March 31, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| All right, people of the internet, this is the Rubin Report, | ||
| and welcome to another Friday Roundtable Extravaganza. | ||
| Joining me today is the opinion editor of Newsweek, Josh Hammer, and the independent sub-stack journalist and author of The Grey Lady Winked, Ashley Rinsberg. | ||
| Josh, Ashley, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Always a pleasure, Dave. | ||
| Josh, you've been on many times. | ||
| The audience is familiar with Josh Hammer, so I wanna give Ashley a moment on his debut Rubin Report episode to just tell everyone a bit about himself and a bit about the book, because I think they will see why I thought you were a good fit for today's show. | ||
| Yeah, thank you so much, Dave. | ||
| I, as you mentioned, I'm an investigative journalist, independent. | ||
| I don't have a, unfortunately for my bank account, don't have any corporate masters. | ||
| But I get by. | ||
| So I wrote this book in 2021 about the New York Times called The Grey Lady Winked. | ||
| Actually, I published in 21. | ||
| I wrote it many years before, but it was blocked at every turn by the publishing industry, which did not want this book out. | ||
| And this book is about the 10 cases that the New York Times misreporting actually changed history. | ||
| So this is all the way from Walter Durante denying the Ukraine famine in the early 1930s, right up until today. | ||
| Nicole Hannah-Jones, Trying to convince America that we are a slave nation, rather than a nation based in liberty, and everything in between. | ||
| So that is The Grey Lady Wanked, and it really struck a chord, of course, as we're talking a lot about media today, and media corruption, malfeasance, and the kind of distortion that they weave into all of our lives. | ||
| Yeah, the book is really excellent, and my audience will totally dig it, because, yeah, The New York Times. | ||
| Ashley, I'm guessing they didn't put you on The New York Times bestseller list. | ||
| They did not. | ||
| And you know, that is an editorial list. | ||
| That is not a numbers list. | ||
| They make those choices by whoever they want to include and exclude. | ||
| That's why you don't see a lot of conservative authors on that list, proportionate to their sales. | ||
| Yeah, it's hilarious, as everyone knows. | ||
| And then we'll move on. | ||
| My first book made it to the list. | ||
| I should have been number four. | ||
| They put me at 11. | ||
| My second book should have been number two, possibly number one, depending on how they counted by sales. | ||
| And they didn't even put me on. | ||
| I mean, and it's like the only reason I even mentioned it. | ||
| I truly don't care. | ||
| The first time I wanted my editor to get it. | ||
| Because it was good for her career. | ||
| I didn't care. | ||
| I make fun of the New York Times all the time. | ||
| But the point is that if they literally mess with sales numbers, which are hard numbers, it's like, do you think they might be messing with some of those other 10 things that you mentioned? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let's just dive right into it, guys. | ||
| I want to talk about independent Because Josh, you're kind of on both sides of these things as a Twitter guy and a Newsweek guy. | ||
| Joe Rogan this week had a nice summation of what's going on here when it comes to the failure of mainstream media and why independent journalists are so important right now. | ||
| Because if it was not for independent journalism, we would be in a pickle. | ||
| We would be in a really bad state, because a lot of people got duped by the pharmacy, the pharmacological industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, the military-industrial complex. | ||
| They've been duped by so many different companies and corporations that have a vested interest | ||
| in getting one narrative out. | ||
| And if you can get that narrative out through the traditional pipelines of mainstream media | ||
| with no one fact checking, no one interfering, no independent journalists saying, "Actually, | ||
| that's not true at all. | ||
| Here's why they did that. | ||
| This was the influence. | ||
| Here's where the money is. | ||
| We have emails. | ||
| We can show you they were influenced." | ||
| If it wasn't for them, we would be fucked. | ||
| And it's one of the beautiful things about the Internet today. | ||
| The Internet today allows people like that to thrive because these mainstream media corporations are so corrupt. | ||
| They're so obviously indebted to the companies that pay for their advertising. | ||
| Ashley, I always tell my audience, I don't consider myself a journalist. | ||
| I think other people do. | ||
| I just tell people what I think for a living, and then I chat with other people, and my opinions are what they are. | ||
| But I suppose this has become a type of journalism because mainstream media's journalism has become so negligent. | ||
| I take it this is not a surprise to you. | ||
| No, I mean, they've created a void. | ||
| They've created a huge gap, and people have filled it because there's a necessity. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| Throw out the baby with the bathwater and say journalism is bad, it's evil, and journalists are enemy of the state. | ||
