The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Hunter Biden and the Media

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Eric Levitz is a senior writer for Intelligencer. He covers politics and economics.

🎵 This is Live from the Table, a Comedy Cellar-affiliated podcast coming at you on SiriusXM 99, Raw Dog. And on the Laugh Button Podcast Network, I'm here, Dan Natterman, with Noam Dorman, the owner, the proprietor of the world-famous Comedy Cellar, which has become something of a... What's the word I'm looking for?

Institution? A juggernaut, an institution. It's a big deal. A mirage? It's a big deal in the world of stand-up comedy. Is it really, Dan? I think so. I mean, in the humble world of stand-up comedy, it's not, you know, it's not a big tech company,

but in the world of stand-up, it's a big deal. We have also Pyrrha Laschenbrand is here. She is our producer, but again, there's been some controversy with regard to that title, but that's neither here nor there. I think that's been resolved. I don't know if it has or it hasn't. She is also the producer of Stupid, which is an animated short series of shorts that takes place here at the Comedy Cellar. Each week brings you a different comic

or comedy-related person being interviewed in animated form on the stoop here at the world-famous Comedy Cellar. And speaking of the Comedy Cellar dynasty, I think maybe that was the word I was looking for. We were talking in previous episodes about the expansion of the Comedy Cellar. I was wondering, Noam, what's going on with that?

I know you were talking about opening up yet another room, another showroom here in the West Village around the corner at the sushi joint. I don't know what's going on with that. Well,

that's on hold right now because I may have another opportunity which is better, but I can't discuss it. But if it worked out. It would be amazing. It would be really fun for me and maybe good for my family someday. What about good for the comedians? Well, of course it'd be good for the comedians.

Yes, absolutely. Okay. What's good for me is good for the comedians in general, of course it would be good for the comedians. Yes, absolutely. Okay. What's good for me is good for the comedians in general. We're like Siamese twins. Can you still say Siamese twins? We're conjoined twins. Yeah, I guess conjoined is the better word right now. All right.

There's a whole thing about words now. You see that thing at Stanford? They have this, like you're not allowed to- Stanford University? You can't say balls to the wall anymore because it's ableist. It's so stupid. Oh, I never heard of it. Why is balls to the wall anymore because it's ableist. That's so stupid. Oh, I never. Why is balls to the wall?

Because some people don't have balls. Well, women don't have balls. Or I shouldn't say that women do have balls. You can't say American. You can't say. The modern conception of the word woman. There's such a long list of things you can't say. No more gloves.

Some of them are so funny. You're not supposed to have gloves anymore. Why can't you have gloves? Because not everybody has fingers. Oh, you know, that was an example I used years ago as an ad absurdum. What do you mean? Like, take the gloves off, you can't say? No, they're saying that they're just going to start making mittens now because gloves.

No, come on. I mean, they're people that only have one leg, so they're not going to make pants anymore? I don't know. One thing that does interest me about this whole thing is that, you know, quite often there's a say, well, you shouldn't say blacklist anymore. There are a lot of words that use the word black, and they'll say, you know, we should get away from that

because somehow it stigmatizes the black race. But I think that it would be easier to change the name of the race because they're not actually black, right? And maybe they were called black in some kind of racist way. But my thinking is this. Black is the absence of light, right? So darkness, the absence of light, this is always going to be a natural metaphor for when

you want to describe things in a certain way, because the absence of light, it has a natural poetic thing. So I don't think you're ever going to rid the language of allusions to the color,, you know, allusions to the color, to blackness,

or, you know, evocative of that. Nor should you, because when somebody uses the word, you know, blackness or blacklist, whatever, they're not alluding to the black race. They're alluding to the absence of light. I know this is a ridiculous thing to say, but maybe it would make sense to reconsider, to say, well, you know, we don't want to be called black we're not black we're brown or

whatever it is but but more importantly we don't want to be associated with that metaphor you know what i mean well but how much how much pushback is there really against these words like black i mean i'm sure there are people that say that hello come on in sir i'm not hearing an overwhelming amount of pushback uh or rejection of words like blacklist, blackmail. But there is, you know. There's some, but I don't know how overwhelming it is. No, there is and even though I don't get it, I kind of get it. You know,

you don't want to have your identity have that association. I kind of get it. You know, I don't usually want to give an inch on these things, but I kind of get it. But I'm saying I just think it's You think, what you're saying is that we should change the name of black people get it. But I'm saying, I just think it's... You think, what you're saying is that we should change the name of black people to something else. I'm saying that, well, I was being purposely outrageous,

but I'm saying that since blackness is the absence of light, and that's a natural metaphor, and will always be a natural metaphor, that's why these words like blacklist or whatever, black date in history, whatever these things. That's where this comes from. Black box.

Black box. These things didn't come up because people were thinking about the black race. The black box is actually orange. Whatever. These came up because people were thinking of the color black.

And, you know, you're never going to, I don't, it'll always sound stilted to avoid that because that's not what they're alluding to. Right. So I kind of I just kind of understand it. You know, I know. But I just don't. Like I said, I was purposely was a word that kind of took over almost overnight. And but African-American is not I mean, it's black people all over the world. And I understand that. But the fact is, you can change language fairly profoundly and and fairly quickly if the will is there. And if all of a sudden if all of a sudden the will was there to change over from calling black people black people to something else, if the will was there, it can be done. If you look at it objectively, kind of, which is

the misnomer or whatever it is? Is it these allusions to blackness, black box, or whatever it is? Or is it calling this race black, even though knowing that word black already has certain darkness natural metaphors to it? Maybe that was the bad choice of a word, you know?

I mean, every word becomes kind of taboo. I don't even want to say, you know, like the technical, I don't know why I don't want to say, you know, the technical description of the scientific name for the race is not black, you know, but whatever. So, it's just a thought I had. It's stupid. Don't take it the wrong way. I'm just saying thought I had. It's stupid. Don't take it the wrong way.

I'm just saying that I don't know that there's that much pushback against using these words. Well, Stanford University had this thing that was in the news about these words that you're not supposed to use anymore. I don't know how much people pay attention to that. All right. You can introduce our guest. I will do so. Eric Levitz. Happy Hanukkah, by the way.

I guess with a name like Levitz. Yeah, you got that one right. Don't make any assumptions. Any relation to the store, you'll love it at Levitz. Remember that store? Is that still around? I don't believe so,

but throughout my childhood, I was perennially asked to... You'll love it at Levitz. Yeah. You don't remember that store? I do not have any of the furniture money. Bring the mic a little closer to the mic. He is not part of the Levitz department store dynasty, that store? I do not have any of the furniture money. Bring the mic a little closer to the mic.

He is not part of the Levitt's department store dynasty, but yet we're happy to have him on the Levitt's. As far as he knows. He is a senior writer for Intelligencer and covers politics and economics. Welcome, Eric Levitt. Intelligencer is part of your magazine, right? That's correct, yeah.

It's an online news vertical. A vertical? That's the fancy word that in digital media you use for basically a section of the magazine. Okay. And that's all you got there? That's all you got on him? That's all Perry El-Semi with regard to an introduction. You know. But I can, if you want me, I can wing it.

Yeah, wing it. He is 30-something. On the nose right there. Yes, indeed. Intellectual from the Northeast. That's correct. Love's a good bargain. Wanted for murder.

Please welcome to our show, once again, Mr. Eric Levitz. Ivy League educated? No, to my parents' disappointment Johns Hopkins University Well, that's equivalent That's not bad That's what we call Ivy League equivalent

Yeah, I mean, I guess You know, if you're from Maryland or New Jersey It's not equivalent to a Jewish parent I think it would be to Stanford Hopkins, yeah, come on

Hopkins, Stanford These are the Ivy equivalents Is Johns Hopkins an Ivy? I don't think so. It's almost. It's more like Tufts. If I was a pre-med at Hopkins, I think that would be pleasing to a Jewish parent, but I was a creative writing major, so.

Oh, me too. And mind you, the Ivy League was nothing more than the sports league. You know, the Ivy League was just a group of schools that played sports together, you know, like the Big Ten. Yeah. There's nothing necessarily superior about an Ivy League school other than, I guess, they're older than these other schools. But in any case, no safety school, John Hopkins, that's for sure. Well, I went to Tufts and people...

