Dec. 2, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[Outro Music] | |
| Alright people, we are live on Rumble YouTube and Blaze TV and according to the paperwork, I'm still Dave Rubin | ||
| and it is Friday, which means it's time for another Friday extravaganza roundtable madness | ||
| for you, brought to you by us. | ||
| Joining me today is a senior columnist at townhall.com, Kurt Schlichter, the CEO of Becker News, Kyle Becker, and a contributing editor at The Spectator and host of the Fair Perspective podcast, Melissa Chen, Kurt, Kyle, Melissa, all Rubin Report veterans. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It's good to see you guys. | ||
| You know, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do this week. | ||
| It's been a lot of Apple, of China, of Elon, of Kanye. | ||
| And then we thought, all right, we're dropping Kanye. | ||
| We're going to focus on mostly on Elon and Apple and free speech and all that good stuff. | ||
| Of course, the big thing this week seems to be that the world is crashing down on Elon as all he has done since he has taken over Twitter is demanded more or asked for or said that he's going to push for some more transparency and be a little more respectful of free speech. | ||
| Apple doesn't seem to be thrilled about that. | ||
| He had a meeting with Tim Cook. | ||
| Maybe it calmed down a little bit. | ||
| And then, of course, there are these images and videos coming out of China. | ||
| related to their zero COVID policy and how Apple is actually stopping the people of China from sharing videos and images so that the rest of the world can see what's going on there. | ||
| So that's what we're gonna be focusing on today. | ||
| I wanna start with a tweet from Reuters a couple days ago because Elon responded to a response to the tweet and that's sort of just gonna set us up today. | ||
| So here is a tweet from Reuters, Twitter not safer under Elon Musk. | ||
| Says former head of trust and safety. | ||
| And then as it works on Twitter, random people respond to things. | ||
| So this is just a random person that responded to that tweet by the name of Eva Fox and said, Twitter has shown itself to be not safe for the past 10 years and has lost users trust. | ||
| The past team of trust and safety is a disgrace, so it doesn't have any right to judge what is being done now. | ||
| They had a chance, but they sold their souls, they sold their souls to a corporation. | ||
| And then here's where it got interesting. | ||
| Elon responded to that and said, exactly. | ||
| The obvious reality, as longtime users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust and safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections. | ||
| Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent, And even-handed. | ||
| Kurt, we kind of all knew that they weren't that even-handed or fair or anything like that, but interfered in elections? | ||
| I thought that was crazy conspiracy stuff. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was told. | ||
| I was told that our elections are perfectly fine unless they occurred in a year other | ||
| than 2020. | ||
| You know, it's kind of remarkable that we have a major news organization like Reuters | ||
| coming out really against free speech, because there's no such thing as safety. | ||
| Safety is a nanny state word designed to justify whatever political action these folks want. | ||
| It's funny how the Venn diagram of safety and leftism is a single circle. | ||
| And I like how Elon Musk just kind of bowls through it. | ||
| See, here's the thing about Elon, and I may write about this next week in town hall. | ||
| He believed all this stuff about liberalism, and so did you. | ||
| You believed, you were a liberal guy, you thought, well, free speech, people get to say what they want. | ||
| But that's not what a lot of liberal guys really think. | ||
| A lot of them think, well, free speech is great until it stops being useful, and then it's unsafe. | ||
| Or hateful. | ||
| Or some other weasel word used to justify silencing the opposition. | ||
| And I love that we have Elon Musk coming out and blasting through it like the old Kool-Aid guy in the Saturday morning cartoons 40 years ago. | ||
| Melissa, putting aside the election stuff for a second, the idea that he's getting rid of the trust and safety people, you know, he went, there's that video of him in the closet getting rid of the Stay Woke shirts. | ||
| I mean, he is purging what I think most people watching this would believe are the bad aspects of the employees at Twitter, the people that were going out and about and censoring and all that stuff. | ||
| I take it you see this as a positive, huh? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, how many times in the last few years have we seen friends of ours, commentators, public commentators, get their accounts booted for reasons that are very unclear, right? | ||
| We see that with the trans debate. | ||
| If you deadname somebody, use the wrong pronouns, you basically express, I mean, Meghan Murphy expressed the radical idea that, you know, there are just two genders and she got banned from Twitter. | ||
| And you can see kind of like the top-down decision-making process, why this is so toxic to discourse. | ||
| And you know, the truth is that there's only been this kind of landmines when it comes to speech on one side. | ||
| And I'm glad that Elon's coming in. | ||
| He's fixing it. | ||
