Tech Won't Save Us - The Right is Building Its Own Platforms w/ Jacob Silverman

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Jacob Silverman to discuss how the right-wing of the tech industry are funding media platforms like Rumble to reshape the political discourse and why they’re helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenge Joe Biden. Jacob Silverman is a journalist and the co-author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. He’s also the host of The Naked Emperor on CBC Podcasts. You can check out Jacob’s Substack.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Jacob wrote about Rumble as a MAGA platform, why tech is boosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revolutionary war reenactors getting caught up in Facebook’s purge of militia groups, and David Sacks.Mark Zuckerberg chose to go easy on Alex Jones and other right-wing figures on Facebook.Trump Media may be going public via a SPAC merger.Darren Blanton was involved in a scheme to keep Black voters from the polls.Wendy Siegelman put together a chart of the connections between Rumble, Trump Media, and other groups.Rumble went public via SPAC in 2022.Brandy Zadrozny wrote about RFK Jr. and his views for NBC News.Support the show

you need to have some alternative or like you need to get Evgeny Morozov on the phone and have him design a new tech industry for you or something like because right now the right-wingers are trying to do it however self-servingly and clumsily. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is returning friend of the show, Jacob Silverman. Jacob is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. He's also an independent journalist who's written for a bunch of different publications and the host of the Naked Emperor on CBC Podcasts. Now, Jacob recently wrote an article in The Nation about Rumble, this right-wing video platform that you may have heard of or may not have heard of that

is becoming increasingly influential, not just in the right, but beyond that as well, as it uses, you know, the money that it has to bring on a lot of popular, especially right wing, but also to a certain degree, people who would traditionally identify themselves as being on the left, but have kind of caught on to this big kind of trend of conspiracy theories over the past few years, whether it's anti-vax or a number of other things, or they claim to be on the left but frequently attack liberalism, and their critiques line up very well with the right wing, so they're convenient allies for them to have. And of course, they don't often do much criticizing of the right itself. So in this conversation, I wanted to

understand what this platform was all about, why it seems to be doing well when so many other kind of right-wing efforts to start social media platforms have failed. Things like Parler, for example, or Truth Social, you know, it's still out there, but no one really uses it. And also how these people on the right who have a lot of money are able to deploy that capital to make kind of media projects get attention even if they don't have a business model that makes sense right unlike the left where there's not all of this money that's just easily available and can fund these media initiatives on the right there are a bunch of very wealthy funders who will fund a bunch of things to keep

them going to try to make them influential even if they're not actually making money, right? And so I thought that this was an interesting case study for us to explore further because Jacob also has done a lot of investigation into the types of people who are on the platform, the people who are funding the platform, the relationships between all those people, and the relationships between those those people, and the relationships between those people and kind of the MAGA republicanism, kind of the right wing extremism that has been growing in the United States, but you know, obviously, many other parts of the world as well. But in this conversation, we focus on the US. And so I think that this is particularly

important, because it's not only discussing the social media platform, it's not only discussing the US, right, but the growing connections between the tech industry as it makes its right wing shift. And, you know, all of these other things that we're talking about. So for me, obviously, I love having Jacob on the show, I think that you as the listeners, you know, if you've been listening for a while, the feedback I get is that you like to hear Jacob as well, whether we're talking about cryptocurrency, or the right in Silicon Valley. And after speaking to him earlier this year about the Silicon Valley bank collapse,

I figured it was a good time to have him back on the show to explore another aspect of how the right wing in the tech industry is kind of helping to push that political movement into the mainstream. So if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into

making the show every single week, so I can keep having these critical conversations, so we can keep exploring, you know, the real impact of the tech industry on our lives, you can join supporters like Lessig from the USA, Ann Petticolas in Austin, Texas, and Catherine in Brooklyn by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Jacob, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, how are you? I'm well, thank you. Thanks for coming back.

Thanks for having me. Always. I'm always excited to chat with you, whether it's about crypto or, you know, the right wing politics of the industry. You were last on to talk about, I think it was Silicon Valley Bank back earlier this year when that all imploded. But you have a new piece in The Nation looking at Rumble, which is, you know, this kind of right wing video platform that has really been taking off in recent years. And, you know, if people are not on the right, maybe they haven't been over there. Maybe they haven't watched it. Maybe they're not super familiar with it, but it's increasingly influential. So I thought it would be good to dig into that

with you in this conversation because there's so much around it we can talk about too. And before we talk about this specific platform, I wanted to ask you about this broader narrative that we hear that kind of informs why it exists, right? You know, the right has been saying for years that they're being silenced online, and that these platforms are like out to get them. Is this even true? And where did this notion come from? It's interesting, I think it actually has a kernel or angle of truth. But it's been very much lost in public discourse, even just in mainstream publications, and of course, in the right-wing persecution complex, which really predates Trump or the alt-right or these online forums we're talking about. But a claim towards victimization and persecution has been a staple, I think, of the right-wing toolkit and sort of cultural landscape and how they perceive themselves and present themselves for a long time. What I think has changed in recent years with some of

these online platforms and the claims of censorship is that the right wing in the United States, I'm just going to focus on the U.S., has been pretty radicalized. And the Overton window or sort of the standard deviation of what a stock Republican or right-wing political actor or voter is, has moved to the right. And I'm sure there's adequate scholarship backing that up, but we've also very much seen it happen in public. And then what I say in the article is that it's almost like because a lot of right-wing political expression has become overtly racist or transphobic or homophobic or conspiratorial in certain ways, or kind of rooted in the big lie, as they say about the

election or other forms of disinformation, that is running up against the content policies of some of these platforms. Now, from another angle, you can argue that, and this is part of the conservative argument, I think, is that these content policies are too restrictive and the platforms like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter have gotten too censorious and also too close to the government as not really shown in the Twitter files, but we don't really get it. But I think what's happening here though is, you know, there's potential aspects of both. Certainly, you've had people on the show talk about content moderation. I mean, these are crude systems. They're very exploitative, of course, towards the human moderators. They don't work very well. They don't scale very well. But when you add policies against hate

speech and against transphobia, for example, or against COVID misinformation or disinformation, which was a choice by a lot of these platforms, and then those same kinds of expressions are standard for conservative right-wing Americans, then of course they're going to feel censored and persecuted because things that they like to say about ivermectin cures COVID will be not allowed on a platform. And of course, there are specific arguments to be made about some of these topics, like should COVID misinformation be so heavily policed like that? You know, the difference between misinfo and disinfo by some standards is misinformation is kind of accidental. Disinformation is often knowingly or, you know,

crafted by some sort of actor or state actor, perhaps. So perhaps we need to police disinformation more than the average middle American who's tweeting ivermectin cures COVID because they just think that. So those are the kinds of dynamics that I see in play. I think there are problems with content moderation and policy at the policy level and at the implementation level. But I also think that you have a right wing and a sort of MAGA set that has been mostly radicalized and traffics in kind of open bigotry. And that's going to create a problem for them when platforms want to have, I guess, a safe space for the bulk of their users and for advertisers. Absolutely.

