The Megyn Kelly Show - Tech Censorship And Independent Media, with Glenn Greenwald and the CEOs of Parler and Substack | Ep. 50

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Parler founder and CEO John Matze, Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best, and journalist and The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to talk about Big Tech and tech censorship, President Trump's ban from Twitter and other social accounts, the rise of independent media, free speech, what everyday Americans can do to fight back and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Trump and others on the right are being banned from Twitter and Facebook. Parler, booted entirely by big tech. Its CEO is here, along with a Substack founder and Glenn Greenwald. Now. Hey everyone, it's Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We are going to get to our jam-packed show with a bunch of great guests for you in just one second, and there's much to discuss. But I've got some thoughts on what we're seeing right now that I wanted to add before we go there.

I've been thinking over the past few days of the old Rahm Emanuel motto, never let a crisis go to waste. Remember that under President Obama? Well, it's rearing its ugly head again in the wake of last week's Capitol Hill riot. Everyone was outraged by what they saw at the Capitol last week. I have yet to hear anybody defend it. A cop was murdered. Another was beaten mercilessly with American flags. At least four other people died, including that one female protester who got it in her head that she would, quote, die for President Trump, pushing, you know, ridiculous claims and storming the Capitol, a place she never should have been. You've seen these tapes of the lawmakers who try to serve the country honorably.

A lot of them do. And their staffs forced to cower under their desks as the Capitol police were drawing guns to prevent the breaching of the congressional chambers. It was disgusting. It was stomach turning. Every one of these rioters should be tracked down and prosecuted. And it's happening. And law enforcement, which, as it turns out, had been warned that this was coming, but

did not take it seriously, needs to reevaluate its approach to these threats, especially in the next week, because we're hearing more chatter about more events. But the answer is not to change the parameters of free speech in America. And that, to me, that seems to be the left's and the media's and big tech's solution to what we saw. In fact, my impression is many seem to be salivating at the opportunity here to shut down not just Trump, but conservative platforms, speech, and any viewpoints they deem problematic, stuff they've wanted shut down for years now. They want to use this as the excuse to do it.

And this, to me, does not appear to be about preventing another attack at this point or curbing someone's dangerous rhetoric. It appears to be about silencing one's political adversaries. First, they've come for Trump. The president of the United States. Okay, I realize Trump is controversial, but he's still the president.

Banned now forever from Twitter and at least temporarily from Facebook and Instagram. Even the company responsible for processing donations to, I think, his campaign has severed its relationship with them. So it's been a clear and concerted effort to silence the president. And frankly, it started before last week. Remember when CNN and MSNBC and even some shows on Fox cut away from the president when he veered off into his unsupported electoral gripes instead of simply

fact checking him after the leader of the free world? How did that work out? Was all of America suddenly disabused of its trust in President Trump or in their suspicions that there might have been electoral fraud? No, because that's a left-wing fantasy. That's not how this works. Now it's morphed into a total shutdown of his communication with the American people. The vast majority of Americans, contrary to the belief here, are people who can separate fact from fiction and who, even when they fail to, even when they've been lied to and they don't see the difference between the lies and the truth, can control their anger and would never dream of storming the Capitol and hurting people.

Now, are there some nutcases out there? Obviously. Can we solve that with Twitter and other electronic censorship? No, I don't think we can. That's why we had riots and societal outrage and breakdowns long before we had the internet. The internet gives us a peek at what these groups are up to, what they're saying and planning. It gives us a heads up if we would just listen and plan accordingly. The internet, while far from perfect, is not the cause of the angst and the outreach seething in the country right

now. For that, we have to look at so much more, you know, the, the partisan media, a hyper partisanship and government, these shutdowns,

interminable and indiscriminate, then aren't followed by the people imposing them on us, political elitism, where they turn up their noses at middle America and say, you don't matter, and much more. And don't even get me started on Trump and all of his rhetoric and untethered relationship with the truth, as I've said. But only that last thing is being discussed. Now, sometimes the internet is a place for confused people to traffic in baseless conspiracy theories. But that's America.

You're allowed to be a nut. When things veer over into threats that clearly incite violence, speech can and should be curtailed. But the standard should not be arbitrarily applied based on politics. That's what we're seeing. And people like the president should be given as wide a berth as possible. The Twitter crackdown on Trump was absurd. In my view, he did not call for violence or any kind of attack. He was obviously slow to denounce it, and some of his surrogates got a lot closer to the line than he did. But Twitter, you know, holier than thou

Twitter, they allow the Ayatollah Khomeini to urge jihad against Israel, saying, and I quote, everyone must help the Palestinian fighters and saying, quote, the Zionist regime is a deadly cancerous growth that must be uprooted and destroyed. Twitter says, well, that doesn't violate his policies because it's, quote, discourse by a world leader. Give me a break. So what was Trump's discourse that ultimately got him booted off the platform? Two tweets in particular, says Twitter. One, he says, the 75 million great American patriots who voted for me will have a giant voice long into the future. OK, we're waiting for it to get controversial. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form.

Boom. Incitement. OK, the second one was, he said, to those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th. The argument is he was telegraphing that violence could take place there, even though he wasn't going to be there. Based on what? Maybe he was just finally letting us know something we've been speculating about for months in this country, which is, would he go if he lost? And by the way, his daughter Ivanka already says she's going. So please, on that other theory. So basically, where are we? Destroy the

Zionist regime with jihad? No problem. American patriots will not be treated unfairly. Off you go, Trump. And now we find out that Parler, that's the Twitter competitor popular with conservatives, has been shut down. Not only did Apple and Google remove the Parler app from their smartphone app stores, but Amazon suspended Parler from being able to use its server. All of them claiming too much hateful or violent content is appearing on Parler and it's allegedly posing a danger and did prior to the riot in the Capitol. That is effectively the end of Parler for right now, though the CEO is going to be here in a second, the founder. We're going to talk about

whether that's true, what his plan is. But this is selective outrage, people. Those who have been looking into this actually say Facebook is where much of the planning took place for the Capitol riot, not Parler. We'll talk about that with Glenn Greenwald. Already we're seeing some media analysts and others say more, more need to be banned. More speech needs to be silenced, not just Trump. The media critic over at CNN wants Fox News to be silenced. They want Fox gone. Anyone who supported President Trump now being lumped in with the nutcases who committed murder at the Capitol last week. Future career and other opportunities are being threatened. And if you want to raise questions about, quote, widespread voter fraud in this election, good luck. YouTube's already banning those discussions, which gets censored on Twitter and elsewhere, too. Now, look, there's been zero proof of widespread voter fraud. The Sidney Powell Kraken never came through. People admit it. It wasn't there. They were trying to craft a soft exit for the president where he didn't have to admit he lost, but he did. So people do need to

accept reality. But if you choose not to, that's up to you. And frankly, if you want to continue discussing your beliefs, even if they're unfounded, you should be able to. What is this, East Germany? I mean, speaking of East Germany, by the way, even Angela Merkel, who grew up there, is criticizing Twitter's decision to ban Trump. But OK, those claims are based on lies, you say, right? It's not true. There wasn't widespread voter fraud. OK. So people are saying, why shouldn't YouTube and others shut down these discussions? Those are the lies that influence those people who stormed the Capitol. First of all, do you have any idea how many lies there are on YouTube and the Internet?

And not just lies like I was abducted by aliens and lost my virginity to an alien hologram at age five, which is which is what I actually just watched. OK, that's on YouTube now. But lies that matter, lies that have led to deep anger, division and even danger. Look at what happened just this past summer. The lies told about police. LeBron James saying cops are literally hunting black men, hunting them in the streets. Did Twitter put a warning on that as disputed? Lies like America was founded to preserve slavery, which appeared in the New York Times and won a Pulitzer,

despite the fact that it's been universally discredited. They're not even admitting that they lied. Lies like Michael Brown really did say, hands up, don't shoot, before he was killed by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri. A lie that is still being peddled by race hustlers like Al Sharpton. No problem. Well, you might say, those aren't lies, they're just opinions. But the same could be said about the widespread voter fraud claims we're hearing. Well, those lies about, say, cops and race, they're not being peddled by elected officials with huge power and influence.

You mean like Kamala Harris, a U.S. senator, now vice president elect, who said the cop who shot Michael Brown, who was, by the way, exonerated by Eric Holder's DOJ, committed murder. That was her word. He committed murder, totally unfounded, exonerated by Eric Holder's DOJ, committed murder. That was her word. He committed murder, totally unfounded, untrue and outrageous. But that's fine because why again? Well, I'll tell you why, because this is America and she's entitled to her opinion, even if it's unfounded. And if you think there was widespread voter fraud and the Kraken was suppressed, it's not true, but you're entitled to your opinion and you're entitled to discuss it. It's crazy to me, the standards. You know, meantime, of course,

the New York Post is shut down from circulating online a true story about Hunter Biden's foreign corruption deals because, you know, big tech and its defenders tell us honesty matters, except in certain instances. It's like the it's like the corona protests, like the coronavirus and the shutdowns. Stay inside. It's dangerous. Socially distance, unless you're protesting BLM or mourning RBG or celebrating Joe Biden. The double standards are obvious to anybody paying attention. Here's the bottom line. These big tech giants are so powerful, they're so huge, and they're so monopolistic in their control of the Internet that they need to be treated like a governmental entity. The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed dated Monday by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld that sums it up perfectly. They say these guys, these guys in Silicon Valley have the power of a governmental entity without the accountability.

And the authors end the piece by saying, quote, Silicon Valley seized on last week's attack to do what Congress couldn't by suppressing the kind of political speech the First Amendment was designed to protect. Aggrieved plaintiffs should sue these companies now to protect the voice of every American and our constitutional democracy. Amen. We'll get to our guests in one second, but first, insurance can be complicated. That's why the Zebra was created. Oh, have I gotten your attention? The Zebra. When you use thezebra.com, insurance finally feels like it's in black and white. No more confusion. Just honest rates from real companies. The Zebra is the nation's leading insurance comparison site for car and home insurance.

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black and white. And now, without further ado, we're going to get to John Mates. He's the CEO and founder of Parler, which is kind of like Twitter, not quite as big, but was on the rise up until they just got shut down by Apple, Google, and ultimately Amazon, which has its server. And Parler has become very, very popular with conservatives who have kind of had it up to here with Twitter. Unfortunately for John Mates and those who like Parler, as of now, it's been, if not killed, placed on life support. And we're going to get into why. Here's John. John Mates, CEO of Parler. Thank you so much for being here. How are you? Thank you. I'm doing okay, given the circumstances, but you know.

