Feb. 8, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[MUSIC] | |
| All right, you internet people, it's February 8th, 2022. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| It's the Rubin Report Direct Message. | ||
| We are live streaming on Rumble, that YouTube thing, and on Blaze TV. | ||
| Do me a favor, share, subscribe, tap notification bells if you can find them, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I think today, and I don't want to over-promise, but I think today is going to be one of our biggest and most important shows that we've ever done, okay? | ||
| We've never done anything like what we're about to do, which is going to be a full-on expose of what I think is the biggest story of the day because it combines every piece of everything, politically and culturally, that I've been yammering on about for years, the things that you all care about, and it's just the perfect encapsulation of why so many things are wrong, so many things are confused, How perhaps we can pilfer some truth and honesty out of any of this, etc, etc. | ||
| So, of course, I'm talking about what's happening right now with Joe Rogan and cancel culture and corporations versus people and media dishonesty and the whole damn thing. | ||
| So that's what we're doing for the full at least half hour today. | ||
| So it's one story. | ||
| We've crafted, I think, a pretty compelling narrative on the whole thing. | ||
| We're going to start from the beginning, get it all the way To what happened yesterday, which is that Rumble officially offered Joe Rogan $100 million to move from Spotify over to Rumble to be completely uncensored, put his entire catalog, which was censored the second he joined Spotify over a year ago, put his entire catalog on Rumble. | ||
| Yours truly had a little something to do with that decision. | ||
| Actually, I don't want to tease too much because I'm going to tell you the whole story of how it all went down, but it actually was my idea. | ||
| And I'll tell you a little bit more on that in just a minute. | ||
| So we're going to talk really from the beginning of how this whole thing started. | ||
| But before I lay out the case, and I'm going to try to do this as honestly as possible, | ||
| and I'm going to try to take into account all different perspectives and everything else, | ||
| I want to play a quick clip of Joe himself on his show not too long ago. | ||
| You made a really good point. | ||
| You said, the thing is, if you censor yourself just 1%, you say, I'll just censor myself 1%. | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| I'm going to make them happy. | ||
| And then they're just going to keep moving it. | ||
| They're just going to keep moving it forward, moving the goalposts and providing you with more money and giving you more things, but keep moving it in a certain direction. | ||
| And if you keep giving into it, they're going to have a hold of you. | ||
| OK, so that's Joe Rogan himself. | ||
| And I want to be clear in everything I'm about to do. | ||
| This is not a criticism of Joe Rogan. | ||
| As I said on the show the other day, you know, and I've been saying for a while, it's like he's just one guy. | ||
| He's a comedian who suddenly, through having conversations, became more powerful than news networks. | ||
| OK? | ||
| And everyone, for the most part, I can't say everyone, but most of us, I think, that do something like this for a living are just doing the best we can. | ||
| And it's going to come with some mistakes. | ||
| You're going to be learning on the fly, etc, etc. | ||
| So you can sort of see Rogan learning on the fly right there. | ||
| Now, interestingly, the guy he's talking to in that very clip is Alex Jones. | ||
| Now, Alex Jones, doesn't matter what you think about Alex Jones or what you think He's said or not said or if he's a bad dude or a savior. | ||
| None of that matters. | ||
| He himself was booted off all of the big tech platforms. | ||
| I've said several times on this show that one of my regrets in the last, say, two years is that when it immediately happened, I didn't offer enough of a defense. | ||
| I did say immediately that I didn't think he should be kicked off, but I should have been louder about it because it obviously wasn't going to stop. | ||
| With Alex Jones. | ||
| And again, that has nothing to do with anything that he said or didn't say. | ||
| It's like there's plenty of awful people on social media. | ||
| Many of them work for giant corporations and they're out there spewing neo-racism and all sorts of terrible stuff. | ||
| But what you can see there is Joe Rogan making an honest assessment of how this thing works. | ||
| That if you give an inch, they will just kind of keep taking. | ||
| And maybe they'll give you more money and you'll be quiet again or whatever it might be, but it's just going to keep moving on you. | ||
| Well, now that very notion has come to Joe's doorstep. | ||
| And Joe, if you remember, about 10 days ago this whole thing started. | ||
| This was all about how Joe, through his conversations with people like Dr. Robert Malone, who was one of the inventors of the mRNA vaccine, the technology, that Joe was spreading COVID misinformation. | ||
| We had about three days in the machine, the media machine, where it was all about Joe | ||
| Rogan spreading misinformation and he's getting people killed and they're taking horse dewormer | ||
| and other weird things and he's a bad scary dude because of that. | ||
| Well that somehow didn't destroy him. | ||
| So then the machine ramped up and this compilation video of Joe Rogan saying the N-word was released | ||
| and at no point, I've watched it several times, was Joe Rogan using the N-word to be racist. | ||
| He was often repeating the word that someone else said, he was mocking those who say it, | ||
| that sort of thing. | ||
| You guys all get that. | ||
| But then Joe, I think, made a mistake. | ||
| He's just a man and he made a mistake and he apologized for something that did not deserve | ||
| an apology. | ||
| Here is part of his Instagram apology. | ||
| Hello friends. | ||
| I'm making this video to talk about the most regretful and shameful thing that I've ever had to talk about publicly. | ||
| There's a video that's out that's a compilation of me saying the N word. | ||
| It's a video that's made of clips taken out of context of me of 12 years of conversations on my podcast and it's all smooshed together and it looks horrible even to me. | ||
| Now I know that to most people, there's no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word, nevermind publicly on a podcast. | ||
| And I agree with that now. | ||
| I haven't said it in years, but for a long time, When I would bring that word up, like if it would come up in conversation, instead of saying the n-word, I would just say the word. | ||
| I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing. | ||
| But it's not my word to use. | ||
