WTW95: Where Was Gondor When I Got Cancelled for Orc-Face?!
Lydia continues sharing the very-good-examples from The Federalist of times when the Left abandoned Free Speech principles because the impacted person was a Conservative. Yep, they're still going. How Outrage at Kimmel Grew to a Shout From a Whisper, Stuart A. Thompson (9/19/2025) The Censorship-Industrial Complex, Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (5/1/2024) The Mechanics of Government Censorship, Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (9/29/2025) Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do! To support the show (and lose the ads!), please pledge at patreon.com/law!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic handstand.
The woke monster is here, and it's coming for everything.
Everything.
Everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green MM will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas Dad over there is Lydia.
How are you doing?
Oh, hello.
How are you?
I'm good.
You didn't blurt out wokeies.
I'm surprised.
You were so wokies.
I'm just here keeping you on your toes.
Yeah, bordels.
Great show.
Oh man.
I'm excited to do some more whataboutery.
Yes.
From the sparkling what a battery region of whatever.
Just nonstop whataboutisms.
Yep, yep.
There's a few more that we're gonna get into on this.
Yeah, so every time like meme or I guess I could get.
I mean I really easily could grab the sound bite and do it.
Maybe I should start doing that.
Hold on.
I'm just gonna Gondor will answer.
Gondor.
Where was Gondo when the Westfall fell?
Where was Gondol when our enemies closed in around us?
Where was Gondor?
I love that little choice.
Where was Gondor when I was being canceled for blackface?
Yeah.
Okay, let's just watch Lord of the Rings.
Oh hold on.
Okay, stop the show, everybody.
My wife wants to watch Lord of the Rings.
I think uh no, I you don't understand the bit I'm doing right now.
Cancel everything for the next 12 hours because we're doing the extended series.
And then I want to find the old DVDs I had with the commentary.
God, that was so fucking funny.
You haven't experienced that.
Hold on.
You haven't experienced that, have you?
Uh no, I don't think so.
You are there.
I don't know.
Where can one still find that?
Because Wokies, let us know.
I know you guys are nerds.
I know, yeah.
Literally 201.
They all will answer in unison.
Cause like it's the best.
My sister and I in 2000 fucking like two or whatever it would have been.
No, I guess it wasn't until the whole series was out, I think maybe.
Because I remember the set that we had.
Yeah, that they did like the full release.
Yeah, I think.
And it was the extended ones, and and there's the DVD commentary kind of thing.
And obviously, like Mary and Pippin are just so funny.
Like I still quote those lines with my It's pretty good when you can quote a DVD commentary.
Like that's you know what I mean?
Like it was that funny.
We got it, we gotta do it.
And then they would have some other like it would go through them, you know, and be like, Gandalf would come on, and it's like kind of interesting, you know, in in the world.
Yeah, well, he's a freaking knight, so yeah, and then like and like someone else would come on and they do take this serious approach.
I'm like, can you put the hobbits back on?
Like I want to hear more of the bullshit.
Like they're so silly, like they just had all these jokes.
They're the best.
I can't.
I never until this day of my of our year of our lord 2025.
We've been married for however many years, and I've never thought of the fact that you don't know what that is.
Like you haven't experienced it's such a touchstone to me personally.
Yeah, I don't think I I mean I think I've seen like maybe clips here and there, like if they get used for certain things.
Because like Mary Mary and Pippen, especially.
But the commentary, maybe maybe.
I don't know, maybe.
It's pretty funny.
Yeah.
Anyway, I don't know.
Anyway.
Well, what were we doing?
So we're gonna do that, everybody.
We cancel the episode.
No, we're gonna take on the latter half of the where was Gondor when Megan Kelly endorsed blackface, I guess.
Mm-hmm.
And some other things.
We're gonna see if they have any better whatabouties, but what about what about isms?
What about a reason?
I don't know which one it is.
Is it both?
What about hery or what about isms?
Well, what about isms and what about a re is the practice.
Oh, is it the plural, maybe?
Like what about ism is a singular and what about reason?
No, I don't think so.
Well, um, someone else answer that.
Unless, like, maybe if you're selling it as like a collection, you can be like, this is the what aboutery.
Or is the what a battery like the petisserie, like where the whataboutisms are?
That's what it is.
The what a battery is where you get your what about yeah, exactly.
I think we've solved it.
I'm gonna make merch about that too.
I'm not down to the what about battery.
Do you want me to get any stupid justifications for fascism while I'm there?
Yeah, uh, yeah.
Yeah, I could yeah, I could go.
Uh I'm not like I don't need them like right now, but I imagine by the time you get back from the what a battery, I'll be like, I'll want to do some fascism, you know.
Probably.
Yeah.
Well, if you're gonna go anyway.
Yeah.
So we'll uh we'll head on down to the what a battery and see what they have in store for us.
Hey, support this nonsense and the eBay auction for the extended DVDs for Lord of the Rings and the eBay auction for the DVD player that will need to watch that.
Yeah, assuming that's the only way it's still available.
I doubt it.
They probably have some other way.
At patreon.com slash where there's woke.
Oh, and also you can support the content and you know, debunking and whatever that bullshit is.
But mainly Lord of the Rings fund our like watching every every man listening.
I don't want to sorry to get gendery, but like every dude listening heard you say, Oh, yeah, let's watch Lord of the Rings.
And the things they did, I can't repeat it on the air, but likely the reaction they had was probably they loved it.
So more of that, and watching Lord of the Rings uh with patrons at Patreon.com slash where there's woke.
After this break, we'll get to it.
All right.
Well, here we are, only a few seconds into the episode because I edited out all of that intro.
Yeah.
We're so quick.
Yeah, just right to it.
Right to the point.
We're at the what a battery.
