Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - (9/27/24) EXCLUSIVE: Ken Klippenstein BANNED By Elon For JD Vance Dossier

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Krystal sits down with journalist Ken Klippenstein to talk about him leaking the JD Vance dossier and Elon subsequently banning Ken from Twitter. Ken's Substack: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/ To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, guys, so we're joined this morning by Ken Klippenstein, who is a journalist and many regular watchers of the show will recognize him. He has a fantastic sub stack where he breaks a lot of national security news in particular. relevant in our national conversation because there has long been a J.D. Vance dossier compiled by the Trump campaign that we've known for months now had been hacked by some actor. Put a pin in that. There are suggestions it might be Iran. We'll get Ken's thoughts on that as well, but put a pin in where it came from. And quite a variety of mainstream news outlets were refusing to publish it. Now, they cited two primary reasons. One was because it was a hacked document, and the other was that in some estimations, it was deemed to be not newsworthy. Well, Ken was able to get his hand on that dossier,

published it to his sub stack. In fact, I can pull this up while we're talking about it, so that people could judge for themselves whether or not it was, in fact, newsworthy and see what sorts of concerns the Trump campaign had internally about J.D. Vance and his selection onto the onto the ticket as Donald Trump's vice presidential pick. So Ken joins us now to talk about that, but also to talk about the fallout after posting this dossier. He's now been banned on Twitter. Elon Musk has gone after him personally, describing the publishing of this dossier completely unredacted as, quote, evil. So we want to talk about all angles of this topic. Ken, thank you so much for spending some time with us this morning.

Good to be with you. Yeah, of course. So first, just take me through your thinking, why you came down in a different place on publishing this dossier than other news outlets did. Yeah, a number of other news outlets acquired this, including the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post. And I just thought it was the worst of media paternalism to decide that the public, that they knew better and the public doesn't need to know these things. And to the extent that they did talk about it, I mean, they were happy to paraphrase some of the contents. So I thought, well, why not just show people the

underlying thing instead of relying on their paraphrase? And an initial concern I had, having worked in media for a number of years now and seeing how when media tries to make the judgment about what people are going to be interested in and misreads what the general public might be interested in because they're overwhelmingly focused on other things. I think that turned out to be true in this case. I encourage people to go and read the actual document and compare it with the articles that were said to have paraphrased it in which the media was saying, look, we've already basically talked about what's interesting there. What's the deal here? Look at the actual document, compare that with reporting, and you're going to notice a gulf between those two things,

a huge difference in terms of the specific parts of the document that were never mentioned in any stories, and just the tone of the campaign. To me, the most interesting thing is not the disclosures. Looking at this as something like the Steele dossier that's going to have all this salacious detail, that was never what this was. What's interesting about this is the metatextual point

of that it gives you insight into what the campaign thinks is problematic about Vance. And what's interesting about it is overwhelmingly the theme that they focus on being his liability is what makes him Trumpy. It's like the MAGA dimension to his character that they seem uneasy with, which is funny and interesting, because it shows that the party is in conflict with Trump. They both need him to win, and they're uneasy with his policies, particularly the ones that tend towards isolationism

and protectionism. Yeah, there were definitely some things in here that made me personally like, oh, if this was the J.D. Vance that was put forward, I would be more receptive to him. Like, for example, he was critical of Donald Trump when he assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. He described himself as a non-interventionist. These were all things they flagged as like potential political problems for him. And the two things that I found interesting was, number one, as you're laying out, the two big areas that they thought were a vulnerability for Vance were, number one, his overwhelming past criticism of Donald Trump. And I do think that that turned out to be somewhat of a focus of conversation, somewhat of a liability for him.