| And nothing could be further from the truth. | ||
| The epigram of my book is a Thomas Jefferson quote saying, if he could have a state without newspapers, or newspapers without a state, he would take the latter. | ||
| Newspapers are more important to Thomas Jefferson than the state itself. | ||
| But that's not true when the newspapers become aligned with the state and start taking dictates from the FBI, State Department, the White House, you name it. | ||
| They are no longer serving that critical role. | ||
| That's exactly what Rogan was pointing out. | ||
| Josh, I wish I could say the word journalist without using air quotes all the time, but it's become mostly impossible. | ||
| One of the things you're doing at Newsweek with the op-ed section is you're trying to get a plurality of voices back in there. | ||
| It went very far left. | ||
| You've obviously brought it back more to the center. | ||
| But what do you make of the general state? | ||
| As someone, you know, at Newsweek, so you're around the general state of kind of legacy media. | ||
| Is there anything left there, or should we just be saying goodbye to them and move on? | ||
| So, I mean, the general state, I think, of mainstream media, the New York Times obviously being a perfect avatar of that, is pretty, pretty bad. | ||
| I mean, I'm a little biased, obviously. | ||
| I happen to think that a lot of what's going on in Newsweek, Perhaps especially the op-ed section that I've been privileged to oversee for the last three years or so. | ||
| We're trying to do something a little different to your credit, Dave, but I have to say, I mean, I'm not sure how well this will sit with my Twitter followers and whatnot, but like you, Dave, I very much eschew the label journalist. | ||
| I do not, I do not think of myself as a journalist. | ||
| I don't, I don't do investigative reporting personally. | ||
| I write opinion columns and I solicit opinion columns and I host podcasts and things like that. | ||
| So I'm very much in the opinion business. | ||
| But I just want to echo what Joe Rogan said and really what Ashley is doing here. | ||
| I love Substack. | ||
| I just absolutely love kind of the revolution to journalism that Substack has brought over the past few years. | ||
| I think you'll see some kind of in the corporate vestigial media and the Times, Washington Post, that kind of crowd that kind of scorns Substack and very much views it as potential competition and things like that. | ||
| At least from where I'm sitting in my own personal capacity as an opinion editor and | ||
| syndicated columnist, I just love it. | ||
| I love the fact that people are able to kind of get their words out there without any kind | ||
| of filter, without any kind of restriction. | ||
| And I definitely think that it has made good quality investigative journalism, the likes | ||
| of which the mainstream media very infrequently does at this point, much, much easier. | ||
| Is the, just trying to give the devil his due here, I mean, is the problem with that, though, that we end up with everyone just siphoning off to their own whatever they agree with, and then no one can really fact-check it? | ||
| Now, of course, I say that with irony, because who's fact-checking the fact-checkers? | ||
| And usually the fact-checkers are partisan hacks, so it's just really, really complex, right, Ashley? | ||
| Yeah, it's a hard thing to negotiate, but I think that's kind of on both sides of it. | ||
| It's kind of you're pointing out, Dave, which is that you could have stuff going on at the New York Times that would make people on Substack blush. | ||
| And that actually is the case. | ||
| I mean, we look at the coverage of COVID, we look at the coverage of Russiagate, and you had every layer of the editorial structure there just amplifying the mistruths and the falsehood. | ||
| Under the guise of this being totally credible. | ||
| So it kind of worked against the reader to have all this structure of editorial oversight. | ||
| Whereas on Substack, you at least have kind of accountability. | ||
| Like you know who the person is and you know what they're saying and you know probably more or less why they're saying it. | ||
| Whereas with these big corporate structures, you've got no idea what's going on behind the scenes. | ||
| You've got no idea what are the corporate incentives, the shareholders pushing for some storyline, the government getting involved. | ||
| There is so much interference at these big organizations that it totally negates all that careful oversight and structure that they've built. | ||
| Yeah, you know, one line that I always use on this is that truth has become a time-release pill. | ||
| And it's like, you only have to look at the last couple of years of COVID where there were a whole bunch of us, I'm sure you guys included, Josh, I know you for sure, saying, you know, things that now we all accept as true about COVID, or most of us accept as true about COVID. | ||
| And they just simply were not allowed to be said on mainstream media. | ||
| You know, Wuhan lab leak, nobody could say it on mainstream media until Jon Stewart said it on Colbert. | ||
| And then suddenly everybody started saying it, like they wait for these airlocks To be lifted, I want to show you this clip. | ||