And I think it's so interesting that you describe it that way too, right? Because I feel like one thing that we saw like in the kind of maybe the earlier 2010s is that, you know, I guess the right hadn't been radicalized to such a degree, but also, you know, the kind of the hammer of content moderation wasn't necessarily always as strong. And especially

when we move into the mid-2010s, you have more of a radicalization happening on the right. You also have the platforms feeling like they need to up their moderation game because there's a lot of focus on Facebook and on the election and on the Brexit campaign and the impacts that all these things had and the questions as to whether these platforms are effectively moderating what is happening on them. And even with that, like, yes, there's a greater moderation that happens. But we also have the reporting from Facebook and these other companies that they're concerned about, say, kicking someone like Alex Jones off the platform because it'll really piss people off. Right. And you still have like Republican and right wing people high up in these companies that are suggesting like you can't do

too much to kind of impinge on these people's ability to say whatever they want or kick them off the platform because then that would like, you know, cause chaos and you'd have the entire right coming after you. But there was still a need to do some degree of additional content moderation to kind of address what was happening in these spaces. And then that really seems to come to a head during the pandemic moment when you have both a further radicalization, but also kind of a scaling up in the content moderation that's happening in that moment. Even I remember early in the pandemic, I had like a tweet blocked or my account was like suspended or something on Twitter for a short

period of time because I tweeted about Bill Gates and vaccines, you know, not to say that he was putting microchips in us, but because, you know, the vaccine apartheid discussions that were happening at the time, and that was just automatically flagged and I was suspended for it. Right. So you can see how these things were kind of affecting people in a greater degree as you're talking about just targeting, like kind of going with a broad brush and trying to hit people. But then you have this reaction. And I feel like that's also part of what motivates Musk to go after Twitter, because he is feeling like the types of things that he's increasingly interested in, the people that he's following are interested in, are getting caught up in these moderation systems.

No, very much so. I think that dynamic dynamic and I think pegging it, I mean, there are different inflection points or sort of important milestones. 2016 election, certainly, I mean, a lot changed after that and across tech. Beginning of COVID is worth, I think, just noting, as you said, because, yeah, you had both a radicalization of a lot of people towards state authority and anything from curfews to businesses being shut down and things like that and vaccine mandates. But also, you know, people really were figuring this stuff out online or trying to and getting their information online. And meanwhile, you do have some authorities who weren't always reliable. Like, I can't honestly tell you what

mistakes the CDC made. Oh, first they'd said you don't need to mask. And then they did. I know there were some things like that. Like I know that public health authorities made some, some mistakes and especially in messaging, probably some good faith ones and probably some bad faith ones too. But I also am not, was not someone who was sort of obsessing over that kind of thing. I guess I was, I mean, I was pretty focused on COVID protocols and things like that, but it's understandable, I guess, is what I'm trying to say that some of these people who are very invested in, you know, what's happening with COVID, I guess I would describe myself as like a COVID normie in terms of like my media consumption, like I try to, during the height of COVID, I tried to read the times and abide by best practices and wear a mask

and things like that. But I wasn't like lab leak, ivermectin, or even just like the natural questioning of authority and power and what's going on here that anyone should be asking, not just in a conspiratorial sense. Like, that was not one of my focuses. But for people who were very engaged in that kind of stuff online, even in the way of talking about vaccine apartheid, which is, of course, an important issue, they were easily caught up in these systems. And it's not like you can call Twitter and say, hey, what's up? I wrote an article a couple years ago for the New Republic. I mean, it's a little lighter in nature, but it was about revolutionary war reenactment groups, specifically, then they call themselves like, you know, the something,

something militia from Pennsylvania or whatever. And because of, you know, the posts, well, really the post January 6th crackdown on militia content on Facebook, they all started getting booed off Facebook. And they're like, look, we just like to dress up in costumes and like hold old muskets. And like, it's incredibly like endearing. And like, it's like a Ren Faire D&D level of nerdery, like, oh, this is so sweet. And it was a definite community of these folks, these different kind of reenactment groups who sometimes meet up

and they were totally reliant on Facebook. And a couple of them, I was able to get their accounts restored because I emailed the PR department of the company, though now you can't even do that with Twitter. So it's just, this speaks also to the systems that these companies have built, which is like, maybe if you have a sad story and go viral, or you talk to a sympathetic journalist who can email Facebook or Twitter PR and say, why is this Revolutionary War group banned?

You might get somewhere. But, you know, I hear from people all the time still who are like, a gamer who talks to me about games and politics a little bit on Twitter in Georgia, he texted me the other day. He's like, hey, I got banned from Twitter. I have no idea why. And like, no recourse. You know, this speaks to how these systems can't scale, how like maybe these public squares are too big or at least too big for these kinds of companies as currently constructed to handle or manage. And certainly everything got far worse once Musk took the helm. Absolutely. And so these are kind of what we're talking about are platforms that people are much more familiar with, right? The Facebooks, the Twitters of the world that a lot of people use. But there's also been a move to create specific platforms for

specific communities. And of course, the right has been very engaged in this, especially, I would say, since, you know, 2016 and kind of the Trump era and all this kind of stuff. Right. And of course, the article that you wrote for The Nation was about rumble in particular, which I feel like, you know, people have heard of like parlor and gab. I feel like rumble is one that maybe fewer people have actually encountered. Like it's not one that I'm as familiar with, even though I've heard of it a number of times because I know people like Glenn Greenwald are on there, but you know, what is this platform? How does that actually work and where did it come from? Yeah, so there's been this alt-tech movement, as it's sometimes called, for years now, really. And some of it, again, is rude and very understandable principles of who wants to

