The "Cultural Civil War" Narrative | Joe Rogan & Tim Pool

People might say I'm a little alarmist when I mention a potential civil war, but let me clarify. Like I don't, I'm not saying, because I've brought this up before, I'm not saying it's going to be like, you know, 1800s, two big battlefields. But at the same time, what people don't seem to realize when it comes to history is that when you read about World War II, we've condensed all the highlights into a very short paragraph or a series of paragraphs. You don't realize the war was several years. There were periods where nothing happened, right? I was in Egypt during the Second Revolution. You could look down and you could see Tahrir Square, people screaming, laser pointers, helicopters, Apaches, and they announce in the news, we've deposed the president two blocks away, a dude's eating a cheeseburger McDonald's watching a football match, as if nothing's happening. So when you look at these street battles, the political violence, when you look at the biased banings, you look at the dude, there was a guy who fired a couple rounds at a police officer in Eugene, Oregon, and some bombs got planted at the police department, or somebody planted bombs at a statue in Houston. It starts to feel like there's some kind of political violence that is bubbling up that can't be mended at this point. And a lot of this comes from the suppression that we're talking about, where people don't feel like they have a voice, or that voice is being suppressed by an opposing ideology. You know, yes, but it is really complicated. I can't claim to know how everything happens, but what I will say is, I believe social media is responsible for the political violence. I believe it's not just about suppression. You look at the systems that were built, Facebook, right? What content can make it to the front page of your Facebook profile when you're looking at your newsfeed? Well, Facebook has to build an algorithm to determine what matters most. Companies then figure out how to manipulate that algorithm to get that content in front of you, because at most you can see what three posts on Facebook. So what happens is early on, companies quickly found out that anger drives the most shares of any emotion. All of a sudden we see a wave of police brutality videos. There was one website that posted almost exclusively police brutality content, and it was like Alexa 400 in the world. Some ridiculously high number, it blew my mind. I knew someone claims that they were making six figures writing police brutality articles, because it was pure rage bait, right? Content that just shares really easily. But that content constantly being put in front of somebody breeds an ideology. You then tell someone, did you know that white supremacy is on the rise, and there are 11 million white supremacists in the US, and they go, I can believe it. But that's nonsense. It's just not the case. The Anti-Defamation League and the SPLC say that rough estimates are maybe like 10 or 12,000, but people really believe that there is like that the president is secretly a Nazi, and that he's being propped up by the secret cabal, or there's an alternative influence network on YouTube where you and me are somehow trying to convince people to, you know, this is ridiculous. Well, that's the aim thing. Yeah. What was it called? Data and society. Right, right. And that was nonsense. Yeah. What did we get connected to? Are we alt-right adjacent? Are we bootlickers? Are we that one? We're part of the... It's a network that feeds into extremist ideologies and other... They connected me with people. Well, it's so schizophrenic, the way it's drawn out, the little map where one person's connected to another person. And what I said to her... And it was fake. I said, Barbara Walters interviewed Fidel Castro. Did that make her a communist? You know, that's... That's what I tweeted at her. I'm like, you're crazy. This is a crazy way to look at things. But what happened with that story? Media reported uncritically. I reached out to a bunch of journalists. I know a ton of journalists. I'm a member of the Online News Association. I've been a speaker at their events, and I'm reaching out to these journalists like, hey, why did you guys write that? That's just completely fake. It's got my name, like my name in the middle. Right. You know me. Right. You can call me to quote you. Yes. They don't do it. Right. They just uncritically report it. And there's a couple reasons for it. Facebook recently changed their algorithm. I don't know... This was a while ago. They may have changed it again. But it was a huge hit to the incomes of a lot of these companies when all of a sudden news articles stopped appearing as much because Facebook wanted friends and family to be more connected and less so news organizations. So these news organizations who write this viral clickbait and rage content weren't getting as much traffic. So they have to go crazy. And so it's a downward spiral of where these journalists all follow each other. They start producing... I don't think it's a conspiracy they produce this stuff. I think they're hired specifically because the content they produce is viral. And it's viral for a reason. Right. And so the more they produce it, the more they eat their own excrement, essentially. And then it's a game of telephone where they're sitting in a circle constantly telling each other the craziest things and it gets crazier and crazier. But another aspect of it is when they write an article saying, you know, Trump is racist, it goes viral. The next day, they can't write the same article. So they write Trump is the most racist. The next day, they have to keep one upping it. And we talked about this with Forbes articles, the term nasty surprise. They use it with tech. Like they'll say, the new Galaxy S10 has a nasty