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May 6, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:31
3677 The War Against Free Speech | Dave Cullen and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well here with Dave Cullen, a technology and social commentator.
We've got some URLs for you.
We'll, of course, put the link on the low bar on the video and in the notes of the podcast.
ComputingForever.com.
I assume that's a website with no expiration date.
Twitter.com forward slash DaveCullenCF.
And youtube.com forward slash lac78.
And we've got gab.ai.
We've got minds.com.
We've got vid.me.
We'll put all the links below.
And of course, if you want to check me out on these new spanking censorship-free social media platforms, gab.ai forward slash Stefan Molyneux, minds.com forward slash Stefan Molyneux, and the appropriately similar vid.me forward slash Stefan Molyneux.
Dave, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me, Stefan.
Now, censorship, demonetization, globalism, and the salvation of Western civilization.
Take your pick, which should be...
Oh, blockchain too!
What should we dive into first?
Yeah, okay.
Well, let's start off with...
I think because there's two elements of this is the culture war.
There's obviously politics being downstream from that thing.
I think maybe we start off with the culture that's driving the outrage that leads to corporations and politicians capitulating to special snowflakes and adding more censorship controls.
It's a funny thing, and I was just thinking about this while watching your videos before we had the chat today, Dave, but it's sort of like in the past, we were allowed to have free speech because there were gatekeepers in the mainstream media.
you know, so you can have this right, but because you don't have, you know, multi-million dollar TV studio and a license for the government, yeah, you can photocopy your manifestos in your basement and you can hand them out at street corners and you can have all night gab fests in your libertarian dorm rooms and all that.
But because you can't actually gain any traction, because you can't get past the gatekeepers and the licensures, sure, you can have this free speech.
But now with the internet and with social media, well, we actually do have free speech and And I think now it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on.
That was symbolic.
The free speech thing was totally symbolic.
You were allowed to write letters to the editor.
But now that you're actually changing the outcomes of elections, and now that you're actually changing the minds of people and bringing information to the masses, we don't want you to bring, ooh, we're going to have to backfill a little because it looks like these free speech rights are coming to life.
Yeah, it really is.
And now in Germany, so they're starting to introduce what are basically radio licenses, broadcast licenses.
This is what they want to do next for Twitch streamers and potentially for YouTubers as well.
Okay, so you build up a big enough audience, and when you get to a certain level, then we're going to smack you with something you have to...
Look, at the end of the day, it's, hey, that's a lovely channel you've got there.
It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
I'm going to put my hand out, because I'm Mr.
Government Man, and if you don't pay up, little Johnny's going to break your legs.
I mean, it really is the mafia, and this is what we're dealing with.
So, yeah, I mean, it's exciting times, but, you know, I speak to so many very tech-savvy people who are creating the next...
Uncensorable platform.
For the government, I think it's going to become, Stefan, like whack-a-mole.
Every time a new platform emerges, it's going to get that little bit more difficult for them to censor.
But the only thing that they will have left, if they can't take...
The platform away from you, eventually they will try and take you away from the platform, and that's when things get really, really dicey.
Right, right.
So let's talk about some of the technologies that are holding out the sort of carrot of censorship-free – and we'll talk about sort of demonetization as a softer form of – I have trouble with the sort of free market elements involved there, there.
So I have trouble with using the same word censorship as I would for sort of government crackdown on free speech by inventing this magic evil spell called hate speech.
And because, you know, if you take something that people like free speech, and you attach a negative emotional word to it, like hate, suddenly you've solved this dilemma.
But what is out there that is promising to give people more of an unfettered access to the hive mind?
people more of an unfettered access to the hive mind?
At the present time, it was actually after Milo's banning on Twitter, I thought, look, we've got to find something.
And so I reached out to a relatively new social network, a co-founder by the name of Bill Ottman of Minds.com.
And Minds, more than any other, including Gab, actually, are really the free speech meccas right now.
And Minds has grown enormously.
And shortly thereafter, I had some very productive conversations with him last summer.
And because this was obviously alongside the spate of demonetizations just before the election, I can just add my own two cents into that.
It should give you a laugh.
I produced a video, Four Reasons Not to Vote for Hillary Clinton.
That was permanently demonetized.
So I produced a – I wonder why.
I can't think of why Alphabet Incorporated would do that considering they're a donor of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And then I produced a satirical video, Ten Reasons Not to Vote for Donald Trump, and that remained monetized.
So go figure.
A lot of YouTubers are putting their two cents in because that's all that they have left in monetizing revenue.
Exactly, at this point.
So it was around that time I said, we also need something that's not only going to replace Twitter or Facebook, but also has some YouTube-style features to it.
Minds is a kind of a merge of all of those.
So if you want a Facebook replacement, it serves well to do that.
It'll also be your Twitter replacement, and it can do some YouTube stuff.
So Bill is the real deal.