That is a safety school. Yeah, that's... I had a spotty... We're going to get to it. I had a spotty, we're going to get to it. I had a spotty record in high school, you know, so I, like my sophomore year was very, You're probably too busy with the guitar. Is that the problem? You know, I was kind of a free range and I didn't have, my father's very busy.

I didn't have anybody really making sure I did my homework and stuff. And then I kind of snapped out of it in my junior year. And I got straight A's in my junior year. And I got pretty good SATs. And I managed to get myself into Tufts. And I was also able to get into Penn. But I only heard about Penn after I'd already accepted to Tufts. I was on the wait list or something. I don't remember.

By then, I was like, ah, forget it. I'm already going to Tufts. But I didn't realize the difference. Whatever. You know, it's so different. Like, you're like 20 years or 15 years't realize the difference. Whatever. It's so different. You're 20 years or 15 years younger than I am. No, 25 years younger than I am.

When I was a kid, we didn't know. I didn't think about college until my junior year. I didn't even know I was supposed to study for my SATs. It was not like it is now. My daughter, my 10-year-old, was always stressing about college. I'm like, don't worry about college. But we didn't really know.

Your 10-year-old's stressing about college? Well, also to a kid, a year is a long time. So when you're a freshman in high school, college seems like a lifetime away. To an adult looking at their kid who's a freshman in college, the adult is thinking, holy shit, my kid's going to be in college soon.

The kid is thinking, I'm not going to be in college for a long time. We did it all ourselves. I got the Barron's book. I wrote my own applications. Most freshmen aren't thinking about college, I don't think. Now, every parent, it's like a whole industry to shepherd their child

through the entire... It might be better to get the kid into college, but it's not good for these kids. I think the whole college infrastructure is going to crumble. I think it's going to, there's going to be a complete upheaval in the world of higher education. Because most of it is completely unnecessary. Yeah, I don't know. I have found, you know, I recently, or I'm about to turn 35, and I found myself kind of getting into the, you know,

kids these days sort of mentality quicker than I had ever anticipated. But I do think that the generation behind us, behind mine, that was exposed to the Internet, you know, in early adolescence as opposed to college, I don't know, I don't think their brains work right. And I think that it's that combined with in we had this too, but I think an even more intense helicopter parenting mentality because of the competitiveness within the upper middle class for positions, both in top schools and then in the, you know, more coveted professions that that parents are really supervising their kids around the clock. There's, I think, been some research that suggests that this really intensive hands-on parenting has made kids less resilient and independent-minded in their maturity, younger at 18 than previous generations had been. Absolutely. I see it in my employees.

All right. So you wrote a column. Now, maybe, you know, things have changed since you wrote this article about the Twitter files. So you may have rethought some of the things that you wrote. But you wrote an article pretty much pouring cold water on the whole newsworthiness of the Twitter files and the whole idea that the Hunter Biden story should have been run, whatever it is. And I marked the whole thing up because I pretty strongly disagree with you about it. But rather than going through the column and holding you accountable for all of it, why don't you just tell us what you generally think about and we can use that to launch the conversation? Because I think this is a very important issue.

Sure. Yeah, so I guess I haven't studied the subsequent revelations as closely as I did at the first two threads, which is what I wrote about there, which was all that was out when that column came out. But yeah, basically my take on the situation is that it is concerning. There's reason for concern that, you know, social media companies, they exercise really significant influence over the general discourse. And, you know, we do not want them settling live political debates by suppressing certain points of view instead of others. I do think that there is a legitimate function for social media moderation generally, that ultimately, if you do not have any moderation whatsoever on a social media site, neo-Nazis and trolls and sort of spammers and scammers that post so rampantly that they decrade sort of the user experience and will eventually render that site uncompetitive

just on a business level. And so I think that's why all of the major platforms do engage in content moderation. Andrew Doyle, can we mention that Andrew Doyle, who was here just last week? Yeah. We had the same discussion with him, and he felt that the best way to answer that question, content moderation, he thought the best content moderation was more or less no content moderation and let each user create their own experience

by whatever mechanisms, by blocking people. But I strongly disagreed with him on that. I spoke to him more afterwards. But let me just... Are you conflating viewpoint discrimination or viewpoint suppression and bullying, racism, whatever it is? Because to me, they're drastically different issues. The 4chan, neo-Nazis, people calling each other the N-word, personal attacks about you kike, all that stuff.

That to me has nothing to do with the universe of considering the kind of Hunter Biden, Dr. Badajoz, Babylon Bee, all sorts of things which Twitter was involved with suppressing or throttling, whatever it is. I think it's sloppy in a way to consider those things together because they have nothing to do with each other. The people at The Wall Street Journal who were fighting, who were outraged that the Hunter Biden story wasn't allowed to run on Twitter, they're not thinking about, they're not wanting people to be able to be called the N-word. They're saying, well, this is a real story. Why are you regulating this? To reach into this neo-Nazi stuff, it's kind of a scarecrow, a straw man.

Well, yes. So I think that, mean i agree i i you know as i write in the piece i i don't think that um i i think twitter made a mistake in suppressing the hunter biden story i think it is important you do think that because it doesn't come through in your in your article that you thought it was a mistake i do um in retrospect it was mistake, or at the time they did it, it was a mistake? I mean, I think that at the time they did it, it's difficult to say, but I think with the information that we have available now, it's obvious that they— They can't be judging what we know now. They have to be judging what they knew then. Sure. Well, I think judging what they knew then. Sure.

Well, I think that it was a mistake. I mean, they acted under the presumption that the information they had available to them was going to lead to the conclusion that this was hacked materials. They were wrong about that. So obviously they made an incorrect judgment. So obviously they made a mistake. I think it's contextually important to understand that the Post's story was suppressed for 24 hours and that the action of taking this step, you know, likely attracted more attention to the story ultimately. So I think that

the way that it's been, the significance of this event and the way that it's been, the significance of this event, and the way that it's been framed by many Republicans since this revelation, including Donald Trump, who suggested that this was such a massive violation of the electorate's ability to make an informed choice that they did not for 24 hours have the ability to click on this link on Twitter that the Constitution should be overturned and he should be reinstated. Was it link on Twitter that the Constitution should be overturned and he should be reinstated. Was it only 24 hours that the story was off Twitter? Yes.

The post account was, I believe, suspended for longer, which was, you know, egregious. But the link itself was only blocked for a day and then they reversed course. And then, okay. So, you know, you go in your... Well, you know, it's interesting. It's like, you know how people have arguments on text messages

and then they meet in person and the text messages do a bad job of conveying the vibe of where they were coming from? I notice this all the time with writers who come in here. Like what you just said now is nothing like the vibe that I got from your article. I don't think you said here that you thought it was a mistake. And that would have changed the whole kind of framing of the way you describe it. I'll tell you what I took issue with. You say stuff like, so I'm pretty conservative. I don't consider myself a Republican.

But I probably agree more often with conservative points of view. But this didn't describe me that this information warfare hasn't merely cost conservative commentators, followers, or retreats. It cost Republicans. It cost the Republican president the White House. That's the story conservatives want to tell about what Twitter used to be in the bad old days. You say, I mean, you go on that they're unhinged and that in the post telling the email on Hunter Biden's laptops contain dispositive evidence that Joe Biden has used his power as vice president to advance his charisma.

None of this stuff rang true to me. And so wanton that they make Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader. Like this is all such a characterization that doesn't – You pronounced wanton? Wanton, yeah. You said wanton. I know. I mispronounced it.

