kind of a personal issue for me because I'm involved with the WalkAway campaign, and after January 6th, WalkAway's Facebook group was completely banned off of Facebook for no good reason. | ||
| But what a lot of people don't know is that not only was the WalkAway Facebook group banned, But every single admin had their personal accounts banned. | ||
| So we're talking just average everyday people like merchandise managers or people that work for walkaway who are running businesses on Facebook. | ||
| Those businesses got completely destroyed. | ||
| So the walkaway campaign is actually a part of this class action lawsuit and I'm excited to see where it goes. | ||
| Do you guys think that if these things just blew up, just meaning if what happened to Parler just somehow happened to them, that we would just be much better off as a species, Viva? | ||
| Well, I say Twitter is the, you know, the dark hole of the internet. | ||
| It's a place where people are angry. | ||
| They go to vent their anger, but it is a place where information is exchanged, where real-time information is exchanged. | ||
| I don't know what the solution is. | ||
| There is a very, very big problem because Twitter clearly has a monopoly. | ||
| Google and YouTube clearly have a monopoly and they are clearly censoring based on ideological perspectives. | ||
| How do you go about solving this problem? | ||
| I think you have to find a better argument. | ||
| I'm not sure that the state actor is going to be the working argument this time, but it will start a discussion by the time Trump runs again in 2024. | ||
| This will have worked its way through the courts and either been shut down or approved, probably shut down, in which case it becomes an election campaign issue. | ||
| But people need to start realizing this. | ||
| And they only do realize it once they start getting banned themselves, despite not being on one side of the political aisle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Walter, what do you think, just in terms of just the general health of society, if these things just disappeared? | ||
| I mean, one of the reasons I'm usually not for regulating them, I'm sort of for breaking them up, I think, at this point. | ||
| But the reason I don't like the regulation idea is, to me, that just makes sure that they're always going to exist as that public square. | ||
| And as you said, they've sort of privatized the public square. | ||
| Well, they aren't the public square. | ||
| In the real public squares of the world, people stand with signs saying, the Messiah is coming, repent. | ||
| People swear and rant and rave. | ||
| What they are is an engineered discourse environment. See, what Twitter does really is not | ||
| allow you to freely speak and then just compile. They engineer the responses, | ||
| they invite in bot armies that push away certain ideas and applaud others. | ||
| It's a manufactured event, Twitter. | ||
| It's like an audience for play in which everyone's secretly working for the playwright and some people's job is to laugh and other people is to boo. | ||
| And so maintaining that controlled environment, that sort of artificial dome of discourse, is very hard for them. | ||
| And one thing Trump did that they don't like Is that he kind of blows it up when he goes on there. | ||
| You know, he's the Lenny Bruce of American politics. | ||
| His job is to say the unsayable. | ||
| And that is his great value to us, in fact. | ||
| Yeah, Carlin, since you've been through the shadow banning and all the other stuff, does it seem like it's gotten weirder to you in the last couple weeks? | ||
| This is a little insider baseball, but I've noticed, for example, when I tweet things out now, like the first 50 responses will all be how much people hate me and all this nonsense, and then I always have to click see more to see then hundreds of people who are saying nice things. | ||
| So they've created a situation where they're, depending on what political allegiance you have or whatever your beliefs are, they can decide who's going to show you the nice stuff, who you're going to see that's, you know, nice and positive and just reorganize things. | ||
| I mean, I think that's Walter's point. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Dave, your first mistake there was reading the comments in general. | ||
| You never read the comments on Twitter. | ||
| But no, I mean, listen, I got a strike on my YouTube channel for being a psychologist who read a peer-reviewed psychology article about the psychological impact of masks. | ||
| I was banned on Facebook for like four days for quoting the New York Times. | ||
| It's absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| There's no rhyme or reason to how they apply these things. | ||
| And, you know, I think people are starting to wake up to just how artificial the entire environment is. | ||
| Or there is a rhyme and reason, and we just don't know what it is. | ||
| Well, the rage clicks are definitely what they're after. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| So the algorithm is driven by interactions, and negative interactions are more prevalent and more heated than positive interactions. | ||
| But to what Walter said about this not being the public square, I think these ideas are not mutually exclusive. | ||
| I think it is the public square, even if it is geared towards profit for the enterprise. | ||
| But that's where I think, like, this has to be regarded as a public square or something of a utility. | ||
