We are learning more about the scheme inside X to suppress the JD Vance dossier and ultimately ban reporter Ken Klippenstein from the platform for publishing it. In a New York Times feature on Elon Musk's coziness with Donald Trump [00:00:16] and his campaign, it was revealed that after a reporter's publication of Hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform. According to two people with knowledge of the events, [00:00:33] X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter's account. And they're talking, of course, about former TYT employee and current independent reporter Ken Klippenstein. Now, this coordination to suppress information that's, quote, [00:00:50] potentially harmful to the Trump campaign comes in addition to Musk's reported $500 million cat is $500 million cash injection to pro-Trump electoral efforts, and in addition, they reportedly speak a couple times a week. [00:01:08] Trump and Musk but back on X, things have taken a pretty clear, pro-Trump bent. Users are frequently subjected to pro-Trump content, despite not following those accounts and clearly having a different point [00:01:23] of view, and it is overwhelming. So Elon himself has also spoken out overwhelmingly in support of Trump. Musk has reportedly posted at least 109 times about Trump and the election [00:01:39] since endorsing the GOP nominee in July. They include a now deleted post last month in which he said no one's even trying to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. He has also accused Democrats of trying to fast track immigration in an attempt to [00:01:57] manipulate the voting landscape in their favor, and spread baseless conspiracy theories about Trump's opponents. And just last week, Musk campaigned with Trump at a rally in Butler, PA. But back to the Klippenstein ban. And that story, as many have pointed out, it resembles similar actions taken [00:02:16] by Twitter during the 2020 campaign, with stories about and tweets including materials from Hunter Biden's laptop, including his nudes. And you might recall, writer Matt Taibbi was given exclusive access to internal Twitter documents [00:02:33] that showed Biden campaign officials were communicating with then Twitter staff about removing tweets some including those nudes that were found on Hunter's laptop and that was framed as a matter of grave importance and government censorship. [00:02:49] Despite Biden not being in office at the time by both Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk. And in October 2023, Elon Musk asked what prison sentences were given out to those who suppressed the Hunter [00:03:05] Biden laptop, information that did have a material impact on the election. Now I'm getting a breaking update here. I got an exclusive, too tight statement from Ken Klippenstein, he says. I did everything right and they suspended me. [00:03:21] It was a perfect article. Jake. Are we going to get justice for Ken? Did everything right and they suspended me anyway. So we have more from Ken because we interviewed him about this [00:03:39] when this story broke. But first I want to go to a different clip. It's from JD Vance because he agrees that if you block a negative story about someone right before the election, that that actually is election fraud. It's like the worst thing you could possibly do. [00:03:55] And if that happens to you, well, you should be able to negate the, the election and that that you should say the election is stolen. Now. Was he talking about this? Well, let's find out. This literally happened today. Interviewed with the New York Times. Here's what J.D. Vance said about the 2020 election. [00:04:11] - Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? - Let me ask you a question. Is it okay that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story? Which independent analysis have said it cost Donald Trump millions of votes? Senator Vance, I'm going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? [00:04:30] Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? - Senator, that's the question. - I'm going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020? I answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I'll answer yours. [00:04:45] I'm talking about something very discrete, a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020. And more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris's government, which has screwed this country up in a big way. I've said that I would have voted against certification [00:05:01] because of the concern that I just raised. I think that when you have technology companies, the answer is no. When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that, again, independent studies have suggested affect the vote, I think that it's right to protest against that, to criticize that. [00:05:17] And that's a totally reasonable thing. Big technology companies censoring a story. That's the deeply, deeply problematic thing that you could say that, hey, even if I lost an election I actually won it and you could commit fraud. [00:05:33] You could try to terminate the Constitution. You could not certify an election. What is Twitter or X? It appears to be a big technology company. What did it do? It censored Ken Klippenstein story about who? JD Vance. And now all of a sudden, that's not swinging an election? [00:05:51] No, no, no, of course, Twitter should not be able to censor a story about Hunter Biden, but he should be able to censor a story about JD Vance. Of course, they say with a straight face it was. Yeah. [00:06:06] And the crazy thing is, it wasn't just Twitter, right? Like, if we if we could say that it was just, you know, Trump's boy Elon and his pet toy Twitter or X or whatever the hell we're