give more business to Amazon or to Google Cloud or whatever. But it's also, there are political principles behind it. We want our own infrastructure. We don't want to be censored. We don't want to rely on liberal companies whose policies we don't like, things like that. Rumble started about 10 years ago, I believe, in Canada. It's always Canada, man. It's this guy, Chris Pavlovsky, and he has a co-founder and some other people around him. He was a young Canadian entrepreneur. I believe he's still in his mid-30s. And he was sort of a serial entrepreneur. You can see videos of him speaking at tech conferences and doing the, this is how I failed on this and that. And there's a story that he tells about going to India to do some sort of

fintech startup and it failed because he knew nothing about India or fintech. And you're just like, I mean, he tries to approach it lightly, but you kind of feel for the whoever got whoever in India might have gotten roped into that, you know, but it's all supposed to be part of his startup journey. And, and ultimately, he started kind of an IT outsourcing company called Cosmic, or Cosmic Development. As far as I can tell, they do all kinds of things from I think, content moderation, app development, or websites. And Chris is I can tell, they do all kinds of things from, I think, content moderation, app development, or websites. And Chris is, I believe he was born in Canada, but his parents are members of the Macedonian diaspora. He's very involved in that world and in a cultural and business organization for people from Macedonia. And you can see he's gone to conferences

there and stuff like that. So he eventually set up offices for his company in Macedonia. And I think there's one in Serbia as well for this Cosmic development. I honestly couldn't tell you numbers about how well it's done, but it's been a going concern for more than a decade. And that preceded Rumble. So what happens is he and a couple of the guys from Cosmic start Rumble as this video platform in sort of the early 20-teens. And the idea at the time seemed to be

they were going to give a little more power to creators and offer them a bit better revenue sharing, ad sharing revenue than YouTube was offering. And that was the main sell for a while. It wasn't ideological. It wasn't about free speech, which some folks argue isn't ideological. It had none of the political character

we're talking about now, really. As far as I can tell, it kind of puttered along. It had some interaction with his other business, with Cosmic. Cosmic provided moderation services, and I think still might, for Rumble. So I think there's a way in which he's benefited from having, and he said this in some of his public talks, from having basically this other business, parts of which are based overseas, and maybe that saves on labor.

And there's been some synergy there, I guess you could say. And then really Rumble's pretty quiet until about 2019 or so when MAGA World starts discovering it. Some of the early people to join were Devin Nunez. And tell us who Devin Nunez is. Sure. Devin Nunez is a former congressman who is very sort of loyal MAGA-ist who got involved with some of kind of the dirty tricks of trying to unmask supposed spying on the Trump campaign and stuff like that. He doesn't have the best reputation, but then he moved on to be, and he still is, the CEO of Trump Media, the company that's trying to merge with a SPAC in South Florida and go public, and whose deadline is approaching, I believe. So there are some connections here, actually, between the Rumble world and the Trump Media

world. And actually, this didn't make it into the article, or it might be a parenthetical, but there's this guy, Vladimir Novachky, who's another Macedonian who is a friend of Pavlovsky and works for Cosmic Development as a C-suite executive, I believe CTO. And he has a similar position at Trump Media. And he's barely mentioned actually. And that's one reason why it didn't really make it into the article very much because, I mean, first of all, no one at Rumble would answer my emails and Novachky didn't answer my messages. But it seems like cosmic development and Rumble kind of like helped fill out some of the tech infrastructure that people were looking for to create a MAGA media

network. And that's how I kind of feel, see what happened, which is that around 2020, actual investments started flowing in. So you have Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and this guy, Darren Blanton, who's not as well known, but Blanton runs something called Colt Ventures in Texas. It's a VC firm, but the guy is obsessed with horses. I joke sometimes that he's a horse semen connoisseur. I mean, he does breed horses for racing and like, you know, buys horse semen at incredible prices. And so that's why his VC firm is called Colt Ventures. But like, you know, he's this billionaire in Dallas. More importantly, he's close to Bannon.

He was on the board of Wang Guo's or he has a bunch of different names, but the Chinese spy slash businessman slash grifter who was just charged in New York with fraud, who is Bannon's close associate. They were both on the, Guo Wengi, excuse me. They were both on the board of his media company, Bannon and Darren Blanton. And as some people know, Bannon was, for one of his arrests, was arrested on the yacht of Guo Wengi. So there are a lot of connections here with sort of dark money, dirty tricks, MAGA world, you know, and the billionaires who fund this stuff. Blanton is linked to, and there's a long piece in Bloomberg that I encourage people to read, this sort of voter suppression operation that targeted Black voters, very well funded by Blanton.

Might have to throw it in allegedly or two here, but some of this is chronicled in the January 6th investigation. It's written about in Bloomberg and elsewhere, but basically Flynn, this former Navy SEAL guy who was a supposed computer wizard, and Blanton tried to run this online advertising campaign to discourage black people from voting at all

or to vote Trump. And he was paid by the Trump campaign several hundred thousand dollars to do that. There are records of that. So these are the lead investors, Thiel, now Senator J.D. Vance, and this guy, Darren Blanton. There are other people who come in later, but that's when I think you really start seeing the shift is in 2020. An open question for me and one I frankly wasn't able to solve, but would still like to. I mean, Devin Nunez doesn't talk to reporters really, but I would like to know kind of how that money first came in. Like how did Peter Thiel and company decide on Rumble? Like, okay, we're going to take this kind of middling startup that no one really knows about. That's just this Canadian

video startup that shows skateboarding videos and stuff. And we're going to pour millions into this thing, hundreds of millions of dollars, and make it a real attempt at a video platform competitor to YouTube and others. So that's something I'm not really sure. But you can see those connections there that someone like Nunez came in early and then Ren and Paul. You know, eventually over the next couple of years, it started getting folded into all these Republican personalities, media strategies. Absolutely. Like, it's fascinating to hear you explain all that. And I imagine like that meme of like the guy at the board, like drawing the links between all the different, you know what, what I'm talking about? Like, I imagine you just doing that, like drawing all these connections between the rumble and the MAGA world and like all this kind of stuff.

