The final (for now) part of of coverage of the IDW's Weinstein brothers. Back to Eric, with special reference to his boss Peter Thiel and the Gawker affair, Eric's response to Becca Lewis' Alternative Influence Report, and to Eric's thoughts on BLM and the current protests. Warnings Apply. Notes/Links: Owen Thomas, Gawker, "Peter Thiel is Totally Gay, People." https://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, "The Most Expensive Comment in Internet History?" https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/ Steven W. Thrasher, "Peter Thiel's Gawker War Not His First Brush With a High-Priced Vendetta." https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jun/05/peter-thiel-gawker-lawsuits-james-okeefe-acorn Maureen O'Connor, Gawker. "Christina Hendricks Says THese Giant Naked Boobs Aren't Hers, But Everything Else Is." https://gawker.com/5890527/christina-hendricks-says-these-giant-naked-boobs-arent-hers-but-everything-else-is Maureen O'Connor, Gawker, "Olivia Munn's Super Dirty Alleged Naked Pics." https://gawker.com/5890506/olivia-munns-super-dirty-alleged-naked-pics-lick-my-tight-asshole-and-choke-me" Bollea v. Gawker at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker Rebecca Lewis, "Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube." https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/ Full PDF: https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf Eric Weinstein abuses Becca Lewis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=beccalew%20(from%3Aericrweinstein)&src=typed_query Dave Rubin, "What Is the Future of the Intellectual Dark Web?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUl7-SvntQ4 Eric Weinstein, "Some Thoughts on Wokeness and Shame in light of events." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETcq7qqPhow
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
Welcome, welcome, welcome to episode 62, the fabled episode 62, don't know why I said that, of I Don't Speak German, featuring me, Jack Graham, he, him, speaking, as usual, to my My friend and my co-host Daniel Harper, he, him also.
Hi Daniel, how's everything going at the moment with you?
I wouldn't really be asking how everything was going with anybody else, would I?
No, well, I'm currently Googling to see if Aesop ever read about Adam's Greek-German episode 62.
I don't think it's a thing.
But, you know, other people wrote fables other than Aesop, right?
So, I think we're okay.
I think we're covered.
Yeah, and so this is... I mean, we're on time this time, having made you wait a long time for part one of our Eric Weinstein We're now hot on the heels fairly quickly with part two of our Eric Weinstein coverage.
No news today at the start.
I mean, there's plenty going on, but that's not really for us to cover.
It turns out that some Boogaloo boy murdered a couple people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which Isn't THAT far from me, uh, last night.
But we're not even gonna talk about that.
That's very sad.
And, uh, very, um, distressing.
And the world is now a different place.
That's it.
That's why it's fabled, isn't it?
Instead, we have internet Nazis to talk about, and we have Hulk Hogan's penis.
We have more important topics than the murder of protesters by far-right activists.
Hulk Hogan's penis is now upon us.
That's it.
That's why it's fabled, isn't it?
That's why this episode is fabled.
That's why, because we're finally getting to the topic you've all been waiting for.
So yeah, so what's this episode about?
I mean, I know it's Eric Weinstein Part 2, but more specifically?
It's really more about sort of Peter Thiel and the sort of extended intellectual dark web network.
and about sort of the way that various figures sort of responded to things.
And so we're not really gonna talk much about Eric in the first half of this episode.
We'll get to him in a lot more detail in a second.
And I wanna kind of refocus our attention here as to what brought us here in terms of discussing this topic.
And that was cancel culture.
That was this idea of cancel culture, of people are being canceled and silenced by, you know, mobs of college students are calling people racist and refusing to listen to their bigotry around pronouns.
And this is the most terrifying thing.
That could possibly happen to anyone in our society, is not being able to express your opinions and your bigotry in an unfair way.
That's essentially what this whole thing kind of starts from, right?
Which is, you know, slightly unfair, but also slightly not, and you know, like, it's fine.
And what I wanted to do at this point was to sort of, I've been doing a lot of kind of deep background research on Peter Thiel and on the Weinsteins in the last, in the last, you know, couple of months and in particular on Thiel in the last week or so.
And I have read big chunks of his first book, The Diversity Myth, and it's complete fucking horseshit.
And I've watched a lot of videos of him online dating back to his brief career as a C-SPAN political pundit in the 90s and it's complete fucking horseshit and there will be a more detailed episode about Peter Thiel and in particular about his relationship with the Neo-Reactionaries because of his like friendship and
Mentorship something, I don't know, like it's kind of complicated with Mencius Mobug, who is the original founder of the Neo-Reaction movement.
We'll do all that in a future episode, I think.
I think we'll talk about the Neo-Reactionaries later on.
But I really wanted to wrap up this kind of quasi three-parter talking about a couple of times
You know, to the degree that these intellectual dark web people have been victimized by online mobs and have been victimized by this kind of concept that we can just go after people for their unpopular opinions and crush them with the weight of online disapproval, I wanted to tell a couple of stories about how this is actually not the case.
And in fact, it is not online leftists complaining about racism or complaining about various things that are doing this.
It's actually coming from the right wing.
And so we're going to talk about two stories.
And the first is we're going to talk about the Gawker case, which I think most of our listeners will have at least some background on, but we're going to kind of get into some detail about this.
And then we're going to talk about the Alternative Influence Network report.
And Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel's response to that.
And so this is going to be kind of a tightly focused episode, but possibly slightly kind of disjointed from what people normally expect us to talk about.
So I want to be clear, we are going to kind of get back to kind of our normal like topics, but bear with us for this episode because we are going to go, we are doing something slightly different here today.
And what's interesting to me is that I don't think Jack knows much about these two topics, and so this will likely be kind of an educational bit for all of us.
Yes indeed.
As you say, we're trying something a bit different while at the same time we're going old school because it's going to be like IDSG Classic where Daniel tells me all about stuff that I basically don't know anything about.
It's going to be like the Siege episodes where he's explaining it to my mystified face.
So that'll be fun for everybody.
So let's just get started here.
I don't know what kind of cultural relevance this person has over in the UK.
So let's just start here.
What is your knowledge of Hulk Hogan?
Let me see.
Mullet is the first word that immediately leaps to mind.
Singlet is another word.
I mean, calling it mullet is probably too kind, frankly.
Yeah, it's a sort of mutant mullet.
It's the male pattern baldness thinning on top with long back hair.
I think of it more as like the The slightly more masculine, not masculine, slightly more, you know, slightly more hirsute version of the Bobcat Gowthwaite is the best way to describe his hair.
Yeah, yeah.
He's got a Steven Universe's dad cut, doesn't he?
Yeah, very much, yes.
Indeed.
Droopy moustache.
I think he did a movie or two, didn't he?
He did a few movies.
He tried to get into that Arnie niche of doing comedy movies about tough guys and kids or something.
I think he was in a TV show once.
He was a wrestler or something.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, even to be honest with you I'm the wrong person to ask because even during his heyday You know, he would have he would have been quite familiar to people in this country I think in his heyday whereas, you know, even then I really wouldn't have been tuned into that sort of thing.
So Sure.
Well, sorry, you know, no, no, that's fine Like it gives me it gives me like a like a baseline to work from and so, you know You're right, you're completely right.
Hulk Hogan got his start in wrestling back in the early days, in the 70s.
and wrestling and wrestling and wrestling, kind of back in the early days in the 70s, works its way up through the kind of farm circuits and becomes one of the major stars, if not the major stars,
I mean like this this huge Larger-than-life figure this is massive celebrity within this kind of like Ultimately this kind of like tiny world of like the kind of burgeoning professional wrestling thing when that was really a new thing like he was like the headliner at like WrestleMania one and
And becomes like sort of the huge star, like the face of professional wrestling as it sort of begins its reign into kind of this current weird space in American pop culture.
You know, and someone that I was very, you know, I'm, you know, you and I, I'm a little bit younger than you, but not that much younger than you.
You know, throughout my childhood he was pretty omnipresent on my television.
His heyday was kind of between roughly 1985 to 1995.
People who, you know, I have... The vintage years.
The vintage years of Hulk Hogan, yes.
You know, I'm sure that... The vintage years of the world, really.
Yeah, 85 to 95.
Wow.
Was there ever a greater epoch?
Between, you know, Reagan's second term to, like, Clinton's first term.
That's sort of the, you know, those are... That's the time period in which you really wanted to be, like, the big celebrity.
And I think it actually kind of... Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
Sorry.
That's fine.
And I think it actually sort of like understates the case to talk about like Hulk Hogan without saying like this is someone who literally had like a breakfast cereal.
Like this is someone who had An animated show.
You're right, he did a few.
He did a couple of action movies, and then he did a couple of family-friendly comedy action movies.
One of which I watched a bunch as a kid.
I used to really like Suburban Commando when I was like 12 or whatever.
Um, and so, like, I have no idea if that holds up, but it does have Christopher Lloyd in it, and I really like Christopher Lloyd, so it probably is, uh, it's probably a fucking disaster.
I don't know.
Like, you know, that might be something we won't do on this podcast unless, you know, somebody, uh, somebody gives us some cash for the Patreon or something, but, um, you know.
I will literally do anything for Patreon.