Wanton. It's – no offense to my Asian brothers and sisters. That this doesn't describe any like reasonable person that I know and what their attitude about the Hunter Biden story was, nor does – I went back and I read all the Washington, I'm sorry, the Wall Street Journal editorials at the time. It didn't describe what they were writing either. You stand by all that stuff? Yeah. So I think it's always tricky in commentary. One often uses as shorthand, conservatives say this or progressives say this,

which does ally the fact that pretty much any ideological movement is going to have diversity within its ranks and there's going to be many different viewpoints, some more reasonable than others. I probably should have said some conservatives. I do quote in the piece Blake Masters, Donald Trump, other prominent conservatives who did frame the story in these terms. But I agree that there's there's more reasonable perspectives. I mean, look, the story is interesting to me. So let's just get into it a

little bit. Sure. What you do say, the one thing I remember you saying is that you agree that Hunter Biden was was influence peddling. Hunter Biden got paid because it's interesting. He was selling access to his father. The question is whether or not he was ripping them off. In other words, for him to take the money, there's a tacit agreement there. Listen, you give me the money and I'll hook you up with my father in some way. Now, maybe the bubble over his head was, I'm never hooking these motherfuckers up with my father in some way. But he can't. Now, maybe he the bubble over his head was I'm never hooking these motherfuckers up with my father. I'm just going to take the

money. He's kind of stealing from them. But whatever it was, we agree on that. Yeah. I mean, so much of like influence peddling, like just, you know, the above board official stuff in Washington and on K Street, you pay former Democratic representatives who still have friends or Republican representatives who still have friends in Congress. You hire them because they are an entry to the lawmakers. They potentially will get you FaceTime with the lawmakers. That isn't necessarily a guarantee that, you know, if you have that access, you're going to get get the deliverables you want. Yeah, but this is this is but this is a little bit different than that. This is more like to me,

Ginny Thomas, you know, being in contact with important people during this election denial thing while while this might come before her husband's Supreme Court like that's that that crosses a line into outrageous. If when the vice president, it's the story has always bothered me. So Biden knows Biden's the vice president. He's in charge of Ukraine policy and he knows that his son is selling this influence. He knows that and he lets that happen. Now, he shouldn't let that happen. I don't let my managers take basketball tickets from a comedian because I know, you know, that looks bad.

If I were vice president, I was like, do not dare take millions of dollars from Ukraine when I am in charge of Ukraine policy. That just makes us look like, you know, a banana republic here. So that went on. And to say that some people lobby. Yeah, they do. But to me, this is far beyond this. We know that there were memos that went around about the apparent conflict of interest that was presented by Hunter Biden taking this job with Ukraine. And then they were told, don't talk about it to Joe because Bo died. And he's, you know, like they had all these reasons for. Right. No, I mean, it's obviously not not as a shady, you know, setup, as i suggest in the piece i don't think that it is you know shadier than you know the the setup that that donald trump had with his family uh giving them actual white

house roles and allowing them to run the business while he had well it is shadier and i'll tell you why it's shaded i don't think so i'll tell you why it's shaded and also operating a hotel in dc in which foreign delegations knew that a way to directly bribe the U.S. president was to book rooms in his hotel. It's not shadier than that, if that's what happened. But it is shadier than appointing his family. Look, Bobby Kennedy was appointed by John F. Kennedy. We don't consider that shady. There is shadiness in design, but there's also, and this is what Twitter is, when something is in darkness, when something is not transparent, it's much shadier.

So sure, it doesn't look good for Trump to appoint Jared Kushner, but if he does it out in the open, that's different to me than doing it in secret for we didn't know that Hunter Biden was taking this job. And if we had known it at the time, there would have been outrage about it. He wouldn't have been able to take it in public, just like Twitter wouldn't have been able to have weekly meetings with the FBI. If we had known about it, the criticism would have been withering. Yeah, I mean, I'm talking a little bit less about the nepotism of official appointments than about, I believe, like, you know, things like Eric and Don Jr. But let's not talk about Trump because we're really not talking about Trump. You know, I well, that's that's my concern in the piece as far as look in the primary. I wrote an article about it's a what about thing.

And I might agree with you. Well, I'm an article about... It's a what about thing. And I might agree with you. I'm going to stipulate you're right about Trump, but let's just focus on Biden. Well, sure. I mean, all I say in the piece is that I am making a critique of the argument that Republicans have made that this is like such a violation of the ability of voters to make an informed choice because they didn't know

that we have circumstantial evidence that Biden had potentially maybe an incentive to engage in corrupt acts. So my argument is that this is one, the story was suppressed for 24 hours and two, the evidence of corruption on Trump's part is so much worse that if we're deciding, did the voters have the ability to make an informed choice about which candidate they preferred, you know, if they wanted to prioritize corruption as their number one thing that they wanted to oppose, I just don't think that argument holds. So I'm addressing a specific argument, not necessarily the argument that you would make. So let's talk, let's handle it all. So first of all, this isn't really just about Twitter, but there's an there's a overall stigmatization of this story that went on, which was very effective. The story was never debunked. between Twitter and the major newspapers and the media and important people talking about it,

it became something that was not discussed in polite company and then 51 intelligence experts. And this is, I mean, we have to take stock of the fact that a relevant story was suppressed until after the election, in an election which was won by like 40,000 votes, right? So we don't know if it could have swung the election or not. I'm not saying it did swing the election, but it could have swung the election. But let me say one more thing. To me, the story wasn't that in any way dispositive of proof of any corruption. But Biden, it was the smoking gun was that Biden lied.

Biden lied when he said that he didn't discuss any business with his son. Biden met with the guy from Burisma. You say that, and I thought this was, you know, respectfully, it was like the weakest part to me, that there was no evidence that the meeting was one-on-one. But he wrote an email thanking Biden for, thanking Hunter for introducing him to his dad and allowing them to spend some time together. Now, that is a direct lie to what Biden had told us. And now, well, I'll let you answer.

And now think about this. And you tell me if this is plausible. It's a very intimate relationship between a father and son. I don't know how your relationship with your father is, but this is a very, very close relationship. Hunter was hired as the legal in charge of legal affairs at Burisma at one point. This was what it was released as. And it was scrubbed. Did he not, now his father's investigating Ukraine

and is putting pressure on the prosecutor who was investing Burisma. Burisma is where his son works and gets millions of dollars. The notion that they had no, that some sort of Chinese wall of integrity existed in their private moments between Hunter and his dad

about this issue that his father was directly overseeing, that directly impacted his son, that had millions of dollars at stake. And then let's add in, sprinkle in stuff that came out in these articles that Hunter complained that 50% of his money went to his dad, you know, which you can take seriously, not take seriously. All this stuff is a prima facie story of something significant enough that the ball should have been then kicked to Joe Biden's court to say, listen, what's going on here? Similarly, some of these emails that nobody believed, they had like three, four people on these emails. This was simple to debunk.

You just go to the guy, hey, is that your email or not? I remember one article like this guy Walker, Hunter Biden, whatever the other guy was. You know, nobody denied looked at the camera and lied, lied and said this was a plant. Now, he knew it wasn't a plant. Right. He knew it wasn't a plant. Not only that, the FBI had subpoenaed this laptop a year prior and that we knew at the time as well. This is awful. This is an awful picture and to say that something similarly awful handle happened with trump we don't want to normalize this this is a kind of thing which should have been out there being discussed not stigmatized biden should have been required to explain it

the people on the email should have been required to either say, yes, that's my email or no, that's not my email. Biden said it was a plant. You remember how President Clinton said, I never had sex with that woman. And he looked in the camera. That was considered a very big deal. The president, the candidate for the president of the United States during the debate looked in the camera and said this laptop was a plant, a hoax. And it wasn't. Isn't that very fucking serious?

So a few things. I think that if I if I have my facts wrong, correct my facts, too. Sure. So I think that to me, it is significant that Hunter Biden's entire laptop, the contents of all of his emails and personal communications and text messages are intercepted. You use the word stolen. But did anybody care that Trump's tax returns were stolen when the Times printed them? I think they would possibly described that way. But nobody cared. Hunter didn't...

I don't think that we should care that they are stolen. Right, but you used the fact that they were stolen at some point here as like... Well, because Twitter had a policy of not allowing the sharing of materials that were hacked. Nobody said they were hacked.

Well, it's hard when you have a story that shows that somebody has gotten a hold of all of someone's emails. But the FBI had... So emails taken from a laptop versus hacked materials can look similar. That's the context. No, that's not what hack...