| To Kurt's point, actually, the other few words that are now used, there's free speech, there's hate speech, but the other word that they like to use also now is misinformation or disinformation, right? | ||
| So that is just misinformation. | ||
| That is COVID misinformation. | ||
| And you see kind of Elon rolling back all these things and allowing people to discuss things again. | ||
| I remember a time when we weren't even allowed to talk about the origins of of COVID on a social media platform. | ||
| And so I'm really glad that we're taking a look at, we're able to take a look with Ilan in charge right now | ||
| about what exactly went on the last few years. | ||
| What were Twitter censorship policies? | ||
| 'Cause it was never clear. | ||
| And what is he gonna do moving forward? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kyle, do you think that he is going to actually release the internal documents? | ||
| Like, are we really going to actually ever see, oh, these are the people that actually were clicking buttons or sliding sliders on touchscreens that were making sure that certain things weren't seen or that certain things were seen or that were going into people's private DMs or deleting tweets, whatever it might be. | ||
| Because I always say it's not the stuff we know about. | ||
| It's the stuff we don't know about that I'm more worried about. | ||
| Do you think he's really going to open it up? | ||
| Because to me, that's the only way we really get on the other side of this, by understanding how distorted our reality became via these activists. | ||
| I think Elon Musk has teased the Twitter files and releasing this. | ||
| I think we might get a sanitized version of it. | ||
| I don't think he will name names and publicly accuse employees. | ||
| By name, but I think one of the employees that was cited in that Reuters article, ironically, Joel Roth, speak about a failure of trust. | ||
| Reuters abandoned its own editorial guidelines by failing to point out that this is a disgruntled former employee who had made anti-Trump tweets and made Twitter more toxic himself. | ||
| So the hypocrisy there by Reuters is not surprising, but they're abandoning their own editorial guidelines. | ||
| As are a lot of publications like the Washington Post, the New York Times that are complaining about Twitter and Elon Musk. | ||
| So, you know, back to your point about Elon Musk releasing the Twitter files, I think he gave us a little bit of a taste with the election interference confirmation that he gave. | ||
| And I think that is really alarming for me, because what you see with a lot of his critics is that They tend to brush aside the legitimate complaints of people like Elon Musk. | ||
| And they also fail to call out his competitors like Facebook. | ||
| They were involved in election interference. | ||
| Zuckerberg personally. | ||
| You also see TikTok, you know, basically a right hand of the CCP from the very beginnings tracking people. | ||
| They're only complaining about Elon Musk because he's giving conservatives Yeah, I think it's not only the even playing field thing, but you know, by democratizing the blue check, which he's still figuring out some of the, you know, how it's actually going to be rolled out properly. | ||
| You know, what it did was, it basically made all of the quote-unquote journalists at Daily Beast and HuffPo, all of these people that nobody really followed, that had 2,000 followers, let's say, but they had the blue check. | ||
| They had this fake influence, and now he has made that fake influence go away. | ||
| I think that's what they're freaking out. | ||
| Guys, we've got breaking news here, a headline from Breitbart. | ||
| Jim Carrey has left Twitter. | ||
| My God, Jim Carrey has left Twitter. | ||
| Kurt, how are you gonna stay on a platform without Jim Carrey? | ||
| How are you gonna do it? | ||
| I'm trying to find the strength to move forward, Dave. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, sometimes you're just speechless. | ||
| Well, okay, so I won't push you that hard on the Jim Carrey thing, but this idea that suddenly these people, Elissa Milano is freaking out, and you know, all of these, again, these quote unquote journalists, we're gonna leave Twitter, and it's like, no, you're not gonna leave Twitter, because you guys don't have the wherewithal to build anything yourself, but that they didn't care Three weeks ago when we were all getting censored, now they think this is the most evil thing ever, even though there's no empirical evidence that hate has been ramped up since he's taken over. | ||
| Well, I wouldn't care if hate was ramped up. | ||
| Free speech is free speech. | ||
| Period. | ||
| You get to say things other people don't like. | ||
| Now understand, I want to be real clear, this is not hypocrisy on their part. | ||
| Some Twitter people are hypocrites. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| They don't believe in free speech. | ||
| They are actively against it. | ||
| So is the regime media. | ||
| They are actively for censorship. | ||
| And they're upset because Elon Musk came along and bought their BS line of reasoning. | ||
| Melissa, what do you think about that? | ||
| Because we have a lot of similar friends or had some similar friends that were, you know, thought of as more liberal that suddenly really kind of are tacitly or sometimes outwardly coming out for censorship or not respecting views and having that plurality of views. | ||
| It's disappointing to say the least. | ||
| You know, firstly, I haven't thought about Jim Carrey in a long time. | ||