Yeah, yeah, for anything, $5 on Patreon.
Yes, we will absolutely review Suburban Commando through the lens of what it has to say about American fascism today, you know, the sci-fi comedy action thing.
Anyway, so he has this like kind of massive career that kind of goes into the doldrums in the mid-90s.
About ten years later, he comes back and in that
in this era of the VH1 celebrity reality show he has a show called Hogan Knows Best in which it's all about like his relationship with his teenage daughter and I think he had a son and he was going through like a divorce from his wife around that same time and so there's this like kind of complicated narrative around this guy um but he was this kind of you know he had a brief period of you know roughly 10 years probably less maybe more like eight years of being like this like huge omnipresent celebrity within this tiny world
The thing kind of comes back is this kind of like, you know, kind of off-brand celebrity, kind of a man who makes his living on having been that person in the past.
He has had money issues, very famously, and so around the mid-2000s, he is doing regular guest appearances.
He lives in Central Florida, and he's doing regular guest appearances on the show of a buddy of his, Bubba Klim, who is a radio shock jock, who goes by Bubba the Love Sponge.
Oh yes, previous appearing character.
Previous appearing character from, ironically enough, the Tucker Carlson slash Christchurch Massacre episode.
Which you know has you know the goofy part of Tucker Carlson talking shit and then like talking about the massacre of 50 people which has enormous influence today.
It turns out Britton Tarrant was sentenced this week and there's been some pretty Heartfelt stuff going on online around that and we're not even gonna talk about the date that today because again We have more important things to cover Namely Hulk Hogan's penis and in particular the length of his penis is going to come up.
It's actually a legally actionable point Which we are going to discuss here momentarily.
So, in addition to talking about his sex life... It's at moments like this that I start to ponder my choices.
I do this every day, Jack.
You understand that I spend hours of my life every day listening to Mike Enoch whine about the Holocaust ignorantly.
And if you think I don't question my life choices, then you don't understand what it is to listen to Mike Enoch whine about the Holocaust.
So, anyway, Bubba the Love Sponge, they not only have a professional relationship, but they have a personal relationship.
And by this I mean Bubba the Love Sponge, Bubba Clem, he's married to what appears to be a younger woman, I couldn't quite get her age, but From photos, it appears that she's significantly younger than he is.
And apparently they have an open relationship in which Bubba likes to watch her fuck other men.
I'm not kink-shaming.
This is perfectly acceptable behavior.
I have no problem with any of this.
But one of the men that got invited into this little soiree was Hulk Hogan.
And sources differ on this, but... Hulk Hogan cucked Bubba the Love Sponge?
He cucked Bubba the Love Sponge with Bubba's... We both can't say that!
With Bubba's complete consent.
Bubba was totally into this.
You know, he recorded it on a CD.
This is a very, like, 2005-ish sort of story, right?
In which there's, like, a CD in which he wrote, like, Hulk Hogan on it and, like, stuck it in a desk drawer next to, in his DJing office, from what I am led to believe.
Sources differ about whether Hulk Hogan was aware he was being recorded at this point and there's a kind of complicated story around that and this does play into the legal case and I'm not comfortable kind of stating one way or the other like Baba has said at a certain point on other shows on other radio shows that of course Hulk Hogan knew all about like Everybody knew exactly kind of what was going on here.
Hulk Hogan maintains to this day that he had no idea he was being recorded when this happened.
I have no idea.
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pass judgment on that.
So it appears what's happened is that one of Bubba the Love Sponge's rivals in the DJ business was aware of this like sort of like desk drawer full of CDs.
Picked out the one that said Hulk Hogan and sent it along to the website Gawker.
And so, are you familiar with Gawker?
Sort of, yeah.
Okay.
Give me a second to drink some water and catch my breath.
Tell me what Gawker is in your mind.
Well, to be honest, to me Gawker is primarily the website that Peter Thiel shut down.
Sure.
That's mainly what I know it for.
It was a sort of muckraking tabloid journalism site, wasn't it?
It kind of had, it's weird that like this was again in that sort of like mid-2000s era and I think it's hard to sort of remember what online journalism was before sort of Facebook and Twitter and social media sort of crushed a lot of the innovation sort of like they become the place that people go for this.
Gawker was a website, it did have a lot of that muckraking journalism aspects, it had a lot of You know, celebrity gossip, a lot of kind of like, you know, titans of industry gossip, you know, kind of stuff that, you know, like today's gossip is tomorrow's news and so they would publish things and saying like a blind item that, you know, and then like a couple weeks later we kind of come out like, oh no, it turns out this is actually published in a thing.
But they were also talking about, you know, stories that had real import and in particular Real import within sort of the burgeoning sort of Silicon Valley industry and in real like real sort of corruption cases and real sort of like internal battles.
And they were willing to sort of publish stories that were not as fully vetted as something like, you know, sort of the establishment media like the New York Times or the Washington Post and sort of these more respectable sources.
They were willing to kind of go out there and say, We have this.
We have pretty good sources on this.
We're willing to kind of talk about this and to publish it without necessarily having a sort of like we've dotted every I and crossed every T sort of level of the sourcing.
I didn't necessarily mean muckraking pejoratively.
I mean I just want to be clear about sort of like what the perspective is is that there's kind of like there's a couple of different versions of Gawker depending on what you wanted to read into it is that there is the sort of like celebrity gossip side in which the you know they were posting you know like
Celebrity boobs and that sort of thing and you know gossip about you know who's fucking who and then they were also publishing like real Inside journalism and the whole thing was they were kind of doing the story behind the story At the same time while they were doing that they were funding a lot of like other really interesting kind of journalism sources a Deadspin was a kind of a highlight of their work and
They were doing, I think, Gizmodo and then quite a few other websites that were doing, again, very important niche journalism that would otherwise not be funded had they not did not have like this giant sort of like clickbait empire that was built on The muckraking gossip and so mm-hmm understanding you know understand that there's you know, this is a slightly disreputable company and maybe even a Largely disreputable company.
I mean, I want to like I'm not I'm neither defending nor damning Gawker and it's kind of full state.
I think there's a very real case for Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit here, but they also did a lot of really good stuff.
And one of the things that they published was this sex tape.
But they didn't even publish the whole thing.
They published about, between 60 and 90 seconds, it's been taken off the internet.
And so I couldn't find the, like the original article no longer exists.
And I didn't do a whole lot of digging in terms of actually watching the Hulk Hogan video.
I certainly didn't care about it at the time.
And that seems to be sort of the effect that most people who saw it didn't really care about it at the time.
It was not like a huge story.
It was just like, oh, there's this washed-up wrestler who is now on reality TV.
And apparently he's fucking his friend's wife.
And here's 60 seconds of that if you hate yourself and want to watch that.
What we've seen with the footage is not, this is not like erotic footage.
This is very, you know, sort of like security camera in the corner.
You know, sort of secret recording sort of, you know, it has a very particular vibe to it.
This is not titillating footage.
Let's put it that way um except that it's like Hulk Hogan You know kind of a lot of people's childhood hero kind of doing a thing So the reason that this becomes important, and the reason that we're talking about it on this show, is that a couple of years later, so the article comes out in 2012, this sort of like, this publication of the sex tape.
Nobody particularly notices at the time, but a couple of years later, like a year or so later, Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, files suit against Gawker for a large variety of things.
There's a large story around sort of the legal maneuverings, which we're not going to necessarily get into.
There's a documentary, which is pretty good.
I liked it a lot when I saw it the first time in 2017, and I've watched it twice since we started prepping to do this episode.
And the more I watch it and the more I learn about the history of this, the less I like it, mostly because I think it does whitewash Gawker's Gawker's own culpability here, and because I think it sort of simplifies some of these issues, and I don't think that it really kind of tells the story appropriately, and it sort of gives a clear through line for the audience.
I think that I have problems with this documentary.
That's it.
It's on Netflix, and if you don't know the story, it's absolutely worth seeing the documentary, and I'm going to give you some links to kind of tell the fuller story in the show notes to this when we get to that.
But big picture, Gawker is sued by Terry Bollea aka Hulk Hogan for emotional distress for essentially a kind of violation of privacy.
This was my private personal life.
This was my sex life.
You had no right to publish this and you caused me emotional and financial harm by damaging my career and etc.
etc.
etc.
Um, the basic legal response is, well like, look, you were going on Bubba the Love Sponge's show and talking about your 10 inch penis.
On a regular basis, and like, your sexual prowess was something that you were highlighting at the time to build your career.
And so like, in a sense, you know, like, what I think most people don't necessarily realize about like, sort of celebrity sex tapes, and this goes back to, um, not necessarily like the, kind of the original, the ur-example of the celebrity sex tape is the Pamela Anderson sex tape back in the mid-90s.
But most of these sex tapes are essentially like, you know, it's linked to the tabloid press As a way of building the careers of, you know, the celebrities involved.
And so, certainly in like 2006 or so, it's not... It's not out of the question that whoever leaked the fucking tape to Gawker wasn't trying to, like, build up Hulk Hogan slash Cherry Pellea's career.
Like, it's a completely reasonable thing for someone at Gawker to believe is happening.
