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Oct. 15, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:12

Facebook and Twitter Just Ushered In The Most Dangerous Political Moment In Memory | Ep. 1116

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	After the New York Post runs a bombshell story about Hunter Biden brokering a meeting between a Ukrainian oligarch and Joe Biden, Facebook and Twitter crack down on the story.
	We examine our intrepid journalists who continuously cheer censorship, and Amy Coney Barrett moves one step closer to confirmation.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	My savvy fans secure their internet.
	Join them at expressvpn.com.
	By the way, one of the reasons you should secure your internet is that social media giants cannot control the information that you see and hear as easily.
	And that is the topic.
	Of today's show.
	I mean, this is unbelievable.
	Unbelievable.
	So yesterday, late morning, early afternoon, the New York Post breaks a story about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
	And essentially the story is this.
	Hunter Biden, who is in fact a crackhead.
	I mean, he is a drug addict.
	He's an unsavory character.
	He has several, he has had many affairs with various different Women, he's a mess.
	Hunter Biden is just a mess.
	He's a mess of a human being.
	And that's not Joe's fault, per se.
	I mean, there are lots of good parents who have messes for children.
	But it is Joe's fault that Joe has allowed Hunter Biden to run across the world picking up sacks of cash by trading on his last name.
	And that is what Hunter Biden has been doing for years.
	He picked up sacks of cash in China.
	He picked up sacks of cash in Ukraine.
	And for a long time, conservatives have been focused in on Hunter Biden's activities with regard to Burisma.
	Now, the original narrative with regard to Burisma is Burisma is a natural gas and oil company In Ukraine, Hunter Biden was sitting on the board of that company and picking up checks for $50,000 a month, despite the fact that he didn't know anything about natural gas or oil, despite the fact that he himself was a personal mess.
	The only reason he was on that board is because he was related to Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden was then the vice president of the United States and largely in charge of Ukrainian policy.
	Well, Joe Biden then bragged on tape about getting one of the chief prosecutors over in Ukraine fired.
	He threatened to withhold $1 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine until they fired this guy.
	Joe Biden always claimed that it had nothing to do with Hunter.
	And this prosecutor claims that he was about to investigate Burisma.
	That was the company Hunter was working for.
	The chain has never quite been made.
	So there's a lot of controversy over whether Victor Shokin, who was that prosecutor, was actually going to prosecute Burisma.
	There was indeed a lot of focus on Viktor Shokin as a possible corrupt figure inside Ukraine.
	A lot of people in Europe wanted to see Viktor Shokin go as the chief prosecutor in Ukraine.
	Biden has always claimed that his firing of Viktor Shokin was on the up and up.
	Shokin has always claimed that it was corrupt.
	That controversy has been out there for quite a while.
	What is unchallenged is that Joe Biden's family members, ranging from his brother to his son, use his name in order to make money for themselves.
	And that does have an element of corruption to it.
	Now, the best that you can say about it is that Joe Biden turned a blind eye to it, right?
	And this is sort of what Joe has argued.
	Joe Biden has said, well, I didn't know about it.
	Nobody ever did anything.
	Nobody ever did anything, man.
	Nobody.
	Come on, man.
	Come on.
	I never knew.
	No, come on.
	OK, so here is the bombshell.
	Yesterday, the New York Post reports that Hunter Biden actually brokered a meeting between a Ukrainian oligarch who was a Burisma chief member and Joe Biden directly.
	That's what one of these emails tended to suggest.
	So here's the story from the New York Post. Hunter Biden introduced his father, then Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company according to emails obtained by the Post. The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadim Posharsky, an advisor to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17th, 2015, about a
	year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to 50 grand a month.
	The email reads, Dear Hunter, Thank you for inviting me to D.C.
	and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spend some time together.
	It's really an honor and a pleasure.
	An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Posharsky, reportedly Berezman's number three exec, asking Hunter for advice on how you could use your influence on the company's behalf.
	The blockbuster correspondence, as the New York Post reports, flies in the face of Joe Biden's claim that he has never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
	It's contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.
	The computer was dropped off, apparently, at a repair shop in Biden's home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store's owner.
	Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who's admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.
	The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.
	The shop owner couldn't positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said that the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter's late brother and former Delaware Attorney General.
	Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to the Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop's owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.
	Before turning over the gear, according to the shop owner, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, Barbara Costello.
	Steve Bannon, the former advisor to President Trump, told the Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September.
	Giuliani provided the Post with a copy of it on Sunday.
	If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting money.
	Hunter Biden for the introduction to his dad, the then vice president admittedly pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk into getting rid of prosecutor general Victor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip to Kiev.
	Biden infamously bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations, I looked at them and said, I'm leaving in six hours.
	If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting money.
	Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.
	And so it is not necessary to actually believe that Joe Biden got Shokin fired to protect his son in order to recognize that Joe Biden taking meetings with people that his son is picking up bags of cash from who have influence in areas over which Joe Biden had influence.
	That is not a good look.
	It may not be illegal, but it is certainly corrupt.
