Feb. 10, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
50:35
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
[Outro] | |
| Alright internet people, we are live on the computer machine. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report, and it's time for another Friday Roundtable extravaganza. | ||
| Joining me today is an all-star panel host of Viva Barnes Law on Locals.com, Viva Frye, the CEO of PragerU, Marissa Streit, and the founding partner of Kraft Ventures, and the co-host of the all-in podcast, David Sachs. | ||
| Viva, Marissa, David. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Good morning, everyone. | ||
| Good to be here. | ||
| Good to be with you guys. | ||
| Let's just dive right into it because this was a bit of a crazy week between the Twitter stuff and the State of the Union and much more. | ||
| Let's start with these Twitter hearings that everybody was freaking out over. | ||
| It looks like the Republicans are actually Starting to show some teeth, as I've been saying. | ||
| Let's start with this video. | ||
| Jim Jordan grilling Yoel Roth. | ||
| He was the former head of trust and safety over at Twitter. | ||
| This is during the hearings yesterday, and I believe there's some more hearings going on today. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where? | |
| So we don't know how many people had security clearances? | ||
| Twitter. | ||
| Do we know? | ||
| Mr. Baker? | ||
| Mr. Gaddy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ms. | |
| Gaddy, anyone know how many people on Twitter had a security clearance in the 30 days prior to the election? | ||
| I don't know the answer to that question, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ms. | |
| Gaddy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do not know. | |
| Mr. Roth, you don't know? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| How about the last one? | ||
| Ms. | ||
| Navarroli, do you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I mean, it seemed like the offer was to sort of just hand them out like candy. | ||
| I just wondered who had them. | ||
| No one knows? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Saks, I want to start with you on this one because obviously you've been helping Elon during some of this restructuring. | ||
| You were with me when I was in San Francisco with Elon a couple weeks ago, so you have some insider insight into this. | ||
| What I kind of took away from the whole thing was that it is just an absolute Mess over there that he's trying to clean up. | ||
| So I'm somewhat sympathetic a little bit. | ||
| Obviously there's some negligence with these guys, but I am somewhat sympathetic to people not really knowing what was going on because it almost seemed like it was designed that way. | ||
| Am I, am I being a little too kind here? | ||
| Well, in terms of the issue of security clearances, it, this information is, um, this came out, I think during, uh, the, the year before Elon bought the company where there was a, um, There is a cybersecurity expert, I think named Mudge or something, who basically pointed out that their cyber practices were completely lax and that they didn't really have control over their data. | ||
| And so there was a whole set of revelations prior to Elon buying the company about this. | ||
| I'm not quite sure where Jim Jordan was going with this. | ||
| I assume that this is the predicate for something else that the committee will be looking into, because it wasn't exactly clear how this Line of inquiry fit in with the rest of the revelations that day. | ||
| So I assume he's setting up something for the future. | ||
| Right, so speaking of the future thing, one of the things that I was saying yesterday when we were covering this, Viva, was that it's one thing to grill the Twitter people and it is worthy to find out what they knew and who they were working with and all of that stuff. | ||
| But it seems to me at this point, you need to be grilling some people at the FBI too. | ||
| Like those are the people, you can't just blame the guys who were getting the call and then either doing, you know, bad things or not. | ||
| You have to blame the people that were also making the call in the first place, right? | ||
| Well, this is the point I made. | ||
| I did a radio appearance yesterday where, you know, it's nice that they're grilling the execs of Twitter. | ||
| We know what they did. | ||
| We know what happened. | ||
| Many of us knew it at the time because we were paying attention at the time. | ||
| The issue, and what we did not know the extent of at the time, was active intelligence infiltration and direction. | ||
| And so at the time everyone's saying, okay, look, so it's a biased, partisan, private company. | ||
| It can do what it wants. | ||
| And now we know that that is not the case anymore. | ||
| Whether or not it was bribery, coercion, or whatever, they were acting at the behest of, under the direction of, and having been infiltrated by intelligence. | ||
| Like James Baker is not just an executive of Twitter. | ||
| Some might regard him as an intelligence mole in Twitter. | ||
| Just to be clear, he's a former general counsel for the FBI, and that basically was also his job at Twitter. | ||
| Right, who joined the company five months before the election. | ||
| It's very curious. | ||
| It would have been nice for them to ask them the circumstances around that. | ||
| Right, and Jim Jordan did, or no, sorry, Lauren Boebert, I believe on Wednesday, did mention that there were at least nine FBI agents working at Twitter, and it's a little unclear whether they were still working for the FBI or not. | ||
| But Marissa, I'm sure none of this surprises you, because you guys are PragerU when we talk about censorship. | ||
| You guys have been in lawsuits with Google and YouTube before and been fighting the algorithmic tricks and all that stuff for quite some time. | ||
| Well, I think that's where Jim Jordan was trying to reach. | ||
| He's trying to figure out and really highlight to the public and to Congress how involved these media companies have been with the government. | ||
| And this is one of the issues that we have had when we've sued YouTube, and now we have these issues with NewsGuard. | ||
| The answer that we keep getting when we're experiencing censorship Is that these are free, you know, these are companies, they are free agents, they're allowed to do whatever they want to do. | ||
| And we keep highlighting the fact that there is government intervention. | ||
| It's just we can't seem to grasp where it's coming from. | ||
| And hopefully these congressional hearings, but more so, more investigation. | ||
| And I agree, we need to start asking the FBI, why are media companies like mine have felt so much pressure to censor, to self-censor Uh, and not just self-censor when we produce content about climate or about the lockdowns. | ||
| I don't call it the lockdowns. | ||
| Why have we been threatened with being, you know, basically, you know, taken off the internet entirely. | ||
