ALI ALEXANDER ("STOP THE STEAL" ORGANIZER): A lot of folks who don't know will have to understand that in 2017, I started doing some streams on Periscope. I was one of the kings of Periscope, by the way, if you don't know me. And my live streams about race, in particular talking about the difference between white supremacy, white nationalism, and white identitarianism, and also black separatism and black identitarianism. And, you know, the problems that we were actually facing and the problems that the media were saying that we were facing, I did a whole series on that probably in the summer, in the early fall of 2017, I believe it was. And that caught the attention of some very influential people in culture. And so people in the music industry and people in Silicon Valley who were traditionally on the left started becoming viewers of mine. And that was really interesting and humbling. And one of the people who reached out to me was Jack Dorsey. And so we began conversations and it was really interesting. Jack actually discovered my work through a mutual friend and another very influential person, and we began having conversations about race. And so he was very open-minded about having these conversations.
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And so that is to say that, you know, we had some very great conversations and I've had great conversations with a lot of celebrities on race relations. And so that is how that initial stuff sorted itself out. The other thing that happened is that the mutual friend between Jack Dorsey and I had pointed Jack to a editorial essay that I wrote on Medium.com and Medium.com I wrote about how Twitter had changed. I've been on Twitter since May, I think, of 2007. I'm an early adopter of Twitter. I was one of the first four political operatives on Twitter. A lot of the reason why Republicans are on Twitter is literally because of me. And that's a whole history. And I had written this screed slamming Jack Dorsey and slamming Twitter and pointing out that they were killing Twitter year by year, and that it was a disservice, they were dishonest. And I not only complained from the conservative perspective, I just pointed out, you know, from a market perspective, what they were doing in limiting their options and, frankly, not doing really well with their fiduciary duty. And I also talked about the origins of Black Twitter, the origins of TCOT, or conservative Twitter.
So anyway, why am I giving you all these details? I'm giving you these details to understand why I had a relationship with Jack Dorsey in the first place and what positioned me to start behind the scenes on giving Twitter the conservative perspective. Any time they would roll out a new feature in 2018 and 2019 and 2020, I pushed back, representing the conservatives, and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to inform the CEO as to what our perspectives were. And then sometimes we got that mitigated.
So very famously, The Wall Street Journal did an article where they were examining the internal conflict in Twitter between Jack and some of his executives. And the executives have planted stories against Jack. And in an attempt to force his hand on some things, the executives — most of them, not all of them — hated the fact that Jack talked to me, because not only did Jack talk to me, Jack put me on the phone with other Twitter executives. And some of these details I'm sharing with you all for the first time, or I'm sharing with the public for the first time, but some of it has already been chronicled in The Wall Street Journal.
And so very famously, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the reason why it took so long to ban Alex Jones on Twitter because I was intervening. And so I intervened and prevented Infowars and Alex Jones from being deplatformed for a very long time through offering the conservative perspective, offering the perspective of — so I'm not a free speech absolutist. A lot of people think I am. I'm actually not. But I'm more pro-free speech than anti-censorship. And all of this, like I said, it's verified in The Wall Street Journal. So then Jack's staff got super angry. So anyway, all of that is to say that I know a lot about Twitter. I know about stuff about Twitter that journalists don't know. I know stuff about Twitter, how it internally works. I know a lot about Twitter. And so, you know, some random conservative pundit, you know, being for the Twitter deal is very different than, you know, Ali being for the Twitter deal because my opinion matters.
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I also prevented Gavin McInnes, I also prevented Gavin McInnes from being banned initially. So, you know, my street cred is undeniable and I've been radically pro-the Twitter privatization deal, frankly, that would not have happened without some of the work that I've done in the universe. So without a "Stop the Steal" movement, without a January 6, there would be no banning of the president during his term. So that's good, that's bad, I say Romans 828. But there would be no Twitter privatization deal without January 6. It's just a fact.