	Pete Rose didn't have to bet on his own team in order for it to be a bad thing that he was betting on baseball.
	The Clinton Foundation did not actually have to manifest in Hillary Clinton doing things for the various countries who were sending cash to the Clinton Foundation.
	The fact that they had access to her was the corruption.
	Shoken has said that at the time of his firing in March 2016, he'd made specific plans to investigate Burisma that included interrogations and other crime investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.
	Biden has insisted the U.S.
	wanted Shoken removed over corruption concerns, which were shared by the European Union.
	So as early as 2014, the emails show that this top person at Burisma was urging Hunter Biden to use political leverage to help the company.
	OK, so that was the story.
	OK, and it's a story.
	I mean, it's certainly a story that Joe Biden apparently.
	Met with or was planning to meet with this Burisma executive on behalf of Hunter Biden.
	So that Hunter could continue to traffic with daddy's name.
	So the Biden campaign released a statement via Andrew Bates, their spokesman.
	They said investigations led by the press during impeachment and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as not legitimate and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath. The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of the story.
	They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani, whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported, claimed to have such materials.
	Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time in no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.
	Okay, so that is a very carefully worded statement.
	The reason it's a very carefully worded statement is it says that it's not on the calendar.
	Okay, well, lots of meetings happen between people that are in fact not on the calendar.
	Furthermore, I do enjoy it when Democrats start complaining and whining about Russian disinformation, when they literally trafficked in Russian disinformation for three long years, culminating in an impeachment attempt against Donald Trump.
	Okay, the fact is that the Mueller report was largely predicated on the Steele dossier, which was a piece of Russian disinformation that was not only bought into, it was overtly trafficked by the Hillary Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS to the Intel community.
	This is unchallenged.
	So don't lecture us about Russian disinformation when the fact is the Democrats were perfectly willing to accept Russian disinformation and then jabber on about how Trump was on tape asking people to pee on him and such.
	That just doesn't work.
	So it's a very carefully worded denial from Joe Biden.
	And then as it turns out, the denial doesn't actually mean anything.
	Because a little bit later in the day, Politico reported, quote, So now they're admitting, oh yeah, by the way, the meeting could have happened.
	former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pazarskii, which wouldn't appear on Biden's official schedule.
	They said any encounter would have been cursory.
	Pazarskii did not respond to a request for comment.
	So now they're admitting, oh yeah, by the way, the meeting could have happened.
	At no point anywhere in here, at no point, is there a denial that the emails are real, that the emails are legit?
	That they were written by Hunter Biden or by Pujarskii.
	At no point does the Biden campaign actually deny a material fact of the report other than continuing to deny that Biden got this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, fired in order to protect Hunter and Burisma.
	That is the only part of the story that they've denied.
	They've not denied any of the surrounding circumstances.
	They've not denied that a meeting took place.
	They've not denied that the emails about the meeting are real.
	So the story is real.
	Okay, the story is correct.
	And Senate Republicans immediately announced that they would launch an investigation into all of this.
	We'll get into that in one second.
	It turns out that the big story here is not, in fact, this Hunter Biden story.
	The big story is how our social media betters have decided there's information you should not see and you should not hear.
	And they are doing it on a purely political basis.
	There is no question about this.
	I've been a big defender of freedom of the internet.
	I've been a big defender against using legislation to crack down on social media companies.
	It makes it very difficult for conservatives to defend a laissez-faire view of Facebook and Twitter and various other social media companies when they act as overt organs of the Democratic Party and involve themselves in censorship of mainstream media outlets like the New York Post because they don't like the story.
	It makes it almost impossible I don't think legislation is the proper answer to this question.
	I don't think the government overseeing Facebook and Twitter and controlling what they can do is the answer, but I sure as hell don't trust the people who are in charge over there if this is the kind of activity in which they're going to engage.
	This is egregious, okay?
	That's the actual story here.
	So the Hunter Biden story, that's bad, but it's just the predicate to the actual story here, which is the attempt to stop you, the American people, from being able to access information that you want.
	In an overt attempt to stop you from seeing bad information about Joe Biden in the three weeks running up to the election.
	That's madness.
	That's madness.
	These social media companies who purport to be platforms rather than publishers are now in the business of censoring content they do not like.
	Not on the basis of any neutral application of rules, but on the basis of absolutely non-neutral application of rules.
	We'll get to this in one second.
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	and 15% off your first month by going to fubotv.com slash ben. There are no contracts, you can cancel anytime. Go to fubotv.com slash ben for 15% off your first month and a free trial.
	Again, that's fubotv.com slash ben, f-u-b-o-t-v.com slash ben. I've been using FuboTV, it's fantastic. And again, it's going to cost you way less than cable. So just cut that cord and get involved over at fubotv.com slash ben to get 15% off your first month. Okay, so the Senate committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee is now announcing an investigation of According to the Censorsquare, U.S.
	Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the committee will now be investigating newly released emails published by the New York Post that purport to reveal that Hunter Biden introduced his dad, Joe Biden, while he was VP of the United States, to an executive at Ukrainian gas firm Burisma.