Everybody knows what hacking is. Hacking is not when somebody hands you a hard drive. That's not hacking. Right. I'm saying that there was a story that was published that had a trove of emails, whether those emails were in fact recovered from a laptop or taken from hacking. Nobody thought they were hacked. Well, people did actually. But there was no evidence of that.

No, I don't think that there was strong evidence. People, I think, were primed to view them as hacking. This is an important point. This is why, and I thought this at the time. There was questions about Hillary's emails being hacked. Did the Russians hack? This was unknowable. We have a guy

saying, here is the receipt. I got this laptop, and I gave it to Rudy Giuliani, and it's real. And Hunter could say, I was hacked. Joe Biden could say, I was hacked. The people on the emails could say, those are not my emails. This was not...

There was nothing concrete that would lead anybody to say that it was hacked. Which is why I think Twitter made a mistake. Because the principals would be the ones to say that it was hacked. Which is why I think Twitter made a mistake. Because the principals would be the ones to say, I was hacked. But their silence made it clear that they weren't hacked, right? Yeah. We knew they weren't hacked because Hunter Biden wouldn't have said, I was hacked. He would have said it.

Yeah, anyhow. Am I wrong? I was saying, no, I agree that the non-denials are significant. Yeah. What I was saying was that we have access unfiltered to his emails and his text messages. And the closest thing that we can get to a communication that conveys that Joe Biden did anything untoward on behalf of Hunter's business interests is a single email that suggests that somebody from Burisma had an opportunity to meet Joe Biden on a trip to D.C. in a context that we do not have information about. Separate from that, we have the fact that a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired and that Biden led a coalition of Western interests

that was pushing for his ouster. However, we have, you know, the very salient fact that deputies of that prosecutor were caught with a trove of diamonds and cash and were taking bribes. This has nothing to do with Twitter's decision. Well, it has to do with the Hunter Biden story and the significance of it, which you were suggesting. Are you telling me that Twitter goes into that level of detail when it decides various stories? No, I'm saying you were saying this paints a really awful picture. I am saying that we have no evidence that Biden actually engaged in any corruption. Do we have evidence that Joe Biden told a lie while campaigning for the presidency?

Yes. I think that pretty much every candidate who is one of the White House. Tell me if this analogy is fair. If there's rumors that I'm having an affair with a woman and I constantly say, listen, I've never met that woman. I've never had any dealings with that woman. There's no community. I don't know anything about that woman. And then it comes to light. Thank you for meeting me the other night.

Would anybody expect my wife not to demand an explanation? Like, who would say, well, honey, Mrs. Dorman, you don't know the nature of their meeting. That's not the point. He'd been telling me all along. He did not know this woman. He has nothing to do with her, never in the same room with her, never spoke to her. And now we have concrete proof that he met with her. I want to fucking explain

the American people are the I'm sorry, the press corps should have been the wife here. Say, you told us these things, now we have a picture of you with the guy, or one of the guys and now we have an email that says that you met with him.

We demand an explanation. They never demanded it. I believe they did ask and that Biden denied having met with him. No, they never demanded any explanation from Biden nor from Hunter. What was the explanation? Did Biden admit to meeting with him? I believe that I would need to check, but I thought that Biden's line was that he just didn't remember meeting this person. Yeah. And that's satisfactory to the American people? um you know prefer conservative issue positions feel like this was like a really good uh timed

clean hit on biden and that it should have had more legs than it did um i just sincerely doubt that that anybody who uh does not have an investment in republican policy policy is going to cast their vote on the basis of, you know what, I just, I cannot stand the thought that a Ukrainian natural gas company, my number one issue is the integrity of the Ukrainian natural gas sector. And I just, I need to, you know, make sure that I support candidates that support that. I just don't think that's credible whatsoever. Listen, no, no, no. With all due respect, who cares what you think? This is a matter of the American people being this some number of people who would say, you know what, I was really on the fence here.

And now that I know this dude has been lying to my face about this laptop being a plant. He never lied. And so you can just, you have one candidate who is perfectly honest and another who isn't. No, no, that's your analysis. I'm saying that for people who are on the fence, they might say,

you know, I was going to vote for Biden. This is a totally plausible. I'm just trying to, I was going to vote for Biden because I thought he was different than Trump. I kind of agree with Trump on a lot of policies, but his character is just too much for me.

And now I find out that this guy Joe Biden, he lied to me in the same way. He looked at me right now, he claimed that this laptop was a plant, when actually his son was meeting with these guys and, I mean, his son introduced him to these guys at Burisma, and then he fired the prosecutor shortly after. You know what?

I don't believe either of them anymore. So I'm going to go with Trump because I kind of prefer him on policy. Maybe, does that swing 20,000 votes in in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia? It might. I don't think that, again, the New York Post story for a single day not being clickable on Twitter, the least used social media platform that. No, but you say the New York Post story was dishonest and misleading. This is how you describe it. Yes, it was. Right. So this was the... But it wasn't... It was dishonest and misleading. The Post story suggested

that Biden fired the prosecutor on the... That the prosecutor was fired at Biden's behest. No, it doesn't say that. The Post story does not say that. I have it here. I can give it to you. Sure. It doesn't say that.

It talks about that story. I'm sorry. It at least strongly implies it, and it does not provide the context that it was not just Biden who was pushing for the prosecutor's ouster, but also the IMF and the European Union. Other materials extracted from the computer includes a raunchy 12-minute video showing 100 people struggling, blah, blah, blah.

Before turning over, it's out of order. I'm a jackass, okay? You know what? This is why I went to Tulsa. Have some Christmas music while Snowm looks for his article. Joe Biden has insisted the U.S. wanted Shogun removed over corruption concerns, which was shared by the European Union. Meanwhile, in an email dated May 12th, shortly after a Hunter Biden joint Burisma Award shows Posarsky attempting to get him to use his political leverage to help the company.

The message had the subject line urgent issue was also sent to Hunter Biden business partner, Devin Archer. And then it shows the email. So it, it, it shows the smoke similar, similar, very similar to a story about. I rep in the story.

It, it's a frames. It is though. The prosecutor was, was fired at Joe Biden's behest. And. Because he was looking into. Verisma was investigating Verisma at the time. Okay. Which he was looking into Verisma, was investigating Verisma at the time,

which he was not doing. I'm sorry that I don't have this printed out in order. And we can even look at it afterwards. And if we get it wrong, we can cut something out. But this is, in good faith, what I took from the story, was that this accusation has always kind of been out there that Biden fired Shulkin to protect his son. Biden's answer was always, I have nothing to do.

I never discussed my son's business with him ever. And now, since we know that Biden actually did meet with somebody with Burisma, it's perfectly fair now to reconsider that maybe all this other evidence, because we now know that the president was not being honest about it. And this is by a generically valid approach to news. When anybody is caught telling a lie as an explanation, like if when Clinton was caught telling any lie about Monica Lewinsky, all of a sudden it became way more likely that the Monica Lewinsky story was true. If Joe Biden was caught telling a lie about Tara Reade, all of a sudden it would be way more likely to say, you know what, maybe there was something to that Tara Reade story because

he lied about it. Anytime somebody lies about something, we— What is the story here? The story is that. Biden, the vice president of the United States. The story is that his son gaslights the IMF and the European Union and executes an elaborate scheme that leads them to falsely believe that Shoken is corrupt. Like, you know, I mean, the fundamental thing here is that we have from multiple different entities and angles, a coalition that is pushing the idea that Shoken is corrupt and must go. So the fact that Biden is not the soul or even necessarily the principal agent pushing this narrative makes it a little bit harder to believe that his relationship

with Hunter was the decisive factor. We don't know. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. Listen, you can have your opinion and a voter in Arizona can have another opinion, but it could be decisive. It might not have been decisive. The point is that it was helpful to his son.

His son was getting millions of dollars and he made a decision that was helpful to his son to keep making those millions of dollars. And that serious conflict of interest was President Vice President Biden's. He waded into that eyes open. He chose to get into that swamp of conflict of interest. And we as voters and journalists should give him no benefit of the doubt and no quarter on that. He should be required to explain, listen, it was bad enough you had this conflict of interest. Now we know you're not telling the truth about it. Don't tell me that the Germans also wanted this guy fired. So therefore somehow that means that you would have done the same thing anyway.

