d not do drugs. There are people who do it. You could not get arrested. It's possible, right? You could do as good as well as you could do in that poor school but because you come from you know minority disadvantaged situation you might be able to get a little lift, a little maybe a college scholarship, a little extra consideration and then from there you're on your own. Get yourself a useful major and you could probably pay for your student loans if you have them etc.

Okay so I would just say that things would be really different if we just taught people the basics when they're small.

All right. Rasmussen did a poll to find out if people think that Musk is going to make Twitter better or worse. Thirty-four percent of American adults who regularly use Twitter believe that Musk will make the site better. So about a third say he'll make it better and almost exactly the same think that Musk will make it worse. But how many people — this will be a little test of your psychic ability — how many people roughly do you think believe that Elon Musk, the world's greatest entrepreneur, paid forty-four billion dollars for Twitter to not change it too much? To not change it too much? How many people think they spent forty-four billion dollars to not really make anything any different?

Wow you're good. Wow you're so, that's good. This is twenty-four but your guess is of twenty-five are just scarily accurate. How do you do that? I don't know. I don't know how you do it.

Well the Twitter cybernetic brain which fascinates me when I look at the currently trending section because to me that's the consciousness or where Twitter is focusing his brain and there were four names in my — I think it's different for each person but in my list these four names: Nick Fuentes, Will Smith, Alexander Vindman and Tim Pool. Those are all the trending names today on my list. And I'm thinking poor Tim Pool. Tim Pool gets thrown on the list with Fuentes, Will Smith and Vindman but for different reasons except that they're all being criticized, right? They're all being criticized or in some cases complimented.

Speaking of Tim Pool you probably know by now that he got an exclusive kind of a scoop interview with Ye and Milo and Nick Fuentes. That would be the first I think big, probably the first time they would appear together since the dinner at Mar-a-Lago. And if you didn't know it ended abruptly when Tim very carefully broached the anti-Semitism topic and then Ye got up and left without comment.

Now who knows what Ye is thinking, right? It's impossible to imagine. But here are the things we learned. Number one: Ye confirmed that Trump did not know that Fuentes was coming and Trump did not know who Fuentes was. Now I believe that's true. I believe that's true because Axios reported the same thing before we did so we have now two sources that are not necessarily on the same side saying the same thing and also Trump said the same thing so it looks like everybody's agreed with that.

Now some people are saying well it looks like the Tim Pool interview as short as it was, about twenty-six minutes I think, it cleared Trump. What do you think? Is Trump cleared now because he didn't know Fuentes and did not invite him? No. Is he cleared? No. Nothing works like that. You're falling into the trap of imagining that any kind of common sense or rational thought is involved here. There's none of that. It's purely a narrative that the left is never going to let go of. It doesn't matter how true or valid or anything. All you have to know is that they've chosen it as a narrative that they're going to ride that horse until it expires and they are and they're doing a good job of it. They're really nailing it hard.

So no, Trump is done in my opinion. Trump does not come back from that. I think that was a kill shot. Does anybody disagree? How many of you think Trump could come back from that? Because remember it's not even true. It's like half hoax, half a little bit true. So you think you can. Now the argument that he can is that our attention span is too short. The trouble is our attention span is irrelevant if it's all they talk about.

Do you remember that Biden ran on the Charlottesville hoax? We elected a president on a hoax. It didn't matter that it was a hoax and it didn't matter that it was the most easily verifiable hoax. You just have to listen to it and they go oh okay that was a hoax that didn't really happen. And but think about it. You would probably have said that Charlottesville thing once it's debunked as an obvious hoax you probably said well it's not real so that's not going to affect anything in the real world. But it elected Biden. It actually changed the nature of our leadership of the biggest country in the world or the most powerful.

So yes the fact that this happened even though it looks like an op to me it wasn't Trump's fault per se.

Now I want to give you, you know I often compliment Mike Pence for being a clever politician who avoids getting in trouble. I want you to hear how cleverly he criticized Trump because he's really good at this. He wanted to criticize him clearly but not go too far into crazyville. Right? Crazyville says that Trump invited him like that that's too far. So I hope you're not going to see any Republicans you know buy into the part that he got invited. So Pence is too smart to fall into that part.

But here's how Pence, who we believe will run against Trump for president, Pence says, President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table blah blah. And I said again a seat at the table. Giving him a seat at the table. Is that not brilliant? That is brilliant for political criticism without being technically incorrect because giving somebody a seat at the table is conceptual. It's conceptual but it also makes you think of the real thing because at the same time there was a conceptual seat at the table there was actually a literal seat at the table. Pence is a genius. That is genius communication wise. I mean I don't think it's an accident that he was such a good vice president. His ability to parse words and pick just the right word that doesn't get him in trouble while still saying something is quite impressive. That is quite impressive. I don't prefer him for president but I just like you know credit where credit is due. That was really good.

Now you don't like it if you're supporting Trump. You don't like it because it's a pretty good hit. But a place at the table that gives them everything. That's just the perfect perfect criticism.

Now and I suppose the question is should Trump have you know gotten up and left but I don't believe Trump knew exactly who Fuentes was the entire dinner. Like I think he figured it out later but that he had a chance to disavow him. So here's my next question. Should Trump have disavowed Nick Fuentes? Go. Should Trump have disavowed Nick Fuentes? I'm seeing mixed messages. Here's why this is not an obvious question.

