Vivek Ramaswamy: belief

Transcript context

…Most people in tech companies are privately… Their political persuasion is on the left, and most journalists, majority of journalists, are on the left, but to characterize the actual reporting and the impact of the reporting in the media and the impact of the censorship is difficult to do, but that’s a real problem, just like we talked about a real problem in immigration. But there’s two different problems, I just want to sort them out, right? I have problem with both. You talked about two issues, and I think both are important, but they’re different issues. One is bias in reporting. One is censorship of information. So bias in reporting, I felt certainly, the recent presidential debate moderated by ABC was biased in the way that it was conducted, but that’s a different issue from saying that voters don’t get access to information through any source. So, this Hunter Biden laptop story, we now know that it contains evidence of foreign interference in potentially the Biden administration and their family’s incentive structure. That story was systematically suppressed. So, in the United States of America, if you wanted to find that on the internet through any major social media platform or through even Google search, that story was suppressed or downplayed algorithmically that you couldn’t see it. Even on Twitter, if you tried to send it via direct message, the equivalent of email, sending a peer-to-peer message, they blocked you from even being able to send that story using private messages. That is a different level of concern. That’s not bias at that point. That’s outright interference in the election. Let’s do a thought experiment here. Let’s suppose that Russia orchestrated that. What would the backlash be? Let’s say the Russian government orchestrated the US election. They interfered in it by saying that tech companies… They worked with them covertly to stop US citizens from being able to see information on the eve of an election. There would be a mass uproar in this country if the Russian government orchestrated that. Well, if actors in the US government bureaucracy or the US technology industry bureaucracy orchestrated the same thing, then we can’t apply a different standard to say that if Russia did it, it’s really bad and interfered in our election. But if it happened right here in the United States of America… And by the way, they blamed Russia for it, falsely, on the Russian disinformation of the Hunter Biden laptop story that was a false claim. We have to apply the same standard in both cases, and so the fact that if that were Russian interference, it would’ve been an outcry, but now it happened domestically, and we just call that, “Hey, it’s a little bit of bias ahead of an election.” I don’t think that that’s a fair characterization of how important that event was. Okay, so the connection of government to platform should not exist. The government, FBI, or anybody else should not be able to pressure platforms to censor information. Yes, we could talk about Pavel Durov and the censorship there. There should not be any censorship, and there should not be media bias, and you’re right to complain if there is media bias, and we can lay it out in the open and try to fix that system. That said, the voter fraud thing, you can’t right a wrong by doing another wrong. If there’s some shitty shady stuff going on in the media and the censorship complex, you can’t just make shit up. You can’t do the fake electors scheme, and then do a lot of shady, crappy behavior during January 6th and try to shortcut your way just because your friend is cheating at Monopoly when you’re playing Monopoly. You can’t cheat. You shouldn’t cheat yourself. You should be honest and with honor and use your platform to help fix the system versus cheat your way.…

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