Maybe you even would have done the same thing anyway. We have no way of knowing, but this is a story and the voters can decide simply the fact that you were comfortable with this level of conflict of interest? What if the let's take it to counterfactual? What if the other Europeans had not wanted Shoken fired and Biden decided to fire him anyway, because Biden, in good faith, really thought it was the right thing to do? It would be impossible for Biden to make that case anymore

because, well, the other Europeans were against it. You say you were for it for good reasons, but how convenient. Your son works there. It paralyzed him, except for the fact that the other Europeans were on the side. It's wrong from every angle. And to stigmatize this story was just bias. And, you know, you make the point somewhere else that a lot of this Twitter stuff, going back to Twitter, was in good faith.

And I kind of agree with you. Just like I think a lot of what went on in the FBI about Trump and Russia was actually in good faith. I think they were actually scared that he might be a spy. But you know, that's why we have double blind experiments. If a doctor, if a researcher gets it wrong in investigating a medicine, but he does it in good faith, we don't say, well, you know, it's not such a big deal. He did it in good faith. We say,

that's what you get for not relying on principles. It's not enough that Twitter did it in good faith because they're not capable. They're human. They're not capable of discerning their own bias. If Twitter was staffed by a bunch of Trump voters, very, very likely they would have come out differently on that issue in good faith. Very few people will talk about the conservative Supreme Court people, you know, liberals like I presume you are, and will say about the conservative Supreme Court, you shouldn't be upset about it. They're acting in good faith. They're upset about the decisions.

I presume good faith from every justice on the Supreme Court. I presume good faith in the people at Twitter trying to try and kind of do the right thing. But this is what happens when you have no principles. And that's why in the end, and which I think is the death blow here, Jack Dorsey himself wrote about these Twitter files that in principle, social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. When I led the Twitter of, I'm sorry, when I led it, when I led Twitter, it did not meet any of these principles. What does he know that we don't know? He says it right there. It was not resilient to corporate and government control. This is the guy who was in charge of Twitter is saying it. And yet people want to defend it beyond that. Why is he falling on his sword that way? He knows what was going on because he knows there was no principles. Right. So I think that it's worth clarifying where we agree and

where we disagree. We agree that the relationship between Hunter Biden and Burisma was, you know, unethical, that Biden, at the point that he gets the Ukraine portfolio and his son is working for a Ukrainian gas, source of funds, or else, you know, suggested to the president that he should take on a different foreign policy issue, give this to someone else. I think that Twitter was wrong to suppress the New York Post story. Yeah. was wrong to suppress the New York Post story. But we disagree on the honesty of the Post's reporting. I think they frame things at certain points misleadingly. We agree that— Well, do me a favor, just socially.

After we finish this podcast, reread it and, like, email me what you're referring to. Because it's interesting. It's like a Rorschach, you know. Like, very often how the story reads to you is affected by what's going on previously in your head. You know, like, I really didn't take it that way. Yeah. And I totally believe that you did. Yeah.

But go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. But go ahead. Yeah. So I do think that, you know, we don't have unfettered access to these documents. I'm a little bit suspicious of the political leanings and commitments of many of the journalists reporting on them. And nonetheless, my personal presumption would be that a social media company like Twitter in our current political era, in which college-educated, urban-dwelling people

are very disproportionately liberal and democratic, and so would therefore be the people largely staffing the higher uh reaches of this company they would probably uh you know again in good faith uh or not but but even if they're operating in good faith probably there's some political bias towards the left um i think that would probably manifest to a certain extent. But look what was being normalized there. Finish your sentence. I'm sorry. Just my argument is about the need to keep this in proportion. Well, that's what I wanted to say.

So, I mean, zooming out, they also suppress stories by, you know, eminent doctors about the damage that lockdowns might do to children. Well, I think that we need to be clear again about that. Right. So what was found there was that Dr. J. Bada Chai. Yeah. I don't know how to say his last name. Yeah.

Anyhow, it was not that his account was really heavily suppressed. I believe he was put on a list of people who the algorithm would not actively promote. Twitter still served as a platform where that doctor could reach a followership of, I believe, 300,000 people, and from that platform spread heterodox ideas about the public health, heterodox ideas about public health that were not as prevalent on CNN and on mainstream news networks. And so functionally, you know, Twitter... But they didn't do it transparently. Let me give you an analogy. I don't know what you want to call it. If we all paid $1 a year to be on Twitter, then that doctor would have a lawsuit and say, listen,

I'm paying to be on Twitter. You de-emphasized my reach. I didn't violate any terms of the and you never told me about it. I'm not getting what I paid for here. There's something. Well, I mean, again, if there was a contract that was signed that I pay a dollar for access to this platform and in exchange, I am guaranteed that the algorithm will treat my content neutrally, then there would be a violation. Twitter always claimed they treated content neutrally. Well, not, I mean, so the whole way that the algorithm works, right, is if you do- Can I stop you there?

Because I want to make a broader point, and I'm surprised you don't agree with me. Twitter, in a sense, doesn't matter. The doctor can be totally suppressed on Twitter, and then Tucker Carlson will go on TV and spread the same disinformation or whatever you want to call it to four million people. There was nobody who didn't hear about the Hunter Biden story. There was nobody who didn't hear about these arguments about lockdown. Twitter did nothing to, in my opinion, to prevent anybody from hearing anything. What Twitter did is participate in stigmatizing these stories. And stigmatizing a story rather than debunking a story,

I think is very damaging for the country. Because a lot of these stories did turn out to be true. And you saw it kind of an interesting way when Jon Stewart went on Colbert and said, yeah, I do think it was lab leak. What are you, ridiculous? It's, you know, it's like this Hershey, Hershey, Pennsylvania filled with chocolate, delicious, you know, chocolatey goodness.

Remember he, and Colbert looked at him incredulously like, I can't believe that story. Only, you know, Tucker Carlson believes stories like that because the story had been effectively stigmatized. And Twitter is part of that. The intelligentsia of America are kind of deciding what polite company of smart people will even consider worthy to talk about. And that is what I think the real damage here is. That's what I see as the danger of Twitter. Twitter's a private company.

They can do what they want. They should do it transparently, and the fact, like I said, if they'd been doing everything that they did, if we had known about it in real time, they could have never done it. This story that they're resorting to now about shadow banning doesn't mean you know

throttling accounts of course that's what shadow banning meant because you know I think you wrote about it one time Twitter defined if you know this Twitter said we didn't shadow ban because we define shadow banning as nobody but you can see your posts right that's how they defined it now

how stupid is this if nobody could see but me but I could see my own posts, that would be so obvious instantly to me. But I or but me? Nobody but me. Nobody but I, I think. You're the writer. If nobody but me, if I'm the only one who could see my posts, then I would know that in a second. I wouldn't need a congressional hearing to ask somebody, do you ever make it so nobody can see their post?

I would ask my friend, hey, I just posted something. Do you see it? Or I'd go write it. I'd take out another account and I'd see, oh, I can't see it from the other account. Or I would notice I usually get thousands or hundreds of thousands of likes when I post and I have zero likes and zero comments. It's so obvious that that couldn't be what people were talking about when they were talking about shadow banning.

It was so disingenuous for them to resort to that semantic argument that, again, that should just be part of this, this, that should lead a reasonable person to be very skeptical of the entire Twitter thing because we know they're bullshitting us. They've been bullshitting us with, with plausible bullshit and implausible bullshit and plausible lies and implausible lies all along. And why would somebody who's a journalist, despite your political leanings, not think this stinks to high heaven in kind of just a, in a sense of the profession? Like these people are part of the problem. They're liars. They're liars. So, yeah, I mean, I think that I don't think that any corporation should be, you know, that all of its public relations communication should be taken on face value.