calling it now, that did it. It wasn't just them. Facebook got involved. [00:06:22] They throttled the links. They, you know, suppressed access to to Ken's story. Thank God, you know, I'm a member of the newsletter. I, you know, it's Substack. I'm a paying member of the Ken Klippenstein Substack. I was able to read the story and get the basic gist of it. [00:06:38] I didn't read the whole dossier. I mean, I thought what was interesting about it, honestly, is that JD Vance, like, wasn't in lockstep with every single thing Donald Trump had ever did. And that's what they saw as like sort of his downfall. But besides that, just just the idea that these people, it's [00:06:56] all BS, the free speech, anti-censorship, that stuff all was always crap. And we saw it went down completely down the toilet. The second people started getting censored over on Palestine. We saw none of these people that were free speech warriors and they were heterodox. [00:07:16] And no man like you can't just tell us what to say and what to do. Like there's the First Amendment. Like, come on now we're absolutists about free speech. You can't just do this to us. As soon as it came to Palestine and the Gaza Strip and the horrible atrocities [00:07:33] and people threatening to never allow students who showed up to a freaking protest to get a job ever again. Silence. It's, I think, the argument that the Hunter Biden laptop and the materials on it would have [00:07:53] changed the outcome of the 2020 election is so funny because when you look at what they were actually showing, displaying Marjorie Taylor Greene did it at least once in a House committee hearing. It was what the Biden campaign wanted taken down. [00:08:09] It was like pictures of him. And to credit to Cat Abu-ghazaleh, who is now independent. She, she and I just did an interview earlier and she reminded me there was a photo that went viral on the right of him having a three way with a giant stuffed [00:08:24] squirrel in the background of the photo. It's that I think would have. I mean, you really can't quantify how many voters that picture alone would have shifted to Trump as soon as they saw a cool, tan, fun, rich guy having a three way. [00:08:40] I mean, those I mean, the favorables alone for Trump would have been colossal. Yeah. I mean, look, and these Republicans, I can't stand their whining. It's it's grating on the nerves. Oh, you can't have big stories against us before an election. [00:08:56] When did that become a rule? I remember in 2016, the biggest story right before the election was the Anthony Weiner nonsense. And they said all we have to reopen the investigation about Hillary Clinton's emails because of some rando weird sexual thing that Anthony Weiner did. [00:09:12] And that costs her a ton of votes and arguably the election. Do you see Democrats going, James Comey, who is a person who did that? He should be arrested like Trump the minute that, of course, Comey did anything about Trump. He's like, he should be fired. He should be arrested. [00:09:28] Well, you didn't want him arrested when he was torpedoing Hillary Clinton's campaign. You didn't mind stories that come out right before an election when that happened to Democrats. But they think that any story that comes out about them should be made illegal, but that there's still free speech absolutists. [00:09:43] It's absurd, man. And get over here, Hunter Biden obsession. Oh my God, he oh, he smoked drugs. He had. He did drugs and and had a lot of sex. I think they're mainly Republicans are just jealous and they're like, oh, he was corrupt and got money for nothing from Ukrainians, etc. [00:10:00] That's like what every Republican politician dreams of. I think Hunter Biden is their hero and they don't even realize it. Yeah, if only he would have got a nice fat check from the Saudi royal family. After the Biden administration, is over. Wouldn't that be something? [00:10:18] - Yeah. - He got. Look, we've said it a billion times. He's a low level con man. Right. He got $500,000 for a piece of junk. Modern art. He got $5 million for being a Ukrainian gas expert. It's absurd. Right. So. But it didn't have a connection to Biden. In fact, the laptop proved that it did. [00:10:34] He didn't have a connection to to Joe Biden. But anyway, meanwhile, Tawas Point, Jared Kushner, $2 billion from the Saudis right after the election. And he was he was in charge of our foreign policy [00:10:49] about the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. And they're like, I don't see it. I don't see it. Of course, after an election, the son in law who was in charge of that for no goddamn reason, has no expertise on Middle East or foreign policy or politics. Of course, he should be in charge. [00:11:05] And right afterwards, Muslim fundamentalist dictatorship should give them $2 billion. Atta boy. Oh, but oh, Hunter Biden. Did you see how large his junk is? I'm so jealous of him. I mean, I hate him. [00:11:22] There was another. There was another moment which I thought was really funny on. It was a Tucker Carlson episode when he was still on Fox, and there was this big groundbreaking reveal that Hunter Biden had a picture where he had he was balancing M&Ms on his, [00:11:40] thing, and that was like a big scandal they were trying to gin up. And I think to your point, Jack, it's maybe they're just jealous. It's just it's envy. Wait wait wait wait. Jordan, which M&Ms was. It was the sexy kind, like. Tucker Carlson likes. Or was it the politically correct one with the sneakers on? [00:11:58] That doesn't even turn on. Tucker Carlson. - It was the green. - Ones. - It was the sexy green ones. - No. No, it. - Guilty. - Jealous there. - Yeah. - Justice for the peanut M&M man? Yeah. All