| So it's kind of like there was this moment of like, wait, who is this person? | ||
| Yeah, no, I yes, I imagine him coming out of a rhino right now. | ||
| Like that's just, you know, but this whole thing about celebrities kind of threatening to, you know, leave Twitter. | ||
| It's so shallow, and it's so hollow. | ||
| I mean, Elisa Milano said, oh, I'm going to sell my Tesla. | ||
| I'm buying a Volkswagen. | ||
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Hilarious, because obviously, what is the history of Volkswagen? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| It seems awkward. | ||
| And she's tweeting, or she's still using an iPhone, right? | ||
| But she's grandiosely announcing that she's leaving Twitter. | ||
| This iPhone, the one that she's using, has all sorts of problems. | ||
| Apple was found to have been sourcing parts of this iPhone from Xinjiang, which is where the Uyghurs are being held, and they're involved in the production of some of these parts. | ||
| And even the White House has passed the Uyghur Force Labor Prevention Act, and she's still using an iPhone. | ||
| And she's not complaining about all these components that go into this that actually affect actually marginalized people. | ||
| And so it just rings very hollow to me, all of this kind of posturing about, like, leaving Twitter. | ||
| And with regard to what you're saying about our friends who, you know, make huge announcements about leaving Twitter and are trending online for, you know, for days. | ||
| Well, I don't know about you, but I kind of saw that coming, you know, especially after recent viral clips. | ||
| I know we're all talking about Sam Harris, viral clips, but he, you know, in his latest show, he did explain why he left. | ||
| And it's kind of the same argument that we saw with the Washington Post headline that said, the gates of hell are now open with Elon at the helm. | ||
| And, you know, Sam claims to leave because of just dealing with so much hate on the website and it's turning him into this awful person. | ||
| He doesn't want to, you know, he just doesn't want to be part of it anymore. | ||
| Fine, that's a legitimate reason to leave Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I keep telling people, as I've gotten one or two mean tweets at me in the years, you can just mute or block people, or you can actually not look at your phone all day, which is a really fascinating thing. | ||
| I'm not a doctor, but I think most people can do that. | ||
| But let's move from the celebrities for a minute, because we've got some info here from the Financial Times. | ||
| Just to show you, this isn't just about celebrities leaving this That really governments are truly afraid of what's happening. | ||
| Breaking news, the EU has warned Elon Musk that Twitter could be banned in Europe unless the billionaire abides by its strict rules on content moderation. | ||
| Kyle, they really don't want that information we were talking about getting leaked. | ||
| That's what this is really about, right? | ||
| It's not about some frog kid making fun of Alyssa Milano or Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| No, Elon Musk was on this call with this unelected bureaucrat. | ||
| I think he already threatened. | ||
| I don't think anybody's ever heard of him before, but he just kind of popped up on the scene all of a sudden and basically said Elon Musk has got to, you know, bend the knee to the EU and to Brussels to conform with all their hate speech. | ||
| And as we saw, you know, in a lot of these places, you know, you can you can be arrested potentially for certain kinds of hate speech. | ||
| Uh, in some of these EU nations. | ||
| And, uh, I, I think that what we're seeing out of the EU is sort of, uh, you know, the harbinger of, you know, we wouldn't be surprised if you see, uh, all of these, uh, you know, left loyalists like, uh, you know, Trudeau and all of these other, uh, left wing, uh, you know, I mean, we saw today, um, with, uh, Macron who met with, with Biden, he was criticizing Elon Musk. | ||
| So I think, like, they're going to ramp up this campaign against him. | ||
| And, you know, they don't have anything to say about his competitors. | ||
| They don't have anything to say about Apple and the gulags that are essentially running in Zhengzhou City and Guangzhou and in some of these places where we've seen violent worker revolts in the last week and a half. | ||
| They have nothing to say about that. | ||
| Even Elon Musk has had very little to say about this. | ||
| You know, I'm keeping an eye on that. | ||
| And I hopefully he will speak up after his powwow with Tim Cook yesterday. But they don't have | ||
| anything to say about CCP's gulags. | ||
| But if the second that Elon Musk wants to grant amnesty to 11,000 conservative or otherwise banned | ||
| users, then the EU has supposed concerns. So. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And speaking of the parts that they don't want to talk about, you know, there's suddenly all these articles in the last week about how Twitter has a child porn problem and Elon isn't doing enough. | ||
| Now, I have no doubt that he's doing something, but let's say we don't know exactly what he's doing yet. | ||
| But nobody was writing these articles for the last 10 years. | ||
| So it's only until he took over that suddenly the mainstream cares that there is a child porn problem on there. | ||
| Obviously that's a huge problem, and hopefully he can deal with it, but they're pretending to care about it when they've had the last 10 years to care and they haven't. | ||
