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π¨Vivek Ramaswamy LIVE: Hunter Biden Laptop,Twitter Free Speech & China
Recorded: June 2, 2023 Duration: 1:54:51Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion covered various topics, including strategic partnerships with international stakeholders, changes in Twitter's leadership and technical framework, and the importance of technological independence in national security. Vivek Ramaswamy's participation highlighted emerging trends in corporate governance and geopolitical strategies.
Full Transcription
Man, is it just me or does news all break at the same time?
You can go, you know, the whole day without anything happening at all and then the news just hits, hits, hits, hits.
It's just you.
It's just me, okay.
Well, that might be because it takes you 15 years to post a breaking news thing, but you know, that's okay.
I'm totally kidding. Sometimes you beat me.
Did he say it takes us 15 years, like me 15 years to post a breaking news?
Is that what he said?
I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding.
It's a rival.
Oh shit.
Well, no, no, I like it.
Suli, I hope you're listening to this shit.
Man, what can I say, bro?
I've got the slowest, slowest people helping me out.
No, but to be honest, you give the difference between, I would say me, you kind of get like an instant headline, right?
But you guys actually go into it a little bit more.
By that, I mean a lot more, actually, where you go through and you give the key points to the story, right?
And then you give, you know, a lot of context to it.
And so that's what makes you guys different.
And you're actually very quick at it.
So I'm, you know, kudos to it.
Have you guys gone through the Hunter Biden laptop ship?
No comment.
Suli, have you gone through all the Hunter Biden material?
I want to have.
I wouldn't say what I meant.
There's not what I meant, but now it is what I mean.
Are you trying to get us both on a fucking whip, Mario?
Come on.
So is there, on a serious note, is there actual material of him with underage girls?
Is that 100% or still being debated?
It's hard to...
It's hard to confirm because you don't necessarily know who the ages of the individuals are.
You can tell that they're very young, but a lot of their identities haven't actually been released.
Some people would argue that they have confirmed that, but that is a very difficult thing to do.
So I don't want to make that accusation here, but it's pretty light.
Surely, do you know much about this?
It's not the topic of today's space, but do you much about this?
He was a one-off?
He was a little too close to his niece when she was underage.
Just a little too close.
I don't necessarily know anything beyond that, but that has been proven.
Sleeping in the same bed.
Anyone else has gone through them?
Also, have you gone through all that material?
No, I've been fighting a lot this AT4 shit.
Do you know that all the shit you care about, no one else cares about, or no?
Do you notice that?
Yeah, I get it.
Thanks, Mario.
I appreciate the support.
I'm just being honest.
Like, I think someone needs to tell you.
How do you not care about the fact?
You have some dude.
Wasn't Vivek talking about it today, so obviously somebody cares about it.
But what is it?
Okay, let's see.
What is it about all force?
The claims that the rocket launcher, first of all, he said it was javelins with their mouth, their 84s, and then second that they were diverted.
Well, well, AlSov, don't give away your questions.
What are you doing?
Whatever.
No, no.
He's not listening now, bro.
No, he's not listening now.
Bro, we're just getting excited as soon as you talk about cartels.
Listen, all sorts.
When you're going to ask someone a question, don't give away the question.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I did put it at the top, though.
It's up to the top for anybody that wants to see all sorts of threat.
It's actually really fantastic.
But the moral of the story is...
Oh, yeah, thanks Nick for retweeting that.
Yeah, man.
You're welcome, question mark.
Um...
But anyway, yeah, so it's worth noted, guys, that we're talking about a fucking shoulder-fired anti-tank launcher.
Okay?
That is miles from the U.S. Mexico border in Matamoros, Mexico, which I traveled to Madamoros, Mexico when I was covering the border here a couple weeks ago.
So, I mean, that tells you how close this actually was to the border, and that's, you know, that is fairly concerning.
So it's, yeah, that rocket, though, probably is inert based on the coloring.
But regardless, they have it.
I mean, the cartels have had this for over 10 years.
Like, this isn't, it's rare, but it's nothing new.
Yeah, so there was also that report that they actually had javelin.
uh rocket launchers as well
there's absolutely no evidence of that way
hold on hold on
so the debate is
the debate is whether the cartels have
javelin rocket launches is that what the debate is
so no
Go ahead, Nick, go ahead.
Well, what I was just going to say is because AllSour's did give a lot of context of this in his tweet,
the accusation of cartels having javelin rocket launchers, which, correct me, if I'm wrong,
AllSource, are much more sophisticated.
They're being used in Ukraine right now.
And so what people are saying is that the weapons that the U.S. are sending to Ukraine, including javelin launchers,
are making their way to the cartels in Mexico, and that's where that comes from.
Correct.
Go ahead.
No, I'll continue, bro.
So the issue is a Mexican, a very popular, famous Mexican TV presenter,
she went on television last night, and they misidentified this launcher that's in this video.
It's at AT4. They called it a javelin.
And that was an error in the reporting.
It is not a javelin.
It is an AT4.
Like there is no question this is an AT4, not a javelin.
That's what caused this mass because of an error in reporting.
And just, I mean, it was just a legitimate report.
It's just they misidentified the weapon.
That's what caused all the things.
But then the argument is, oh, well, regardless as AT-4s,
but that specific rocket has been in Mexico.
Again, cartels are not well known to have a lot of these types of weapons systems,
like these rocket launchers are not like everywhere.
Like you would see in, let's say, Afghanistan or Iraq or Sudan.
It's not that common.
But they do have it and they've had it for...
Like the last thing.
But then it is also, and why you're obsessing over it so much?
Is that just because you hate disinformation or misinformation?
So, yes, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah, bro.
No, it's not.
It's because he mentioned the word cartel.
I'd be honest also.
Yeah, it was a lot of information on cartels.
I thought you would support me more.
He just had about cartel and he just thought.
All right, guys.
So in news today, there is Hunter Biden's laptop.
We did a tweet about it.
I don't think we thought about doing your space about Hunter's laptop.
But it wasn't much to talk about.
It's just a bunch of photos you can go through and allow your eyes to be hurt.
So I'll pin it above if anyone wants to go through this.
Let me go, where's the tweet?
All right, I'll put it above the link.
The link is pretty easy, actually.
It's just Bidenlaptopmedia.com.
The website is going down occasionally, so you might struggle to get into it.
It's got to keep trying.
Probably they're getting DDoS attacked from a bunch of companies that Hunter's using to bring it down, which is not surprising.
So you can go through it.
That's just a guess, by the way, I'm a pure guess.
So you can go through it if you want there.
But a brief overview, at least from the stuff I've seen and people tweet out different
photos, is just Hunter doing, and I'm actually, even though it's not part of the topic, I
want to talk about this for a few, for a bit.
It's just Hunter doing some crazy shit with girls.
Now, pretty much all of it, and let me just start it off, and again, I've only seen bits
and pieces on Twitter.
Pretty much all of it is his own business.
You can call it as disgusting as you like,
and let me finish.
As disgusting as you like,
as horrible as you like, as appalling as you like,
it's Hunter doing his own shit.
Where it gets concerning is when laws are broken.
That's concerning from a legal aspect
and from an ethical aspect,
because some of the girls do look underage.
And this is where it does require more scrutiny.
Now, whether that should reflect on his father,
that's a different discussion in terms of the president.
I think corruption is a much bigger issue,
whether it's Biden or Trump or Obama or anyone else,
and what the president does rather than what his son does.
That's how I look at it.
Does anyone disagree with this, that this is not more concerning than what I stated,
but should be more related to Joe Biden than what I've just mentioned?
Well, so what I would say is that my biggest concern here is that there's a double standard here because Hunter Biden is President Joe Biden's son, right?
This is a powerful family. Biden has been in government for like 50 years now. And it seems to be that anybody else would have been prosecuted.
for this sort of thing,
especially the fact that Hunter Biden
was caught with a weapon
in one of his pictures
with crack cocaine and such.
In which country, do you know?
No, he was in the United States.
And there was literally a photo of that.
So that's, you know, most people would look at that as that's pretty much all the evidence you need.
We have heard nothing about this investigation.
Supposedly there is one.
But this has been ongoing for years and years.
Who's leading, yeah, who's leading that investigation?
Do you know?
supposedly the DOJ, but we don't, we have like no information on that at all.
That's just what they said in the past.
But for me, the most concerning one man is that there is, and one of my team members
is sending me a message or a friend is sending me a message, Mark, I'll read out exactly
what he said.
It's child, he's pretty direct with me.
It's child porn, bro.
What the fuck you're talking about?
Look at it.
Some of the girls do look underage.
So essentially, um, there is a lot of photos of him with underage girls.
Yeah, for me, that is pretty major.
In terms of him holding a gun and taking crack cocaine, wasn't he in Thailand for a while as well, Nick?
Yeah.
I'm not sure about him being in Thailand, but the reason I mentioned the gun crime is because that alone is a felony.
That alone is a felony. We don't need any more evidence on that. It's already been proven that he was, that he actually committed that family.
But you're sure because the photo, are you sure this photo is in the US? Because that photo could have been taken in Thailand. That's what I'm trying to figure out.
Well, it was in the same hotel room that he was proven to be in with a bunch of hookers. So...
So yes, yes, it is.
I don't have the specific details on that hotel room right in front of me.
I can go grab them if you want to, but...
Yes, that was in the United States.
Interesting.
Certainly anyone else, any quick thoughts before we dig into the China issue on the Hunter Biden laptop?
Maybe we go to Jackson.
Jackson, you're pretty direct, you don't mince your words.
What are your thoughts on the Biden laptop?
How concerning is it and how related should it be to Joe Biden?
Okay.
My opinions don't differ from yours.
If there's anything criminal, that should be, you know, obviously an issue.
I think his business dealings are an issue and voters have said as such that if they knew about the contents of his laptop and they knew his corrupt business dealings were all real, as per the correspondence we uncovered from the laptop that Glenn Greenwald reported on prior to the election that a lot of voters would have changed their minds.
But yeah, I mean, I think if anyone had their entire photo album leaked on the internet online,
uh you'd be upset and there'd be a lot of i mean i i i don't think i have anything illegal on my
my uh photo album but you know it's never a good thing and that it just kind of sucks but yeah
yeah
All right, man, I think that's, and I think we kind of mostly agree how related Joe Biden is.
Doesn't look like he's too related.
It's really final words because I'm going to kick off the discussion on China.
I think you should.
Let me say one more thing real quick here.
The debate on whether or not Joe Biden was involved is based on emails that were found on this laptop,
such as a compensation agreement from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board for.
Right? Which he had no experience in energy whatsoever before he ended up on board.
Can I ask you, quick question.
Nick, that's moving away from the Hunter Biden laptop kind of, because there's two aspects of the laptop.
There's one of them that links to the corruption aspect that might involve Joe.
I think anything to do with corruption should be investigated very seriously.
And Joe could be involved.
The president could be involved.
And the second one is like the images of the girls and the drugs and the guns.
So I'm kind of drawing the line.
So what you're talking about now is the corruption side of things, correct?
Correct.
But the only reason we know about that is because it was found on the laptop.
Fair.
Yeah, 100%.
So, but yeah.
This is what Joe Biden was supposed.
I'm putting the laptop at the two categories.
So you're talking about the corruption category,
but still the laptop, still applies to the laptop.
I think the leaks is mainly,
do the leaks include anything about the photos
or it's mainly about the,
sorry, anything about the corruption or it's mainly the photos?
The leaks, like I said, the reason that we know about this potential corruption where that compensation agreement was sent through to Hunter Biden's emails.
It wasn't because his email was hacked.
It was because there was a backup of the email on the emails on the Hunter Biden laptop.