And there's chapter and verse of him going through, you know, all the ways that he used to hate Donald Trump and think that he was unfit and believe his sexual assault accusers and all of those sorts of things. Right. Which you probably many people will be familiar with the what J.D. Vance has said about Donald Trump in the past because of mainstream coverage. The other bucket was him being a n-traditional conservative and having views that, for example, you know, talking about how he thought Democrats had some policies that would be favorable to the working class, how he had said some favorable things about unions, for example. And they saw that as a liability, which is interesting in and of itself. But the other piece that I found interesting, Ken, is what wasn't in this dossier, which is that I wondered if they had surfaced some of the comments that have genuinely been a problem for J.D. Vance, which is like his whole, you know, his whole motif on childless cat ladies and similarly situated commentary about women and what he thinks

role for women should be and this very sort of narrow and contemptuous view that he has of women who don't fit the prescribed roles that he would like to see them in. And none of that was in here at all. So, I mean, that's interesting in one regard because there have been a question about whether Donald Trump really realized all of these things about him, whether he would have put him on the ticket if he knew he had said all of these things. And also interesting because you realize how these standard issue Republican consultant consulting firms, which would have been behind this type of this type of dossier, how blind they were to what the actual liabilities would be for him in this campaign. Exactly. And I should note, a campaign in which policy is not centered. I mean, this is

a vibes campaign. I, as a reporter, am trying to find something, anything to be able to talk to readers about what these people stand for and what we can expect will happen. And it's really hard because they don't talk about it. I'll give you an example. I went through not just the Republican convention, but the Democratic convention. Collectively, they mentioned the word healthcare twice during the entire speeches. And in both references, they had essentially nothing to say about it. And then you look at national security, basically, like slightly more to say about that, but still basically nothing. I mean, it's really hard to define what they're doing. And so when you have a document like this,

that gives you some sense of not just what the attitudes of the party are, but I think too, why they're so quiet about a number of things, because they're uneasy with their position on a lot of different things, including on things, which it wouldn't be, it's sort of counterintuitive that they are. So if this document, as was suggested by the media, oh, it's just going to be based on polling or whatever, then they're going to talk about overwhelmingly the cat lady stuff that you're saying, because gender is a huge issue of, it's a huge problem Republicans face. It relates to the abortion question and is central to, I think, their main liability going into this election post-Dobbs decision and the overturn of Roe. But instead, they're interested in these positions

that could be characterized to be definitely popular among the isolationist wing of the Republican base, probably so among reporters generally, and they acted as though it's a liability. That tells you that they're not primarily concerned with the public opinion. They have other concerns. I mean, I'm guessing where their money comes from.

That's a very interesting point. Yeah, I mean, they had lots in there about, you know, they knew the fact that he had these fringe extreme abortion views would be a potential problem, although it's kind of down the list in terms of the areas that they were concerned about, which is also interesting to me.

But, you know, there's also a quality to these, you know, official campaign like vetting documents where it doesn't take into account any of the quote unquote X factor, like whatever it is about J.D. Vance that just judging by the polls and the fact that he has the lowest favorability rating of, you know, the set of the four Kamala, Tim Walz, Donald Trump and him, he has the lowest favorability ratings. There's no real putting your finger on whatever that lack of an X factor or whatever the off-putting nature of him,

which I think is tied up in some of this like weird childless cat lady type comments. That is completely absent from this as well, which to me was an interesting insight too. Ken, before we move on to, you know, sort of what has happened with you and Twitter, et cetera, since this was published, the handling of these hacked documents, obviously very different from how the media handled the Hillary Clinton campaign hacked documents back

in 2016. Now, one argument you could say is, you know, a lot of liberals were very upset about that. People like you and me supported the, you know, publishing of those hack materials, because guess what? Journalists get weird source materials from sketchy people all the time. You factor in their motivation, but if it's legitimate information, the public deserves to see it. So we supported that, but a lot of liberals didn't. And so one of the arguments is, okay, well, the news outlets were pressured by liberals to change their ways. And they basically, quote, unquote, learned their lesson and decided this time around, they were not going to publish hacked materials that may have come from an Iranian government actor. And again, we'll put a

pin in that and discuss that more later. What is your sense of why the handling this time appears to have been so different from the handling back in 2016? I think the point that you made is essentially right. And that's kind of half of the story. I'll get to the second half in a moment. But the first half of the story is the media has locked themselves into this narrative. I don't mean to say they've said this explicitly, but the kind of vibe in 2016 or 2017 was, oh, on the part of a huge number of liberals was, oh, Trump won because of election interference from the Russians. Now, if you actually break down the data and look at that,

