Kent Heckenlively and Dave Rubin Talk “Big Tech Censorship!!”

And, they get right to the point…

By Kent Heckenlively, JD

Like Tim Bolen, I’ve been trying to figure out the next steps forward after the disaster our country has become since November 3, 2020. The quick answer is I needed to make a lot of new friends.

And quite honestly, it’s been very successful.

It has resulted in the writing of two new books, both being published in August.

The first is Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Expose of Big Tech Censorship, (August 3, 2021) cowritten with Zach Vorhies, the actual whistleblower at Google.

And Behind the Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship, (August 17, 2021) cowritten with Ryan Hartwig, the actual whistleblower at Facebook.

Along the way, Dennis and Susan Prager have become big fans of my work, and that led me to an interview with Dave Rubin, (the Rubin Report and author of Don’t Burn This Book) who has to be one of the nicest people on the planet. His staff is also extremely courteous and professional, some of the best people with whom I’ve ever interacted.

I believe there’s a convergence between those of us in the health freedom movement and conservatives who are finding their voices censored online. It’s time for all the various tribes to unite and fight the common enemies of freedom.

In that spirit I present my interview with Dave Rubin…

Kent: I thought you did an excellent job of framing the idea of “leftists and liberals” in your book, and that was helpful to explain to somebody like me on the right what’s going on. But I’m curious as to how effective that has been for the left. Do they like that formulation, or not?

Dave: The lefties of today, the modern 2021 lefties are not happy with somebody like me. They hate freedom as a general rule, they hate individual choice and your ability to think and all that. But what they really hate beyond that, which is a subset of hating freedom, is they hate people who leave leftism. They hate people who walk. And then they say, ‘maybe the lefties aren’t right about everything. Maybe the government isn’t the answer to all things. Maybe high taxes and high regulation cause more problems. Maybe big government programs like affirmative action don’t actually work.’

When you walk away from that, and you start questioning it, and it’s not like you’re suddenly saying I’m a libertarian, or I’m a conservative, or I’m a Trump supporter. Once you even question it in the most banal sort of way, they will lash out at you in ways that are really unimaginable. The mobbing on Twitter, the going after your job, all of the stuff that people know about. Because the left has become radically authoritarian. Which is actually the complete antithesis of liberalism. Today’s lefty, who wants the government to do absolutely everything, and make every decision for you, if you have to wear a mask, or when you can go to work, or when you can leave your house, or that your company has to pay somebody a fifteen dollar minimum wage or something, or whatever it might be, those are completely anti-liberal ideas.

The idea of liberalism in its truest sense is that you believe in individual autonomy, you believe in individual rights, you believe in logic and reason and the ability for a citizen to make a decision for themselves, with limited government intrusion. The left, they did something you almost need to admire, the way the doctor in the original Alien movie, admired the alien. He admired the brilliance of its evil.

And I think that’s kind of the way we have to look at the left. They have all the wrong ideas, but you have to sort of admire how they’ve infected the system, and how they’ve been able to destroy so much in such a short period of time.

Kent: Where do you think we are in this Big Tech censorship fight? Beginning, middle or end? I can’t really see an endpoint to it. I don’t think they’re going to put us in camps as some believe, but I wonder where they think this will go?

Dave: It’s a good question because we’re in a very strange time. At some level, we’re only at the adolescence of social media and technology. We’ve only had this stuff, walking around with phones in our pockets, for about twenty years. That’s a very, very short time. So, on one hand, we’re at the very early stages of it.

On the other hand, it seems like the glory days of the internet, the truly free internet, the golden age of the internet, that kind of seems like it’s over. We were all promised this incredible thing. But what we didn’t realize when they were giving us all this stuff for free, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., they were really using us as the product. Mining us for our habits and our data to sell us stuff, and manipulate us in ways so that w have no idea what’s really going on. Whether they were manipulating us politically or culturally or otherwise.

I’d say the stage we’re in right now is probably the most dangerous stage we could be in. Which is that so many people have woken up to how dangerous Big Tech is, so many people have woken up to how connected they are to the Democratic Party, so many people have woken up to how the mainstream media, the corporate press, covers for all of them, the question is how much longer can they leave all of us online?