There's a lady named Wendy Siegelman who's on Twitter, who's done some of that too. And like, I was actually, I looked at something that she did. Cause I think she was the one maybe who found that guy, Vladimir Novotsky. Cause in one of the filings for, it's either for the Trump media or for the SPAC they're merging with, I'm sorry, I don't quite remember offhand. They list two key employees, and it's like the General Counsel of Trump Media or something like that. And this guy, Nowaczki, who's the CTO, which you think is important, but this is like a designation in an SEC filing. There really is something happening here in terms of a coming together of money and talent and kind of politics and cooperation between various companies. And also worth noting, both cases using SPACs. The Trump company is such a mess and is under multiple

government investigations that I don't know if the SPAC will ever happen. They basically have to have approval to merge with this shell company and go public. That's what Rumble did last year. And so Rumble went public at, I think, about a $2 billion market cap. And they've sort of fluctuated up and down. But the insiders were instantly made very rich, at least on paper. The people they've been hiring, I don't know, actually, if they've given stock options or stock grants to talent. I asked Glenn Greenwald once on Twitter.

He denied that he was getting any stock. You know, I didn't ask like, you know, is there an LLC that you benefit from that's getting stock or something like that? But he said no. But we know that all the executives, including people from Maga World, who are now work at the company, Havlovsky is still the CEO. He still has some of his buddies there. But it's sort of you have like the top lawyer and the company secretary and other people are people who worked in the Trump White House and stuff like that. And all those people were given millions of dollars worth of compensation. And they are in a lockup period, I believe. And it'll be interesting to see what happens, because I believe in September, at least for the CEO, Pavlovsky, who's right now a billionaire on

paper, his lockup period ends. And it'll be interesting to see what happens. He'll want to sell, but how much will he? Will he try to slow play it to not tank the price? There's a short selling firm that I mentioned in the article that released a report basically calling bullshit on Rumble and saying, their ad network sucks, their numbers are faked, they're not making any money. I mean, some of those things are verifiably true, like the not make any money part. So it's risen very quickly because they went public, they raised hundreds of millions of dollars, they raised around a pipe financing, which is like another bit of private equity, chocolate syrup on top of your SPAC or a sundae or whatever. I'm not sure if those investors are

all known, but they raised another $300 million doing that. So they have all this cash, or maybe it's $100 million, but then they have $300 total. But they have hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, but they've already pledged to spend more than $100 million on talent, they say. And they're losing 20, 30, maybe more million per year. So they're not making money, and they could easily burn through that pretty quickly. Plus, the stock, once people start selling in the fall, who knows? So that's sort of what I'm thinking about looking ahead is like, they've signed up a lot of people and a lot of conservative and kind of MAGA people, who had big audiences. But you got to be able to keep the lights on and sustain this thing beyond just when the

executives cash out. Definitely. And I think that's a good kind of pivot for us to move from what's happening behind the scenes and kind of, you know, on the money side of thing to what's happening in front of the camera, right? Because as you describe, this is a platform that really takes its kind of right-wing turn around 2019 and into 2020 as there's this kind of desire on the right to have their own platforms, but you also have this money flowing in from a number of different investors,

as you've been discussing, people like Teal and others. So what is kind of the nature of the type of people and the type of content that is being hosted on this platform? Because I feel like one of the things that stands out to me is that it seems like, at least in the beginning, it was a lot more kind of focused on, you know, explicitly kind of right wing talent and what is going on there. But it seems like over time, they've tried to expand into this kind of group of people who say that they're on the left, but actually repeat a lot of right wing talking points and conspiracy theories in order to kind of, I guess, grow the tent of this growing kind of extreme right movement. So what do we see

on the platform? Well, I think that's right. I mean, I wrote an article in the fall about David Sachs, the Elon's buddy and advisor, and very much a part of this, actually. I mean, he was one of the largest outside shareholders besides some of these big funds that invest in everything like Vanguard in Rumble. And then recently, they bought his podcast site called Colin, which I wrote about in the fall. It never really got a huge audience or kind of got more attention than audience perhaps. But it almost felt like Rumble and Sax's allies like Teal were kind of doing him

a solid. And he joined the Rumble board and they took his money losing podcast startup off his hands. But it had a similar idea and sensibility in some ways, like this new right of both like sensitive to MAGA, but also trying to attract disaffected leftists, or even people who like claim affiliation to with the left, but maybe are arguably not left in practice. So Rumble has very explicitly given multi million dollar deals to a lot of right wingers, like, at least according to CNN, they gave something like $9 million to Andrew Tate and people like Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle and Steven Crowder, who I opened my piece talking about,

and really some of the most popular streamers and MAGA people. Oh, another person I didn't mention earlier, Dan Bongino, say what you want about him, but big Fox News personality now, he's an investor. His stake in Rumble is worth a couple hundred million at least on paper. He was one of the early investors actually from kind of MAGA world, almost preceded Teal, I think. And he has his show on there. A lot of people are just sort of syndicating, but some people are getting a lot of money, you know, this pot of hundreds of millions of dollars that they plan to spend. And then, you know, they will tell you, hey, we have entertainment, we have people who claim to be leftists. And they do have some people like that, or people who are more heterodox. Glenn Greenwald is obviously the most prominent journalist on there. You have Russell Brand. And I mean, we can

go into like what they're doing and what kind of political purpose they might be serving or what their material kind of reflects. And I do mention that a little bit in the article. But you know, frankly, Glenn Greenwald is often a subject unto himself, and I didn't want it to be a Glenn Greenwald article. But I think it is notable, as I mentioned in my article, that this is the guy who broke the Snowden story and is Mr. Anti-Security State and Mr. Anti-Corporate Media. And Rumble could not be more corporate. It has venture capital from Peter Thiel. It went public via SPAC, which was like the shadiest corporate vehicle du jour for the last few years during the era of low interest rates. And everyone who works there pretty much is MAGA or MAGA line. I mean, they talk about free speech

a lot. But as I argue in the article, when you look at their content policies, I mean, they equate Antifa with the KKK. They ban anything about Antifa. They have pretty restrictive content policies, actually. So, you know, the free speech stuff, I argue, is kind of a canard. And the pretense of neutrality behind the scrim of just free speech, I also think is wrong. I mean, it's not necessarily the most important thing. But one of my arguments here really is like, look at the money, look at the talent, look at what they're promoting. And pretty much everywhere, it has to do with Republican or Trumpist politics. And I think that's pretty undeniable. So anyway, just to put a cap on the Greenwald thing, like, now you have Greenwald, the guy who represents certain things going to work