So when you see 10% for the big guy, and this all happened while Joe Biden was vice president.
That's where all this comes from.
You know, we don't have proof of that yet, but that's why Joe Biden can potentially be implicated in this.
Well, don't we also have some evidence of the connection between Hunter and Joe via Congressman Comer's subpoena of the bank records, including one bank and China?
He's made that assertion publicly and has promised more hearings.
This is part of the investigation that we covered a week or two ago, correct, Doc?
Yeah, it's all out there.
And Comer seems to think the financial records demonstrate direct payments to Joe, which, of course, would be criminal.
Cool.
I think we should β when there's more revelations, we'll do a whole space on this.
I know the Vex's coming shortly.
We're going to keep today's space relatively short.
But Suli, I know Elon visited China.
Some people have concerns.
Well β
Before we go into that, I just want to say there has been breaking news here in the past like 15, 20 minutes.
Ella Irwin, the Twitter's head of trust and safety, has resigned.
which is, you know, there have been a lot of people recently that have come out and expressed a lot of concern about Twitter's policies and moderation, and especially today, because the Daily Wire, came out and publicly said that their documentary, what is a woman, was being censored on the platform, and that Twitter was trying to block the distribution of that documentary.
Do you think she was like, though, or she actually quit?
You know, given the circumstances and the fact that she...
doubled down on it even after the,
even after her department had declined to allow them to put it on the platform.
They,
and they were trying to enforce a misgendering policy that had been already cut from Twitter's terms of service.
That was one of the first things that Elon actually did.
And once Daily Wire said,
okay,
we're going to take the two parts that you said,
we're misgendering,
and we're going to post them in two separate videos here on Twitter.
Oh, they did, and both of them got censored.
So she practically doubled down on that.
So I would say she was most likely forced to resign, but we have not confirmed.
And has, in addition to that, you've basically got a scenario where Elon replied to the Daily Wire or the head of Daily Wire and said that,
you know, they won't be censoring.
And then what later he tweeted and replied and said that,
although they won't be censoring,
certain sponsors may not want to sponsor under their tweet,
and therefore that will impact and affect reach.
So that was the first thing.
And then recently, now that they've actually published it,
it does have on there that basically you have a scenario where,
It's been flagged for hate speech.
It's got a visibility.
The visibility is limited and it says this tweet may violate Twitter's rules against hateful conduct.
And I believe that you're not able to retweet or reply to it.
I'm sorry, make a comment.
I wonder if you guys think that this is a conscious choice on the part of Twitter management to censor this particular item for the Daily Wire.
Or could it be that there's...
kind of lag in or in attention to setting up the systems under must command, even at this point in his tenure, where they actually haven't revamped the, you know, some of the moderation structures even now that existed before he took over. I don't know, I'm just thinking aloud.
I mean, it seems like that, didn't it, but then the fact that, as Nick just said, I passed it over to Nick, as Nick said that Ella Irwin resigning, I mean, it doesn't seem like it's coincidental, but Nick, go ahead.
Well, I just want to say, you know, just reiterate this policy doesn't exist anymore on misgendering.
We have heard practically zero, you know, people being censored or, you know, especially people on larger platforms.
We've heard a lot about the transgender stuff here recently from large accounts and, you know, talking about the target situation and women's sports, lives of TikTok.
none of them have been censored based on this policy.
So what triggered this right now?
Because, you know, automation...
I don't know, but the policy seems like it's irrelevant.
I mean, hasn't it been established at this point that the quote-unquote policy is just the whim of Elon Musk?
I mean, so what does it matter if it's actually on the books or none as a policy?
It seems like it's arbitrary and sort of...
Oh, I'm sorry.
I tried to unmute.
I don't mute it.
This was specifically taken out of those terms of service, though.
You know, does that make any difference?
No, Michael's saying that.
Michael's saying that essentially what we've seen in this version of Twitter, Twitter 2.2,
is that, I mean, you have the terms of services,
but then you have basically Elon who...
is able to go against the term and services when he wants and ban people if he wants and you know
Yeah, or in other words what technically is in the terms of service doesn't really tell you a whole lot because ultimately it comes down to the day-to-day whim of the guy running the thing.
Okay, so would you think that possibly Ella Erwin Irwin may have resigned?
Um, because, well, actually, so there is Jeremy Boring, the CEO of Daily Wire did come out recently and say that he had been hearing that Elon was actually in the room when the decision was made to, uh, not allow the full version of what is a woman, the documentary to actually be posted on Twitter.
And being that he kind of came out and, uh, and backtrack that, you know, would you think that it's, it's a possibility that maybe she did actually resign because, you know, he, you know, he,
essentially sort of maybe put the blame on her a little bit, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, I have no clue.
You probably know better than I would.
It sounds plausible.
Yeah.
You know, it's fitting that guy's name is Jeremy. Jeremy Boring.
It's like, there's nothing more boring to me than like a censorship controversy over the Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro's latest trans thing.
I mean, I almost want to just go against my ordinary beliefs on speech and just have them censor.
It just had a pure annoyance. I mean, who, okay, we know Matt Walsh that you're really...
angry about trans and gender ideology. Do you have any other interested life? I mean, even just
basketball or something. I mean, it's just like so monomaniac. Has anyone, has anyone,
Nick, did you listen to the space that the Daily Wire did? Can you tell me why, you know,
what's the big deal? And what's, what are the allegations they're making?
Well, the allegations that they're making the biggest one is that censorship is still alive and well on Twitter. And the biggest revelation that came from that space is them saying that Elon Musk had something to do with it. And so, like, I'll go back a little bit. I'm not making any sort of accusation that Elon Musk had anything to do with it.
And I'm not saying that's why everyone would have resigned, but this is kind of their standpoint on it right now.
And we haven't heard much from Elon after that at all.
The issue is this, Nick, that we basically had on this space, a number of times I've spoken about people who've been banned.
Clearly, when they've not contravened the terms and services, I gave examples like Scott Rear.
There was other examples like Ye.
There was other examples.
There's various other examples.
And the argument that pro-Elon people were essentially making was, well, it hits his platform and he does as he please.
So they shouldn't be complaining about this because if that's the case, it's his platform and he does as he pleases.
Or is it that, you know, there's certain people they do on sentence and certain people they don't.
Even if it is his own platform, the problem is he is advocating for a censorship free platform.
So while if you're speaking whether he's got the right to do it, he doesn't have the right to do it, that's one discussion.
But it's not though, is it?
How is it a censorship free platform when he's banned so many people?
A censorship free platform is not as binary as you're making it out to be.
It's a path towards censorship free.
It's a realistic version of censorship free.
If you want Twitter to exist, you cannot have a platform that's completely censorship free.
And I want to actually invite the guys from the Daily Wire.
I want to try to invite Shapiro and stuff.
I'm not sure if they can come on such short notice.
But while you do that, I do want to encourage.
I want people to put their comments and questions down in the bottom right hand corner because...
You know, even us, even the panelists that are up on stage right now, we really are struggling to understand.
There's a lot of different opinions on this as well.
And so, you know, we're going to try to cover a lot on this and hopefully we'll be able to dig up some information.
If you know anybody that's been banned for this misgendering policy recently, definitely.
Yes, I, you know, I'm skeptical of just the technical resources that they're investing in the platform at this point.
So, yeah.
You know, is there a possibility that it's literally just because they don't have the systems in place that would properly manage whatever their...
applying to this particular tweet. I don't know, but I do know that I'm probably getting more bots and spam than I ever have before in like, I don't know, the 12 years or whatever that I've been on Twitter.
That seems like a system flaw that's not being adequately addressed in some fashion. I mean, I'm no expert on it, but I don't know. It's a, it makes me generally wary about how the whole thing is being run.
Well, okay, but wouldn't that sort of add to the, you know, it's really hard to wrangle up and kill a bunch of these.
The terms of service is quite large, right?
There's a bunch of garbage to it.
You have a bunch of garbage moderators still and stuff, and there are a lot of bands that are being reversed.
And then you've got the bot problem and everything.
And so would it be fair to say that you have to give the guy some time to be able to take this platform and totally, like they're literally rewriting the code base for the platform from the ground up.
So, you know, are we being a little too hard on the guy?
Oh, no, yeah.
I get that.
I'm speaking for myself, I think that's perfectly reasonable.
But, you know, if you're the richest man in the world and it's been, what, like seven
and eight months and you have a lot of resources to hire some of the most skilled engineers
and so forth on the market, I don't know.
It just seems like if it was a priority, then we'd see that prioritization.
I mean, the problem to me...
Priority, hold on,
priority,
shouldn't it be to make money first
before being a censorship-free platform?
Because you can't be any...
Well, the priority today is that Starlink has a new contract with the...
When you do all this drama and basically be like,
I'm buying this for free speech,
every interview you literally,
that is the same mantra you're saying,
like, look,
I appreciate it almost.
Like,
I appreciate what he's done on the platform.
Like,
some of the stuff that I post probably wouldn't be allowed under the old regime.
But like he keeps saying in every single interview,
I'm going to, you know, I'm going to allow free speech.
This platform is about free speech.
44 billion was worth it for free speech.
So when you're saying that and then essentially banning people based on your feelings,
such as the case with, you know, we said Alex Jones, we've said, we've said, yeah.
The reason we keep reiterating those examples is because they're more wider,
well-known examples, many other examples, Scott Ritter being some of them.
So when you're doing that and you're not even able to explain the policy
and it's just based on your own personal feelings, then say that, just say, look,
I'm the boss of Twitter and I'm going to ban who I feel like, but that doesn't sound as good, does it?
Well, okay, but let me bring in, uh, arguably one of the most censored people on old Twitter and, you know, especially YouTube. Uh, Jackson Hinkle, I think there was a policy in place before that had to do with, uh, the Ukraine, uh, Russia war. I mean, do you feel like you have a lot more, uh,
you know,
leeway to be able to post what you,
you want to post,
report what you want to post.
and,
you know,
have you ever faced any sanctions for that under Elon Musk?
Yes.
Yeah, I think this is an interesting conversation. I mean, uh, Suleiman has brought up Scott Ritter, who's a big, uh, you know, Russian military expert who's been, I, I believe he's still banned from Twitter. Um, I've been banned from Twitter three times under Elon Musk, each of which obviously was reversed and, uh, reversed quite quickly with the exception of one.
and that one was not related to Ukraine, unlike the others.
There's about like transgender stuff in misgendering.
But as I mean...
Okay, so you were banned for misgendering.
Was this before or after the misgendering policy was taken out of the terms of service, do you know?
Probably before, I mean, probably before, it was like, I think, three or four weeks after Elon took over and, like, began with actual changes and everything.
So I don't know when that was implemented.
But the last thing I'll say about this is Twitter, as we can all, I think, attest to is infinitely better now than it was before.
It is infinitely better than YouTube.
There's tons of things that we can say about.
foreign policy be it China or Ukraine that we couldn't say before but there's still stuff you
cannot talk about like you cannot deny atrocities which gets into a gray area because if you talk
about you know cities like busha in Ukraine which I'm not going to do right now you will be banned
for saying that sort of stuff so it's not perfect you know yay nick quintas Scott ritter still gone
but it's you know elite levels better
Dr. Gorka, I know you're just up on stage right now,
and let me ask you,
so what are your opinions specifically on some of these people
that continue to be banned,
have not been let back on the platform,
such as Stephen Bannon and such?
Does that make sense?
I mean, would you argue that this may not be
a total free speech platform at that point?
Well, look, I think, you know,
Elon's got some very specific...
Trothers, so he's setting the limits.
Somebody mentioned Nick Fuentes.
I mean, there are certain people that you're just, you know, in polite society,
denying the Holocaust.