| I'm well aware of that now, but for years I used it in that manner. | ||
| I never used it to be racist, because I'm not racist, but whenever You're in a situation where you have to say, I'm not racist. | ||
| You f***ed up. | ||
| And I clearly have f***ed up. | ||
| But I do hope that this can be a teachable moment for anybody that doesn't realize how offensive that word can be coming out of a white person's mouth in context or out of context. | ||
| My sincere and humble apologies. | ||
| I wish there was more that I could say, but all of this is just me talking from the bottom of my heart. | ||
| It makes me sick watching that video. | ||
|
unidentified
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Alright. | |
| He gave an inch. | ||
| I would argue he gave more than an inch there. | ||
| Now he's just a man. | ||
| I do not know what pressure was brought to bear. | ||
| I don't know what Spotify said. | ||
| I don't know what his agent said. | ||
| I don't know what his wife said. | ||
| Maybe his wife was just like, Joe, I've just had enough of this shit. | ||
| And you just better apologize so we can move on. | ||
| I don't like getting looks when I go to Whole Foods. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I have none of us have any idea. | ||
| There's one person who knows. | ||
| It's Joe Rogan. | ||
| But he did give an inch there, right? | ||
| He gave more than an inch. | ||
| This idea that you have to apologize for saying things that you did not mean, right? | ||
| He did not call anyone the N-word to be offensive. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The idea that certain set of people can't say a certain word. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure this is going to get me in some degree of trouble. | ||
| This is really dangerous. | ||
| This is really dangerous. | ||
| Should you be allowed to make gay jokes if you're not gay? | ||
| Seth MacFarlane, a family guy, would have an awful lot to apologize for, right? | ||
| We see these people that make all of these jokes. | ||
| They often do apologize, but never turn the money back, right? | ||
| They never return the money. | ||
| Hank Azaria for 25 years played Apu on The Simpsons doing an Indian. | ||
| And Apu actually was one of the best characters who I've often said was probably the hardest | ||
| working guy in Springfield, totally welcomed in the community. | ||
| He was a friend of Homer. | ||
| They did a whole episode on immigration where Homer is anti-immigrant at the beginning, | ||
| becomes pro-immigrant at the end. | ||
| The great song about the Quickie Mart, you all know it, right? | ||
| It's like, you see what's happening here? | ||
| This is really dangerous stuff. | ||
| But they got Joe Rogan to give an inch. | ||
| They actually got him to bend the knee. | ||
| He does not... I don't believe in my heart that Joe Rogan really believes it's not his word to say. | ||
| I have no desire to say the N-word. | ||
| I don't think in my entire life I have ever said the N-word to be offensive. | ||
| Have I ever said the N-word? | ||
| I have. | ||
| I've said it in a joking context. Actually, I'll tell you this right now. | ||
| When I was doing stand-up in New York, I used to do a joke about the Transformers. | ||
| I'm talking about Autobots and Decepticons. | ||
| And Jazz was the one black Transformer. And I did a joke about it. | ||
| And I would say the N-word at the end, not E-R, I would say it G-A, G-G-A at the end, | ||
| as I was doing an impression of Jazz talking about Megatron. | ||
| And it would get a huge laugh from white people, black people, Asian people, gay people, and maybe trans people, I'm not sure. | ||
| And one day I was on stage doing it, it would get a huge laugh, like a huge laugh. | ||
| And one day I was on stage and the crowd kinda, well I heard a lot of groans, and I was just like, you know what, I'm just gonna set that one aside. | ||
| Now, does that make me racist because I said that? | ||
| Because of the color of my skin, I should not be allowed to say a certain word. | ||
| Now I get it. | ||
| There's no win in this for me, even by saying that right now. | ||
| And now I'll have a bunch of internet weirdos trying to hunt down videos of that. | ||
| But the bending of the knee here, I cannot say certain things. | ||
| And then he said something that was even more dangerous. | ||
| He said something to the effect of, when you're in a situation saying, I'm not a racist, you fucked up. | ||
| That is really bad because they level accusations of racism at everyone. | ||
| Everyone they disagree with is a racist. | ||
| Look at all of the people who they have dishonestly called racists over the last five years. | ||
| Forget about Donald Trump. | ||
| They called half the country racist and white supremacist for half for the last five years. | ||
| So it's like. | ||
| Actually, if you get called a racist and you don't defend yourself, if you're not, you're the one making the mistake. | ||
| It's not just because they level an accusation that you automatically have effed up. | ||
| Of course that's not true. | ||
| Of course that's not true. | ||
| So we really have to have a conversation about this as a country or whatever the hell we are at this point. | ||
| We have to have a conversation about this. | ||
| Are we all going to apologize? | ||
| Just think, are we any more tolerant right now? | ||
| Is anything that's happening in this country, politically or culturally, making us more tolerant right now? | ||
| Obviously it's making us less tolerant. | ||
| And if Joe Rogan is completely silenced, if Spotify gets rid of him, if you delete all of these episodes, if you take all of us out who dare to talk for a living and try to think things through, will we be more tolerant at the end? | ||
| Are we more tolerant right now because Uncle Ben is not on the rice box and Aunt Jemima is not on the syrup container? | ||
| We removed black people from things that everybody loved in the name of equality or something like that? | ||
| Nobody's even sure why we did any of it. | ||
| The Land O'Lakes lady is gone. | ||
| Did this help? | ||
| Are we less racist? | ||
| This is all complete nonsense at every level. | ||
| But the nonsense continues. | ||
| And why does it continue? | ||
| It continues because all of us don't really say what we think. | ||
| So then we feed the monster. | ||
| We continue to feed the monster. | ||
| So the Spotify CEO, Daniel Elk, released a statement. | ||
| Now, we've got some of it here. | ||
| He said, Spotify team, there are no words I can say to adequately adequately convey how deeply sorry I am for the way the Joe Rogan experience controversy continues to impact each of you. | ||
| Not only are some of Joe Rogan's comments incredibly hurtful, I want to make clear that they do not represent the values of this company. | ||
| I know this situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated, and unheard. | ||