He's very committed to free speech.
And I said to him recently, and this is something I said to Paul Watson as well, If Mainz was hit with the same terms that Germany wants to put on Facebook and Twitter right now, which is to say, if you don't curb that hate speech, we're going to hit you with $50 million fines.
That's the budget that they have to hit them with.
He said, we just have to leave Germany.
In other words, they wouldn't be accessible outside of a VPN, something similar to what we've seen in Turkey banning Wikipedia.
And that's really what that's about.
I mean, it's not that Facebook or rather the German government necessarily want to hit Facebook and Twitter with these bannings.
What they want to do is basically say, you will be blocked at the level of the ISP if you do not comply.
So the first one I would say is Minds.com.
It's growing.
It's had something like a 400-and-something percent increase in search traffic, in search for the site, as well as its Alexa ranking now surpassing 1,000.
So it's significant.
It's got something like two to three million active monthly users now.
So it's growing very nicely.
I know you're there, Paul Watson's there, and a number of other people in the skeptic community.
Well, and I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a fork in the road.
And the platforms, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and so on, that have been developed and have grown largely as the result of creative, innovative content.
I mean, nobody's perusing Facebook, well...
Not many people, I guess, with half a brainer perusing Facebook to look at pictures of what people had for dinner or how cute their cats look when they sleep funny.
So there's going to be this fork in the road.
All the people who drove the growth of these media platforms by producing intelligent, creative, innovative content are going to be driven off it, and it's going to be left to the people who just...
Here's a picture of a bug I found in Mexico or something.
And the people are going to migrate to the new platforms.
And that's not unprecedented in history where you grow a platform and people are doing cool stuff on it.
The authorities don't like it.
So they make it more difficult.
People migrate to a new platform.
They're still the old platform.
It's just become so blandified that no one cares about it anymore.
And so it's actually beneficial.
Because it means that if you want to go to get intelligent content, you don't have to sift through the old media platforms because the only cool stuff is happening on the new media platforms.
Yeah, this is so...
in a way it's so frustrating and it demonstrates the elite their technical illiteracy because what they keep doing is just simply saying oh well there's several companies google twitter facebook what have you they've got a monopoly on the public discourse they've got several billion users uh we'll just simply tackle those we'll ban this we'll we'll We'll throttle that.
We'll drop this particular type of content and flag that from our algorithm.
That should do it.
That should make the problem go away.
We can just go down the street.
It's quite that simple.
And it's what we will do.
Now, I'm always trying, and I don't want to put on my tinfoil hat, but I'm always trying to predict the next move on the chessboard because I know that the elites have all the power pieces.
And I know what their end goal is.
And I look at what's been happening in other countries.
So, for example, last year, I think it was last June in China, The government announced that it would begin asking basic journalists would have to go to the government to vet everything they used on social media.
So you have to go to the government to get approval.
And I'm thinking, Stefan, we're there now, kind of, because the government has chosen its preferred third parties.
It's telling Google what to do.
They signed up to these EU hate speech rules.
It's happening now.
And so we have to be ever wary of this fact.
But at the same time, like I say, we do have these other options.
But I'm concerned for free speech because if these networks that have this incredible monopoly on the discourse to the point where if you're not on Google, you're really not on the internet, it's going to take a consumer revolt on a significant scale.
Well, and that will happen.
I think that will happen.
The smarter people generally have the most income.
The smarter people are going to flee platforms where it just has become so bland and people are so afraid to say anything, and they're going to move to other platforms.
And over time, if those other platforms allow for advertising revenue, or even if it's just subscription-based, as I know some of these are, not like YouTube subscription notification, but dollar or cash subscription, then...
The minds, the intelligence, the creativity, and to some degree the ad revenue is just going to migrate to the new platforms.
And this is part of, you know, if I were in the tech companies, if I was still a tech entrepreneur, as I was for like 15 years, I would say, like if I was on the YouTube board or senior management when this whole Wall Street Journal thing came down, I'd be like, nope.
No, we're not demonetizing everyone.
What are you, crazy?
I mean, they're the whole reason we have a platform.
They're the whole reason we have a platform.
And so we're going to stand by our – we're going to gain the allegiance of our most creative and intelligent people, people who've made us hundreds of millions of dollars.
We're going to gain their allegiance by standing by them.
We're going to calm the tits of the frantic advertisers by reminding them that not every ad is an endorsement of every content.
We all understand that.
And what an amazing moment that would have been.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And actually, on that subject, what, again, is quite sad about it is the fact that YouTube has forgotten that, yes, okay, we get it.
The advertisers, massively important.
It's their dollars that's going to be driving us forward.
But they're there because of the content creators.
And there isn't a content creator who hasn't been affected by this.
But the writing was really on the wall when YouTube refused to stand by PewDiePie.
They could have just so easily just sat down with Felix.