Yeah, you have a right to do it, but does Elon Musk have to put up with it?
I don't even know if Steve wants to be back on GERDA.
I mean, I was on his show today, and he seems to, back on Twitter, I think he loves GERDA.
I think this is another false dichotomy.
We're going to fall into the old argument,
well, it's a private company, blah, blah, blah, kind of thing.
At the end of the day,
I mean, what is it that Elon said last week,
which I cheered, you know, relentlessly,
and I'm going to use his tweet on my Newsmax show on Sunday.
What did he say?
If you are a doctor who performs...
transgender surgery on a minor, you should be imprisoned for life.
I fully agree with that wholeheartedly.
Would I have a problem with him, you know, banning somebody on his platform who says, you
know, double mastectomy's unhealthy, 14-year-olds is okay?
No, I really wouldn't have a problem with it.
Does that mean I'm anti- First Amendment?
No, not really.
I think if you're mutilating children, you should go to prison and you shouldn't be allowed to talk about it on a private platform.
So, you know, call me a double-stand merchant on the First Amendment.
But at the end of the day, protecting children, protecting the most vulnerable in society, I think that's a good thing in general.
Jackson?
I think, Nick, I think it's important to highlight, though, when we're talking about the person who is Dan Scott Ritter, he's twice, twice.
Oh, yes.
Twice.
So when we're talking about Scott Ritter, let's just highlight that important.
So is somebody who's convicted, I mean, I don't particularly care for Scott Ritter, but what is, what relevance is that?
Is that entitled?
I mean, somebody's convicted of a crime and they serve their sentence, they ought to be censored for the rest of their lives?
Is that your point?
they have an issue.
They have a generally issue.
By all means,
you scarred Ritter as a martyr.
I mean,
if he's post-pornography,
then, yeah,
go ahead and remove that.
But that's not what he does.
So what's the point of bringing up
the criminal record other than to just cast aspersion again no i don't care for scott ridder i think he's actually
kind of a joke about scott ridder we need to highlight that he's a twice convicted tell why what does that
do with the speech in question that because he's a child pedophile no you're right he could be a mass murderer
it wouldn't have anything to do with the political speech on twitter
Yeah, I'll just add in...
And in reality, like, let's be honest.
Sorry, Jackson, Proocchio,
let's be clear, he only got banned
because he got mass reported by Nafo,
so it wasn't like...
How do you know that?
How do you know that?
Well, on what crowd was he banned?
I don't even know.
He was, I believe he was banned over talking about Busha again.
So, I mean...
Recently?
Isn't that what happened the first time around?
Yeah, but I mean, he was still talking about it.
You still have people...
I mean, I had someone in a debate last night and a debate today talking about Boucha.
People still talk about this, if you can believe it.
But I always refuse because I know it'll get you banned.
But...
Like they're saying it's atrocity denial or something like that?
Yeah, yeah.
And...
You know, I, yeah, I mean, you can bring up anyone's criminal record, whatever.
I mean, there's a lot of criminals on this app, murderers.
You have people flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private jet to his island on this app.
But I guess we're not going to talk about that.
But Sebastian-
It's also irrelevant.
What did it to do with the speech that was banned for?
Let me just finish my, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.
But Sebastian brings up an interesting point about people who might be serving,
you think you should serve like a life sentence in prison.
Well, even if you serve a life sentence in prison for committing a certain crime,
you know, they don't cut your tongue out and say you can't speak anymore.
So I think, you know, even if you disagree with someone's views,
you should be able to have your speech so long as you're not violating it.
But you're not allowed to vote.
You're not allowed to buy a gun.
These are interesting, right?
I mean, for the record, I feel like I should say it's just going to happen to know.
The guy's not even a convicted pedophile.
He had no interaction with any underage child.
He was...
entrapped essentially by one of these
sting operations.
Oh my God, Michael.
Oh, stop it.
No way.
Good morning, Michael.
I appreciate that.
With Chris Hansen that's the entrapped
idiot,
you know,
guys on the internet
absolutely. You're 100% right, man.
Listen, I'm not gonna...
I don't like Scott Ritter.
I think he's wrong analytically,
but I also don't like you
like all the,
like reflexively bringing up
an irrelevant criminal charge
has nothing even to do with the speech
in question that got a ban
from the platform.
This isn't a DUI.
Well, it's not why...
I'm not gonna bring up somebody
who I got a DUI or a drug charge.
What does it matter?
He can be a serial killer.
He could be a mass murder and wouldn't have anything to do with speech.
It speaks to character.
And if we're going to talk about somebody, like,
if we're going to pass a character test to be on Twitter.
We should highlight that to the listeners because I'm not.
You're making him sound like a martyr.
So you have to be a false convicted child.
Wait, so you have to pass a character test to be on Twitter?
I think he is a martyr.
And if you're going to talk about people in that manner, I mean,
So what?
Are you now going to ban every former president that slaughtered thousands, if not hundreds
of thousands of civilians abroad?
Flip it.
No, no, hang on.
Let's just flip it for a second.
You get into a very, very sticky situation when you talk about making-
But it's far easier, far easier to argue the obverse.
Just flip the whole thing.
Okay, well, I would never-
Does anybody, does anybody, does anybody have, I would never leave Scott Ritter?
Does anybody have-
Does anybody have an absolute right to speak on a private platform?
Yeah, I'd never leave Scott Ritter with my kids, you know, to watch them or nanny them.
But like, I do value.
That's not the point.
That's not the point.
Does anybody have an absolute right to exploit a privately owned platform?
Period.
If you say it's a free speech platform, then yes.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's marketing.
Okay, does anybody have an absolute right
to be platformed on a private platform?
That's absurd.
Well, no, but the idea that social media companies
are going to be endowed with investigating the moral character
of everybody on the platform
and not even making an evaluation of their property
based on their speech,
but on their past offline activity, that's great.
I have no right.
Okay, I have no right...
to go on Newsmax singing the praises of Fox.
I have no right to, you know, use Coca-Cola's annual festival in Atlanta to praise Pepsi guys.
Wake up.
Well, I don't think anybody's, I'm not talking in terms of rights.
I mean, rights are sort of fictions anyway.
I mean, that's not really.
Oh, that's just to this point.
The first obligation that Elon Musk has, the first obligation Elon Musk has, despite the marketing is to his shareholders and investors.
And what we're now kind of debating really is the distinction between sitting in the chair and being the man in the arena or sitting in the audience trying to decide what he should do.
But first and foremost, he has an asset that lost 50% of his enterprise value in six months.
And he has to find a way to play the game.
And he's figuring out the rules as the game goes on.
And this is part of that process.
And as time goes on, these rules will be more and more crystallized, but you cannot expect
them to be crystallized now because what he did was he came in, he tried to cut costs as much
as possible.
He had to let a lot of people go.
Otherwise, he would have completely lost the business.
And now he's figuring out he has to play ball with advertisers.
In order to play ball with advertisers, he does not want a bunch of pedophiles.
Right.
like denying mass murders.
He wants to find a way to get this platform to get to be viable.
And this is the best way, in my opinion, to do it.
This is a business, first and foremost, despite what the marketing says,
before it's a town square, before it's a free speech platform,
is a business that needs to make enough money to return all the,
make returns to their shareholders.
And as of right now, it's not there.
Yeah, okay. Vivek, we have Vivek Ramoswami on stage here. He's a Republican presidential candidate.
Excellent.
Vivek, I want to ask you, so, you know, we've been going through this.
There's been a thing all day long. It's been one of the most talked about things on Twitter.
Censoring the Daily Wires, What is a Woman documentary?
There's been debate. Actually, Ella Irwin, the head of trust and safety at Twitter, resigned.
We heard that about 45 minutes ago.
What are your overall thoughts on this?
And if anybody has any questions for Vivek, put them down there in the comment section, bottom right hand corner.
Just giving your heads up.
I'm going to give you a bit of credit, Vivek.
So the planned interview today, the planned discussion was going to be about China.
That was the discussion with Vivek.
But obviously, in the last few hours, we saw the Biden laptop come out, and we saw the drama between with the daily wire and Twitter's quote-unquote censorship and the concerns there.
So we'll be focusing on China and Elon's visit to China and some of the concerns that you've echoed.
But we might ask you a few questions about these recent topics as well, if you don't mind Vivek.
But the mic is yours.
Yeah, no, I'm down to roll in whatever direction of the conversation.
I promise you, Mario, whenever I join, it's not prescripted.
I think Twitter spaces works better when we're not operating off a script.
So, at least that's my model of campaigning.
So, listen, so I was actually catching some of the discussion beforehand.
And, you know, I think it was a good debate about the question of rights.
And I think that there's a separate debate to be had about,
social media companies that enjoy federal protections like Section 230, C2, and what does that mean for their ability to engage in viewpoint discrimination or not?
That's technical. We can go there. I think it's less interesting than the question of just colloquially as users of a platform, customers of a business,
is the business telling you one thing and doing another.
And so my view is that a true free speech platform,
and this is not making a legal argument,
it's not making an argument about being in court,
but...
If you're a free speech platform, part of what that means is that you don't discriminate on the basis of viewpoint.
Now, that doesn't mean that you're going to platform pornography, illegal content.
Those aren't viewpoints or commercial fraud.
But if you're talking about the expression of an opinion...
I can't imagine what it means to be a free speech platform if it means that certain opinions can't be expressed on that platform.
And so I think it is at once reasonable for customers to make a judgment that this platform tells me it's being one thing,
when in fact it is not being the thing that it's telling me that it's being and judging it accordingly versus legal.
We decided that was accepted.
Vivek just had breaking news coming a minute ago as you were speaking.
So, yeah, about, I'm not from Elon.
I'll let you talk about Elon, what came out of Elon.
But so we saw a few about, let me exactly when we saw about,
less than an hour ago, Ella Irwin, who was the VP of Trust and Safety,
has quote unquote resigned according to sources.
And just a minute ago, it came out that May Ayyad,
who's another employee at Twitter's brand safety
has also resigned from the company.
And Nick, did you have something else from Elon?
Yeah, so it looks like Elon just actually responded to Ian.
So earlier on, about 10 minutes ago, Elon Musk,
replied to somebody else and we're updating the system tomorrow so that those who followed the daily wire will see this in their feed
but it won't be recommended to non-followers nor will any advertising be associated with it that's responding to the
censorship of that what is a woman documentary and how that it was getting totally suppressed off of twitter
i'll see if Elon Musk then respond to
Good.
Ian said the visibility issue, Ian Miles Chong was up on stage right now.
So the visibility issue prevents it from even being commented on at this moment.
It should be shareable on timelines as well.
Elon responded just two minutes ago saying commenting and deliberate sharing will be allowed.
Sensitive content just won't be pushed to people unless they ask for it or a friend sends it to them.
So that's an update for you.
Seems like this policy is rapidly changing.
Hey, hey, Zach, I wanted to get your, your opinion on something that we had just been talking about in terms of the extent of what the purview ought to be for people running these tech companies, right?
Because it's actually an interesting philosophical question.
Ought it to be within the purview of a...
moderator on Twitter to look not at the speech of a user necessarily, but the character,
even if the criminal record has no manifestation on Twitter per se, but the idea that if you
don't want somebody who's done something heinous in their life on the platform whatsoever,
even if they're not posting child pornography, let's say they were convicted of it 12 years ago
or something, I don't know. I think it's obviously dicey because you're going to immediately get
attacked or one would get attacked.
as somehow being a defender of child pornography, which is, of course, the opposite of what I would want to do.
But you see the quandary there, right?
Do we want to endow the tech officials with this sort of like totalizing surveillance authority
where they're supposed to be making judgments as to the character of users rather than just looking at purely what they post on the platform?