As a citizen of the United States I can disavow Nick Fuentes. I disavow him. There I just did it. So I think you'd all agree that citizens can disavow anybody, right? Just an ordinary citizen. Yeah we all have free speech. We can disavow anybody we want. But here's my question. If there's going to be one exception there's only one kind of person I want to not be criticizing citizens and it's the president. That's the only person I don't want to criticize a citizen who's obeying the law. This is an important caveat.

So given that Fuentes is obeying the law as far as I know he's not been accused of any law breaking as far as I know. So as long as he's a law-abiding person who just has ugly opinions in the opinion of many people I'm perfectly okay with a president whether it's Trump or anybody else, perfectly okay with the president criticizing behavior and opinions and ugly you know bad policy ideas but disavowing a person by name that's too far. That feels too far.

Now the exception would be a critic. So if a politician goes after somebody who's just been like dogging them forever like you know Rob Reiner or something you know if the president goes after Rob Reiner it's because that's somebody who's been going after him personally for a long time. That's fine. That's just politics. But to go after somebody who has not been criticizing you and only has opinions that you feel are vile, do you want your president to do that? And I say I do not want my president to be insulting any individual citizen with the obvious exception of Rosie O'Donnell. I think we could all agree that if it's Rosie O'Donnell that's fine. That's fine. But everybody else, everybody else no.

All right so I feel like this is a fine line but I think it's an important one. Now I think Trump did not disavow Fuentes' opinions and that's sort of a glaring thing that's missing but I think he could have parsed it. I think Trump could have said you know what if somebody's obeying the law and they have terrible opinions I'm still going to eat with them but I will disavow their opinions. If you'd like to hear that yes I disavow that opinion. That would work for me. That would work.

I say that censorship is the new voting. What do you say? Because we've got this big debate over whether Musk is improving free speech or making it worse, say his critics. But whichever way it is would you agree that the following is true? That censorship determines what narrative is the important one. Would you agree if you never see a competing narrative you latch on to the one that you see? So censorship determines what narrative rises to our attention, right? And the narrative would determine your opinion, right?

So that's how we get opinions. We don't really make opinions on our own. Opinions are essentially assigned to us by the way the narrative is presented to us. So the censorship determines the narrative. The narrative determines public opinion. Public opinion determines what the vote is because then we vote our opinions. So you've got the censorship determines the narrative. The narrative determines our public opinion. Our public opinion determines the vote. And that's it. That's our current system.

The current system is it's just a censorship game. The vote actually becomes a somewhat subsidiary downstream guaranteed effect that is guaranteed by what happens upstream, right? The vote is downstream from censorship. And I'm borrowing Andrew Breitbart's famous saying that politics is downstream from culture but the vote is downstream from censorship.

Now was this always the case? Has this always been our system? Because I don't think so. It feels like it's something that could evolve because of social media and the media landscape. And just in one comment I think it's I don't know who it's for but just says you it feels like it's for me but maybe not. Might have been for another commenter. But this battle over censorship and Twitter in particular because Twitter as you know is the lever that moves all the other media because it's the place that the media professionals go to find out what they can get away with. And if you can get away with it on Twitter then you can take it to the rest of the world. So this is the biggest battle because our political system is now basically down to what Twitter will allow you to see.

And I think it has been this way and I think that's what our last election came down to, what Twitter allowed people to see. Let me ask you this as many times as the Charlottesville fine people thing — I'm gonna get rid of this guy. As many times as the Charlottesville — why are you on here saying bad things Eddie? All right Eddie don't do that. I'm gonna turn off the locals. The locals I'm gonna keep the locals feed but I'm going to turn off the open part so it's going to be only for people who are subscribers because I think I got a troll over here. So when I turn off the open part it should get rid of the troll. So we'll do that. If you're on locals and you're not the troll go over to YouTube and you can watch it. Good. Boom.

All right so locals is now private for subscribers. But I'm not wrong, right? The battle over Twitter is our new political system because Twitter will determine what we think or what the journalists can get away with. And back to my earlier point if Musk had owned Twitter before could Biden have run on the fine people hoax and gotten away with it? I'm not sure. I don't think he could have because it was only because the Democrats were completely walled off from any hoax debunking. They just never saw it. And even the professionals never saw it. There are plenty of people in the professional reporting journalist field who actually believe the fine people, that the Charlottesville fine people hoax was a real thing that happened. They literally believe it happened. That's only because Twitter allowed them not to see the other side. So maybe that'll change. I don't know.

And certainly Twitter has completely changed who is visible. My visibility on Twitter went through the roof recently. I don't know if anybody's noticed. If you look at my Twitter feed the number of subscribers is climbing like crazy faster than ever before. And when I do even a medium quality tweet I get over a thousand likes and that would have been two hundred before Musk. So it's probably a 5x visibility difference for me now. You don't think the left was trying to suppress me? If they were trying to suppress me they weren't playing the right game. They should have been. They should have figured out who's making a difference, who could move the needle and focus on those people.

All right. Musk this is like the biggest story I don't know of since the pandemic I guess or maybe it's not as big as Ukraine but it's up there. That Musk is going to go full transparency. He's promised us that the public deserves to know what quote really happened at Twitte