| I think it's important that you're aware that we've had conversations with Joe and his team about some of the content in his show, including his history of using some racially insensitive language. | ||
| Following these discussions and his own reflections, he chose to remove a number of episodes from Spotify. | ||
| He also issued his own apology over the weekend. | ||
| Okay, so I think first it's important to note that when Joe Rogan signed the deal with Spotify, I believe it was 46 episodes were taken away immediately. | ||
| It was Alex Jones, it was Joe's friend and comedian Brian Callen, a bunch of other people, they immediately did that. | ||
| So Joe, this is just something that Joe has to Like, accept and come around to the reality of it. | ||
| They said, here's, let's say, $100 million, roughly, at least. | ||
| We're going to remove 46 of your episodes. | ||
| So when he did that, he was signing a deal with the devil in a certain way. | ||
| And again, I'm not begrudging it. | ||
| No one has offered me $100 million. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| If someone came to me right now, a giant corporation, and said, Dave, we'd like to offer you $100 million. | ||
| You do have to remove that one episode of your show. | ||
| Whatever that one episode is. | ||
| You gotta get rid of that one. | ||
| We'll offer you a hundred million dollars. | ||
| Like, am I just gonna... Just like that. | ||
| Like, just like that. | ||
| Like, I'll say no to... It's not even life-changing money. | ||
| A hundred million dollars, it's beyond imagination. | ||
| All the good you could do for a gajillion people and everyone you know and everything else. | ||
| So, like, these are just easy things to be like, he's a sellout and bleh. | ||
| It's not that easy. | ||
| It's not that easy. | ||
| But it's important to note in the context of this story, because this is a story being told right in front of us right now, it's important to note that when he signed the original deal, he knew that they were censorious. | ||
| He knew that they did not like certain things to be said. | ||
| Also, the way that the CEO, Spotify CEO, says that there, it's like, you employees have been offended by his racially insensitive remarks, except He did not say them to be pejorative. | ||
| He did not say them to be offensive. | ||
| This is everything about this. | ||
| A CEO treating their employees like they're these snowflakes. | ||
| You think this is a problem? | ||
| You think this that five years ago when a whole bunch of us were screaming about what was happening on college campuses? | ||
| Do you think maybe it actually now leaked out into reality? | ||
| It leaked out into the real world and it's going to destroy all of these companies? | ||
| And by the way, this will destroy Spotify. | ||
| Maybe that's the silver lining here. | ||
| These places, they won't deserve to exist, ultimately. | ||
| I like the service of Spotify. | ||
| I actually still have Spotify. | ||
| I have some great playlists on Spotify. | ||
| Maybe I'll share them with you guys. | ||
| I'll share them in the Rubinport Locals community, actually. | ||
| I've got some great Spotify playlists. | ||
| I'm doing a Yacht Rock thing that you'd love right now. | ||
| What he says there is we've offended some of you because of this language. | ||
| Joe offended you and we're sorry about that. | ||
| OK, so you're sort of letting the inmates run the asylum at that point, right? | ||
| You know, like people work at companies that they're not always happy with everything that's going on at the company. | ||
| It's very possible that one of the three gentlemen in this room right now is not happy with me. | ||
| Is that possible, guys? | ||
| No, no, no, not at this company, but at other companies it's possible. | ||
| OK, so then he says that Joe then decided to remove some of those episodes. | ||
| So then it's like now we're playing like a weird sort of semantic or optics game, right? | ||
| Because it's like Joe chose to. | ||
| Well, they might have said, Joe, we're going to take away the 100 million bucks. | ||
| So how can we make it make it look like we didn't force you to do it? | ||
| So could you just do it? | ||
| Did Joe in his heart of hearts, In his heart of hearts, the guy that I played that video a moment ago about, you don't give them an inch because they give you money and they'll just keep going. | ||
| Do you think he honestly, like in the most sort of forthright, honest way, was like, you know, I really thought about it. | ||
| I said those words not to be offensive. | ||
| I'm just one man. | ||
| I will do this. | ||
| This is what I want to do. | ||
| And I really have offended people. | ||
| And this is my deep shame. | ||
| It's like nobody thinks Joe Rogan's a racist. | ||
| Nobody does. | ||
| Nobody thinks Joe Rogan has killed anybody because of COVID. | ||
| We are surrounded by, we are encapsulated by people that lie to us about everything. | ||
| But this has much more to do with the media freaking out over a guy that's replacing the media than it does over COVID or the N word or anything else. | ||
| I'll get to that in just a sec. | ||
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| And now back to me. | ||
| Okay, so what is this really about? | ||
| Is this really about this comedian who has long-form conversations with MMA fighters and comedians and politicians? | ||
| A guy who is mostly a lefty who was a Bernie supporter? | ||
| I mean, the funny part of this is The people who love to cancel people should still love Rogan because even though Rogan has sat down with all of these amazing thinkers on the right and people who talk about freedom all the time and has interviewed, you know, say Jordan Peterson probably eight or nine times, it's like Rogan still came to the conclusion that he should vote for Bernie Sanders and support Bernie Sanders. | ||
| It's like, that's a whole other issue entirely. | ||
| But this is a guy who left California because of taxes, right? | ||
| He gets a hundred million bucks. | ||
| Then leaves California because of high taxes brought to you by Bernie types brought to you by progressives to move to Texas where there is no state income tax. | ||
| So it's not even like he has like a completely holistic view of the world that fully makes sense in line with whatever they're trying to destroy. | ||
| It's just also silly, but perhaps it's not. | ||
| About COVID misinformation specifically, and perhaps it's not about talking about the N word in the past, even though you didn't mean to be racist. | ||
| Perhaps what this is about is that. | ||
| It's an upending of the world order. | ||
| The media landscape has changed so drastically, and this is the machine's way of showing who's still boss. | ||
| So here are two propagandists by the name of Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta. | ||