Yeah, so here's what I would say is let's assume that these companies are actually behaving as private companies.
without special protections and not acting at the behest of the government.
The first thing I'll observe is that's not a true assumption.
These companies are often directly coordinating with the government, taking direction from the government as to who they do and do not platform.
Before Elon took over Twitter, certainly the White House was providing instruction to Twitter to, say, take down the account of Alex Berenson, a very specific critic of the U.S. government.
They all enjoy Section 230's C2 protection.
But for the purpose of this discussion...
Assume, because I think it's more interesting this way, assume that they don't have any special favors, any special carrots, any special sticks from the government.
In that case, should we want these tech companies to be doing or not?
In that case, look, they're free to.
So there's no legal argument against their ability to make decisions about who they do and don't platform in that world.
But if you're going to claim to be a free speech platform...
Then I think it is fundamentally at odds with your stated mission to behave in a manner that silences people based on either their opinions or your substantive judgments of them as a person.
What does free speech mean?
It means we...
We engage with not only the speech we agree with, but the speech we disagree with, not the speech we love, but the speech that we do not love. That's literally what it means to embrace free speech as a value. And so I don't think that you have an obligation as a company to do anything. Again, this is on the assumption that the government isn't actually giving you special protections or special threats, which is a false assumption. But assume that's the case.
Even still, if you're going to call yourself a free speech platform, it means you cannot discriminate on the basis of opinion.
And I think this is really interesting.
I mean, I've been, look, I've been largely a proponent of Elon's vision for Twitter as a distinction from the prior vision of Twitter.
But I disagree from day one.
And I think some of this is not just implementation.
I think it's a philosophical difference where, you know, what Elon said is he wants...
80% of the views to be represented.
10% that's crazy on either side,
but it's what he said in New York at a conference
shortly after the deal was on its way to completion.
We want to be for the 80% in the middle.
Well, my view is that's not really a free speech platform. Who decides what's the middle? I mean, that's itself a political judgment. I think if you believe in free speech and you're operating a free speech platform and marketing yourself as such, I think it means that there's no viewpoint discrimination. Hate speech goes away as a category. Why? Because hate speech is just what you call hate speech is just someone else's opinion.
And so I'm actually a free speech absolutist.
And I think being a free speech absolutist means not that illegal content or commercial fraud or pornography or something like that is protected.
That's not the expression of an opinion.
But if free speech means anything, it means that opinions are protected as a protected form of expression.
And that's how we actually get to truth.
Vivek, one question for you, Mario.
Sorry, I have a follow-up real quick.
Vivek, should they be able to use the N-word in his full form on this platform if it's a true absolutist?
If hate speech is allowed, is that okay?
I don't think it's okay as a cultural norm, but I think if you're going to be a free speech platform, then yes, you allow the expression of opinions.
I would personally condemn those opinions. I condemn that. I mean, I think that the answer to bad speech is not less speech. It is more speech. But if you're going to be a free speech platform, if we're going to be a country, right? I mean, you can measure it against the standards of the First Amendment. Are you allowed to express a viewpoint?
However heinous that viewpoint is, are you allowed to march in Skokie as a Nazi?
Well, it turns out we actually have sorted out difficult questions like this through much of our national history.
The United States is a country where you get to march in Skokie, Illinois, as a Nazi.
It is a country where you get to go out in public and burn the flag.
Do I disagree with these behaviors? Do I condemn them? Are they heinous? Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But part of what it means to live in a free country is that you get to do those things.
Now, a company isn't a country, but if a company is going to call itself and brand itself as a free speech platform, I think it is a reasonable expectation for the users and consumers of that company's product to adopt the definition of what free speech means, which is no viewpoint discrimination.
It's not a legal point.
So Vivek, just...
So Vivek, just a point on that, and let's just specify it.
I mean, you've been very clear in your point.
But then according to you, if it was truly a free speech platform based on the ideals that you mentioned,
you and you were in charge of Twitter, you would not have banned Kanye West,
you would not have banned Nick Fuentes, and you would not have banned Scott Reiter.
That's correct.
I would not have banned anyone for expressing an opinion.
even however heinous that opinion is.
That's what it means if you brand it yourself as a free speech platform.
Now, I'm not running Twitter.
I'm running for President of the United States,
and I have views on what the government's job here is to do,
which is mostly to get out of the way.
And let's be clear, the government's absolutely in the way here.
There is direct and indirect meddling,
both with respect to carrots and sticks,
conferred upon these companies that tilt the scales of the behaviors that we see.
That's a big part of the story.
But, and it's not just the U.S. government, and this Mario part of the topic we're going to talk about.
It's the Chinese government, too.
I mean, their government is absolutely pulling the strings on private actors to behave in ways that they otherwise wouldn't behave.
That's a big problem, including here in the United States.
And so that's my scope of focus, because that's the arena that I'm in or running to be in.
But I'm not the one running Twitter, but if I were, that's how I would do it.
I would not have censored them, absolutely.
So, yeah.
But I think that the concern is, so based on yours, because you made out very clear standards of where it should not be banned.
So by that logic, releasing, let's say, ISIS propaganda videos on Twitter is an opinion.
Is that then a free speech?
Should that be allowed?
releasing an ISIS propaganda video.
So do you have to know what propaganda made?
I don't think plotting...
No, let's just say there's no, you know,
there's no violence, actual violence in there,
but they're glorifying ISIS.
What would you call that?
Would you censor that?
I would call that the expression of an opinion, right?
And I think the answer to bad speech is not less speech.
It is more speech.
But then do you understand...
But then do advertisers have an obligation to be on that platform?
No, they don't.
Does that mean then...
So then they can lose business and the system can shut down.
Well, all it means is then you're not a free speech.
It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong as a business,
but if you want to be a business that does what you say you're doing...
then do what you say you're doing, which is actually be a free speech platform, cater to advertisers who actually want to embrace that.
Now, we have a deeper cultural problem and reality in our country, that we have a deep culture of fear in commercial enterprise in the United States.
That itself is driven by a different form of government action.
I see, Jen Ellis on here, we were talking to her on the radio about this this morning, which is that actually the public companies in this country are all, have...
their strings being pulled by different puppet masters who are large financial institutions that effectively put pressure on these companies to behave in the way they do,
like pulling their advertising from platforms like Twitter that call themselves free speech platforms.
Again, that starts with the government because the government is...
like states like California are guiding these asset managers to behave that way.
So we can get into the complexity all we want.
But if you're going to call yourself a free speech platform,
I think it's reasonable for consumers and users to believe what that means is you don't censor opinions,
no matter how heinous opinions are.
Well, here's the thing, Vivek.
I mean, I have to push back on this a little bit and keep in mind.
I'm, you know, all for free speech, but...
The rise of ISIS can be tied back to the post of, you know, the videos that were on YouTube of Abu β what's his name, Baghdadi, right?
Like, he posted a lot of videos back in the day, and they served as a vector for recruitment for ISIS in the Middle East, in Syria in particular.
So how would you counter that?
I mean, don't you have a responsibility to, you know, prevent people from joining terrorist groups?
Well, I think that the U.S. has laws against this.
And there's a thing I'm going to say is every company has to apply its own laws with respect to
comply with international laws, including those here in the United States.
Glorifying or inciting violence is not included in my expression of an opinion.
But the expression of an opinion is the essence of what the First Amendment protects.
And so I do not believe that.
If you're going to call yourself a free speech platform, I don't believe that you're violating any obligation other than sticking to your state admission.
It's okay.
Twitter doesn't have to be a free speech platform.
Twitter can just be like every other company in Silicon Valley.
Twitter can be whatever it wants to be, right?
Elon Musk owns the majority of Twitter.
It can be whatever he wants it to be.
But I think that it is reasonable for consumers and users in making a value judgment to say that,
If you're going to censor
viewpoints, or if your view is
the 80% of views in the middle
are the ones that are actually going to be
platformed, not the 10%
on either extreme.
And I'm using basically Elon's words here.
That's perfectly his right to do, but I think
that that's not a
free speech platform it's a middle platform and then what does middle mean
well that's exactly a value judgment in a political judgment that
whoever the proprietor of that platform is gets to make
but that's not the same thing as operating a free speech platform and I think that
free speech is a really high standard so I'm not saying that somebody
as a private enterprise has to hold themselves to that standard our country does
our government does by the way we have a First Amendment that's what I care about is
running the country
The government is absolutely intervening in ways that the government itself is not actually holding itself to the high standards we set forth in our Bill of Rights.
A company doesn't have to tether itself to that standard, but if it's not, then it's not a free speech platform.
That's what I say.
So Vivek, I want to go to China in a bit.
I've got a question about the Hunter Biden laptop, but before that, Jen, I'll give you the mic because I know you were with Vivek earlier today.
Yeah, thanks so much. And this is actually a perfect segue. So Vivek, I completely agree with everything that you're saying. And I think that the lines have really been blurred in people's understanding of the First Amendment as applied to government actors versus the First Amendment as
applied or not applied really, to private corporations and what they're allowed to do.
So in this sense, because you are running for president, I mean, it's no secret that the one
really big disagreement that I have with Governor Ron DeSantis, who is now running for president,
is his treatment of the Walt Disney Company, because while I absolutely disagree with their
statement opposing the parental rights and education bill,
I don't see his action retaliating against them from making that statement as constitutionally acceptable.
And I'm wondering what your position is on that.
So I actually think that this represents a deeper disagreement that I have with Ron DeSantis on the philosophy of free speech. I think that's okay. I think that we're allowed to disagree on these things. I think that that's something that we're actually able to do. But he also signed earlier this year a hate speech bill, a bill that actually signed this while he was in Israel to effectively prohibit people from...
engaging in heinous speech.
It was a bill that bans a form of hate speech
in the state of Florida.
So I think that he and I have different views
And part of we live in a country is we get to debate this stuff.
We'll debate it on the Republican Party's debate stage.
That's great.
David, I can ask you something on that?
Because as part of that bill, which two questions, I mean, is it normal?
I mean, do you think it's appropriate for someone to sign a bill in a foreign nation?
And the second question is, it wasn't just hate speech, was it?
Because if I understand it, right, he also was signing that.
boycotting the BD so basically being part of the BDS movement which is essentially boycotting
products from Israel that was that would also fall under the purview of that bill so what's your
thoughts on both well I'm against I mean I also want to know about his name yeah I'm I'm dead set against
the BDS movement so there's many parts of a bill one can agree with and disagree with but the parts
that I disagree we're having a discussion about free speeches I think that hate speech is not a category
under the law, if you believe in free speech.
And in our country, we have a First Amendment that protects all forms of speech.
And so, Jen, I think I agree with you that political retaliation on speech against in any given direction, no matter how objectionable the speech is not the American way, I believe that the right answer to bad speech is more speech, not less speech.
speech. And so I think that there is a philosophical difference on the right, and I think it's good that we smoke this out where some conservatives believe that we should use tools of, you know, call it censorship, call it speech suppression, to make sure the right kinds of ideas are advanced.
I understand where they're coming from, given the state of our culture, but I disagree with it.
I think the right answer is, I'm a free speech absolutist.
That's the value that actually makes us who we are as Americans.
And that's what I'll stand by on apologetically at the governmental level.
And at the level of a company, you get to decide what kind of company you want to be, but advertise yourself and hold yourself out to the public.
as the company that you actually are,
that's the standard that I would apply there.
So, Vivek, I do want to focus on China
because for me, this is a much bigger issue
than the hiccups we're seeing
as Twitter moves to more free speech.
and even the Biden laptop.
So I've got a question for you on the Biden laptop.
How big of an issue is this?
We saw a big leak come out today based on the material.
Some of it is just Hunter Biden living is life,
doing things that many of us don't like and wouldn't do.