| But I wanna shift a little bit to the China portion of this, but real quick on the Apple part specifically, a little tweet thread here that involves Elon. | ||
| He said that Apple has mostly, this is a couple days ago, Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. | ||
| Do they hate? | ||
| Free speech in America. | ||
| Then he followed up, Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won't tell us why. | ||
| And then he ended up going to Apple headquarters. | ||
| He met with Tim Cook. | ||
| Thanks, Tim Cook, for taking me around Apple's beautiful HQ, which was attached, he had a video attached. | ||
| And he said, good conversation. | ||
| Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. | ||
| Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so. | ||
| Kurt, can we trust that Apple is going to stay on the up and up here and that Tim Cook is going to do the right thing and would be willing to stand up to the pressure from EU and wherever else he's going to get pressure to boot Elon and Twitter? | ||
| Well, I certainly hope so. | ||
| But the real pressure, I think, is actually coming from the conservatives. | ||
| It's not just Elon Musk. | ||
| He's not afraid of Elon. | ||
| And I think he'd happily throw Elon off the App Store if he could do it. | ||
| The interesting change is what's happened with the Republican Party. | ||
| And when this threat to throw Elon Musk off of the Apple store came out, A lot of Republicans, a lot of fairly senior ones said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you can't do this. | ||
| And if you do, you're going to have a problem. | ||
| And we need more of that. | ||
| We need to get past is, you know, I'm a Republican, not everybody is, but the Republican Party needs to get past the idea that we're some sort of cheerleaders for every corporation, company and limited liability company there is. | ||
| We need to start standing up to these guys and saying, look, if you're going to, Get in a culture war with our constituents, then you're our enemy. | ||
| And we're going to treat you that way. | ||
| You can use your economic power. | ||
| We can use our political power. | ||
| So if that's a game you want to play, go ahead and play it. | ||
| And I think Tim Cook wisely understood that the Republican base, which now holds the House, is not going to tolerate being made war on by corporations anymore. | ||
| So I think if doing the right thing isn't reason enough for Tim Cook to act, fear is, and that's fine. | ||
| Melissa, do you see that as a direct extension of DeSantis' ruling so clearly and cleanly here in Florida? | ||
| I mean, he's been fighting Apple and Twitter and making comments about China, but showing people, to Kurt's point, that if you stand up and do the right thing, that people will follow you. | ||
| And it seems to me that Republicans might be getting that a little bit. | ||
| Kevin McCarthy just the other day, you know, we're not going to go after Elon Musk, even though Biden said they'll try to find something on him. | ||
| I mean, that's that's banana republic level stuff coming from the Democrats. | ||
| Yeah, I think we shouldn't forget what happened to Parler. | ||
| I think, you know, in thinking about whether we should trust Apple or not. | ||
| At the end of the day, it's not just Twitter and Apple. | ||
| Spotify and Meta, you know, they have had complaints about what's going on. | ||
| Epic Games, which is in a lawsuit with Apple, has a lot of complaints about what's going on with the App Store and how much power Apple has as a platform that built another platform on which other platforms kind of rely on in this ecosystem. | ||
| So, I appreciate the fact that the Republicans are actually pushing back, and especially on the inconsistency, as you say. | ||
| You know, the White House is monitoring what's going on with Twitter, but giving Apple a pass. | ||
| And the fact that DeSantis is pointing this out, and a lot of commentators are pointing this out, is a good thing. | ||
| Kyle, I want to shift for a second because let's move to the China part and then I think you connected something here that's sort of breaking at the moment. | ||
| But we've got a tweet here from Whole Mars Catalog. | ||
| Apple has released a software update limiting the use of AirDrop in China in light of recent | ||
| protests. | ||
| AirDrop was being used by protesters to transmit info directly from phone to phone bypassing | ||
| the Great Firewall of China. | ||
| So we covered this over the last couple of days. | ||
| And in essence, they updated everyone's app. | ||
| You know, so you're just sometimes if your phone's just plugged in at night, it gets | ||
| the update. | ||
| But what they didn't do, which they normally do, is they tell you exactly what's in the update. | ||
| And in this case, they did not tell you that they are changing how AirDrop works. | ||
| So all of these people that are out there, they're sharing these videos. | ||
| That's how we're seeing any of this stuff coming out of China right now. | ||
| Apple clearly sided with the communist government on this. | ||
| I take it you're not that surprised. | ||
| No, I think if you go a little bit beyond the thinking that Apple is sort of complying with the CCP's demands, to really think that Apple actually gets more than half of its production out of its Chinese factories, including in Guangzhou City, Zhengzhou, Xinjiang, all of these, they have basically iPhone camps that are run by Foxconn. | ||
| And there have been uprisings in these camps in the last week and a half, two weeks. | ||