Now we gotta keep that part.
That was funny.
Okay.
So let's get back into this article.
Business mode.
Seriously.
And yes, very serious.
I will say this next one involves the government.
So they're getting closer.
So let's talk about this one.
I called it.
It's gonna be, you know, they're gonna try to do the either Hunter Biden's dick or COVID.
That's my guess, but I don't know.
Did I lose?
Kind of sorta.
Uh it's sort of both.
Um let's not forget the Biden administration's censorship machine exposed in the machine.
Yeah.
Exposed in Missouri v.
Biden, later known as Murphy v.
Missouri.
The administration and federal agencies coerced and colluded directly and indirectly with social media companies to censor things they didn't like on a litany of topics, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, election integrity, and COVID-19.
In fact, such as these things, I love it too, because I just have to point out the stuff that Trump is censoring, literally censorship, is stuff that he doesn't like for personal reasons.
Yeah.
The stuff that they're even alleging before we get even into it, the stuff that they're alleging is pro-social, like science, election integrity, genuinely stuff that we should care about.
I just think it's such an indictment of the right.
It's such a sign of how the sides aren't equal, where it's like, well, this guy got censored, taken off the air for saying something that was perceived to be a slight insult to like a conservative.
And that's just like when Biden tried to get them to take down medical misinformation.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It's like like obviously those are things that we should care about, but beyond that, they're also the things when you get it wrong, it's dangerous for people.
Um so that that was like safety and uh you don't know how dangerous it is to not worship Charlie Kirk for a moment.
If you do you don't know.
You're right, I don't know.
Hashtag not even once.
In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later admitted on the Joe Rogan experience that Meta was complicit in the censorship.
Yeah.
So let's talk about this a little bit.
So fucking pathetic.
I saw clips of this pathetic, transparently self-interested interview that he did.
And it's it's just I can't even it's so it's so pathetic.
I'm embarrassed for this billionaire.
It's just stupid.
Like he clearly saw which way everything was going, obviously.
Yep.
And was like, how do I go and pander badly?
There's something I've been mean to say, and sorry to hijack you.
Go for it, please.
I've heard at least three people who were doing the same thing where they're trying to find a way to justify a shift in support to Trump, you know.
And the thing they all picked, because it's this like values neutral thing.
Do you know what it is?
When they say when they ask, like, oh, here's why I started supporting Trump.
Any guesses on this?
No.
No.
Well, it was when they tried to shoot him.
And just how he just like got up back up on the stage.
It was so badass.
So that's what we need.
We just need that that kind of leadership.
It's so perfect too, because it like they're picking something that can't is they can't tie it to like, well, I love how he treats trans people and kills immigrants and stuff.
Like they don't Zuckerberg doesn't want to be pinned to that, you know, in four years when the when the Democrats might take over kind of thing.
So he has to pick this like values neutral thing, and it's just so pathetic.
Like the idea that that like we just Need this like masculine hero energy.
The idea that that's how you would support a president.
I know it's not what how he made his decision, but just the calculation that goes into that fucking pandering lie is just so pathetic to me.
Yeah.
So let's talk about uh that case a little bit, Murphy v Missouri.
The claim behind that case was that the Biden administration jawboned, um, which is informal efforts by government officials to persuade someone outside of the government to take action in a particular way.
Okay.
I'll hear it out.
Like if it is true that there was a government official that like tried to informally like if somebody sent a confidential email instead of going on a right-wing fucking Russia propaganda website, like I'll still say that's censorship.
Like if they were to do that, I would like if this FCC guy, what's his name again?
Brandon Carr.
Yeah, if Brendan Carr had sent an email with this same message, it would I would still say, Oh, that's censorship.
You know, so like I will entertain the idea that, oh, maybe if this is some informal pressuring that we that was kind of behind the scenes, I will totally accept that that could still be censorship.
Yeah.
So here it was about social media companies took down or quote, downgraded posts by attorneys general and various individuals in two states.
So two states kind of combined for this effort.
And the specific thing that the Biden administration, at least with regard to this lawsuit, was interested in was restricting misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.
We not only got a court case about it where plaintiffs actually won at the district court level.
Oh, wow.
They said that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment by coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms' content moderation decisions.
What circuit was it?
Louisiana.
Okay.
So yeah.
So is it Fifth Circuit?
Yeah.
So then we get to the then the Biden administration appealed that.
It went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
They largely held the ruling from Louisiana.
Uh Louisiana, the federal judge out of Louisiana also part of the order was that it was going to limit the extent to which the White House and other government agencies, not all of them, but a lot of government agencies could communicate with social media platforms moving forward.
Um, which seems like odd.
Yeah.
And a little bit of overreach.
It's like an overreach.
Yeah.
That's not even so that wasn't even like we're not even at the circuit level.
That's the just the district court saying, like, yeah, let's control how they're even.
That's okay.
Yeah.
Don't have a lot of faith in their unbiased decision making there.
Right.
So then the Court of Appeals largely upheld it.
And so the Biden administration took it to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court reversed the decision.
Wow.
Barrett drafted the order and basically said that even if government officials sometimes influence content moderation decisions, quote, the platforms moderated similar content long before any of the government defendants engaged in the challenged conduct.
So there were thoughts about like, well, what what kind of standing do you have?
Like what kind of damages are there?
Oh, okay.
They were not convinced, the majority here.
They were not convinced that the government had actually altered the way that yeah, the way that the private companies were acting here.
It's interesting.
What was the margin on the decision?
Uh six three.
And the dissent was Alito, um, who authored the opinion, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch.
And he suggested that the case could be, quote, one of the most important free speech cases to reach the Supreme Court in years.
Uh he said in one of the footnotes, um, Matt Cameron over at OA will appreciate this.