| This is really wild. | ||
| And if you watch mainstream media, you probably didn't see the original clip. | ||
| But Matt Taibbi, who is a Substack journalist, a lefty, I think he's a self-proclaimed progressive, he was testifying at Congress. | ||
| It was on the weaponization of government. | ||
| And while he was doing it, the IRS showed up at his house. | ||
| Okay, I mean, you cannot make this stuff up. | ||
| The script writers aren't even doing that well here. | ||
| It's just too obvious. | ||
| So anyway, Chris Stewart, who's a Republican congressman from Utah, he asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about that. | ||
| This is a day or two after it happened. | ||
| About the IRS showing up at a journalist's house as he is reporting, or as he is testifying, about the weaponization of government. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| This is a video of a new species of spider. | ||
| I mean, look, I don't know exactly what that had to do with why you would ask Janet Yellen that question. | ||
| So I'll sort of give her a little bit of a pass. | ||
| It seems that she should have been at least aware of it, but okay, so be it. | ||
| Josh, the broader point here that they're showing up to the guy's house. | ||
| He's not under investigation. | ||
| It sounds like it's possible the government might've actually owed him a little bit of money. | ||
| They generally don't show up to give you cash. | ||
| I mean, what is going on here? | ||
| So real quick on the Janet Yellow point in particular, you know, just looking at this visual of this woman who is clearly elderly, just saying that she is not aware of what's going on. | ||
| It's perfect, right? | ||
| I mean, it just underscores that we are living in what some commentators have referred to as a gerontocracy, which is kind of just say an oligarchy, basically of elderly people. | ||
| I mean, 65 and up. | ||
| And I think that exchange right there with the younger congressman, kind of the older, you know, treasury secretary, you really kind of saw that juxtaposition right there. | ||
| But to what you're asking about, Dave, I mean, look, Chris Stewart there was estimating the odds would be one in a million. | ||
| I mean, frankly, he's probably low-balling it. | ||
| I would guess probably even lower odds than that, if I had to guess there. | ||
| Talk about just a ridiculous chilling of the First Amendment. | ||
| I mean, what Matt Taibbi has done is just exposed blatant government corruption, the government working hand-in-hand with the big tech oligarchs, all the Twitter files, you know, I know that you know that, Dave, very well. | ||
| Man, I mean, I have never heard of an IRS agent showing up to someone's home either, but to do so literally while you are testifying at the Weaponization Committee, I mean, like you said, I mean, like, if you were writing this in Hollywood, people would laugh it off and say, dude, you're just taking this a little too far, but such is the reality of what we're dealing with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just too on the nose. | ||
| I feel like I got to tell my social media guy, Brock, we got to put together her greatest hits. | ||
| Inflation is transitory. | ||
| Remember the other day, climate change is part of our monetary policy. | ||
| And this one, I'm not aware. | ||
| It's like we got to put that to music or something. | ||
| Ashley, in a weird way, when I heard this, that this IRS agent showed up at his house, I was just like, yeah, of course they did. | ||
| Of course they did. | ||
| Because nothing is too over the top here at this point. | ||
| Well, I mean, remember one of the lines of questioning from Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the hearing was, did you make money? | ||
| Did you profit? | ||
| She's asking Taibbi if he made money from the Twitter files work he did. | ||
| And, you know, he had to kind of tell her, well, I invested money and she kept pushing and pushing and pushing. | ||
| And she was obviously sending a message to him that we're paying attention to your finances. | ||
| And then this happens. | ||
| And of course, it's a message. | ||
| I mean, nobody does that. | ||
| Without wanting to send a message to him and to people around him and to people like me watching from the outside to say, watch out. | ||
| You better watch your back because we're looking at you. | ||
| And we know that they're watching us. | ||
| We know they're looking at us. | ||
| We know that from the Twitter files. | ||
| We know that the level of interference has become stratospheric. | ||
| They are leaving nothing to chance. | ||
| They're playing this extremely tight and they're not playing by any of the rules that we think apply. | ||
| Those are all gone. | ||
| So I think this was A clear message. | ||
| I don't think anyone would take the chance of this leaking out unintentionally if they didn't intend it. | ||
| I think that is absolutely what happened. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're right. | ||
| It's intentionally like, look what we do. | ||
| As I've mentioned on the show several times before, I campaigned with Larry Elder for the recall election against Gavin Newsom. | ||
| Obviously, it did not go well. | ||
| I think three days later, I was audited by the state of California. | ||