It's got to be a scary time for you. I mean, this is your company. You decided to create and innovate a space where people could speak freely with their opinions and not have to worry about, in particular, liberal censorship, which we've seen. And the answer this week has effectively been not only does the conversation on Parler need to change, Parler itself is done. That's effectively the message you've been given. Well, that's what they'd like. I mean, they tried pretty hard to basically erase us from the Internet completely, you know, by terminating web services, by terminating our app store. The app stores alone is devastating, but they pulled the plug for our servers too. And with that, the reputational damage and a lot of the fake information out there about

what Parler actually stands for, it left such a big impact that we can't find other service providers. Now, we are finally identifying a few who will stand up, but even the few that we have come in contact with, they say they get attacked in the press, they're getting attacked by hackers, they're getting attacked by everybody as a result of what's happened from Amazon. I mean, what they did is evil. So Parler, just to take one step back, I think people know this at this point, but Parler is basically like Twitter. It's a forum in which people can post their opinions and sort of quick, short posts. And it encourages back and forth and so on. But it's not as big as Twitter. And as of a

couple months ago, it wasn't yet profitable. It's only been around for a couple of years, but you were growing. And just to take a, again, step back, just tell us why you thought it was necessary to create the forum. Well, I guess it goes back into the kind of the root of what we call to post. So when you post on Twitter, it's a tweet. You post on Facebook, I guess it's just a post. But when you post on Parler, you create a parlay. And if you look up the definition of a parlay, it'll be two opposing parties. Maybe they hate each other. Maybe they're just in a disagreement. Maybe they violently disagree with one another. And then a parlay is bringing those two people together,

or those two parties together, to have a civil discussion and to work things out. They may not leave the discussion agreeing. Maybe they found a better answer. But when they leave the discussion, you know, they don't hate each other anymore. That's the idea of a parlay. And parlor was founded on the principles of free speech, not conservatism, not liberalism, not, not political, you know, the idea that, you know, we all, uh, have an innate right to have a voice and that we shouldn't be tracked or stalked or surveilled in the process of us speaking online. And so those are our two, you know, founding principles, which I think, you know, it doesn't get more American than that.

And it doesn't get more, you know, it's not, you know, this is what we need now more than ever. Well, I know that one of the thoughts you had, and you only graduated from the University of Denver in 2014, you're a young guy,, you were sick of the ideological suppression you felt you were seeing of conservatives by big tech. And when I read that, I thought, oh, the irony, right? The irony. Little did you know what was coming your way, which would be what certainly looks like ideological suppression of your entire business

by big tech. Yes. And compounded oned on it, uh, you know, a lot of, a lot of angry people on the internet, uh, you know, on places like Twitter, which, uh, you know, I have described as being a very hateful place, um, you know, are compounding it by spreading information. You know, they, they started a rumor the other day that we were hacked, but it's not true, you know, and that went on for a full day. So it's pretty crazy. And people genuinely, as a result, hate us. But we also have a lot of support, right?

I mean, it's not all doom and gloom. We have a lot of people, millions of Americans all over the country who can see through it, and they know what's happening is wrong. Well, I think most conservatives like Parler. I mean, I'm on Parler and I like it a lot and I actually do find it far less hateful than Twitter, far less. And the people who don't think Twitter are hateful are liberals. That's their forum. They get their worldview reinforced and they get people who are conservative shamed and ratioed. And Parler's like, you know, I lean more right, although I'm not a Republican, but it's it reminds me of a line I heard from Ann Coulter years ago at the Republican National Convention. I saw her. I said, Ann, how's it going? How are you feeling? And she goes, I feel great. I'm in a sea of Republicans. And I think, you know, Republicans have very few places

they can go where they feel like that. And if Parler has turned into that for them, great, fine. That's the marketplace working. I mean, you found a market and you were growing. But as with so many things, as with Fox News and even these more, I don't know, I mean, OAN is more fringy, but it has a base. Fine. You may not like it. You don't have to watch it. You don't have to join Parler. But to shut it down is to take it to a new place. And so what were you told specifically? Forget,

I know Google and Apple removed the Parler app, which was bad enough, but Amazon removing your ability to even exist. I mean, basically, they shut down your ability to access the cloud, which means you can't get Parler on your phone anymore. You know, you'll see nothing. So when you heard that, what was your first reaction? You know, I was pretty shocked. In theory, they could have done that, right? In theory. It's very, very rare slash, you know, I've never really seen Amazon do that to anybody. But I thought it's feasible. But I was assured from our rep that they would never do something like that. It's not in writing. It was over telephone conversations. But I felt really confident. I used to be an Amazon Web

Services employee. I know the staff there. They felt very open-minded to me. And so it was very shocking to know that my former, you know, coworkers even did this to us. And, you know, it's worse than just having us taken offline too, because yes, you can't access Parler, but we can't even access our own code right now. Our developers cannot work because our services that were, that were hosted, uh, that, uh, you know, we, we even got our own, uh, get repositories and everything, but they were all hosted between two data centers, one in Amazon and one in another data center. The other data center also dropped us because they saw Amazon did, and they were our hedge against Amazon. Um, and so, you know, it's, it's more devastating than that. We lost a lot

of communication. Our parlor jury who oversees the platform and makes sure that violent content doesn't get out and makes sure that these things don't happen, the things that they're accusing us of, the group that actually organizes to stop that. The messaging service that we use to talk with them also dropped us. So we don't have any contact with our 600 jurors anymore. So, I mean, they really, and even if we wanted to contact them, we can't access our servers because Amazon shut them off. So we can't get their email addresses, even if we wanted to email them. So, I mean, this is, it's really what they've done is devastating.

We're going to overcome it. We're not to overcome it. I would hate to describe Parler as done because we're not. We're going to come back. When somebody does something that's evil, you don't let them get away with it. Well, and that's where you're fighting back and you filed this antitrust lawsuit against them, which I'll get to in a second. I mean, I'll tell you just a headline. I think you filed your lawsuit on the wrong basis. I don't think this is an antitrust case. I think this is a First Amendment case. And I think you should be going off of the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by some constitutional scholars yesterday saying these guys should be treated as First Amendment actors and they should be held to the same First Amendment or as government actors and they should be held to the same First Amendment standards as the state would be. They can't shut down this kind of a speech. They may not. Now that they control the Internet the way they do, they have to be subject to different restrictions than your average private company. This was never foreseen. But I'll get your reaction to that in one second, because I do want to talk to you about the lawsuit. Before we get to that, what Amazon

is saying is, look, we didn't want to shut them down, but there's been a steady increase in violent content. And what we've seen, especially leading up to the Capitol riot, is you don't have a reliable process to prevent violations of your, of Amazon's terms of service, which don't allow that kind of violent content to post. And they say this has been going on for a while and that they're not satisfied with your jury. I mean, over at Twitter, they've got Jack Dorsey, who basically can ultimately decide this is an okay post or this isn't. You guys have this jury, jury of one's peers, where it goes out to, let's say, five people who volunteer to serve as jurors, random people brought together who have sort of been taught what the standards

should be. And if they like it, it can stay. They think the post is okay. It can stay. If they don't, it goes. But what do you say to Amazon's claim that your system's not working and it's leading to, as they say, quote, a steady increase in violent content? No, our chief policy officer and me, and I have too also been in contact with them, have calls all the time with Amazon. We had. They sent us emails. Anytime they found stuff that they didn't like, they'd send it to us and say, hey, just by the way, just one or two complaints. We said, should we be worried? Do you have any problem with what we're doing? No,

no, no. Continue. You're doing fine. You know, just keep on going. But, you know, just take a look at these couple of things, but otherwise, you know, you guys are doing great. You're fine. You know, and we get calls, you know, how can we help you scale more? We love your business. We love what you're doing. How can we help you get more services? Can we sell you more Amazon products? Can we help you here? Can we help you there every week? It's the same thing. And so out of the blue to pull the plug and help us succeed more because they knew that they liked what we were doing. And, you know, they claimed they couldn't find a quick remedy. We even offered them to say, hey, Amazon has products that can detect violent content.

They have machine learning algorithms, Amazon Recognition with a K. And, you know, we offered to use that and they said that wouldn't remedy it. And I'm like, well, if your own products can't remedy it, you know, this doesn't really seem. How are we supposed to remedy it? Yeah, how are we supposed to remedy it? So what about the people are looking at specific parlays now and saying, well, look, this is egregious. And the one that keeps getting circulated is the, the, the parlay by Lynn Wood, who's the pro-Trump lawyer. Um, he's been permanently suspended from Twitter and he tweeted out or forgive me, I'm used to that,

that language, but he sent out a parlay saying, get the firing squads ready. Pence goes first. That's a problem. That's a problem on Twitter, at least. Is that a problem for you? Well, that was removed off parlor. That exact parlay that you're talking about from Linwood was deleted and was deleted very quickly. When did it go up and when was it taken down? I don't know the exact timing but it was within 24 hours and the only place that that parlay existed on the internet where people could see it and spread that information was on Twitter one of Amazon's clients

and they weren't taken down over it but it was mostly on Twitter becoming a trending thing because people were so outraged about it it was mostly on Twitter becoming a trending thing because people were so outraged about it. It got retweeted and retweeted because people were like, what the hell? Yeah, but nobody nobody informed them that it was removed off of Parler. Well, so that wasn't the only one, right? There were if you go through the list, there was a lot of talk of sort of insurrection and violence and going to the Capitol on Parler. And now that's being used against you saying your system didn't work well enough to call out these communications. Do you take any responsibility for that? I mean,

is that true at all that your system did not work very well to call out those communications? Well, we definitely didn't do our best job in the last few days because, you know, we had a large influx of people. And our backlog of, you know, cases that needed adjudicating by the jury had skyrocketed. And, you know, that was a problem. That had been a problem in the past, too. And Apple and Amazon and Amazon actually never talked to us about this stuff. They never gave us any indication. Actually, Apple was the only one who ever gave us any indication that, you know, they

were, but they, Apple in the past had communicated to us and said, you know, Hey, you know, you're looks like you're falling behind here. And we said, yes, we are. But, you know, give us, you know, we're just really growing a lot. Give us a few days. We've got to grow out the jury some more. We're taking this really seriously. We just need to get more people on this. And they, in the past, it's been acceptable. And, you know, it never got to the point where they were

threatening to remove us. They just said, hey, you guys should really do something about this. We said, yes, of course we are. We'll take care of it. And so, yeah, we were behind. But, you know, most of those things are against our rules. And when the jury would get to them, you know, they're supposed to take them down. And the jury is trained and contrary to popular belief, in opinion, they are paid to do this. And, you know, I, legally speaking, you know, we want to follow the law, which, and we want to make sure that, you know that that doesn't happen. But also from a personal responsibility and my personal opinion on the matter, we don't want violence. I don't want to see that. And that's not what our platform's for. You know, what is it? Insurrections, violence, all this stuff has no place to be spread on social media, especially not Parler. Right. And that's always been my belief. So what are you I mean, when you get specific, you know, when you start broad brush and say there was sort of violent rhetoric,

you say, okay, that's not good. And then you look at the specifics and I'm just going by what I've seen reported in Washington Post and elsewhere saying there were specific posts on Parler, like you want a war? Well, you're asking for one to the American people on the ground in DC today and all over this great nation, be prepared for anything. Now we're here. Now they get what they want. And going on saying, bring our weapons. Bring your weapons in support of our nation's resolve. We'll come in numbers that no standing army or police can match. The police are not our enemy unless they choose to be. Come armed.