for a very corporate media company doing a cable news style show, which I thought he hated. And then funded by Thiel, whose company Palantir tried to, I believe, ruin Greenwald's career and create a rift between him and WikiLeaks more than 10 years ago. I mean, this is well known and Greenwald has written about it. And he'll say, well, I don't work for Peter Thiel or things like that. But like, that's the situation. Plus, the chief legal counsel is this guy, Michael Ellis. Michael Ellis is from the work for Devin Nunez. It's from like the Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen, Watnick, Devin Nunez world, who if you know those names, these are all kind of like the guys who I think actually Felix Biederman

was talking about them recently on Chopper. Like the guys were like kicked off the National Security Council and stuff because they're all just a little too shady or had their security clearances revoked or whatever else. But they kind of are aspiring dirty tricksters. Well, for a while, Michael Ellis was on, at least worked for the National Security Council. He also worked for Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee and helped write a report about the Snowden revelations and like how to mitigate them. I mean, to me, it's just mind boggling. And I'm also indebted to Gumby for Christ from Twitter for bringing this

to my attention initially, actually. But like this guy is the lawyer at the company. So say like they've had legal troubles. They decided to go dark in France rather than submit to some moderation or censorship, you know, and Greenwald likes to tout that. Good for them. Sure. But if, say, Glenn Greenwald actually reported a news story that challenged power or challenged Peter Thiel or the security state or anything else, like the guy defending him and his work on a corporate and legal level would be this former NSA. He also worked at the NSA briefly before the Biden administration basically forced him out. But it would be this former NSA, NSC intelligence official. It cannot be stranger. But those are the new kind of bizarre alliances that are happening. And whether it's changing politics or also a certain degree of denial, perhaps that maybe they have enough in common on being anti-war or anti-security state. Maybe that's true, but I don't fully buy it. And I think when you look at what's actually being preached every day, it's not diversity of

viewpoint, pro-free speech. It's pretty bog-standard, bag of politics from a lot of these people. I should also say that, you know, some of the kind of the other things that they added, they have extreme sports, they have gamers streaming, they have some music, they signed some hip hop artists, you know, they have people who who kind of cut against type and might not be like conventional liberals or conventional conservatives. But these feel like just a little kind of sprinkling of ideological talent diversity in what is largely an enterprise geared towards putting people like Stephen Crowder or Glenn Greenwald interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene for an hour in front of a lot of people.

That's really interesting. And like you say that one of the things that might bring them together is like anti-war or anti-surveillance or whatever, but i imagine a big part of it too is anti-woke uh whatever that word is gonna mean right yeah and all the culture war stuff i mean there's so much transphobia on there it's troubling like it's become very normalized and i guess i mean standard stuff on the right of course but like i don't know like you go on a site like that even from from, from YouTube or Twitter, or even Elon's Twitter, where it can be pretty bad. And you just realize like, this is just, it's so normal for them in some ways for it's become such a part. I don't even really like saying culture war because like, this is people's lives, you know, and, and their medical care and stuff. But, you know,

these kinds of issues have become so natural for them and basically in question. And a lot of the people who kind of like Greenwald or others, Russell Brand, who do the anti-woke stuff, essentially pay lip service to a lot of pretty upsetting transphobic stuff. And it's just, you know, they certainly don't care over at Rumble. I mean, they recently had a big live stream with Andrew Tate, but they don't seem to care. I've emailed them saying, do you care that one of your biggest talents is on house arrest for human trafficking and rape and organized crime?

And they don't respond. They bragged on Twitter about the size of his audience and that they were able to do it without Amazon Web Services. Like it was a technical achievement for them and reflected their independence. And that's what happens with this anti-woke stuff is that every criticism almost gets subsumed under it.

So you're either trying to censor or you're being woke, but sometimes you're like, no, I'm talking about like a violent person or the fact that I read in the article that their most polished sort of offering is this thing called Power Slap. It's from Dana White, the UFC guy. It's like grossly entertaining if you can watch a fighting sport or something but then like after five minutes it gets pretty disgusting because like a guy stands and they just they get one chance to slap their opponent as hard as they can and like people are frequently knocked out the guy just has to stand there and take it and then there's commentary and all this stuff and competition

and like if the guy can stand up he gets to slap the other guy back and it's horrible and they live in a house together it's the whole reality tv script and like but these are people who you feel like they kind of scraped off the sidewalk like some of these people really talk have some stories of trauma it's just it's rough and this is like one they're featured products that they pay for. And it's hosted by Dana White, who himself was filmed slapping his wife, I've seen the video, at a New Year's party in Mexico. I believe either beginning of this year or beginning of last year. You know, there's a lot of people who just straight up are abusers who are the on-air talent. I mean, Dana White is the host of the show. And that seems to go along with the fact that it's almost like, LOL, nothing matters, you know, or something like it's just like, or kind of trolling meets anti-wokeism. Like, they'll never take those kinds of critiques seriously. Like, well, what about the abusers? Or what about like the transphobia? Some things are really ugly, and not just provocative or trolling or challenging the status quo. But because the anti-wokest

philosophy can be so broad or just generalized, it doesn't matter. And that's what I really see on Rumble is like, they'll never apologize for Andrew Tate. They'll brag about their technical acumen. And that's as far as I think they'll ever really go until like, I don't know what happens. I'm sure he'll go to jail and they'll still broadcast him. Absolutely. And like the anti-woke language and kind of, you know, just what they're doing in general is a way to kind of justify and normalize an incredibly extreme right wing politics, you know, white nationalism, all the other kind of stuff that the right is increasingly pushing and trying to make people, you know, go toward or believe in. I was wondering as well, though, like you're talking about kind of how Rumble has had this success, right? Obviously, it has all this money from all this investment. It has become a very important platform, not just for like the MAGA right, but anyone who kind of wants to succeed on the right.