I think that, again, I just really think that it is important to keep what we're talking about here, you know, clear. As far as Twitter is limiting the visibility of some accounts without their awareness, they're also increasing the reach of a bunch of accounts without their awareness, because the way the algorithm works versus a chronological timeline is that through some, you know, sort of mathematical formula for increasing engagement the robot identifies what tweets are going to gain a lot of attention and it promotes those tweets over other wouldn't it be better for twitter to cut this shit out when there was an analysis of the political you know breakdown of what tweets the algorithm the robot was elevating they were

elevating right-wing content over left-wing content in the United States, potentially because it's engaging. If Twitter were having weekly meetings with the FBI during the Vietnam War era, what would they have been censoring? If Twitter were having weekly meetings with the FBI during the Patriot Act period, after 9-11, what would they be suppressing? It is so obvious that this is an outlier period where the FBI was kind of aligned with certain left-wing, I don't want to call it left-wing, with the Democrats because Trump was such a

jackass. But there will be a regression to the mean. The FBI is almost always going to line up against the American freedom of the American people. And we already saw it. They flagged Billy Baldwin's account. Why in the world would the FBI flag a movie star's account as something that Twitter ought to be concerned about. What does that tell you? Right. So, yeah, I have not followed that specifically. I do think that... You don't need to know much more than that. They were flagging jokes. They were flagging satire. They flagged the Babylon Bee. This is such a threat to our, like I said, our norms, our spirit of the Bill of Rights in everyday life. We should not be looking for reasons to explain this away. This is terrible.

We should all stand against this. Well, I don't know. I just think that it is, again, so you mentioned the Vietnam War, and I think some of your concerns with the- The Pentagon Papers were hacked. They were stolen. With the influence know the sort of intelligentsia can have in determining which stories are taken seriously and which are not and i just think it's a really sort of important

fact about our present reality that uh you know the elite liberal intelligentsia has less control over that than ever before. You know, we are in a situation where, you know, in the, for much of the 20th century, you had three major television networks and their news teams, their producers and editors got to choose which stories anybody heard about. And we romanticize that period probably wrongly. Yeah. And social media is the content moderation. I mean, the way that I've described it is, you know, if you think about the number of different perspectives and people who get to actually have the ability to speak

to a mass audience of millions and or to have their words read by the most influential politicians and journalists, the elites in the country, that number has been expanded so vastly by Twitter and Facebook's existence. And then, so maybe that expands it by five miles, and then the content moderation policy moves it back by six inches. But we're still living in an era of really sort of unprecedented freedom of speech in terms of the ability of different perspectives to reach an audience and have their voices heard. Well, sort of.

I don't totally disagree with you. But we may be living in an era of unprecedented freedom of speech in certain ways if you're ready to take the heat for, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really unhealthy. But the heat never existed like it does now. But we are also living in an era of, in my opinion,

of unprecedented incuriousness of the press. And, you know, just to, we'll wrap it up like that. So this is not the Ukraine thing, but there's Hunter Biden emails where there was a deal going on with some China company.

And he says it would be 10% for the big man. You know that email, right? Now, there's three or four people on that email. The fact that immediately all three or four of those people were not contacted and somebody to ask, is this email accurate? And if the big man was not Joe Biden, who did you take it to be? The fact that we still don't have that answer two years after this came out. What does that tell us about the press? Biden lied about this.

If this were Trump, there's no way a Trump junior laptop would have been treated this way. We would know immediately. Biden has denied it. It could be illegal to leave equity on the side that he doesn't claim. There's no reason to think Tony Bobulinski was a liar, although not one other network covered his interview. What kind of press doesn't want to put this to bed and say, you know what? This is easy enough to find out. Let me call up Rob Walker.

He's like Biden's, you know, one of Biden's team. This 10% for the big man email. Who was that? Have you heard that question asked? No. No. Doesn't that shock you? And can't you take from that some conclusions about where the press is coming from?

If there was an email in the Biden, in the Trump family, and said 10% for the big man, and everybody thought it was Trump, would they have just not asked the people on the email? They'd be yelling questions at them. Who's the big man? Who's the big man? I don't know. I haven't followed it much. I do think that it's, you know, in reading about the Hunter story, generally Steve Bannon was very excited by that email and by the narrative that Biden was bought by China.

So, again, I think in terms of just the significance of the story, you know, insofar as, you know, is there actually a payoff here in terms of corruption? I think it's just worth noting that Biden is incredibly aggressive on China, that he has taken Trump's policy and defended them. Trump was incredibly aggressive on Russia. This is not, the analysis, you can make that analysis, but that's not a journalist's job, and maybe your job, maybe you don't consider yourself a reporter. The reporter's job is to get all these facts out, every single one of them that could be relevant. We need to know who the big man was. And then we can decide whether this is something that concerns us or not. Is it okay that the

president-elect was doing business with China? Is it not okay? That's up for the voters to decide. I'm not particularly worried about Biden's patriotism. I don't think Biden's going to sell out the United States of America for because he had a business deal while he was out of office. I find that almost impossible to believe. But what I say, therefore, my opinion needs to be implemented in the way this story is presented so that the American people must. That's the only possible conclusion they could have. No, I don't think that at all. This should be reported. When, when, when Hunter has an email, a text and says, I've been having to give 50% of the money to my dad. I mean, what does, what does that mean? President Biden? This was not, you know, this is a private communication. He said that, is it not true? And there's other things that aren't coming immediately to mind that were in there.

We still don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think those are legitimate questions. I haven't followed. I don't know whether some reporters have pushed on that and just gotten silence or not. But yeah, if... Oh, there was audio tape with, I think it was also this guy Walker,

where Tony Bobulinski said, you know, I'm going to go public with this. He says, if you go public with this stuff, you're going to bury us. You know, why did he say that? Like, what did Rob Walker think was so radioactive that he was so worried about coming forward? Oh, and there was another text message that said,

do not put anything in writing, do not put anything in writing about Joe. He doesn't want anything in writing. You know, this is so much smoke. Yes, you can write it all off as, you know, well, Washington is corrupt. It always has been corrupt. And this is no different. But, you know, I don't even think you would see it the same way if the corruption came from the other side.

We shouldn't sign off on this kind of stuff. We should at least demand to know what went on here. And it seems to be no interest in the press. And Twitter doubles down on that. And it's self-enforcing. And it's a bubble. And, okay, everybody should read that Eric Wemple blog. I'm sure you read it, where he discussed the firing of Bennett at the Times

and he confessed I just didn't have the balls to say this out loud at the time I was just intimidated by the fact that everybody was supposed to be saying that the Times didn't do anything wrong you know that

he gave away the game you guys you journalists you're all human. And this kind of pressure for groupthink and this stigmatization of stories, it undermines democracy. It really does. They say democracy dies in darkness. This is darkness, that's coming full circle to the issue. Not blackness. Darkness. No. Can we zoom out a little bit? I was curious.

You had alluded to this at the beginning when I said that Andrew Doyle said that Twitter really should maybe not completely abandon censorship, but basically it should be the user should create their own experience. If they don't like people saying things, they can block them. I'll give you my answer. And this is what I said to him. I compared it to the comedian's table. And he was surprised because if I had Twitter, I would not

allow misgendering. Among all the different personal names, I wouldn't even allow that. And I gave an analogy. He also wouldn't allow the N-word and other racial slurs. Right. And the analogy was this. If I was at the comedian table, you know, we have a comedian table

in theology, a lot of comedians, and they argue about stuff. And we have a transgender comic, Jay McBride. If the comedians at the comedian table wanted to discuss pronouns, puberty blockers, transgender issues, Leah Thomas, any of these things

that, you know, are hot issues, I would never stop them from discussing that in front of Jamie Bright. And if Jay was offended by it, I'd say, listen, Jay, these are interesting subjects. I'm not going to protect you from that. If one of the comedians made a point of calling her by the wrong pronoun in that thing, I would throw them out. And if they misgendered her when

she was not at the table, I wouldn't stand for it either. Meaning to say that just because she can block it, essentially by walking away, doesn't mean she no longer has an interest in what's going on. The fact that the user can block it is

not the... If all that nastiness is still being hurled at her, first of all, she's still going to hear about it, whether she hears about it on Twitter or not. And it's still wrong. And it still has nothing to do with the spirit of the First Amendment, which is free discourse about ideas. This is why it's vital to us. I mean, yes, the government can't easily discern between hate speech and ideas. So the government opts to give the benefit of the doubt to the expression. The government doesn't want to risk it. But the private sector doesn't have to do that.