They could have just simply – look, we know these allegations of fascism, whatever.
He made some jokes no different to John Cleese doing the goose step in Fawlty Towers, the classic scene, right?
So they could have sat down with him, but in all honesty, they're building for YouTube TV, which is to basically further corporatize and sanitize YouTube.
And YouTube is kind of a microcosm of what they want to do to the internet.
Which is to basically turn it into television 2.0.
A very safe, you know, family-friendly kind of place.
But there already was television and people left it because it was so bland and they came to the internet because they can get edgy, intelligent material without it all having to go through the corporate terror filters.
So it's sort of weird.
It's like, I don't think these mammals are the future.
Let's really, really invest in the dinosaurs because that's where things are heading.
It's like, we just left that.
We just pulled out of that whole town and we ain't going back.
Yeah, and on that subject as well, it's the fact that corporate culture still does not get the cleverness of the edgelords and all of these young kids with their memes.
They can't get behind that.
They don't understand it.
It's like, oh, it doesn't make sense.
Boomer, it's completely out of touch.
Shut it down.
And that's kind of been the attitude.
But look, I mean, people in this entire audience...
Why would anyone care about a picture of Sean Bean?
Like, they just don't understand how powerful this stuff is and how much it changes people's minds.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, look, 54 million people, it's galvanized his audience around him, and there's going to be a hell of a lot of young people.
You look at Generation Z, already said to be far more conservative than before.
These young people are growing up, they're very media savvy, and all they think is terrible things of the Wall Street Journal.
They'd never heard of the Wall Street Journal, probably, before this fiasco.
So they're going to be very politically and culturally literate, and they're going to be very angry, very angry, Stefan, with the brands who've Aligned with social justice and the likes of Pepsi, the likes of Nissan Ireland recently, the likes of Audi, all these guys who are, you know, MTV, who are pushing this Feminist propaganda or social justice propaganda that we're seeing.
Marvel comics as well.
I mean, that was actually an hilarious situation.
The VP of sales of Marvel came out and said, hey, look, it's the diversity.
We're pushing too much diversity.
People didn't want the characters changed gay or black or women or whatever it was.
They didn't want this feminist propaganda.
And then the mainstream media came out and said, no, no, no, it's fine.
No, the diversity is exactly what we wanted.
Ignore your sales charts.
Ignore your ROI. That's completely irrelevant.
And then what did he do?
He folded.
He just came out and said, oh yeah, sorry, I retract my original statement.
This is mental, Stefan.
I mean, if you were my boss and I worked in your sales company and my sales were in the toilet and I was tanking the company, I was just like a net loss.
I was the worst performing employee.
You're not going to take me into my quarterly briefing and tell me, Dave, you're doing a great job.
This is the problem.
This is the reason the left has this predisposition towards communism because they are inherently anti-meritocratic.
Well, I mean, if they want black characters, I mean, I'm sure there are wonderful black artists and writers to just go and create black characters and create their own companies.
Social justice warriors don't take over companies because they want to make those companies better or more diverse any more than termites are interested in building up your house.
They go into these companies in order to destroy these companies.
That is the entire point.
And once people understand that, like as managers, when you start to get these social justice warriors coming into your company, you should view them as the equivalent of hiring international espionage agents from foreign technology companies.
They're in there to do you harm.
They're in there to undo your relationship with the marketplace.
And what they're in there to do is everyone recognizes, and I think the generation that's coming up, you mentioned the sort of conservative generation, they recognize that This is the time for either being a lion or being a lamb.
There is a culture war that the future of Western civilization hangs in the balance.
And what the social justice warriors come in is they come in and try and turn everyone from a lion into a lamb.
And the problem is, especially, you know, Marvel is so particularly funny because they have these huge, ripped, muscular, brave people who are willing to fight intergalactic squid-headed monsters.
It's been a while since I read them, but I'm sure there's something like that involved.
And they're incredibly brave superheroes.
Superheroes who can stand up to interdimensional evil with astonishing nuclear tip nipples.
I don't know what the hell goes on in these comics anymore, but you've got these amazing superheroes, and then you get some threats from social justice warriors, and you fold.
I mean, come on!
Who's going to take anyone seriously who talks about heroism when you fold on that kind of stuff?
People don't understand.
I mean, ever since Gamergate, people need to understand that if you stand up to these people, you gain loyal, enslaved friends and acolytes for life.
People are so desperate for anyone to stand up to this nonsense that they would be incredibly benefited in the marketplace.
Yeah, you've got some short-term bumpiness, but so what?
You know, turbulence gets you into space.
Yeah, it does.
This is what I would say to these companies.
In a sense, it's almost like this generational estrangement between the millennials and the boomers that are hiring them, which is not entirely dissimilar to the fact that there was a very low parental investment to those kids who went into daycare.
No wonder we have this self-entitled generation.
I would just simply say you've got to know which kind of millennial that you're hiring.