You know, on and on. So it's like those specific words are problematic. You know, I, I've, I wouldn't say I've defended President Trump's rhetoric around this issue, but his specific tweets that got him in trouble, I do not think are legal incitement. These are a lot closer. Sure. And then on those days leading up to those events, that content was viral and happening on every platform. They just looked at us. In fact, a lot of these events were organized on places like Facebook and Telegram. In fact, there was an account that was on Parler that was recruiting people, had over 100,000 people following it, that was recruiting people to

Telegram where they were organizing stuff like this. We banned them weeks, at least a week in advance of the event. What about that? Because we're going to have Glenn Greenwald coming up in the program in a minute, and he's going to be talking about what he saw on Facebook. Do you see a double standard in the way Parler's being treated versus the way Facebook has been with respect to this particular incident? Oh, yeah, completely. Facebook's gotten a pass. Twitter's gotten a pass. And all of them have gotten a pass, really. It's just they wanted to find a scapegoat and blame them for what's happening. And, you know, if you kind of look at the way the world's sitting right

now, you have a lot of angry people in the United States. You have a lot of angry people who are upset about what happened on the 6th. They're very upset about what happened and understandably so. Nobody wants to see a country fall apart. Nobody wants to see violence. No one wants to see the Capitol attacked. That was awful. And so there's a lot of angry people and understandably so. And so the irresponsible thing that has happened is these tech companies have acted as cowards and have blamed Parler for it and are trying to or insinuating that, you know, it maybe they're not outright saying it. Maybe they're not outright saying it. Apple definitely insinuated it in their email they sent out to the press as well as they sent to us. That's what they insinuated. And that's not what the country needs. We need people to look at each other as humans again and say, we are not each other's enemies. We can't let our leaders blame each other for these things. We have to come together as a country and move on. What do you think make of the fact, John, that not only are they now saying, you know,

the violent talk, you know, what appeared to be plans for violence is problematic, but now they're saying now they're going after Parler and others for any talk that was allowed about widespread voter fraud, that that that in and of itself should have been banned the way Twitter kept doing, the way we saw even some cable news channels do, that those discussions themselves were dangerous. Well, that's a bit extreme. If there was widespread voter fraud, wouldn't you think that, you know, talking about it, at least finding some transparent answer that satisfies everybody would be the answer? But, you know, they're saying there wasn't any, you know, once those cases were settled and it was proven that there was no white spread voter fraud, which, by the way, I agree there wasn't. They could not prove it in court. That's for sure.

That the discussion, the mere allowance of an ongoing discussion about it was dangerous and fired up these crazies. That's essentially their argument. Well, they didn't convince them. You know, I don't know what to say. You know, you have to talk to people. Do you believe it's OK to have a discussion about something like that? I mean, do you believe that people should be able to talk to one another and convince them? Or do you think that it's up to, you know, an authoritative state or an authoritative central point of power to sit there and say, this is what you may, and this is what you may not talk

about? I know I have to say, I find it, I find it really problematic. I've been fine all along saying, okay, they keep, they they're holding on. Let's talk about it. Here's what, here's what I think. They haven't been able to prove it in court. In fact, when asked to specifically offer their pro their proof of fraud claims in courts, they keep saying they have no fraud claim. They don't have, they don't have it. They say a different thing in front of the microphones than they say to in front of a judge, which tells you what you need to know if you're paying attention to this. And I think the more discussions we can have like that, the better, but I don't believe in just it's banned. The words may not come out of your mouth because

they're too dangerous because there is a faction of crazies in this country that, you know, do consider themselves sort of an unarmed or an armed but ununiformed militia and that, you know, they're going to do what they're going to do. I don't know that the solution is like whack-a-mole, try to shut down those discussions wherever they happen. I just don't know, A, if that's going to work, and B, if that's the way this country is supposed to work. If you believe you've been wronged and you want to talk about it, even if you're a little hysterical because you've been wronged, right? And you feel you have been. And so you want to talk about it. The last thing that's going to deescalate that individual or those groups of individuals is going to be to ban them

or to get rid of them or to censor them. If you ban them, censor them, get rid of them, it's going to make the problem worse. You're pouring gas on a fire. You're not solving it. What you need to do is come out and say, I understand your concerns. How do we get through this together? And how do we get everybody on the same page here? Because we're moving forward. We're not going to collapse over this. We're moving forward and we're moving forward as a country. So we need leaders to set that example. We need the press to set that example. Instead, people are just kind of riling them up more to get clicks and to get links to their website so they can read about this outrage and get more ad revenue or dehumanize the other side. This needs to stop. This is more of a societal problem than trying to blame a specific social media for saying free speech is allowed. If free speech is not allowed and free speech is dead, then I think our democracy is too. We have to allow people to speak their mind.

Since Amazon has cracked down only on you and not on Facebook, which also uses its cloud, is this a PR stunt by Amazon? I don't know exactly what their intention is. Um, I can speculate on a few things, you know, I can speculate that they were probably worried maybe Donald Trump would join and they wanted to make sure he was off the internet and getting rid of us was a good way because they knew that we wouldn't ban somebody just because of their name. Uh, you know, I don't agree with his politics much of the time. In fact, I made that very clear during some of the time on Parler and some of my parlays, but he still has a right to speak.

And that is true, but maybe that's part of the reason. Maybe part of the reason is people were looking to blame Facebook, Twitter, and the tech companies, and they wanted to cover up. Or maybe they just wanted to get rid of a competitor because they saw us as a threat. We had a large percentage, not large, but a sizable percentage of US voters on Parler. And people were getting a lot of real interaction. A lot of links were being clicked. People were actually viewing the material. I know you put a lot of your podcasts and some links on Parler. They probably performed very well. So that's the threat. But I mean, you're tiny in comparison to Twitter. You've got, what, 10 million users and Twitter has almost 200 million, right. So it's they dwarf you. You're you're just getting started, which doesn't mean that you're not a threat at all to them, but you're a, about 20 million, you know, Parler is concentrated in the United States, which is one of the, you know, which is where most of the revenue comes from, too, by the way. So, you know, the United States is a very, in the United States, it's a smaller subset of the accounts on Twitter. Now, our accounts are harder to make on Parler. You'd have an SMS number. It limits the amount of accounts you can make, the time to get in. And so they might be using a standard to measure user numbers that are not the same as ours. But in fact, we had a large

number of people on Parler. And I do feel that it was a threat to their business model. If I were them, I would have been afraid and I would have taken it seriously. Because if you look at the engagement on Parler, you know, a lot of people, a lot of prominent people like, let's say, Devin Nunes or Dan Bongino, you know, they were getting even Hannity. They were getting more followers and more engagement on Parler than they were on Twitter. People were using it. They were getting real results. And that is.

So let me ask you this. So that makes sense. That explains why Twitter might be threatened by you. But why would Amazon be threatened by you? Because you've now filed this antitrust suit trying to fight back. And I admire you for trying to fight back. I do think in a lot of what we've seen this year, people are have been too reluctant to use the law, which which will help a lot of people in these kinds of situations. But your lawsuit is against Amazon, and it's alleging an antitrust violation. And I don't see, why would Amazon want to squash you for competitive reasons? You're a client, Twitter's a client. What, competitively,

because that's what the antitrust law looks at, trying to squash competition. Why would Amazon want to do that? Well, a few things. One, I'm not particularly well-versed as a legal scholar. So I'm an engineer, so I wouldn't be able to answer any legitimate legal question in any proper way. But it isn't just against Amazon, though. It's my belief that they work together with the big tech community, with Amazon, Apple, Google, and all of these other companies that banned us within a 24-hour period, too. They all work together to benefit the established companies such as Twitter and Facebook, who are very large spenders

on Amazon and have just recently made large long-term commitments to using their services. Who else dropped you? I mean, it's a pretty long list. I'll give a couple examples. One of our legal teams, we had many legal teams, one of our legal teams that we relied on heavily at that time dropped us. Have you said who that is yet publicly? No, I'm not prepared to yet. I'd like to get a lot of it approved, but some of them that came out publicly, you have Zendesk banned us, Slack. We had Twilio ban us. Twilio was pretty unfortunate too, because that's how we kept. They are the largest SMS company in the world. They send text messages. So when people try to

log in, we tell them, hey, send this person a text message so we can verify that that is their account. And so that we can verify they own that phone. That's how we kept out a lot of bots, a lot of hackers, especially a lot of foreign bad actors. We were able to track them effectively by making sure like, hey, this isn't a US country code. Okay, it's interesting. Now they're posting a lot of US news and they're pretending to be US media outlet. Okay, that's nice. Now we know that this is good information. So they were really helpful in that regard. It's interesting because a lot of the things that they were complaining about, you know, they they they were taking away the tools that would make it even worse for us. Yeah, right. Right.

Which just goes to show you that they're trying to they're trying to send a message to America that they're not on your side, that they won't be associated with anybody who allows violent discussion that leads to an event such as we saw last week, period. And they're not really interested in the specifics, right? From what I can see, they don't care that Twitter did it too, that Facebook did it worse. You've gotten made the scapegoat and now everybody's running without looking. Do you think that storm is going to calm down where people are going to say, eh, maybe we can't really blame this on Parler and we need to lighten up? I think the public has already started coming around a lot to it. I think it's a small fringe group of very angry people. Most of it goes viral on Twitter, that believe that Parler is evil. And they kind of are experiencing what I'd call the five minutes of hate, where they just learn to hate and get

really angry, and then they all want to just go after it. They probably never used Parler. They probably don't know what our core values are. They probably just read a couple pieces in BuzzFeed or the Washington Post, and they go, you know, this place is evil. And they think it's a, it's a horrible right-wing neo-Nazi place, which is not true. Couldn't be further from the truth. And, you know, if I thought those things about a place, I would probably be outraged too. And I probably wouldn't have as much sympathy if I thought, I wouldn't have any sympathy if I thought, hey, that place is all about spreading evil, violent things. The problem is, is they've been misled. And so I don't blame the people who are angry and coming

after us and calling for us to get canceled, although I am against cancel culture. I don't blame them for their anger. I just blame the leadership of these media outlets that don't show journalistic integrity. They're not telling the truth. And I blame these companies for falsely portraying our problem as being bigger than the problems of our competitors. That's the problem. What do you make of some of the tweets we discussed earlier that do have the violent rhetoric in them? Does it make sense at all to have somebody at the company who monitors these parlays and says, when appropriate, we're going to get law enforcement involved? I mean, was there any thought to saying that that's on our site and

we're going to take it down and, or we're going to notify the cops? We do. We already do that. You know, we have, uh, we have multiple authorities and different jurisdictions all over the United States that, um, that our policy team works with daily, almost, for stuff like that. Okay. So is there any way of ramping that up? If you're not going to beat Amazon, and again, I do think you have a different kind of lawsuit against them that you should at least try, the First Amendment case. But if you're not going to necessarily beat them, and it's tough to go up against Amazon, what about trying to comply with their demands in a way that doesn't gut your commitment to the free exchange of ideas and speech?

Well, that's the crazy part is we offered to, you know, by the time Sunday came around and they banned us, we had implemented a proactive algorithm and what it would do is it would and it was only it was only online for a few hours but it would analyze any any and all comments and parlays before they went out to check to see if they were violent or toxic and potentially inciting violence and it would go and flag it and send it to the jury before it could go out. And we said, if then once the jury approves it, then I can go out. And we said, is that good? And then by the way, also by the end of Sunday,

we worked through most of our backlog that was building up too. And they said, oh, that's great. That's exactly what we asked for, but no. We're like, well, then why did you have this meeting with us? If you already knew the answer was no, you know, and I said, well, what if we use your tools to do that? Would that be good enough? No, we just don't think you, we just don't think you can handle it. And I said, well, if we use your tools, do you not believe in your tools? So, I mean, they had already made up their minds. They were not talking with us in good faith. They were talking with us, in my opinion, in bad faith.