| And what you see is that the COVID lockdowns and the CCP's measures sort of benefit Apple. | ||
| I've looked inside some of these Foxconn production facilities. | ||
| It's very dreary, dark. | ||
| You know, they're all bunked together. | ||
| I mean, it's like the worst dormitory you could even imagine. | ||
| And so the thing is, there's sort of a quid pro quo going on between Apple and CCP. | ||
| Where CCP, basically all of their measures are indirectly benefiting Apple. | ||
| And it's basically kind of slave labor type camps there. | ||
| And they have a long history of cooperating with CCP going back to 2017. | ||
| So they limited the VPNs that can be used on the Apple phones in China. | ||
| They also limited some privacy features last year. | ||
| And this November 9th update, they changed the airdrop that you were talking about to where it basically | ||
| expired after 10 minutes. | ||
| You couldn't use it after that point. | ||
| So I think that it's really what you're looking at is they are very heavily influenced by | ||
| Chinese production and the Chinese market, which has grown, I think, up to 16% of the | ||
| market share to this year. | ||
| So I think that's the way to look at it, is that the CCP's policies are kind of a synthesis | ||
| of this kind of globalist corporatism that is benefiting companies like Apple. | ||
| And so I think that what the Republicans need to do is stand up for American values, demand | ||
| that they comply with our values in our country, like free speech. | ||
| And basically coerce them and use the power of government or Apple's going to continue to be a threat to citizens all over the world, essentially. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And look, you can call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think a guy like Justin Trudeau is watching that happening in China right now. | ||
| And despite the fact that he's saying all the right things, we know what he did to his truckers and the protesters when they wanted to open up Canada. | ||
| And I think he's watching going, boy, it's possible if they uprise against me again, that Apple will help me shut down their phones. | ||
| That that would be pretty sweet. | ||
| Like they're running a little test over there. | ||
| But Kyle, real quick, can you can you elaborate on what you sent us right before the show? | ||
| This this interview with Tim Cook that just broke because it's pretty telling of everything that's going on here. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| I was keeping an eye on Tim Cook. | ||
| You know, any news with him being confronted by reporters and Hillary Vaughn over at Fox Business. | ||
| Essentially confronted and was there when Tim Cook was asked three different questions. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. Cook, do you support the Chinese people's right to protest? | |
| Do you have any reaction to the factory workers that were beaten and detained for protesting COVID lockdowns? | ||
| Do you regret restricting airdrop access that protesters used to evade surveillance from the Chinese government? | ||
| Do you think it's problematic to do business with the Communist Chinese Party when they suppress human rights? | ||
| He didn't even respond when he said, do you support the Chinese people's right to protest? | ||
| And then, do you regret restricting the airdrop access that protesters use to evade surveillance from Chinese government? | ||
| Completely silent. | ||
| I think that really this shows that he feels like he is under duress to kowtow to the CCP. | ||
| Uh, and he doesn't want to criticize them. | ||
| And, you know, look, uh, it is not, it goes beyond corporations in this country. | ||
| We're seeing politicians, high level and officials. | ||
| We saw the DOD Spocks the other day was asked at a press conference, uh, about this. | ||
| And he said the protesters speak for themselves. | ||
| He couldn't stand with them. | ||
| Uh, it was really unbelievable. | ||
| Um, you know, so I think like we're seeing the elites Whether they're corporatists or, you know, CEOs, you know, in our defense department, they're on the same page. | ||
| They're basically on the same page with Communist China as we saw, and not to get too far afoot, but we saw recently with the geofence data on January 6, the FBI using NSA databases to track U.S. | ||
| citizens. | ||
| They're using the Chinese-style surveillance in the U.S. | ||
| right now. | ||
| I think we've seen some recent articles that show that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And literally millions of people in the United States have TikTok on their phone, which we know is a spy app. | ||
| And Eric Swalwell slept with a Chinese spy. | ||
| Everyone knows that, too. | ||
| And he's still in Congress. | ||
| Melissa, do we have any leverage over China to do anything about this, whether it's influencing Apple to, you know, help the protesters, or at least not harm the protesters, or anything else maybe related to Taiwan or anything? | ||
| Or are we just, like, we're bit players in China's game, almost, at some level? | ||
| Well, one of the drawbacks of globalization that we don't talk about is that when our markets were interlinked, it became really hard for our country and companies in our free country to actually stand up for its values. | ||
| We saw that with the NBA. | ||
| It was on such stark display. | ||
| And what we have instead is that instead of exporting our model of You know, political freedom to China was the other way around. | ||