And I suppose the argument is that by going on the show and talking about his 10-inch penis, Terry Bollea put his penis in the public domain.
Right, exactly.
And I don't think anybody really questions the fact that, you know, based on sort of the provenance of the tape and based on the legal, the free speech argument within the United States, nobody seems to really dispute the fact that Gawker had the right to publish it.
And there's sort of a criminal liability versus a civil liability and civil suits are I don't know this I'm not a lawyer I would love to you know if Some like leftist lawyer wants to come on this show and talk about the details of this case I would love to like pick your brain and we can talk about this for like two hours on this podcast believe me and I do have like kind of a legitimately weird fascination with this stuff.
Sorry, go ahead.
I can't think of anything more important for a leftist lawyer to be doing at the moment.
No, I listened to a couple of the, you know, I was a big like Mike Dicta fan when Mike Dicta was a thing.
Mike Dicta is this like kind of legal podcast.
They did a whole, they did like, well a whole segment of an episode about Christopher Cantwell when he was first In jail for his crimes of assaulting particular people, you know, including Emily Gortzinski.
And, you know, that show ended because of what appears to be sort of like personal conflicts.
And there are now like three intermittently produced lefty legal podcasts that I listen to because I do just kind of love listening to leftist lawyers make fun of terrible Supreme Court decisions and terrible people within the law, etc.
And we can put those in the show notes.
If, you know, if Charles Starr wants to come on and explain this to me, please, I don't know that Charles is listening, but everybody go like tweet at Charles and tell him to explain Hulk Hogan's penis to me on this show.
I would I would really appreciate it.
So the reason I keep bringing up Hulk Hogan's penis is that like the defense that Hulk Hogan brings is like, look.
When I come on this show, when I go on Bubba the Love Sponge's show, and talk about my sexual prowess, and I talk about all the women I've fucked, and I talk about my 10-inch penis, that's a character that I'm playing on the radio.
Oh, it's Kayfabe!
It's Kayfabe, exactly, it's Kayfabe.
Could you explain that, just again, to give me a little bit of a chance to catch my breath, explain what Kayfabe is to the audience who may not know it?
You're asking me to explain wrestling.
Pretty much everything I know about wrestling comes from another podcast that I listen to.
Kayfabe as I understand it.
What podcast are you listening to that talks about Kayfabe?
Well, it's the podcast that actually helped inspire the title of this podcast.
It's a podcast called I Don't Even Own a Television.
Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Which is about bad books, and it's a pretty good podcast, and they often, let's say the hosts often veer off the subject of books onto other subjects, and one of the subjects they often
Veer off to is wrestling so I've picked up a lot of second-hand knowledge of wrestling just from listening to them not talking about books and I I'm given to understand that kayfabe is is sort of because I mean wrestling is it's performance it's not sport it's performance and kayfabe is what they call It's like the fakery, it's the performance.
It's the act you put on.
The idea is that you never break character in front of the audience.
Oh, that's right, yeah.
Yeah, no, the terms, it's work and a shoot, isn't it?
Right.
When something is a work, it's a performance.
And when something is a shoot, it's real.
Or the other way around, I can't remember.
Yeah, I don't remember.
I didn't grow up as a wrestling fan.
Again, we have personal friends.
I have personal friends who are going to listen to this.
and are going to want to strangle me for not knowing the details of this.
But the idea is...
Just be forbearing.
I'm an ignorant Britisher.
Well, I grew up in Alabama, so I have no reason not to know this.
But the idea is that within the wrestling world, there are these guys who would...
Look, they're on the circuit.
They're friends.
They're co-workers.
They hang out all the time.
They eat dinner together, etc., etc., For the public, they're supposed to be, like, world-class enemies.
And so they couldn't be seen hanging out together in places where any member of the public could see them.
So that's maintaining kayfabe, right?
Right, I got it.
And so there were cases, I believe there was a case in which there was a vehicular manslaughter in which a wrestler You know like was in a car accident and like was looking for someone who could give Evidence that would present that he was not actually at fault in this in this accident And the only other person who give that was a wrestler that he was supposedly not
Not friends with in real life And they refused to drop kayfabe in order to prevent this guy from going to jail or something to that effect like I mean That's the level at which this was taken seriously particularly in you know sort of like that era and you know in these kind of local circuits Etc And so like this is a big deal.
Um, in fact, there's a I'll link this in the show notes There's a very nice sort of a five-part documentary.
I believe it's still online from the youtuber the moa who did a did a did a full piece about like kayfabe and about sort of Donald Trump and about the like the Trump campaign and about how like this sort of idea like sort of celebrity and less of the public and private face and It's a very interesting documentary and something that sort of inspired a little bit of what this episode is, and so I will link that in the show notes.
But, you're right, yeah, it's kayfabe.
And so, in, like, literally in the court, Hulk Hogan, or Terry Bollea, is saying, like, look, I, Terry Bollea, do not have a 10-inch penis.
Like, clearly.
I'm not talking about my personal sex life.
I'm talking about Hulk Hogan's sex life when I'm in that and so sharing my Terry Bollea's sex life, sharing that sex tape is an invasion of my Terry Bollea's privacy despite the fact that I
My character Hulk Hogan is talking vociferously about my sex life on this radio show with the man who was involved in this tryst that I am now suing over.
And so I would like to say here for the podcast that I, Daniel Harper, also have a 10 inch penis.
And I would find it completely objectionable if anyone were to challenge that.
Except that, like, I, Daniel Harper, the real person who was just playing that character who said he has a 10 inch penis, actually has a 12 inch penis.
And I would consider it insulting that you publish a piece that said that I only had a 10-inch penis.
But really, it turns out that there are a dozen characters, all named Daniel Harper, that I have been playing over the course of this podcast who have penis lengths of various sizes.
None of which are in any way connected to the actual person, Daniel Harper, who is not talking into this microphone and who has a real life outside of this.
And that the real person, Daniel Harper, is not responsible in any legal sense for anything that has been said by the various characters named Daniel Harper who have been on this podcast providing information about far-right extremists.
And so if Peter Thiel or Hulk Hogan or whoever wants to sue Daniel Harper, you have to pick the penis length you want to sue.
That's sort of the end of the line on that.
Wow.
That took a turn.
But this is actual legal logic.
This is the actual story that Terry Bollea tells on the stand.
You can watch him tell this story in this Nobody Speak documentary.
And it's, like, there's a reality to it and there's not.
Like, um, Alex Jones, when he was doing a, uh... Yeah, that's just what I was thinking.
When he was fighting a custody battle for his children, he makes this exact same argument.
He says, like, look...
I come across as super erratic and super crazy on the microphone and on camera.
That's a character named Alex Jones that I'm playing.
That's my online persona.
That's my entertainment.
That's not me personally.
By any indication, Alex Jones has deeply fucked up personal stuff.
You know, like, this is complete nonsense, you know.
Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly.
No, please sue the 12-inch Daniel Harper if you choose to sue Alex Jones.
But, you know, the point being that this is sort of a new legal argument that's becoming more and more popularized within this world.
And Terry Bollea wins the lawsuit, and there's a lot more detail that sort of goes on in terms of the background, in terms of, for instance, Bollea is suing at 1.4 emotional damage, like emotional distress.
Um, and this is covered by Gawker's insurance policy, uh, as, uh, you know, sort of like insurance against bodily harm caused by, um, you know, their publication or whatever.
Um, Bollea drops that from his lawsuit.
And it seems in particular the reason being because suddenly once that claim isn't being made, the insurance company is no longer liable for the damages that might come out of this lawsuit.
And so, very early on in this lawsuit, it appears that the goal is not for Terry Bollea to recover damages based on lost income or hurt feelings or whatever, that the goal is to destroy Gawker.
And after the end of the lawsuit, it turns out that that was actually true.
And Peter Thiel was personally funding this lawsuit.
Because back in 2006, and this is sort of the narrative, right?
Back in 2006, Gawker publishes a piece, and I have this in front of me here, and I'm going to read a bit of it.
The title of the article is Peter Thiel is Totally Gay People, and Peter Thiel sort of, and this often gets kind of repeated in the media as like, you know, this is a piece that outs Peter Thiel.
And so, who is Peter Thiel?
Peter Thiel is, he's one of the founders of PayPal.
He invested early on in Facebook.
That's where most of his money comes from.
He's currently, as of 2020, worth 2.7 billion dollars or something like that he's got I mean he's he's got he's got some money he's a venture capitalist um he funds Eric Weinstein which is why largely why we're kind of talking about him today um but this piece in Gawker is really about like look everybody in this world knows that Peter Thiel is gay like this is this is an open secret
publishing this as an open secret and the point is to say that look there are a lot of like queer people who want to create software companies who get sidelined by venture capitalists because actually despite the fact that we're in northern california which is supposedly
very open and inviting place um there's a deeply deeply reactionary uh attitude among venture capitalists who will not support projects that are created by queer people and yet one of the big like names who's like this big exciting guy if you're in silicon valley around this time peter deal is totally gay and so maybe we need to like just sort of like relax about all of this and so within you know believe me as an anti-capitalist
and like i i'm ruining my teeth at this despite like all the layers of bullshit that are sort of built into the very idea that this article exists um This is not about attacking Peter Thiel.