| And so I think that's, they have learned how to play this very tricky game where media companies can't speak about certain things that the government doesn't want you to speak about. | ||
| And then they use these. | ||
| Third party companies to basically claim that it's their freedom of speech and their free agents, which they're not. | ||
| No, they definitely are not. | ||
| I want to show you another video of Jim Jordan on the Hunter laptop situation. | ||
| But before we do that, David, do you think that Elon knew the level of the government stuff before he bought this? | ||
| He clearly had some sense about the bot problem and some of that other stuff. | ||
| But is a lot of this just unfolding right in front of his eyes? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think any of us knew about the extent of government influence and involvement in social media censorship until the Twitter files came out. | ||
| First of all, I don't even think we knew for sure that shadowbanning was occurring to the extent it was. | ||
| Remember that Twitter executives denied for years, including under oath, that they were engaging in shadowbanning. | ||
| That was something that Jack Dorsey denied at a congressional hearing with Vijay Aghati sitting directly behind him as his general counsel. | ||
| That would have been a nice thing for them, I think, to go a little deeper on. | ||
| They asked her in the hearings about whether Twitter had engaged in shadowbanning, and she said, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We did something else. | ||
| We did something called visibility filtering. | ||
| It's like, well, what exactly did you think shadowbanning meant if it didn't mean visibility filtering, i.e. | ||
| the throttling of traffic, the secret throttling of traffic to accounts based on their political viewpoint? | ||
| So in any event, we didn't even know about shadow banning in a conclusive, proven way. | ||
| That was the first revelation of the Twitter files, that Twitter was engaged in this Big Brother-like censorship. | ||
| And they created very elaborate tools to label accounts they didn't like, and thereby throttle traffic to them. | ||
| We then learned that the FBI had something like 80 agents flagging accounts that they didn't like to be reviewed by Twitter's Trusted Safety Department, managed by Yoel Roth. | ||
| We learned that Roth was meeting on a weekly basis with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, this sort of this intelligence community writ large, it included the CIA, it included groups within the State Department. | ||
| So that came out. | ||
| We then learned that the FBI had been pressuring Twitter for information about Russian collusion and Russian influence that Twitter could not find. | ||
| I mean, you're all Roth, I think to his credit, in the Twitter files. | ||
| Kept saying, guys, we've looked at this, and there's nothing here. | ||
| These accounts that you're flagging for us are not Russian bots. | ||
| They're just normal accounts. | ||
| And then, of course, you had the ultimate expression of this was the Hamilton 68 dashboard, in which you had this group for years tell us that this dashboard they created, 600 accounts, was a Russian influence operation. | ||
| It turned out they were just ordinary accounts, ordinary Americans. | ||
| Twitter, on the inside, knew this. | ||
| They knew that the Samuelson-68 project, which was quoted by thousands of news articles as, again, evidence of Russian disinformation, they knew that this was a complete hoax. | ||
| They were saying that inside the company, but they didn't expose it. | ||
| So all of these things were revelations that came out in the Twitter files, and I don't think we would have known any of it. | ||
| If, if Elon hadn't opened up these files. | ||
| And it's wild because David, you were sitting with me right there at like 2 a.m. | ||
| We've got engineers on both sides of us with their laptops. | ||
| I'm asking them every question I could think of that was relevant. | ||
| And they were gladly showing us everything that they could. | ||
| They're not showing us private, you know, user data information, but they basically opened up the books and Elon said, Hey, as long as it's true, then, then go tell the people, let me show you this to that point, this next clip of Jim Jordan on the, on the Hunter Biden laptop. | ||
| Mr. Chairman, Mr. Roth, did the government tell you that the Biden laptop story was fake? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, sir, they did not. | |
| Did they tell you it was hacked? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, sir, they did not. | |
| On October 14, 2020, Twitter blocks the New York Post story on the Hunter Biden, the New York Post story on Hunter Biden and suspends their account. | ||
| The night before, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends you an email. | ||
| The email says this, heads up, I will be sending a teleporter link for you to download 10 documents. | ||
| It's not spam. | ||
| Please confirm receipt when you get it. | ||
| Two minutes later, 624 p.m., you respond back, received and downloaded. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| What were those 10 documents? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Twitter didn't give me access to my laptop, but Special Agent Chan has said publicly and the FBI has confirmed that those documents did not relate to Hunter Biden, and that's my recollection of that. | |
| What did they relate to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My interactions with Agent Chan and with the FBI almost entirely focused on what the FBI called malign foreign interference. | |
| Things like Russian troll farms and Iranian involvement in the elections, not on any type of domestic activity. | ||
| Okay, so let's give Yoel Roth the benefit of the doubt and say that what he just said there is true. | ||
| It wasn't about the Hunter Biden laptop. | ||
| It happened to happen the night before, but clearly there's been this ongoing conversation with the FBI about Russian troll bots and everything else. | ||
| By the way, when the media thought that that was helping Trump, they were very interested in it. | ||
| Somehow they're not interested in this story at all. | ||
| Viva lawyers, private companies. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Just to add one thing to what Dave just said earlier, all the revelations, now that it's | ||
| been revealed as well that the FBI was remunerating or reimbursing or compensating Twitter for | ||
| their time in the order of three some odd million dollars, peanuts, you know, probably | ||
| in the grand scheme of things, but, you know, operating now at the remuneration of, but | ||
| it's beyond interference. | ||
| It's infiltration. | ||
| See, Twitter was nothing more than an arm of intelligence, CIA, FBI, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| They had been infiltrated and were not acting at the behest of, but in conjunction with, as an extension of the body. | ||
| And it's, I mean, it crosses the line, but one thing that's amazing, I'm convinced Elon had to have known about this, because it's impossible to explore the bot issue without stumbling across Do you want to comment on that? | ||