But then other parts of the leak includes images of him with underage girls.
I'm not sure how much you know about this.
How big of a problem is this and how much should it reflect on our current president?
So listen, I think that...
It's not only that it reflects on the current president, this was actually the form of election interference that actually mattered in the last presidential election.
Okay.
This was the form of election interference that if you look at the actual hard data would have shifted based on extensive polling people's opinions had they known beforehand.
And this is one of the risks of threats to free speech.
So the big risk here is that when social media companies, including Twitter, systematically suppressed users from being able to share the Hunter Biden laptop story, as reported by the New York Post, the fourth largest paper in circulation in America, founded by Alexander Hamilton.
They suppressed that story and locked their account.
That, I think there's a reasonable case to be made significantly impacted the outcome of the presidential election.
And I think that.
I don't think that many people would dispute that.
I mean, you look at the hard data and the number of people, it's math, that said they would have changed their mind had they had access to that information.
That's why I think this is a big deal, is that it was probably one of the most, probably in American history, the single greatest form of.
of private election interference in an election.
It's the biggest constructive in-kind campaign contribution ever made
was, you know, you could write a billion-dollar check,
and you wouldn't have influenced the election more
than by suppressing the most damning piece of information
against one of the two presidential candidates
in the late stages of that race.
Yet that's what large technology companies did up and down Silicon Valley.
And now, a couple years later, the New York Times and others,
you know, meekly come around to admitting that reality that it was absolutely true, was not
Russian disinformation as it was dismissed. In fact, the disinformation was the idea that it was disinformation.
This was hard truth. Now, I think there's a second point, which is, I think it shows the ways in which
the foreign relationships of Biden and his family leave a president in office who's compromised
Frankly, one of the things I worry about is leaders of many institutions in the United States, from universities to companies to free speech advocates to the president of the United States are all compromised by...
China and their relationships therein. That's, I think, a deeper and bigger issue that we ought to talk, you know, talk about not playing small ball, start playing big ball here and actually talk about the big threats to the practical future within our own lifetime. I think China's ways of actually intervening with not only people who lead our biggest companies, but today the people who sit in the White House, that's deeply concerning and that too is part of this.
broader Biden foreign relationship story.
But as it relates narrowly to the Hunter Biden laptop, the thing that bothers me most is
it is the single most effective.
And I say this in a bad way, effective form of private election interference probably
in the history of our country, certainly the modern history of our country.
And I think that if we don't learn from our mistakes, we're going to be at risk of making
them over and over again.
You know, this is like small potatoes.
But frankly, I was censored by LinkedIn last week.
LinkedIn locked my account.
I'm a U.S. presidential candidate for making statements about climate change and about the fact that fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.
LinkedIn, multiple emails, went back and forth, already beginning to censor that speech.
And so, you know, that's not something that...
I'm not making a big deal out of that.
We publicized it.
They were embarrassed into actually having to correct it
and tried to mischaracterized it in retrospect
by calling it.
They called it an error.
It wasn't an error.
There was an employee there who was literally sitting
and replying to my team extensively,
pointing out which statements they found objectionable.
But the fact of the matter is we haven't learned
from those mistakes because we've tried to sweep them
under the rug.
And the most egregious example of it
in a way that probably had significant influence on the election
was the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Sunnih?
So Vivek, I've watched your Twitter video, which was for six minutes.
Some of the things you mentioned which concerned you was China cozing up with conservatives,
people becoming pawns for the CCP.
But just for those who haven't watched that six minute Twitter clip,
if you can just summarize your main points of contention in terms of for...
in terms of people's connection to the CCP, the conservative connection to CCP, and Elon's connection to China and CCP.
Yeah, so listen, here's how the CCP plays its game.
And I'm not actually even blaming the individual business leaders here in the United States.
I'm just describing a fact of how it works.
The CCP says you do not get to access the Chinese market unless you meet certain demands of the CCP.
And so what they do is if you criticize China or if you apply an emissions cap in China or you do, frankly, anything China doesn't lock, you don't get to enter the Chinese market.
If you at the same time are criticizing the United States or constraining the U.S. in some way, you get bonus points.
That's how you get to enter the Chinese market.
So this has been going on for a long time.
A lot of people don't know this, but well reported the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere a couple of years ago.
Airbnb regularly hands over private user data of American users, including where they're staying,
the private messages they send to one another.
That is a ticket for Airbnb to be able to do business in China.
Airbnb's co-founder, Nate Blacharachik, I think it was a couple of years ahead of me in college.
He's one of the co-founders.
He's quoted as saying, we're not here to advance American interests.
And that's a fair statement.
I think he was speaking truth.
It was in private, but he was quoted as such.
Think about Nike, criticize...
systemic racism here in the United States without saying a peep about actual slavery in the present day in China, while John Donahoe, the CEO of Nike, says we're a brand of China for China when he's in China.
Larry Fink does a lot of lobbying, did a lot of lobbying for lower listing standards of Chinese
companies here in the United States on stock exchanges.
Shortly after that, he gets an adder boy on the back from the CCP when they became
the first asset manager that gets to sell mutual funds as a foreign owner of mutual fund managers
in China.
So this is a repeated pattern.
And I think we're now seeing it.
Elon is not an exception.
But I think that the irony, in Elon's case, what does he do?
He went.
earlier this week to China, calls the U.S. and China conjoined twins, tells them that he opposes the United States and China decoupling.
They have their statement. The Chinese foreign ministry, minister puts that out.
Tesla's VP posts it in China, but notably not in the United States.
So what does that say?
It says there's different game playing on different sides of the Pacific about what you tell who.
And this is about seven months after he came out gratuitously in favor of saying that Taiwan should peacefully annex itself.
to China. So I think that this is just part of a repeated pattern where, I mean, China, you know, Taiwan being a part of the, of China. I mean, this is. That's absolutely not the American policy. It's a one China policy. I mean, you guys, you know, America, United States government recognizes that, right? For all the United States government has.
The United States government has said we would go to war if China invaded Taiwan or blockaded it.
So I think that that's an inaccurate description, but we have used the description the name one China policy as a way, which I think is a mistake, by the way.
But nonetheless, the point is if there's business leaders, I give about five examples, the big problem is that the CCP is using U.S. business leaders as pawns.
to advance their agendas by doing their geopolitical bidding
by using market access as a carrot in a way that undermines the United States.
And so I'm not blaming those business leaders.
They're doing what business is.
Guys, guys, guys, we'll go to, I think Jackson, but just let's focus on China.
And Vivek, what should the U.S. do then?
What would you do?
Because if you're going to be a capitalistic economy, you know, this is the choice of those businesses.
Unless you start cracking down on Chinese businesses and Chinese businessmen.
You're muted, by the way, Vivek.
You've got to unmute again.
I'll go next.
So that's right.
That's right.
And so...
Here's what I would say is business leaders are going to do what business leaders do.
Whatever allows them to make the most money.
That's not a negative judgment or a positive judgment.
It's just a fact.
So the job of the United States in protecting U.S. interests is to say that
We'll trade and allow for free trade with anybody who's playing according to the rules of the economy.
But if there's a government actor on the other side that's deputizing our own companies using incentives to accomplish their non-economic goals, then the U.S. has to actually protect our national security interests accordingly.
For example, there are Chinese laws that say that those U.S. companies, like Zoom, for example, can't even disclose in the United States the kinds of things that they're actually required to do in China.
That's not capitalism. That is mercantilism. That's a name. There's a name for that model. It's not capitalism. It is mercantilism. In this case, Chinese mercantilism. What does that mean? That's why I've said as U.S. president, I would ban U.S. companies...
from doing business in China unless and until the CCP radically reforms those practices.
And you know what's going to happen?
That's a lot harder on China than it is on the United States.
And that will be, I believe, the basis for the CCP to fold.
To say no more intellectual property theft, data theft, using companies as pawns, using
conditions to advance geopolitical ends.
But that's going to be the standard that I apply as U.S. president is that we're not going
to let a geopolitical actor turn our own companies into Trojan horses that undermine the
United States from within.
That's not the job of a business leader to do.
It's a good.
It's the job of a U.S. President.
Hold on, Jackson, Jackson, guys, guys, Jackson, go ahead.
Yeah, I have two quick questions.
The first one is you just said that the one China policy is a phrase that I think you said you don't like.
Do you know what the one China policy is and what it specifically says about Beijing governance?
Yes, it recognizes that the U.S. does not officially...
recognize Taiwan as a separate nation from China.
It absolutely recognizes that
There is a position of strategic ambiguity.
That's exactly the grounding.
And the way it's been described for decades in the United States is a position of strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan.
But you have leaders in both political parties, including each of the last two presidents, that said that we would militarily defend Taiwan from being physically annexed.
So I know that this is an issue we could spend a lot of time on.
I'm happy to. Taiwan policy is really important to me. But what I'm talking about right now, for the moment, just to keep the discussion focused and we can go to Taiwan after that, is how China and the Chinese government specifically, the CCP, is using economic incentives to cause companies to behave in ways that expressly undermine American interests.
in a way that is not part of the model of global free market capitalism,
but a model of state-directed market.
Guys, guys, if everyone wants to ask questions, if everyone jumps in,
it's going to be very difficult to ask for that questions.
Jackson, he said a follow-up question, and then we'll go back to Sleiman and then other speakers.
All source.
Go ahead, Jackson.
Yeah, my follow-up question, it is directly related to the economic question that you brought up to Vec.
My question is, well, first of all, I mean, the United States prevents a lot of countries from doing business with us or receiving financial aid from us if they don't agree with our gender policies or LGBT policies or whatever.
But I'm sure you probably wouldn't agree with that.
But my question for you is, how does banning corporations from doing business with China coincide with free market ideology or even help U.S. businesses?
Because George Soros says that.
China is the number one threat to open societies.
I know you are a Soros fellow for the New America,
so I'm just curious about all those links in that question.
Yeah, I mean, I can address the latter parts to that any time you want to,
but from a biographical perspective.
I want to talk to you about the substance of it.
I don't think that China is participating in a system of global capitalism.
So capitalism is a system in which private parties are free to pursue whatever is in their economic interest with state interference to the minimum only there to protect private property rights.
That's not what exists in China.
China is behaving differently because they're expressly preventing companies from entering the Chinese market unless and until they meet non-economic political demands of the CCP.
So part of what we're doing is we're operating under an illusion that what we're actually engaged in is free market capitalism from China, because that's the narrative we've fed ourselves over the last 50 years, when China actually viewed that as a way of undermining the U.S. from within, turning those companies into Trojan horses in ways that China could have never accomplished directly using Greece and Troy in the Trojan War.
Greece never believed that it was going to defeat Troy militarily.
So they gave Troy the gift that they knew Troy could not resist, the Trojan oars.
They used that to burn Troy down from within.
Well, America, China views and Xi Jinping views,
our description of what we think of as capitalism as the gift we can't resist.
But what do they do?
They say Airbnb, you can't enter the Chinese market unless you're actually handing over the user data of individual Americans.
By the way, which Airbnb had not told individual Americans at the time that they brokered a separate deal to enter the Chinese market.
They told BlackRock, effectively, you can't enter the Chinese market unless you lobby for different standards for Chinese companies to list in the United States, which Larry think dutifully did.
Only after that, certainly on the facts of it, the sequence of events was it was only after that China granted them the license to sell those mutual funds in China.
Even Elon Musk, it was days after, literally, days after...
Elon Musk tweeted and commented about Taiwan peacefully annexing with China that they got a special tax exemption in Shanghai.
Again, a nice little adderoy on the back.
And so I think it is at least an interesting irony, wherever you are in the debate about policy.