right, one last thing about the story. So Ken had a portion of the of the document that was unredacted, right? [00:12:17] We had him on the show. We asked him about it, and I said, look, I would have redacted it. So there's nothing wrong with a good, honest conversation about that debate. ET cetera. And he's a journalist, and he made an active decision that he thought that that was the more journalistic way to go. [00:12:34] You can agree or disagree, etc.. Right. But they also are blocking his links to the articles that had nothing to do with things that were unredacted. That's just, hey, I don't want the story getting out. They don't even have an excuse for it. In fact, can explain that on The Young Turks. [00:12:51] Right after the story broke. Watch. What reasoning were you given for your ban on Twitter? - I got an. - Email citing two tweets. One was the link to the JD Vance Research dossier story that I published, [00:13:06] and the second one was more interesting. I also, I also just reposted a story I'd done talking about how overblown I think foreign influence operations are not just by the press, but by the Intelligence Committee, maybe even the culture at large. Not that they don't exist, not that they're, you know, not real, not that the government shouldn't respond to them, but to treat them like, [00:13:25] you know, some dumb Russian memes or Iranian memes or whatever are going to, you know, decisively swing an election. There's no evidence for that. And, you know, in the story I explore that. But it said that I what was it violated by posting personal information? Which again in the second post, there was no personal information that shows that [00:13:42] there's a political dimension to this. Yeah. So they. Elon Musk has given no explanation. And according to J.D. Vance's logic, blocking a legitimate article on a big technology company [00:13:58] site like X is grounds for saying that the election should be nullified. So good news to Kamala Harris if she loses, guess who certifies the election? The vice president. Guess who the vice president is, Kamala Harris. Well, now that they blocked Ken's article on X, [00:14:15] according to Vance and Trump logic, she should be able to nullify the election, not certify it and say, you know what, I think I would have won if Ken's story had gotten out on X. That's not my logic. That's J.D. Vance's own dumb ass logic that you just saw with your own eyes. [00:14:34] Yeah, I mean, that also is a significant departure from what the policies used to be. So I think a lot of people complained in the past, especially under past ownership, that material or information, [00:14:50] personal or otherwise, they couldn't do anything on Twitter if it was being linked to because it didn't live there. And you've watched as free speech warrior Elon Musk has changed the rules. Flip flopped, tinkered around the edges and manipulated them [00:15:08] whenever it fits his idea or his ideals, his partizanship, or what he wants the ultimate outcome to be from it. From the private jet tracker saying it was assassination coordinates to this. [00:15:23] He is totally inconsistent. And that's why I think Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said this. His behavior is what it looks like when someone treats free speech as a slogan and not an ideal. Yeah, it's a joke. [00:15:39] Obviously, you guys will remember when he did some great censorship in India on behalf of Modi. Like he loved that censorship. Of course we mentioned that the right wingers didn't care about censorship. [00:15:57] According to Gaza, and Palestine, like he he met up with. It's so crazy. It was like the same week that he posted this crazy anti-Semitic meme he reposted on his, on his Twitter. And then he met up with Benjamin Netanyahu and was like, oh, all right. [00:16:15] Yeah, we'll ban free speech in regards to the conflict over there in Gaza. Like he'll do it on behalf of a foreign government, too. He will ban Americans free speech ideals on behalf of foreign governments as well. [00:16:32] He's a complete joke on the subject matter. Yeah. Last thing here is, when TikTok did not throttle, videos about Palestine, Mitt Romney, Anthony Blinken, Hillary Clinton all said ban TikTok. How dare you? And interesting, isn't it? [00:16:48] Democrats and Republicans? If you criticize Israel, then free speech is not important. They all agree. Make sure you ban the hell out of them. Ban Ken Klippenstein, ban any criticism of Israel. [00:17:03] But we're free speech absolutist. Are you? Are you? Because you certainly don't look like it. And the very last thing I'll say is to Jordan's point about him throttling the Lynx. Guys, if you don't know what that does, is I know why he does it for a business reason, right? And he has every right to do it because he owns the platform. [00:17:21] And that's exactly what we said about Twitter before he bought it. So we are principled and consistent on it. He has a right to do it because he doesn't want you to go from his platform to other websites and read the New York Times article, or the Associated Press article, etc. But when you do that and you throttle those, then people do [00:17:39] not put links in to news stories. So then people that are on his platform become less educated. They have less access to the truth and to reality. Weirdo memes and deepfakes. And I created pictures. [00:17:55] Oh, that's totally great. That's encouraged, not discouraged. So you want to lie to people? Oh, have at it. Ha! Super encouraged on X, but you want to put in a link to a story that shows you actual facts. No, no, we don't want that. We're free speech absolutist unless you mean the truth, [00:18:10] in which case we have no interest.