I don't think there's a lot of evidence. Yeah, not the case. But that was the vibe. And when the media affirms that, then they lock themselves into that rationale. And so then when you have another foreign interference case like this, well, we've already gone pot committed for this narrative before. So I guess we have to follow through with it in the next case. And that happens to be about a Republican. It's very strange, very surreal to see these publications, democracy dies in darkness. I mean, some of the most stridently liberal and resistance figures being like, nope, we can't use this thing about JD fans. It's surreal. This is completely aside from why I published it,

because I just generally think if something's about a public official and it relates to policy, that's fair game. But it's just bizarre to watch. As to the second dimension that I mentioned before, I think that that is much more insidious and one that's not being talked about very much. There has been, and I've reported on this on my sub stack the last five months or so that we've run it, on the obsession with foreign influence campaigns, including disinformation. They have set up new offices across the federal government to focus on this

purported problem. Now, I don't deny that it exists. I don't deny that the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese are doing this. I take the intelligence community's assessments at their word, at least in broad strokes. But the efficacy of those programs, there's almost no evidence to suggest that they're broadly efficacious. It's also very selective.

It's only the official bad guys that we get upset about when they're interfering in our elections. There's been quite a bit of reporting, including by Haaretz and the New York Times, about Israeli official government influence operations, and those don't get the same level of national security state scrutiny, to say the least. Exactly.

So setting all that aside for a moment, the media sees that, and frankly, it's scary to them. I mean, when I worked at The Intercept, I got a number of the tertiary documents early, and I wanted to just publish the underlying documents, and they balked, because I don't remember how it was described exactly, but there was clearly concern about just the whole, there's just this ambience around national security and the FBI, and oh God, what do we do? And so I really think that part of this, which is not talked about, is that when the government obsesses with foreign influence campaigns, and you saw it in the case of this ridiculous,

those tenant media guys, and I mean, it's just so ridiculous. And obviously I'm fine with DOJ prosecuting that. Nope, I mean, that makes sense. But you look at the actual numbers of the videos and you guys get more views than them in like a week than they did in an entire year. I mean, these are not huge operations. And again, I would like for them not to happen,

but to just throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, you know, we've got to stop doing news and giving the public access to things for fear of this abstract thing, which again, there is no evidence that it has swung in a presidential election before. There just isn't. And there's a lack of evidence that it swung elections down ballot either. And so you can both think it exists and think it's bad, but then have a sort of rational and proportional response to it, which doesn't include this just freak out about it, you know, just upending American society. Like that's not easy to do. Our own politicians can't propagandize us effectively. Do you know how hard that is? Do you know how hard that is culturally to do that from a different?

I always think about that too. I mean, billions of dollars will be spent on this election trying to move the needle by a half a percentage point. And yet somehow people will be convinced that a handful of poorly worded, like awkward Russian memes through the election to Donald Trump in 2016

is like, all right, guys. It's also a real paternalism about deciding what you think the public can handle, what information you think the public is allowed to have access to. If it's accurate information and it's newsworthy, you know, to me, that's that's sort of the bar and the standard. And I think that's you know, that's what you've articulated as well. Just very quickly, you know, is it your sense? I put this up on the screen while you're talking. But is it your sense that these were documents that were hacked by the iranian government that's been sort of suggested but not definitively you know asserted the trump campaign certainly seems to