And if I was in charge of Twitter, I would do everything I can to not allow these kind of personal attacks that are hurtful and unproductive and don't add anything to anybody's. As a matter of fact, detract because they get adrenaline and and jigger up hate, which actually makes people think more poorly. It actually detracts from the idea of debate, of enlightenment emerging from debate. So I wouldn't allow that stuff. And blocking doesn't really change that. And yeah, there's some close calls, but they're close calls about a small subject here.

As long as every idea can be discussed, no matter what it is, I think Twitter would be great. And if people don't like it, they don't like it. So you're saying personally, you would draw the line if you had to define the policy that you would advocate would be personal attacks. That would be the dividing line.

In other words, somebody could say, I don't think Jay should be called, or a transgender person should be called by their what they identify as. I think they should be called by what they're born as. Yeah, they could say that they could say that doesn't allow to be somebody to actually call somebody. That's right. And I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't allow a clever way to do it either. And I'm sure there'll be tough cases.

Look, every standard is going to have tough cases. Even the incitement standard. I'm sure you could have a five to four Supreme Court case where five people thought it was incitement and four people thought it wasn't. There's always going to be tough cases. But you want to limit those tough cases to something that is less and less significant. You can rephrase a tweet that is classified as hate speech and still get – if you're really just trying to make a point, it's hard for me to imagine that you couldn't still make that point and clean up the language a little bit. But you should be able to make any point you want. Would you allow the N-word in – rather than calling somebody the N-word, would you allow the N-word – like I think if somebody tweeted, I think white people should be able to say – and then they say the N-word, would you allow the N-word, like, I think if somebody tweeted,

I think white people should be able to say, and then they say the N-word, would that be okay? Yeah, I don't know. My gut, I mean, I think, like, newspapers, Rolling Stone, radio stations, everybody did allow that when it was being discussed

until pretty recent history. It may be a singular exception that we have to just live with. You can't fight city hall on this. My, my, my honest instinct is that black people, this comes from, I'm not,

this comes from talking to many black people about it are not, uh, um, are able to, I mean, James Baldwin used the word, are able to read the word in the context of... But James Baldwin wasn't black. Yeah, I'm saying, but they're able to read the word in the context of, well, also in back and forth, able to read the word in the context of an intelligent discussion, in the way Jews are able to see pictures of the concentration camps

in the context of discussing the concentration camps without saying, how dare you show me the picture of the concentration camp? It's troubling, but you can discuss it. But, you know, as I said, you can't fight City Hall on that. Maybe that's just a word that just can't be used anymore. You know, if we have to have that one exception,

you know, so be it. It's not the end of the world. The important thing to me is that Twitter, everybody should be able to discuss without stigmatization, any ideas they want. The ideas that doctors couldn't discuss. Hey, you know what? Maybe we're getting this lockdown thing wrong.

Maybe this is harmful to children and let everybody jump in. I think they should be able to discuss that the Holocaust was – I don't think Holocaust deniers should be censored. Are they censored currently? They probably are. I think so. I don't think they should be because, first of all –

I'm pretty sure I've seen some Holocaust denial stuff on Twitter. What weaker argument is there to prove somebody wrong than saying you can't talk? We forbid you from talking about that. It seems so cowardly. Debunk it. If I ask 100 Jews, do you know, where do they get the 6 million number from? How do we know it? How do we know that the gas at the concentration camps was able?

They have no idea. They have no idea because these debates are never allowed. Let them have no idea. They have no idea because these debates are never allowed. Let them have the debate. Let people start really—let it become more common knowledge again why these stories are so ridiculous of Holocaust denial, like 9-11 truthers. It's just hard to imagine anybody who's like really wanting to litigate the exact number of Jews who died in the Holocaust who's coming from a completely, like, sort of... They don't have to be coming from a good faith. Yeah, just a good place, you know, just, I'm really just a stats nerd, and I just... Except that in every one of these things, there's a certain percentage of people who are cynical about it,

and there's certain people who are duped. There are people who hear these stories about Holocaust denial, and they're like, Jesus... You would put Kyrie in that category. Maybe, and they're convinced, and there's would put Kyrie in that category. Maybe. And they're convinced. And there's no pushback other than, how dare you say that?

That's not an answer. How dare you say that? I can see the, you know, the general experience of just like, there are pretty few Jews on the planet

and there are so many of them in the entertainment industry in powerful positions and like, you know, you're coming into that world and you're like, whoa, what's going on here? And then you see some anti-Semitic memes and stuff.

And, you know, I can sort of see how that happens maybe, but I don't know just the specific thing of just exactly how many Jews died in the Holocaust. It seems like kind of a. We are not going to get rid of the internet, right? And we're not going to be able to stop information. Twitter can censor anything it wants. People will find it.

They can close that door. Another window will open. Another window will open. Tucker Carlson will say it. 4chan, 8chan. So we're going to have to learn as a society to deal with the Internet. We may have to have courses for our kids on how to determine whether something is true or not. Maybe Twitter has to set up like rotten tomato type things so that various people can weigh in.

Like you can have a group of like journalists and experts who can rate certain facts and you can have the layman rating. In fact, you know, Rotten Tomato has the experts and the audience and some way that we kind of can get a feel for consensus opinions about things and maybe some way to keep a scorecard on what very how accurate various sources look like we're going to need to really shine light on all this so we can learn as a nation a free nation how to deal with the internet they're starting to implement these courses in elementary and middle schools. That's great. We are not going to be able to do it by playing whack-a-mole

with particular facts. And even if we did try to do it that way, it will be a matter of which particular facts kind of offend the person holding the hammer, you know, just viscerally. They don't even realize why some this Hunter Biden thing. It scared the shit out of a group of people who were deathly afraid Trump would win. Let's be honest about that. They were really afraid this would have an effect on the election. And they they they they went to attention on this. And sooner or later, that will be the opposite direction. We have to have a principle that everybody's going to be happy with, whether it's their candidate or the other guy's candidate, is implicated here.

And the fact that it's true ought to be a big wake-up call. Holy shit. You know, look, it turned out to be true. So I guess we have all the proof we need to know that that system does not work. By the way— It was true. What more do we need to know than that system is a failure? We suppressed a true story.

Were you able to sway Andrew Doyle a little bit because we talked with him during the show and after you talked with him a little bit more? I think I was. This whole notion that hateful speech and name-calling can't be separated out in good faith from people really trying to hash out arguments is just insincere to me. He's a free speech absolutist. Well, his argument also was that there's no perfect decider of what's good speech and what's bad speech. So since nobody can decide perfectly, we should just not decide at all yeah but it's a private company it will become a cesspool it will become a cesspool of hate and what what will be accomplished by that like i said this this this this concept of a of a spirit of the bill of Rights is, I think, is very, I think about it a lot. Used to be that in the private world, we all tried to emulate the lessons of the Bill of Rights. So,

yes, I'm a boss. I can fire anybody I want. But I try to be fair to the people I fire. I try, if I think they might be stealing, yeah, people are innocent and proven guilty. Well, actually, no, they're not innocent and proven guilty. There's nothing that says that. That's the lesson of our system. And we try to – a decent person used to want to give that benefit of the doubt as much as he can to his employees. I want people to be able to discuss it. I'm not going to easily fire somebody that I know loves Louis Farrakhan, even though I know Farrakhan loves Hitler or whatever it is. But people would expect me to fire a white guy who claimed,

you know, I'll say, you know what, this is all a bad idea. I don't really care what people debates are because I'm informed by the lessons of the constitution. And that's- And the legal system. Yeah. And that spirit is being lost. And then once that spirit is lost – But are you exaggerating how much we ever really had it? No, I don't think so. It used to be the liberals who are now defending Twitter were the same kind of people who were defending the rights of the Nazis to march in Skokie.