| And when you have government officials using it to convey emergency measures, emergency tweets, information, then I think it has to be treated as a utility and it can't be shut down or turned off because of what some people are saying on it, save and except for that which is officially illegal already. | ||
| But no question, negativity is definitely the driving force on Twitter. | ||
| Walter, what do you think about that argument? | ||
| Because I think that's pretty compelling, even though at the same time we could all close our accounts and walk off tomorrow and we'd still be okay. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we could all shut up and lock ourselves in the back room and wait for the next 50 years of history to pass. | ||
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And that might be a good option because it's getting darker. | |
| But, you know, I don't know quite what the argument was, essentially. | ||
| I mean, say it again. | ||
| That it has effectively become a utility in that it's not just a private company. | ||
| Government officials use it to convey politics, messages, emergency messages. | ||
| They use it as a utility in as much as, you know, the public horn system in the Netherlands | ||
| to warn people of a flood or something. | ||
| So it is more of a utility and a public square officially than it is a private company. | ||
| And I think in that sense, govern it the way you would govern cell phone carriers, water supplies. | ||
| Although, Dave, in California, they are shutting off electricity if they don't like what you're doing. | ||
| But I say treat it that way. | ||
| That's the stronger argument to to end the sort of censorship. | ||
| But I don't think it's been fully fleshed out in the courts yet. | ||
| The thing is, as you alluded to earlier, Dave, there are a lot of forms of manipulation, censorship and sort of behavior modification that aren't just banning someone from Twitter. | ||
| I mean, I've begun to be able to read what Twitter is doing with my account from week to week. | ||
| You say it's been weird recently. | ||
| And it does get weird at times. | ||
| There are times when people don't see your tweets. | ||
| There are people who really subscribe to your Twitter feed who suddenly don't and then they get it back. | ||
| There are times when you lose and gain followers for mysterious reasons. | ||
| You feel like you're a lab rat in Twitter. | ||
| And these people in white coats that you can't see are constantly changing the food and putting in water over there and closing off this part of the maze. | ||
| And so if it's a public square, Then it should not be allowed to bring fake and artificial people into the public square to constantly make it seem that things are happening that are not. | ||
| I mean, the worst thing isn't just that they ban people. | ||
| It's that they promote fake people that aren't people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And just to put a button on this one, it's like, not only could we all walk, but the strangest thing with Twitter and Facebook and everything else is they have so much ubiquitous power over our lives. | ||
| And it's like, you can't get anyone on the phone from any of these companies. | ||
| We all have Gmail. | ||
| Has anyone ever spoke to someone from Gmail on the phone? | ||
| Has anyone ever spoke to someone from Facebook, Twitter? | ||
| I mean, I'm a pretty well-connected guy. | ||
| I can't get anyone on the phone or any representative to talk to anybody. | ||
| So maybe they are a little too big. | ||
| But speaking of a little too big, The second story is this really, really bizarre story that started, it kicked off last week when Tucker Carlson accused the NSA of spying on him because information was leaked that he said could only have been leaked from his private email. | ||
| We've got a little more on that. | ||
| Last week, last Monday, we told you that the Biden administration's largest intelligence gathering agency, the NSA, had been reading my private emails. | ||
| Even saying that out loud is weird. | ||
| It's one of those segments we never thought we would do, ever. | ||
| But the country has changed that much, that fast. | ||
| And honestly, the whole thing was kind of shocking. | ||
| The government was spying on us? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| It seemed crazy. | ||
| But it's true, and no one in Washington appeared to be shocked in the slightest. | ||
| In fact, the usual shills right after our segment had a ready explanation for it. | ||
| Either it never happened at all, they said, just a cable news show lying for ratings, or there must have been a good reason it happened, and they began furiously making excuses for why the NSA did it. | ||
| A powerful, heavily politicized spy agency surveilling journalists who've been critical of the regime? | ||
| No problem. | ||
| It's perfectly normal. | ||
| Just don't call it spying. | ||
| But it's not normal at all. | ||
| It is third world. | ||
| And as we told you repeatedly, it did happen. | ||
| Now that has been confirmed. | ||
| All right, so just to clarify, Tucker had reached out to Kremlin contacts about getting an interview with Putin. | ||
| Tucker is a journalist. | ||
| He interviews people. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| Walter, it seems like most of media is just like, yeah, big damn whoop, he shouldn't have reached out or he's a Russian operative. | ||
| I mean, just the usual nonsense that we've gotten over the last four or five years. | ||
| Yeah, well, okay, here's the thing about this story. | ||