| That's actually the same day that I put my house for sale. | ||
| No joke, I was like, that's it. | ||
| I already wanted to get out, I was done, but that was officially like, we're leaving and I can't stay here. | ||
| Let's move on, because the other big story of the week, obviously, was this shooting in Tennessee, and it turns out that this was a, apparently it was a biological female who was at least going by male pronouns. | ||
| It's unclear to me if, She was actually trans, meaning had surgery, but sounds like there's probably some level of hormones or testosterone. | ||
| We're going to find out all about that. | ||
| But I want to, again, focus on the media version of this. | ||
| Here is MSNBC Joy Reid. | ||
| And as far as I know, Joy Reid did not bring on any of the victims or victims' families or perhaps a pastor from the church or anything like that. | ||
| Here she is with trans advocate Charlotte Clymer. | ||
| Who, I think, she is, he, she, whatever, is trans. | ||
| Oh, just watch. | ||
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I think children are only unsafe at drag shows when a shooter shows up to kill them. | |
| That's right. | ||
| That's where the threat is. | ||
| I would challenge anyone just to get to know trans people. | ||
| We are a vibrant, diverse community, as diverse as anyone else. | ||
| You know, I'm from the great state of Texas. | ||
| I served in the military. | ||
| I go to church every Sunday. | ||
| My faith is very important to me. | ||
| But God made me in her image. | ||
| God made me transgender. | ||
| And to see these people so cynically weaponize this and exploit these children's debts and their teachers' debts, It breaks my heart. | ||
| I wonder what those families are thinking right now. | ||
| What do you feel when you have somebody like Michael Knowles say at CPAC, we need to eradicate transgenderism, and when somebody like Tucker Carlson says that transgender people are at war with Christians? | ||
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I can't see Christ in their words. | |
| That's for damn sure. | ||
| I can't see where the biblical principles of loving your neighbor and walking the walk with Christ that they can see. | ||
| I can't see what they're seeing right now, because that's not of Christ. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Okay, well, first off, Charlotte Clymer on Twitter runs around calling everybody racist and bigoted, and certainly is not using Christ in his or her words. | ||
| But the fact that that's what they're talking about, as opposed to the obvious... To me, if you go into a school and you shoot children, you obviously are mentally ill. | ||
| Let's remove the trans part. | ||
| There's obviously a mental health issue here for all of these people that do this. | ||
| Ashley, This is just standard media 101, because this case, a trans person shooting Christians, doesn't fit the narrative. | ||
| Had it been the other way, they could have dealt with this in a whole much bigger way, and it would be way bigger, right? | ||
| If a Christian went in and shot some trans people, now we have a story that fits the narrative, we can run with that. | ||
| Yeah, and we also have this, like, a very confused narrative about the gender, because it's usually put on boys and men as being violent. And here it's like, really, | ||
| which one do you go with? And it just completely distorts that narrative that has been run by the | ||
| media. So yeah, I think that this has been a real muddled case for them. And the fact that they | ||
| are once again, imposing a narrative here, where sure, you might want to have a conversation | ||
| here and there about guns and here and there about what's going on with transgender people. | ||
| But mental health is the thing that is not You cannot talk about people walking into any place, | ||
| a school, a church, anywhere, and killing many people without any motive, any cause, any reason | ||
| that you can point to without this being a conversation about whatever's going on, whether that's psychosis, | ||
| whether that is, who knows? | ||
| We don't know because we don't even talk about it. | ||
| This is where it is. | ||
| And instead, the media has used this once again as a wedge. | ||
| It's a wedge issue to push people apart from each other to make it us versus them instead of to think | ||
| about problem and solution. | ||
| It's also fascinating because it's not just that they don't talk about it, they go out of their way not to talk about it. | ||
| The View this week, Whoopi, made a huge point about how it had nothing to do with mental illness. | ||
| This was clearly about guns. | ||
| And if you guys remember the Uvalde shooting, Joy Reid went on air the next night and opened her show by saying this had nothing to do with mental illness. | ||
| There's simply no way she could have known that. | ||
| No, typically not. | ||
| less than 24 hours after the shooting. | ||
| And again, from where I sit, by the very definition of the action, | ||
| it is mental illness. | ||
| Josh, not much sanity coming out of MSNBC, huh? | ||
| No, typically not. | ||
| I mean, there's so many layers of this story and the media reaction to it to impact, | ||
| but I think your point is a very good one, which is we as a society, as Americans in general, | ||