| They exported their brand of censorship and their way of life almost. | ||
| We saw that with lockdowns. | ||
| They exported it to the rest of the world. | ||
| So, you know, in terms of leverage, what can we do? | ||
| At the end of the day, you know, decoupling is probably the best thing to do. | ||
| It looks like our calculus of actually enriching China through trade and economic integration Well, it's a bit of a mistake. | ||
| And you are seeing that Biden has actually rolled forward all of Trump's policies on China. | ||
| Nothing has been rolled back. | ||
| In fact, he's doubling down on more. | ||
| So you look at the CHIPS Act that is being passed, that has already actually been passed. | ||
| So that's probably our best leverage right now is to decouple and assert ourselves. | ||
| I mean, if you notice, it's the CEOs and the companies that are not involved with China that can actually speak honestly about the issue. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And so that's telling us something. | ||
| If you want to stand up for your values, You have to have no economic interest in the country who you want to speak honestly about. | ||
| You are giving me a segue like a pro because speaking of speaking honestly and with clarity and doing the right thing and not being beholden to other countries, here's Ron DeSantis from the Free State of Florida. | ||
| The CCP, they have been imposing these zero COVID lockdown policies. | ||
| They've been doing it on and off for three years. | ||
| And you have people in China that are really engaged in a noble effort to protest, which is basically Leninist rule. | ||
| So what is Apple doing with that? | ||
| They are limiting the airdrop function of the protesters. | ||
| So they are serving basically as a vassal to the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| They exercise more authority in some respects than even some governments do, and they're using their authority to protect the CCP, while also trying to limit speech here in the United States. | ||
| Kurt, I always say on the show, it's so refreshing when someone tells the truth because it's like the truth is supposed to be heard. | ||
| It's supposed to be spoken. | ||
| And it's so rare these days that when you hear it, it's like this exhale. | ||
| We're never gonna get that kind of clarity out of this administration, are we? | ||
| When it comes to China or pretty much anything. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| They're totally in hock to China. | ||
| It is remarkable how an American government Actually covers for all these dictatorships, where it's Iran or China or Venezuela, which can now pump oil while Americans can't. | ||
| It's almost as if they were on the other side. | ||
| And I look at this and I'm thinking, what would they be doing different if they were actively anti American? | ||
| And I really can't think of anything making excuse for China, the most thoroughgoing and Evil dictatorship currently on Earth. | ||
| Maybe North Korea gives it a run for its money. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| And the way they've abandoned all our key principles, Dave, like free speech. | ||
| I mean, you would think that at the very least, they're going to stand up for the First Amendment and the concept behind it. | ||
| But no, they're against it. | ||
| They're actively against free speech. | ||
| for Americans and they side with foreign dictators to make that happen. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's a solution. | ||
| That's why I keep, yeah, well, that's why I keep bringing up this point | ||
| from a couple of weeks ago when Biden had that, he literally had a TikToker conference at the White House. | ||
| So they bring in Chinese spyware and then one of them asks him, | ||
| what are you gonna do about Elon Musk? | ||
| And he said, we don't know that he's done anything wrong, but we'll look. | ||
| I mean, it's the most crazy Kabuki theater type stuff But for those people that are watching this that aren't sure what's going on in China, there's a gajillion videos despite what Apple's doing with AirDrop out there. | ||
| So we've got about a minute's worth of compilation for you. | ||
|
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| I mean, it's just unbelievable. | ||
| It's like half of what was happening in Canada over the summer, throwing a little Squid Games and a couple other dystopian movies, and that's what you've got. | ||
| Melissa, obviously, I think we're all in agreement, the U.S. | ||
| isn't gonna do much about this, but do the Chinese people have a chance? | ||
| Like, is there any chance they can create any sort of change themselves? | ||
| Or is this gonna sort of be like what's going on in Iran? | ||
| It's like, it kinda happens for a while, and then it dies down, and the regime never changes. | ||
| I'm not optimistic about any change per se, but this is significant, what has happened over the weekend with these protests. | ||
| This is the largest display of public defiance against the regime since Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. | ||
| And to see such widespread civil disobedience at the same time is quite striking in a place like China. | ||
| What I will say is that Because these protests are actually very targeted, what the people want is to get out of this perpetual lockdown situation. | ||
| I mean, they are frustrated. | ||
| In Xinjiang, for example, they had been in lockdown for 100 days straight. | ||
| And many of these cities like Beijing, Shanghai, people are starving. | ||