This is about, like, sort of using the example of Peter Thiel to defend, like, all of, like, queer people.
Within this realm of Gawker.
I have the link, it's still up, it's still up there on Gawker.
Gawker's no longer updated because they got crushed by this lawsuit.
But I will link it in the show notes, and you can go read it for yourself, and I encourage you to do so.
It's a very anodyne article.
And the story I heard was that they contacted Thiel before they published it, and he was fine with it.
Oh, I didn't hear that story one way or the other, but I would believe that to be true.
I'll see if I can find a link to that.
If there's no link in the show notes, forget I said it.
No, it was the 12-inch penis version of Jack Graham who said that, and not the actual Jack Graham who, as we all know, has a 14-inch penis.
No, we're going to create some wounds today.
Again, the reason that this is important is that, A, this is sort of a journalistic... That would be really cumbersome.
I wouldn't... Sorry, anyway, go on.
Yeah, well, you know.
I just reiterate that we have, like, actual respectable people who listen to this podcast.
And the number of times that I've said, like, 10-inch penis should completely disavow anyone from taking this podcast remotely seriously.
Yeah, the number of times the word penis has appeared in this episode is...
Like, if you did a graph of all the times that it appeared in various episodes, you'd be like the unemployment figures.
Very much, very much, yeah.
It's the COVID-19 penis spike, that's what this is.
Ouch!
And so the reason we're talking about this is that Peter Thiel, like essentially this lawsuit kind of comes back.
Gawker loses the lawsuit.
They get like a hundred and forty one million dollar settlement against them.
They say they're going to appeal it, but through various kind of legal finaglings, the money is owed immediately and it like crushes Gawker.
Gawker is no more.
Like just a few months later they have to shut their doors.
And, um, there is kind of a larger story in which, you know, apparently there was a separate Hulk Hogan tape in which he was saying the N-word and some homophobic slurs a bunch, and that might have been the real thing that Hulk Hogan, or Terry Bollea, was scared about getting out there.
And also, like, Gawker, through their Valleywag blog, which was one of their, like, kind of subsections which was talking about Silicon Valley, Talked a lot about Peter Thiel and various people in relationships with Peter Thiel.
Who were doing some shady shit in terms of like working with the national security state etc etc And that might have been sort of a bigger thing than like they said maybe he might be gay But this is what Peter Thiel was this is the story that he tells and he has been very open about You know it was sort of revealed that some billionaire backer was funding this through a guy named Ryan Mack, who wrote a piece in Forbes.
Well, Gawker actually sort of published, like, we think there might be some backer, and then Ryan Mack writes the piece in Forbes that sort of identifies Peter Thiel, and Peter Thiel admitted to it.
And so this is not speculation.
This is known.
And so what I would like to do at this point is to jump us ahead to the present.
And I apologize for this, but we're going to play some Dave Rubin clips today.
Oh god.
I was really trying to never ever do this, but Peter Thiel appeared on Dave Rubin's program, and in part they discussed this issue.
And so, given this kind of extended preamble, I would like to now play this bit of Peter Thiel discussing, Peter Thiel and Dave Rubin talking about The Gawker Lawsuit and about why he did this.
So this is two minutes and three seconds long and again, as is my want, I have played this at 1.5 speed just to save you some time.
So here we go.
We're gonna listen to Dave Rubin and Peter Thiel talking about the Gawker Lawsuit.
Yeah, we need some answers.
All right, let's shift a little bit to some of your history, because I think a lot of people, or a certain set of people, probably only know you through the Gawker prism.
And every time I read anything about Gawker or what happened with you or Hulk Hogan, it always seems so distorted the way they present it, which is probably very obvious to you.
But to me, it was like, you weren't, because people will say, well, T.O.
hates the media.
He sued a publication.
He obviously hates the media.
And it's like, actually, you were defending the right to privacy, which is something that the media should be doing in and of itself.
What made you want to get involved in this?
You had your own history with Gawker, obviously, before Hogan and all that.
Yes, and it is, you know, there are all these elements of the story that are, of course, you know, sort of a little bit larger than life.
We have sort of a sociopathic Manhattan media company.
I think that's a too kind of characterization.
Our internal code name for Gawker was the MBTO, the Manhattan-based terrorist organization.
There you go.
Well, you've likened them to Al Qaeda before, right?
And then, yeah, it was a crazy story in 2009 where they completely distorted things.
I was speaking to a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News and, like, what do you think of them?
I said, oh, they're the al-Qaeda of Silicon Valley.
Can I say that?
Yes, you can.
Of course you can.
But the, I think they were sort of this, And it was in some ways, all sorts of things you can say about it were kind of crazy.
It was super destructive.
Mostly they didn't go after people like myself.
They went after people who were relatively powerless, often just average people, not public figures in any sense of the word.
Hogan was sort of an in-between person.
He'd been like a very high-profile celebrity, but it was definitely beating up on a weaker person in the context in which they did it.
And so it had this sort of heroic underdog fighting this sort of hate factory.
factory machine.
That's the right way to describe it.
Targeted at various people.
We have a First Amendment and I believe in freedom of speech.
And you have, of course, always the Hogan trial, the jury trial.
In the jury trial, you can always argue the law, but you can argue the facts.
So the Gawker side argued the law, which is there's a First Amendment and it's sacred and we're journalists and we get to do whatever we want.
That was roughly their argument.
The Hogan side was, you published a sex tape that was secretly taken in the privacy of a bedroom.
And so, A, what a fucking like bootlicker sycophant Dave Rubin just always is.
Like, you know, because if you, If you were ever looking for the most leading of leading questions, well, the mainstream media has expressed this in a certain way, but clearly that's not true.
So why don't you give me your talking points around this issue?
And didn't you once compare Gawker to Al-Qaeda?
Well, I didn't want to talk about that here.
But yeah, I did, and notice how he doesn't really want to repeat his statements, like comparing Gawker to Al-Qaeda towards a larger audience there.
But I find this Manhattan-based terrorist organization, this MBTO thing, really interesting.
What came out later on and even after this Nobody Speak documentary was this book by this guy Ryan Holiday.
And I have not read this book.
I did read some interviews with him and I've read some of his other writing.
Holiday is largely sympathetic to Teal in terms of sort of like the right to privacy and really kind of lays it on Gawker and kind of gives sort of the bad vision of kind of what Gawker was in terms of like kind of defending like sort of the right to privacy.
I will withhold judgment on that until I have the chance to read his full book and to sort of like have a... There will likely be another episode on this topic kind of down the line and some of the related issues around it.
That said...
There's another figure who even before the Terry Bileo lawsuit, this guy who was called Mr. A in this book by Ryan Holiday and who has since been revealed to be, sorry I've got his name in front of me,
Aaron D'Souza who is himself a venture capitalist who was in 2011 when he presented this idea to Peter Thiel a 26 year old kind of up-and-comer who liked finding sort of father figures within this world of Silicon Valley and sort of treated Peter Thiel in this way and gave him this idea of like Well, look, we need to take down Gawker.
Gawker needs to go down, and the way that we do that is we find some person, some lawsuit that we can fund that we can just sort of crush them secretly from behind.
And, you know, Ryan Holiday in this interview I found, which I will link to you, he kind of says, like, look, if you're Gawker and you get sued by Hulk Hogan, you know that Hulk Hogan has sort of limited financial resources.
And the way this like there's rarely like civil litigation is rarely like there are good people on one side or the other like it's usually two people who are kind of despicable who are kind of fighting it out for for some various reasons.
This is just a reality of civil litigation this is just sort of like it's it's it's a it's a mud fight.
Gawker's goal, if you're sued by Hulk Hogan, is like, look, we have deeper pockets than Hulk Hogan.
Let's make him spend a lot of money on briefs and depositions until he can't afford the lawsuit anymore, and then he'll settle for some, you know, reasonable sum which we can pay.
This is built into your business model at this point, but if you've got a billionaire backing Hulk Hogan that no longer works because Peter Thiel can outspend Peter Thiel spent ten million dollars on this lawsuit Peter Thiel could do that 200 times over before he's broke Even assuming that all of this money is actually real money and like works the same way that my bank account works Which is not the way this works, right?
Because once you get above a certain amount, then this isn't like money so much as it is like fluid capital, etc., etc., etc.
Not something we need to get into here.
And so the fact that there is a secret benefactor funding this litigation, this can be done to anyone.
And Peter Thiel literally funded this lawsuit.
And I want to be very clear about this.
So regardless of how we feel about Gawker and about their own culpability, and I feel like I've been very balanced on this.
I think we can be much more negative towards Gawker than we have been.
They did a lot of shady shit, and maybe they deserve to be taken down.
But this can be done to anyone by someone with sufficient financial resources to fund a lawsuit like this.
And it is becoming an increasing strategy.
Sheldon Adelson, who is a big Trump donor, who had major connections in Las Vegas and in Nevada, essentially bought out one of the big local papers in Las Vegas and ran it into the ground. essentially bought out one of the big local papers in And that's part of this Nobody Speak documentary, which kind of nobody talks about.
But it's a much more important story in the sense of, you know, like, and we will never know that this is happening unless it happens to come out because, like, responsible journalists report it.