| are far too reticent, far too unwilling discuss mental illness and talk about its many ramifications. | ||
| Just this past weekend, Dave, I was in your old stomping grounds. | ||
| I was in Los Angeles. | ||
| I was out there for a wedding. | ||
| I was walking around Santa Monica. | ||
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Poor bastard. | |
| Yeah, no, I didn't particularly enjoy my time there. | ||
| Happy to be back in the free state of Florida. | ||
| But the homeless people, some of them were just yelling at my fiancé and me at the top of their lungs, speaking all sorts of gibberish. | ||
| I mean, these people are mentally ill, okay? | ||
| And they should not be on the streets. | ||
| So the point is, whether it's homelessness policy, whether it's gun policy, You know, this person, the shooter, whose name I will not use per my normal custom, you know, apparently was seeing a psychiatrist for some sort of emotional disorder. | ||
| I actually read that just this morning. | ||
| And according to both Tennessee and federal law, if I'm not mistaken, when you are in a situation like that, you should not be able to legally purchase weapons. | ||
| So if the relevant gun laws were just enforced, this never would have happened in the first place. | ||
| But the broader point here, which I think is the most important point to make about the media coverage of this, is compare the media coverage of this To the Buffalo supermarket shooting, I think it was last April or May, where you had an actual neo-Nazi white supremacist shoot up a predominantly black neighborhood, if I'm not mistaken there. | ||
| Obviously the media is all over, what is the motive there? | ||
| You know, hierarchy, oppression, intersectionality, all this stuff. | ||
| And here, what you have what seems to me to be a fairly straightforward case of anti-Christian animus Obviously the last thing in the world they want to speak of | ||
| is that I think it was Reuters. | ||
| Reuters had a tweet in the headline earlier this week where they were like, | ||
| "Former Christian school student shoots up Christian school." | ||
| I mean, burying the lead does not do that justice. | ||
| No, that's beyond burying the lead. | ||
| We need a new phrase for that one. | ||
| We saw that one. | ||
| Whoopi also, not only did she say this isn't mental illness, she said it had nothing to do with the trans thing. | ||
| The point is they don't know, but because it doesn't fit the narrative, they keep running with it. | ||
| I wanna show you another clip since we brought up the gun portion of this. | ||
| This is a CNN reporter at the Capitol In the last couple days, in the fallout of this, talking to Byron Donalds from Florida and Representative Andy Oogles from Tennessee about guns. | ||
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So, Second Amendment here in the United States, people are allowed to possess firearms. | |
| Need is in the eye of the beholder. | ||
| I don't question why you need a blue suit, but you got one. | ||
| And I know we're talking about something very, very different, but the Second Amendment allows American citizens to possess firearms. | ||
| AR-15s. | ||
| Why not put a ban on that? | ||
| If you're going to talk about the AR-15, you're talking politics now. | ||
| Let's not get into politics. | ||
| Let's not get into emotion, because emotion feels good, but emotion doesn't solve problems. | ||
| Why not ban AR-15s? | ||
| Why not talk about the real issue facing this country in regards to this shooting, which would be mental health? | ||
| You know, when we talk about these quote-unquote journalists, to me that is such a perfect example of it, because it's subtle what they do. | ||
| It's not that he's going out there yelling at the guy, but the way he asks the question. | ||
| So there's a shooting, and immediately the question should be, why don't we do something against the Second Amendment? | ||
| So it's a trickery in how they're actually going about the business, right Ashley? | ||
| Yeah, that's a classic way of what in the study of bias is called framing. | ||
| You frame it right off the bat as as having to do with guns. | ||
| The questions are about guns in the answers, even in the negative, therefore about guns. | ||
| So you just get people saying guns, guns, guns, guns, guns over and over and over. | ||
| And that also brings in another kind of bias, which is omission bias. | ||
| What is not being spoken about here? | ||
| And that is a whole host of other factors and things that are at play. | ||
| That is absurd. | ||
| That is exactly what the gentleman was saying. | ||
| That is politics. | ||
| Let's talk about it, sure, talk about guns, but you cannot have that conversation | ||
| at the exclusion of every single other factor that might be involved. | ||
| That is absurd. | ||
| That is exactly what the gentleman was saying. | ||
| That is politics. | ||
| That is not journalism. | ||
| Josh, I don't like playing the games that the left plays with, you know, | ||
| always blaming a group of people for the actions of one individual, but at what point, | ||
| if we have an entire mainstream media that is constantly going after, you know, | ||
| white, straight Christians as the worst people on the planet who have ever existed, | ||