| These are Democrats who are on a network known as CNN, which was a place for news at one time, although actually, in retrospect, we didn't have the internet, so who knows how much they've been lying about the entire time. | ||
| But these are Democrats who pretend to be journalists, who now are quite happy, actually, that Spotify is punishing Joe Rogan. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
|
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Joe Rogan is now apologizing after videos resurfaced of him using the N-word multiple times on his podcast, Patriot Takes, which put the video together as an organization that aims to expose extremism on the far right. | |
| The video is an edited compilation of different podcast episodes. | ||
| Brian, what is Joe Rogan now saying? | ||
| He is now apologizing, and we're gonna find out if that's enough for Spotify, the company that has an exclusive distribution deal with him. | ||
| Jim, this is all coming to light because of the recent controversy about anti-vaccine rhetoric on Rogan's podcast. | ||
| Some artists decided to quit the service. | ||
| One of them, India Auri, pointed out this video, this compilation video, and pointed out that the language Rogan has used around race in the past is just as or maybe even more problematic than his rhetoric about vaccines. | ||
|
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Put anybody out of a job. | |
| I mean to me I It's it seems untenable to have that kind of video surface that kind of compilation surface and keep one's job Joe Rogan can continue to host his podcast if people want to listen to it They can but it doesn't have to be on Spotify There are many examples, including in Hollywood and entertainment, where people have lost their roles for less than this. | ||
| And that may be why Spotify is being so quiet. | ||
| At the same time, I want to recognize there are reasons why Rogan has lots of fans, millions of fans. | ||
| People want to hear his candid conversations. | ||
| But there's a difference between that, between candid, in-depth conversations, and the kind of vile that's in this compilation. | ||
| There is bile and it's being spewed by you, Mr. Potato Head. | ||
| The way they are drooling. | ||
| The way they are drooling at someone should be... | ||
| How could he keep a job? | ||
| What was the line? | ||
| That would be enough for anyone to lose their job. | ||
| That's basically what Acosta said. | ||
| Notice that they never said that he didn't use the n-word to be racist. | ||
| He didn't use it in a pejorative manner. | ||
| That he used it when he was either repeating what other people said or when he was mocking people or anything else. | ||
| They never say that. | ||
| But they do say far right. | ||
| There's a website. | ||
| These people create compilation videos to guard against the far right. | ||
| And then they use the name Joe Rogan. | ||
| Do you see, guys, how this whole thing comes together? | ||
| And why are they really upset? | ||
| One more time, guys. | ||
| Why are they really upset? | ||
| Do you think that Jim Acosta, Democratic activist Jim Acosta and Democratic activist Potato Head, do you think that they are actually offended by Joe Rogan repeating a word in a non-offensive way? | ||
| Or is it because more people are paying attention to Joe Rogan? | ||
| That nobody, nobody would pay a dime for Jim Acosta or Brian Stelter if they did not have CNN next to their name. | ||
| And CNN, which is crumbling, and Jeff Zucker just had to step down, and Tubin masturbated on a Zoom call, and Don Lemon did some weird shit, and they had to get rid of Cuomo, and the whole thing. | ||
| The place is going down, right? | ||
| The place is going down. | ||
| okay fine, but when it goes down, Jim Acosta is not gonna be able to go independent | ||
| and create a podcast that anyone will pay for, right? | ||
| Brian Stelter, nobody cares about Brian Stelter. | ||
| These are people who are corporate suck-ups, they are. | ||
| I don't know how to describe them in any other way because they lie about absolutely everything and they're now lying about their opponent because they want to take out their opponent. | ||
| But it's even worse than Jim Acosta and Brian Stelter because now it's leaking into every bit of our political machinery. | ||
| We've got a quote here from The Telegraph. | ||
| Barack and Michelle Obama are reportedly seeking to move their podcasts away from Spotify, adding to the company's woes as it struggles with a misinformation controversy and low growth. | ||
| One source told Business Insider that the couple's higher ground audio company's pitches did not always align with Spotify's interest in popular, wide-reaching shows. | ||
| A few days later, Joni Mitchell also demanded that her music be removed, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who have a deal to host and produce Spotify podcasts, express their own concerns over the spread of pandemic-related misinformation. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Barack Obama. | ||
| And Michelle Obama. | ||
| And we know that the administration, remember our Surgeon General said about two weeks ago that perhaps Spotify should do something about misinformation coming from Joe Rogan. | ||
| And we know that Jen Psaki said a few months ago that the administration flags posts for Facebook. | ||
| So that they can remove posts. | ||
| This is as close as you can get to violating the First Amendment without actually violating the letter of the law. | ||
| And maybe it actually is doing that when you apply that sort of public pressure. | ||
| By the way, Facebook's stock is absolutely tumbling right now. | ||
| I think Meta, which is now the parent company, Lost something like 25 percent of their stock value. | ||
| And then in another huge story yesterday, and it's all connected to all of this, Peter Thiel, the original investor in Facebook and really one of the few sane people to come out of Silicon Valley, mostly a libertarian. | ||
| And I know him personally and he's a good guy. | ||
| He just stepped down from the Facebook board. | ||
| So there are major things happening, major, major things happening. | ||
| But this is a moment for good people to hold their nerve, right? | ||
| Not just fall into the pit, the endless pit, this endless descent to hell that we're all in. | ||
| And good people need to stand up. | ||
| I'm trying to do the best I can. | ||
| I hope you're doing the best you can. | ||
| But if you want to see someone that won't do the best they can, here is former presidential candidate and a guy who I've interviewed. | ||
| Andrew Yang, he tweeted this yesterday. | ||
| I don't think Joe Rogan is a racist. | ||
| The man interacts with and works with black people literally all of the time. | ||
| Andrew Yang deleted that tweet. | ||
| So Andrew Yang got some people to be mean to him and people, anonymous people on Twitter must have said, Andrew Yang, you're a mean guy and you defended a mean Joe Rogan. | ||