And you don't think there's any way around that because right now this is about PR, right? I mean, this is maybe it's a principle, maybe it's PR, but your point is it's not actually about a violation of policy. No, it has nothing to do with their violation of policy. They made that up. If it was a violation of policy, they would have talked to us a month ago. They would have talked to us a week ago even about it. They gave us an extremely small amount of notice, an extremely tight time frame on a Friday during a weekend to find new hosts. People aren't even working on the weekend to

sign the contracts. We had to wake up CEOs of other billion dollar companies to try to get them to sign paperwork. And some of them did. Some of them did on a Sunday or a Saturday or even a Friday. We got one on Friday that agreed. He got up 60 employees at one of his data centers. And I'm not going to say the name of the company because they were genuinely trying to help us. Got up 60 employees who were a lot of people on Parler. And this was a billion-dollar company, very large data center. They all started setting up servers to start hosting us for 24 hours. Sunday comes around. We're almost ready to switch over and use them. The CEO, apparently somebody on their board came to them and said, you can't use Parler. They dumped us on Sunday at the last minute. We would have been online

Sunday at midnight had that not happened. And so these are the things that keep happening to us over and over again. Is there any hope? I mean, you mentioned at the top of the conversation, you had a few glimmers of light. What are they? Or can you talk about it at all? I mean, there's only one reality and we have to rebuild from scratch on our own. I mean, that's what we're going to have to do. And we're going to have to be self-reliant.

We're going to have to rebuild most of the core infrastructure that most of these companies never have to build because they rely on people like Amazon or Twilio or these other companies to do for them, which is the industry standard. And so that's the only way we can be really self-reliant and can't be blamed for things like this in the future. That's the only way. And so it's going to take time, but we're going to come through and we're going to do it. We've got a lot of people motivated and a lot of people supporting us. You have millions of people all over the United States who want this back. We had almost 20 million accounts on Parler by the time we were booted. So there's a huge number of people who want this back. I'm one of them.

I mean, I'm sure there has been violent rhetoric on there. I've seen a lot on Twitter. I myself was subjected to about 200 tweets from our president that were pretty unfortunate and misleading and had me with like Saudi sheiks who are known for bad conduct, all made up in Photoshop. I never thought Twitter should ban the president. I thought this is going to create a problem in my life. I'm gonna have to deal with it. It's

unpleasant. It's, it's America. We're allowed to say stuff that's not true. You know? Um, I understand if it's, if it's incitement legally, that it could lead to the immediate, you know, violence, it's in a different category. Um, but you, you know what? I think the standard for you guys needs to be there needs to be a good system that goes after, quote unquote, dangerous speech. But the standard for what's dangerous speech has to be pretty generous because this is America. As long as you're involving law enforcement, as long as you have, maybe you could get better and faster at cracking down on some of this stuff. But I also think, I mean, you tell me, because I also really believe that the way forward for you is, because I'm going to predict that your antitrust lawsuit is going to go away. I think it's going to get thrown out as a lawyer.

I'll tell you that. But I do think that you've got a real argument that even though the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government, not private parties, from curtailing speech, that these entities, that big tech is now effectively acting as a government arm. I mean, they've been threatened by Democrats in Congress to do exactly this kind of thing. So that's, you know, the stick, as this Wall Street Journal op-ed put it. And they've been sort of lured into doing it.

Like, you know, we're going to be super happy with you because all of America hates these conservative leaning publications, right? All of the media, at least. And I think you've got a good argument that these are now government actors and should be treated as such. And that means they cannot abridge your free speech. They cannot shut you down based on your political viewpoint. What do you think? Well, it's certainly a good idea. We're exploring a lot more options. So maybe this is something I

can bring up with our team. Did you see the op-ed? We talked about it this morning. Which one? Okay. Well, I don't know. Did I post it on Parlay? Abby's here with me. She's my assistant. I don't know if I reposted it, but it's a Wall Street Journal opinion piece called Save the Constitution from Big Tech. And the reason it caught my attention is because one of the authors is Jed Rubenfeld, who's a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School. Really smart guy, and goes through exactly why they've crossed over into state actors. And like the immunity that that the government has provided to these guys, the 230 thing that actually works to your benefit, the threats that the congressional

Democrats have made to the social media giants, if they fail to censor speech that the lawmakers don't like, the tweet by Jen Palmieri, Hillary Clinton's former communications director, that basically said it didn't escape my notice that this happened just as the Democrats were about to take over all the committees that oversee these guys. In other words, you know, real nice company you have there and hate to see anything happen to it, par alert, right? All of that and the control that they operate, the monopoly they have over these clouds and so on, give you a much better argument, I think, that they have to behave as the government would, which means they can't have viewpoint discrimination in the way they manage these companies. That seems like a fair argument to me. We really need to stop what they're doing.

This is sick because it's not just parlor. It could happen to anybody they don't like at any time. And if they could get away with something like this, that sets up horrible precedents where you live in a country that's ruled by Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook and a few other people. They just rule everything. And if they don't like your business, they can shut you down. I don't know what's worse, a tyrannical government or a tyrannical group of three or four tech tyrants that give in to the rage mob online. I mean, that's pretty crazy. Well, and all of whom share the same politics. So you're basically shutting down the voice of half of the country, which already doesn't

see its voice expressed in media, in Hollywood, in these sports, you know, social justice activities we've seen in corporate America's recent crackdown on beliefs. None of it reflects what most Republicans believe. And now the people who control the biggest means of communication in the United States, you know, big tech and everything we do online is declaring, I mean, it's a war that it's on. This is about much more than parlor. So I await your amended complaint. Uh, there, there's my unsolicited legal advice for you, John. And, uh, I really hope you fight the good fight because I think this is, this is much bigger than you guys. And, uh, my experience of your company has been nothing but positive. Thank you very much. Yeah. I mean, people are on our side, not just Republicans. We've got people all over the spectrum on our side. And I don't think the people are with these big tech companies. There's a small, very vocal minority that is.

And I think we're going to win. And I think we're going to come through just fine. We might come through this better in the end if we can prove that what they did was so wrong and not legal. It's certainly the best name recognition boost you could have asked for. I wouldn't say good PR, but just your name recognition has gone through the roof. So, you know, there's something to be said for that. Look, all the best and good luck with it.

Thank you very much. Take care. From the founder of one new platform to the founder of another, Substack. Its founder and CEO, Chris Best, is going to be here on independent media and what he's most worried about. And then in a bit, we'll talk to Glenn Greenwald, who's on fire. Stay tuned for him. But before we get to any of that, listen, sticking to your New Year's resolution, we're not yet in February.

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I think so. I mean, it's definitely concerning seeing especially people higher up or lower down, I should say, in the tech stack. Having AWS take action against somebody, I think, is a different kettle of fish than Facebook deciding what page to leave up or not. And it's definitely concerning. So when you look at this as a guy who started his own company, Substack, that allows for independent media to get their views out, do you worry? Could you be next? I worry about this stuff in general. I think we're at a really bad moment in our shared understanding of norms and values. And all this stuff that's happening right now, I think there's a lot of cases where there aren't good answers.

We've gotten to a place where every alternative that all of these platforms and all of these people have is kind of bad. And the fact that we're having to have the conversation like, hey, when is it appropriate for social media platforms to kick the president off, the fact that we're in the place where we're having that conversation means that something went very wrong some time ago. Things have not been in a good trajectory for a while. And the thing that I'm fascinated with, although I know this is all kind of like really hot in the moment right now, the thing that fascinates me is like, what has been happening to our information ecosystem over the past several years, the past decade that's got us to this point and how can we improve those underlying causes? Because we're at a place now where like, whatever happens, it's not like whether, you know, when do you decide to kick the president's Twitter account off? When does, you know, is it only hosting, like should hosting providers be able to kick people

off or this or that? None of the outcomes of these decisions are going to really help things. It's kind of going to be bad, whatever happens in my estimation. No, I sent out a tweet yesterday saying these companies are going to rue the day when they did this because they may think this is solving the problem of Trump or Parler. It's creating a whole different kind of hornet's nest for them. I really think the lawsuit's going to come alleging that these guys have now become government actors and need to be treated as such.

And that's going to change their companies forever. That's going to change the internet forever. Yeah. And I think people are right to be concerned about that. I also think that we're... I'm somebody that has a very strong bent towards free speech and freedom of the press. It shapes what we do at Substack. I also think a lot of people who are wringing their hands about this are wringing their hands a little over dramatically and not selectively enough. Like I, I think the question of,

you know, what role do platforms have in shaping and like deciding who's, who gets to use them and who doesn't? It's actually a pretty nuanced question. And the answer is not an obvious, simple rule, even if you're someone that strongly believes in free speech and a principle of the free press. What do you mean? I mean, all the regular layperson knows is apparently Parler had to use Amazon to get out to the people. And now Amazon has said you're booted and they have precious few other options. Yeah. And I definitely think that hosting providers like Amazon.

So Amazon runs like the servers that Parler runs on. And I think that's an instance that is more concerning and deserves more scrutiny of like, hey, the lower you are in the stack, which is kind of like the further away you are from kind of the end user and the more that you're just powering the inner workings of how servers run. I think there's a much stronger case to be made that intervening in these kinds of decisions is a big mistake and a bad precedent, right? You're kind of closer to the, you're getting closer in that world to being like, you know, the utility company. I agree. It's like the phone company stepping in to turn off your phone if you're talking about white supremacy or something really bad. But up until this point in

history, at no point has AT&T been stepping in to say, you're disconnected. Exactly. And I think that's a really strong argument. And I agree with that. I think that AWS doing that is a mistake. I do think that the same people who are saying that now are saying the exact same things about, hey, I don't think Twitter should ever be allowed to kick the president off. I don't think Facebook should ever be allowed to moderate these things. And I think when you get into that world, a lot of that is less compelling or at least less clear cut. And everyone in this debate it feels to me has kind of like rapidly switched sides of what they believe due to circumstances like you got a bunch of people kind of on the left saying you know hey of course it's of course corporations have the right to like intervene in political speech

because that's really important and good uh because it's convenient in this case. And as is tougher for me to criticize, you get people who are making vaguely free speech arguments, I would say disingenuously saying that, hey, none of this stuff is actually a problem. All of this is just protected political speech, yada, yada, yada, and kind of refusing to address the elephant in the room, which is at some point, if you're inciting, you know, a violent mob to march on the Capitol, it's different than expressing, you know, expressing your beliefs. Well, that's, there's no question it is different, but, and even under the first amendment, even if this were a government making these decisions, the Supreme Court has been very

clear that time, place, and manner restrictions on speech are OK. You know, you can say you can protest that we saw this with those crazy lunatics at the Westboro Baptist Church who were protesting the funerals of dead soldiers with horrific signs. And they held that they said that they had the First Amendment right to do it. And the Supreme Court agreed, but but said there can be time, place and manner restrictions placed on you. So you may have the right to show up and say crazy ass things. But the local government of the state can say you've got to be 100 yards away from the church or the cemetery. And it can only be done during the following hours, like all those things are okay. So I feel like if Twitter, if Facebook, if Amazon get treated as government actors, which I do think is where this is going, they too will be allowed to use time, place and manner restrictions, neutral content, neutral restrictions, right? You can, you can say we can't have illegal

postings like child pornography. You can say we can't have violent postings that may place somebody in danger, but they have to be applied uniformly. You can't single out just the one conservative platform. And I really think that's where that's how it that's how this looks, right? Because Twitter has a lot of violent postings. Now they say that their system's better for calling it out. But Facebook, you know, they they have a lot of violent postings leading up to the Capitol protest and they're just fine with Amazon. Amazon's not cracking down on them. Yeah. I think we're at a delicate moment here where the things that I worry about a lot are kind of the overreactions in both directions to what's happening, right? Either people who are

upset about the, you know, the march on the Capitol saying, oh, this is a great excuse to kind of come in and have like a massive crackdown on, not just this one thing, but all of these things that we've disagreed with all along. And, you know, anybody who doesn't buy into all of that is not with the program and they're bad. And I think that way lies madness.