	The emails contradict claims Joe has repeatedly made to the media.
	Johnson told Fox News the committee was in contact with the source of the emails, quote, although we consider those communications to be confidential because the individual in this instance spoke with the media about his contact with the committee, we can confirm receipt of his email complaint, have been in contact with the whistleblower and are in the process of validating the information he provided.
	About two weeks ago, the Senate Committee announced the findings of a year-long investigation into Hunter Biden after Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa raised concerns about alleged corruption linking Hunter Biden to millions of dollars in transactions taking place between Burisma Holding, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, and Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing's communist government.
	Joe Biden has repeatedly said he knew nothing about any of this.
	It is all brand new to him.
	He did not know anything about any of this.
	And then as it turns out, well, not so much.
	Okay, so the underlying issue is again an issue of corruption.
	The appearance of corruption is certainly there when the Vice President of the United States with power over Ukraine policy is meeting with Ukrainian oligarchs in charge of natural oil and gas companies at the behest of his son who is picking up bags of cash in Ukraine from that company.
	That does not look good.
	Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana, he pointed this out last night on Fox News.
	President Obama put Vice President Biden in charge of America's foreign affairs with two countries, Ukraine and China.
	And in both cases, his son, Mr. Hunter Biden, walked away with millions of dollars of contracts.
	I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but I'm telling you this.
	This is the message it sent to the rest of the world.
	The foreign policy of the United States of America can be bought like a sack of potatoes.
	Okay, that is the impression that is put out there in the same way that the Clinton Foundation, which was receiving bags and bags and bags of cash from foreign sources during the years when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and then all the funding magically dried up the minute she was no longer Secretary of State.
	Gives that same appearance of generalized corruption.
	Okay, but that's not the real story here.
	It isn't.
	The real story here is the social media reaction to this.
	I have never seen anything remotely like this.
	I've been highly critical of Twitter in particular for censoring material, for booting people, for using fake fact checks in order to target particular stories and particular tweets, particularly from Trump.
	I've been extremely critical of Facebook and their use of outside fact checkers.
	I did an entire episode on this just a couple of weeks ago, when Facebook used outside fact checkers to take down two separate ads that were both true.
	One claiming that Joe Biden was going to raise your taxes, and the other claiming that the Equality Act would make it impossible for there to be separate male and female sports, if taken literally.
	OK, the Facebook took both of those down based on garbage fact checks from a garbage leftist fact checking site called PolitiFact.
	So Facebook has been attempting to remove itself from the business of determining what material should be up or down.
	Instead, they outsourced it to a bunch of outside fact checkers who all Virtually all of whom happen to be left-wing fact-checkers who have no interest in actually checking facts.
	Instead, what they do is they will take a statement that is perfectly true from a conservative, and they will fact-check the implications, quote-unquote implications, things that nobody said, and then they will declare that a perfectly true statement is false.
	And then Facebook will censor the material based on the outside fact checkers.
	Facebook has also set up a group, it's supposed to be a panel, like an appeals board on this sort of stuff, but that appeals board has not gone into place yet, so we have no idea how that appeals board will rule on particular cases.
	So Facebook has been deliberately attempting to take itself out of the business of being directly responsible for censorship by trying to outsource it to various fact-checking groups.
	Yesterday, the mask came completely off, completely off for Facebook, and Twitter never had a mask.
	And so Twitter basically just decided, okay, well, you know what?
	We don't like this story about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
	It doesn't matter that we have yet to find an element of the story that is overtly not true.
	None of that matters.
	The only thing that matters is that this story cannot go out.
	It cannot go out.
	So Twitter decided that they were going to censor the story.
	So did Facebook.
	They both made it impossible to distribute the link.
	You literally, on Twitter, you literally could not link the New York Post story.
	If you tried to tweet out a link of the New York Post story, a warning would come up.
	If you did tweet out the New York Post story, they suspended your account.
	The New York Post main Twitter account was suspended.
	It was suspended.
	You couldn't tweet from the New York Post Twitter account because of this story.
	Kayleigh McEnany, the White House Press Secretary, had her Twitter account suspended for tweeting out information from the New York Post story.
	I mean, this is crazy talent.
	This is a mainstream media.
	But New York Post is a very mainstream publication.
	It is.
	Nothing in the story is less well-sourced than a bevy of other stories the mainstream media have run with that are anti-Trump.
	Does not matter.
	Both Facebook and Twitter cracked down on it and made it impossible to distribute the story.
	That's an unbelievable breach of whatever Twitter and Facebook were supposed to be.
	If again, the idea is that these are platforms and that their job is to provide an open forum for people to disseminate information, particularly if the information is not overtly false.
	I mean, again, this is prior to any fact check.
	The emails are real.
	The allegations in that Hunter Biden story, whether you think they're serious or not, is of secondary concern.
	The bottom line is this.
	It appears that Facebook and Twitter were so concerned with the ramifications of a bad story going out about Hunter and Joe Biden based on leaked emails, That they shut down the entire story.
	And there's only one reason for that.