It's interesting that the world's biggest self-professed champion of free speech is pissing the ring and bowing at the feet of the world's biggest censor of speech.
It's just an interesting phenomenon to observe and ask what's going on there.
And part of what's going on there is a government that is tilting the scales of those incentives.
Vivek, how does is it any different than what the United States does with ESG?
How is it any different?
Yeah.
Well, actually, it's part of one of the reasons I'm a big opponent of ESG in the United States. I think the United States does not, we do not live up to our best ideals. And so I'm right there with you in terms of the way in which state actors in the U.S., from CalPERS to the state of New York, to even the Biden administration, is using private companies to do through the backdoor what government couldn't get done through the front door. And so you're not going to find a bigger approach.
opponent who's written multiple books on this very topic and started a company that
competes against BlackRock with a firm that raised over half a billion in the first three
months and is rapidly growing from there.
That's why I've spent the last three years of my life the way that I have because I disagree with that approach here in the United States and I'm severely critical of it.
We fall short of our ideals.
So I share your skating.
That's for your band.
So Vivek.
One second.
Yeah.
No, I have a quick.
So Vivek.
I have a real quick one to Lleman, sir.
One, no, no, no, we're Ian Lemp and Schneider.
It was Vivek.
One of the main points that you're making or the argument that you're making is that you have concerns that essentially American companies or American businesses, including Elon Musk, are doing business in China.
And part of doing business in China is that you have to kow to their principles, ideals and whatever they want you give examples of user data.
Now,
The issue is that you were the CEO of Royven as well as, and apologies for I'm pronouncing it wrong,
and you were also the chairman up until you just resigned just before your presidential election.
It is a subsidiary of Saitovant, and Saitovant was backed by the C-I-C-I-C-E.
who are the equity arm of the CCP and liver health also backed them, which is,
which is, again, backed by the Ministry of Affairs in China.
So haven't you done the exact same thing that you're complaining about?
Yeah, so one of the things, I'll say two things.
I said this at the very beginning all the way through.
In this discussion, I'm not blaming the business leaders.
I'm blaming the U.S. for creating a regime that allows U.S. companies to be deputized as pawns.
I will tell you this, though.
I've learned from my experiences.
Part of where I come from, this is not vacuum.
I'm not making these opinions up in a vacuum, right?
I've been an exchange student.
Two of my semesters, actually spring semesters in my years at Harvard, I was an exchange student.
One of them was for a couple weeks at Bay Da, which was the top Chinese university, the Harvard of China.
I've done business in China.
You're right.
Now, when I started Strive, which was the asset management firm that most recent company that I started, it is my informed perspective that led me to say that, you know what?
I made a commitment on day one that no major U.S. asset manager has made, which is to say that we would not.
open an arm of strive in China because I don't think you can be a good fiduciary to U.S. clients
if you have the boot of the CCP on your neck.
And so my view is, though, I'm not blaming individual business leaders, although some of them,
I think, aren't good fiduciaries to their U.S. clients because they're dancing to the tune
of the CCP.
I'm blaming the U.S. government, because this is a job of the U.S. government
to look after the national security interests here in the United States.
And so Vivek, do you not have the boot of the CCP on your neck through CIT, I-C-C-E and liver health?
And so essentially, like you said that people have to counter, how do we know that based on your own argument that you're not basically subservient China based on your previous dealings?
Everyone should be asking this question. Absolutely. So one of the things I did quietly over my time of CEO, you'll actually look at this is exited, quietly exited. I mean, the political environment in China and these practices in China are very recent. And they've gotten far worse in the last several years. Xi Jinping has taken a dark turn. You could see where the writing was going. So actually exited and, you know, actually there's no remaining businesses of as,
as of the time that I departed as CEO,
but it's also part of when I started my most recent business,
why I said I don't want the boot to the CCP on my neck.
So has the CCP any interest over me?
Absolutely not, and that's actually why I'm one of their biggest critics.
Unfortunately, can't even personally go to China
because of the nature of my public criticisms of the CCP.
What disappoints me is seeing, and I've lifted the curtain on this,
I understand the position that the Jamie Diamonds and the Elon Musk's and the Larry Finks are in.
What disappoints me as an American is seeing the way in which some of the loudest mouth voices
that'll opine about any other topic here at home with a loud mouth won't say a peep about the actual puppet master who they ultimately cater to,
who is China that builds a great Chinese wall, says you can't enter the Chinese market,
unless you actually please the CCP.
And I think that's dangerous.
And I think that's-
In effect, you know, creating a, you know, a more divided world, a more polarized world.
I mean, we've seen what happened when the United States and the European Union tried to isolate Russia.
What happened was much of the world, the developing world or the global south...
teamed up with Russia and said, you know, we'll buy your oil. And China is a much larger economy than the Russian one.
I mean, wouldn't you be in effect empowering China? Because, I mean, all the sanctions against Russia have done is empower Russia.
So you're proposing basically a sanction on taking Chinese money or doing business with China.
Wouldn't you in effect be empowering them by doing this?
So now you're getting into a pretty interesting place.
Actually, one of the North stars of my foreign policy vision is U.S. President, and you haven't heard this from any of the other candidates, because we got to get into the specifics, is we actually have to disband. I think what I would do is I'm going to give you speech tomorrow night in New Hampshire laying this vision out exactly, but I'll preview it with you guys.
is that we should end the Ukraine war by actually committing to Russia.
You get the Korean War-style agreement, freeze the current lines of control, not another
dollar of support to Ukraine, and actually remove the economic sanctions against Russia
in return for getting Russia to exit its...
alliance, it's in a treaty of mutual military support with China. So I think it's a bad fact.
You're right. The United States has made bad decisions vis-a-vis China, vis-vis Russia, that is driving Russia into China's hands.
And that's, I think, bad news for the United States. I think the Sino-Russian alliance is the single greatest military threat the United States has faced in modern history.
I think that there's an opportunity to end the Ukraine war in a way that the condition that we get back out of Russia is they exit that military partnership with China.
That's actually what I think we need to do by our way in the U.S.
That's a great idea.
But there's an issue.
Sorry, one second.
Sorry.
Vivek, just to clarify it based on the questions I asked, have you got any financial relationship with China and do you have any forms of financial interest related to the CCP?
You're muted, Vivek.
On mute, your bottom-off.
Sorry, none that I know of is the answer.
All my assets have been independently managed for a little while,
so I don't even look at what I own precisely because I think if you're running for
president, you've got to be thinking about the actual country without looking at one separate
eye at your own, at your own pocketbook.
I think Biden is a good embodiment of some of the risks that you create.
But my view is.
But based on your answer.
Yeah, yeah, but based on, oh, it's definitely not because if you're saying that you've not
looked.
I mean.
I mean, shouldn't that be the first thing you check if one of your main arguments is that we need to have no financial links with China?
No, I think, I think...
My view is that...
Yeah, go ahead, perfect.
Yeah, I have no financial links with China to the extent that I know and they're independently managed assets.
It's exactly what I think every presidential candidate should do is they shouldn't actually be managing or their own portfolios while they're also running the country or let alone even running to run the country.
And so I believe in practicing what I preach.
And my point is...
There's a reason, and again, part of the reason why I'm one of the only people who's been as critical of China openly, despite being a business leader in the United States.
And even despite being a presidential candidate, there's a reason why you don't hear the level of open criticism of the CCP that otherwise people would behind closed doors to agree if it weren't for the fact.
that their financial interests say that you need to behave well with the CCP to enter the Chinese market.
My position, Sully, my position on this is that, you know, Vivek having business in China,
and even if you did Vivek, you could still hold that same stance, but the stance has to apply to all
businesses. Because if one business pulls out of China for whatever ethical or whatever values they hold,
then it just gives the advantage to competitors.
Although I do have concerns with the global ramifications.
I agree with you on that.
I agree with.
Yeah.
So I kind of,
you know,
kind of backdrop a bit here,
but I do disagree with the strategy of,
you know,
kind of sanctioning China,
the global economic ramifications.
Yeah.
of doing this could outweigh
can't we be can't we do something somewhere in the middle
and the Slaman I'll go back to you with the hard questions
but can't we go somewhere in the middle
where you just make it harder for Chinese businesses
to operate in in Europe or the US
rather than just completely disallow US businesses
from operating in China
I would go in both directions.
I do think that I'm in favor of a ban on CCP affiliates buying land in the United States, making donations to universities in the United States, a lot of which come with strings attached to.
So that's a separate point and a good point.
But part of the point I'm making is that when U.S. businesses...
have to hand over, for example, American user data to the CCP as a condition for doing business in China.
And then when China often passes laws that say even describing that requirement here in the United States is itself a violation of Chinese losses.
They can't even talk about it.
I think the right answer is I would ban all U.S. businesses from expanding into the Chinese market unless and until the CCP abandons those behaviors.
And so I think if we're willing to take that hard stand, China is in a weaker economic spot than we are in many ways.
I think that's exactly how you bring China to the table to ultimately fold on the other practices that they've otherwise been getting away with.
But I do not think that taking a soft approach is going to get the CCP to behave any differently than they have.
I think we have to be willing to make some short run sacrifice.
Now, as a side note, I think this includes the United States doing better trade deals with Japan, South Korea, India, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia, Brazil.
This makes it actually far more achievable for the United States to accomplish what I'm saying, declaring independence if necessary from China.
while still making sure that American consumers and the American economy is minimally harmed,
minimize any harm, if any at all. I think that we can actually make that, and we've studied
the supply chains, if you're willing to use the full gamut of other countries that can fill the gap,
this actually becomes far more practical and far more achievable. But we have to be willing to
stand with the spine and say we're,
actually willing to do it or else China has no incentive to actually make those concessions.
And so my prediction is that the CCP will have to radically reform if we're actually
holding that line. But in order to do it, we have to be willing to actually pull that trigger.
And so I want to first of all, thank you for coming on because you are getting tough questions.
Like none of these are easy softballs.
It's not scripted and you're not got like your fans coming up asking you questions as per
recent presidential announcements.
I've got a pretty hard one for it.
But anyway, Vivek, I have fun with this, though.
I mean, he's had quite a few tough ones.
Vivek.
Oh, I know, I know.
Yeah, Vivek, last time you came on,
one of the things that you wanted was closer relationships
between India and the United States.
Yeah.
Now, in the UK, the reports have come out from Times of India, as well as the Daily Mail,
where the BJP have infiltrated the local elections, taken four-year-A seats.
I'm also working on a paper where Sunak has links to Modi.
So, I mean, is this another point of concern that maybe you are trying to bring, I mean, is, so...
I mean, should Americans be concerned that something similar may be happening in the United States?
Have you got any links to the Indian government?
And is that some kind of perspective on why you want closer relations?
I have no relationship to India other than my last name and the fact that my parents immigrated from there.
So I would expect that it's a natural question.
I'm going to get through this.
The narrow context in the last conversation where I actually suggested this wasn't the context of Taiwan.
This is actually a deeply underappreciated fact that
It's the Indian Ocean through which energy supplies from the Middle East reach China.
And so one of the underappreciated levers is actually the role of India itself.
And here's a direction that I don't want to see India go.
I mean, India has its own conflicts with China.
It would be a shame for the United States.
If India did a deal with China that stopped India from getting involved in a potential conflict situation, by the way, I want to avoid that conflict situation at all costs.
It's why I actually want to dissolve the Russian China alliance and the Russia-China Treaty because I think it will further deter China for going after Taiwan militarily.
So my top objective is avoiding war there.
How would you guarantee things to, you know, countries like Russia, which are neighboring China and any other country that's bordering it, right?
I mean, how would you β like American foreign policy has been dictated by these two, four, six-year terms, you know, based on whoever's in office.