| Joe Rogan, of course, gave Andrew Yang three hours on his show to, you know, say whatever he wants and promote himself and raise money and all that good stuff. | ||
| But Andrew Yang deleted that tweet. | ||
| Do you think for one second Andrew Yang thinks that Joe Rogan is a racist? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| But the mob comes. | ||
| And it's amorphous. | ||
| And it's mean. | ||
| And I've seen it. | ||
| It's come for me. | ||
| And it ain't fun. | ||
| And years ago when it came for me the first you know few months when it was just unhinged lunacy because I was announcing that I was leaving the left in essence or as I was not even that it was when I was first saying hey there's some problems on the left and I would just get thousands and thousands of tweets and I'd get I'd literally get death threats to my house and all kinds of other stuff that I would prefer not to tell you you know what happened to me lost a whole shit ton of my hair developed alopecia which It's all mine now. | ||
| We're back. | ||
| We're back in business. | ||
| But it's not fun. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| So I'm not diminishing that. | ||
| But if we don't have people that will be brave, then we've got nothing. | ||
| So Andrew Yang, it's like, you're done, man. | ||
| You're done. | ||
| You're completely done. | ||
| Then it continued. | ||
| It continued with this guy, Dwayne Johnson, better known as The Rock. | ||
| And here we've got some info from the New York Post. | ||
| Just days after publicly supporting Joe Rogan, Dwayne The Rock Johnson acknowledged the controversial podcaster's repeated use of the N-word, calling the revelation a learning moment. | ||
| So you need to understand this. | ||
| The Rock defended Rogan first, because The Rock is not an idiot. | ||
| The Rock is not an idiot. | ||
| The Rock is not an idiot. | ||
| He's not a liar and a moron. | ||
| The Rock knows that Joe Rogan's not racist. | ||
| The Rock knows that. | ||
| But then, this video goes around, the mob starts coming, and even The Rock... The Rock, you might say, was caught between a rock and a hard place. | ||
| And The Rock then retracted, and basically the implication is, no, no, Joe Rogan is a racist. | ||
| Now, that would be fine, except... | ||
| Most rocks have skeletons in their closet. | ||
| I think that's a saying. | ||
| And then, of course, this tweet popped up. | ||
| Somebody dug this one up, where The Rock, a couple years back, said to this random girl on Twitter, at KatieRobin23, shh, don't be angry, Miss Katie. | ||
| It's not our fault you're turning blank. | ||
| You can read the word yourself. | ||
| I'm sure I'm demonetized already, but why add fuel to the fire? | ||
| You're turning blank tricks to put yourself through nursing school. | ||
| Shush. | ||
| Now, that's to a random girl on Twitter. | ||
| It's a couple years back. | ||
| But why did he say that T-word? | ||
| That very offensive T-word? | ||
| Is The Rock a transphobe? | ||
| Could it be that we've all used words in ways that either we regret or at the time we're okay or something like that? | ||
| But, you know what, Rock? | ||
| You gotta be destroyed now. | ||
| By their rules, not by my rules, man. | ||
| You've shown that you are not nearly as brave as you purport to be in a lot of the movies that you're in. | ||
| What would The Rock do? | ||
| I've never seen any of the Fast and the Furious. | ||
| I've never seen any of them. | ||
| I think that's actually one of my keys to life. | ||
| I've actually never seen any of the Fast and the Furious, but I assume they're doing things fast | ||
| and they're pissed about it. | ||
| And they probably don't apologize for saying bad words. | ||
| Would that be a fair assessment of the movies? | ||
| Yeah, they don't apologize in those movies. | ||
| So The Rock, the guy The Rock, is not the Rock that you want him to be. | ||
| But it continued, it continued, and there are some people | ||
| sort of making some sense through this. | ||
| Actually, one of the guys making some sense through this is Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| Now, Glenn Greenwald is a lefty. | ||
| He is an Edward Snowden lefty. | ||
| Glenn Greenwald and I used to fight on Twitter all the time. | ||
| Glenn Greenwald has repeatedly called me racist. | ||
| We've sort of made amends privately once about a year ago. | ||
| So we don't go at each other anymore. | ||
| But I have obvious political disagreements with him. | ||
| Is what it is. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But I like to give credit where credit is due. | ||
| And here he is on Fox talking about this issue that I'm mentioning about media resentment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's the same reason why you look at why they're so obsessed with Fox News, sort of the one place that has always existed in the large media ecosystem that deviates from what the rest of the media is typically saying. | |
| Like, why can't you have just one place where people are questioning your orthodoxies? | ||
| And it's because the ability to control information is an incredibly powerful instrument | ||
| that everyone who tries to obtain it wants to safeguard. | ||
| And so what you see with Joe Rogan is he's built an enormous audience, | ||
| bigger than essentially everybody on television, an audience that's young and ideologically diverse. | ||
| And he does often question and dissent from the pieties they're attempting to implant | ||
| in the minds of so many people. | ||
| And as their ratings decline and their audience evaporates, they're looking to censorship as one of the ways | ||
| maintain this stranglehold on our discourse. | ||
| There's a huge component of kind of resentment on the part of this insular class and liberal enclaves that nobody else is entitled to have influence. | ||
| Yes, Glenn Greenwald, we're good to go, man. | ||
| By the way, what's interesting at another level about that is he's on Fox saying that, okay? | ||
| Now, as he makes the point, they're always trying to destroy Fox, right? | ||
| Because Fox is the only counterplace. | ||
| Fox, by the way, is the only network that will put me on. | ||
| And they put me on completely uncensored. | ||
| I do things live. | ||
| They've never once asked me to say anything or not to say anything or anything else. | ||
| When my first book came out a couple years ago, we tried to get on every other network. | ||
| Nobody put us on. | ||
| It was a book defending liberalism, but actually they're anti-liberal. | ||
| That's a whole other thing. | ||
| But what's interesting about that is the guy that he's talking to right there is a guy by the name of Howard Kurtz. | ||
| And you might find it interesting that Howard Kurtz used to be a host on a network called CNN. | ||
| And do you know what show he used to host on CNN? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a show called Reliable Sources. | |
| Yes, he was the host on CNN of Reliable Sources before Brian Stelter. | ||