	The only reason for that is because the leftists at Facebook and the leftists at Twitter and the leftists in the journalistic establishment have decided that it is time to shut down the dissemination of information they do not like.
	Okay, this is a threat to the Republic.
	I don't think Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are a threat to the Republic.
	I do think that social media becoming a tool of one side to the extent that they are now openly censoring what material can be disseminated.
	Informational journalism.
	They're shutting it down.
	You want to talk to me about Trump being a threat to the press?
	Trump isn't one iota the threat to the press that social media are when they decide that you cannot publish a story that reflects negatively on Joe Biden.
	That's insanity.
	Perfect insanity.
	People should be leaving these services in droves if these are the standards that are going to be put forth by these social media companies.
	Again, I've been very hesitant to talk about Big Tech as sort of a monolithic leftist entity.
	Well, yesterday they acted as a monolithic leftist entity without any attempt to pretend that they were enforcing anything remotely resembling a neutral rule.
	That's madness.
	We'll get to more of this in one second.
	I'm enraged by this, and you should be enraged by this too.
	Honestly, left, right, or center, you should be enraged by the idea that these social media companies will literally stop the dissemination of a story because they don't like the story.
	Not because of any underlying reason.
	Because they don't like the story, therefore you cannot disseminate the story.
	And they particularly don't like the story because they are afraid that if Joe Biden were to see that story disseminated on Facebook, that maybe Joe Biden and his Democratic friends might regulate Facebook.
	This is exactly the accusation that the left has been making about Trump and companies like Facebook.
	Because Trump has had conversations with Mark Zuckerberg.
	That Zuckerberg was somehow biasing the algorithm at Facebook to benefit Trump.
	This is all part of the leftist bullcrap narrative that they pushed in 2016 after Hillary Clinton, a horrible candidate, lost to maybe the most unpopular candidate of all time, Donald Trump.
	They pushed a narrative that it was because Facebook, taken over by Russian bots, had somehow changed the outcome of the election.
	And then they decided to pressure Facebook into changing its policies.
	So basically, these social media companies are so afraid of Democrats that they will voluntarily do what Democrats want so Democrats don't come after them.
	This is a blackmail routine by Democrats against social media.
	It's an inside-outside job because so many members of the media love Facebook-censoring material.
	And is Facebook an inside job and Twitter of an inside job when top Democrats at these places decide that it is time to shut down material?
	There's a baseline agreement between Democrats, the social media bros, and the journalists, all of whom are lying to you about their true agenda.
	None of them apparently care about freedom of the press, particularly the journalists.
	It's astonishing.
	It's astonishing how little journalists care about freedom of the press.
	I mean, they really don't care about it.
	They hate it, in fact.
	They would love to see, many of them, free speech cracked down upon by social media in the name of their actual principles, which are of the left.
	I'll bring you the details on this in just one second, because it's horrifying.
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	Okay, so here is what happened in detail.
	So, Twitter.
	Okay, they said that in line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links of, or images to, the material in question on Twitter, is what a Twitter spokesperson told National Review.
	Twitter's Hacked Materials Policy states it does not permit the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets.
	Okay, so let's just be straight.
	The New York Post reports that there is a laptop, Hunter Biden, who is a dope addict, okay?
	WikiLeaks to be shared.
	The platform said the policy applied in this case due to concerns about the lack of authoritative reporting in regards to the origins of the material.
	OK, so let's just be straight.
	The New York Post reports that there is a laptop, Hunter Biden, who is a who is a dope addict.
	OK, Hunter Biden, who is a drug addict and a and a derelict, left his computer at this computer repair store, according to the New York Post.
	He never picked it up.
	It was filled with all sorts of stuff.
	The guy opened up the computer.
	He saw all this foreign material.
	Apparently he called it into the FBI.
	He made a copy of it because he seems to be something of a conspiracy theorist.
	And then he handed it over to Rudy Giuliani.
	Right?
	That seems to be the way that this got to the New York Post.
	But according to Twitter, they suspect that this is actually Russian disinformation, that it was hacked material by the Russians handed over.
	So a couple of things.
	One, since when has Russian disinformation been banned?
	Seriously, from Twitter, Russian disinformation is not banned from Twitter.
	The entire Russian collusion scandal was essentially Russian.
	The Christopher Steele dossier was all Russian disinformation.
	Did Twitter take down a single story on it?
	How about the idea that Twitter takes down hacked material?
	Really, how much hacked material did they take down from like Edward Snowden or WikiLeaks?
	The answer is none.
	They didn't take down any of that stuff.
	So this is just crap.
	By the way, Twitter's policy is even broader than that.
	First of all, when they say there's a lack of authoritative reporting, based on what?
	Based on what lack of authoritative reporting?
	Again, the thing had not been fact checked yet.
	It's not as though there was a fact check of the story and people said, OK, well, this story is falling apart.
	And so Twitter took it down.
	Instead, preemptively, Twitter took it down and banned you from disseminating the article.
	So let's just be straight about this.
	A month and a half ago, there was a story from the Atlantic claiming that Donald Trump routinely went around to military cemeteries and said bad things about dead soldiers.