They would defend every – the ACLU used to defend every white supremacist, everything on every count. And now their grandchildren are like, this shouldn't be allowed on Twitter. And it's the right wing now, which is worried about civil liberties. Once that spirit is lost, then the Bill of Rights begins to look like an obstacle, not something that we should be trying to emulate in our personal lives, but actually, well, if it shouldn't be on Twitter and it shouldn't be here, it shouldn't be there,

why the hell, why can't the, I mean, if it's really that serious, maybe the government shouldn't allow it either. Maybe we should get rid of this whole private-public distinction. Maybe the government should be allowed to do it too. And then also, that's not so crazy because in Europe, they do put people in jail for things like this.

Doyle was on this show last week telling us about these things, people in jail for saying certain things in European countries that would just blow your mind. I don't know if you remember any of them. Like people actually going to jail for saying things in Europe? Yeah, they are. In England, they were going. England and Canada.

Is the right wing really that concerned with protecting civil liberties? I mean, I think the right wing is. Well, right is a broad term. The libertarians, which are often called are, the libertarians are. Right, but the quote unquote right wing proper is, I don't think. Well, they may be doing it opportunistically because. They are. Right, but the quote-unquote right-wing proper is, I don't think... Well, they may be doing it opportunistically because... They are. Because their ox is being gored now, and they would... I mean, I think if you look at the way that Musk is handling Twitter so far suggests it's, you know, not a hugely principled position against...

I gotta go. Well, you know, Musk is making a mess of Twitter. He's making a mess. But I don't think it's actually fair to him to conclude that he's not about Twitter being able to debate ideas. What I think you're seeing here is very unbecoming, thin-skinnedness. And it's not totally wrong. You know, I'm sympathetic that he doesn't want his airplane location out there. Well, except that he had just said that he's going to let – and it was public. I mean this kid was tracking his plane public off of public information. No, no.

He just kicked a bunch of people. So perfect example. This is another kind of – like I said about the shadow banning thing. Since when was doxing ever a matter of not public information? Doxing was putting somebody's address out there. Everybody's address is public information. You can find my address in two seconds. I think the issue is more just that he banned so many journalists who just tweeted just about the fact.

Well, they linked to it. They linked to it. And he seemed to have a pattern of specifically suspending journalists who had covered him critically in the past. It's just a little bit shady. I agree with you. It's a lot shady. You know, we tend to say that everything has to be black and white.

I am leaning, I'm 70-30 against Musk on this, but I don't want it to be lost then. Yes, they were linking to the location, to his plane. Yes, he is a walking target. Yes, I do think the difference between putting the location and putting a link to the he is a walking target. Yes, I do think the difference between putting the

location and putting a link to the location is a bit too clever. If it was AOC's location that was being tracked, the New York Times reporter would not say, but you can still find it here. Just like when there's a really horrible racist thing that somebody says in a video or something, to my frustration frustration they'll write the story about it and they won't link to it so you can't you have to google yourself to find it but they don't do that musk said i'm not going to allow these people to to i'm not going to allow this dude to track my plane anymore on twitter i'm throwing them off so the people wrote people wrote about it and said well but he is still is still here. And they gave the link.

Musk was right about that. But a bunch of other journalists got kicked off because that had covered him critically having nothing to do with it. I don't know if that's true. But having said that, Musk should have taken down those tweets, not banned the journalists. He should have taken down those specific tweets and told those journalists, I'm not going to recognize the distinction between linking to something and actually printing it itself. It's too risky for me. Now you're warned, and if you do it again, I will have to ban your account.

And I don't think anybody could have found a flaw in that. But he didn't do that because he's an emperor, right? I just want to say that I really agree with the spirit of what you say, how Twitter should operate in terms of abusive interpersonal speech. No, but any point of view, yes. Though I do think that just fundamentally Twitter cannot work if you have to censor every personal insult. If it's not just a protected category, but just people calling each other an idiot, that's like 60% of the site.

I'm not saying it would be easy. What about something you're saying you're a dummy? You would allow that. Probably. I'd written to Barry Weiss that she should suggest to Elon Musk the terms of Twitter's terms of use, whatever you call that,

terms of service or something. Terms of service, sorry, that's it. Twitter needs a preamble because the rules are imperfect. Rules turn out to fail. No plan survives. Contact with the enemy. Some rules get gamed. Twitter needs to express its vision of what it wants to be.

And then if the rules are allowing something which clearly are contrary to that vision, it can be criticized for that. Or then if a rule is technically correct, but is being enforced in a way which undermines that expressed vision. This is the same way we look at things that happen in America. Then we could judge it against that. But Twitter needs to express kind of what we're saying here as a preamble to its terms of service. And then give the terms of service as its best stab at trying to implement that. But then within the context of a preamble, we would all accept much more flexibility because we'd understand why you're changing the rules as you go along. We're changing the rules as we go along because it's emerging that these rules are not getting

us to our vision and everything we're doing. And it reminds me of my business. I always tell my staff, I say, listen, you can break any rule you want, any rule you want if you're doing it because the customer is unhappy. Because I can't predict every scenario. But don't tell me, well, the reason I did that is because you told me not to do that. But you knew the customer was going to be furious. Well, but the rules are rules. No, rules are not rules. There's a vision first, which is we're running a business here to make customers happy. And then we write down all these rules to try to guide you and hopefully we can get, but the rules are not the point. The vision is the point. Twitter needs to express its vision. And I think that would be a huge positive thing for

Musk to do. Does that include giving free drinks to the customer? No, it doesn't include. But that's the problem here. You know, so within that context, really, within that context, it will be difficult to decide what insults to allow, what insults not to allow. But like I said, you might start with protected classes. But like I said... You might start with protected classes. But like I said, the consequence is not that dire because if you're really only trying to make a point, you can rephrase it. I'm not saying you can't make your point. Just don't call them...

Maybe don't call them a dummy. You know, it's not the end of the world. Not allowing lockdowns to be discussed based on scientific evidence by eminent doctors, that is serious. That's quite serious. And stigmatizing those conversations is quite serious. You know, making the wrong call on a personal insult is really not, it's a capillary as opposed to a jugular. You know, we need to worry about the jugular, the capillaries, whatever. You know, you get them wrong, get them right. We'll kind of back into something which

works. But they've got to get out of the business of thinking that the deplorables and the unwashed and the people who don't have anything less than a Johns Hopkins education can't handle hearing stuff. But if they have a Tufts education, that's less. Democracy is based on people being able to handle

hearing stuff, even stuff that's not true. And we'll have to sort that out. We have to be able to hear that stuff, even stuff that's not true. And they'll have to sort that out. We have to be able to hear that stuff. A story that is in the New York Post cannot be verified by Twitter. It can be debunked on Twitter by reporters who want to ask the tough questions. I'm going to prove this story is false. President Biden, you know, I demand you answer this. And by the way, President Biden, I'm demanding you answer this question because there's a story out there.

You should want to answer the question. If you can debunk this, you should want to debunk it. I'm not going to. Why are we giving him a way out where he doesn't have to debunk it by stigmatizing the whole story? Fifty one intelligence experts say it's Russian disinformation. We never demand that he actually just go on record and saying, yes, that's the laptop. No, it's not the laptop. Hunter Biden never. What if you just want to bunk it?

Whatever. I'm repeating myself. I don't think you actually disagree with me. No, I generally don't. I got to go. OK, thank you, everybody. Send me send me read reread the post article and send me what you want. Thank you, Eric Levitz. No relation to the I believe, defunct department store,

although it might still exist. I'll Google that after the show. But in any case, Eric Levitz, Noam has a lot of fancy intellectual friends. Thank you, Periel Ashenbrand. Neither you nor I said a whole lot today, but that often happens when Noam gets... When you ever see Noam with a stack of papers and notes, you know how it's going to go.

Well, or anything relating to Hunter Biden, apparently. Yes, that's true too. And of course, Nicole Lines,

I'm not going to ask you what you thought of the show. I know what you thought of the show. I know you thought it was a bit, a bit in the weeds for you.

What did you think of the show? In the weeds. But in any case, podcast at comedyseller.com for your comments and suggestions, criticisms and compliments. We'll see you next time. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye and Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah and all the best.