| related to the bots, Russian bots, et cetera. | ||
| I wanna give Elon like the benefit of the doubt here or even maybe impute a lot of intention | ||
| that might not exist. | ||
| I think he knew it when he bought it and this was the plan to blow the lid off it all along. | ||
| Otherwise, you know, reimburse it, take it back and give me my $42 billion, please. | ||
| Sax, real quick before I let Marissa jump in, do you wanna comment on that? | ||
| I mean, do you have any, do you think that he kind of had the feeling like- | ||
| I can't answer conclusively what he knew or didn't know, but I know. | ||
| I think that the Twitter files was a revelation to all of us. | ||
| And just remember, the way that happened is that Elon brought in these journalists, Barry Weiss, Michael Schellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and gave them access to company emails and company Slack channels. | ||
| And using the techniques of investigative reporters, they went out and dug all this stuff up. | ||
| I don't think he would have had access to this, generally speaking, before the acquisition. | ||
| But can we go back to the video here for a second? | ||
| I just want to unpack what happened here. | ||
| What happened is, what Jim Jordan is referring to, is that the FBI had a tool called Teleporter, which was a tool where they could convey information, basically emails or written documents, to Twitter. | ||
| Or to executives of social media companies. | ||
| And those documents would then disappear after some period of time, after 10 days or whatever it is. | ||
| So what's going on is that the FBI is engaged in conveying secret instructions to social media companies about what they want to have happen. | ||
| And there's no way for the public to know about this. | ||
| I mean, this goes a step beyond classification, where normally with classified documents, maybe at some point in time, they could become declassified. | ||
| Here the documents are actually disappearing. | ||
| And I think Jim Jordan is right to ask what exactly is the government up to here that they need to provide employees of social media companies who are engaged in, you know, trust and safety, which is censorship. | ||
| What do they need to provide that so sensitive that it disappears? | ||
| You got to give this Chan guy some credit for putting it in an email, what he was doing related to the disappearing things. | ||
| Marissa, I think what this all boils down to, though, is will anything happen? | ||
| It is nice to see that the Republicans are doing the right thing for a change. | ||
| But we've all seen these things, right? | ||
| We've seen Ted Cruz grill the hell out of Jack Dorsey. | ||
| And as David said before, basically Dorsey lied about shadow banning and just used another phrase or whatever. | ||
| Do you think anything actually comes of it? | ||
| And what do you think should come of it? | ||
| That's exactly the point I was going to make. | ||
| Well, I think that Twitter being freer now is certainly a relief to us, certainly those of us here at PragerU. | ||
| But it's not the first time that we're seeing real concrete evidence of either shadow banning or censorship coming from these big tech companies. | ||
| I mean, we've sued YouTube. | ||
| Our case got thrown out. | ||
| We've shown many screenshots and evidence on Facebook where we would post a video to our millions of followers on Facebook and we would get two or three views on them and so there was obvious shadow banning. | ||
| We have communication both with YouTube and with Facebook where they have notified us that they will be shadow banning us for several days. | ||
| And that is because we are labeled as misinformation. | ||
| Well, who determined that? | ||
| The government? | ||
| Did the government do that? | ||
| And so when we have shown evidence, we have seen nothing. | ||
| We have seen no results and no change. | ||
| And so my frustration is, look, I mean, we can all celebrate that Twitter is now free and obviously incredibly grateful to what Elon Musk and many others have done. | ||
| We finally can advertise again on Twitter, which we couldn't for many, many years. | ||
| But now what? | ||
| Now, what is the government? | ||
| I mean, we know the left is not going to secede power because this is exactly what they're looking for. | ||
| Will the Republicans grow enough? | ||
| What do you say here, men? | ||
| Balls. | ||
| You can say balls. | ||
| It's the internet. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I'll let you complete the sentence. | ||
| Well, they grow the balls to actually fight for the freedom of speech that they promise that they're going to fight for when they're running for elections. | ||
| I mean, that is really what we need to see. | ||
| And I think a big question is Section 230. | ||
| Section 230 allows these big companies to have the cake and eat it, too. | ||
| And I understand where it came from and why it was written in 1996, which feels like a very long time ago, certainly in the world of the Internet. | ||
| But it gives them all of this protection. | ||
| And frankly, they've taken advantage of it. | ||
| And I think those are some of the next steps. | ||
| We have enough evidence. | ||
| Now what? | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Now what? | ||
| David, let me give you the last word on this since you're in on this with Elon. | ||
| I mean, do you feel that he's ready to just keep going with all of this and he'll keep, you know, fixing it as much as they keep trying to destroy it? | ||
| Well, I think what Elon has done here is an unprecedented act of corporate transparency, where he's just basically thrown open company emails and Slack channels to these investigative reporters, and he's let them go find out what happened. | ||
| And I don't think there's been another company that's ever done anything this transparent. | ||
| The media is always talking about the need for corporate transparency, but here you don't see them praising it or even covering it. | ||
| And I think the reason is because it's exposing something they don't like, which is Big text complicity in censorship of basically Democrats' political enemies. | ||
| So this is the last thing they want to expose. | ||
| I just want to make one other comment about FBI involvement here. | ||
| The whole reason why I think this is newsworthy and why there should be congressional hearings is because of the FBI's involvement. | ||
| Remember, this panel is called the Committee on Government Weaponization. | ||
| It's the so-called Church Committee 2.0. | ||
| It's the involvement of the FBI in the Hunter Biden laptop story that makes it relevant. | ||
| It's not just executives of a private company who are making these decisions because of their political bias. | ||
| If it was just that, I don't think there would be that much. | ||
| It still wouldn't be right, but there wouldn't be as much to investigate. | ||
| The manner in which, though, the FBI influenced Twitter is really interesting. | ||
| I don't think That it's a clear-cut case of the FBI ordering Twitter to do something. | ||