| It was a Sunday morning show and I remember watching it growing up and I thought it was really interesting because I've always been interested in media and he would do this honest assessment of media and critique of media and what are we doing wrong and sort of let's look in the mirror and figure out what's what. | ||
| I don't remember exactly the controversy that got him fired from CNN, but then Fox News picked him up. | ||
| And there he is doing an honest assessment of the media with a guy, Glenn Greenwald, who is clearly not on the right, who is clearly not in agreement with most of the stuff that is said on Fox News. | ||
| OK, but now it continues. | ||
| Barry Weiss, who, of course, was the New York Times op ed person who famously left the New York Times two years ago. | ||
| She defended Joe Rogan, and obviously I've been somewhat critical of Barry. | ||
| I'll get to that in just a second. | ||
| But she wrote, ditto, this is a tweet from Barry Weiss. | ||
| This is a retweet of Lex Friedman. | ||
| She wrote, "Ditto, grateful for Joe Rogan." | ||
| And of course what Lex said was, "I stand with Joe Rogan. | ||
| "It is not a coincidence that the attacks calling him racist | ||
| "come as pressure on Spotify to censor builds. | ||
| "Politicians and the media profit on division and outrage. | ||
| "They fuel the extremes that make us believe "we're divided, we're not, we're in this together." | ||
| So my only, and I don't mean to be petty about this, but I do have to mention this Barry Weiss thing | ||
| because Barry, as you know, she wrote the original "Intellectual Dark Web" piece. | ||
| In the New York Times, where she said that if interviewers, she was talking about me and Joe Rogan specifically, if we talk to some of these scary people, and she was talking about Mike Cernovich, she was talking about Alex Jones and a few others, that we'd have to either be cynical or stupid. | ||
| So she put that in the New York Times. | ||
| She called me, and Barry, I will talk directly to you and I've texted you, so I'm not talking shit behind your back. | ||
| You called me the next day crying after the article came out apologizing for putting it in there and said that your editors forced you to put it in there. | ||
| So you were doing the same gatekeeping that now you don't want done. | ||
| They're forcing Joe Rogan to not talk to certain people. | ||
| That's exactly what you did when you were at the New York Times. | ||
| I don't mean to make this about you, but why not just admit that now? | ||
| You're free and independent and on Substack. | ||
| Why not just admit what you know to be true? | ||
| I'm not making this up. | ||
| So that's that's just a little sidebar. | ||
| And I apologize for even bringing myself into this at that level. | ||
| Brett Weinstein, who, of course, has been on my show many times and who has survived cancel culture and You know, literally survived being at Evergreen State University when kids showed up with baseball bats. | ||
| He had a good tweet about this. | ||
| He said, Joe Rogan is taking flack because he's over the target. | ||
| I support him for the very same reason every other person who understands the relationship between a free exchange of ideas and liberty supports him. | ||
| Hashtag thanks Joe Rogan. | ||
| So, of course, Brett is right there. | ||
| And it is good to see it is rare these days, but it is good to see some of the people that have been through the machine not come out Sucking up to the machine and, you know, standing up for what I know that they believe in. | ||
| So props to Brett on that one. | ||
| And now I want to sort of link this to what happened yesterday. | ||
| Because yesterday and the night before, it actually started the night before on Monday night, was a crazy, crazy time. | ||
| So this whole story is breaking. | ||
| All this Spotify stuff and the censor stuff and he said the N-word and all of the stuff that I've just laid out here is breaking. | ||
| On Monday I had a big meeting in Sarasota. | ||
| Rumble just opened up huge offices in Sarasota. | ||
| They were getting the most of the team, not the entire team. | ||
| We have people literally all over the world, programmers in Eastern Europe and in Spain and all over the place. | ||
| But we were getting the entire team, people in Canada and the United States, together, as many of the people as we could. | ||
| For a first company-wide meeting. | ||
| And as you guys know, Locals, the company that I started, to fight all of this stuff, we merged with Rumble about six months ago. | ||
| And the reason we did it was because they have the distribution, they have the right set of people involved to fight cancel culture, to stand up for the principles that I'm always talking about here. | ||
| You know, it's like, it doesn't take a village to raise a child, but it does take a village to fight big tech. | ||
| And you can't do it on your own all the time. | ||
| I didn't think I could just do it on my own. | ||
| So we found the right allies to merge with. | ||
| So we merged these companies. | ||
| We're building some really awesome stuff to stand up against YouTube, to stand up against Amazon, AWS, the whole thing, and to defend free speech. | ||
| So anyway, there was a big company-wide meeting there that had nothing to do with the Rogan thing. | ||
| This had been planned for weeks. | ||
| on Monday and on Sunday night, the whole people were arriving from all over the world | ||
| and we went out to this big dinner and we're all sitting at the table | ||
| and everyone's talking about Joe Rogan because obviously this is not only the thing | ||
| that's happening right now, but it's certainly related to the work that Rumble's doing | ||
| and what I do and everything else. | ||
| And I just said to everybody at the table, I was sitting across from Chris, the CEO, | ||
| the Rumble CEO and I was sitting across from Asaf, the CEO of Locals and a bunch of the other people, | ||
| some of the lawyers and whatever else, And I said, you know, we need to just do something nuts. | ||
| Why don't why don't we just make a hundred million dollar offer to Rogan publicly? | ||
| Like, can we do that? | ||
| Let's just do that. | ||
| And I was like, sort of kidding, but also not kidding. | ||
| Like, I don't actually know how much money Rumble has. | ||
| I was just like, you know, let's just do, let's just shock the system. | ||
| That's what I kept saying. | ||
| The system needs to be shocked. | ||
| We need to show people that there's a chance and that people will fight and something. | ||
| And Chris just freaking lit up, a soft lit up. | ||
| And it was, everybody was like, holy shit, that that's a freaking great idea. | ||
| Like that's what we should do. | ||
| That's what we should do. | ||
| And Chris immediately turns to the lawyer. | ||
| Can we do that? | ||
| And the lawyer starts like kind of thinking and mumbling a little bit. | ||