Did they take a gender studies component?
Because they may not be the most profitable performing employee in your company.
Check the HR department.
That is the hole.
That is the interdimensional hole by which they will come in.
Check the hair color.
Check the number of...
Anyway.
So, yeah, I mean, this is important.
And those who are able to resist this kind of evisceration, this de-spining of the corporate culture, will gain the allegiance of the young, will gain the...
And I shouldn't say.
It's not just a generational thing.
I mean, I'm not...
Particularly young anymore, but it is those who recognize that we should not make decisions based on threats and bullying.
You know, demonetization, attacking the source of your revenue, attacking your reputation, threats and threats and threats, they're not arguments.
They're not arguments.
And if you bow to bullies, you know, it's this appeasement that's so endemic.
And you think we would have learned our lesson from the 1930s.
But there's this appeasement and this idea, well, I'm going to buy a five-minute piece today.
At the expense of what?
At the expense of what?
And this is sort of very frustrating for those of us who understand that you can stand up to this stuff and nothing particularly bad is going to happen.
But if you fold to it, Well, you have revealed yourself.
You have become an untrustworthy ally in the greatest fight of the age.
And you have folded to so little.
I mean, it's funny, you know, I was just reading the other day that Japan took in just a couple of dozen refugees last year.
You know, they get thousands and thousands and thousands of applicants and they just took in a couple dozen, right?
And so what?
I mean, who's screaming about Japan?
Just say no.
It's really not that complicated.
And it turns out all they have is hot air and no arguments.
And when you have a giant desire for something, but you don't have the either the position or the intellect or the verbosity or the intelligence to make arguments, of course, you're going to have a tantrum.
I mean, that's what toddlers do who are raised badly, who want something.
And they feel that if they appease these guys, somehow it's going to go away.
Oh, come on.
I mean, this is like parenting 101.
If you give into a tantrum, okay, have a cookie.
All you're doing is paying the kid a cookie to have a tantrum.
I mean, so this folding is only going to increase the amount of aggression.
It emboldens these bullies if you fold.
And you just can't because if you're going to do it next year, it's going to be even harder because there'll be more of them and there'll be more emboldened.
Yeah, this is what I keep saying about social justice in general.
I mean, it's just completely toxic to your brand.
But these organizations, whether it's Bill Nye doing what Bill Nye is currently doing right now, or whether it's Francesca Ramsey on MTV, who's now – her approval rating is abysmal.
I mean, her views on a channel that has 1.6 million subscribers on MTV, doing MTV Decoded, constantly talking about how white people are the source of all that's evil and cultural appropriation and everything else.
She's now gotten a promotion.
She's gotten a job with Comedy Central, who are producing a show called Problematic, which is exclusively about cultural appropriation.
And it's the cheesiest stuff.
I mean, it's like what the...
The Christian right was doing in America for a while trying to get with the youth by doing Christian slam poetry.
They're doing exactly the same kinds of stuff.
Just like Jesus did.
Exactly.
Look at your approval rating.
Look at your comment sections.
You're hiding comments.
You're disabling ratings.
How are you ever going to be able to track your ROI or understand how successful your advertising or marketing campaigns are?
This is the thing.
They're customers when they hit the like button and they leave positive feedback.
They're trolls and haters when they leave negative feedback.
I mean, you can't limit what kind of cognitive dissonance even are we dealing with here?
So I think at some point, shareholders have got to realize this is just not working and And when it starts to hit them in the pocket very hard, they might start finally listening to this silent majority.
Well, a friend of mine makes a pretty good bank by shorting companies that start putting out social justice warriors signs on the internet because he knows that they're just going to start that slow 747 no power arc down to a particularly fiery crash.
So...
How have you found the sort of migration to the new platforms?
For a lot of people, this is sort of going back in the day, it's like, I'm going to learn Esperanto, because that way all of the proletariat can communicate with each other, and you don't want to be the only guy with the video phone waiting for someone else to get one.
How's it been for you, I think, in watching your videos and looking at this stuff, Dave?
It's actually...
Pretty good.
I mean, the user engagement is pretty good and monetization is pretty good.
Subscriptions are pretty good.
And some of these guys do combine, you know, Patreon with some other sort of forms of social media.
Have you found it relatively easy to do this transformation?
Is it working out in terms of views?
How's that going?
It has been.
In fact, there's been studies done on minds, just as an example, as a case study.
They've posted the same content on their Facebook, their Twitter, and their mines, similar size accounts, and orders of magnitude more engagement on mines.
And it's not just a sales thing to say that.
The reality is that there's a huge amount of throttling happening on Facebook and your Twitter.
Eventually, what Twitter and Facebook started to do after a time, they had an agenda to push.
And this is what they do when they drop certain hashtags out of their ranking.
It was only just this time last year that the hashtag, the triggering, was going around on Twitter with Lauren Southern.