suggest that we also just got this news that a federal grand jury has indicted multiple iranian nationals for their involvement in a plot to hack and steal non-public materials from former President Trump's campaign. Could be that what you received, this J.D. Vance vetting document, could have been among those non-public materials that were hacked by Iranian nationals. What is your sense or what is your view of that? That's my guess, yes. But I'm glad that you pointed out that this is just a possibility. There's been a lot of sloppy media coverage around this. I've read the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That's the agency that oversees the whole intelligence community. And their statements, if you read them carefully, they have said that there is malicious cyber activities from the Iranian-connected directed at, and they even named Trump, which is unusual, but they won't say which. There's no specifics as to which articles, which hacks, what specific information. And so that would certainly apply to all of this and what I'm working with. So it makes sense. But the truth is we just don't know. And we have to be careful with it, not just in the abstract, because going back to 2016,

for example, there were Russian state backed hacks of democratic information. But there was at the exact same time, contemporaneously, a hack of Hillary Clinton's emails by just some random, I'm trying to remember what country it was, Romanian national. I think he went by the handle Guccifer. And it came out that he was just some dude that was just like, didn't like Hillary Clinton. It was like, I'm going to hack into her emails. And he did it.

And any reasonable observer at that time, I probably would have just assumed, yeah, it's probably the Russians because that's what they're doing too. But the world is complicated and chaotic and there's so many different things. So, you know, gun to my head, would I guess it's Syrians?

Yeah, I would guess that. But I don't know. And I'm guess that. But I don't know. And I'm careful to say that I don't know. And I resent that when you were careful to try to get the facts right, people were like, oh, are you trying to defend the Iranians? No, we just don't know. And I'm trying to be careful with that, you know? Yeah, absolutely.

All right. So let's move on to the subsequent events which have made you a central part of this story, which is that after you publish this uh dossier and you posted about it and link to the sub stack your sub stack where the dossier was posted um you were banned by elon musk and i want to put up on the screen um you posted this as is also from your sub stack um i want to put up here the reason that they gave you. And so you, it says your account has been suspended for violating the X rules due to a user report specifically for violating our rules against posting private information. You may not publish or post other

people's private information without their express authorization and permission. So they're asserting that they took down your account and, by the way, banned people from even linking to your sub stack because effectively of doxing. You publish this entire report, including some information about J.D. Vance, including a portion of his social security number, an email address, and a home address. So first of all, just give me your reaction if you think that's really the reason why Twitter has suspended your account and is banning the linking to this report, and also your rationale for why you didn't take out those private personal details. Okay. So first of all, I think that's a pretext. Of course, Elon is not going to come and say, we don't like his politics. He's criticizing the guy I gave a

bunch of money to and we're going to get rid of him. They have to come up with something else. And every time I've done a high profile story, this is what happens. They find some detail to try to make the story about that. Now, I'll explain in a moment why we decided to publish what we did, which included what you said. But first of all, I want to point to something that was really weird and interesting in that screenshot that you showed viewers describing my suspension from Twitter. So it, of course, includes the link to the advanced dossier, but includes a second one. And nobody seems to have noticed this

It's really important the second tweet foreign influence operate is me saying foreign influence operations are a joke And if you think they can swing an election the presidential election You need to take a deep breath and it links to my story making that case There is no private information in that tweet that was articulating the point that we've just been talking about this past few minutes And it's very interesting that that was included in the ban because because there's no, again, there's no private information to speak of. It's just making the case that I said before, which I think is uncontroversial, but which there's currently, I think, a sort of moral panic around that the government is going to, that some foreign government is going to redirect an election, and which social media companies are terrified of

getting called in front of Congress and asked questions about and drilled about and are making every effort to look like they're complying with what the federal government wants, which I think is problematic. And so I really want to know why they included that, because those are the only two emails listed. Again, that was just an analysis piece. I think I interviewed a couple people, but there were no documents. And so that makes the point that I want to make with all this, which is that these companies are terrified of having the government say, hey, you didn't respond sufficiently to this threat after the election doesn't go one party's way or the other's way.