| And then Chris gets on the phone with somebody. | ||
| They got to call an accountant. | ||
| They call a bunch of people. | ||
| And then Chris comes back about 10 minutes later. | ||
| We're going to do it. | ||
| We're going to do it. | ||
| And we're sitting there and everybody, 50 people, everybody is going, holy cow, this is freaking amazing. | ||
| Like we're actually going to do something. | ||
| We're going to we're going to give it our best shot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like we're going to offer Rogan the off ramp. | ||
| Like if you don't like the censorship of Spotify, I don't know everything about his deal there. | ||
| But if you don't like it and there's a way to extricate yourself from that situation. | ||
| Hey, you got a home here We'll take all your stuff. | ||
| We will never censor you do whatever the hell you want And here's a hundred freaking million dollars to do it. | ||
| So the offer that we made was a hundred percent authentic and then the next morning Chris the rumble CEO tweeted this out and if I could just pat myself on the back for a second I wrote it. | ||
| So there you go I did have a little bit of help, but these are my words. | ||
| I think you'll hear me in this. | ||
| Dear Joe, we stand with you, your guests, and your legion of fans and desire for real conversation, so we'd like to offer you a hundred million reasons to make the world a better place. | ||
| How about you bring your shows to rumble, both old and new, with no censorship, for a hundred million bucks over four years? | ||
| This is our chance to save the world. | ||
| And yes, this is totally legit. | ||
| Sincerely, Chris Pavlovsky, Rumble CEO. | ||
| I think you can hear my voice in that thing. | ||
| I was the one I really pushed. | ||
| They wanted to put dollars, a hundred million dollars instead of bucks. | ||
| I said, let's just do bucks. | ||
| Make it friendly. | ||
| So the offer is real. | ||
| I want to be very clear about that. | ||
| I saw a bunch of people, the usual suspects and blue check haters and all that stuff. | ||
| It's not a real offer and they don't have the money and blah blah blah. | ||
| It is a real offer. | ||
| Joe Rogan or anyone associated with Joe Rogan, if you are watching this, take a hundred million dollars from Rumble. | ||
| You will be completely uncensored. | ||
| You can do whatever you want to do and your entire catalog can be up on Rumble tomorrow. | ||
| Maybe today. | ||
| I'd have to talk to the people. | ||
| But it is completely legit. | ||
| It continued because in this weird culture war that we're in, it never sort of ends | ||
| and everybody's got something to say. | ||
| You may remember former President Donald Trump, the orange man with funny hair. | ||
| He released, you know, he's been booted from big tech, right? | ||
| He's not on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or anywhere else. | ||
| So he releases these press releases with his logo on them. | ||
| Here's what he said about the whole situation. | ||
| Joe Rogan is an interesting and popular guy, but he's got to stop apologizing to the fake news and radical left maniacs and lunatics. | ||
| How many ways can you say you're sorry? | ||
| Joe, just go about what you do so well and don't let them make you look weak and frightened. | ||
| That's not you and it never will be. | ||
| Like, yeah, Trump. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| And you know, there's this funny thing, this idea of F you money, right? | ||
| I've talked about this before. | ||
| Like people are always like, oh, when you have F you money. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, when you have so much money that you can just say whatever you want, you will start saying whatever you want. | ||
| And I know a lot of rich people, and it is very, very rare that that's actually what they do, because you start feeling like you have more things. | ||
| You have more responsibilities. | ||
| You have more staff. | ||
| You have more employees. | ||
| If anything, you become more quiet in that often. | ||
| I would say that Peter Thiel is maybe the one and probably best reverse example of that. | ||
| He's someone who still is fighting for the things that he was always fighting for and remarkably consistent | ||
| over 20 years if you watch his videos from 20 years ago. | ||
| But most people, once they get a certain amount of money, like, and again, I don't mean this as a judgment to Rogan, | ||
| but it's like you got that money, there's a certain comfort, a certain lifestyle | ||
| that comes with that, and you have other responsibilities. | ||
| So this is messy, it absolutely is messy. | ||
| By the way, there was one other guy who had FU money, who said FU to the whole system. | ||
| Yeah, it was the guy that released that press release, wasn't it? | ||
| That was the guy who had an awful lot to lose, billions of dollars. | ||
| His businesses are in shambles right now. | ||
| Like, I can't imagine that the Trump properties are doing particularly well right now. | ||
| Even the hotel in DC closed, if I'm not mistaken, or they had to license out the name to someone else, and that was a freaking awesome, awesome, awesome hotel. | ||
| But he said, F you, and the system said, well, here's what we can do to you. | ||
| So what do we do with all this? | ||
| This is frightening stuff. | ||
| This is, this is, This ain't fun stuff, but I believe in humans. | ||
| I believe in individuals. | ||
| I believe we can keep going and keep fighting. | ||
| Like it's what the story of being human is. | ||
| It's what biblical stories are about. | ||
| It's what the grand narrative of the human experience is. | ||
| And by the way, there are people that are warning us about this and have been warning us for quite some time. | ||
| So now I want to throw back to this guy, Jordan Peterson, a guy who has been through the machine and the machine tried to destroy him. | ||
| The New York Times. | ||
| Tried to destroy him with a front page article that he was for enforced monogamy, basically making it seem like he wanted women to be subjected and othered by men and just at the whim of whatever their husband wanted them to do. | ||
| Of course, it was complete nonsense. | ||
| front page story in the New York Times, written by Nellie Bowles, who is Barry Weiss's partner. | ||
| Just like another weird piece of the puzzle here. | ||
| And Nellie actually is quite red-pilled. | ||
| I probably, she probably doesn't want me to say that, but I know that she is. | ||
| It's just all pieces of this freaking thing. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| Well, Jordan Peterson was on Joe Rogan's show talking about how they keep moving on ya. | ||
| And it just keeps moving, and moving, and moving. | ||
| I think some of you will remember this clip. | ||
| I just don't understand how it gets to the point where-- | ||
| Well, I think things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time. | ||