	It turns out that every element of that story fell apart.
	There were people on the record denying the story.
	Every source in that story was unnamed.
	Every element of that story, so far as I'm aware, has now been debunked by people who are on site.
	Okay, there is yet to be a single main source in that story.
	Not one link from the Atlantic was removed on that basis.
	You know how many stories we've seen like that?
	How many links went out there about how the Russians were paying Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers and Trump was ignoring it?
	And then it turned out that that story kind of fell apart.
	Did any of those links come down?
	No, not one of those links came down.
	Okay, so there's no neutral standard here.
	This is just a bunch of crap.
	It's just a bunch of crap.
	Twitter originally suggested, not kidding, that their rationale here was hacking.
	There is no evidence that the thing was hacked in the first place.
	Again, the story in the New York Post suggests it was not about hacking.
	The story in the New York Post suggests that it was a laptop that was physically turned over to Rudy Giuliani and to the FBI.
	Okay, so then, later in the day, Twitter tried to release a second explanation.
	Here was their second explanation.
	We want to provide much needed clarity around the actions we've taken with respect to two New York Post articles that were first tweeted this morning.
	The images contained in the articles include personal and private information, like email addresses and phone numbers, which violate our rules.
	Okay, no, this is not correct.
	People disseminated those images all day yesterday on Twitter.
	Their accounts were not taken down.
	The link was blocked.
	And here's where it gets good.
	As noted this morning, we also currently view materials included in the articles as violation of our hacked materials policies.
	Commentary on or discussion about hacked materials, such as articles that cover them, but do not include or link to the materials themselves, aren't a violation of this policy.
	Our policy only covers links to or images of hacked materials themselves.
	Again, there is no evidence at this point that this is hacked material.
	Hunter Biden is an idiot, so he left a laptop at a computer repair store.
	Beyond that, Okay, so then it gets even worse.
	Okay, you ready?
	Here's where it gets wild.
	Twitter says, The policy, established in 2018, prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization.
	We don't want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials.
	Okay, here's where we are off the rails now.
	Okay, hacking is a very specific charge, which is that somebody illegally violated the law, they hacked into your computer, they took materials, Twitter doesn't want that distributed.
	Forget about the fact they have not evenly applied this policy, obviously.
	They literally say that their policy prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization.
	Hmm, let's see.
	Can we think of a story in which content was obtained and distributed without authorization?
	Can we think of Twitter in the past having distributed those sorts of stories and played them up?
	What if I told you that like a week and a half ago, Twitter went buck naked crazy on the Trump tax returns?
	How do you think those came out?
	Do you think Trump just decided to release those?
	Do you think an authorized person decided to release those?
	How exactly did those materials come out?
	I mean, I'm told by Twitter that they prohibit the use of their service to distribute content obtained without authorization.
	Who authorized the release of those materials?
	Anybody?
	Anybody?
	Bueller?
	Bueller?
	Okay, I can name a half dozen stories off the top of my head in which Twitter allowed distribution and not only allowed the distribution, pushed the distribution.
	Right?
	Propped it up on their Twitter trends.
	I'm old enough to remember when there was this tape of Mitt Romney talking about 47% of Americans who wouldn't vote for him.
	That was tape that was not authorized.
	It was Jimmy Carter's grandson who took a tape of it.
	Was that authorized material?
	Had Mitt Romney authorized the release of that material?
	How about pictures that are not authorized of people who have not given their permission?
	That's every public photo in a public place.
	This is insane.
	This has nothing to do with a neutral policy.
	Nothing to do.
	I mean, it's a clown show.
	A total ridiculous clown show.
	So Trump's tax returns, apparently, that's authorized.
	That's all authorization.
	But, you know, but this was completely unauthorized.
	Crazy.
	Crazy.
	Okay, so how does Jack, Jack Dorsey, dumbass head of Twitter, guy who donated $10 million to Ibram Kendi so that he could feel not racist while getting bit by mosquitoes in Malaysia or something, how does Jack Dorsey respond to this?
	Quote, And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we're blocking is unacceptable.
	The problem is not your communication strategy.
	The problem is that you blocked the material without any actual rationale as to why you would block this material as opposed to any other leaked material.
	Virtually every major story is an unauthorized leak of information.
	Every bombshell story is an unauthorized leak.
	How many authorized leaks have there been from the federal government in the recent past?
	Every story involving Andrew McCabe leaking to the Wall Street Journal, which, as it turns out, got his pension canceled, I believe.
	Those stories were not taken down by Twitter.
	Every unauthorized leak from the Mueller probe, were any of those taken down by Twitter?
	Of course not.
	There's only one story that has been overtly banned by Twitter, and that is a story involving Hunter and Joe Biden.
	Hmm.
	I wonder why it could be that.
	Why is it that Trump's tax returns, perfectly, they were authorized.
	Now I'm to believe that they were authorized.
	Okay, Twitter is a leftist garbage heap.
	You should go check out Parler today.
	Parler is a good alternative to Twitter.
	It is not going to ban people or informational dissemination based on pure political content.
	Go check out Parler today.