We know now that valuable speech includes information about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, which was also suppressed.
Cool.
Uh that doesn't really like again, if the logic of the majority is, well, they were gonna restrict this anyway.
I feel like that's just trying to have your own way without considering that, you know, like what the majority is saying, you know?
It's not really because it seemed like the majority thing wasn't well, I who knows.
This is an opening argument, so we're getting not getting super deep into it, but it seemed like the reasoning wasn't from what you're saying related to like, well, was the information right or whatever?
It wasn't really didn't seem like the decision rested on that.
No, no, it didn't.
It was more like, and also it didn't really totally rest on like did the government engage in conversation, you know, with the social media company regarding their moderation practices.
I I don't think they're they were making an opinion about that.
I think they were like, well, they were doing that stuff before they continue to like make those those decisions after, and it doesn't seem to be influenced by the government.
Do we have in the record?
I don't I know if you know this is one of an idea of six items in this article, but in the record, I assume if there are any bad documents of, you know, the FCC fucking chairman at the time saying we can do this the easy way, the hard way, I'm sure we would have that in the fucking record.
Yeah.
So here's the thing.
Before the SCOTUS decision came down, like very shortly before, the the House was also investigating this simultaneously.
And they have a select subcommittee now on the weaponization of the federal government.
And they released a staff report right before the decision came down.
And it's titled The Censorship Industrial Complex.
How Biden White House officials coerced big tech to censor Americans, true information, and critics of the Biden administration.
Written by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I think this is Jim Jordan's committee.
And it's 881 pages long.
And so there might be something in there, I guess.
It's not exactly at the front of anything.
I mean, they were doing um hearings and things like that.
And I I don't even know that the Biden administration would disagree that they probably contacted social media companies and said, like, hey, you know, we are concerned about people getting the wrong information here.
What kind of, you know, policies do you guys have in place?
Also keep in mind, this is after we, you know, finding out about Russia's influence on the election in 2016.
You know, like there's there was a lot of concern as we are getting to the next election in 2020 about what disinformation is going to look like on these platforms.
Well, yeah, not only that, I mean, when you think of speech, we do have an extensive, obviously, freedom of speech in this country.
But when you think of the few things we aren't allowed to say, one of them would be like, well, you can't like lie about medicine.
You know, I know we have the supplements are kind of bullshit.
And a lot of that is not as strong as it should be.
But I think if you talk to average Joe, you'd be like, well, people shouldn't be able to say like this medicine will save your child's life, but actually it kills them.
You know, like I think we would all agree on that.
And who is the only entity that can limit the speech?
It's the government.
Right.
So yeah, like if it involves medical misinformation, it's it doesn't surprise me that the government would be they have an interest trying to influence them.
Yeah.
And and maybe even depending on how it is, like it maybe this would be some like a rare case where the government should actually be able to restrict certain kinds of speech.
But it sounds like they didn't even get close to that.
Yeah.
Uh actually, as I have this 800 page document in front of me, let me read to you actually a couple examples that they cite here of big tech changing their content moderation policies because of Biden White House pressure.
In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore's new content moderation policy change.
Quote, the impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden administration about sensitive books we're giving prominent placement to.
Okay.
Criticism.
Okay.
Like just it's an internal email between Amazon employees.
It could be someone who's just saying that that has no information, like could just be someone ventured into their coercion.
What is the criticism?
Do we know?
Yeah.
I mean, is it related to I'm like if like plandemic kind of stuff?
Was it done out in the open?
Was it them just saying like we don't again, were they just giving their opinion on like we don't think this is how they should do their thing?
Or is it like an email where someone's like, all right, you better do this differently or else, you know, which is a very different thing.
And I think it wasn't the second thing, because if it was, I'm sure we would have fucking heard about it.
Also, I I think the other piece here too is that like with very, very few exceptions, Amazon hasn't taken books off of the marketplace, right?
Like there, there's a couple, I think that I can think of that that they've ceased selling.
But what this criticism could be is that because they say, you know, we're giving prominent placement to some of these items, the criticism could be like, hey, your algorithm is really pushing this.
You might want to take a look at it because we're concerned about, you know, how like dangerous some of that content could be.
Who knows?
It could just be that like you can still buy those items.
It's just they're not going to be posted as like, you know, things you should read or whatever the little lists are on Amazon.
In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon's bookstore policies were being applied, quote, due to criticism from the Biden people.
Okay, that's the same exact thing.
Why don't we just have the criticism?
Why don't they have, you know, like why don't they have what the criticism was?
I feel like that's pretty important.
I mean, and that's a quote literally from the internal email.
So there is nothing specific about what the criticism was.
Yeah.
In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS COVID-19 Virus, the employee responded because we were under pressure from the Biden administration and others to do more.
We shouldn't have done it.
Who is that random employee that was responding to Nick Clegg's question there?
I have no idea.
They don't tell me.
How would they know?
We don't we don't know.
They don't tell us.
So anyway, there's just it's examples like that that are vague and sound scarier than I think they probably are.
That page count is entirely intentional, too.
Oh, yeah.
Because they're just like, look at this huge ass fucking report.
No one's gonna fucking read it.
Yeah.
Two people will read it and it doesn't no one listens to those people.
And then, you know, of course, like in the wake of like the Twitter files.
Um, they have infographics here, the Facebook files, the YouTube files, the Amazon files.
They still want to do the Twitter files someday, even though it's not really relevant anymore.
Like that was just such a fucking cat.
Yeah, yeah.
No, totally.
Let's pull it from the archive.
I think it's still worth Matt Taibi is is like fully, I guess you wouldn't call him like MAGA, but he's fully bought into that worldview still.
Yeah.
Like he was I saw him on an interview.