| It was much more subtle than that. | ||
| What actually happened is that over a course of many months, the FBI influenced Twitter by basically priming Yoel Roth. | ||
| They told Yoel Roth that there was going to be a Russian hack and leak operation close to the election, that there would be Russian disinformation, and specifically it would involve Hunter Biden. | ||
| And so Roth, in other contexts, has testified under oath that he was primed by the FBI to be on the lookout for a Russian hack and leak story. | ||
| And that is why he has previously testified that they jumped on it and basically engaged in censorship. | ||
| Now, at this committee, mysteriously, you saw in that clip with Jim Jordan, you all, Roth had just mysteriously forgotten about that. | ||
| You know, his previous testimony about this point. | ||
| And that is the thing that the Republicans really need to drill in on, is where did this FBI pre-bunking operation come from? | ||
| You know, it's an awfully big coincidence that the FBI was telling all these social media companies, be on the lookout for a phony story about Hunter Biden, you know, and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. | ||
| That's an awfully big coincidence. | ||
| And they even said it, be on the lookout for it close to the election, you know, roughly in October. | ||
| So how was it that the FBI came to be involved in influencing social media companies to think about a story about Hunter Biden that way, a story that we now know was completely true? | ||
| Yeah, actually, let's stick with this for a second, because I think you're making a really good point. | ||
| This priming idea, which seems to me is kind of like a mafia tactic by the FBI. | ||
| It's not like walking in there And demanding the money today, demanding all the answers today. | ||
| It's just showing up and going, hey, we're around and you're kind of going to do what we want you to do on the legal front. | ||
| It's a psyop. | ||
| You know, just kind of just one more thing that was really creepy that came out of these hearings that Michael Schellenberger has written about is that a few weeks before the New York Post came out with this story, there was a there was a meeting at the Aspen Institute in which Joel Roth attended and other Trust and Safety Executive Social Media attended and the Aspen Institute ran what they called a tabletop exercise for these social media companies in which they were basically asked to game out, sort of war game out, what would you do if there was an October surprise in which a Russian, you know, hack and dump operation involving Hunter Biden came out and not just involving Hunter Biden, but Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine working for Burisma. | ||
| Literally, this was the exercise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
| Wild. | ||
| It happened three weeks before the New York Post story came out. | ||
| The person who runs the Aspen Institute is a politically connected Democrat. | ||
| And the Republicans on the committee were asking Earl Roth, well, don't you think this is an awfully big coincidence? | ||
| And his only explanation was, yeah, I guess it was a coincidence. | ||
| This had nothing to do with how I thought about the New York Post story when it came out. | ||
| But this obviously was one element, along with The FBI and intelligence community pre-briefing Yoel Roth and other social media executives for months about a potential story involving Hunter Biden, and this primed them to later censor that story. | ||
| So it was a very elaborate operation that appears to want to, it was an operation to influence these tech executives. | ||
| And that is really the thing to get to the bottom of is how did that happen? | ||
| Was it really just a coincidence? | ||
| Because it is an awfully big coincidence. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| Yeah, Viva, bring us home on this one. | ||
| It's beyond priming. | ||
| I mean, this is like the mafia showing up and saying, you have a lovely social media | ||
| company here. | ||
| It would be a shame if something happens to it. | ||
| It's priming or it's basically threatening. | ||
| And it's an iteration of the wrap-up smear. | ||
| Like, what they're basically doing is getting the media companies or the tech companies to do what they want them to do by planting the seed there and then running with it afterwards so they can pen an open letter saying it's Russian disinformation or the Hunter Biden laptop has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. | ||
| The same FBI, you know, leaks phony stories about pee-pee in Russian hotels so that they can then have Yahoo publish it so they can then invoke it before the courts. | ||
| It's an iteration of the wrap-up smear Information laundering, or in this case, disinformation laundering, and it just shows the extent to which Twitter had been acting as a de facto branch of the intelligence community. | ||
| Dave, I know you want to move on, but just one final point on this. | ||
| Remember, Zuckerberg, when he was interviewed by Rogan, said the same thing that you all, Roth, had previously testified about, which is the FBI came to Facebook and said, be on the lookout for this type of story. | ||
| It's also the same story that, as Viva just said, there were 50 former security state officials who wrote a letter when the New York Post story came out claiming this was all Russian disinformation. | ||
| So in other words, you have these former security state officials in their letter maintain this line about Russian disinformation, and you have active FBI officials claim that it was Russian disinformation, and you have former FBI official Jim Baker inside of Twitter basically leading the charge saying it's Russian disinformation. | ||
| How did they all synchronize on the same story? | ||
| It's one thing to synchronize on a story when that story is true. | ||
| But when that story is a lie, when it's false, we now know this was not Russian information. | ||
| This all came off of Hunter Biden's laptop. | ||
| But yet they all synchronized on this lie. | ||
| Here, you know what, let's actually continue with this, because I think this is what is on everyone's mind. | ||
| So we're gonna drop the, we were gonna do something about Trump and DeSantis. | ||
| We're just gonna let that go at the end. | ||
| We'll do a little more on State of the Union in a minute. | ||
| But Marissa, to David's point, the sort of lie laundering, I am absolutely obsessed with this, how these lies work through the system and somehow get to the New York Times and the anonymous sources, and that they're all kind of in on it together. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You talk about mafia lying and threats. | ||
| How do we talk about censorship without talking about the fact checkers? | ||
| The fact checkers sound like a small thing, but it's actually a massive thing. | ||
| And I'll, I'll share an experience here that we've had at PragerU. | ||
| So we produce content. | ||
| There is a company called NewsGuard. | ||
| NewsGuard claims that they're the arbiters of truth, right? | ||