	It's run by a bunch of my friends and colleagues.
	Worth establishing an account.
	It wasn't just Twitter.
	It was also Facebook.
	And Facebook's standard is even more insane.
	Even crazier.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so it's not just Twitter.
	Facebook also did this.
	Facebook censored this and downgraded it.
	Before a fact check, before a fact check, they didn't wait for their vaunted outside fact checkers to fact check the story.
	They preemptively prevented you from disseminating the story.
	Andy Stone, who is a former Democratic operative, he now works in a high level over at Facebook, he tweeted this out yesterday, very early yesterday morning, quote, while I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners.
	In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
	That's insane.
	That's crazy!
	Okay, so go back to that first tweet for a second, because we've got to break this down.
	So their new standard is, if Andy Stone doesn't like it at Facebook, they will preemptively ban the distribution of the information, waiting for a fact checker to do their dirty work and call the thing false.
	That's nuts.
	It has not been fact-checked yet.
	The story came out that morning.
	He literally says that the story is eligible to be fact-checked.
	Every story is eligible to be fact-checked on Facebook.
	Every one of the Daily Wire stories is fact-checked basically by PolitiFact, and half of them are lied about overtly by PolitiFact.
	Again, it is a sin for Facebook to outsource its fact-checking to overtly political sites like PolitiFact.
	They purport to be Non leftists.
	They are leftists in the extreme.
	But that's not even that's not even what this is.
	This isn't that they outsourced a fact check of a true statement to a leftist source who declared it false.
	This is we didn't even bother to wait for the fact checkers.
	We are banning the story before it is fact checked.
	Why?
	Because Andy Stone and the Democrats are suspicious of a story that makes Joe Biden look bad.
	He refers to the Facebook policy there, right?
	He says, well, you know, this is in line with our normal Facebook policy, which is that we will reduce distribution of a story pending a fact check.
	Here's the actual Facebook policy.
	Quote, we're working to take faster action to prevent misinformation from going viral, especially given that quality reporting and fact checking takes time.
	In many countries, including in the US, if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third party fact checker.
	What were the signals that this piece of content is false?
	Any?
	Really, what?
	I have yet to hear a single aspect of the core story debunked.
	The Washington Post hilariously tried to debunk something that actually is not the core element of the story.
	They say, well, you know, there's no evidence that Joe Biden actually got Victor Shokin fired in order to protect Hunter.
	That is not the core element of the story.
	The core element of the story is the emails in the meeting.
	None of that was debunked.
	Not a word of it.
	So what was Facebook's preliminary information signaling that the piece of content was false?
	What, that Biden denied it?
	Because Trump has denied a thousand stories that Facebook has not preliminarily taken down.
	This happens all the time.
	Every single day, there's a story in which the New York Times reports something that the Trump administration says is false.
	Has Facebook ever once preemptively removed the link or downgraded the distribution?
	Of course not.
	Of course not.
	It's perfectly obvious what happened here.
	Democrats decided they didn't like the story.
	Democrats in social media decided that they didn't like the story.
	And journalists cheered.
	This is the part that's maybe the most sickening of all, is that our journalistic establishment is very much in favor of censorship.
	They love it.
	They love it.
	They think that Trump is a threat to the Republic.
	They think Trump is a threat to the press.
	The press is a threat to the press.
	Our journalistic betters are a threat to the press.
	It's jackasses and morons like Kara Swisher at the New York Times, or Kevin Roos at the New York Times, or Charlie Warzel at the New York Times, who spend each and every day trying to not-so-subtly urge social media to crack down on dissemination of any information that they personally do not like.
	There is a reason that Ben Rhodes, a man who overtly acknowledges that he created a journalistic echo chamber to promote falsehoods about his Iran deal, He tweeted out, I have a question.
	What says that this is disinformation?
	What?
	There's no information here.
	unchecked demonstrates why you should not be able to spread this information unchecked. They know they have no political viability without the capacity to spread lies. I have a question. What says that this is disinformation? What?
	There's no information here. What Ben Rhodes means is information I don't like is disinformation and it should not spread unchecked and therefore I want all of this shut down. And it was not just Ben Rhodes.
	It was a bunch of journalists.
	It was Charlie Warzel at the New York Times yesterday.
	Well, you know, just because there's a freedom of the press to print doesn't mean there should be freedom of distribution.
	Doesn't mean we should let the social media do all this stuff.
	There are a couple of underlying factors here.
	One, members of the press are generally of the left.
	They do not want people Who are of the right to have the ability to distribute their material.
	There have been 1,000 stories about how my outlet, The Daily Wire, is successful on social media, on Twitter, on Facebook.
	And the implication is, of course, that we are doing something deeply corrupt with Facebook.
	We're currently being downgraded by Facebook on a bullcrap fact check, okay?
	So that's not true.
	Beyond that, the basic notion, which is that the right wing is being specifically pulled out and chosen by Facebook, that is a lie.
	They know it is a lie.
	They continue to promote the lie anyway.
	The media keeps saying over and over and over that engagement on the right is really high.