I almost almost was gonna look into it for maybe doing something, but I didn't, I was doing something else at the time, but I saw an interview recently of him saying, like, oh, these indictments are coming for like Hillary and Russia gate and crap.
I was like, what is happening?
Like he's bought into that.
It's crazy.
Yeah, it sucks.
This is an old Supreme Court case, you know, from last term.
I guess it's not that old.
Um, but but the the issues are, you know, from years ago.
It's still going.
Just a week ago, we get an update from the judiciary committee in the House.
Google admits censorship under Biden, promises to end bands of YouTube accounts of thousands of Americans censored for political speech.
You might have heard about this because everybody was saying Alex Jones is coming back to YouTube.
Uh Nick Fuentes is coming back to YouTube.
And then you might have heard that shortly thereafter them joining back on YouTube, they were kicked off again.
And they were saying it's, you know, a witch hunt that an equivalent of that, right?
Like we're being censored, we're being silenced.
Um, you know, they said we could come back and and they lied and just just me existing is a problem for them, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, YouTube has responded to that very, very recently.
And they said that the program to reinstate accounts actually isn't up and running yet.
Also, it's going to be a pilot program.
So it's not going to be available to every single account that was removed.
They're going to do a limited program to reintroduce some folks whose accounts were taken down related to like COVID-19 situations and things like that.
Also, Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones may not even be eligible to participate in the program because of the particular things that they violated.
Yeah.
It wasn't like COVID misinformation.
Fucking Sandy Hook stuff, you know.
Sandy Hook stuff, anti-Semitism, like really gross, gross conduct.
And so YouTube has explicitly said in this response, Jim Jordan, like, you know, took it the whole way and said, everybody's coming back.
And he like spread this idea.
So everyone was expecting everybody to come back immediately.
And then YouTube had to be like, we never said that.
Uh, we said it was gonna be a pilot program.
And we never said that we were ready to start it now.
We're getting ready.
And it's not launched yet.
So yeah, these are people that are trying to get their accounts back online before we've given them the green light to come back.
So yeah, just kind of an interesting thing there.
Uh Vivek Ramaswamy, a name we haven't heard in a while, uh, actually commented about Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones being removed, quote unquote, from this and compared it to Kimmel's suspension and preempting.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, totally.
Let's not look into any of the details there.
That's probably a good comparison.
Our country is at its best when we're able to hear one another.
Shut up.
Nick Fuentes and Jimmy Kimmel probably don't like me for different reasons.
I don't care.
It's still un-American to muzzle the peaceful expression of opinions.
Peaceful expression of opinions.
I'm such a hero.
And no, that's not a legal point.
It's a cultural point.
What a better American than everyone else.
Yeah.
So I'm so sick of it.
Can we be done?
And it sucks.
Like, I want to be done with the bullshit free speech argument, except it did actually apply in Kimmel.
So it's like, yeah, well, when it's actual government censorship, that matters.
When it's hey, this guy who made up shit, horrible stuff about the Sandy Hook victim.
Like just unforgivable stuff.
Well, we're better off when we can all listen to it.
Shut the fuck up.
Fuck you.
Yeah.
And even to, you know, as we're recording this, Senator Cruz, so he oversees the commerce committee in the Senate.
He released today an investigative report revealing how the Biden administration transformed the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, CISA, into an agent of censorship pressuring big tech to police speech.
Now, his report that he's issued is only 40 pages long.
Oh, I couldn't get the page count up.
Also, his cover page is way nicer.
He's blue as load on the cover page.
You can get the 888 pages or whatever.
Senator Cruz said as he was discussing this report.
Our report shows that the Biden administration used CISA to strong arm social media companies into taking action against speech protected by the First Amendment.
For the past decade, I've led the fight against government censorship, whether it's CISA or the FCC or the Biden White House, inevitably these tactics have been and will be disproportionately used to silence conservatives.
Given renewed Democrat interest in the First Amendment because of Kimmel, I'm slightly more optimistic that Congress can pass legislation to stop government from using this left-wing playbook to jawbone private companies to censure speech, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
What does that have to do with anything?
Oh, like that it could be fake or something, maybe?
Or I don't know.
I don't think that's it.
Yeah.
You just like threw that in out of habit.
I don't know.
Yeah, could pretty much every statement he's saying, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
So in in the previous episode, you know, we gave a little shout out to Ted Cruz.
Um, I'm taking it back because now he's using the Kimmel situation.
Give back your shout-out, sir.
I appreciate your cover page on this report, and that's about it.
So I think it's perhaps their most compelling example or possible example of government.
But like, yeah, but even then, as we're breaking it down, there's not really a lot of there.
Again, if there was any smoking gun document, I know we would have seen it.
It would be everywhere.
It would, it would be, it would literally be news.
And there's nothing like it's stuff that's hidden in 800-page reports on government websites that only people like me and other nerds are gonna be pulling up.
All right.
Now, here's our next example.
Speaking of the Hunter Biden laptop, no one raised any alarms when conservatives were being locked out of their Twitter accounts for sharing the New York Post's bombshell story.
In fact, left-wing media outlets gave cover to big tech, with NPR framing their reporting on the censorship as Twitter and Facebook merely limiting, quote, the reach of an article with unconfirmed claims, before couching that with a note that so-called, quote, experts warned that social media platforms are full of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
I don't hear anything wrong in that.
Yeah.
It was an article with unconfirmed claims.
This is probably actually the best case.
I still don't know.
Like the laptop thing is really confusing because apparently like we don't know what was that definitely something was real in there, but we don't know what, and we don't know 100% if it wasn't like tainted by Russia.
Well, they did like these forensic teams have like very meticulously gone through like the all the emails, the thousands, tens of thousands of emails and stuff.