But I think that there's an equal threat in the other direction saying, hey, we've always said that these private companies, it's their platform, they can allow or not what they want. But now that they're cracking down on people that I like, I actually don't like that. And I think the government should be stepping in and saying what the moderation decisions on these platforms should be. And I think if you have any kind of a liberty loving bone in your body, that should give you the major creeps. Who wants Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer

regulating what we say? And on the other side, President Trump regulating what we say. Nobody wants that. No sane person should be putting this anywhere near the hands of the government. But right now, it's in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and, you know, all the others who run these companies. And that's that's not OK either, because, as you know very well, these are all left leaning guys, even if they weren't, even if there was a diversity of views, it'd be problematic. But you know how this is going to go. One side of the country, by the way, Republicans are half the country is going to get shut down. And that you want to talk about insurrection that this isn't going to help prevent the next one. All right, let me before we go forward with that. Let me just give people your background because I don't know that everybody

knows what Substack is. And I'll tell you, it first came to my attention because people I really liked reading like Matt Taibbi went over there. I'm like, what is this place? Why is he? Why is he writing over there? He works for Rolling Stone. Why doesn't he just write his stuff on Rolling Stone? And then I found out just by reading what he's been writing and listening to him. And then I had him on the show. Matt Taibbi doesn't necessarily feel he can print everything he wants to print in Rolling Stone and wanted a more open forum where he could write what he wanted to write. And that's what Substack is, as I understand it.

It's a place where independent writers can go, journalists, what have you. They can write what they want to write. They can have a direct relationship with consumers where the consumers pay, let's say, five bucks a month. And then they get to read whatever Matt Taibbi writes, or Glenn Greenwald now, without an editor stepping in to say no, without Amazon so far stepping in to say no, without Chris Best who owns and runs the company stepping in to say no. Do I have it right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And there's, you say sort of have a direct connection with your audience and there's two really important pieces of that. One is that, yeah, you, you know, you can have paid subscriptions on Substack. People can pay you directly. And so you're kind of hired and fired by your readers. And the other piece is that

because it's based on kind of an email list, like you have this direct connection where you get to send your stuff to your readers who have opted into it whenever you want unmediated by an algorithm that doesn't necessarily have your interest at heart. So this right now, I would think, is looking very attractive to people who don't have the correct views. And I speak, of course, of conservatives or people who support President Trump. That is not the right view to have at the moment. And I've listened. I mean, I listen to conservative radio and podcasts and television, along with the regular

mainstream. And I know that conservatives are scared right now. I mean, if I told you the number of people, Chris, who have contacted me by text over the past few days saying, let's make sure we have each other's numbers, we could all get shut down. People are scared. So I think a place like Substack is probably looking good to folks who are worried they might get booted or their platform might get, you know, attacked. But you're not immune from this. Are you, are you immune to this, to this kind of crackdown? Cause you, you also have servers that you probably don't control. No. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, that's part of why this stuff

is worrying to me too. Like, I don't think that we should be having people shut down people's servers and all that stuff. I think that, that, that way lies madness to me. The more interesting question here though, is not like, you know, yes, our present moment is crazy. Everyone's starting to kind of like realize that things have gone off the rails, but things have been going off the rails like for some time. And my, this is sort of the reason we started Substack. It's the reason we started this company is I kind of feel like the place we're at now is a necessary consequence of the way that like the internet and our reading habits and the incentive structure

within media has been pushing the whole discourse for the past sort of decade. Outrage, outrage, outrage. Outrage, outrage, outrage, right? You have, outrage. You have all these things where on social media, on these feeds that are maximizing for engagement, it's all about these takes. The people are fun. It doesn't matter who says the take. As long as someone says the take, it's going to take off and be great. And that means that you get this kind of market for outrage where even if you're an honest person and you don't want to take the cheap take, someone's going to take it, right? So any incendiary take that can exist will eventually exist.

The truth gets devalued. It completely breaks our ability to see our own society and understand it, right? Because you're always seeing the craziest takes from everybody that you see as your enemies. And you get this funhouse mirror view of society where everybody that's not on my team is completely crazy. It completely justifies whatever my team does. And if enough people believe that, if enough people, even if you don't believe in what people say on social media, people tend to believe that other people believe it. And then you get this effect where that becomes a reality, right? People start to organize around these crazy lines where whatever we do is justified, whatever they do is awful, everything is in this complete fight to the death. And then you get this group think, right,

where anybody that's critical of your own tribe lives in fear of being ostracized, of being shut out. And you really do see this across the spectrum, right? You do see this, I think you're probably familiar with the left-wing cancel culture, throw people out. This happens on the right too, right? People that are insufficiently supportive of Trump have been being thrown out of things for a long time. And it breeds this place of craziness that no individual moderation decision or rule about a company kicking people off or not, none of that's going to help unless we can rewrite the rules of how we're having these conversations in the large scale. Well, and you're starting that, I mean, by providing a platform for these journalists, you know, Andrew Sullivan's another one, to go direct to consumer.

I mean, I guess it's not totally direct because they're using you. But the pushback we've heard so far against places like Substack is, you know, by the mainstream journalism outlets, which, of course, feel threatened by you. The New York Times does not like a like a group like you because great writers can reject them and go go right on Substack and make a lot of money and have all the same followers who would read them in The Times. But the pushback, of course, is there's no control of the information. There's no fact checker. There's no editor the way we have at the Times, who of course is the entity that led the 1619 project to be published, which is a disgrace.

My favorite one is, I think it was the, was it New Yorker magazine said, but is all of this journalistic individualism really good for the collective? Oh, the collective. The editor thing's a bit of a canard, by the way. On Substack, you can use an editor. And often a lot of great writers really like having a good editor and benefit from having a relationship like that. The difference is

that on Substack, the writers and the readers are in charge. So if Matt Taibbi or Heather Cox Richardson or any of these people, it's up to them what they're going to publish. And if they want an editor that's going to come and help them make it better, they can do that. But there's no one that's coming in and telling them, drop that story. It's too hot or whatever. Well, so, and given the freedom that they have and these, these guys who have been going over and gals there, and I say this in a good way, they're kind of like outlaws, you know, they're the ones who maybe used to be acceptable to in particular, the mainstream, the left.

And then, you know, when they just refused to bow to what they were being told they must write became unacceptable and they said you know screw you i'm not compromising my integrity the truth is the truth i'm thinking about glenn in particular and i'm going to keep doing it and that i think makes you a big target and so i do wonder just i mean when you say it you worry about it sometimes like how could they shut you down if If somebody wrote something, let's say it was factually incorrect and it led somebody to do something nuts, that'll be the argument. I don't know how much I believe in this one person's words led this other person to do X. But anyway, it can happen. And they come after you. How could you get shut down? I think one important piece about Substack

is the way that you own the audience is that you have the email list. And so one of the things that we put in as a deliberate valve for this is the fact that you can actually leave Substack. You have exit rights. And so the worst case scenario from any way that someone could get shut down on Substack is basically, hey, you can't publish on Substack anymore, but you own all your content. You own the rights to it. You have all your content. You have your email list, right? Everyone that's kind of opted into having this relationship with you, you have it.

You can take it with you. And that's true for whatever know, whatever kind of a way, uh, for whatever you worry about, right. Whether Substack turns evil and starts kicking people off or, you know, the government comes in and shuts our servers down or whatever thing you worry about. I actually think that's, um, the best sort of practical answer that we have to this whole thing is to just say like, look, there's not going to be a world where we can promise that we'll never get shut down. There's not going to be a world where we can promise that we're never going to shut anyone down. We're strong proponents of a free press, but we have a conduct policy. We don't have to allow everything in the world. However,

if that does happen, you own the rights to your stuff. You have the relationship with your people and you can leave. I think that's a robust answer to that. right? So if they wanted to pull it, they could pull it. My pal Ben Shapiro has a hybrid model where he offers a free podcast, but he also asks people to subscribe to the Daily Wire because he's hedging his bets. He realizes he could be targeted and he wants to maintain that direct relationship. So he's found, I think, a pretty clever way of doing it. And I'd hate to believe we all are going to need to be in that role where we have to hedge the bet, but we probably will because this sort of interference in speech and opinion giving is getting worse, not better. And I take your point very well about how the opinion industry has gotten pretty disgusting writ large, right? The need to stoke outrage and not be based in fact

and so on. But I don't know what the answer to it is. Well, and as much as, I mean, here's part of our answer. As much as all of that is scary, right? Like, yes, there's a bunch of, you know, it's better to be a pirate than join the Navy and you get all of the rebels coming to Substack. That's a massive tailwind and advantage for us and for this kind of a model. Because what it means is that all of the people who at some point placed their integrity above the kind of like whatever pressures were on them to deviate from, you know, either telling the truth as they saw it or doing the work they thought was most important or whatever that thing is, the people that were kind of willing to stand up to the group think that

they were pressured by wherever they were, those tend to be the best people. Those tend to be the people that I, as a reader, if I'm choosing who do I want to trust, those are the people that I want to trust. Those are the people that paid some personal cost for sticking up for their integrity. And if I'm thinking about, hey, who do I want to chip in 10 bucks a month to support? It's them. And I think Substack is a really appealing place for those folks. So does your company grow at all from the written word? I mean, I feel like it's really more for, obviously, the written word, but are you going to do podcasting? Are you going to do digital television? What are you going to do podcasting? Are you going to do digital television? What are you going to do? So we're very focused on writers right now because we think that that's,

there's just such a need and there's so much room to grow within that space. It's the thing that's kind of like the most underserved has the most broken ecosystem by in our estimation. And so we're very focused on writers. That said, it turns out that a lot of writers want to have a podcast. And so we do actually have some beta podcast functionality that's in the platform now. And I think over time, that will give us a natural way to expand. It's like people that are great writers, sometimes they want to do a podcast. Sometimes they want to do a video lecture. Sometimes they want to do this other stuff. And staying focused on writers gives us kind of like the right way to focus and prioritize that stuff. So rounding back to the top of our discussion, what do you think is the answer? I mean, do you think, let's start with us. Do you think

Twitter was right to impose a lifetime ban on Trump? I think that, as I said before, at the place where Twitter is put to these decisions, at the place where Twitter's having to make this call, it would be easy for me to criticize Twitter because we are positioned against Twitter, positioned against the social media status quo, it would be convenient for me to say, oh, crazy Twitter is coming to, to stomp on your, you know, stomp on your free speech. And there are other decisions they've made where I absolutely believe that. Like, I think their, their censorship of the New York Post story of Hunter Biden was a, was a colossal error. In the case of banning Trump, I don't know if it's exactly the right moment or not, but I'm kind of sympathetic. I'm like, you know, there's at some point, at some point there's, there's a line somewhere and you can quibble about when you drew the line and whether it was the

right thing and what, you know, whether it was the right action or whether the process was, was, was good enough. But I'm, I'm, to be honest, But to be honest, I don't think that re-litigating that decision is actually even close to the overall solution. I think the solution is we have to play an entirely different game. The place we're in has happened because of what you said, because of the outrage market. This media ecosystem we live in where there's this really hyper-competitive market for attention. Markets are powerful. You got to be careful what you create a market for. We've created a market for outrage. And as long as that's how the business works, it's going to lead to bad outcomes no matter what everyone's moderation policy is.