	And it's true, engagement on the right is really high.
	So for example, in August, News Whip announced that the Daily Wire, my outlet, had for the second month in a row taken the top spot for total engagements, amassing 104.9 million engagements over the course of the month.
	Two other explicitly conservative sites, The Blaze and Breitbart, made it into the top 10.
	So this was supposed to be big news.
	Okay, but here's the thing.
	If you add up all of the engagements of the three conservative sites, you find that they collectively racked up 187.8 million engagements over the course of the month.
	That is just under a third of the 587.8 million total engagements among the top 10.
	If you expand the list to the top 25 news publishers for August, you'll find just three more self-styled conservative sites, Western Journal, CNS News, and Conservative Opinion.
	The total engagements represented by that group of six, 257.4 million engagements.
	That gives explicitly conservative sites just 27% of total engagements in the top 25.
	If you include Fox News, Daily Mail, and the New York Post, you'll find right-leaning sites account for less than half of engagements produced by Facebook's top 25 sites.
	And if you look at the data from previous months, you will see that it completely falls apart.
	That in previous months, our reach has not been quite as great as that.
	And it's not just which sites get the most engagement, it's which sites have the most reach.
	In other words, which sites' posts are seen by the most users.
	There too, left-leaning and mainstream media outlets outperformed conservative sites, a point highlighted by Facebook's head of news feed, John Hageman, in July.
	In response to the New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roos' steady stream of Facebook-themed tweets trying to suggest that conservatives should be shut down on social media, Hageman suggested that Roos and others are missing the proper metric.
	According to Hegeman, a more accurate metric for understanding what news people see on Facebook is reach, or the number of people who saw a link in their news feed.
	Hegeman shared a list of links that had the widest reach on Facebook, compared with the posts with the highest engagement on the same day.
	On July 5th, for example, the posts with the highest engagement came from Franklin Graham, me, Breitbart, For America, and CNN.
	By contrast, the links with the widest reach that day came from the LA Times, MSNBC, Ranker, BuzzFeed, and ABC News.
	So they're just lying about the idea that conservatives have this outsized advantage on Facebook.
	It is just not true.
	But this is all part of the generalized journalistic rage that the right-wing even exists.
	There's an attempt by mainstream media and left-wing outlets to shut down dissemination on the right.
	This does not exist on the right.
	It does not exist on the right.
	There is no one on the right who believes that social media should shut down NBC, The New York Times, ABC News, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, or any other leftist outlet.
	There's no one on the right who said that the New York Times should not have the right to post that Trump tax return stuff on Facebook.
	We may have objected to the story.
	We may have asked whether it was criminally obtained.
	But nobody suggested that Facebook should take it down.
	Only the left and our journalistic betters are saying this.
	Our journalists do not care about the First Amendment.
	They object to the First Amendment.
	The First Amendment allows people to disseminate information they don't like.
	And so what they are attempting to do is use non-governmental mechanisms in order to reduce distribution for material they don't like.
	That is what you are seeing in action right now.
	Social media being used as an informal mechanism of creating a bottleneck in the informational dissemination system.
	One of the beauties of the internet is that it broke the mainstream media domination.
	That was one of the beauties of the internet.
	And now, mainstream media are pissed.
	And what they would like to do is reduce distribution for everybody else via the social media networks, where everybody gathers, and make it so that you are back to only having access to stories that the left-wing approves of, and only outlets that the mainstream media like.
	They're trying to re-establish a monopoly via Facebook, via Twitter, via the social media sites.
	The predictable effect of this should be that people should be rushing away from those sites en masse to sites that are actually going to allow you to see the things that you want to see.
	As I say, this is purely political.
	It is obviously political.
	As Sourabh Amari, the editor of the New York Post op-ed page writes, this is what totalitarianism looks like in our century.
	Not men in darkened cells driving screws under fingernails, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging expose on their preferred presidential candidate.
	He says, you know, the standards that they're using, they've never been applied to any of these other stories.
	Remember when four CNN reporters claimed in June 2017 James Comey was about to dispute in congressional testimony Trump's claim the FBI director had reassured the president he wasn't under investigation?
	Comey didn't do it.
	Did Twitter and Facebook censor the story?
	Nope.
	Remember when The Guardian concocted a story about Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and Julian Assange meeting at Ecuador's embassy in London?
	The meeting didn't happen.
	Did Facebook or Twitter block the story?
	Nope.
	You can still post it.
	Remember when The Atlantic published a several thousand word story suggesting that Jeff Sessions had lied when he said he didn't meet the Russian ambassador as a Team Trump surrogate, but as a routine member?
	But as a routine matter?
	The Mueller report debunked The Atlantic decisively.
	Is that Atlantic story blocked as misinformation?
	Nope.
	Okay, it's perfectly obvious what happened here.
	And the disgusting and stomach-churning part of this is that it is not only approved by Democrats, which you would expect, but by the social media companies themselves and the Democrats within, and it is approved by the journalistic institutions who supposedly stand squarely in favor of free speech and the First Amendment.
	Nonsense.
	They do not.