And you know, they've been able to verify X amount with a particular method, and then they use another method to see if they can verify others.
So there are some things in there that are legitimate, but I don't know if they've ever finished.
Because it's a lot.
Um the amount I don't know if you looked this up.
The amount of time that it was throttled was like not a lot.
No, no.
And and really, like when people were locked out of their Twitter accounts, it really was like the premise was really locked out of their Twitter account.
It was basically Twitter was concerned that users were violating a policy regarding um sharing hacked material.
Oh, yeah.
And so they basically said, hey, you need to delete this tweet.
Right.
And then they would be allowed back in.
Yeah, yeah.
That was them being locked up.
Pretty much how it always works.
And then Twitter tried to prevent users from being able to tweet or direct message a link to the article because again, that was at that point in time, no one really knew what was going on.
And so Twitter was treating it as distributing hacked material, which there's a ban on that.
They made a call.
It might have been the wrong call, but it's also like a tough close call.
Yeah.
I think it was 24 hours when I was watching the Jack Dorsey interview about it.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
That would have changed the election.
It's like, really?
They don't you don't think enough people heard about Hunter Biden's fucking laptop?
Because I think they did.
Exactly.
And like, and the elements of even how the post got this story are so insane, too, that like I don't blame a company for being like, okay, like like pump the brakes.
This seems nuts.
That Hunter Biden dropped off of a laptop at a repair store and then it wasn't picked up timely.
Crazy.
I don't know.
I've heard from people that like that's not that crazy.
So I I don't know.
That just seems like that's a good idea.
yeah, an abandonment contract clause.
Uh yeah.
And like the guy like the guy's a Trumper, like that gave it to them.
Well, and then he's blind.
Also, yeah, it's via Rudy Giuliani, gave it to the New York Post.
I don't know.
It's it's weird.
And exactly.
And that's the thing.
It's like I do not blame.
So they took 24 hours.
Yeah, I don't blame Twitter to be like, we need to check this out like a little bit more before we let it take over the entire site.
Because this seems suspect.
Now, who wait, did the government direct that?
What was the evidence?
Did they ask them or something?
Or was that just them doing it?
So from what I was reading, it's not clear what triggered Twitter to act on that.
Um Facebook had that's when Trump was in office.
Yeah.
So what the fuck are we talking about here?
Well, so Facebook had said that their decision had been informed by an FBI warning to watch for disinformation spread by foreign actors.
So it's similar, it's kind of like the similar thing that we were seeing in the content moderation in the previous example, where we had significant disinformation surrounding the 2016 election.
We're coming up on 2020.
And not only is it another election, it's also in the midst of COVID and everything.
And so I think all these social media companies were like, well, we know we screwed up in 2016.
What what we did, which was nothing was not enough.
So let's see if we can correct here.
And maybe they overcorrected in some cases.
I don't know.
That's not for me to say exactly.
But it sounds like all I can think of is like, yeah, you're right, that it would have been the Trump administration anyway.
So it's them making no government pressuring.
The details matter in terms of the fucking censorship.
So dumb.
It's not the same if it's not the the actual FCC threatening you.
Yeah.
With with real and not just like, hey, our opinion is that this is bad.
Not just that, like actually threatening to remove licenses and stuff.
It's just so categorically different.
Some people feel that the way that this was approached by the social media companies, though, like they say, you know, could have amplified disinformation thanks to the stry sand effect.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Who knows?
But who knows?
And then this sparked um Trump going off about Section 230 and you know, all the things around that.
You know, one of the uh many obviously harms from fucking Trump being elected the second time is I meant to say with the Google thing and with the f Mark Zuckerberg Facebook thing, they all had all every incentive now to just fucking legitimize the bullshit conspiracy theories to try to get on their good side.
That's that's why they all were like, Yeah, they admitted this.
And it's like, yeah, it's fucking bullshit.
They're kissing ass and they're trying to get back in the good graces because they know precisely because they know that Trump is gonna abuse his power.
Yeah, they're not as worried about getting in the good graces of Democrats because Democrats aren't gonna abuse their power to this degree, you know, to like make it make life miserable for these companies in the way that Trump definitely will.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so that was story number five.
You ready for this last one?
Oh, final story, everybody.
Okay.
Where it was gondor.
This is a little combined.
Um, but I'm I'm really just gonna focus on this first sentence.
No one clutched the first amendment when the Federalist John Daniel Davidson was locked out of his Twitter account for stating the obvious fact that then U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health, Rachel Levine, is a man.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Yeah.
So do you remember the name John Daniel Davidson?
God, that sounds really familiar.
Yeah, didn't we just cover that?
We did.
We just covered him briefly on OA a few weeks ago, yeah, I guess two weeks ago, when we were doing uh the reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder, and he won Matt's award for the most unhinged right-wing op-ed.
Um, the title of it was Charlie Kirk's Assassination Should Herald the End of the American Left.
I'm just gonna read a little bit from this because I know folks here, you know, you got a lot of pods to listen to.
I get it.
But if you didn't catch that over on opening arguments, I'm gonna give you a little little snippet of what John Daniel Davidson was writing over at the Federalist about Charlie Kirk.
So how should the right respond?
On the formal institutional level, the Trump administration should dismantle the entire ecosystem of left-wing political activism in America.
Antifa and BLM groups need to have their assets seized and donor lists.
That sounds really free speechy.
Yeah.
The left-wing billionaires who fund these organizations need to be criminally investigated and charged if possible.
Groups tied to transgenderism, Palestine Hamas, socialism, and other radical leftist causes should be targeted Using every tool available to the Justice Department and federal law enforcement agencies.
The law should be applied maximally to these groups and the individuals who lead them and fund them.
If the Democratic Party and Democrat leaders are implicated, so be it.