| They get to determine what is misinformation and what is information that is allowed out there. | ||
| When we produce content on what they label as misinformation, they label PragerU and Daily Wire and Federalist and all these other companies with this rating as if we are making fake news. | ||
| And of course, they'll give CNN and New York Times and those who behave according to their standards, they'll get a great rating. | ||
| Now, why is this important? | ||
| We wouldn't even care about NewsGuard. | ||
| We track down where does the money come from? | ||
| Who are the supporters of NewsGuard? | ||
| We found that $750,000 was wired to NewsGuard from the Department of Defense. | ||
| And so when NewsGuard applies pressure on media companies like ours, and we received threatening emails from NewsGuard saying, why did you post this about COVID? | ||
| Why did you post this about the lockdowns? | ||
| Questioning us and pressuring us to take down content that they don't like. | ||
| That is very, very fishy. | ||
| And we know that NewsGuard partners with these tech companies. | ||
| They partner with Facebook. | ||
| They partner with many other tech companies. | ||
| And so how can we say that there is no government involvement when there is actually financial wires coming out of the government into these fact-checking companies And the fact-checking companies have partnerships with the tech companies. | ||
| They found this very clever loophole to use government intervention and pressure media companies to comply. | ||
| Right, and to Viva's point earlier, we now know that the government paid Twitter over $3 million because they were using their own employees to look into some of this stuff. | ||
| One of the things that David and I found out when we were at Twitter was that when I was banned in July of 21 for saying that vaccines were not working as promised and mandates and boosters were coming and all this stuff, that they unbanned me a day later, but the depression in the algorithm related to my account, that stayed. | ||
| They didn't know that until Just a couple weeks ago. | ||
| David, since you're the SaaS guy on the software part of this, related to big tech companies, I'm actually sympathetic that they need ways to take down content. | ||
| In other words, if someone does put child porn, which apparently nobody cared about on Twitter until Elon took over, now he's actually doing something about it and suddenly they care. | ||
| But the point is, they need some mechanisms to take some things down. | ||
| But it seems like almost an impossible job, right? | ||
| At this point? | ||
| Because of the way the government then sort of takes advantage of that? | ||
| Well, everybody agrees that there needs to be some level of content moderation, even if it's, you know, just taking down child porn, for example. | ||
| Everybody agrees that needs to come down. | ||
| I think most people agree that hate speech should come down or violence or graphic content. | ||
| The problem is that what happens is that in order to facilitate that content moderation, these big tech companies create tools. | ||
| And then once the tools exist, they can be hijacked. | ||
| And so we first thought That these tools have been hijacked by just highly political and biased employees of these companies. | ||
| Now we're finding out that those employees have had extensive communications with the FBI and intelligence community and the intelligence community has been flagging content for them to take down to the point where, like you said, the government was reimbursing millions of dollars of employees' time. | ||
| That's how much they were using them. | ||
| You know, they had over 80 FBI agents involved in this operation. | ||
| So what we saw is that tech companies start with, let's say, a valid need to engage in some content moderation. | ||
| So then they create these powerful tools, and the tools then get usurped and hijacked or influenced. | ||
| by really powerful actors who are behind the scenes. | ||
| That's why it's wild what we learned at Twitter because, you know, Jack says, no, we don't shadow ban. | ||
| They testify, oh, we don't shadow ban or whatever phrase they want to use for it. | ||
| But as I tweeted out, it was like the whole system was designed to shadow ban in a bizarre sense. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, exactly. | ||
| I think that there's no way that you can defend that statement because there, as we found out, there were, if you look at the tools that were created, there were flags that said, Do not amplify. | ||
| In other words, you could label an account with do not amplify, and it would de-boost or throttle the amount of traffic they would get in their feed from people who were following them. | ||
| There was a flag for do not appear in search. | ||
| There was a flag for do not trend. | ||
| So they could very precisely control how much traffic you got and where you appeared on the site. | ||
| And of course, the word shadow here is key, which is they were not informing anybody. | ||
| Mm-hmm about when a label was implied to you you were never informed I mean obviously when you were kicked out of your account and Suspended if you were banned you found out about that, but anything short of an overt ban They never told you about that was the whole point of shadow banning That's what that word means is that you're not informed about actions taken on your account to throw all your traffic And what we found is they were doing that and they had very elaborate tools to do that Yeah, and they deny it, and then when it comes out later, then Yoel Roth refers back to some tweet from a while back and says, see, we told you we were doing it, but we used the word. | ||
| And then when you criticize Yoel Roth for having done that, then it becomes like the internet mobbing Yoel Roth and the victimizers become the victims. | ||
| But just to highlight one thing about those 50-some-odd intelligence officers penning the letter that the Russian The Hunter Biden laptop had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation. | ||
| They knew at the time it was true. | ||
| The FBI had had it for over a year since 2019. | ||
| They knew it was a lie. | ||
| They're priming. | ||
| When the FBI shows up at your door, like Zuckerberg said in his clip with Rogan, you take that very seriously. | ||
| Because like Chuck Schumer said, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you. | ||
| So this is FBI knocking on your door and telling you what to do, but in a manner formulated as a question. | ||
| All right, one more on this then, which is that on the First Amendment front of this, I actually spoke to a couple of fairly well-known lawyers about what actual repercussions there are if the government infringes on your First Amendment rights. | ||
| Meaning, if I tweet something out and then about vaccines, let's say, which happened, and then the government forces a private company to take that down, is that actually a violation of my First Amendment because it's government coercion? | ||
| And what is your recourse? | ||