How would you make these guarantees to Russia that β
you know, that America will hold up its end of the bargain. And furthermore, right, this is the second
part of the question. How do you prevent China from turning into, you know, Imperial Japan prior to
World War II, where they were economically isolated or put in the same position that you intend
to put China in? Wouldn't this make them extremely militaristic and force them to basically
go to war in order to get their resources that they need? I mean, isn't this just destabilizing
the world even further?
You're asking great questions. So I understand the points of view. Let me say the first thing, first with respect to prevention of war and what you're going to see with respect to Russia's expectations. So you're right. I think we've given Russia a little reason to necessarily trust us there. But I think a permanent written commitment, including from NATO itself, to say that Ukraine would not become part of NATO,
and also actually pulling out all other forms of aid to Ukraine,
I think it's a big concession to Russia, freezing the current lines of control,
giving Russia the Donbass region,
agreeing that internationally that will be recognized as part of Russia.
Those are giant concessions.
And then the other thing you do with Russia is get rid of the economic sanctions regime.
Restore a normal economic sanctions regime.
How do they know that?
We're buying stuff from Russia again.
The West is buying stuff from Russia.
So that's how they know is they're experiencing it.
Russia then has less of a reason to depend on China.
And.
And we move from the bilateral international order right now, functionally what it is.
Let's call it what it is between the U.S. and China back to a trilateral international order.
Now, talking about the case of war, China's bet, are they going to be behaving like a wounded bear?
That's kind of your question.
China right now, its best chance of going for Taiwan is its bet that the U.S. will not engage militarily?
because the U.S. would not want to go to war with two different nuclear superpowers at once.
And the 2001 treaty and the 2022 addition to that treaty basically commit Russia and China to each go to each other's back if either is in a military conflict with the U.S.
So if we unwind that alliance, that actually reduces China's position of confidence or strength to be able to go for Taiwan.
And one of my top, if not my top, national security and foreign policy objective would be to deter Chinese aggression vis-a-vis Taiwan without taking the U.S. to war.
So this is a critical element of making that happen.
I think the U.S. has behaved, I think, in regrettable ways with respect to Ukraine, sending over $200 billion, nearly $200 billion, I should say, an actual total aid, including military aid to Ukraine, has not been helpful.
I think that is tending us in the wrong direction.
It is driving Russia further into China's arms.
And so as the next president, if I'm successfully elected, you're right.
That will make my job even more difficult than it otherwise would have been because of the most recent Biden administration.
I think that also raises the bar for diplomacy that's going to be required in order to achieve the foreign policy vision that I'm laying out here.
But those are you're suggesting that Russia and China, I just want to make sure I understand your point, that Russia and China have a mutual defense pact.
Is that what you're saying in the streets?
Because that is not even remotely close to what any treaty, Russian China,
they have no mutual defense pact whatsoever.
And I just have to respectfully push back this idea.
The fact is wrong, but continue to finish with what you're saying.
I can describe the treaties to you if you're interested.
Yeah.
have a military alliance similar to NATO in this space.
Russia, China have a military alliance...
first codified in the 2001 treaty of good neighborliness and friendly cooperation.
And where in that treaty is a specified mutual defense of military aid in case of conflict
specifically of that treaty, where it specifies the defense of one another and attack.
And then the second and then the second codification of that was what was referred to as the no limits partnership that Putin entered with Xi Jinping in 2022.
So much so that prior to 9-11, this was actually a top objective and concern of the U.S. administration was the entry into that 2001 treaty until our attention actually shifted to the Middle East following the 9-11.
Does it say they have a mutual defense pact?
The functional way that that treaty operates is that, look, I think there is no doubt.
I don't think that you're going to actually find it's not a popularly discussed topic, but I think the consensus perspective on people on both sides of the Ukraine war is absolutely that if China is attacked militarily, Russia comes to China's aid.
It is no accident that is when we began arming Ukraine that China started to aid Russia militarily.
So we got to be grounded in what the actual hard facts are.
But then we have to look at what are our objectives.
And I think the closer the relationship between Russia and China, the worse off for the United States.
And I think the silver lining in the otherwise disastrous situation we've mired ourselves in in Ukraine, the silver lining is I think we can use that as a catalyst.
to further drive space, daylight, in the relationship between Russia and China.
And I think that will be good for long run U.S. security interests and will actually serve to further deter China from going after Taiwan.
It's not a guarantee.
But it is one of many pillars of a strategy that prevents the U.S. from entering war while still deterring Chinese aggression, which I think has to be the top.
foreign policy objective of the next year.
Viveka,
hold on,
Sully,
Jackson before,
yeah,
Jackson,
because Gabe hasn't asked
any questions yet,
if you don't mind.
But before that,
I do want to read out one thing.
You could agree
or disagree with what Rebecca saying.
I just want to read out a comment
from an audience member
who's a regular panelist as well.
He's actually more liberal.
He says the following.
Damn, this is the first time I've heard Vivek talk at length.
Good speaker.
And I hope this encourages other candidates to also speak freely without pre-vetted questions
and a pre-vetted panel.
And we've had some congressmen come on, you know, do the same thing as Vivek.
So give them credit as well.
Gabe and Jackson, final quick questions before Sully wraps it up, Gabe.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah. I had a, it's kind of a two-part question. The first one is there's been some speculation about your motivations to run for president. Is there a special interest group or an individual that is paying you to run for president?
No. It's kind of a laughable question. But, hey, I'll take all questions seriously. If you're asking to run for U.S. President, can't handle the heat. You stay out of the kitchen. So, you know, I mean, you run for presidents. It's what's eye-opening to me is the funny imaginations that people will have. I'll tell you what my story is, is I didn't grow up in money.
We did succeed, though, through the system of free market capitalism.
I've put in eight figures of our own family's money into this campaign precisely because I cannot stand to be someone's puppet, ring a tin can, take a hat in hand, ask a bunch of donors for permission to run.
I mean, with due respect, I think that it's interesting that...
We're talking about Ukraine, right?
Ron DeSan has changed his position three times over on Ukraine, largely because after he told Tucker, one thing, the donors got mad at him, forced him to say another thing.
It's not his fault.
It's just the way the system works is that you're supposed to jump to what the donor's class expects.
And you're right.
If you do accept and you are being put up, Larry Ellison, or you know, you could think about the different people who have their own little puppets in the race.
Yes, those come with strings attached.
And I believe part of the reason I stepped aside from my job as the CEO of the first company I found it.
I wanted to be free to speak my mind unapologetically, unconstrained, and I would rather lose
this election and speak my mind at every step of the way than to somehow win by playing some
political snakes and ladders. I'm in New Hampshire right now. The events I'm doing here suggest
that might actually be a good winning strategy. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. But that's the
way I'm doing it. And our family is making the...
The financial sacrifice is the least of it, but the financial sacrifices included to actually make sure that we're actually free rather than constrained by the handcuffs of somebody else's money that has, frankly, I would say, disappointing expectations attached to it.
And that's what you see from the professional politician class.
And bottom line is refused to play that game.
I've got one more question about Taiwan.
So I value the fact that Trump prioritized diplomacy and win-win cooperation with China.
You say you want to avoid war with China over Taiwan.
Yet in the past, you've made statements like Taiwan were coming for you.
The NRA can open up its next branch in Taiwan, put a gun in every Taiwanese household,
have them defend themselves.
Let's see what Xi does then.
Given the fact that the United States has U.S. troops training Taiwanese separatists in Taiwan.
We've been supplying them with javelins and your comments such as this and your whole policy of decoupling.
How is any of that de-escalatory with China?
I think that it's a philosophy of whether or not you think you're going to get the result you want to by being weak
or whether you're actually going to get to peace by being strong.
And it is my view. It is my top objective.
of doing whatever we can that minimizes the risk of war while still deterring China from going for
Taiwan for at least as long as we'd lack semiconductor independence in the United States.
And by the way, that might make a lot of people on the pro-Taiwan camp mad that I added that
addendum. But I'm looking at this exclusively through American interests.
The reason Taiwan matters in a way that Ukraine doesn't is that they're responsible for supplying the advanced semiconductor chips that power our modern way of life in the United States.
I think it is regrettable that we ever got to a place that our entire economy depends on a tiny island nation off the southeast coast of China, but we are where we are.
And so my view is at least until the United States achieves full semiconductor independence.
And I think that's not happening tomorrow, but hopefully it can happen in a matter of a few years at earliest.
Until then, it's very important that Taiwan stay independent rather than giving China full economic leverage and more than economic leverage over the United States.
That's why I'm thinking it's differently. I'm an outsider. I'm not a professional politician.
So a lot of these ideas are different and outside the box ideas.
One of them is driving a wedge in the Sino-Russian alliance.
Another of them, I believe part of American exceptionalism is exporting some of our greatest inventions, including, for example, why do we have a Second Amendment in this country?
It was to deter monarchy, keep monarchy, British monarchy at bay.
So what I said is, I'm not talking about going to war with China.
I said, just like we have a Second Amendment here.
And actually the NRA trained Americans, including black Americans after the Civil War.
This is something that really made Don Lemon mad when I pointed out that fact of history to him.
But this is a big part of how Americans secured their freedoms.
Taiwan, you could do the same thing.
Put a gun in every household.
Actually, other milk folks.
folks in the military and who are knowledgeable about having studied the history of this, describe it back to me.
They said, actually, it's similar to what they describe as the porcupine strategy for Taiwan.
I like that analogy.
But take a portfolio of approaches while also securing semiconductor independence for the United States.
And the more semiconductor independent the United States is, the less of an incentive China has to actually militarily annex Taiwan.
My top objective is to deter Chinese aggression while avoiding all probability of going to war.
And I think the biggest probability of going to war is if China actually does invade Taiwan, holds our modern way of life hostage, that's actually what would necessarily draw the United States into a prolonged military conflict that's going to be good for no one.
I think the way we need to do it is instead be strong by getting in the way of that China-Sino-Russian alliance,
by preparing Taiwan to defend itself such that the United States doesn't have to actually enter that conflict.
And in a way that deters Chinese aggression, I don't think by being weak or conciliatory is actually going to do it.
I think that's going to achieve the opposite result.
And that's why I have that you mentioned.
Guys, guys, guys, guys.
Yeah, I want to give Joe a last question and so you can wrap it up.
Joe, a final question for Vivek because he's gone way over time.
Yep.
And I've got to go at 10.
I've got to go at the bottom of the hour.
So two minutes.
So, yeah, Joe, go ahead.
Vivek, thanks for your time.
You said something earlier about people doing business in China
and how they kind of fall under the boot of China.
Trump famously tried to get patents for almost a decade,
and then after dinner with Xi Jinping, he was given the patents finally,
and he does business in China.
Are you suggesting that your opponent could be under the boot of China?
Look, I think that I don't have the facts on what you just described, but my view is anyone who's prominent in the United States...
that wants to do business in China in a major way has to dance to the tune of the CCP.
That's just a fact.
It's well known.
There are things you can say, things you can't say.
And again, I don't blame individual business leaders.
I've said that several times during this discussion.
So I know some of the people who I named may find, you know, take offense to what I said.
It's not even their fault.
It's the fault of the U.S.
And that's why I agreed with Mario's comment earlier.
It's got to be everyone marching to the same beat.
And so if you're the U.S. president, your job is to look after the interests of the United States as a whole.
And that's why I would take as somebody who supports free market capitalism, nonetheless to recognize that if China's turning that into mercantilism, we have to be willing to cut that tie unless and until the CCP reforms those behaviors.
So I'm in favor of that ban.
I think that any business leader who's, you know, from even Elon Musk to Larry Fink.
I'm not criticizing them individually because that's what their business interests call for them to do.