It might be that the DNC and the Democratic Party itself need to be destroyed, root and branch.
In the near term, Democrat politicians like Representative Ilhan Omar, who mocked Kirk after he was killed, should be expelled from Congress by the Republican majority.
Yeah, man.
That's a chill take.
Like you can just say stuff.
Also, no one should ever be allowed to like a flavor of ice cream that I don't like.
It's just fucking stupid.
They're doing maximum fascism, this guy.
And uh where was Gondor when he called a woman a man?
Yeah.
I don't care.
Gondor was like, why the fuck should we care about that?
Don't even I'm not lighting my fucking uh beacons over transphobia.
And also I love it too, because like if you just think throughout history and throughout like, why did the founders care about free speech?
You know, and like what were they thinking of, you know, in terms of like probably some really horrible stuff, especially when you talk about like the crown and like executing people for saying the wrong thing.
Just like horrible stuff like that, like they probably wanted to avoid.
And then just imagine telling them like, where were they when okay?
So I was locked out of my Twitter.
When it's just like fucking unless I deleted this one tweet.
Yeah.
Where I just used a different pronoun than the person is.
Yep.
Yep.
I need to also read this tweet.
This is uh related to Charlie Kirk's murder that he posted that was not in his article, and then we'll talk about his great offense and his martyrdom.
He said, for people on the right who publicly engage in political cultural debate with the left, Kirk's murder and the celebration of it revealed there's a lot of people in this country who want to kill us.
We don't intend to let you.
Everything that's coming is defensive.
The left has brought this on itself.
Uh-huh.
That's scary.
Don't love that either.
It's like when the cop shoots an unarmed person and says, he reached for his gun, like on the So the Body Cam has the that.
So in the article we've been reading, it links to a piece that he wrote when this happened.
Um, so I wanted to share a little bit from it from from his perspective.
Twitter locked my account for telling the truth about Rachel Levine.
And he wrote, big tech, this is his tweet.
Big tech will eventually silence everyone who dissents from their woke ideology.
They're not even trying to hide it anymore.
If you say that Rachel Levine is a man, they will come after you.
Doesn't matter that Levine is in fact a man.
Truth is no defense.
Telling the truth about Rachel Levine.
Like, look, you think it's gonna be something like actually like weighty, like, you know, there's some sort of scandal.
Yeah, exactly.
Like how she's treated people on her staff or I disagree with someone in their assertion of what their pronouns are.
Like, no, that's stupid.
That's nothing.
Also, this wasn't a government.
No, this was Twitter.
This is fucking Twitter and don't uh don't worry.
That's not doesn't exist anymore.
Twitter is the opposite of free speech now.
It's it's Nazis.
Free speech for Nazis and not for thee.
Free speech for me for Nazis and not for thee.
I'm trying to I was trying to remember how quick.
This is all related to Twitter's at the time, what their hateful conduct policy was, which was intended to be protective of trans folks.
There's been some commentary at the time when it obviously changed with Elon Musk, but it was it did in writing say you cannot, you know, misgender or dead name trans folks.
That's considered to be hateful conduct.
Well, that's good.
Alejandro Caraballo, you know, from all the social media sites.
Caraballo had said, you know, that she had tried to report various things that either she observed or were directed at her as violation of this hateful conduct, and Twitter failed to act on a lot of occasions, you know.
So it's it was not always applied.
It seemed to have been applied in this case, and it really, really pissed off John Daniel Davidson.
He said, This article is just it's trash, honestly.
I'm I'm not gonna read much of this at all because it's just so incredibly rude and dismissive and disgusting and it's all the things.
But he said, you know, I'm not the first commentator to get locked out of Twitter for pointing this out that he disagrees with Rachel Levine's gender identity.
Wait, how are we even hearing from it?
I thought he'd been silenced.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
It's nice because he's he's an editor over at uh the Federalist.
So he has a platform.
Yeah, senior editor.
Wow, maybe just use that fucking platform, fucking dick.
Indeed, my offending tweet was merely linking to a column I wrote last week detailing how Twitter had locked out the Babylon B, its editor in chief, Kyle Mann, its founder Adam Ford, and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, all of whom ran afoul of Twitter's terms of service for saying Levine is a man.
In Twitter world, saying Levine is a man amounts to hateful conduct.
As you can well imagine, Twitter's hateful conduct policy is rather capacious.
It isn't limited to prohibitions on obvious things like violent threats or harassment, but that is that is harassment.
Or calling for harm to specific groups of people.
It also includes, quote, targeted misgendering or dead naming of transgender individuals.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
And then he he just tries to like really twist things here and decides to define things the way he wants to define them.
Dead naming is when you use a person's given name, is what he says next.
For example, before Rachel Levine transitioned in quotes, his given name was Richard.
Misgendering is when you say a trans woman is in fact a man or a trans man is in fact a woman.
It's just nonsense like that.
That is what it is.
Sorry, what's the point of this?
That is what it is.
Yeah, it's just it's nonsense.
He goes on to say that trans people suffer from dangerous delusions, that they need people to tell them the truth, and that's what being compassionate means in their case and transgender folks' cases is to deadname them and misgender them because they are disturbed and they don't know.
Oh, cool.
Well, this private company had a different opinion at that time.
Yeah.
I mean, they don't anymore, but they did at that time.
So that's what happened.
Yeah, exactly.
Unfortunately, it has changed in the wake of Elon coming.
Everyone kind of expected it because of Elon and how anti-trans he is.
So no one was really surprised, but it became a less safe space for sure.
You know what's funny?
And they always say, I think there are even are people on the left who will talk about like, hey, it's you can't just hide behind the private company thing because like it's convenient when the company agrees with you, but then once like your side's being censored, then you're gonna be pissed.