The idea is that you need to have some sort of connection to Rumble, whether you're hosting a show on it or you're going on the various shows that are on the network and have some relationship to this platform. We obviously saw other attempts to create right wing platforms in the past few years, things like Parler or Gab or even Truth Social that still continues to exist out there. But none of these platforms, I would argue, have been very successful in kind of making a real mark on the general conversation and becoming a platform where it felt like people really had to go. Like people pay attention to Donald Trump's truths over on Truth Social just to see

what he's saying, but like no one really cares about the platform otherwise. And Parler and Gab have kind of descended. So why did they not really work or take off? And why does it seem like Rumble is getting a lot more kind of notoriety and attention where they did not? Well, there's an interesting thing that happened to Parler. They were supposed to be bought by the artist formerly known as Kanye,

which is never going to really happen. But then they were bought by some kind of nameless tech concern. And they did kind of a logical thing. The new owner shut down the social network and they kept the data and the tiny cloud business, which I don't even know if it's a real thing, and basically took it for parts. And they posted something on Parler.com that said something to the effect of a conservative Twitter clone is not really possible in this day and age. And one thing I put in my article is I would argue that, you know, that's Twitter now or X as we now have to call it. And, you know, he's trying to do that Elon and you can see the effects, like it's breaking,

it's hemorrhaging users and advertisers and all that stuff. And it's just becoming an unpleasant place to be. But there is something to that idea. And from the cultural perspective, I think, and the social perspective, I don't know. People, while they're in their own bubbles, I think they still want to at least see some people unlike them. It's not very fun, I think, even for the right-wingers to just be surrounded by other angry right-wingers or QAnon conspirators. Like they want to troll us and journalists and stuff like that. And I think there are, you know, there are other practical things like I can go off on the role of media in some of this

stuff all day, but like journalists are sort of a catalyst for bringing attention to a platform, kind of taking things that are trending on a platform like Twitter and putting it into the news cycle and reporting on it. Like there is that symbiotic relationship a bit. So on these other platforms, you basically just have small audiences, mostly like-minded right-wingers, sometimes very extreme, and no one really from left of center, the mainstream, or like the media establishment. I think Gab is a disgusting place because it's run by a Christian nationalist who's openly anti-Semitic, but it's an interesting case study. I've written about it for the New Republic because he really believes in this alt-tech stuff,

Andrew Torba, and is really trying to create like a full technical infrastructure that can really survive as an alternative to AWS and PayPal and just like everything. I mean, he still has a ways to go, but he's committed to that. And like, I read his newsletter just because I want to know what this guy is up to. And like, he has this very strong Christian nationalist tech secessionist, like alternative economy type vision where like, we need the separate Christian economy, parallel economy. And what I think we find is like, yeah, you can try that. It's difficult.

And yeah, you're going to have your parallel thing. But these other companies, they need that mainstream crossover ability. And, you know, Getter got hacked and was run by Jason Miller, who then went to go work for Trump again. True Social is associated with Trump's failing media company and Parler was shut down.

What Rumble has to its advantage, I think, is that it has this huge infusion of money. It has some relatively mainstream conservatives and MAGA people on it. And it has video, which is a little more flexible and entertaining and monetizable than text. One problem is their ad network is terrible, actually, like that kind of their ad tech. This didn't make into the article also because it was rigorously fact checked. And I did not have a screenshot of this. But you have to take my word for it that when I was first going on Rumble a lot in the spring, there were lots of ads for ivermectin. But I never took a screenshot of the ivermectin ads. But like, it's exactly what you think. Like it's these terrible low grade ads for like ivermectin for gold and silver for like Sean Hannity telling you to buy silver. And it's often the same ad over and over again for days. So they're making so little money

that like, I don't see how they can really build up the kind of infrastructure they're talking about. I'm not sure how much they have the cosmic development connection and stuff, but I'm not sure how much their cloud business really exists beyond true social. So that's the ambition, I'd say. And somewhere in the middle, the collapsing Twitter and the somewhat rising Rumble will meet, and then maybe collapse again together. X Rumble will be the new platform. I think that's interesting though, right? Because it suggests that maybe part of the reason that Rumble is doing well and is really in the conversation right now is not so much that it's this huge, massive thing, but just because it has a lot of money so it can survive while losing a ton of money, at least for

now. But if that money dries up, then it might not kind of have the same experience. And it's, you know, it's possible because the right has these billionaires who have a ton of cash, who can just fund these things and make them influential, even if there's not like a serious business model kind of at their foundation. Yeah, that's true. Like you got to ask, are there right wingers, right wing billionaires, whether Thiel or other people who see this in their long term interests to have money losing online media venture with some potential reach? And I mean, that's how a lot of right wing, very ideologically motivated media has survived. Certainly a lot of the small magazines, I mean, Weekly Standard or some of those other small magazines were eventually chucked because like the owners get bored of losing money. But those are all kind of political projects, you know, and losing money is part of the bargain. One other thing that's

worth mentioning is Rumble is the official streaming partner of a Republican presidential primary debate that I believe is next month in August. So it'll be just interesting to see how that's presented and handled. I assume it'll be on cable news or network TV also. But, you know, like I said, like when you're doing that kind of alignment and bragging about it and like echoing the language of Andrew Tate and the Matrix and all this crap, like it's clear what's going on here, I think. But sometimes logging on to Rumble feels like logging on to Gab or something else where you're just like, hey, like, I want a few cute animal videos or like a music video mixed in with Steven Crowder yelling about how his wife shouldn't be allowed to divorce him or something like it certainly runs on these dominant currents of anger and reactionary feeling. And I think you even see that in Glenn Greenwald, who is a journalist

and does reporting and interviews people and stuff like that. I mean, I disagree with some of the things he says in his methods, but like, he runs on reactionary anger towards the democratic and liberal kind of establishment and status quo. And I think that's pretty recognizable. So that is not really a fun scene or tone to be constantly surrounded by. It certainly has its place, but it's a really loud bar playing like bad EDM or something. You know, it's someone yelling in your face all the time. And like, maybe if you're an angry bigot, you do want to watch three hours of Dan Bongino and Steven Crowder per day. But I don't know. And also, one other thing I'll add is that the

numbers haven't been that great. Like, So Crowder had millions of viewers on YouTube. I think he had some suspension problems. He supposedly had a $50 million offer from the Daily Wire and turned it down. Who knows if that was all made up. And then he went to Rumble. And the numbers aren't very good. It's like hundreds of thousands of viewers. And Rumble has been accused of faking its audience numbers or using a lot of kind of fake traffic, like malware-driven traffic. It

was in this short seller report from Culper Research. So again, he cares as long as they can keep paying him. But it's in Rumble's interest to make this somehow more self-sustaining, or at least not have to go hat in hand every six months to Teal and Sachs and whoever else might pour some money in. Yeah, that's a big drop in reach and viewership to go from millions to hundreds of thousands, right? And some of these guys are going to care about that, of course, or most of them, because they want to reach the wise number of people. We saw that also with Tucker Carlson.