| I mean, in the land of abundance, right? | ||
| Supposedly, the Chinese Communist Party pulled so many people out of poverty. | ||
| They're all middle class and wealthy now. | ||
| People are actually starving because of lockdowns. | ||
| People have died because of lockdowns, as we saw in the fire that killed 10 people. | ||
| So people are frustrated. | ||
| That's the end of what they can tolerate. | ||
| And they're rising up. | ||
| But at the end of the day, the Chinese state power and surveillance apparatus is so perfected. | ||
| I mean, you need a code to even travel to a certain place and into certain buildings. | ||
| And if you don't scan that code, you're not going to be allowed in. | ||
| And they can use this kind of technology that was originally meant for controlling the epidemic to actually curtail movement. | ||
| And we saw that, an example of this actually last summer, when they were able to prevent protests for a bank run using the actual software that was meant to monitor the infections. | ||
| So I'm not optimistic about Any kind of higher up kind of change in terms of toppling the government in terms of challenging the regime's hold on power. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| China is is is still stable in that sense because of the way it's structured. | ||
| But I think that what we will see is Probably loosening up of COVID restrictions is probably the best case scenario for the Chinese people. | ||
| Kyle, is it nuts or obvious that, you know, two years ago when we were all being forced to, you know, have COVID passes on our phones or whatever else, I never did it for the record, but when they wanted to force us all to do that, and a whole bunch of crazy right-wing people on Twitter, many of whom got banned, were saying that this was really to institute a social credit system, which in essence is what Melissa is talking about, It's like, yeah, it probably is on the way here because COVID was breaking in China before 2020, before it hit America. | ||
| And, you know, it'll probably break this way when it comes to some of this tech stuff. | ||
| We have to kind of look at, for me, how, uh, it's so many coincidences that defy belief. | ||
| First of all, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it almost certainly looks to be man-made | ||
| according to latest peer-reviewed research that says that they found the fingerprint | ||
| and they can now synthesize or resynthesize the SARS-CoV-2 virus. | ||
| And it did break before December 2019. | ||
| It looks somewhere in that period where it became public knowledge. | ||
| So what we have now, and I just looked at the global seroprevalence data | ||
| and the seroprevalence data in the United States, we have almost nearly universal exposure to SARS-CoV-2 now. | ||
| If you look, it's somewhere between 97% and 99% in the US, according to the CDC SeroHub. | ||
| There are sero-trackers around the globe that show very similar rates. | ||
| So we have this universal, almost omnipresent virus that can be used as an excuse for lockdowns. | ||
| The QR code system that Melissa was talking about where they can just give you a red code and you can't get in to where you need to be at. | ||
| You can restrict your freedom of travel. | ||
| So you have that and you look at the fact that even if you take the highest estimates of 6.6 million fatalities with COVID, That's 99.9% survival rate at this point. | ||
| And I think it will project to be about 99.9% or less, even giving the benefit of the doubt on the mortality rate. | ||
| So the fact that the Western societies were so quick to turn their societies upside down, | ||
| kill small businesses, prevent people from seeing loved ones in the hospital, going to | ||
| funerals, shutting down kids' sports, all of these things, the masks in the schools, | ||
| we turn this upside down, it shows a collapse of our values. | ||
| At the philosophical level, our universities, our education system is a rot. | ||
| If we were a strong country, we would look at China and what they did with their virus | ||
| as an attack on us, as an invasion. | ||
| Instead we're sort of just like, oh, let's look at, like Fauci, let's look at China as | ||
| as a model. | ||
| a model. | ||
| You know, we just had the deposition from him last week, the seven-hour deposition in that lawsuit, and it revealed that he looked at China as a model, him and his advisors, to go with. | ||
| You know, and I know recently two-faced Fauci sort of disavowed or played it down, like, oh, the draconian lockdowns in China went too far. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Well, they went too far in the U.S., too, because it violated our civil liberties. | ||
| And all of this could have been left between doctors and patients like Rhonda Sanders did, for the most part, in Florida. | ||
| You know, very early on, he sort of, you know, pivoted to doing what he should, what I thought should have been done by every governor in the country. | ||
| Protect the nursing homes, protect the vulnerable, and then just sort of manage it the best you can. | ||
| Instead, we got people like Fauci, you know, and he's bailing town now and, you know, probably a wise decision on his part. | ||
| But, you know, these these officials need to be held accountable for I think so. | ||
| We'll look into that soon. | ||