| at what point are they somewhat culpable? | ||
| And I know that is an extremely slippery slope, but the constant demonization, there's one group you're allowed to demonize, and that's the group of people that happened to be killed in this incident. | ||
| Look, from where I'm sitting, you know, Jew hatred and anti-Christian bigotry are probably the last two politically correct forms of bigotry in the United States today. | ||
| I mean, it is not merely not a problem to criticize Jews and Christians when they're acting like Jews and Christians, but it is oftentimes, it is praise. | ||
| I mean, that will get you platformed by large swaths of the liberal media. | ||
| I don't think that's overstating it. | ||
| And, you know, I like you. | ||
| I tend to try to stick to individual culpability. | ||
| Individuals are responsible for their actions and all of that there. | ||
| But the media as a class has just such dripping animus and disdain for the traditional views of religious Jews, religious Christians, frankly, even just like, you know, religious Muslims as well, honestly, to an extent. | ||
| I think back to this op-ed, and this is only tangentially related, but I think back to this op-ed the New York Times published a couple weeks ago. | ||
| It was basically saying that, oh, the Jews back at the time the Torah was given in Sinai, oh, of course they supported transgenderism. | ||
| And like, are you kidding me? | ||
| I mean, what is wrong with you people? | ||
| Why are you trying to warp What religious people believe to suit your very tendentious agenda. | ||
| Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| We're going to Israel in a couple weeks. | ||
| I'm taking my entire team. | ||
| We're going to do some shows. | ||
| But are you telling me now, I know that, you know, that was in Egypt, technically, where the Ten Commandments, I've been to the mountain, Mount Sinai. | ||
| But are you telling me that Moses was not a crossdresser? | ||
| I mean, Deuteronomy, if you wanna go there, Deuteronomy literally says that you shall not wear the opposite sex's clothing. | ||
| It's like a direct passage, actually, but crazy stuff, man, crazy stuff. | ||
| Well, I'll get on. | ||
| I don't know that we're going to Egypt. | ||
| Maybe I can take a quick bus trip to Sinai. | ||
| I did it once. | ||
| I don't know how many times I can do that. | ||
| Let's move on to the other big thing of the week, because Congress is in session, and there are things happening, and we were in D.C. | ||
| earlier in the week. | ||
| There really was a certain energy in D.C. | ||
| that was nice to see, and I sense The Republicans are kind of coming around a little bit on some important issues, but there's still always some weird language in bills that sound right that end up kind of being evil. | ||
| This TikTok ban, this potential TikTok ban, as part of the Restrict Act is now sounding somewhat crazy. | ||
| I want to read a tweet by Greg Price, who actually is a journalist. | ||
| He took a screenshot from the The bill itself. | ||
| And he wrote this. | ||
| The bill to ban TikTok is absolutely terrifying. | ||
| It gives the government the ability to go after anyone they deem as a national security risk, at which point they can access everything from their computer to video games to their ring light. | ||
| This is a patriot act for the Internet. | ||
| And then he took a screenshot of a portion of it. | ||
| I want to read you just the second half. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'll do the entire portion. | ||
| In general, the secretary in consultation With the relevant executive department and energy heads is authorized to and shall take action to identify, deets, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate, including by negotiating, entering into, or imposing, here we go, and enforcing any mitigation measure to address any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person | ||
| With respect to any property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States that the Secretary determines. | ||
| In essence, guys, this bill to ban TikTok, which we can talk about Chinese spyware on everyone's phones, and what do you do about that? | ||
| Surprise, surprise, deep within that bill, they will have access to every freaking thing you have ever done on this device, basically in perpetuity. | ||
| And they said any about 10 times. | ||
| The kids say problematic, I think, Ashley, is this a problem? | ||
| I mean, you know, the one thing that's really the Patriot Act obviously comes to mind, but even more so what comes to mind is the the CCP, the Chinese government's 2017 National Intelligence Act, which gives very similar powers to the Chinese Communist Party, and it uses that word, any. | ||
| It's really not about anyone having to meet a legal threshold. | ||
| It's whatever the person in charge determines to be relevant. | ||
| In the case of China and the Chinese law, you have to turn over anything that might be considered actionable or useful intelligence to the state, whether you're a business or a private A private citizen or or a NGO, it doesn't matter. | ||
| And in this case, we're seeing the exact same kind of language. | ||
| Whatever it is, it is covered by the law. | ||
| And this is something that we need to put the brakes on today. | ||