He went from Fox to Twitter and his numbers went way down. I mean, Fox is horrible. I think all cable news should be thrown in the fire. But like, there's a reason why people still, you know, a lot of people still watch these channels and mass media still has some reach. And there's a mistake sometimes that even like people like Elon Musk or these executives make who are way too online, just like the rest of us, and think that the old people in their easy chairs who kept Fox News on all day are going to go on Twitter and find Tucker's show. They're just not. No, definitely. I completely agree. And, you know,

talking about that kind of political angle of it, how Rumble is hosting this Republican debate and how these kind of candidates want to be on the platform, need to be on the platform. You know, there's another relevant angle to this too, where it's not just the Republican Party, but we have this guy, what's his name? Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I believe, who's running in the Democratic primary, but who is getting a lot of attention from the right and from the kind of tech right in particular, who seems to be funding him and seems to be very excited about his candidacy. And he has also, of course, been on Rumble and been on some of these shows and all this sort of stuff, you know, getting into this circle of not just the right wingers on that platform, but the people who say that they're on the left, but they're into all these

anti-vax conspiracy theories and stuff like that. So what do you make of the RFK Jr. candidacy and how this plays into this broader kind of shift that we're seeing happening in the politics, but not just how it affects kind of the right wing, but how it's trying to kind of bleed its way into kind of liberalism and the left as well? Well, you know, I think there are some realignments going on politically and have been for years now, but, and some kind of genuine of people kind of thinking differently and more heterodox beliefs and some out of convenience or bad faith or whatever else. And I think the RFK Jr. situation falls more in the bad faith category. think from his perspective, look, he's sort of anti-Ukraine war and anti-NATO, but he's Mr. Israel, which is, you know, personally as a lefty Jew is very annoying because like he, like the other day he was basically saying that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who I don't even like was an

anti-Semite. And I'm like, she's Jewish. Like, or like was insufficiently supportive of Israel's like, she's just a standard Democrat in Israel and she's Jewish. Like, but so you see, like, or like was insufficiently supportive of Israel's like, she's just a standard Democrat in Israel, and she's Jewish, like, but so you see, like, are those things the same? Or like, or are those sort of like, positions of convenience in a way like and like using Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who's like, you know, like a celebrity rabbi of a really low grade, like Michael Jackson, I always call him Michael Jackson's former rabbi, like, he's the guy like, when you don't go to the Anti-Defamation League to apologize for being anti-Semitic, you go to Rabbi Shmuley or something, like when they're not available, and do the public appearance and everything. And I wrote something for Slate about this, but I think RFK Jr., I think it's mutual opportunism, him and his right-wing tech backers. You know, David Sachs,

like, it's hard for me to believe that he actually wants RFK Jr. to fully succeed or be president. I mean, he is the most prominent DeSantis supporter in tech. He introduced him, his presidential campaign, and is a big donor. And especially now that Ken Griffin might be turning away from DeSantis, he might be like the biggest donor left or one of them. So, you know, it seems like there are a couple of things which they agree on, or they at least like RFK Jr. as an agent of chaos, who will question the establishment on COVID, some Ukraine stuff, and then who knows, just say a lot of other batshit crazy stuff and make problems for Biden and the Democrats. I mean, I think it's pretty clear they would like Biden, who's a doddering old man, to go on stage and like be possibly shown up by like an HGH fueled RFK Jr. who's just done 20

pushups backstage. I'm just, you know, I'm just cynical, of course. And the problem is we do a version of this a lot because our electoral system is horrible. And like, there's no room for third party candidates or challenging incumbents. And we have a pretty bad incumbent in Biden. I mean, the economy is doing okay for some people, but you know, he's certainly not a very inspiring figure and very old and, you know, actuarially he's unlikely to survive a second term. But again, you're not allowed to question it. You know, everyone gets tarred as a Russian tool or something like that. But in this case, I think it's pretty easy to point to, you don't have to do the Russia crap, which I hate. You can just point to like, okay, David Sachs hosted a fundraiser for RFK Jr.

Why do you think he did that? And I think it's pretty clear. And also this kind of right-wing sensibility or sort of the MAGA adjacent realignments that Sachs is part of, very much they love refugees from liberalism, you know? Like, cause part of their whole narrative is, oh, San Francisco destroyed itself.

We left, we went to Austin and Miami and stuff, or like we tried to save it. Like the Democrats failed at cities we need to recall these liberal da's which sax puts a lot of money into like and even musk has said this kind of thing not very eloquently but you know he supposedly used to be a democrat but now the democrats are too intolerant to calic jason calacanis who's you know is sort of their their hanger on says the stuff put me in the game coach i had to callicatus to say anything like to suck up to them you know yeah yeah of course so they love people like rfk jr who seems rejected by the liberal establishment which he is um but i would argue that he has like one or two good ideas and a lot of bad ones yeah because he's a crank yeah he is a crank i'm sorry like in the old-fashioned sense and like read like the

nbc article by brandy zadrosny where she went for a walk with him and she's used to writing about conspiracy theorists in a reasonable way like he believes some pretty wacko stuff and like this guy is not going to give you universal health care or like stop american militarism he's going to be an impediment towards probably most democratic political goals, if that's your thing. It's not what tech billionaires want. They want him to be that impediment. And that's why they're funding him. And that's why a site like Rumble takes them in because it's a similar attitude. They're like, look, we're the defenders of free speech. He got suspended or an interview taken off of YouTube. I think it

happened more than once because of some of his COVID stuff. You know, I honestly have pretty mixed feelings about COVID moderation and some of it does feel like censorship or unnecessary. I did talk earlier about disinfo versus misinfo and stuff like that. It does create this like victimization complex for people. And you do have to balance kind of competing interests also, which is something that the right never recognizes, which is that like, there are public health concerns, you know, there are real concerns about this kind of stuff. And sometimes those might conflict with free speech, which is an enormously important and central value. But sometimes rights do interlock, if not conflict, or at least require some kind of negotiating and complex thinking. And that's, I think, what we're missing. So there you have RFK Jr. They brought his show on and he's won their featured attractions now. And you can see how that kind of political movement works. It's kind of what Saks was doing with Colin, but just with smaller, frankly, media personalities and

not someone running for president. Absolutely. And like, do you think the effect of that then, like, I feel like, I don't't know one thing i'm seeing repeated a lot on twitter lately is that just a lot of people seem to have absolutely like lost their minds in the past few years and just like fall for all the craziest like conspiracy theory bullshit right and it feels like you know obviously the right has been radicalized in a really significant way like since the trump years in particular and we've seen that kind of continue during the COVID period with the anti-vax stuff and all the other kind of conspiracy theories that have been built on top of that. But it seems like, you know, you have the Greenwalds, I guess, to a lesser degree Greenwald, but like, you know, the Russell Brands, of course, who is on