And to the point about the addresses and the partial social security number, all of that information is publicly available. It is not factually true to say that that you can say informally, you can say sort can say informally that that's private information. But media companies buy it for research. I could go on my computer right now and in two minutes pull up an address, pull up any of this information they're talking about. Journalists do it all the time. Corporations are selling this stuff. Those people running for office preside over a legal system which does not regulate that kind of information, so it's out there in the open.

You can literally Google and find all of those addresses that were listed on there. The reason we did this, and it was intentional, was because the whole point of the story is that we are tired of adhering to these norms that exist to deprive people of information, and it felt dishonest to decide, oh, but we're going to do this. For a public figure who's running for vice president, who the media has done segments of in front of his house, including last week, like including on the house, like the address label, like in front of the door. So I think that this entire thing is a tempest in a teapot. And to the extent that people are, oh, I sympathize with this kind of thing. He's not a private individual. He's not at that house. That's not how this works. He's going around campaigning. And I guess more generally, I'm just frustrated by there's a

mission creep that exists when the media is like, oh, you can't do this, you can't do that. And then I was going through the document and thinking about this. And it occurred to me, there's all kinds of addressed stuff for businesses. Does that count as something you'd redact? And then for associates businesses. And it's kind of like this whole game that I just, I have played it in the past. I'll be candid about that. But at a certain point, I'm just like, what is the point of any of this if this is a public figure that has a security detail and is facing less, you know, it's just, so it's kind of a philosophical point. And I understand that I'm probably in the minority there,

but that is the philosophical position that we have on freedom of information. So let me lay on the counter case and you can, you know, you can respond to it. So the counter case would be, listen, he may not be there, but his family is. And yes, this information, if you want to dig and find his address, there's no doubt that

you can. But you know, as public figures, you and I being less of public figures than JD Vance, but still being public figures, you know, if it takes a few hoops for people to jump through to find my home address, I prefer it that way. Because you're just going to end up with a little bit less crazy at your doorstop and your mailbox, etc. If you make it widely available, you open up the funnel. So you're likely to get a little more weirdness at your doorstep. That's that's one piece. And then, of course, this is all in the context of his running mate having just gone through two different assassination attempts. And then the other piece is,

it's hard to argue that a partial social security number and a home address have any sort of news value. So why not just err on the side, which is kind of standard practice, as I think you would acknowledge, of just taking those details out, since they really aren't important, newsworthy details for the public.

What's your response to that? I spent a long time interrogating my views on, because this whole story is about what I said before, media paternalism and you know, the media knows best, this kind of thing. And at a certain point I'm just like, how do I'm still,

if you're drawing a line somewhere, you're ultimately guessing and you're doing that. And it felt hypocritical in the context of the story that we're doing, which is like a response to media paternalism to be like, oh, but we know about this. And and I considered the, you know, knock on effects. And I thought, you know, a home. And then, I mean, it's that you can't tell what the Social Security number is. I think half of it is redacted. That's why it's in the report.

That's how they were able to get it. And that was ultimately my view. It just felt fake. It felt phony to say, hey, media doesn't know best, then we know best. So let me put this up on the screen from Glenn Greenwald, who was broadly supportive of you and has been fairly consistent on freedom of speech issues, you know, whether it was Hillary Clinton or the Hunter Biden laptop. We'll talk more about the Hunter Biden laptop and potential hypocrisy with the handling or the treatment of that

from the right. Or, you know, with regard to pro-Palestine speech, like he's been fairly consistent. So he says there's no question the Vance report that was published did contain information that should have been redacted prior to publication, including Vance's home address. But not only that, the solution is to take that down, repost a redacted version and reinstate Ken's account. What is your opposition to, you know, you wouldn't even have to necessarily take this version down, just posting a separate version that doesn't have those details, and then linking to that on Twitter. And that way, you're kind of calling Elon's bluff of like, all right, well, if it's really about this, quote unquote, doxing, here's a version that has all the details that you want stripped down, stripped down. Now, am I good to go? And you know, if the answer is yes, okay,