And the only solution to that is to get people by their own free will to choose to play a different game, to say, I'm not actually going to spend all of my waking life on Twitter anymore. I'm going to go somewhere else where I'm not the product and where the business model works a different way that actually serves me. And Substack that that's, people should pay for stuff they think is great, right? If you, if you are paying to read a writer to have a, you know, ongoing relationship with a writer that you trust, that fundamentally changes the kind of work that that writer

is going to do. They're not in the, the, the outrage take market anymore. They're in the keep your trust game. Well, I like what you're saying. As somebody who's now in independent media, I like that because people get to choose. And if you trust me, then you'll come to me. If you don't or you don't find me interesting, then you won't. But I think it's different. We're talking about the president of the United States. It's the president of the United States. Why can't he communicate with the people? I mean, I realize a lot of what he says is totally untrue. That's why we have fact checkers.

Let me put this to you. Is there anything that he could say on Twitter that you would say, you know, if you were the queen of Twitter, that you would shut him down? Is there anything that you could say? Definitely. I think, well, I mean, I think there, we already have to have, we have rules that make sense. Like you can't post child pornography, things that would be illegal. And you can't dot somebody. So you agree that there is a line. Of course. And we're quibbling over where the line is. So it's not just, he's the president. There's no line. There's still a line. And we're quibbling over where the line is. So it's not just he's the president. There's no line. There's still a line. It's just a question. But I don't think he's gotten anywhere

near it. I don't think he's anywhere near the line. I really don't. I don't like what he says. I don't believe much of it is true. I don't think it's particularly helpful or necessarily always a good force in America. But I don't believe in banning the president of the United States unless it is disgustingly egregious and absolutely has to be shut down. And the two tweets that they actually banned him over are absurd. I mean, they're nothing. It's they're not even arguably over the line. It's like my American patriots are going to have a giant voice long into the future.

They shouldn't be treated unfairly. And I'm not going to be at the inauguration after all the tweets. That's what did it. And even his tweets about massive voter fraud, which aren't true. There wasn't massive voter fraud. There was voter fraud, which we should look into. We should improve the system. No, you don't ban the president United States.

You don't you don't interrupt him while he's speaking. You don't ban his Twitter feed. You fact check. That's America. The answer to speech you do not like is not less speech. It's more. Now, what do you think, Chris? You put it on me. Now, what do you think? That's my answer. I think, I mean, I sort of said this up top. I think it's tough. I think I'm, you know, we agree that there's a line somewhere. You know, when do you cross the line? I think it's, you know, those tweets are not, the content of the tweets by themselves. Like if there wasn't a mob that stormed the Capitol, would he have been banned because

of that stuff? No, obviously not. But I do think that there, you know, because of the nature of these platforms, because it's not just the case that people have these direct relationships, but rather that the platform has this algorithm that's taking the most incendiary stuff and sending it out to all the people so that it can keep them maximally riled up. And these effects do exist. And it is sort of having these real world consequences. I understand the decision, to be honest. But there's no proof of that. I mean, as a lawyer, I want proof of like, you know, I, I understand the decision to be honest. But there's no proof of that. I mean, there's as a lawyer, I want proof. What, what is the proof that Trump's tweets are the proximate cause of anything we saw at the Capitol?

These people are disaffected and they're pissed off and they've been angry for a long time. And I'm not going to deny that they've been egged on by him. I've, I've said that publicly. He's been really irresponsible in his rhetoric, but to blame it all on Trump is to deny reality. They live in an alternate universe. And with or without the internet, without Twitter, without Parler, without Trump, they find a way to communicate. They're angry. They're angry at the media, at the government, the Democrats.

You could go on, right? I just don't- We all live in alternate universes now. It's no good. This is like trying to, you know, the people blamed the it was a Bernie Sanders supporter who went and shot up the congressional baseball game and shot Steve Scalise. And that wasn't Bernie Sanders fault. Some people are nutcases. Some people are loons.

Some people are totally disaffected and are going to do bad things. And the answer is not to run around playing whack-a-mole with people's speech. It's to have a generally responsible system that allows for as much debate and back and forth and monitoring in case we cross over into the dangerous place as possible. Yeah, I agree with that. I think emphasis on the generally responsible system. And I would say if you're in a place where you have an irresponsible system, then making the individual moderation decisions different one way or another, like by the time we're at the place where we have to talk about what, like, when are we banning the president?

Like something has gone wrong far upstream. And that's, that's sort of where I want to focus my time and energy is like, how do we change the underlying root causes of all of this? Because whether they banned him this week or two weeks from now or not, it's the fact that you have a set of people that think it's reasonable to storm the Capitol and all of this other stuff that's going on, it's not good. Well, listen, I thank you for being part of the solution, which I really think you are. I think it's innovative and it's exciting what you're doing and totally rooting you on. So

go get them. Thank you so much. In a minute, we're going to have Glenn Greenwald. And I think you're going to love Glenn today. I did. My team did. He's fired up and I'm fired up. And he says all the things that need saying in the way only Glenn can do. He's really good at this. But listen, before we get to him, let's talk about ScoreMaster. Now, I shared a hot story a couple of weeks ago. It nearly crashed the ScoreMaster website. And the story is the average American has 97 points, three short of 100 that they can quickly, quickly add to their credit score.

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MK. And now journalist Glenn Greenwald, who started and founded The Intercept. He recently left it because they'd been trying to sort of put him under the thumb and say, only great things about Biden. I'm short forming. But he said, forget this. I'm going to do my independent thing and is now writing on Substack, where I recommend all of you read him. And happily, we have him here with us today.

Glenn Greenwald, thank you so much for coming back. It's great to be back, Megan. Thank you for having me. All right. So I've been reading your tweets and your column on Substack and here you're just as even more fired up about this whole thing as I am. And, you know, it isn't about Trump. Let's just start with Trump and Twitter. And then we'll talk about Parler, too. But it's not about Trump. You don't have to love Trump to defend him on the total shutdown of his ability to communicate. You don't have to love Parler and the conservative discussions that happen on there. They're not all conservative, but leaning to defend what's to attack what's happening to Parler. What's your what's your take right now? Well, in general, when you're talking about free speech or monopolistic behavior, both of which are at play here, it never really matters

what your opinion is of the person to whom that power is being applied. And, you know, we can say it's not about Trump, but the evidence of that is that two of the world leaders with whom Trump has the most acrimony, the chancellor of Germany, uh, Angela Merkel and the president of Mexico, Amlo, who's a leftist have both come out and very vocally denounced Twitter and Facebook's banning of Trump on the grounds, not that they love Trump and think Trump should be heard, obviously, but on the grounds that they think that what's happening is that Silicon Valley is essentially ascending to a position far more powerful than any democracy and controls the discourse and the politics of world democracies by exercising these censorship powers. And they

know it's not just confined to the United States, but to their countries as well. So, you know, if anyone has any doubts about what you said, that it's not about Trump, not about Parler, just look at the people, also ministers in France, who have said the same thing, who obviously have no love harbored for Trump and yet are just as concerned and troubled by this as are we, as is the ACLU, by the way, who told the New York Times

that what in particular was done to Parler is extremely troubling. Yeah, the ACLU. I mean, they've changed a lot from what they were born to be. But, you know, when they're saying it's wrong and shutting down any sort of right-leaning speech or outlet, you've got to pay attention. All right, me let me play the devil's advocate or argue the other side. OK, because you and I probably agree, but I want people to understand both arguments. Now, what Kara Swisher or somebody like her would say is, but violence, but five people are dead, but allowing Trump's rhetoric and the discussions on Parler, which got pretty specific in terms of bring your guns and, you know, get Mike Pence first, can be directly tied to the dangers that we saw unfold with our very eyes last Wednesday. Right. Well, first of all, on 9-11, 3,000 people died. Three commercial

jets filled with innocent human beings were flown into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. And yet we recognize that despite how traumatizing that event was, how evil and horrible it was, not even in the same universe as what happened last week at the Capitol, still major excesses were committed in terms of powers that the state seized in the name of combating it. Most people recognize that now. Some people took a longer time to recognize that than others. That's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, there's

always a cost to free speech. There's a cost to every liberty. We have a restraint on the police that says the police can't come into our homes and search our homes without obtaining a search warrant from a court, which means that the police often are hamstrung in finding murderers or in finding rapists. And sometimes people are able to rape and murder again because of that constraint. But that liberty is something we all cherish and don't want to give up, even though it has a cost. Free speech also sometimes has costs, which are people use that free speech to disseminate dangerous ideas. And so when you're weighing this framework, you can't just look at the speech being suppressed and ask whether or not you think it's a good or a

bad thing for that particular person to be heard. You have to look at the other side of the equation, which is the dangers that emanate from empowering tech companies completely outside of a democratic framework. No one elected Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook or Google executives, and yet they're exercising deeply political power, which has its own dangers. And then finally, the irony of all of this, Megan, is that most of the planning and advocacy of that breach at the Capitol was not done on Parler. The first 13 people arrested, at least as of Monday, none of them appeared to be active users on Parler at all. Most of the planning was

done on YouTube owned by Google, Facebook, and Twitter. So why aren't Democratic politicians and people who are making that argument calling for the removal of Facebook from the Apple store or from Google Play? It's because this isn't about that. It's an opportunity to destroy a platform that is a new competitor to Silicon Valley giants and politically to destroy one that's associated with right-wing ideology. So they would say Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, they at least try to play the whack-a-mole. They at least try to shut down those tweets and so on when they see them. And Parler's too relaxed. Well, it's not even true. That's it's so funny. It's not that, you know, I wonder, I know you signed up for Parler. I know

you've used it before. I would be willing to bet that an infinitesimal percentage of people who are advocating Parler's destruction and making claims about how it functions have never been on it, have no idea what it is, have no idea what its rules are. They have terms of service that explicitly preclude and prohibit advocacy of violence. They have a team of paid, trained moderators who are there to delete any tweets or postings, as they call it, in violation of their terms of service, just like Facebook and Twitter does. So imagine if someone didn't know what Facebook and Twitter was like, and you cherry picked the worst possible tweets or the worst

possible Facebook postings to show them, they would say, oh my God, this is like a neo-Nazi site. This is an insane violence site, right? You know how many times I've seen people advocating my death or violence against me? I'm sure you have too on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes it's deleted a few days later. Sometimes it's not. Same with Parler. They have exactly the same terms of service and exactly the same moderation practices as Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And as I said, the planning was done overwhelmingly on those larger sites, not on Parler. Yeah, no. And I've said, Jane F was done overwhelmingly on those larger sites, not on not on Parler. Yeah, no. And I said, Jane Fonda, you need to stop that.

Just kidding. Just get over it. No, you're exactly right. Even Instagram. It's like Instagram is usually the sweetest place of the nicest pictures. And it's like you can find yourself in certain pockets where you're like, oh, no, it's horrible. No, you're right. It's more traumatizing at Instagram because you expect like everybody to be sweet and nice there. But you're right. And you can find that there, too. Right. That's supposed to be the rainbows and unicorns site. But you're 100 percent right. None of these people has ever been on Parler. They have heard that it's some I mean, I see it described now in all the articles, this right wing site. Well, it's not that the CEO is a nonpartisan guy. He's more right leaning,

I'd say. And he partnered with Rebecca Mercer, who's a right wing person who's funding this adventure. But that doesn't mean it's unfair and it's crazy and it needs to go. This is how they view Republicans, Trump supporters and the right wing in general. It's like, what is it, confirming bias? I think that we can look at how 9-11 played out for lessons, not because what happened at the Capitol is comparable. It's not, but people are talking about it as though it is. And a lot of the behavior is the same. What happened with 9-11 is when the, you know, trauma of that event took hold, everybody said, well, we have to go get the terrorists, which meant the people who are members of the group that actually perpetrated those attacks.