And that was wonderful.
But now, certain things they don't like just get dropped from ranking and trending feeds.
This does not happen on Mines.
The site is entirely egalitarian in terms of the algorithmic discovery.
So when you post something, all of your followers can see it in their feeds.
They may not all click on it, but they will all see it.
It will hit their feeds for sure when they log in or they turn on their phone.
On Facebook, not so much.
You could have 50,000 followers on your Facebook account.
But just like MailChimp...
They want you to pay to reach them all.
So you can reach a couple of thousand for free, sure.
But if you want to reach the rest of them, you have to boost it.
That's not the case on Mines, which is really great.
And there is also a boost system on Mines, because they've kind of gamified social media in that sense.
So activity, getting likes, uploading things, posting things, you get these things called boost points.
And these boost points allow you to basically advertise your content on people who aren't following you and to the rest of the Minds network.
So this is a fantastic way of growing your channel on Minds even further.
And I just, I think like most people, I just want it to be fair.
That's all.
I mean, I don't want to see anyone suppressed.
I mean, there can be some crazy leftists out there.
I actually want them to do well.
I want their channels to grow because then they put ideas out there.
They open up conversations.
You can do rebuttal videos and, you know, may the best thinker win.
So I just want it to be fair.
And I would sort of really...
I encourage content providers to recognize that there may be indications, and it may be slow, it may be faster than you think, like that old statement, you know, how did you go bankrupt?
Well, really slowly, and then really quickly.
And so at some point, I think if the government keeps up the pressure and if the advertisers keep up the pressure and the social justice warriors are emboldened by every victory, that the existing media platforms, they're like the Titanic.
You want to be the first person.
You don't want to be that last guy who falls down and gets decapitated by the giant propeller at 80 degrees.
You want to be the first people edging towards the lifeboats.
And the new platforms, if you get in there and you get in there early, it is going to be substantially better than waiting until it's later on when it's going to be more crowded where you're going to go and it's going to be more restricted where you are.
And remember, when you are creating content, the danger is the internal censorship.
I could say that, but ooh, I don't know if it's going to get me demonetized or I don't know if it's going to be pushed down in the rankings or I don't know if it's just some negative thing's going to happen to the video.
The more you work in that kind of environment, the more you start to self-censor.
And self-censorship is like any habit, right?
It starts as a cobweb and it ends up as a chain.
So if you're finding yourself as a content provider second-guessing yourself about what you can say and what you can't say, Then that's to be a good sign that you've got to get into these new platforms where you're going to be able to exist and speak your mind without fear of that.
Yeah, it is.
And as you say, it's the reason why people need to get in there from the ground up and really build their platforms.
These are grassroots networks and they're really dependent on their content creators.
In fact, Minds has a disproportionately high amount of creators to general user consumers.
Which just goes to show so many people have had to migrate for the very reason that you've outlined.
And the same thing we should probably talk about VidMe.
Now, I had seen VidMe and I thought, okay, this platform has a lot of potential, certainly, in terms of its features and its UI and everything else.
But I did notice that in their terms of service, they have the term, those perilous words, hate speech.
And I wanted to talk to the guys to get a definition of what they think it is and if there's any kind of wiggle room there.
Because look, I kind of put free speech here on these platforms on a spectrum.
On one side of the chain, we've got YouTube, we've got Facebook, we've got Twitter, and that's the extreme censorship platforms.
And the other side, we've got minds.
We're a pure free speech network.
Say what you want.
Every step away from YouTube, in terms of what you can and can't say, is a step in the right direction.
So Vid.me, I like the platform.
They don't tend to rank political content We're good to
go.
And they're enjoying the experience in general.
Like I say, the algorithm, just like with mine, is very, very open and the discovery is great.
But, you know, I would say it's imperfect but good.
And what really I'm learning from all of this is you have to be pragmatic.
You're never going to find an absolutely perfect platform, which is why it's important, Stefan, for us to be in as many places as possible.
I don't consider myself a YouTuber anymore.
I'm a content creator.
I'm in a myriad of different platforms right now.
And I think that's really what we have to decide to do going forward is not put our eggs in one basket.
So let's talk about something that you've brought up a number of times, Dave, in your videos around the rebranding of communism known as globalism and its opposition to free speech, its opposition to borders, this sort of giant Bulky, tentacle-bellied spaceship that seems to be hovering over mostly the West these days.
I wonder if you could help people sort of understand, because globalism is one of these phrases that, a little bit like a disco ball, that kind of reflects back a lot of different directions.
What's your take on it and its relationship to collectivism and communism?
Put simply, it's the Borg collective in many ways.
At least in terms of the West, I can talk about its effects.
It's I mean, you're, I think, if I'm not too much mistaken, you're Irish originally?
I was born in Ireland.
You were born in Ireland, that's right.