And it's like, I don't think that matters because the reason that like with what Twitter's doing and with what truth social is.
Yeah, my argument is not, oh, now I I am hypocritical because now I'm saying that companies should allow all kinds of whatever.
No, it's just like, well, you shouldn't have those shitty values.
That's my argument.
Yeah.
I thought it would be fun to, I'm enjoying layering these things in with the Jimmy Kimmel cancellation because they're so equivalent.
I forgot which we were talking about, honestly.
I think we were talking about him.
But I want to I wanted to share some of what John Daniel Davidson wrote when Kimmel was suspended and preempted and all that stuff.
He wrote this on the Federalist.
Davidson writes the title, we are not going to have a debate about free speech.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's settled.
The cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel's show doesn't matter.
What matters is that the fellowship is.
No, sorry, you're debating.
I said we're not going to have a debate.
I'm not listening.
You said we're not listening.
There's no debate is happening.
What matters talking?
What matters is the left's embrace of political violence.
You can't be like, we're not gonna have a debate.
Anyway, here's my side of the debate.
Yeah.
No, seriously.
So, okay, and here we go.
The conversation we need to have is about the normalization of political violence on the left.
We need to be talking about left-wing Antifa trans terrorists gunning down Christians in broad daylight while Democrats and the corporate press justify it and the online left celebrates it.
That's the only conversation that matters right now.
The manufactured outrage over ABC canceling Jimmy Kimmel's show is an attempt to change the conversation to flip the script so that instead of talking about the first major political assassination America in 60 years.
Uh, sorry, what?
There was the literally the Minnesota folks right before this.
Yeah.
Instead of talking, they don't talk, they don't count.
Exactly.
Instead of talking about the mainstream left's embrace of political violence and the institutional ecosystem that foments and funds that violence.
You know, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, there will be no debate because I don't debate fascists.
You know, Medi Hassan and that debate video thing that I don't think you saw, but it's just truly fucking horrifying.
There was one of the disgusting smiley fascists who was just a fascist, and then Matty was like, Oh, well, I don't debate fascists.
I'm not gonna do that.
Like, why would I talk to you?
And then they tried to do the free speech thing.
Whoa, you're not gonna even listen to his ideas.
And he's like, why would I listen to his ideas?
He said, I don't get to count as a person.
I don't get to live here.
I don't get like I don't debate fascists.
Yeah, we shouldn't debate fascists.
This guy is the most fucking f this guy is more fascist than Trump.
Yeah, yes, I agree with that.
So yes, there will be no debate.
Douchebag, because I'm not fucking listening to you.
Okay, But I'm gonna keep reading this article because it's crazy.
What nonsense and what a tell.
It speaks volumes that Democrats, liberal media, and online leftists are so desperate to pivot away from talking about Kirk's assassination that they have chosen to take it.
The transparently stupid cause of Kimmel's free speech rights.
Remember, these are people who don't care at all about free speech.
So when I my account, I couldn't log in.
And it I think it was because of Miss Gen, shut up, dude.
This is actual government censorship.
God is so fucking funny.
They don't even care.
Where was Gondor when my Twitter account wouldn't log in?
So fucking pathetic.
And it hardly needs to be said that nothing about the Kimmel story implicates free speech in any way.
Yeah, I agree that that doesn't need to be said.
You're right.
Kimmel didn't just mock MAGA or criticize Kirk.
He patently lied about the ideology of Kirk's alleged assassin.
And by allowing his comments to air, ABC arguably violated the terms of its FCC license.
Anyone with an internet connection and half a brain cell knows that Kirk's alleged killer was deeply into Antifa and transgender ideologies and that he specifically targeted Kirk for speaking out against these things.
He was a creature wholly of the left.
And to declare otherwise, as Kimmel did, is a deliberate falsification of the facts surrounding the most high-profile political assassination of our time.
That means Kimmel blatantly violated FCC regulations.
And then he goes on to talk about that.
No surprise then that Brendan Carr addressed Kimmel's comments when he went on Benny Johnson's podcast on Wednesday and quotes that.
Not that the FCC had to take action because the marketplace was already reacting.
And he just talks about the fallout there.
It's so crazy.
Yes.
They get to say whatever the fuck they want.
There's no there's no rules.
They can just fucking say the most hypocritical fucking dog shit.
And uh I won't hear it.
I for one would like you to stop reading it.
So no, we won't be having a tortured debate about the nuances of the first amendment.
Is that you or him?
I agree.
And the finer details of FCC regulations.
We won't be furrowing our brows over the line between regulation and the public interest and censorship of free speech.
We won't be agonizing over what Democrats might do once they regain power and deciding it's best just to let the late night.
Yeah, because you're gonna do whatever life.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So that's that guy.
Uh guy is great.
Awesome.
Cool.
Chill.
Then the other thing that that she mentions is when YouTube censored Senator Rand Paul for disagreeing with the government about CDC guidance.
That was regarding masks.
And I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that because Rand Paul never even called it government censorship or anything like that.
He was like, YouTube's a private company and they didn't want my position on this and my pushback against you know the what the government was saying on this.
And it was at a challenging time in the pandemic when we were all encouraged to get cloth masks and knowing this is him talking or yeah.
So he his well, so his position was cloth masks will not protect you.
And it wasn't like did he have a YouTube channel?
Like what the fuck?
Um, I think it was, you know, good question.
Did they just put like a notice maybe over footage or something?
Because I don't, what did he get?
Yeah, fucking YouTube.
He posted a video of a journalist interviewing him, I guess, on his channel.
And his like and subscribe.
Yeah.
YouTube removed the video and then banned him from uploading content for seven days.
And so it really was about cloth masks versus N95 masks and Rand Paul being like N95 work, cloth masks don't.