And so all of this, again, is preamble.
So we're talking about cancel culture.
We're talking about this idea that heterodox ideas do not have a space in this world because, you know, woke college kids are canceling college professors.
And yet, on the flip side of this, you have a billionaire literally crushing a media organization because it said things about him that he didn't like.
And whether you think that that's because they outed him as gay, or whether they were discussing his business arrangements that were in ways that threatened his financial empire, which I think is far more likely, this is a really disquieting thing, and it puts the lie to the entire fucking project.
Yes, yes.
And so yes, I know we spent like, what, 40 minutes or so talking about this?
But that's the point.
That's the reason this is important, right?
Yeah, yeah.
The point isn't was Gawker a good website or not.
The point is Peter Thiel gets to decide if Gawker stays in business or not because he has that much power.
And, you know, therefore people with that much power have the ultimate final say You know, regardless of all the other says they have before then, they have the ultimate final say on what finds its way into print and onto the internet.
The public conversation.
Ultimately, they have that power of veto.
And they're using it.
Absolutely.
And moving on to our second half here, which hopefully will go faster than the first half, this connects very closely with Eric Weinstein personally, who Again, is Peter Thiel's money man, who has a long background in terms of working with him, at least back to 2015, who has been in the hedge fund industry since the early 2000s and late 90s,
who has a long career of working for billionaires who has a long career of working for billionaires as a financial analyst.
And whose actual duties as Peter Thiel's hedge fund manager are really unclear, because there's no public accountability for that because it's a private organization.
Like, who knows?
Who knows what Peter Thiel is doing?
Peter Thiel has also personally funded James O'Keefe, which we mentioned at the end of the last episode.
The project, which he put $10,000 into back in 2008, was a video in which James O'Keefe, who is then unknown, was going around to poor people's houses, overwhelmingly African American and other non-white Doing a Taxpayer's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.
And this is a parody of the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, in which Ed McMahon would show up at somebody's house with a check, a giant oversized check for, you know, a million dollars or whatever, and say like, oh, we've transformed your life, congratulations, you know, you've won this sweepstakes.
James McKeith was showing up to people's houses and presenting them with a bill.
Oh, you owe $28,000 which is the amount that you owe in taxes to the wealthy who have actually funded your lifestyle because you were on food stamps or whatever.
This is what Peter Thiel decided to fund.
With his $10,000.
And that's what he has admitted to funding from James O'Keefe, who has a very long and disgusting history, far worse than anything that Gawker ever did, which by the standards of James O'Keefe is a resplendent respectable
James O'Keefe is just actively lying by taking video and putting it completely out of context, and publishing it, and gets huge marks in the far-right spheres for that.
He's considered the bold truth-taker, truth-teller.
And, um, you know, Eric Weinstein brings him on and treats him exactly that way.
And, uh, so yeah, either Eric Weinstein has no fucking idea about what James O'Keefe is actually doing in his, um, in his quote-unquote journalism.
Or he agrees with what James O'Keefe is doing and has not looked in any sense into the background of it.
Or they're both paid by Peter Thiel and so it's to their mutual financial interest to just support each other.
And whichever version of that you think is real, and I have my own opinions about that, It's all good.
It's all good.
And it doesn't speak well on Eric Weinstein, who is presenting himself as, you know, kind of a bold heterodox truth-teller, just looking to fix our quote-unquote sense-making apparatus or whatever.
Like, there's a, you know, no, this is kind of vile, disgusting stuff.
And speaking of discussing stuff, we now get to talking about this Data & Society Report, the Alternative Influence Network, which was published in September 2018.
And like Megan Squire, who was a previous guest on the show, this is a paper, a report written by a data scientist, by a PhD student.
She goes by the professional name Rebecca Lewis, But if you know her on Twitter, she's Becca Lewis.
Full disclosure, I have had friendly conversations with her.
We share information back and forth.
She is penciled in as a guest on this podcast next month.
Assuming that there's no terrible news story that comes up that we need to cover instead.
And we will talk more about the Alternative Influence Network and about the process by which she goes on to make it.
But this is another one of those reports.
What she does is she takes YouTube videos during a certain period of time within this Kind of far right YouTube ecosystem and building connections of this person wanting a podcast with this person, this other person wanting a podcast with that person, or wanting a YouTube show with that person.
And it's both a kind of qualitative and quantitative report.
I have it in front of me here and I will read very briefly a bit from it.
And so she says in part under her methods section, which we'll get into that here in a second.
At the time of data collection, this group of influencers was as close as I could get to a snapshot of the alternative influence network.
However, the boundaries of this network are loose and constantly changing.
Since the time of my data collection, newly popular influencers have begun to collaborate with those in the network.
And some of those I tracked in April have since deleted their channels or removed their content.
The data also does not represent the full extent of networking and collaboration that occurs between influencers.
Many of them, for example, comment on each other's videos, they reference each other's ideas in their content, and they interact on platforms like Twitter and Instagram in addition to YouTube.
In other words, the data I collected is illustrated, not comprehensive.
And then she says, like, for a more detailed description, she has appendices in which she discusses each of the individual people that she kind of views on YouTube and, you know, sort of the, you know, some of the issues in the data and some of the issues that she kind of ran into.
And she describes them all in some detail.
And throughout this report, like, this is, we're going to learn, like, Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein are not fans of this report.
In fact, they released an episode specifically, it seems, about confronting this report and calling it nonsense.
I can't think why they don't like this.
I can't imagine why they don't like this.
But this kind of gets painted as like, oh, you're just calling everybody Nazis because you can draw connections between us.
Because, oh, I went on somebody's show and suddenly I'm a Nazi.
I'm two steps away from a Nazi.
This isn't the nature of this report at all.
The whole point is to say, like, these people actually do have ideological differences.
the same thing that we're doing here on this podcast is saying Eric Weinstein is not a Nazi.
Dave Rubin is not a Nazi.
There are clear ideological differences.
Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is not a Nazi.
Clear ideological differences between them, but they sort of like influence each other and have like a sort of like a place within a sort of larger alternative influence network.
And as you're about to learn, Eric Weinstein is not a fan of this report.
And yet he agrees that this report is accurate in a weird way.
And so we're going to play another clip here.
And this is Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein sort of talking about this clip.
And I will include the full Dave Rubin This clip starts around 11 minutes in this episode, but I will include this in the show notes so you can know I did not clip this out of context.
In fact, I didn't even include the full bit of where they're talking about this data and society report because they talk about it at some length and I just didn't want to kind of do the whole thing on this episode, but like let's let's play the clip.
And this is about 3 minutes and 8 seconds long, and again, I have sped this up to 1.5x with the tempo change in Audacity.
So, let's hit play, and then we will come back and discuss the contents here.
Why don't you just go on Dave Rubin's show and become part of the Alternative Reactionary Influence Network as a Bernie voter?
Because this is... Gay poor pro-choice pot smoking against the death penalty over here.
Big right winger.
Right.
You know, I mean, as a fellow... By the way, just as a fellow neo-Nazi, can I ask how you spent Yom Kippur?
Oh, it was lovely.
I just broke it with bagels.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, they've got Ben Shapiro on there saying he's a white nationalist.
It's so completely insane.
Yeah.
It really doesn't require refutation.
What it requires is a middle schooler with an IQ of above 80 and an assignment to say, what's wrong with the methodology of this report?
Because so far as I could tell, there is no methodology in the report.
It's not just that it's got errors.
Can you explain what, in a report like this, what a proper methodology would be?
Because from what I could understand in the 61 pages of this thing, they basically just tried to link us together.
This person talked to this person, this person once interviewed this person, this person appeared somewhere with this person, forgetting the errors in those connections.
But that to me doesn't strike me as a methodology, it strikes me as just It's just human connections.
People cross with people.
It doesn't mean you're promoting them.
It doesn't mean you're secretly working with them or that you're in a network.
I mean, that's what they were really going for here.
And I think there's a bigger reason for that that we're going to get to in a little bit.
Well, OK.
So what could they have done?
Yeah, if you were doing it properly and you were trying to show here's a small group of people that have created this network to extend these horrible ideas.
We are alternative.
We do have influence.
And there's a part of us that is a network.
So in fact, that's not really the problem.
Right.
What you would do normally is you would set out Some list of qualities, characteristics, that didn't pick names that you selectively wanted to feature.
And you would say, okay, here's what we did.
We came up with the following rule.
Somebody needs to appear on at least three shows.
We've done this so that it's exhaustive, and everybody who fits these criteria is listed on this graph, and look what emerges.
Or they at least hold certain beliefs, right?
Could you do it that way?
I'm just trying to say, you're asking me what I would think would be a proper methodology.
So you'd state something that was fairly neutral, that didn't name anyone.
And then it would emerge that the network was the solution to the carefully stated problem.
And then you'd say, isn't this interesting that when I look at those criteria, it picks out Dave Rubin and Richard Spencer, and it doesn't pick out Ezra Klein and Sarah John.
Unfortunately, Ezra Klein does a podcast with Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is named in the appendix, but he's not on the graph, I think.
The Noam Chomsky has appeared on Stefan Molyneux.