that's one thing. If the answer is still no, then the ideological motivation behind this action becomes even more clear. Yeah, it's funny you say that, because that is exactly what we were planning to do shortly. Oh, really? Yeah, and to put the onus on him and still have that document available, because there's all kinds of ways that you can host things. But then say, oh, okay, well, so Elon, so this is all about that. Then what's this about? I think what you'll find is that it's gonna show that this whole thing wasn't about that. It was about the hack of a political candidate

whom he has given large sums of money in hopes that he'll win. So I guess we'll see what happens. We will see what happens. Oh, we got a little breaking news from you. I appreciate that. Let me get you to respond directly to what Elon said here. He describes this as one of the most egregious, evil doxing actions we've ever seen. Presidential candidates are not speculatively in danger. There have already been two attempts on Donald Trump's life. Moreover, the doxing included detailed information on the addresses of their children. So what is your response to Elon's commentary here, specifically saying this was an evil, one of the most egregious evil doxing actions

that he has ever seen? Well, this is the same guy that said that somebody posting public information about the location of his private jet are assassination coordinates. So am I surprised that he's being a little hysterical here? No, that's who he is. I mean, I hope that people recognize it's hysterical and that these comments come in the context of these other crazy things he said about us. I mean, these billionaires, they want a degree of privacy that nobody else has.

That's the point of this. This information, anybody with a Nexus account can access literally in 10 seconds. Corporations have it. The media has it. The one audience that can't seem to have access to it is regular people. And that's frustrating to me. I understand that this is sort of an abstract point that I'm making, but I don't know. A lot of people disagree with me. A lot of my friends disagree with me, but I'm just trying to candidly articulate what my point of view on it is. I mean, I don't want anybody to get hurt. I don't want anybody to get threatened. And when we published it, my honest guess was that they wouldn't. And I'm frustrated that he says that this plays into these threats. The threat matrix, as I've reported, as I've gone

on the show to talk about, exists because of the breakdown of the national security state that is pushing this entire threat inflation ideology in the first place. The fact that a shooter can even get on a roof, that is a profound failure on the part of these agencies. It is not speech that's causing these things to happen. And the insinuation that that's kind of the catalyst for this is very dangerous and takes the onus off of these ridiculously incompetent agencies to do the most basic function of their job, which is protect current and former presidents. And so, yeah, it really pissed me off. So one of the responses that resonated with me, and just to be candid, like, I would not have included those details. I don't think it's the biggest deal in the world that you did. As you said, this is,

you know, largely publicly, it is publicly available if you search for it. But I would not have made that choice. I'm also not a journalist. But one of the things that I thought was important to note is, you know, the right and musk specifically made a big deal of the fact that the information on that that was um you know taken from the hunter biden laptop that that was blocked on twitter that you couldn't share it you couldn't even dm it if you shared it even you accounts are getting banned just from sharing links to this information and um you know that was described by the right as election interference and you know i was sympathetic to that i don't think it you know, that was described by the right as election interference. And, you know, I was sympathetic to that. I don't think it, you know, through the election for Joe Biden, but I don't think that it was the right choice that was made there in terms of, you know, in the interest of free speech and in the interest of, you know, public having all of the information they possibly can to make an important decision about who they're going to vote for for president of the United States. But Lee Fong, who, you know, we both know and who's a former colleague of yours, says the Hunter Biden laptop, which had newsworthy info that was fair game, also had personal docs

info far more than this Vance doc. The Biden laptop had bank and credit cards, personal addresses, nudity, et cetera. You can still link to those Biden docs on X, but the Vance doc link is banned, question mark. And I do think that sort of exposes the ideological motivation here, which again, I mean, I shouldn't be surprised to anyone. Elon Musk is one of the largest contributors to Donald Trump's campaign. As far as we know, he appears to run X explicitly as a platform to try to favor Donald Trump. Whether that's working for him or not is another question. But the very different approach to those two stories, to me, kind of gives up the game of the ideological motivations behind this banning.