Rumble and used to kind of identify as a leftist, I believe he still does, but it's like pushing all these like wacky conspiracy theories now. Or just complimenting ron desantis to his face on yeah and unnecessarily like he's done he's interviewed people by now like he was just saying oh you're it's clear talking to you're very thoughtful and talented political actor base that's a paraphrase but it's basically that's like yeah there's something that's changed i didn't mean to interrupt but i mean i think i argue that and I like to write about this at some point, but I think Elon Musk has been radicalized in sort of the sense of radicalization that we sometimes talk about.

I mean, I don't think he's about to become violent or something, but I mean, that's very clear. He was always, I think he always was sympathetic to some of those views, but he's embraced various forms of white supremacy and conspiratorial thinking and racist theories about crime and all kinds of stuff. I think it's a good point, right? You've had this radicalization on the right. You have these people who used to identify as the left and, you know, increasingly still say that they are on the left, even though they say these incredibly right-wing and conspiratorial things. You know, I guess you can look at Bill Maher as well, who, you know, has kind of become

like an anti-woke crusader and used to be someone who identified as being on the left and all this kind of stuff. And then you have someone like RFK Jr. who seems to be bringing this type of politics more into the political stage. Obviously, you have the right-wingers who say all this stuff, but to bring it more into the Democratic Party and to keep kind of infecting it in that way, I guess the broader question is just like, what do you think is happening here? And what does this say about where the political system is going, but also what tech is doing to try to push this type of politics into the mainstream? Yeah, well, it's a problem in part because the range of acceptable debate and political

representation is very narrow. And it would be easier to be angry about RFK Jr. or like authentically righteous about him, like in one's anger, if there were better alternatives or if the Democrats had like policy or political responses to a guy like this. And they don't. And I don't mean to like suppress his ideas. I mean, to respond to like some of the actual grievances or alienation that he does occasionally speak to. I mean, someone who's much better at that, of course, is like Cornel West. And there's no way to really fold Cornel West into a larger Democratic Party, a big tent or a realigned one. And perhaps to the right's credit is they are trying to do some forms of realignment. You know,

there are people who also they're ex-MAGA people and people who are disillusioned by the Trump years. And I've talked to folks like that, including like people who work for Trump and stuff. But there is arguably through these dynamics, you were just as you and I are both just describing this effort to invite these refugees from liberalism, as I call them, and people who have been absorbed by like anti-woke culture or COVID radicalization. Like a lot of that stuff is finding a home on the right. And I mean, the left doesn't have a response, but the left also doesn't have a lot of political power. I mean, they have some media or independent media, give people health care or like real material relief so they don't find refuge in conspiracy theories or so that their relatives don't drop dead from lack of health care and whatever else. end up, you know, fighting some of these very online battles or the stuff that gets subsumed under the culture war mantle, which I would like to see separate out. Like I said earlier, like,

I think like trans rights should not just be called culture war or something like that, but it's different than maybe like a book ban or something like that, which is, you know, still very objectionable, but it's just a different kind of thing to me. But that's what I see, I guess, on the left is like, and what we also need to say is like, these are quasi monopolies or monopsonies or whatever you want to call them in tech. Like, it's not good that YouTube is so ascendant. I like YouTube as a product. Like I watch a lot of stuff on there and like, I don't feel myself censored, but it's not good that it's like the only place. And same with Facebook and all the others. But there's sort of a satisfaction or laziness outside of anyone not named like Lena Khan

or like one of these antitrust new Brandeisians. Like you need to have some alternative or like you need to get Evgeny Morozov on the phone and have him design a new tech industry for you or something like because right now the right wingers are trying to do it, however, self-servingly and clumsily. But I do think that the one core critique that they do have a point on is like, there is a gradual fusion of Silicon Valley and the security state. I think that's hard to deny. It doesn't mean as some of the Twitter files reporting claim that like, the FBI says, hey, UL Roth banned this guy. I doesn't mean as some of the Twitter files reporting claim that like the FBI says, Hey, you L Roth banned this guy. I don't think some of it really went down that way, but you

know, the personnel, the money, the communication, we know there's a revolving door with all that stuff. Like I've been joking a little bit on Twitter lately. Like it's kind of Eric Schmidt's world vision. Like, you know, this is almost something people talk about more 10 years ago when he was more of a public figure, but we're all kind of living in that world. And that is concerning. And that does speak to the future of our media and our social media platforms and censorship and content moderation. And there's a weird way in which like the Republicans are almost attuned to that, but they have all the wrong ideas and all the wrong interpretations and all these insane conspiracies. Absolutely. You know, like you have, you know, the right has the power and the resources to actually experiment with this alternative kind of tech ecosystem in a way

that the left doesn't really, you know, how it's going to fund creating these sorts of things. But then as you describe as well, there's a lot of problems in the system as it exists. We see the tech industry shifting toward the government as the government embraces this position where China is the big enemy and the tech industry sees how it can very much benefit from that by becoming part of the larger security state. There are all these kind of connections and alignments that are happening. As we've talked about through this conversation, the right has an influential ability to get people to listen to its message because of how it shapes the broader platforms that we all use, but also builds its own.

And it has a lot more resources at its disposal to be able to do these things. Jacob, I think that this has been a fascinating conversation. And I think that is a good place to leave it, to have people reflect on these issues that we're all dealing with. But thanks again so much for coming on the show. Oh, always glad to. I enjoy it. Thank you. Jacob Silverman is a journalist and the co-author of Easy Money. He has a sub stack where you can follow him. I'll include the link in the show notes. You can also follow me, Paris Marks, or you can follow the show across social media on any different app where you want to look us up.

We'll probably be there. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.