It’s one thing that Alex Jones is booted, or that Donald Trump is booted, but now there are millions of people who are being red-pilled every day. When CNN shows you something that’s a lie, that’s complete nonsense, Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, the Covington kids are racist, Jussie Smollet was lynched, well, the truth eventually leaks out online in real time. And they can’t have that much longer. They need the lie to continue to have any authority. 

And the more that all of us can share videos of Fauci flip-flopping on masks, over and over again, the more we can expose their lies, it’s like how much longer are they going to leave us on-line? So, I think we’re in an extremely dangerous spot right now.

Kent: Can you talk about some of the ways you’ve been censored, or had your voice minimized?

Dave: First of all, it’s not exactly the ways we know that I’m concerned about. It’s all the things we don’t know. There’s no doubt that at times I’ve been shadow-banned on Twitter, which is when people just don’t see your tweets. Then suddenly out of nowhere, I’ll get hundreds of people saying, “Dave, I used to follow you. I used to see your tweets all the time and now I don’t see them.” Or suddenly out of nowhere you lose 50,000 followers, or people suddenly don’t see the stuff you’re putting out there, even though Twitter is supposed to be an open platform. You’re supposed to see a feed chronologically of who you follow.

For a long time we were demonetized on YouTube, virtually all of our videos at different times. That’s a soft censorship. Of course, demonetization is not a strict censorship, it’s not that they’re saying your video can’t be here. But it’s a soft censorship for two reasons. One, if they tell you that you can’t make money on this particular topic, well, then you’re going to start censoring yourself because you’re going to say I’ve got to make money. This is what I do for a living. It’s a business. I have employees. I have to pay these people. I can’t just keep putting out content that doesn’t make money. The other reason we know it’s a type of censorship is that we know once you’ve been flagged for demonetization, the algorithm doesn’t let your video get out there as much. 

Because they view that video as dangerous for whatever reason. So, we have no doubt that’s happened to us. I get people telling me they’re unsubscribed from my YouTube channel all the time, that my videos don’t show up in their feed, all sorts of these nonsensical games. I would say it’s not exactly the things I know they’re doing that worry me, but the other things, whether they’re just not showing my video in recommended searches, or whether if you click on a Dave Rubin video because you like Dave Rubin or something, whether all the suggested videos are going to be people attacking me or just they want to push people to other views so they decide who sees what and when they see it. That’s the dangerous stuff that people really don’t know what’s going on.

Kent: One of the ideas I’ve been playing around with is that tyrants in history generally fail when they try to take on too many enemies. It seems to me there’s a blindness with Big Tech because they’re choosing to go after conservatives, but they’re also choosing to go after regular people who want alternative health information about treatments such as hydroxy-chloroquine or ivermectin. Any thoughts about whether Big Tech is making too many enemies at this point?

Dave: There’s an expression that something is “too big to fail.” In some ways these companies have gotten “too big to succeed.” First off, nobody trusts them anymore. If you met somebody and you were having a casual conversation at a bar, and they said, “I think Google and Instagram and Twitter are trustworthy companies,” you would think they just escaped a mental institution. The ship has sailed in one way and we’ve seen behind the curtain and there’s the Wizard of Oz and instead of some big, scary green guy it’s just this little old man pulling levers.

I think the other part of it is that they’ve faked this thing too long, that these were open platforms. Anybody can be here and say what they want, as long as they don’t break the laws of the United States, we’re going to treat your information fairly. We know they’re not doing that. The people who are always silenced are conservatives, but it’s not always conservatives, but maybe if you just have some legitimate question about the election. 

But from 2016 to 2020 you were allowed to question that election endlessly. And you’d be promoted for it. You were allowed to say Donald Trump was an illegitimate president and you were lauded for it and they weren’t going to have any problem with you putting YouTube videos or tweets about that. Then, suddenly with this election, they got what they wanted and the didn’t want anybody to question the election.

Now you know you have a good chance of having your Twitter account deleted, or your YouTube channel deleted.  I had Donald Trump on my show, and he said, I think, thirty-seven seconds worth of stuff about the election. And we knew that if we played it, on my YouTube channel, there was a good chance that my YouTube channel would be deleted. We put sound bars over it and we sent people to the Locals platform, which is my tech company, and we don’t censor it there.

At this point I’d say that Big Tech is basically like the Titanic. It’s this giant ship, there’s this iceberg in front, but it’s too late for them to turn. And they’re going to hit that iceberg. And what I’d prefer to do is be in a ship that’s slimmer and trimmer and can make moves quickly, and building an internet with that concept in mind.

