CLAY: Kyle Mann is the editor-in-chief of Babylon Bee. He tweeted… I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet, Buck. He tweeted:
CLAY: That of course is satire aimed at the fact that China and all Chinese government accounts are allowed to post on Twitter. And for that — for that comment — the editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee had his Twitter account locked as well.
BUCK: (laughing)
CLAY: So let me repeat: China can have all of these different accounts advocating for Chinese communist government rule and spreading propaganda, but the editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee… They already locked the Babylon Bee for making a joke about Rachel Levine, who is the HHS Undersecretary or whatever the heck she is, naming her Man of the Year after, what was it, USA Today named her Woman of the Year, one of the Women of the Year.
BUCK: Yes. Headlining Woman of the Year.
CLAY: So you make fun and say, “Hey, if we had a few thousand Uighurs in a concentration camp…” China’s not banned for actually having Uighurs in concentration camps! A joke leads to a banning. So, that is where we are on social media. And it ties into the point you were making as we went to break, Buck, which was this net delusion argument, which is relatively I think prescient now, where arguably we are becoming less free in the Internet age than we ever were in a pre-Internet age.
BUCK: I was right, by the way. It’s The Net Delusion, by the way, I think it was 2012 it came out. So I said 15 years ago. I was off by a few. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov, and yeah. He’s talking about the other side of these technologies and what they do to society. It’s interesting. It’s been a long time. I don’t remember it all that well.
He says, “For all the talk of the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable as repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda and pacify their population with digital entertainment.”
Remember, this guy wrote this over 10 years ago. I think this all hits close to home, friends, as we all sit here while Twitter is shutting down a sitting president when he was in office still, and we’re all just watching our Netflix binges and everything else. Yeah, free speech not so free these days, Clay.
CLAY: And people are getting shut down left and right over this Lia Thomas Penn transgender swimmer story, and I don’t know if your standard… We talked about it yesterday, that they consider it basically to be “dead naming,” if you say, “Will Thomas,” which is what the person’s name was.
BUCK: That’s what they say. It is “dead naming.” By the way, that will get you kicked off of Twitter if they see it.
CLAY: Isn’t that insane?
BUCK: Yes, it is.
CLAY: But especially when you have to, in order to tell the full context of a story be able to talk about the fact this male swimmer.
BUCK: It’s only if it’s done in a pejorative fashion. If you call Lia Thomas “Will Thomas,” they will make some determination. I would guess that probably decide (laughing), because what do you do?
CLAY: Have to explain this story without saying, first of all, this was a male swimmer. By the way, Buck, I’m not an expert in rap. My kids listen to modern-day rap. I was dying laughing last night. Boosie…
BUCK: I’m unfamiliar with Mr. Boosie.
CLAY: I imagine that a large majority of our audience is unfamiliar with the work of Boosie, a rapper. But he went off on the idea of this Penn transgender swimmer being allowed to compete. I was laughing as he went along. He was saying… Like, he got asked, “Hey, what if Kevin Durant decided to put on a wig and become a WNBA player?” and that was Juwanna Mann back in the ’90s.
BUCK: Dave Chappelle did a standup where he said LeBron James plays in the NBA, he’ll score, I think he said, 850 points a game.
CLAY: WNBA.
BUCK: WNBA. Yeah, same idea. But remember: You’re crazy if you see what is obvious and true. This is what they want you to believe because then it’s so much easier to control you.
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