surprise. The new iPhone 10 has a nasty surprise. And it keeps saying... It's hilarious. It's almost like there's a form letter and they just take whatever Xbox, stick it in there. Nasty surprise. And it's 100% clickbait and it's Forbes. And were you telling me that Forbes, that essentially is like user contributions? Yeah. Yeah. I could probably submit an article. They have like a network of people. I don't know how you get approved, but there's a lot of articles that just get written about like the new video game today. So it's like a clickbait title. Yeah. To just get some ads. Has a nasty surprise, but it's almost like they have like a pattern that they've just accepted. This is going to work. But it's not a conspiracy. It's just like-minded people who are only ever around each other, sharing the same things among each other, believing all the same things. And so you'll notice that certain words emerge specifically among certain groups. Like the left will use certain words and then if like learn to code doesn't appear that much in left wing rhetoric, but the conservatives and the anti-anatterian types understand what it is. And so... The justification for banning someone for saying learn to code regardless of the context seems insane. Yeah. That seems insane. It seems like... That one in particular is almost indefen- I mean, not almost. That's indefensible. Absolutely. Like there have been people who... But let me be fair. There are people on the left who have been banned. Absolutely. 100%. There was a lot of Venezuelan accounts that were banned and a lot of people were very critical. I saw Abby Martin was criticizing this because they accused them of being government actors because they were pro Venezuelan government. But the one thing, there are some Occupy Wall Street activists who absolutely detest me. They lie about me. I do not like them for doing this. They were banned abruptly for literally no reason. And this is what's more worrisome to me is that no one defended them. No one defended them because conservatives certainly won't, but neither will the mainstream ideological left. These are activists for class issues, for international issues. They're on the left squarely and they were accused, I guess, of being bots or something. It was just an abrupt purge of like 50 accounts. And some of them were like independent citizen journalists just wiped up. And with no recourse. No recourse, none whatsoever. So, I mean, at some point, you have to realize how important Twitter is when the president is on it. Could you imagine if there was a physical space where everyone was talking and the president shows up and everyone keeps yelling at him and they're all talking because you had that lawsuit where they said it was a public forum. Imagine that happens and then a private individual bars you from hearing what the president has to say. Right? It's a complicated issue. Very. You get a lot of people on the left saying private businesses can do whatever they want. That blew my mind because the left was usually about not letting massive multinational billion dollar corporations get away with suppressing speech. Well, that was another thing that people got pissed at me about Jack Dorsey and rightly so, that he said that it's a human right. That to be able to communicate online is a human. But the fact that he said it, but yet all these people are banned. So, how, like to take away someone's human right, there should be an egregious example. I mean, it should be something like doxxing someone, like calling for violence, like trying and. But even then. But clearly, that's not the case if Kathy Griffin's still online. But hold on. You can kill a human being and get 25 years. Right. Good point. So, you can literally strip someone of their everything and still not be purged permanently. This was one of the things that Jack and I discussed post podcast. I said, you know, when we were going back and forth about doing this again, you know, I told him, I would really like to see if there's some sort of a path to redemption. Like, you know, for example, for Milo, I mean, who's this like, we talked about yesterday about Christian Piccolini, who was a white supremacist who realized the error of his ways and then became this activist against racism. And now he gives these Ted speeches and he's, you know, accepted by everyone as being this guy who's achieved redemption and really understands the error of his ways. If Milo's banned for life, Milo is only like 34 years old, right? How old is Milo? Around there. I honestly don't know. I hope I didn't make him older than he is. I'd probably be mad. But whatever it is, like, who's to say that Milo, you know, in three years from now, won't have a change of heart or, you know, have a fucking acid trip or something that makes him a different person. But if you're banned for life, are we throwing people away? Like, you ever see that tweet from, I'm going to say, I think it was Tyler, the creator, where he said, how is cyberbullying real? Just, you know, like, close your eyes, go outside, close your eyes. That's, you know, I'm sorry, man. If you want to ban hate speech, I can understand. I am no fan of hate speech. I think it's wrong. I think you shouldn't, you know, target people for specific characteristics. We should respect one another. At the same time, I'm also a human adult who understands sometimes people are mean. You ever walk that you ever go to, you know, a subway in Los Angeles and some guy starts calling you all the names in the book, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. That's just life. People are mean sometimes. Have they punch you? They cross the line. Right. But on Twitter, you know, Milo wants to say mean things, block mute. You know what I do? I press mute. Yes. Yeah. Mute. I don't even block people. I block some people. Yeah. The my