| This cannot go any farther. | ||
| My my fear, though, is that it will go farther, that it will creep further into it. | ||
| And part of that is because we don't have a media that is willing anymore to stand up to the to the national security state Quite the opposite. | ||
| We've got a media that is now working in lockstep with the national security state and with the intelligence community and with law enforcement. | ||
| The three groups that they were used to opposing vociferously is now their closest bedfellow, which is crazy and worrying and disturbing in ways that's really hard to express. | ||
| Yeah, they're basically acting as their PR arm at this point. | ||
| As of us doing this right now, last I had heard on this, Rand Paul, who obviously is the most libertarian senator we have, he was bringing this to Josh Hawley. | ||
| Hawley sounds like he's for this at the moment. | ||
| Now, Hawley wrote a whole book on big tech censorship and a bunch more. | ||
| I happen to like him and I hope he does come around on this. | ||
| He's really the most populist senator there is. | ||
| This strikes me as a populist issue. | ||
| Josh, what do you think is gonna happen here? | ||
| So I could be wrong about this, but I think Josh Hawley has also proposed alternative legislation, so it's not the Restrict Act. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, good. | |
| So some of this is happening right now, yeah. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| It's kind of actually unfolding in real time, at least the last I saw this morning. | ||
| So I think that Josh Hawley is solid on this. | ||
| If I understand correctly, the alternative bill that he has proposed does not incorporate that very harrowing and dystopian, frankly just Orwellian, paragraph that we just heard from you read on air. | ||
| But what you're really seeing here, and this is just such classic Congress, I mean, what they are doing there with all these NEs that you emphasize, they are slipping in an enormous power grab, and they are trying to do so under the, you know, under the confines, under kind of the ruse of trying to solve an actual problem. | ||
| And TikTok is an actual problem. | ||
| I mean, you know, we should not pretend like it's not. | ||
| I happen to think that TikTok really should ideally be banned. | ||
| But the problem is that Congress could do this in literally a one paragraph, maybe like a one or two sentence bill if they wanted to. | ||
| The fact that they felt the need to kind of emphasize this to this extent there is just a pure paragraph. | ||
| And frankly, honestly, it's also a galling Fourth Amendment violation. | ||
| I mean, as a lawyer by background, that's the very first thing I thought of when I heard that paragraph there. | ||
| So if this bill were to somehow pass in that form, which I don't think it will, I would expect some Fourth Amendment lawsuits to stop it right out of the gate, to be honest. | ||
| Is the bigger issue that even by addressing this, let's say the language does get changed and Hawley comes around and okay, we're all feeling somewhat better, that we're sort of just rearranging chairs on the Titanic as it sinks because so much of this is so long gone at this point. | ||
| We have no idea what the security state is doing and nobody ever gets fired, nobody gets arrested, nobody gets publicly shamed, they lie in front of Congress. | ||
| That it just won't even matter whether they remove the specific language or not, Ashley? | ||
| I think there is a creep. | ||
| There is definitely a creep into all of our lives. | ||
| Privacy is sort of an outdated, outmoded notion at this point. | ||
| Though I think this, as Josh was just pointing out, this particular section of that bill is so sweeping and so ambiguous and so expansive that it feels like that would actually be at least a catalyst To something very different. | ||
| We may get there eventually. | ||
| We probably will at the rate we're going, especially with the introduction of central bank digital currency that gives government real just complete control, complete insight into your finances, your property. | ||
| We're heading in that direction. | ||
| There's not much that's slowing the train down. | ||
| But I think this kind of language would just speed it up and put it on steroids. | ||
| And that's why it's such a concern to me. | ||
| I got one more clip before we wrap up today. | ||
| Donald Trump was being interviewed by Sean Hannity and he was giving credit to Elon Musk for what he's done with Twitter. | ||
| And you guys know I've been to Twitter. | ||
| Elon seems like he's doing the best he can. | ||
| I still have a ton of frustrations with Twitter. | ||
| The numbers still seem completely out of whack. | ||
| The engagement still seems Really bizarre. | ||
| He called it a fractal Rube Goldberg machine to me, so it's not an easy thing to clean up. | ||
| But Trump talked about at least the fact that Elon got in the fight and whether he's gonna get back on Twitter. | ||
|
unidentified
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By the way, Elon Musk revalued Twitter at only 20 million. | |
| Well, it was not... Not 20 billion, I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
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But he did a big favor by letting people know how corrupt our government is. | |