| You know, if I encroach on you, and I'm sophisticated about it, I'm going to encroach two millimeters. | ||
| I'm going to encroach right to the point where you start to protest. | ||
| Then I'm going to stop. | ||
| Then I'm going to wait. | ||
| Then you're going to calm down. | ||
| Then I'm going to encroach again, right to the point where you protest. | ||
| Then I'm going to stop. | ||
| Then I'm going to wait. | ||
| And I'm just going to do that forever. | ||
| And before you know it, you're going to be back three miles from where you started, and you'll have done it one step at a time. | ||
| And then you'll go, oh, how'd I get here? | ||
| And the answer was, well, I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone, and you agreed. | ||
| And so then I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone again, and you agreed. | ||
| And if anybody's interested in this sort of process, and this is a horrifying book, if you want to read about how this process works, you can read a book called Ordinary Men. | ||
| I ordered Ordinary Men. | ||
| I have it on my nightstand. | ||
| I have to dive into it. | ||
| Been a little busy for the last little bit. | ||
| But do you think Jordan Peterson kind of just explained the whole damn thing? | ||
| Do you think he just explained everything about COVID? | ||
| Do you think he just explained everything about lockdowns and masks and mandates and encroachment on language and destruction of people and cancel culture and everything else? | ||
| And boy, that sounds an awful lot like what Joe Rogan said at the top of the show. | ||
| We're going to show you that one more time before we head out today. | ||
| But we have this knowledge, guys. | ||
| And while we can exchange these ideas openly for as long as we can, and I get it. | ||
| YouTube could shut me off right now. | ||
| Twitter could take me out right now. | ||
| That's why I'm on Rumble, actually. | ||
| That's why I started Locals. | ||
| Like, I'm good. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'm working with people that have the infrastructure to stay alive. | ||
| It ain't a perfect system. | ||
| But any of us could be taken out at any moment. | ||
| But if you think that your silence is what's gonna keep you afloat, Actually, it's what's going to drown you, right? | ||
| Your acquiescence is what gives this thing air. | ||
| This thing needs energy, and you being afraid of it gives its energy. | ||
| Go watch The NeverEnding Story. | ||
| This is the nothing. | ||
| It's here, okay? | ||
| Where's Atreyu? | ||
| We could use Atreyu and Artax, the horse who died in the Pit of Sadness. | ||
| We could use that horse right now, who probably took Ivermectin. | ||
| A couple comments from the locals community, and then I wanna show you that Rogan video one more time. | ||
| Jeff says, "CNN is turning into a parody of itself, "almost like how Saturday Night Live used to be funny." | ||
| Yeah, all of these things, they've all fallen on the sword of wokeism. | ||
| And as they've done that, they've rotted out any sense of truth there. | ||
| And that's why it's very hard to relate to people that watch these things. | ||
| It's why I'm very proud that our show is on at 11 a.m. | ||
| Eastern now. | ||
| We are completely opposed to the ideas that the lunatics of The View are airing on ABC right now. | ||
| And if you watch this show and your spouse or your friend watches The View, let's say that's what you're doing at 11 o'clock. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If you're watching this right now and maybe you're doing some work or some other things, whatever it might be, but you have a friend or a spouse or whoever that's just watching that. | ||
| If that, like, that's a certain set of information you're getting about roughly the same things, because the view is sort of talking about the same things, let's say. | ||
| Well, you now are living in a completely different world as them. | ||
| And how do we arbitrage those two things? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's why I moved to Florida, because I couldn't be around in California anymore. | ||
| Oop, I said California, five bucks. | ||
| Let's say we're at about 100 bucks right now. | ||
| Vic says, this is kind of how Andrew Yang ran his presidential campaign too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, look, I think Yang is a decent guy. | ||
| I enjoyed interviewing him. | ||
| I'd like to play basketball with him. | ||
| He likes old school Nintendo. | ||
| I don't think he has balls. | ||
| He just doesn't have balls and the intestinal fortitude to stand up for what he thinks is right. | ||
| I thought that a lot of his ideas were sort of like, Half-baked but they were somewhat newish and he was trying to be somewhat moderate and so then that was like kind of okay but like at the end like what do we need do we need weak men right now or do we need strong men? | ||
| I don't even think I'm that strong like I don't know what the hell I'm doing I'm just doing the best I can but but maybe that maybe we just need more of that we don't need you to be strong how about just do the best you can and then we'll see what happens Caesar says you will always outlast the critics if you stand your ground be brave Goes to every single person watching this. | ||
| And finally, I thought we'd end with the very same video that we started with so that if Joe or any of his friends or co-workers or colleagues or anyone at Spotify is watching this, maybe they will hear those words. | ||
| So before I throw to it, then I'm going to get out of here. | ||
| I just want to say that that offer is 100 percent legit, Joe. | ||
| You got an off-ramp, man. | ||
| How much more could you want at the moment? | ||
| You can take the money and run, literally. | ||
| You could either take the money and stay and be censored and have warnings and have some of your catalog gone and have to sort of degrade your past self by staying there. | ||
| That guy was bad. | ||
| He said bad things. | ||
| I'm better now. | ||
| I'm more enlightened. | ||
| Or you could take the money, the 100 mil, and maybe that's just a negotiating start, right? | ||
| I've said too much, but we could do something here. | ||
| So you can take the money and run, and be free, and save the world. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Joe Rogan, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| You made a really good point. | ||
| You said, the thing is, if you censor yourself just 1%, you say, I'll just censor myself 1%. | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| I'm going to make them happy. | ||
| And then they're just going to keep moving it. | ||
| They're just going to keep moving it forward. | ||
| Moving the goalpost. | ||
| Moving the goalpost, and providing you with more money, and giving you more things, but keep moving it in a certain direction. |
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