And over time, what was and wasn't a terrorist expanded so radically that the government almost had carte blanche to do anything it wanted in that just by simply calling somebody a terrorist with no due process, and you just call someone a terrorist and everyone's like, throw them in Guantanamo for 20 years with no charges, no due process, don't prove anything. They're a terrorist, do whatever you need to do. And that's what's happened here is these terms like white supremacist and terrorist and inciting violence are all rapidly expanding so that at this point, Megan, as you know, white supremacy, domestic terrorists basically means Trump supporter. That's how Democrats see the world now. And they absolutely intend to

use the power that they already have over the culture with the power that they're about to merge with the power of the state, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the Justice Department, and with Silicon Valley squarely in their corner. Do you know who the first politician was who demanded that Apple kick off Parler? It was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to her 9 million followers. And Jennifer Palmieri, who was a longtime high level eight of the Clintons, tweeted last week after Twitter and Facebook banned Trump. She said it outright. She said, oh, I find it so interesting that Facebook and Twitter finally acknowledge that they are capable of silencing Trump on the same day that they recognize, this was right after the Georgia races were decided, that it's now Democrats who are going to be controlling the

committees that oversee their industry, meaning they're using their censorship power to appease the party that's about to be in power. She evidently thought that was a good thing, but that's incredibly alarming. But that is what's happening. Yeah. She said the thing out loud, that you're not supposed to say out loud. So let me I want to get to sort of the way they're talking about this and also the the analogy to 9-11, which I think is an interesting one. But here's the question. I actually just had it raised in the last interview.

Do you agree that there is a line, a line that these companies can draw when it comes to speech on their platforms that, you know, that's appropriate applying that may be justified to censor certain things that not even the state, being the state under the First Amendment, would have the right or the ability to censor. So I think, for example, if you say people explicitly calling for violence against innocent people, if a platform wants to say, we don't want to be associated with that kind of language, then I think it's appropriate for those platforms to adopt that rule. The problem is that these companies are monopolies. They're monopolistic in nature, which changes everything. So it's so ironic. If you say to liberals, well, there's a problem with these sites

inconsistently or selectively applying these standards, they'll say, oh, well, they're a private company. They have the right to do whatever they want. I don't know when liberals became libertarians. These are the same liberals who want to force tiny little shop owners who are bakers who don't want to make cakes for gay weddings on the grounds that it offends their religion to force them to do so. But suddenly now they're saying, you know, private companies can do what they want. That's true up until the point where they become monopolies or violating antitrust. Then there is a public interest in how they're exercising their power. And I think that if we acknowledge that they might have some lines that they want to draw, then they have to draw them consistently. Why were bleeding liberals and Democrats permitted over the course of the three months following the George Floyd killing to endorse violence and arson and property destruction in the name of that cause without ever being banned? I think that's the problem people have is if these standards were being applied consistently, then people would

be more comfortable that this power wasn't being politicized, but it clearly is not. Well, that's exactly it, because I opened the show by talking about misinformation on the internet, on YouTube, on Twitter, on Facebook. And if they really want to get into the business of banning misinformation that leads to social unrest, potentially riots and death. They're going to have to take a hard look at the at what happened over this past summer because the misinformation about police officers and the number of unarmed deaths involving black suspects was egregious.

I mean, just blatant lies were being told over and over. And then riots happened and they were celebrated. They weren't even just permitted. They were celebrated. And so now now that misinformation about massive voter fraud has been discussed and there's a large swath of Trump supporters that are angry about it, some of whom were at the Capitol. It's a totally different standard. We cannot have lies that confuse or upset people because it's un-American. Free speech has its limits and we have a responsibility as a social media company to stop it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think two important points about this. Number one is YouTube and then other platforms prohibited any person from contesting the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

If you make a YouTube video arguing that you believe there's substantial evidence that systemic fraud was committed and that the legitimacy of the outcome is in doubt, you will be banned. If, however, you say that the Republicans stole the 2000 election with a corrupt Supreme Court, that Al Gore was really the winner, as many, many liberals believe, or if you say that you think Karl Rove tampered with Diebold machines in Ohio in 2004 to make George Bush the illegitimate winner when John Kerry really should have won, which a lot of liberals believe. Barbara Boxer objected to the certification of the Electoral College vote on that grounds. You're perfectly fine.

If you want to say that you think the Russians invaded the voting system in 2016 and converted Hillary Clinton votes to Donald Trump votes. And that's why he won as two thirds of Democrats believe two thirds of Democrats believe that insane conspiracy theory. You can go all day on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and say that and people are but then suddenly, you're not allowed to say that about the 2020 election. That's the kind of political inconsistency that people perceive and don't accept. The other issue is, you know, I think, and I know you, you know, having gone to law school, study this a lot, but it's one of the major misconceptions, this concept of inciting violence. You know,

we're sitting here doing a show right now where we're talking about the evils of the actions of big tech. It's possible someone in the audience listening to me might get so riled up that they might want to go and do violence against a Google site or an Amazon facility. Obviously, they shouldn't do that, but they could. If you are a pro-choice advocate and you say, I think pro-life activists are endangering the lives of women by trying to make abortion illegal and forcing us to get unsafe abortions, as many of them say, I think pro-life activists are endangering the lives of women by trying to make abortion illegal and forcing us to get unsafe abortions, as many of them say, someone might hear that and say, wait, pro-life activists are killing women? I'm going to go firebomb a pro-life office.

Anything can be incitement. So we have to be very careful that if someone says, you know, I think the 2020 election was fraudulently determined, that that isn't incitement to violence unless they're explicitly saying, and therefore, you ought to go, you know, use violence against the people who did it. And this is one of the key distinctions that's getting lost. You know, any fiery or passionate political rhetoric can be incitement, but it's not incitement unless you're imminently directing people to go burn something down or kill people. It's not incitement legally. I completely agree with you. People are missing this point. And the point I'm trying to make is not that any of those comments about cops and Black defendants or

it's not that those were incitement and should have been banned. They shouldn't have been. People are entitled to their opinions of supported by the facts or not. They're entitled to their opinions. This is America, but it needs to work for both sides and needs to work on both issues and incitement. While you could certainly make the argument for some of the some of the rhetoric we saw online about like, let's get our guns and go now. That's a lot better case than Trump saying, my supporters will not be disrespected. Or even what he actually said right before the rally, which is we're going to march to Capitol Hill and we're going to make our voices heard. At no point did he come anywhere close to the legal standard for incitement. Nor did Josh Hawley, nor did Ted Cruz. I mean, Megan, the chairman

of the Homeland Security Committee in the House, Benny Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, gave an interview yesterday saying that he thinks Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz should be put on the no-fly list because they're essentially terrorists. They incited, how did Josh Hawley incite violence in any way? He exercised this legislative prerogative that he has that Barbara Boxer used, that lots of House Democrats have tried to use. Maxine Waters, I hope, is she going? Is she going on the no-fly list? Because she did did exactly what Holly did, stood up and questioned the electoral results that four years ago. Exactly. Yet they did it in 2004 too. And that time with the Senator and they had to go into that two hour session, which so you, you know, I don't, I don't think what Josh Holly did was

particularly advisable. Um, I'm not supportive of it. And it was clear pandering Of course, he wants the Trump lane. And he had just spent the last three weeks partnering with Bernie Sanders to get $2,000 checks for people so he wanted to show his conservative bona fides. So fine, it's a case of a politician being opportunistic. If that's terrorism, they all belong in Guantanamo. But this language of like these members of the Congress who exercise their legislative prerogative but never encouraged anyone to engage in violence are now terrorists is madness. It is madness. But that is what's happening with the discourse. I totally agree with everything you just said, 100%. And there's also a push by some 7,000 law students and law professors and lawyers to have Holly and Cruz disbarred because they had the temerity to stand up and question the legal opinions, finding that the election was legit.

Do they have any idea what lawyers do? That's exactly what you you question legal opinions. There's always one against you. And when you lose at the lower court, you spend the rest of the case questioning the lower legal opinion. I agree with you. It was baseless. Those guys didn't have a legal leg to stand on. But that is not a basis for censure, disbarment, the no fly list. It's gotten to the point of absurdity, Glenn, absurdity. And as I watch it, I get angrier because they won't learn their lesson. They won't learn their lesson about, I realize no one is celebrating these losers who went

to the Capitol and did what they did. No one is. We all want to see them prosecuted. But to double down on the sneering elite, like look at these disgusting low lives is it's risky. And I don't think it helps just by way of example. Um, there was an article on the Atlantic talking about what happened. It was, I think it was called worst revolution ever. And the writer says here, they were a coalition of the willing deadbeat dads, you porn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans. They had pulled into the swamp with bellies full of beer and sausage McMuffins, maybe a little high

on Adderall, ready to get it done. That on the heels of Anderson Cooper, I think we actually have this, and is sneering about the Olive Garden here. Listen, here's Anderson. Look at them. They're high-fiving each other for this deplorable display of completely unpatriotic, completely against law and order, completely unconstitutional behavior. It's stunning. And they're going to go back, you know, to the Olive Garden and to their the holiday inn that they're staying at in the Garden Marriott. And they're going to have some drinks and they're going to talk about the great day that they had in Washington. And they really did something and stand up for something. And they stood up for nothing other than mayhem. OK, I was with him until the words. I hadn't heard that. I was with him right through. It's stunning. I mean, right. It is deplorable behaviors. No one's defending what they did, but the disgust,

like, why does it have to be their MMA fans? They're slow bellies full of beer, sausage, McMuffins, staying at the holiday and staying at the holiday and no, right. The holiday in the olive garden, screw them. So, so much of this is, you know, about culture and class so much of gardens. Screw them. So, so much of this is, you know, about culture and class. So much of it. I mean, Anderson Cooper was born into one of the richest families in the United States. Yes, he's a Vanderbilt. You know, yeah, he's a Vanderbilt. He grew up on, on the Upper East Side. He lives in this sprawling, you know, meant down like West Village townhouse that has been like an architect, you know, he makes $10 million a year. Nancy Pelosi is one of the richest members of Congress.