So if you actually put all of the people who would occur as part of a proper methodological discovery of a network, there would be things that didn't go your way.
And then there'd be a section at the end that says, we note that the following anomalies are present, people who are clearly opposed to, you might have Linda Sarsour with a note on the network.
And you'd say, okay, why is Linda Sarsour two degrees separated from Richard Spencer?
And then you'd have to say, these are maybe some deficiencies, here's some ideas for further research.
But the point is that there was nothing like a methodology.
And when you look at the author's ideological commitments, which she's very comfortable sharing, they fly in the face of facts.
So there's no, she's not trying to present herself, so far as I can tell, as a dispassionate researcher.
She's trying to present herself as an activist. - She has tweets from August since deleted, because she uses that tweet scrubber thing or whatever it is, talking about how de-platforming people is the answer to these problems that she proposes we have.
So it's pretty clear what's going on there. - Well, you see, you know there, Dave, I could understand somebody saying, look, let's talk about what de-platforming is, and let's talk about it in neutral terms so that it's not being used selectively to wipe out reasonable ideas that I disagree with.
All right, so there's a lot there.
Yeah, the first thing I want to say is like what I didn't include so Dave Rubin References quote-unquote errors in the report and This wasn't including the audio that I got because it was too far away from what I thought was the interesting bit to include it in the full segment, but um Among other things he complains that like well, there's no line connecting me and Joe Rogan And I've been on Joe Rogan's show three times.
And here again, I have the actual methodology section, which Eric Weinstein claims doesn't exist.
Or at least he claims it's not a reasonable methodology section, I guess.
But I have it here in front of me.
It does say that what was done was looking at all the videos from certain channels between January 2017 and April 2018.
Or April 1st 2018 and January 1st 2017.
And it actually turns out that Dave Rubin did not appear on Joe Rogan's program at any time during that period.
So it's actually correct that there not be a connection between those two people on the graph.
Yeah, Dave Rubin fails to understand something, shocker.
In another case, you know...
Eric Weinstein points out that Noam Chomsky appeared on Stefan Molyneux's program.
Yeah, he doesn't appear on The Graph.
And isn't that interesting that he doesn't appear and like it's almost as if they're excluding people who don't fit a certain, who are not cancelable or whatever.
And well, it turns out that Noam Chomsky appeared once on Stefan Molyneux's channel in 2015.
that video doesn't exist anymore because Stefan Molyneux's channel has since been deleted and apparently a whole bunch of stuff got lost.
And I'm actually personally kicking myself because at one point I had all of that material and I had to delete it because I didn't have the space to continue to collect more terrible people and I thought it was a low probability that Stefan Molyneux's channel would get deleted.
And apparently even Stefan Molyneux didn't have all of his archives.
So, you know, George Soros, you should have told me in advance that that was going to happen so I could have made sure to re-archive that.
It would be really nice if the billionaires that fund us would keep us a little bit more in the loop to make sure that we – actually, there is no billionaire funding us, which is the point I was trying to make there.
But, again, not within the time period associated.
And so – So they're literally complaining about flaws that don't exist because they've misunderstood the most basic.
They recorded this episode, or at least it was released about a week after the initial release of the report.
The initial release of the report is dated September 18th, 2018.
It might have come out a day or two before.
I don't know the exact date that it was released, but it's dated September 18, 2018.
I will include a link to the PDF in the show notes and to the Data and Society webpage that contains it, so you can check it out for yourself.
And that podcast episode, that Dave Rubin episode comes out, I think it's on the 23rd.
It's several days later.
What I think is interesting is, or what I find interesting, what I find infuriating and disgusting and despicable is Eric Weinstein's description of Becca Lewis.
And I say this without even, like, the fact that, like, I have Communicated with Becca Lewis.
I think she's a perfectly fine person who is doing important work, etc, etc.
But to describe this as a grade schooler with an IQ above 80 could point out the problems with this report.
It's just like the most vicious kind of bullying and frankly misogyny.
Like this is at least borderline misogyny because Becca Lewis is a young woman who I feel like Eric Weinstein feels like he can talk shit about her because she doesn't have the ability to talk back.
Low-key, it's something that is pretty open.
It's available on Twitter.
I can show it to you.
Becca Lewis has spoken at some length about the fact that she has been a victim of a long-term harassment campaign from both Eric and Brent Weinstein, who have attacked her in bad faith.
Eric Weinstein continually has asked to debate her in a public forum about the contents of this report.
And I find it I find no reason that she should because it is very obvious that he has never begun to Approach a good faith reading of what the report actually says because if you read the actual text, it's very clear about You know it defines the politics I think pretty accurately and Between, like, Ben Shapiro.
It does not call Ben Shapiro a Nazi.
It calls him a, you know, I think it calls him a mainstream conservative, which I think is actually more fair than anything else.
I don't even think Eric Weinstein is listed on the network because at the time he didn't have a YouTube channel.
It describes all these figures with clear connections, which Weinstein admits, it is alternative, it is an influence, and it is in some sense a network.
Weinstein admits that this is a thing that exists!
Like, he has no complaints about this, except that he doesn't like the fact that he's included on it.
And what I think is really The fact that he uses that verbiage to describe this report, that she doesn't have a methodology, you see, there is no methodology that I think is reasonable that could have produced this.
And so first of all, it was very easy to produce the report using the phenomenological methods that she used, which is basically a sort of snowball approach of like, I started off watching one channel and then found Other channels that that channel linked to and then like looked at all those channels.
I mean she did a very thorough year and a half kind of like deep dive into this YouTube content.
You could very easily, having produced the network, then argued backwards and defined like a problem, a mathematical algorithm, that the thing like satisfies if that was the goal.
But that would be a thoroughly dishonest thing to do because that isn't the actual way that you produce the network.
What's really important to me is that 10 seconds after the end of that clip, he starts talking about the Gaiden Institutional Narrative and how this report is just going to be used by the members of the Jinn as a way of like deplatforming people and smearing people as Nazis, etc, etc, etc.
And I would really be interested in seeing the algorithm that produced your fucking gated institutional narrative list or your disk distributed idea suppression complex list.
If that's the standard we're going by when we're producing these...
List these networks of people who are working against certain kinds of ideas.
Maybe, if your standard is this report is not sophisticated enough for your fucking mathematical goals, Eric Weinstein, maybe let's see how you define the fucking gated institutional network.
Because if Becca Lewis is a grade schooler who can be refuted by a grade schooler with an ADIQ, then Eric Weinstein needs to take remedial finger painting by comparison.
And that's the thing that really pisses me off about this segment.
They're just lying.
They have done no work to actually appreciate the actual thing that they're criticizing.
They look at the graphic, they go, oh, this is just smearing me as being in the same network as Nazis, and then making up bullshit and smearing a legitimate researcher doing legitimate work
in the process and have sent their hundreds of thousands of followers after her she has received death threats in her dms and when she talks about it online eric weinstein basically goes like picture it didn't happen Yeah, show us the screenshots of your quote-unquote death threats, little woman.
That's the tone that he, he, it's fucking despicable and I find it vile and disgusting and awful and, um, Eric Weinstein does not deserve any of respect if this is the way that he behaves on this matter.
No, absolutely.
He's just a slightly superficially more sophisticated version of one of the YouTube chuds that produced endless videos calling Anita Sarkeesian a liar.
He's doing exactly the same thing.
He's picking holes in a perfectly good thesis based on misrepresentation.
Sicking the dogs on a researcher, engaging in misogyny, as you say, and then just gaslighting the researcher herself and everybody else by saying, no, that didn't happen.
It's exactly the same.
It's no different.
And, you know, as you pointed out, at one point in that spiel, he actually says, you know, we are an alternative network and we wield influence.
Well, game over!
You just admitted the point!
You just literally just admitted the fucking point!
And then, of course, he goes on to make the
grade school error of assuming the point he's he's claiming to be proving which is he's oh well you know if I was going to be doing something like this I would construct a a method whereby I didn't just you know include names that I that I've decided in advance I want to include that's your claim about what she's doing you can't just you can't Assume what you're claiming.
But you just did, Eric.
Well, and he claims that, like, again, they kind of point out, like, what about, like, Linda Sarsour might have come out of this, like, network.
Well, how would Linda Sarsour come out of this network?
They claim Sarah Jiang.
Sarah Jiang was someone that they were all kind of, another young woman.
Linda Sarsour, Sarah Jiang.
Yeah.
Another young woman that they can, that these right-wing dipshits can beat up on and send their goons after, send their brigade, their audiences.
Linda Sarsour already a hate figure.
Right, right.
And they say, well, like, why wouldn't they show up on the network?
And it's like, well, what, has Linda Sorcerer showed up on Dave Rubin's show during that period?
Yeah.
Did Sarah John show up on Dave Rubin's show on that period?
Exactly.
Is that, like, how, what, how exactly, like, at some point it is, and, like, I can't bring myself- They're not showing up because they're not in the network.
That's why.
Again, you're assuming the point you're claiming you're proving.
I kind of bring this up fairly regularly and I hate to kind of like... I spend hours... I was watching C-SPAN videos from 1996 to prep on Peter Thiel this week.
Alright?
I took notes on Peter Thiel from 1996.