Well, it's not the Ireland that you once may have recognized anymore, and that's the effects of globalization.
And so, for me, this open borders policy has been detrimental to culture.
I mean, the EU is...
Anti-bureaucratic superstate.
That's the only way that you can define it.
And that's exactly what our problem is.
Hang on, hang on.
Anti-bureaucratic superstate?
Anti-democratic.
Did I say bureaucratic?
Oh, sorry.
I thought you said bureaucratic.
I just wanted to clear that up because that was not exactly where I was expecting you to go.
Anti-democratic superstate, for sure.
I think that's true.
Yeah, absolutely.
And sorry, yeah.
Anti-democratic bureaucratic superstate.
There you go.
And what it's done is it's...
Our country has changed quite dramatically over the last...
15, 16 years.
To the point where by 2050, the native, indigenous, Irish, Gaelic, Celtic population will drop down to just under 50%.
This is well within my lifespan.
And I'm going to live to have seen Ireland being 98, 90-something percent Irish down to 40, 45% or whatever it will be by 2050.
So globalization is this – it gives you this wonderful little carrot.
It buys you all over with sweet, shiny things of new roads, of new infrastructure, and maybe some new jobs here and there.
And then you look at it more closely and you go, yeah, but within two generations, my tribe will cease to exist.
It's quite a payoff, Stefan.
Oh, that is – I mean, that is horrendous.
And it would be horrendous to me if Icelandic people were invading Japan.
You know, I mean, I thought diversity was we all get to be ourselves and enjoy the blend.
I don't see how blending everyone in to be the same.
It retains the character of diversity, but I think it comes out of this couple of things.
I mean, there's this basic idea on the left that there's sort of a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
And if you are in a wealthy country, it's because you stole it all from a poor country, and therefore they should just bloody well come and get back what's theirs.
And I think that's fundamentally false.
You know, it's not that there's a fixed amount of beauty in the world.
And if there's a beautiful person, they must have stolen that beauty from someone else.
I mean, people do create stuff as well.
And rather than having people from the third world come to the first world, it would be much better if first world principles, you know, free markets, separation of church and state and all that, were moved to the third world.
And that way they could have the wealth created in those environments rather than come to the West, and particularly if they sit on welfare and so on and just drain the wealth of the West.
That means everyone gets to be poor and the last generating engine of wealth left in the world, which is sort of Western-style free market capitalism, Pretend capitalism, or at least what's left of it, that's all going to be swamped.
And it's not a great idea.
It's the old thing.
You can light someone else's candle if your candle is still lit, but if your candle goes out, it's a whole lot of darkness.
Yeah, it is.
And actually, part of the process really is breaking down the national identity in numerous ways.
It's really what we're referring to here as values.
And at the present time, what George Soros is actually using Ireland effectively as a kind of a testbed for breaking down other conservative nations, like for example Eastern European ones.
So there was a leak recently that came out about his involvement in trying to push for the repeal of our Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.
I'm sorry I'm actually talking about Ireland here, but I'm giving you my example.
No, no, that's fine.
Good to get news from the old side.
Yeah, absolutely.
So basically what they said was if they can change a country like Ireland, which was quite – okay, a small country, but quite, I suppose, monolithic as a Catholic country in the sense that we had a very strong sense of our identity culturally.
And, you know, it was built around Catholicism, for better or worse.
But look, Judeo-Christian values really building the West and defining, you know, a cultural identity of a Western nation.
And they're basically saying that if you can change Ireland, as they did with the marriage equality referendum recently, if you can get them to agree to something they never would have done 10, 15, 20 years ago, it's possible to change anywhere.
And that's really what's terrifying.
You talk about diversity.
What about diversity of thought, diversity of values, diversity of identity?
And that's Any major European city now, I feel when I walk down the streets, everyone has that same look in their face.
There's a detachment to the original identity of the place.
No one feels like they're at home.
I think one of the problems with the nation-state regarding globalism or, you know, this sort of universalism, one of the problems is that there are various experiments going on in...
Nation states that are more attractive to business people, more attractive and so on.
So to me, like the idea of the European Union in terms of one currency and free movement of goods and labor, okay, that's one thing and I could sort of see some arguments to that as long as immigration laws were enforced and so on.
But the problem is that once you get people able to transfer easily across borders, then people want to go to the lowest tax, highest freedom areas.
And so then what happens is you say, well, we can't have that because that puts a lot of pressure on countries to liberalize their own economies.
So now what we need to do is have this big, giant bookshelf row of, you know, two-point SquintoVision regulations that cover everyone.
And that way we take out the competitive element.
It's the same thing in America, where if states are more business-friendly, more like lower taxes and so on, people will move there.
And so people who want to put sort of big revenue-generating business-choking regulations in place, they want to float them up to the federal level so you can't escape them.
And that, to me, was the big lie of like, oh, it's going to be more free market.