Kent: I’m curious, how successful has your Locals platform been and do you think that might break the current impasse?

Dave: Yeah, Locals has been incredibly successful. We’ve been in the midst of some major talks that I can’t go into specifically. But when you put the book out I could possibly give you some more information. But actually if you watch my Live-Stream on Friday we’re going to make one big announcement. However, I can tell you this, we’ve raised millions of dollars from extremely well-known Silicon Valley people who for a long time didn’t want to put money into tech alternatives because they thought it was too dangerous and too political.

But then after Parler’s servers exploded, after January 6th, everybody realized this isn’t just about banning people, this is about destroying companies. That really caused a lot of the investors to turn around and say that Locals or whatever the alternatives are, are really worth investing in. David Saxxe, who was once the CEO of Paypal, and he was in what they called the “Paypal mafia,” he’s one of our investors, and Joe Lonsdale, and Naval Ravikant and others and some big name people.

We’re working on as many of the problems as possible. And we’re trying to build a bottom-up internet and our growth has been spectacular. We built it all ourselves, we own it all, a hundred percent. We’ve done our due diligence and making sure we’re not completely reliant on Amazon, working on multiple payment processors. But I will be honest, there is no perfect system. And you can always take as many contingencies as possible, but this is like fighting the Matrix. We’re fighting a monster that can replicate and change the rules at any moment. 

And you have to just keep building. I will always believe in the ingenuity of the human mind, more than I believe in some system that is designed to control us.

Kent: You’ve been speaking a lot about Dr. Fauci and the lockdowns. What’s your best guess at this moment in 2021, about the integrity of Fauci and the lockdowns in general?

Dave: First of all, with the lockdowns, there is literally no science to prove at all, in any state, that the lockdowns worked. Period. I’m here in Los Angeles, CA, it’s eighty degrees, a sunny day out. I don’t know anybody that’s sick now. That’s not to say there aren’t some people who aren’t sick, but risk is like that. You might get hit by a car when you walk outside. In the old days you might have caught the flu. Now, apparently, nobody catches the flu anymore. Worldwide deaths in 2020 were very comparable to worldwide deaths in 2019. Lockdowns simply don’t work and if they did, then the numbers in California would have been so much better than the numbers in Florida. But the numbers were comparable, and depending to who you talk to, the numbers in Florida may have been far better. And Florida didn’t destroy its’ economy and ruin people’s lives and cause depression and all those other cascading effects.

I would say that most of our elite class has destroyed their own credibility.  I would prefer to trust these people. When Fauci first got on the TV and we all heard of him for the first time and it was two weeks to flatten the curve and do all of this and that, I was all about it. You can go back and watch my videos. I was like, okay, this is the guy who’s in charge, let’s follow him and see what happens. It’s a year and a half later and they’re telling us vaccinated people have to wear a mask. They’re never going to let go.

Because I think this is sort of the end of a society that’s become so secular, they believe in science more than they believe in anything else. If the science tells you to lock somebody in their house, that’s what they’ll do. Ironically, there isn’t even science to say that. But they love control. They love control. I would rather you just live your life. If you want to wear a mask, if you want to get vaccinated, that’s fine. Or if you want to live in your basement for the rest of your life with a plastic bag wrapped around your head, you can do that.

Kent: I want to make a comparison and see if this makes sense to you. In Big Tech, a lot of people talk about section 230 as the root of all this problem. Many people talk about the immunity laws that Big Pharma have for their vaccines, the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Bruesewitz vs. Wyeth Labs, which then threw all vaccines into this system where the companies are not liable, but the government is liable. Do you have any thoughts about that blanket immunity for Big Pharma and their vaccines?

Dave: Yeah, quickly on the section 230 thing, I think it’s a little bit of a catch-22 because we have to be careful of what we ask for. Because if we strip 230, which I understand the arguments for that, that clearly these are not platforms anymore, they’re publishers who are deciding what information is and isn’t seen. But if we strip them of section 230 protection and they’re suddenly liable for everything that’s on those sites, well, they may just start censoring more. The people who want less censorship may actually end up getting more.