I have really interesting things to say about Peter Thiel in 1996.
We will come back to that at some point in the future.
I have a day job and I do this as a hobby because I think it's important to do.
I do real work on even the vilest Nazis that we cover on this show to treat them fairly and to not misrepresent them.
And in the cases in which I have misspoken or treated them unfairly, I do feel legitimately bad about that.
And here's Eric Weinstein spewing bullshit to hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
If that's his standard, if that's what he's gonna go for, I have no obligation to take him remotely seriously until he decides to actually show some of his own work.
And so yes, Eric Weinstein, I would love to see how you develop the Gated Institutional Narrative Network, or the DISC Network.
I would love to see.
Show us your methodology.
Show us your methodology about this geometric physics thing that you claim revolutionizes physics.
Show us how you've reinvented capitalism in your money market theory.
Let us see the actual results.
Let us see the background on Brett, which we talked about in the last episode, on his email to Carol Greider.
Let us see his work.
Let us see the actual evidence.
Let us see the methodology.
If you have reached the level that Becca Lewis reached in this Alternative Influence Network paper, I would not be complaining in the same way.
You're still a reactionary dipshit.
But at least there would be something to go on.
But you've given me nothing because ultimately you're a fucking liar.
And that's the point.
That was the 14-inch Daniel Harper who said that that is not legally actionable to the real Daniel Harper.
I have one more clip I want to play.
I know we're running a little bit long.
We're trying to get out of here a little bit quicker, but we spent a lot of time on the Gawker lawsuit because it is legitimately fascinating.
i would like to play one more clip and this is um this is a clip from eric uh after the pandemic started and after the george floyd protest started and this is um this is if you're a fan of this podcast it's gonna probably make you hate eric weinstein more than you already do um and
And it's the reason it was this clip that made me say, okay, we're fucking doing this.
And I've put like two months of work into this.
I'm glad, because I was going to kind of end with a question, you know, why have we talked about the Weinsteins?
Because, not to say that it's not an important topic, but I just felt like, you know, on a podcast that is essentially about Nazis, you know, why have we spent three weeks now talking about these guys who, by our own statement, are not Nazis?
And this clip, I think, is a good illustration of Of why it was necessary to talk about in this forum.
Sure.
Well, and just before we get into that, I mean, the answer to that, and I hope it's clear just from context, is that, I mean, for one thing, the Nazis aren't doing a lot interesting right now, and so I turn my interest to the IDW as a, you know, sort of, we try to do kind of different things.
We cover the siege pillars, we cover the mainstreamers, we cover, you know, the Nick Flintest fans, we can, you know, and it's sort of, it's based on, What I find interesting at the time kind of becomes the topic of the podcast.
But also I get a lot of requests to cover these guys.
I get a lot of requests to cover this sort of network because there is a sense that like understanding these guys through the lens, through the same techniques that I have brought to studying the Nazis, can provide fruit.
And I think that from the responses that I've gotten, I mean I have gotten some, I've gotten some thoughtful responses from fans of the Weinsteins.
I've gotten some angry responses from fans of the Weinsteins, and I've gotten some very supportive messages from not fans of the Weinsteins, from other people who do this, who have found this useful.
And so I think that it was worth our time, and it is worth doing it within this context, not because they're Nazis, but because they're reactionaries.
And I think that this clip, and because of the existence of this Alternative Influence Network, right?
Eric Weinstein is not a Nazi.
But he's hanging out with Peter Thiel, who's buddies with Mencius Moebuck, who is the king of the Neo-Reactionaries.
We didn't get into that in this episode because I wanted to do this version of this episode first.
We will talk about the Neo-Reactionaries and we'll talk about Peter Thiel's relationship with that in a future episode.
And the Neo-Reactionary in a lot of ways form a lot of these sort of intellectual backbone in 2012 to 2014 that becomes the alt-right.
And so it's all sort of part of the same story and even though we're not like drawing that kind of explicit connection because of the way this podcast works where we do like to kind of like play it a little bit like a little bit more by the seat of our pants and kind of do what we think is interesting in any particular moment.
Like it is it is all connected and like I don't have to believe that Eric Weinstein is a Nazi to believe that like Peter Thiel having billions of dollars to crush any media organization that he thinks is against him is a problem and it is particularly a problem of the left and both Eric and Brett have like incredibly reactionary opinions about Social justice and wokeness and, in particular, socialism.
They are both like avowed capitalists.
I think the one thing that I would hold back from the very first episode we did about Brett is I called him kind of a lowercase s, lowercase c, de-social democrat, which the more I have like paid attention to him, the more I think like that's completely unfair.
He is definitely not a social democrat.
He is a very good liberal who believes in some like redistributive properties, but he is certainly not In any sense, a social democrat.
So I would like to correct the record on that from what I said there.
But I would like to play this clip.
And this is from Eric Weinstein walking outside in the kind of early days of the George Floyd protests, talking into a camera and expressing his opinions about kind of what was going on in the immediate wake of George Floyd.
So this is from early June, and so I would like to... This was kind of very soon after the height of the Minneapolis protests, and so we're going to play this right now, and then we'll talk about it, and then we'll wrap up.
This is, again, 2 minutes and 32 seconds long, and again, this is at 1.5x uptempo.
So here we go.
You remember that song, Strange Fruit?
That song was not written by Billie Holiday.
It wasn't even written by a black man.
Or a black woman who was ridden by a Jew named Abel Meerpoel.
And Abel Meerpoel was such a badass, and I'm trying not to get emotional here, that when the entire world decided to kill both of the parents of the Rosenberg children in 1953 through electrocution, I believe it's Sing Sing, the family wouldn't even take the children.
That's how powerful a mob is.
Everyone was afraid to be associated with the Rosenbergs.
Almost everyone, I should say, because Abel Meerpoel was not afraid.
And he took the kids in as his own.
And that is Jewish tough.
There are a lot of Jewish cowards, there are a lot of Jewish weaklings, but you'll remember the scene, I think, in one of the Avengers movies where the Loki character is ready to execute anyone who won't kneel.
And one guy stands up, and I guarantee you, that was an attempt at a Yiddish accent.
So, it is in part the job of the Jews not to go along with the crowd.
And the crowd is out of control.
A crowd that smashes glass is not only letting the white man know that violence is on tap because the brutality, which I started this broadcast talking about, has to be addressed.
That broken glass sounds like Kristallnacht to every goddamn Jew in the world.
And the violence of the state... I should point out that you would think that 100% of the people lynched in the United States were black.
The overwhelming number, 75% around, were black, but about a quarter of them were white, some of them Jews.
And monopolizing the problem of police brutality, making the assumption that this was a, you know, targeted killing of just about race, that the pre-existing conditions... I mean, look, this guy who killed this guy, murdered probably.
I don't need to prostrate myself in front of you and let you know that, of course, it's wrong, because everybody knows it's wrong.
I don't know anybody who stood up for this.
Okay.
The problem that we have now is critical feeling and critical thinking.
You want to tell me that slavery is such a problem.
And it's still a problem.
How are you going to make the argument that the Holocaust that happened within living memory is a less significant event?
How are you going to make the argument that 1.1 million Jewish children were murdered?
Children?
Murdered?
Industrially?
Okay, and you want to stand down the what?
You want to stand down the police?
You want to take away the people that I can call when a Jewish school is threatened?
You want to defund the people who I would call to stop a shooter like in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh?
What right do you have?
Why do you think everything is about you?
This is not all about the Jews.
This is not all about Americans.
This is a worldwide thing that's going up in flames.
And so the thing that he said there that made me do this podcast, that made me do this three-parter, was comparing the breaking of glass in Minneapolis by protesters to fucking Kristallnacht.
Yeah.
The level of historical ignorance and the level of just complete I can't imagine, like I can't imagine that every goddamn Jew in the world, in his estimation, thought that the breaking of glass by protesters is equivalent to Kristallnacht.
Like that's just, it's so...
It's so vile to me, and I am a Gentile.
I will not take from Eric Weinstein his feelings about the Holocaust, right?
I will not take from him.
Obviously, he has an experience of that as a Jewish man that I will never have, and I'm not trying to kind of make that statement, but The number of people who are Jewish by ethnicity or by religion, who do the similar work or the same work that I do, who Do support the protesters for the exact reason that you know who was breaking the fucking glass at Kristallnacht?
These were party members of the NSDAP.
These were effectively the cops at the time who were breaking and like opposition to that was The resistance?
Like, he's literally turned the entire history on its head in terms of comparing, like, every bit of broken glass is not Kristallnacht, Eric Weinstein.
And the fact that you see it that way, the fact that you see yourself as threatened by protesters going against the police And asking to defund the police is a sign that you are actually in the, uh, among the powerful.
You are literally best friends with a billionaire who can crush media organizations by funding legal, you know, legal battles against him on this purious logic involving that Terry Bollea's penis is not the same as Hulk Hogan's penis.
This is the level to which you have ascended in your life.
This is the level of your class position.
And again, I'm not trying to take like very wealthy people who were killed in the Holocaust.
That is not in question here.
That is not the point of what we're trying to say here.
Obviously, your class position does not affect your kind of racial position.