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The NSA loves it. | |
| The NSA, despite sometimes seeming like the bad guy, loves the message that, yep, we can do anything to anyone at any time, and we don't have to be candid about it. | ||
| They let Tucker make the accusation They then let him be called a liar. | ||
| They then didn't interfere when it turns out to be true. | ||
| And, you know, we see that the thing he was being spied for... | ||
| I was trying to get an interview with one of the other maybe two world leaders who run a great nuclear power. | ||
| I mean, what is more legitimate journalism than trying to interview, you know, Putin? | ||
| They make it sound as though he was doing a dead drop in Marcy Park, you know, trying to pass microfilm. | ||
| My God, he was trying to get an interview with a world leader. | ||
| What is totally flabbergasting about all this, I have never seen in unison so many certified blue check marks on Twitter, mainstream media, run to the defense of the NSA. | ||
| I don't want to have these conspiratorial thoughts like the media must be working with intelligence. | ||
| It's either that or they're absolute ignorant and have totally forgotten about the largest illegal domestic surveillance program that the NSA was carrying out a few years ago, a decade ago. | ||
| And they pretend now that that could never happen again. | ||
| And certainly if it does happen, they've made a carve out for Fox News and Tucker Carlson. | ||
| I've never seen such willful blindness or deliberate misinformation from the mainstream media all running cover for the NSA, given the NSA's history. | ||
| But Vivo, Let's not forget, who was the guy that was in charge of the NSA when he was under oath, and they asked him if we're spying on Americans, and he said, not wittingly, as he was scratching the top of his head, which is a tip off from Seinfeld. | ||
| Who was the guy? | ||
| Who was that? | ||
| Does anyone remember? | ||
| James Clapp. | ||
| He works for CNN now. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, he works for CNN. | ||
| Yeah, he's a high-fiver. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You are not required to be concerned. | ||
| This is not a conspiracy. | ||
| No one's hiding it. | ||
| That's why I say they loves it. | ||
| The NSA loves having its former director on CNN. | ||
| It loves taking the largest cable news personality in the world and making him sit in the hot seat while it, you know, doesn't, you know, that's for me to know and you to find out. | ||
| We're the NSA. | ||
| Carlin, is that like the real stamp on this thing right there? | ||
| That they can just do it in front of us? | ||
| There's nothing Tucker can do. | ||
| There's nothing the rest of us can do. | ||
| And as Viva says, we can also just have a bunch of blue check journalists that basically applaud them for it. | ||
| Well, I mean, listen, Walter has just scared the heck out of me because I'm 100% sure he's correct, that the NSA is loving this entire thing. | ||
| And I think it just goes so, it says so much about how far the divisions in this world have gone, where, you know, people who maybe 10 years ago would have been completely against any of this nonsense are now like, well, it's okay, as long as it's directed at my political opponents. | ||
| Like people have forgotten what the slippery slope is and what it means. | ||
| If they can do it to your political opponents, that means they can do it to you. | ||
| Right, the lefties were pretty upset when Snowden was leaking all of the stuff about what the government was doing. | ||
| Somehow they care a little bit less when it's Tucker. | ||
| We got one more for you, and I know we're in a little bit of a time crunch here, but Randi Weingarten, who's the president of the Teachers Union, and she is a real piece of work, she gave a speech about critical race theory. | ||
| Whether they're teaching it or not, or whether they plan to teach it or not, or how important it is or isn't, let's take a look. | ||
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Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or middle schools or high schools. | |
| It's a method of examination taught in law school and in college that helps analyze whether systemic racism exists, and in particular, whether it has an effect on law and public policy. | ||
| But culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism, or discrimination, SCRT, to try to make it toxic. | ||
| They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history. | ||
| Okay, on one hand, she's telling us it's not taught, and then she's also telling us that the people trying to stop it are trying to stop the truth from being taught. | ||
| So, little inconsistency there. | ||
| I mean, she is an extraordinary liar. | ||
| The idea that cultural warriors are doing this to stop any honest assessment of race or racism be taught is complete nonsense. | ||
| The new meme that they have is, oh, they don't want anyone to discuss Race or anything like that, we all know that's not true. | ||
| I have no doubt that everyone in these four little boxes here was taught about racism and slavery and MLK and Jim Crow laws and everything else. | ||
| Carlin, you've been like at the lead fight against this thing. | ||
| Randy Weingarten, go. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, she's absolutely lying. | ||
| And if anyone has any questions about this, I actually, on my YouTube channel right now, have a recording of an eighth grade class in which they were teaching critical race theory. | ||
| So I have it on video. | ||