| And also held accountable for fraud that they knowingly committed against us in the public. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think we all know that Fauci's not gonna end up in jail, and Walensky's not gonna get fired, and that these people who lied about everything, and that's another reason they want Elon to get, you know, not have Twitter, it's because we can keep showing the videos of Fauci saying, I'm not for lockdowns, I am for lockdowns, masks don't work. | ||
| You better double mask vaccines. | ||
| You won't get or transmit COVID. | ||
| That was Joe Biden. | ||
| Next thing you know, of course you do. | ||
| Kurt, bring us home here. | ||
| You live in California. | ||
| I live in the free state of Florida. | ||
| I'm pretty confident between Ron DeSantis and the apparatus in this state and the spirit of the people that we will fight as much as we possibly can and that this is the blueprint for a free America and a free world. | ||
| You live in the stark opposite place. | ||
| So when are you moving here? | ||
| That's a great question, Dave. | ||
| And it's literally one that I end up talking about every single day with people. | ||
| Look, I like California. | ||
| I moved here when Ronald Reagan was governor in 1972. | ||
| I was just a little kid. | ||
| And California was always about opportunity, about sunshine, which you can see behind me, palm trees. | ||
| It was a place of opportunity. | ||
| And that's not true today. | ||
| I'd like to think it's going to get better. | ||
| But here's the problem with this kind of socialist nightmare. | ||
| There's no bottom. | ||
| It never gets so bad where they look at each other and go, you know, maybe we've been on the wrong track. | ||
| The only answer is to double down to give them more power and more of your money. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| You know, I have a little bit of hope for California in the recent election. | ||
| We won a couple of seats that weren't necessarily expected. | ||
| And there are people with common sense here. | ||
| But a lot of my conservative friends, like yourself, have left. | ||
| I literally have a handful of conservative friends left in California. | ||
| The rest of the people seem to be happy and wallowing in their misery of homelessness, crime, and high taxes. | ||
| It's kind of sad to see. | ||
| Kurt, I saw you a couple of weeks ago at the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. | ||
| You were smiling, you were happy, you were drinking tequila. | ||
| You hadn't smiled in months, you told me. | ||
| And, well, I guess as Jerry said to George, good luck with all of that. | ||
| You know, that's all I could say. | ||
| Melissa's also in California, but at least you bounce around a lot, so I don't really consider you trapped there. | ||
|
unidentified
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True. | |
| Very true. | ||
| Guys, thank you for joining me on this Friday. | ||
| I'm gonna finish up for a moment without you, but have a great weekend, and I'll have you guys back soon. | ||
| Happy weekend. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Dave. | |
| All right, people, that is another week of shows. | ||
| And this was this was an interesting week. | ||
| I hope that even though we talked an awful lot about the Twitter thing and an awful lot about the Apple thing and the censorship thing, I hope that and some of it probably was a bit repetitive. | ||
| I hope that you see why it's so important to hit it. | ||
| We got to keep hitting it over and over and over again so that When guys like Ron DeSantis fight, they know they're backed with people so that when Kevin McCarthy, when he fights, and hopefully he'll be the leader of the Congress, when he fights, he'll know that the people have his back and that enough of us will be wise to the game. | ||
| We don't want the censorship anymore. | ||
| We understand that speech, it's messy and people might say mean things, but we have to get a little bit closer to the truth. | ||
| One of the reasons people are so bananas And so many people suffered from Trump derangement syndrome and COVID derangement syndrome and everything else, is because social media was supposed to be a mirror that we could look at and get an honest reflection of reality to. | ||
| And it became a funhouse mirror. | ||
| And I think, hopefully, if Elon releases some of this stuff, we will get a sense of, boy, it was manipulated. | ||
| Nobody was really into this crazy woke stuff and the gender stuff. | ||
| And they did, you know, do whatever they did with elections and Hunter Biden laptop and all of those things. | ||
| The truth, I don't think I'm the first one to say this, the truth will set us free. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Anyway, have a great weekend, guys. | ||
| We got a big interview coming next week that I'm super psyched for, and lots of good stuff happening. | ||
| If you want to play along during the show, join us at rubenreport.locals.com, and I will see you, oh, Monday we're doing a delayed show, right? | ||
| I believe Monday's gonna be a little bit in the afternoon, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| No show Monday. | ||
| No, I think we're doing a delayed show. | ||
| I don't know, but we're not editing this out because we're going to see what happens. | ||
| It will definitely not be at 11 o'clock. | ||
| I think it's a little bit later in the day. | ||
| You're both looking at me like I'm crazy. | ||
| Tuesday. | ||
| No show Monday. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| No show. | ||
| Well, I guess I've been, well, who knows? | ||
| It'll be a surprise. |
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