F**king Mondays: Mr "Free Speech Absolutist"
Also: talking antisemitism and Russell Brand with Conspirituality Podcast!
It’s that time of the week again, and your regular dose of “F**king Mondays”!
Antisemitism (and Russell Brand)
I was invited on the Conspirituality Podcast for an interview with Derek Beres a few days back and the episode is now out. It was a really big honor to be invited on the show as I’ve long maintained it is one of the most important podcasts in the country. The Conspirituality crew do amazing work exposing New Age cults, anti-vax grifters, and conspiracy theorists, and provide potentially vulnerable people with crucial tools to inoculate themselves from the never ending supply of social media scammers. I talked to Derek about the frightening rise of antisemitism in America and why I think it’s happening. We also discussed Russell Brand’s trafficking in conspiracy theories, and other wellness gurus mining social media algorithms for profit.
You can listen to my interview here.
Also make sure to subscribe to the Conspirituality podcast on iTunes here, and get Derek’s fantastic newsletter Trickle-Down Wellness here.
Elon Musk helping authoritarianism in Turkey
In the least surprising news ever, Mr “Free Speech Absolutist” Elon Musk is censoring Twitter in Turkey during a razor close election at the request of authoritarian President Recep Erdoğan. As Judd Legum writes:
The decision is a sharp break from how Twitter responded to the censorship requests of the current regime, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, before Musk bought the company. Musk has lucrative business dealings with the incumbent Turkish government through his company SpaceX.
Erdoğan is facing a serious challenge from opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who has vowed to restore Turkey's democratic system. Before the election, polls showed Kilicdaroglu with a slight lead over Erdoğan, despite Erdoğan's extensive use of state power, including state-controlled media, to swing the contest in his favor. In April, "state broadcaster TRT devoted 32 hours of coverage to… Erdoğan’s speeches but just 32 minutes to those of Kemal Kilicdaroglu," according to a recent study.
Notably, none of the Twitter Files journalists are speaking up about it:
Matt Taibbi’s entire thesis was that the US government was engaging in a massive censorship campaign in collaboration with Big Tech (Twitter). His evidence consisted of banal chats between government agencies and Twitter executives on whether specific tweets violated their Terms of Service. Some did, some didn’t, and Twitter acted accordingly. Now we have direct evidence of Twitter being told to take specific tweets down by an authoritarian government that don’t break their TOS and Twitter complying without argument. You’d think this would elicit at least a response from the journalists railing against censorship and Big Tech compliance, but nothing as of yet. Elon Musk’s response to Yglesias is telling:
This was not the response Musk had when asked to block Russia from accessing his satellite internet via Starlink:
It is worth noting that Musk has business interests in Russia and Turkey and that his views on censorship in those countries seem to morph in direct relationship to them.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commits campaign suicide
RFK Jr.’s strategy for his 2024 Presidential campaign is based on appealing to anti-vaxxers voters across the political spectrum. Given the Right succumbed to the anti-vaxx movement in a truly shocking way under the Trump administration, Kennedy Jr’s only real chance of getting anywhere near the White House is to capture votes from Republicans. And given Republicans still overwhelmingly support Trump, Kennedy has to appeal to them. That’s why many in the anti-vaxx conspiracy theory movement have been calling for them to pair up. Unfortunately for them, and Kennedy’s campaign, this isn’t going to happen:
I’d like to give Kennedy credit for this, but not wanting to work with Trump is an incredibly low bar. Either way, if he’s ruling out running with Trump, you can safely say that this is the end of his political career.
The podcast!
Listen to The Banter Roundtable Podcast (out now for free):
And our Members Only show:
Until next week!
Sadly, we have a new one to add to the list of down the rabbit hole conspiracy advocates (following Taibbi, Lara Logan, and others) -- Bill Maher. I've loved his shows for decades, and he's spot on about religion, but as the pandemic halted his standup career and derailed his show for a while, he's grown increasingly anti-mask and social distancing (when needed). He recently claimed that the trans movement was planning a "trans day of vengeance" which (as far as I've seen) was a term the GOP coined after that one shooting was linked to someone who claimed to be nonbinary (likely as a legal escape ploy). Maher's recent fawning over in-studio guest Musk was a disgrace, as was the most recent time he had Brand on who made the entire panel segment unwatchable. He's also a blatant transphobe and misogynist so perhaps it's time HBO sent him packing just like ABC once did.