It's like, well, knowing that ahead of time, that was going to put a lot of pressure on governments to liberalize their economies, to compete for investment and so on.
It meant that the other countries that weren't so business-friendly were going to try and get as many regulations put on the more free countries and drag everyone down to this bureaucratic nightmare level.
Yeah, I know, precisely.
And in fact, and they'll do it by any dirty, dirty tactic possible, including trying to desperately maintain their grip on these states, because after all, it is ultimately about the centralization of wealth in across the European Union. it is ultimately about the centralization of wealth in across And so this has a massive effect on on farmers here in Ireland and including our fishing industry in a similar way that it has with with the UK.
So so most recently now, and this is something that Nigel Farage has come out, I believe, yesterday, the day before, in saying that the European Union is kind of stoking the flames of united Ireland as a as a cynical attempt to try and encourage the people of Northern Ireland to not accept in saying that the European Union is kind of stoking the flames of united Ireland as a as a cynical attempt to try and encourage the
I mean, can you think of anything more odious for them to do, given the 30 year war that we had here, given the troubles and given the massive sensitivity?
I mean, if there is to be a united Ireland, it's going to take another generation with respect to birth rates and the difference between Catholic and Protestants right now.
If Catholics are eventually becoming a majority, then perhaps there might be a united Ireland.
But I have no interest in one if it means that bloodshed is required to get there.
And it's looking likely that something like that could happen if this was pushed a little bit prematurely.
But the European Union doesn't care.
It doesn't care.
If it means that a tiny piece of the UK gets to stay in its anti-democratic bureaucratic super state, that's what they will do.
Right.
Well, and I mean, the EU as a whole, it depends on how the polls go over the next couple of days, but...
You know, with the election in France, I mean, if Le Pen does somehow manage to squeak out a victory, then I think the EU may have some significant challenges.
I mean, obviously, they're trying to turn into a sort of sticky, pound-sucking quagmire that the UK has to pay, what is it, 100 billion euros to try and get out of?
I mean, good lord.
Good lord.
I mean, it's like trying to get out of a rental contract.
It's like trying to get out of a cell phone contract.
Hell, it's like trying to get out of a timeshare contract.
I mean, trying to get out of this stuff is very challenging.
And of course, the EU, because it is failing so catastrophically, I think they are facing these nationalistic revolts and they're doing just about everything they can to try and put this down.
And it really does have a lot to do with free speech.
I think if people had the right information, they would make the right decisions regarding voting or sensible decisions regarding voting.
But the whole point is to keep the right information, the right arguments out of people's minds.
Yeah, look, it's the reason why we've had this sudden rise in the perseverance of the term fake news.
And it's it's it's hilarious, to be honest, Stefan, because if you look at the Google trends, it emerged directly after the election of Donald Trump within days.
And nobody was talking about this before.
You know, nobody talked about this.
It was just fake news as a term did not exist when Obama was elected twice, even under Bush.
No one was concerned about this.
It's become a problem now since, you know, an anti-establishment populist leader who's well, at the time, at least whatever the new Trump 2.0 globalist version.
We don't know necessarily what he's become, but at the time, at least, was going to certainly throw a spanner in the works of the globalist agenda.
And so it's it's comical, quite honestly.
And the fact that the EU and the United States and the deep state seem to be all – have their ducks in a line completely and the mainstream media.
I mean this thing came out.
It's so artificial.
It seems so contrived.
It came out perfectly from everyone at the same time.
I just think there's – if somebody can't see that there's something going on there, I can't help them.
Well, I shouldn't laugh, but when you were talking about Bush, when this fantasy of weapons of mass destruction drove or was helped used to grease the skids to have the U.S. and the coalition of the willing invade Iraq and produce the massive disasters and the snowball effect or the domino effect of bringing down a large number of Middle Eastern regimes, which has unleashed a migrant crisis and so on.
When all of that was occurring, the term fake news didn't even arise.
When news was used to drive one of the most catastrophic decisions in U.S. foreign policy, one of the most catastrophic decisions ever in the history of Western culture, which was the invasion of Iraq and all the subsequent disasters that grew out of that, no one ever talked about fake news.
Was openly shilling for mass-murdering psychopath Joseph Stalin and the term for he got a Pulitzer, which they've never relinquished.
So shilling for mass-murdering dictatorships, no problem.
Fake news doesn't even cross our minds.
Helping to grease the skids for absolutely catastrophic, disastrous, European-threatening war.
Not at all fake news.
Oh my God, Donald Trump got it.
Now we've got to leap into action with this term fake news.
And it's like, I really feel like...
There used to be asylums in the world.
Now the world is in an asylum.
It feels like that way.
Yeah, and you know what's really laughable about this, and it's the same.
It's incredible how all of these things seem interconnected.
I mean, if you're a YouTuber, you're affected by this as well.
It's right down to that level with demonetization.