And the government having concerns, understandably at the peak of the pandemic about N95s not being made available to folks in the healthcare industry, you know, needing to up the supply chain there.
So, you know, it that's a tough call to make, but but even Rand Paul's like that wasn't the government shutting me down.
It was, you know, YouTube policies.
Oh, did he say that because it was the Trump administration?
Yeah, probably.
Yeah.
Probably, but whatever.
He's on record saying it.
So I'm not gonna talk about it.
It counts.
And then she closes out this article.
So why the sudden panic now when a private company makes a determination on its own.
Well, because of censorship because of the city of the city.
For spreading egregious lies.
Any of the fucking examples you gave, it's actual censorship.
So that's why if you're confused, why now?
It's because now there's actual censorship.
Check out this parenthetical and possibly violating the law.
What law?
What wait violated what Jimmy Kimmeled the violated the law.
There was a point I did see earlier in the article.
She tried to make reference to like the news distortion thing, but it's not, it's not.
But that's not a law.
I mean, it's just that those are the FCC regulations.
Yeah, but I'm I guess you could say that those have the force of law because they're they don't, you know.
I I'm Yeah, but it's not like he's gonna be criminally charged.
Like the way that she wrote that definitely makes it seem like there's some steep consequences for Jimmy Kimmel in particular.
Yeah, she could be, I don't know what she's referring to.
I am I mean I I would be, I guess, slightly charitable on that.
That like maybe but but I don't know.
Maybe you could be right.
I'm not sure what the fuck she has in mind.
Yeah.
I was trying to like be nice.
But yeah, it's like, where was Gondor when I stuck my toe?
And now that Mordor is at our gates, Gondor wants to come and help.
Where were they?
It's like, well, yeah, that that's one of those things is the thing that one of those things is the thing, and the others aren't the thing.
So where were they when not censorship happened?
Well, they didn't give a shit.
Where are they when censorship happened?
They give a shit.
I solved it.
Yeah.
Um, if you remember at the beginning of this article, her thesis was that this isn't about us caring, this isn't the left about uh caring about free speech.
It's you know, all in service of Trump is authoritarian and trying to keep that that narrative alive.
She hasn't touched on that at all for the rest of the article, but we're gonna get to it here in her final paragraph.
Oh.
So why the sudden panic now, et cetera, et cetera.
Partially because it's one of their own, but even more so because as Rama Manuel once said, and no, yeah, she initially attributed this to Barack Obama and then had to issue a correction.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
The left doesn't really care about Kimmel or free speech, but by pretending that this is some unprecedented Trump crackdown, they get to smear Trump as a dictator or authoritarian to delegitimize his presidency.
It's not about defending free speech, it's just about exploiting a convenient storyline to keep their narrative of Trump as authoritarian alive.
You don't really care about my fascism.
You just want to use my fascism to call me a fascist.
Yeah.
I've made a point.
So fucking believable.
Yeah.
It's amazing how much of their bullshit has to rely, because they just, it's just fascism.
It's just two quote quay, blah blah de blah.
Appeals to like hypocrisy that don't all of their arguing gets caught up.
It's it's just like at a certain point, you just want to be like, do you want to just like talk about like policies that you want or don't?
You know, do you want to just like talk about taxes or something?
You know, it's all well, they you don't understand.
When I my Twitter and when they not they said that we said, and they don't really care, they don't really care.
They're just saying they care, but they don't care.
They really they don't because it's like, what is this?
Like, can't what can't there just be like what should the marginal tax rate be on the whatever?
Or what should our foreign policy be?
Or what should the whatever be?
It's like they just have to be so fucking caught up in this grievance nonsense.
And and not even just on like, you know, within the media and stuff, or or on Twitter or you know, talking heads of various whatevers, but like also in Congress.
Like, yeah, like I shared, like these are huge reports and committee time that is being spent instead of doing other things, they are spending it doing this and following these weird ass breadcrumbs that lead to nowhere, and they pretend that they lead to somewhere.
It's our whole politics has become that.
It's so fucking depressing.
It was one thing when it was just online, but now it's like, no, that's the Senate and the fucking house and the whatever.
It's just such dog shit.
Yeah.
Word of advice to folks.
Um, do not search for John Daniel Davidson videos on YouTube unless you want to be bombarded with his horrific transphobic views.
So, and that's why I did not play any clips of him talking for this, uh, because they were all dark and disgusting.
So I mean, we heard, yeah, we heard some of it.
We did, we did.
He's the worst.
They're all guys sucks.
I would say we uh completely dismantled this article.
Some things are bad and other things are not bad.
You know, there's not the what about.
It's just like I actually I like good things.
I don't like bad things.
End of argument.
This hypocrisy nonsense and the yeah, it's just fucking stupid.
And you know, one thing I I do want to close out on too is in our bonus episode for Sydney Sweeney, I had mentioned that the New York Times actually did a good thing and they had an article kind of tracking the outrage creation that happened as part of the American Eagle controversy.
Um, and they they did some really good data there.
Um they similar to that, they also tracked the evolution of the Kimmel controversy, quote unquote.
Um, so there's some good stuff there.
Um I'll link, I'll link a bunch of things in the show notes for this one.
I think there's some good, some good pieces to check out.
I think when we talk about the right wing outrage machine and how like truly it is a machine, we're seeing it time and time and time again.
And here's just another story where we're seeing it too.
All right.
Well, thanks for the breakdown.
This has been fun.
Thanks so much, wokies, for listening.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Please share the show.
Please support the show, Patreon.com slash wearers book.
And you can get Sydney Swing's boobs on there.
Yes, absolutely.
That's true.
Oh wow.
Holy shit, we got 10 million patrons just from saying that.