| I know exactly how it's being taught. | ||
| Now, the problem is that they're not teaching critical race theory in K-12 schools in the same way that they're teaching it in colleges and universities. | ||
| So what they do in K-12 schools is they just get little nuggets in there. | ||
| Like, what they did in this eighth grade class is they said, If you agree with the Pledge of Allegiance and you want society to be fair and just, then you need to believe in equity versus equality because we want everyone to have the same outcomes. | ||
| They just plant these little nuggets all the way through the educational experience so they're primed when they go to college. | ||
| But I'll tell you this too, One of the state bill, I worked on the state bill in New Hampshire that was unfortunately watered down by my RINO governor Chris Sununu. | ||
| But before it was watered down, it actually had a provision in it that said you can teach every concept in this bill. | ||
| You just have to teach it from an objective fashion. | ||
| You cannot be an activist. | ||
| You cannot teach things as factually true that are not factually true. | ||
| And so the teacher unions are not telling the truth about these bills and what they cover. | ||
| You can still teach about slavery. | ||
| You can still teach about the Holocaust. | ||
| These are just downright lies. | ||
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Right. | |
| It's just extraordinary. | ||
| We're not teaching it. | ||
| And also, it must be taught. | ||
| Viva, I think you saw the op-ed piece in The Times a couple of days ago by David French and a bunch of other people basically saying that these anti-CRT Laws that certain states are passing are bad ideas. | ||
| But to me, we don't teach Nazism, right? | ||
| We don't teach everyone to be Nazis. | ||
| You know what we say on my channel with Robert Barnes? | ||
| Confession through projection. | ||
| And you watch what she just said there. | ||
| Half of it is pure projection in the idea of trying to bully people into silence and demonize discourse. | ||
| That is, I say this from an absolute outsider's perspective. | ||
| I have seen the evolution of CRT in the United States over the last two years. | ||
| What she described as what the adversaries are trying to do to her is exactly what they are trying to do to anybody who opposes CRT in schooling. | ||
| And her double speak that we don't teach it in elementary school or whatever, But it's taught in universities. | ||
| Well, they give it another word in universities, but we've seen it now. | ||
| And we've seen admissions from the teacher saying, we want to teach it, and if you oppose it, you are the bigot and the phobe and the ist. | ||
| But the accusation is exactly what they are doing themselves. | ||
| Walter, since I'm guessing we all agree that she's lying here, what do we do about all of the liars? | ||
| That it seems like almost everyone in charge of everything important right now is an abject liar, and I always quote that Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote, they know they're lying, we know they're lying, we know they're lying, and they continue to lie. | ||
| It's like, there's no shame. | ||
| There's nothing we can do to shame her. | ||
| She's not gonna stop. | ||
| Well, first of all, in her case, America needs to see more of her because she is everything that every child grows up hating about public school teachers. | ||
| She's pedantic, smug, she talks down to people, she pretends that she's infallible when you can see right through half of her things. | ||
| She's not logically consistent. | ||
| We need the liars, especially when they're as bad as hurt. | ||
| Just keep lying. | ||
| Because this tactic of denying that something exists always breeds a very obvious counter move, proving that it does. | ||
| And it's a very easy thing to do. | ||
| And so if they're going to go with this, you know, it's not happening. | ||
| Do you see any monster in the room here while it stands over their shoulder? | ||
| They're going to lose. | ||
| Walter, I got a title for your next book. | ||
| Well, you just came up with it yourself, but just keep lying. | ||
| Like, to me, that's, maybe that's the meme that we need to be pushing for all these people. | ||
| Instead of keep calling them liars, it's, yeah, keep lying, guys, keep lying. | ||
| Listen, I appreciate the three of you joining me. | ||
| Have a good weekend, guys. | ||
| I'm sorry we didn't have more time. | ||
| We were on a little bit of a crunch today, and of course I will have you guys all back. | ||
| And for everybody else, I hope you enjoyed our roundtable this weekend. | ||
| We skipped last weekend because I was traveling, and this was actually a pre-tape. | ||
| Technically right now this is Thursday for me, but I'm in Miami right now for some business with locals. | ||
| As always, I hope you have a great weekend. | ||
| I hope that what we did this week on the show gave you a little something to think about, didn't make you completely bananas, and perhaps sparked some conversation that you can now have with someone in your family or a friend or even on that evil Facebook or that crazy Twitter where you can go, oh, you know, actually what you're seeing on MSNBC or what you're seeing out of this administration is not true. | ||
| There are some other people talking about things in a way that perhaps you should engage with instead of just thinking that everyone that you disagree with is a bigot and racist and everything else. |
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