| You know, I hear that they spied on my campaign. | ||
| And at that time, because truth is incredible. | ||
| But at that time, I was using Twitter. | ||
| Now I use truth. | ||
| Although I have... They want me back on Twitter desperately. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you going to go back? | |
| Well, we'll talk about that at some point. | ||
| But I love truth. | ||
| I think truth is incredible. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's up, I think, 389%. | |
| It's the hottest thing there is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, Josh. | |
| Just talk, what do you got? | ||
| So look, I mean, let's not forget the Twitter files. | ||
| I mean, I share a lot of the same frustrations that you probably have, Dave, with the low engagement numbers, the fact that there's this weird For You column on my iPhone app for Twitter now. | ||
| Engagement is just really, I feel like I'm shadow banned, frankly, worse than ever. | ||
| But let's not forget about the Twitter files. | ||
| I mean, honestly, the Twitter files really kind of, I think, Makes Elon Musk doing this worth it unto itself. | ||
| The revelations in there were absolutely positively striking and they really just confirmed so much of what those of us have been saying or suspecting for years now about this just naked open collusion between the national security state, the intelligence community and Silicon Valley. | ||
| So that in and of itself, I think it really did justify and make this whole experiment that Elon Musk is doing worth it. | ||
| But really just more symbolically, the fact that someone could come in there and obviously, you know, very few people have Elon Musk's net worth, but the mere example that someone could kind of come in there like a white knight and try to pry away a very prominent and important social media platform away from kind of the Jack Dorsey clown brigade, despite my current frustrations with what's happening there and the fact that we're very far from perfection, there is some inherent value and merit in that act. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, as of March 31st, which is today, Elon supposedly is open sourcing this thing. | ||
| That's what he had said in a tweet a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| We'll see if it actually open sources today. | ||
| And then at least if it was truly open source, you'd be able to see how your account was being affected perhaps by the language you use or inserting a link or saying something about someone's gender, et cetera. | ||
| Actually, I'll give you the final word. | ||
| Yeah, I think on Twitter, Musk is pretty clued into where the tech is going. | ||
| And the tech is going towards decentralization. | ||
| It's going towards platforms that are open, that are protocol-based, which means that nobody owns it. | ||
| It's just like email. | ||
| No one owns email. | ||
| You can use it as you wish. | ||
| And we're seeing the emergence of these kinds of platforms, or at least these technologies, like Nostr is one of them, and Farcaster, Minds.com. | ||
| And what it means is that you can just talk freely. | ||
| You don't have to ask permission. | ||
| You have to raise your hand to ask teacher if you can say this or that. | ||
| And it also means that when someone says something hateful or when they express something that is violent, you don't just kick them off into an even darker corner of the internet, but you're able to intervene and to help them and not just banish them into some place that they're going to make it an even bigger mess. | ||
| So Musk, you know, if anyone is going to solve this problem, the Twitter problem, or maybe it's even broader than that social media problem, I think it is Elon Musk. | ||
| I think we think of him as a sort of engineering guy. | ||
| He's much more than that. | ||
| He he as you probably know Dave better than most people. | ||
| He is an entrepreneur on a level that is just you know one of a kind. | ||
| He's he's his own category. | ||
| So if anyone can fix it it's Musk. | ||
| But he still may not be able to fix this one. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, as people have heard me tell the story, but you know, when I was there on day two, I mean, we were literally, our meeting started at about midnight and it was 2 a.m. | ||
| And he still was like, guys, I'm really tired. | ||
| He was going to D.C. | ||
| the next day to meet with McCarthy and all these people. | ||
| And he's like, I'm really tired. | ||
| Do you need me to continue here? | ||
| And everyone was like, all right, you can go. | ||
| But the fact that he's there at 2 a.m. | ||
| to be like, Dave, were you shadow banned? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| The guy could be, he could buy Bora Bora. | ||
| He could buy Mars and just disappear. | ||
| It's amazing, yeah. | ||
| Ashley, I can confirm that you have passed the Rubin Report Rookie Test and we will have you back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Josh, are we gonna let Josh back? | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Josh, they said you could come back one more time. | ||
| Have a great weekend, guys. |
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