| And basically every lawyer that I talk to that are First Amendment lawyers, they're all pretty much in agreement that, you know, you'd have to know exactly the details of who sent the email and all that. | ||
| But in essence, it is a First Amendment violation. | ||
| But there's pretty much no recourse. | ||
| Like, you can't sue the government, in essence. | ||
| If anything, you could maybe get the government to apologize. | ||
| But that's pretty much it. | ||
| That's kind of depressing, isn't it, Marissa? | ||
| So they can just keep doing this over and over. | ||
| And the worst thing that happens is some, like, half-nitwit mid-level management guy from the government comes out and goes, ah, we're sorry we did that. | ||
| I mean, isn't that amazing? | ||
| These huge companies just get to apologize and just say, oh, sorry, you know, it was one of our little employees. | ||
| We didn't mean, we didn't know that they were actually causing a complete change in America's election. | ||
| We had no idea. | ||
| Or the executives suddenly have amnesia. | ||
| I mean, if they really have nothing to hide, why do they have severe memory loss? | ||
| So Dave, just on this point, I mean, there is no, I guess, private right of action or there's no recourse. | ||
| In addition to that, if you look at the emails that were sent from Elvis Chan to Yoel Roth that came out in the Twitter files, what you see is that they're very careful to always say upfront, That we're flagging these accounts for possible violations of your policies. | ||
| So I think we just should be clear about the nature of this influence, which is the government never explicitly orders Twitter to engage in censorship, because I think these government officials know there'll be a blatant violation of the First Amendment. | ||
| What they claim to be doing is flagging accounts that they say are in violation of Twitter's own rules. | ||
| Separately, in Washington, you get pressure From the Judiciary Committee and these other congressmen and senators, representatives, constantly pressuring Twitter to modify its terms of use, to expand the categories that are not allowed, to create these categories of misinformation. | ||
| So essentially, it's this two-handed operation where Washington is pressuring, the elected representatives are pressuring social networks to expand the categories of censorship, and then the FBI or intelligence community is flagging posts Under their own rules, so they basically have the fig leaf of saying, well, we didn't order you to do this. | ||
| And I think you have to understand that it's, again, it's more of an influence game or a pressure game rather than an overt ordering. | ||
| And I think it's just, it's important to understand that if you're an executive at one of these tech companies and the FBI or the CIA comes to you and says, you know, gee, these, these accounts are a problem. | ||
| You're under enormous pressure to basically do what they want. | ||
| I mean, nobody wants to defy the FBI. | ||
| And you can see the deliberations within Twitter. | ||
| I mean, I think to Yoel Roth's credit, there are certain times within the Twitter files where he expresses, gee, you know, they're asking us to do something. | ||
| You know, they're putting pressure on us to censor these accounts. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with these accounts. | ||
| You know, we should push back on this. | ||
| But what you see is that he gets overruled. | ||
| There's too much pressure on them to basically just comply. | ||
| As opposed to defy this incredibly powerful law enforcement agency of our government. | ||
| And by the way, that's why we've played on this show. | ||
| I've probably played this clip 50 times, maybe more than that. | ||
| The clip from what, about a year and a half ago now, where Jen Psaki at one of the press conferences says, we flag posts for Facebook. | ||
| And I always relate it back to me. | ||
| If I was getting a call every now and again from the administration, just saying, hey Dave, we're watching your show. | ||
| You've been talking an awful lot about that thing. | ||
| I might start talking about something else. | ||
| So that that is the mafia tactic. | ||
| But let's just do one other topic that's actually sort of related to all this, because we've been talking about sort of how these lies get laundered through the system. | ||
| Obviously, the State of the Union was on Tuesday night, and I was fascinated while watching this because, you know, one of the memes these days is that we're all watching the same movie and having wildly different reactions to things. | ||
| And I saw people that I respect That that saw something very different than I saw. | ||
| So I want to show you one clip of Biden and the way that our politicians and then the media launder the lies. | ||
| Disrupted our supply chains and Putin's unfair and brutal war in Ukraine. | ||
| Disrupted energy supplies as well as food supplies. | ||
| Blocking all that grain in Ukraine. | ||
| But we're better positioned than any country on earth right now. | ||
| But we have more to do. | ||
| But here at home, inflation is coming down. | ||
| Here at home, gas prices are down $1.50 from their peak. | ||
| Food inflation is coming down. | ||
| Not fast enough, but coming down. | ||
| Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months, while take-home pay has gone up. | ||
| Additionally, over the last two years, a record 10 million Americans applied to start new businesses. | ||
| 10 million. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And by the way, every time... | |
| Okay, so I think everyone watching gets how virtually everything he said there was a lie or a confusion. | ||
| Yes, inflation has come down a tiny bit after skyrocketing. | ||
| Yes, gas prices have come down a tiny bit after skyrocketing. | ||
| The wage that he's talking about is not going up as fast as inflation, so you're still losing money. | ||
| And they did put a whole bunch of people out of work because of COVID, the policy that he still has going till May. | ||
| Marissa, were you pulling your hair out during this thing or what? | ||
| Well, I was actually learning quite a bit from him because what, you know, I run a nonprofit. | ||
| So what, maybe what I'll do is hire my entire staff, 150 people. | ||
| And then in three months, I'll go back to the board and say, look at me. | ||
| I'm so amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just hired 150 people. | |
| Reproductivity. | ||
| So, you know, there's quite a bit to learn from our president, not in a good way. | ||
| Was I pulling my hair out? | ||
| I mean, I can dissect every sentence there and pull my hair out. | ||
| I mean, the energy part is just abysmal as well. | ||
| The first thing he did in office was cut the Keystone Pipeline | ||
| and make America essentially poorer. | ||
| And Viva, he also seemingly, all he has to do for people to basically say it's good | ||
| is not fall off the stage, right? | ||
| I mean, basically, as long as his eye doesn't explode, which happened during one of the debates, pretty much everybody's like, my God, he's still got it. | ||