So when they talk about banning and, as Google was saying, delisting websites to surface more, and this is just straight out of the memory hole, more authoritative content.
Oh boy.
Big Brother would be so proud.
When they do that, when they say these things, the next paragraph in these articles, they always seem to follow the same format, Stefan.
They start off with, we're trying to deal with hate speech.
There's so much hate out there.
There's so much Islamophobia, right?
And then literally the next sentence is, and to curb fake news.
It's incredible how you can conflate hate speech and fake news with the same thing.
Again, it comes back to this sentiment of, He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.
And this is exactly what we're doing.
We want protection from feelings if you're a social justice warrior.
You want protection from blasphemy if you're an Islamist, right?
You want protection from your precious leftist, postmodernist, moral relativist ideology if you're a far leftist.
So this is what we're dealing with.
And to be honest, it's People need to start seeing through this as quickly as possible.
This is why we have these other platforms, because I feel personally, and maybe there's a little bit of paranoia here, our window is shrinking a little bit, particularly now that the tug of war has started to go a little bit back in their direction.
As you say, if Le Pen doesn't get in, I think this is going to embolden the EU a little bit further, particularly over the next four years, whether Macron decides to flood France with more migrants and basically...
What's the word I'm looking for?
To make them citizens as quickly as possible and to naturalize them in order to turn a very considerable voting bloc into a far larger one.
This could potentially prevent another nationalist uprising from happening in France, and that's what a lot of us are concerned about right now.
Oh, yeah.
No, I have people saying, well, don't worry.
In five years, it's like, you know, there are six million people gathering on the shores of North Africa looking to get into Europe this summer, right, when the weather clears.
Five years?
Are you kidding me?
I don't even know that there's going to be any capacity to turn things around in five years.
Maybe not even three.
Maybe not even in two.
I don't know.
But this is why the information has to get out now.
And this is why there is this frantic maneuvers on the part of the globalists to try and prevent free speech from going on.
They know what a thread they're hanging by.
And it is a very, very delicate time in world history, in the history of freedom, in the history of philosophy, in the freedom of free speech, in the history of free speech.
This is a very, very delicate time.
And this is why they're throwing all of their resources at trying to control free speech without freaking people out too much.
Because this is what – you're right.
There's a pattern, right?
Well, we've got this hate speech and we've got to get rid of an emotion through algorithms.
Yeah, that's going to work.
And then there is the fake news.
And then there is – but, of course, we remain robustly committed to free speech.
There's always that third part, which is like, did you not read the previous two paragraphs?
We're going to wage subjective war against people's subjective experience of information.
But we're totally committed to free speech.
What are you?
What?
We'll protect their fields.
Look, I mean, this is the thing.
But what gives me hope, really, is innovation.
The innovation is going to be there.
We're not Turkey.
We're not China.
We're not Iran.
We're not North Korea.
The West was built on very different principles, at least our nations anyway, and there's a huge desire for free speech, and not just a Not just the notion of free speech.
Not just the concept of free speech that were sold as some sort of boilerplate.
Just not some marketing speak.
I look at it like this.
Prison guards can't keep out contraband out of prisons.
They're not going to keep free speech off the internet.
It's not going to happen.
And the way they'll do it is they'll redefine words.
They'll do all the wordplay they can and they'll even retcon the past.
Right now, I had the definition that they've come up with to try and redefine fascism.
As an authoritarian and nationalist right-wing system of government and social organization, emphasis added...
Well, no, but it's associated with the right.
And this was the trick that's been around for a couple of generations, which is to say, well, on the extreme left, you have communism, and on the extreme right, you have fascism.
And it's like, please tell me the difference between communism and fascism.
I mean, both are hyper-authoritarian systems of government that violate the free market and private property and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience and freedom of association.
I don't care whether the poison is in the vanilla ice cream or the chocolate ice cream.
The key part is the poison.
I really don't care about the flavor it's delivered in.
And this just, of course, has you crowd towards the center.
And you can see this all the time.
Extreme, like Le Pen, extreme right wing.
It's like, but you never hear about the extreme left wing.
I mean, you can be a communist and you won't be described as extreme left-wing.
So, yeah, I mean, this kind of manipulation.
Good job, government schools, because now people can be manipulated by various bits of language rather than rational arguments.
So, anyway, I really, really appreciate your time.
I do want to remind people, go to minds.com forward slash Dave Cullen, or for those who know he's in Ireland, David O'Cullen.
And you can check him out on me.
I'm sorry?
Oh, Qualon, if we're really being...
Oh, Qualon, right, right.
So vid.me, Computing Forever.
We can check them out on gab.ai.
Please go and check out vid.me, minds.com, gab.ai.
Fantastic platforms.
I've got presence on all of those.
I appreciate your time.
I appreciate the work that you're doing.
Keep up the good fight.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
Thank you very much, Stefan.
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