This is absolutely what a lot of the reaction is, is seeing the peasants. Wait, just one other point. One other point. He literally owns a castle just north of New York. He literally, his like little weekend getaway is actually a castle. I mean, who is he to sneer about the Holiday Inn? And so all that rhetoric, it only makes the core Trump supporters angrier. Do you think that makes them trust Anderson Cooper when he says there was no widespread voter fraud? I mean, this is it. This is happening in so many democracies around the world, which is that the ruling class is becoming more and more. It is like the French monarchs that live behind the wall in Versailles and were disgusted by the people begging for bread. And when they would try and breach the walls, it was like this kind of

great offense. So much of the reaction was about exactly that, that these are the august halls, that this is Nancy Pelosi's office, and the people who are protesting are unworthy. They're kind of, you know, the dirty dregs of society that ought to be unseen. And again, that's not to justify anything that they did. But I think the insanity of the reaction, the completely disproportionate way that it's being talked about, a major part of it is that class and culture perspective. And that that goes to your point you you wrote the other day, which is that in the same way the Democrats and the media were allies in the war on terror and the sweeping, you know, curtailing of civil liberties we saw right after it,ons under the Bush-Cheney administration, but with the full support of most of the Democratic Party. So it was this kind of like

unity. And unity can be a positive thing when a country comes together in response to a traumatic event, as some of the unity after 9-11 was. But it can also be very dangerous because once that happens, there's no more room for dissent. Those emotions are so powerful. And one of the roles of the media is to, at those key moments, start questioning the consensus that has arisen. But the media is now so integrated into this class. 40 years ago, the media prided themselves on being outsiders. They work in the Capitol. They're friends with all those aides. They're friends with all the members of Congress and Senate. Their kids go to school is not just coming from the political class. It's always amplified unquestioningly by the media class to the point where the people demanding censorship most aggressively aren't even politicians. They're these teams of reporters they have at CNN and NBC and the New York Times whose only purpose, from what I can tell, is to troll through Facebook and

Twitter and 4chan and demand that various obscure citizens have their platform taken away from them, which has that same kind of class imbalance, right? That only we, the people who work at these major news corporations, have the right to be heard and are responsible enough to disseminate information. You are pretenders. You are too reckless and uneducated to be trusted with this. And that is the dynamic that people perceive. Right. The media, just in both cases, right after 9-11 and now, jump on board to be the advocates of saying goodbye to civil liberties if it serves their cause. And I agree with you, after 9-11, we've talked about this before. I, too, was one of those scared people. I wasn't in journalism on 9-11, but you're scared and you want a curtailing

of civil liberties because you don't want to get bombed. And then over time it loosens up and you've got to return to normal. And now they're treating this one event as awful as it was as a reason to get rid of free speech. And of course, conveniently, it's only speech on the right. Right. It's not just let's go kill people at the Capitol. It's it's don't discuss voter fraud ever again. You know, and like you say, the guy at all, Oliver Darcy at CNN, who's trying to shut down half of the Fox News lineup. Like it's I'm worried about where it's going to go because it it has now the Democrats are in charge of every branch of government. Well, you know that the White House and Congress and big tech obviously is 100 percent

on board. And I really am worried about their how emboldened they are. Oh, me too. I mean, look, you know, I pretty much devoted my adult career, first as a lawyer and now as a journalist, first and foremost to defending civil liberties in general and free speech in particular. I left law and started writing about politics, principally motivated by a concern about the erosion of due process rights and the political climate that arose after 9-11 and the years after the Iraq war. And I would say that without doubt, this is the worst free speech crisis, the worst civil liberties crisis that has emerged in the entire time, at least that I've been doing that work, because all of this, Megan, as you know, is stemming from this very ingrained fury that they have that Trump won in 2016.

That is what this is all about. This whole thing with impeachment and the 25th Amendment and wanting to kick his supporters off the Internet, it all comes from this sense that this is their society and that these people came and took it from them unjustly and illegitimately. And they've been wanting to punish them for so long. And they're now seizing on this as a pretext. And that's what concerns me the most is if it were just one event, I would say, okay, I get that like people in Congress that day are scared. I get that it's traumatizing. I'm sure it was. I don't make light of that. But eventually, as you said, especially if it's a one-time event and not like two huge towers falling on top of 3,000 people, but just like a kind of three-hour, four-hour long breach of the Capitol, eventually it's going to subside and people are going to come to their

senses. But this is an ongoing multi-year rage that is driving all of this. And this latest incident is just the kind of opportunity to finally justify doing what they wanted to do all along, which is humiliate these people and silence them for good. Absolutely right. And they and the willingness to try to blame the actions of those people on Capitol Hill on any Trump supporter or somebody who, you know, was even just open minded to Trump has been infuriating. You know, how many how many tweets have you seen? Like this is on all Republicans. This is on anyone who defended President Trump, you know, for any of his agenda items. You're no longer allowed to talk about anything good President Trump did or you're complicit in what happened on the Capitol.

Yeah. And not only that, you know, not only that, but if you are questioning any of the things they want to do in the name of, you know, preventing this from happening again, or punishing the people they hold responsible, not just the people who actually invaded the Capitol, but everyone they think is complicit. That, too, will subject you to accusations that you must be a sympathizer to the people who wanted to do violence. You know, it's kind of like it was the famous George Bush framework after 9-11, which is you're either with us or you're with the terrorists, which got interpreted to mean if you oppose anything that we're saying we want to do, you're going to be subjected to claims that you're on the side of the terrorists.

That is 100% the framework. So if you say, I'm really worried about what was done to Parler, or I think there's a lot of serious repercussions from a private tech monopoly silencing the elected president, they'll tell you that that must mean that you're in favor of Nazis or you want white supremacy speech to flourish. That is the tactic being used. It's really repressive and, and kind of like a despotic way, a despotic way of, of conducting debates. I talked about this on the show the other day. It's, this is small, stupid example, but just, just as an example, um, there's some guy affiliated with the Lincoln project. This. His name is Tom Nichols. And he was trying to scare me, warn me in a nasty way, not in a friendly way on Twitter

the other day, because I said something to the effect of, you know, what happened in the Capitol was wrong, obviously. But these people, pundits and Democrats who are trying to say that they're trying to use it to justify four years of essentially Trump derangement syndrome, criticizing everything he did is bad, are absurd, too. Like this, this doesn't now excuse four years of bias and overreach on things like Russia. And he actually started to get something going like, remember, she said this. It'll be used. You remember. I'm like, this is insane, Glenn. You know, they're all sort of ganging up the left, the media, to make sure anybody who shares any viewpoints with President Trump can understand him objectively, supports any of his agenda, defended him on Russiagate, sees the Democrats as having

overreached on impeachment. Everyone's, quote, complicit. Another attempt to silence and scare like we've been seeing all summer with, you know, the cancel culture. And this is cancel culture on steroids. Totally. And, you know, look, I mean, you are in a position in your work and in your life where you're not really subject to those kind of threats. You know, I feel very similar, but we are a tiny list of people that they believe are responsible for everything bad about the Trump era, including this breach of the Capitol. And they're essentially trying to pressure corporations to disassociate themselves from anybody who's on their list. And most people are not invulnerable to those kinds of pressures. Most people have jobs and are at risk of losing them. We're in a pandemic with an unemployment crisis. The media is contracting all the time. So if you're a

journalist, of course, you're going to be very concerned about getting on that list or some other list. This is a really intimidating and thuggish climate that people like that guy at the Lincoln Project and others are purposely trying to cultivate in order to coerce everybody's acquiescence to whatever orthodoxies they're trying to impose. It's so ironic that they constantly accuse the Trump movement and Trump of being authoritarian and fascist, while at the same time, they're using the weapons and tactics that are the hallmark of both of those pathologies. Think about it. If they can say that to me, I mean, I defy anybody to find somebody at the Lincoln project with all their stupid ads to, to raised a more publicized

question about Trump's temperament than me. Good luck. My question about Trump's temperament. You're public enemy number one of the Trump movement for like a year and a half, because in front of the whole country, you challenged him in a way that they never did. You needed security and guards. And like, I mean, it was a really serious, you know, thing that you were subjected to because you did your job as a journalist. And then they risked nothing who got on board the anti-Trump train only once it was popular and cost free to to do actually much to their profit, um, is going to be threatening you with career repercussions if you don't snap into line. Exactly.

For reporting on him fairly, you know, despite whatever my personal feelings are for just bending over backwards to report on the guy fairly and try to take myself out of it. Um, but that's, I only raised myself because that's me with a big microphone and people know who I am. And, you know, Tom Nichols cannot destroy me. Bigger, more important men have tried, Tom. But I worry about people who aren't in my position. I do. And actually, now, if you if you'll let me that that leads me to something I want to ask you from one of our listeners, because we have a segment on the show called Asked and Answered. And it's where the listeners write in with a question about could could be about anything, could be the news of the day or

a personal question. Today, it's about news of the day. And it's for you, really, based on your column that you just posted on Substack. And Steve Krakauer, our executive producer, has got it. And we'd love to ask it directly of you. Yeah, Megan and Glenn, this is from Jackie LeFevre. She's a 25-year-old who's outside the journalism and political arena and read Glenn's piece and asked a question about that. And she wants to know, what can we do? How do we keep going forward when it feels like we've been defeated by these major tech giants and there's no way to help? So any solutions there, Glenn? Well, I am actually encouraged because a lot of times when someone has a just cause, like say denouncing the people who entered the Capitol, especially the ones who did it with an intention to carry out violence or who actually did commit violence, when they overplay their hand, they turn allies and sympathizers into adversaries and enemies. And I think very much that's what has happened over the past four to five years. So if you look at the ascension of independent media,

the success, for example, of Joe Rogan, who despite barely ever being talked about in mainstream media circles, has become one of the most politically and culturally influential people in the country simply by having a YouTube program where he's just open to different ideas and independent of any faction or dogma and has doubled the audience of these corporate television programs just because he seems honest and eager to speak freely and air differing opinions so that people can decide for themselves instead of trying to manipulate them. And you look at the success of podcasts, like Megan, you have a brand new podcast with already a big audience. And there's other people with podcasts who are doing the same. And obviously,

Substack, which has become, I know you just interviewed the founder. They're super, they know, all these independent platforms know. You know, it's going to happen to Spotify. It's going to happen to anyone carrying independent media, including Substack and Patreon, that soon the guns of the New York Times and CNN and NBC are going to be turned on them. They're going to start saying, you are platforming these extremists. You are responsible for the dissemination of this. We demand that you kick this person off the platform and kick this one off the platform. So if you're concerned, as I hope

everyone rational is, about the monopolistic power of Silicon Valley joining with the power of the state under democratic rule to suffocate discourse, what you should do is support independent media. Make it possible that sites like Patreon and Substack and independent outlets can resist corporate media because they have funding, they have subscribers, they have audience. That kind of lets them react the way we react, Megan, right? Like we say, look, we're in a position where we're not vulnerable to your threats. We have enough success, enough of a platform built that there's nothing you can do to me. That's what needs to happen.

And people can make that happen to fortify these outlets who do want to kind of reject and refuse these censorship attempts and this homogeneity that everyone wants to impose, in order to do that, they're going to need support, financial support, audience support. And I think that that's what any person who wants to help and do something about this can do. It's great advice. And I'm going to start a subscription piece to my podcast immediately. I'm inspired. Glenn, always such a pleasure to talk to you. It's like, I don't know, it's like a warm blanket because you speak sense and you have

such a beautiful way with words and you're always so spot on in your analysis and your historical examples. It's lovely listening to you. Great to talk to you, Megan. I think you're doing a great job and an important job. And I'm happy to come back on anytime. Our thanks to all of our guests today, Glenn, John Mates, Chris Best, and to all of you for listening. This hour was brought to you in part by The Zebra. Find out how much money you can save on car or home insurance by visiting thezebra.com slash Kelly. Now check it out. On Friday, we decided to stay

nimble and we're just going to stay on news of the day because this is a big news week and we don't want to miss a moment of it for you. Things are happening day to day, both with the president, with these Democrats in the house, which, you know, we didn't even get to the fact that they're trying to impeach the president. Oh yeah. By the way, there's an impeachment underway. I mean, that's the crazy news cycle. So we'll have it covered for you on Friday and we'll respond to the day's news. And we hope you'll join us for that. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.