| I feel bad making this observation, but he reminds me, his facial expressions remind me of my grandmother when she was like 102 years old. | ||
| It's not normal, it's not healthy. | ||
| I've said the same thing, yeah. | ||
| And it's like, people who have seen it know what it looks like. | ||
| But the lies. | ||
| Everybody needs to read or listen to George Orwell's 1984 when you have the government talking about how prices have gone down, rations have gone up. | ||
| First of all, Having gone down from rocket high prices because of incompetence is not a success, it's a mitigation of failure. | ||
| And then at the end of the day, you don't even know if any of it's true, but the energy, and Marissa touched on it, on the one hand, cutting the Keystone pipeline, which pissed Canada off as well, but also talking about how Russia's interfering with energy, while allegedly, according to Oh geez, I forgot his name now. | ||
| Someone will help me. | ||
| The journalist who just covered the story. | ||
| While they're allegedly sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines to Germany, everything they accuse their enemies of doing is what they themselves have done. | ||
| It's pure confession through projection. | ||
| Yes, I quote you on that line all the time. | ||
| Sax, you've been talking a ton about Ukraine and going on Tucker and you've been very outspoken on the All In podcast and everything. | ||
| It seems to me that this thing keeps getting escalated, partly so that no matter what happens here domestically, Biden can kind of blame Russia for it. | ||
| Well, yeah, you saw in that clip that he blamed Russia for inflation. | ||
| This is a rehash of the so-called Putin price hike, which was one of their lines when, when, you know, to basically try and fob off the blame for inflation. | ||
| The problem is that inflation was already at something like 7%. | ||
| When Putin invaded Ukraine, the Ukraine invasion certainly didn't make anything better. | ||
| It made things worse. | ||
| And I would lay some fault for that with Biden's refusal to engage in serious diplomacy before the war. | ||
| I do think that the war was preventable if we had used diplomacy and we didn't. | ||
| I do believe that. | ||
| I mean, I think one place where Trump is right. | ||
| There's a lot of things I don't like about what he says. | ||
| He's not my preferred candidate, but I do think he's right. | ||
| That if Trump had been in office, I don't think we would have had this war. | ||
| So there is some blame to allocate there, but just to go back on the inflation point, it's not all because of Putin. | ||
| What happened is that the administration spent way too much money. | ||
| We had trillions of dollars of additional spending in the first two years of this administration, and that set off inflation like a rocket. | ||
| And Larry Summers warned them that it would do that, and then they maintained this party line that it was transitory, and it turned out not to be. | ||
| We're all downstream of those decisions that were made very early in the Biden administration. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, you can't just blame another foreign leader for all of your problems, meaning it's your job to mitigate those things. | ||
| So if there's a war across the world, it's your job to go, okay, how do we make sure that doesn't affect our economic policy here? | ||
| Vivek, I feel like you're trying to get in. | ||
| Go! | ||
| Yeah, no, first of all, Seymour Hersh was the journalist who wrote the story. | ||
| But wasn't there also the fact that they actively deterred diplomacy? | ||
| They said, don't sit down, don't negotiate. | ||
| I mean, they've exacerbated this conflict at every step of the way, and it's because it's easier to govern through emergency than it is to govern through stability. | ||
| And the more chaos oversees, the more they can blame everything. | ||
| The Putin price hike. | ||
| I'd love to see the think tank that came up with that term. | ||
| Yeah, there were a couple of amazing stories that came out in Ukraine just the last couple of weeks. | ||
| So number one is the Seymour Hersh story, in which he contends and really lays out and proves That the bombing of Nord Stream was an American, covert American operation. | ||
| If that is true, that is a significant escalation of this war. | ||
| It represents a direct attack, an act of war perpetrated by the United States on Russia. | ||
| That is something that Biden promised at the beginning of this conflict would never happen, is that we would not get directly involved. | ||
| So, and you know, they're trying to dismiss Seymour Hersh, but he's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's previously exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and he exposed The Abu Ghraib prison abuses during the Iraq war. | ||
| So this is certainly a journalist with, I think, a history of major exposes about, you know, covert military activity. | ||
| So I think that that was story number one. | ||
| Story number two is that Naftali Bennett gave an interview in the past couple of weeks in which he said that this goes back to March of last year. | ||
| He was a mediator trying to find a peace deal in the first month of the war. | ||
| And what came out of his comments is that the administration had no interest in that deal. | ||
| One of the translators used the word block. | ||
| Another one just said that there's a debate over the translation. | ||
| But the bottom line is that the administration threw cold water on a deal. | ||
| This was very similar to a report that came out about the Istanbul peace process that happened in April of last year, in which Boris Johnson was reported to have flown in and basically threw cold water in the process, told Zelensky that the West Did not want to negotiate with Putin and wanted to confront Putin. | ||
| So, you have now multiple stories about the West, really the Biden administration, not wanting to engage in negotiation once the war started. | ||
| They did not seriously engage in negotiation before the war. | ||
| Back in January, the central demand of the Russians was that we take NATO expansion off the table. | ||
| We adamantly refused to do that. | ||
| That basically then was one of the major factors that led to The invasion. | ||
| So I think you've seen here that the administration just has had no interest in shutting down this war and preventing this war. | ||
| And instead, they keep escalating this war. | ||
| And you saw as well, they recently decided to send Abrams tanks. | ||
| So they keep upping our level of involvement, upping the level of sophistication of the weapons that we're providing. | ||
| And now, if you believe this, you know her story, getting directly involved. | ||
| This is an incredibly dangerous situation. | ||
| And the administration has never explained what exactly is the vital American interest | ||
| that compels us to risk getting into war three with Russia, which has something like 6,000 nuclear weapons. | ||
| I mean, there's so much there because there's plenty of video of Biden | ||
| when he was campaigning saying that they're never gonna turn on the pipeline | ||
| and then suddenly the pipeline blows up. | ||