As related to the vaccines, I mean, look, there’s just a massive accountability gap in the United States. It seems like if you’re Big Tech, or Big Pharma, or Big Government, you can do everything wrong, you can kill people, you can send sick people back into nursing homes, like Andrew Cuomo did, and there’s no accountability for anybody. It doesn’t fully make sense to me why these vaccine companies, these drug companies are completely exempt if we find out a year from now we find out that 1 percent of those who got the vaccines develop early blindness, or God only knows what? Why wouldn’t they be accountable? Everybody else is accountable in their own lives.

This is what people who outsource all of their mental capacity do. They end up creating structures that are much more powerful and yet, far less accountable than they are.

Kent: As a fellow Californian, what do you think about the state of the Governor’s race, with Gavin Newsom and Larry Elder?

Dave: Gavin Newsom should be banished into the netherworld and never heard from again. He’s actually the bad guy in a Disney movie at this point. Watch the movie Robots, he’s the villain and he looks like American Psycho.

Larry Elder is the only hope. That is very clear to me. I was glad to see in some recent polls that he is way ahead of all the other Republicans. Caitlyn Jenner was a joke, and it was a PR stunt from the beginning. She’s actually in Australia right now, shooting ‘Big Brother,’ so she’s not even pretending that well. I’d like to see over the course of the next six weeks or so, let’s get some of the Republicans to drop out, let’s get everybody to band together behind Larry Elder. He’s a good man, and he describes himself as a small “L” libertarian, but he’s kind of a libertarian conservative which I really think is the future of what American politics will be, a kind of center-right American politics.

And just to get that guy on stage with Newsom. He’s an incredible debater, he knows his facts, he has a great life story, he’d offer them a really tough flip on identity politics, and then hopefully we’ll never hear of Gavin Newsom again. Just go away. Go eat at the French Laundry every night because nobody likes you.

Kent: This is my wife’s question and it’s the last question for you. How “off-the-grid” do you go in August?

Dave: (Laughs.) I go completely off-the grid. Friday is my live-stream and I’ll be announcing my next book, and some Locals stuff that I mentioned earlier. Saturday we’re hopping a plane, my phone, my laptop, my computer will be put in a safe. I will not touch them until September 1st. We have a very short list of the ways in which people can reach out to us, so if there was some sort of family emergency or medical emergency, there’s a way for people to reach out to us.

But I do not pay attention to any news, I do not read the newspaper, I do not watch television. There could be a little bit of watching some movies, that kind of thing. And I have GPS in my car. I will be as “off-the-grid” as one can be in this modern world.

Kent: But you’ll be talking to people. What will you do if they start talking about the news?

Dave: I really don’t talk to people. One year, people would come up to me in the gym and they’d say, “Oh, Dave, come on, you’ve got your phone in your pocket.” Then I’d empty my pockets and I’d say, “No, I don’t have my phone in my pocket, there’s no headphones in. I’ve got nothing.” I really try to avoid people. We’re going out of the country for a portion of it and just relax on the beach for a while. Then for the rest of it I may just be home. We may have some friends over, but they’ll be aware. But I won’t be out and about. I’m not going to go to the mall where people might want to see me and say hi or something. It’s not perfect. Is it possible I might see something because there will be skywriting or something? Anything’s possible.

Kent: Dave, thank you so much.

Dave: Thank you, Kent.

With the formal part of the interview over…

I mentioned that with his interest in Big Tech I wanted to send him an advance copy of my book, Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Expose of Big Tech Censorship coauthored with Project Veritas whistleblower, Zach Vorhies, and coming out on August 3, 2021. He gave me his mailing address and the interview ended.

While at Freedom Fest I’d seen Dave Rubin deliver a talk to more than two thousand people, conduct a Q and A lunch session with about a hundred people, and with this phone interview, been able to talk to the man for about twenty minutes.

Let me echo what Dave’s millions of fan already say:

He’s an incredibly gracious, intelligent, and thought-provoking human being. I’d venture to say he’s one of the five most important people in our country today.

I’d like to imagine that Dave Rubin is now sitting on a tropical beach somewhere, reading Google Leaks. And yet there’s another part of me that hopes he’s not. The fight against Big Tech will still be going on when he rejoins this petty world on September 1.

Sometimes the human mind just needs to rest, so it can be ready for the battles ahead. Dave Rubin has earned his month away from the circus.

By Kent Heckenlively, JD