And Lee has also noted, which I think is important note as well, you also didn't publish those details on Twitter. You provided a link to your sub stack where those details were available. And that's also a different approach than has been taken in the past. In the past, the standard has been, okay, if these public details, if these private details are published on Twitter,

that could get you banned. But if you're linking to something that links to something that has those details, as far as I know, that has never passed muster in terms of causing an account suspension. Yeah, the parallels with the Hunter Biden laptop case are so overwhelming. I saw a number of conservatives, including Nick Fuentes, of all people, defending me and saying, look, I don't like this communist guy or whatever, but this is wrong. And I was stunned because these are like, never in my, you know, most insane, like eating too much pizza before going to bed induced nightmares, would I have imagined that these types of people would be defending me. But I mean, honestly,

credit to them for actually having some measure of principle on some specific issue, because on this issue, they're right. And so I think that really speaks to it. And I don't know, I mean, what can you say? It's just so absurd, right? I mean, it's like a meme at this point, like, oh, yeah, quote, unquote, Elon Musk, free speech warrior. But it's like, I can't really think of a more kind of vivid rebuttal of that, of his self-style, what does he call himself, an absolutist on speech, than the thing that Republicans like him are most activated by, and doing basically the exact same thing. Yeah.

Last question for you, Ken, is about you personally. You know, Elon Musk is a very powerful individual, very wealthy individual, has a big microphone, megaphone in terms of running this platform. He also has a very devoted following. So, you know, he's been expressing a lot of concern about threats facing J.D. Vance and potentially Donald Trump, you know, as as this resulted in a larger number or an increased level

of direct threats to you, the way that you've been, you know, described as your actions described as evil, etc. Absolutely. And I'm not remotely worried about it because they're very noisy Elon fans. I've gone through this type of a news cycle before. It's never resulted in anything. I don't expect it to result in anything here. And that's another point I want to make. I've always been consistent on this. When people post the same information that I included in that dossier about me, I don't love it, but I've never once reported them. I've never complained about it. You can go through my comments. I've never said, hey, this person should be ejected from whatever the platform is, because I don't believe that that's true. I don't like it. I think it's unpleasant.

Say it's rude even, but to say that it's a threat, I mean, it's just so evocative of, again, this is a national security brain where you're looking at threat matrices and who's going to come and attack us and all these kinds of things. And I just, I don't think that's a healthy place for the society. And I think there's a creep where people's concept of what constitutes a threat. Look at the word doxing, for example, that has come to encompass so many things beyond what it initially meant, which it had a specific meaning initially. And now you see people throw that word around to describe anything. That's what Elon is playing into when he says, oh, you're doxing my jet or whatever. And it's like, where is the limit? This is going to keep, you know what I mean? Public individuals are going to keep exploiting people's understandable

empathy for these things, not realizing that they exist in a very different world than an ordinary private person does. I mean, they have private security. They don't live at the houses that they have listed or whatever. It's like a completely different situation, and I feel like they're exploiting it. And so I need to do a story on that, really. It's like the kind of sprawling counter-threat ideology and how it's encompassing more and more things, and it results in less speech,

and that's the thing I'm most concerned about. It's just this attitudinal shift on what is acceptable speech. Well, one thing I will say, Ken, is people may or may not disagree with the way you handled this, the decisions you made, et cetera. But I don't think anyone could disagree that you've been principled when each of these cases has come up. So, Ken, tell people where they can find you on sub stack since you, at least for now are not on Twitter.

If they want to support your work, my sub stack is Ken Klippenstein.com. All right, Ken, thank you for your time this morning. It's great to see you. Good talking to you, Crystal.

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