But you know what?
If Richard Spencer takes power tomorrow, you and I will both be on the same cattle car, okay?
Let's just put it that way, okay?
And the idea that you are standing against the people who are fighting against the Richard Spencers of this world, and against the Donald Trumps of this world, and against the police forces that are enforcing white supremacy.
This is I cannot describe the level of anger I felt watching that clip for the first time.
I believe a friend of the show, previous guest, Ina Mohamed, was the first person that tweeted that to my attention.
Although she didn't tweet me personally at it, but she tweeted it and I saw it then and I knew.
it was time to do these episodes.
I don't know.
Like, there's so much there.
We could talk about the Abel Mirpool thing as well, which Abel Mirpool is the man who wrote Strange Fruit, which is Billie Holiday's, you know, this famous song, The Billie Holiday Song.
The relationship between Jewish songwriters and African-American singers is kind of a complicated one, and obviously this has clear sort of like social justice and clear civil rights, you know, implications in the 30s.
He praises Avonlea Pearl for bringing in the children of the Rosenbergs, which is true.
The Rosenbergs were executed because they were communists, and so I wonder what Peter Thiel would have to say about the Rosenbergs and the Rosenberg trial if it were happening today.
There's so much in that clip, right?
And it so, like, encapsulates... Oh, you could go through it line by line and every line contains a distortion or a perversion of reality.
It so reflects this, like, ahistorical perspective that Weinstein, that both Weinsteins bring to every discussion of this topic.
That we can't abolish the police because the police are there to protect us.
And he brings up the fucking, like, Robert Bowers shooting of the Tree of Life Synagogue.
The cops were nowhere to be found.
The cops did nothing in that case.
It was fucking anti-fascists who identified Robert Bowers at the time!
Yeah.
It was anti-fascists who knew what he was.
It was anti-fascists who found his social media profiles.
Who realized what he was.
It was anti-fascists who were tracking this stuff.
We are the ones who are defending you, Eric Weinstein.
Not the fucking cops.
Not in that case.
Yep.
Yeah, it's obscene.
It is.
Like, the absolute obscenity of implying that the protesters on the streets now, by their presence there, they're saying or implying or they think that slavery is quote-unquote more significant than the Holocaust.
You know, how You know, nothing of the kind is being implied.
The protesters aren't saying anything derogatory about the meaning of the Holocaust by being on the streets.
The people who are on the streets... And to imply that they are is a slander on them.
Absolutely.
The people who are on the streets who are protesting black people being murdered by the state are equally horrified by the Holocaust.
Yeah!
They are equally, you know, they would equally defend your, even your wealthy white ass If you were being accosted by the police, they would defend you from that.
That's the point of Abolish the Police, right?
Yeah.
It is like, if the secret police are coming after you, I'm on your side.
As much as I find you despicable, Eric Weinstein, if there were secret police coming after Jews, I would absolutely oppose that with every fiber of my being.
Because that's fucking despicable, awful, state violence against human beings.
That does not need to happen.
But instead, you are defending the police, you are defending the police because you think they protect you from crime, despite the fact that they exert horrifying violence against more marginalized communities on a daily fucking basis.
And that's the, that's the thing that just, I really want to wrap up here with this whole thing, is that These, like, rational centrists who just want to have, like, a real conversation about, like, well, we need to reform the excesses of the police and we need to have this.
No, you are diminishing and minimizing the actual horrors that are being put against people.
In the real world, and you're, like, hectoring bullshit around, like, we need to have a conversation about the systems of, like, what kind of thing do we want law enforcement to do, etc., etc.
Just exist to take up the time of people who are doing the real work of finding justice in this matter.
And that's why we're doing this.
Yeah, so much in that.
The absolute cynicism of saying, oh, I'm not going to line up and say it was wrong.
You know, the death of George Floyd, I assume he's talking about.
Because nobody's saying it's right.
Everybody's saying it's wrong.
No, they're not!
They are lining up to defend the cops.
They're doing it again now with Jacob Blake, the case of Jacob Blake.
They're doing it again now!
They line up, they're all over the fucking television telling you why it was okay.
The 17 year old kid who murdered two people in cold blood in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
You can find prominent members of the right-wing establishment, I believe including Ben Shapiro, who's, you know, friend of the IDW, like possibly including possibly not, defending that kid who murdered two protesters in cold blood with an AR-15.
An illegally wielded AR-15, both because he was underage and because he was across state lines.
Gun laws are complicated and, you know, mostly bullshit.
That's the level.
That's the level.
And so I haven't checked Eric Weinstein's Twitter feed.
Maybe, maybe Eric Weinstein has criticized Ben Shapiro and has criticized all the people who have defended this kid in his little right-wing circle.
But I'm guessing not.
And so I would love to be proven wrong.
So somebody please send me that tweet where Eric Weinstein... Yeah, yeah, tell us.
Yeah.
Just the other day the RNC was lionising those people that were waving guns at protesters, that couple.
The McCloskeys.
Yeah, the McCloskeys.
They were on Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson, the number one...
News host or whatever it is talk news host or whatever it is in in the country is Is a white nationalist essentially, you know in everything that he does and says and he's got them on there saying Oh, these people are being demonized for just defending their home.
And now we've got a kid Crosses, you know, he comes from Illinois with a fucking AR-15 and murders protesters, you know and So don't say, I'm not going to line up and do what you want me to do and say that it's wrong because nobody's saying it's right.
Yes, they are.
And by not saying it's wrong, you're not bucking some sort of hegemonic ideological orthodoxy that wants to bully you.
That's not what you're doing.
You're refusing to stand in solidarity with people who are protesting against a manifestly systemic racist police force that is murdering people, and a growing fascist movement in your country that is breeding murderers that go out and attack those protesters on the street.
In this context, you're saying Oh, well you can't, you know, you're, you're, you, the protesters, you're saying, not you, him, to the protesters, you're the equivalent of the fucking Nazis on Kristallnacht?
How fucking dare you?
That is so disgusting.
I just... I spent two months delving into these people's content based on that statement about Kristallnacht.
Literally made me spend two months of my ever-shortening life.
Doing this work when there were like real Nazis.
I could have been tracking No, I need to go and dig into the Weinstein brothers to do this because that Sentence Was so was so fucking despicable and vile.
That's why we're doing this.
So That's why we wrapped up on that's when we wrapped up here Um, and I think it, I think it is time to, like, there's so much more.
I didn't even get into, like, there's, you could go into almost every episode.
Like the Dark Horse podcast, the Brett and Heather podcast, almost every episode has been worse than the last.
I mean, they have been leaning heavily into, like, transphobia and, like, all this, like, Like, let's pick this apart, you and me.
We could do this in our sleep at this point.
There are so many episodes of Eric's podcast.
He interviewed Andrew Marantz, who wrote the piece about Mike Enoch for The Atlantic back in the day.
They had a very interesting conversation.
We could do a whole episode just talking about all the complex relationship that these two have in this thing.
I really wanted to cover that, and we just didn't have the time.
Eric Weinstein's relationship to women.
I call him a misogynist, and based on some of his podcast guests, we could dig into that for sure.
There is much more material on these guys, for sure.
We may do an Eric Weinstein talks to women episode down the line when I just want to, you know.
We'll see.
We'll see if they start to brigade me.
I want to be clear here.
This is something that I've said to people and I am still, we're at nearly two hours.
It's fine.
I have been doing more research on this Evergreen State College story and believe me, there's so much more than there's ever been.
Expressed and please if you are connected to that to that university or that college And have a story to tell about 2017 or about Brent and Heather Please get in contact with me.
My information is in my Twitter bio.
It's all in the it's all in the show notes here There's so much there's so many stories about these guys that have not been told yeah those people yeah because people Don't want to tell the stories people don't kind of do the research in these guys kind of seem like a small fries and To a certain degree, you know, Peter Thiel is a billionaire and he could crush me like a bug But you know what?
I'm not scared like what in this podcast fine.
I've got better things to do with my time Like, you know, in this podcast, Peter Thiel, you know, believe me, you know, Streisand Effect is a thing.
You will only heighten my voice if I have to delete these episodes.
That would be a really bad use of your time.
Like, you know, as I've said to many people, I'm not scared of Brett Weinstein at this point.
Let's put it that way.
It's going to be fine.
Ironically, that's what you call big dick energy.
That was the 16-inch Daniel Harper who made that claim.
Another one of my mini-characters.
OK, so that's, yeah, I mean, loads more to say on this and maybe we will come back to some of it.
We've done three episodes.
We are done for now covering these people.
I think next time we're actually going to do a movie, which will be a little bit of a break.
Although we will be talking about Matt Heimbach and about sort of de-radicalization in general, but we're going to be talking about American History X. And we're going to take a break from ripping the IDW a new asshole, and we're going to move on to ripping Edward Norton a new asshole.
So, you know, congratulations.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
We're on iTunes and show up in most podcast catches.
You can find Daniel's Twitter, along with links to pretty much everything he does, at at Daniel E Harper.
You can find my Twitter at at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore.
Daniel and I both have Patreons, and any contribution you can make genuinely does help us to do this, though it also really helps if you just listen and maybe talk about us online to spread the word.