| So that would kind of lend itself to that. | ||
| But Marissa, to this point of like the slow escalation of this thing, like, okay, | ||
| now we're gonna give them a few more tanks. | ||
| Now we're gonna train a few more people. | ||
| We're gonna send them some more planes. | ||
| I mean, first off, at some point it does strike me that we actually are at war, right? | ||
| If you just fund everything, at some point you are technically at war, I think. | ||
| But even beyond that, to David's point, he's got nukes. | ||
| 14 more tanks are not going to end this freaking thing. | ||
| You know, I think the main issue is that he's taking advantage of this situation that is happening in Russia and Ukraine to blame some of the policies that he has made here. | ||
| And are impacting Americans and sadly Americans are not educated and not aware and they we've been manipulated | ||
| We Americans think that the reason gas prices are higher in energy is higher | ||
| Here in the United States is because of the war in Russia and Ukraine and that could not be a bigger lie | ||
| Every single when you're paying your bills and you're thinking that that is because of something that is | ||
| happening in Russia I mean, he's just using it as a way to really distract | ||
| Americans. The reason we're paying more in energy here is because we have frankly | ||
| stupid policies that are causing us to be more and more dependent on on whatever other terrorist regimes and | ||
| And so, you know, whether we get involved in the war or not, I mean, the fact that he spent all this time talking, my first reaction when I was watching the State of the Union was I felt like I was at A, in a twilight zone, and B, you know, really, are you even speaking to Americans? | ||
| Are you speaking to the issues that we actually care about? | ||
| And so his way of speaking to the issues that America cares about, which is why is my food basket so expensive? | ||
| Why is energy so expensive? | ||
| Is to actually distract us and have us feel like we have to be involved in this Russian-Ukraine war in order to solve our energy problems here or whatever, you know, blue-yellow squares that people post on social media to feel like they're, you know, they're part of the solution. | ||
| I think that is the bigger problem, is this real disconnect with what Americans not only want but what we actually need. | ||
| Well, to that point, the whole purpose of me doing this show at this point is just to like lift a little bit of the fog from the media nonsense related to all of this. | ||
| Because I agree, it's like people watch these things now and it's so disconnected from their reality and I don't know how long that can hold. | ||
| I'll give you each one final word. | ||
| Viva! | ||
| I'm going to quote George Orwell again. | ||
| The war was not meant to be won. | ||
| It was meant to be perpetual. | ||
| And it wasn't just Joe Biden who said, if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, that Nord Stream pipeline will come to an end. | ||
| How are you going to do that? | ||
| It's in Germany. | ||
| We'll make it happen. | ||
| Victoria Nuland said it almost verbatim. | ||
| CIA gives Germany the heads up the summer before that something might happen. | ||
| But yeah, Seymour Hersh is a conspiracy theorist, and they categorically deny that article. | ||
| They deny it, then they admit it. | ||
| Or sorry, they deny it, then they spin it. | ||
| Then they admit it, because the truth cannot long be hidden. | ||
| David, final thought. | ||
| Yeah, well, just to go back to your point that we are directly involved in this war. | ||
| We may not be pulling the triggers, but we're providing the weapons. | ||
| They're more and more advanced weapons. | ||
| We've appropriated over $100 billion. | ||
| We've trained Ukrainian soldiers on how to use those weapons, including on American soil. | ||
| We provided the intelligence to paint targets on the backs of Russian generals. | ||
| You had administration officials bragging to The New York Times, The Washington Post, that our intelligence helped sink the Mosfet, the Russian flagship. | ||
| You've had stories now in the New York Times or Washington Post, where describing how it was American generals who planned the successful Ukrainian counterattack last fall. | ||
| So we are deeply, deeply involved. | ||
| And you heard precious little from Biden during the State of the Union to explain why exactly America is involved, other than very vague generalities. | ||
| And I think he has not done enough to prepare the American people for the level of risk that we're taking. | ||
| And I can only hope that we wrap up our involvement in this war soon, because it is continually escalating. | ||
| Marissa, now the ultimate challenge to you. | ||
| End us on a positive note, considering David just said World War III is coming. | ||
| I don't know if I have something positive to say, but I do have to say excuses or results. | ||
| If you're able to watch the State of the Union and you realize that you're being lied to, stop waiting for other people to do the fighting for you. | ||
| Do something about it. | ||
| Don't rest on your laurels. | ||
| You know, people are not going to do your own fighting. | ||
| Go educate other people and get involved. | ||
| I mean, you might not be able to by Twitter, but there's certainly something you can do other than just complain. | ||
| You need only have a mirror. | ||
| You did it, Marissa. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| Thank you guys. | ||
| This was really, I fully, fully enjoyed this and it's, it's really, it's why I do this show. | ||
| So thanks to you guys. | ||
| I'm going to continue solo for a little bit. | ||
| Have a great weekend, everybody. | ||
| And yeah, I'm bringing my friend Bob on. | ||
| Bringing a childhood friend on. | ||
| My childhood friend Bob is going to now come on the show for our local subscribers and tell me everything I did wrong today. | ||
| That's what we're going to do. | ||
| If you want to join us for that, You can join us at rubinreport.locals.com. | ||
| Let me just say real quick, though, I think, you know, we dumped the third segment there. | ||
| We were going to do something on some of Trump's attacks on DeSantis and some of DeSantis's response on that. | ||
| And I actually felt that the first segment especially was so important. | ||
| This is what's on people's minds. | ||
| If we cannot figure out what is going on here and why our reality is so disconnected from what the media shows us and big tech, we are just going to continue that slow descent to hell. | ||
| So I hope that you all felt that that was a worthy 50 minutes or so, which is longer than we usually do on these roundtables. | ||
| So if you want to join us now and watch Bob rip me apart and go through the rest of the week's nonsense, I said he was a childhood friend. | ||
| He was a friend from my stand-up days. | ||
| Great funny guy. | ||
| Bob's gonna join us from New York, of all places. | ||
| We got a guy in New York to rip me apart. | ||
| Join us right now at RubinReport.Locals.com. |
Export Selection