What I'm calling out is the reality that they're Xi Jinping's circus monkeys.
He says jump.
They say how high.
And it's the job of the U.S. to actually protect ourselves against that reality.
So, Vevac, I've got to.
Guys, we do with TJ.
We do.
TJ, he has to jump off in two minutes, unfortunately.
But Vivek, I appreciate it coming on on on.
with unscripted questions from a pretty tough panel
that we organize intentionally, no hard feelings.
but surely I'll give you the final quick word man but I'd like to see your criticism of
Trump I mean it seems like you're you know you're going after Elon Musk you're going
up to DeSantis but you never see anything bad about Trump I mean what criticism do you have
Operation Warp Speed but we can we can we can we can we can we can get to a full hour and
then another time and you know look I mean I've been on I know that's a that's a DeSantis team
you know is very frustrated with
you know, somebody drawing policy contrast.
Turns out I draw a lot of contrast from Trump as well.
I'm in this race to win.
I hope so.
I mean, I'm like to be a real candidate, right?
I really do.
Absolutely.
And I love you on, too.
I love to see this.
I mean, Ian wanted to go after Trump because he's supposed to dissenters just to be clear.
But go ahead and Rebecca.
Yeah, but also what I would say is, you know, I love 90% of what Elon has done as well for free speech as advocate in this country with Twitter.
I mean, nobody's probably been on Fox News while he was trying to buy Twitter as a bigger advocate for what he stands for than me.
But I'm not in the camp.
And I think that sometimes we fall into this, I'll say it's enclosing in our politics, is an obsession over the question of the who.
We end up in a hero worship culture.
I think the conservative movement is equally bad about this, by the way, of believing somebody's either a saint or a devil.
And I don't view it that way.
I believe that...
Somebody can do a lot of good. I put Trump in this category. I put Musk in this category, but to still be able to call out, DeSantis, in Florida, for that matter, in that category, while still being able to draw legitimate, well-grounded, unsparing contrasts calling out what we see as truth when we see it as such. And so that's part of why I'm in this race.
self-funded, independent, not a professional politician, is that we need to start getting in the habit of speaking truth in an unvarnished way, unconstrained, taking the hard questions, go to meet the press with Chuck Todd.
I don't say I won't talk to NBC News.
I'll talk to NBC News, even though they're not nice to any of us.
You know, that's different than other Republicans in this field.
And so I think what you guys do is great.
I love forums like this.
I came in here on purpose.
Yeah.
Because we need more free speech in open debate.
We can't just talk about free speech to a room full of people who agree with us.
part of free speech culture is practicing what we actually preach.
And I just think it'll be not in some sort of negative,
backhanded way, but in a true way, in a positive way,
I challenge the other Republicans in this primary
to do the same thing, to show up on the south side of Chicago
where I went a couple weeks ago or to college campuses
across this country with unscripted, pre-unvetted questions.
that's going to be good for us.
And maybe politically inconvenient
might have a flub in the short term.
Maybe I had one on this call for all I know
and I'll hear about it afterwards.
But I think that's going to be good for our country,
good for the Republican Party,
good for free speech culture,
and,
actually standing with the spine for what our own convictions are and hearing the best views.
I got some good ones on this call, people who disagreed with me on the other side.
That's what we need more of in our country.
And so in the most positive of ways, I'd like to encourage the others in the field the next time
they do Twitter spaces, let go of prescripted questions.
It's not a dig or anything.
It's a positive vision going forward of let's do more of this.
And you know what?
I'll come on and join you guys if I have time when one of the others is on with you too.
We need to.
We need more of that, not less.
And kudos to you guys for creating that.
Thanks, Vick.
I appreciate it, always.
Thank you, Mr. Pohman, we appreciate your question.
I appreciate you asking, answering very tough questions unlike recent presidential candidates.
Thanks, Vick.
Appreciate you guys.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
What a shit outro, Suli.
I appreciate you asking questions about presidential candidates.
I'll be honest, too.
I was thinking, I need to send a dig to Ian's boy.
I know I was thinking, well, I was annoyed because I had so many questions to ask him and like people are asking lame questions.
It was good though.
But separate to that, I thought, in my head I was thinking I need to set, I need to basically send a dig to Ian and his boy.
Yeah, I heard that.
I heard that.
Yeah.
But, you know, I appreciate Vivek coming on and answering hard questions.
I would love to see other candidates.
Not just, you know, not just Trump.
You think your boy would ever do it, Ian?
Yeah, Santa said that he wanted to do it.
He did say he wanted to do it, so I'm hoping he does it.
You know, I hope it's a tough space and not, you know, like a...
I mean, I get why he didn't do that the first time.
He was obviously he was announcing, so he wasn't having a debate.
But it would like, I would love to see him on a debate stage like this, where he takes tough questions.
and, you know, is able to feel them properly.
The way that Vivek did, you know, I didn't agree with a lot of stuff that Vivek said,
but, you know, I appreciate that, you know, his candor and I appreciate the fact that he
was willing to answer those questions.
I mean, that was great.
So, you know, more candid.
While we're having this discussion, Ian, what's going on with Twitter?
What do you think about these two resignations that we saw today, the censorship of
that video, the daily wide video?
You know, I'm calling resignations.
more like it was probably they were just fired.
That was our guess. That was our guess as well.
But so that video, it's just two seconds.
The Daily Wire video that's being, that was or is being censored.
Have you seen it?
Is there anything?
Yeah, I've watched it.
It's a great documentary.
No, and I don't think that anything in there violates Twitter storms of service.
Elon's own tweets about how he wants to lobby personally, right, to ban minors from having
their bodies mutilated.
I mean, that's in line 100%.
with the video. So the fact that it's being censored even now still shows that there is some
internal strife going on at Twitter. And I'm sure Elon will have it under control by tomorrow,
right? I mean, it's pretty late now, right? So I don't know if any of them are even in the office
at this point. But it's definitely something we should keep an eye on. I do think that he will resolve
this because Clarendon is.
Clearly there is some nonsense going on there.
And, you know, I would guess, right?
And I don't, you know, know, know, know this personally,
but I would guess that Ella Irwin, you know,
who was one of the people who resigned, quote unquote,
put this mandate in place where she probably told the moderation staff
to start censoring the video anytime it gets posted, right?
Which is why even my tweet posting it, which, you know,
was like stricanding the video, got censored, like, you know,
one or...
an hour and a half after it was up, right?
I mean, it tells you that, you know, Elon, yeah, he might be in charge
and he might be able to say, hey, don't do this.
But, you know, if you're, you know, if there is a procedure of Shane,
you know, then there's so listening to the old orders.
Ian, let me ask you a question because you actually posted.
Sorry, he replied.
He had a basically back and forth with you.
Elon replied to a reply.
Hold on.
Elon replied to a reply by Ian, by Ian Saleh.
Ian Muskier, Ian Muskier, same thing.
We know Ian's like Ian Musk, right?
Elon posted right, and he said,
we're updating the system tomorrow
so that those who follow...
the Daily Wire will see in their feed,
but it won't be recommended to non-followers,
nor will advertise and be associated with it.
And then you wrote,
the visibility issue prevents it from even being commented on at the moment.
It should be shareable on timelines too.
He said he's going to solve that.
The issue is that with the Daily Wire,
they've got issues that if this is not being recommended
to people who are not already following them,
and due to advertising,
the reach is minimized,
Their argument is that it is a form of censorship.
Now, do you agree with their argument or are they just...
I would agree with their argument.
Yeah, it's a form of political censorship.
It's a form of political suppression.
I mean, it's...
It's still in line with freedom of speech versus freedom of reach, meaning that if it is on their timeline, it should be retreatable, and it should show up on people's timelines if someone they follow retweeted it or shares the video.
I think that 100% is the case, and that will be the case tomorrow when he deals with this.
But I do think that it's not being recommended on the 4U algorithm, which is what he is referring to.
That is a kind of...
I wouldn't say it's censorship necessarily,
but it is a form of suppression for sure
because it's still being out there.
It's not being, you know,
it's not like he's banning it or anything like that.
It's not hitting the accounts.
But Ian,
according to your argument,
even if he banned it,
like,
so what?
Because your whole argument is,
it's a,
private company. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, but I'm just like trying to make a distinction
between, you know, total suppression, which is, you know, you can't retreat it, can't share it,
your account gets banned for it versus, okay, advertisers will not have to, you know, pay for it,
basically. Because advertisers basically, they're basically paying for it, right? And they don't
necessarily want to. So, yeah.
That's the distinction I'm trying to make in that.
So people can still see it, and if it's retweeted onto the timeline, they'll see it.
If they follow daily wire or they follow me, for example, I'm posting the video.
They can still see it.
But advertisers don't have to pay for it because it won't be recommended in 4 years.
This is, Ian, how cool is we're actually seeing that struggle live?
Like, we saw the video go out.
We saw it get censored.
And then we saw them do a tweet about it that went viral, 18 million impressions.
And then Elon replies to that tweet saying that they're sorting it.
And we see two people at Twitter get, quote unquote, resign not long after the DailyWire
I did a massive space discussing this on Twitter, complaining about Twitter on Twitter,
which again, I love when that happens.
Yeah.
It's just epic to see that because usually when things get censored on YouTube or the other platforms,
on Twitter in the old Twitter.
You just never know.
Yeah.
They just censor it.
They never speak.
Daddy has acted.
They'll never say anything about it.
And you just got to live with it.
So it's a pretty interesting way of running a business.
It's a breath of fresh air.
It is a very, you know, very, I would say it's a breath of fresh air.
And, yeah, it's messy.
But that's what transparency is, right?
It's messy.
And so we get to see this happening, you know, unfold in real time.
And that's a plus, you know, because we get to respond to it.
We get to say, hey, I don't agree with this.
I mean, if enough people say that, you know, that it should be recommended for you, who knows?
You know, like the position might change, right?
Because, like...
You know, Elon's obviously having, you know, arguments with people working at Twitter.
Let's do this.
Let's do this.
Let's do this.
I saw Elon reply to a comment about Twitter's subscriber space as being really good.
We're applying not to do a subscriber space today, but we'll do that now.
What we're going to do is going to create a subscriber space for layman.
Ian, jump in if you want for a bit.
We'll shoot the shits for a bit, 15, 20 minutes.
Talk about Vivex interview.
Talk about what's going on with Elon.
Are you a subscriber though, Ian?
Ian, are you a subscriber though?
You subscribe to Mario.
Uh, no, but I can...
Ah, so Mario,
I'm pressuring the guy.
He's actually peer-pressuring you to pay the dollar.
Fine. I beat it just now.
I beat it just now.
Done.
Oh, my God.
That is peer pressure live to an audience of a hundred thousand.
It's a dollar.
It's nothing.
But guys, guys, subscribe to Mario's sub.
Right?
Because we're going to, we always go in there.
It be amazing.
It be the best thing ever because, like, there's a lot of genuine fans on there, isn't there, Mario?
And essentially going there.
So, Ian, these spaces are unrecorded and we say shit that gets us in trouble.
So just a heads up, Ian.
Oh, that's fun.
They don't, they just goes off in those places.
Ian, we say the quiet, Ian, we say the quiet, quiet path.
to loud.
I feel a quick part of out.
Let me kick it off now.
I think it was in there.
Someone will record it.
It was a good space.
And I want to talk about the daily wire space as well because we talk about that as well
and bring up a few audience members.
But let's go there, shoot the shifts for 15, 20 minutes.
And then we'll go and talk about Tate.
We're talking about Tate's interview Sully a bit because I know we're doing a rumble
video on that right after.
So we could talk about that.
All right, guys.
We'll see you in a subscriber space in like two, three minutes.
Speaker
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