	They simply do not.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second, because this is the scandal of the campaign.
	Whatever else was happening in the campaign, the thing that's going to affect you beyond the campaign is this.
	Okay, because we all engage with these social media sites.
	We're gonna get some more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, we'll get to more of the media cheering on the crackdown on free dissemination of information.
	And by the way, it's not just Twitter and Facebook, it is now Amazon as well.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	♪♪ There's a reason Republicans are fighting mad.
	Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who's been calling for regulation of Facebook and Twitter and social media in general, he is now demanding answers as to why Facebook and Twitter limited the ability to read that New York Post piece.
	And he has now asked the Federal Election Commission to express his concern regarding what he described as unprecedented suppression from Big Tech.
	Tech said the post reporting has understandably attracted substantial public discussions.
	Countless Americans have sought to discuss and debate that article, but two social media platforms have engaged in unprecedented suppression of public discussion of that article.
	The conduct does not merely censor the core political speech of ordinary Americans, though it definitely does that.
	Twitter and Facebook's conduct also appears to constitute a clear violation of federal campaign finance law.
	Federal law prohibits any corporation from making a contribution to a federal candidate for office.
	He's saying this is basically an in-kind contribution by the media.
	I mean, by that standard, frankly, that is the democratic-slash-mainstream media every single day.
	Donald Trump commented on this in a rally in Iowa last night, going hard after the social media companies as well he should.
	Here he was yesterday.
	False and libelous stories every day.
	False and libelous stories.
	And they knew they were false, too.
	They knew they were false.
	They were never taken down by Twitter or Facebook or the mainstream media.
	Never once.
	Yet with Biden today, they take negative posts down almost before they even go up.
	They're trying to protect him.
	They're trying to protect Biden.
	He is not wrong about this, and he is right to call it out, and he should continue to call all of this out.
	By the way, there's a follow-up story today from the New York Post on those Hunter Biden emails.
	It turns out that Hunter Biden was also picking up bags of cash over in China, which is exciting stuff.
	Apparently, he had been offered something like $10 million annually.
	Hunter Biden.
	How?
	By a vanished chairman of a company called CEFC, Yi Jianming.
	Biden was supposed to be paid $10 million a year for quote, introductions alone.
	Yeah, don't worry.
	He wasn't trafficking on daddy's name.
	Meanwhile, by the way, it's not just Facebook and Twitter cracking down on dissemination of material that they don't like.
	Amazon has now canceled Shelby Steele.
	Shelby Steele, who is an incredible thinker, the author of just an incredibly insightful book about race relations in America called White Guilt, among other things.
	He has a new documentary out.
	It's called What Killed Michael Brown?
	Amazon has turned down distribution of the documentary.
	Why?
	Because Shelby Steele takes the perspective that, correctly, Michael Brown was not, in fact, murdered in cold blood by a police officer.
	That, in fact, there are deep and abiding problems with regard to black crime rates, for example.
	The subject, racial relations, is a major fault line in the presidential election.
	There's a reason why the Steeles scheduled their film for release on October 16th.
	The movie, however, does not fit the dominant Black Lives Matter narrative.
	And so Amazon rejected it for its streaming service.
	You can't even obtain it there.
	So Amazon will give you basically softcore pornography if you would like to buy it.
	But if you want to pay a couple of bucks to watch Shelby Steele's movie on Amazon, you cannot.
	Amazon informed the Steele's their film is, quote, not eligible for publishing because it doesn't meet Prime Video's content quality expectations.
	The movie's well-made.
	I've seen it.
	It ain't about that.
	It's about the fact that Shelby Steele does not abide by the Black Lives Matter narrative that America is systemically racist and that all problems in the black community spring from the evils of the United States.
	I mean, that is, so that's an amazing story.
	It's amazing.
	Now, I want to discuss at a little bit of length, again, how the media have reacted to all of these giant crackdowns by these social media companies and by our major corporations.
	And the answer is that they are fine with it.
	They love it.
	I have yet to see a lot of mainstream media reporters or journalists or even opinion columnists saying that it is bad that the social media companies are cracking down on information they do not like.
	In fact, today, over at New York Times Magazine, there is a piece by Emily Bazelon suggesting that free speech is bad, that the First Amendment needs to stop This is literally the piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend.
	It's all about how free speech is a threat to our democracy.
	The basic idea here is that because free speech allows for the possibility of misinformation, free speech is bad.
	According to Emily Bazelon, she says, the conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions, the overwhelming amounts of information, the anger encoded in it, these all serve to create chaos and confusion and make people, even non-partisans, exhausted, skeptical, cynical about politics.
	The spewing of falsehoods isn't meant to win any battle of ideas.
	Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought by causing us to simply give up.
	The problem isn't just the internet.
	A working paper from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard released early this month found that effective disinformation campaigns are often an elite-driven, mass-media-led process in which social media played only a secondary and supportive role.
	Trump's election put him in position to operate directly through Fox News and other conservative media outlets like Rush Limbaugh's talk radio show, which have come to function in effect as a party press, the Harvard researchers found.
	A false story about Democrats plotting a coup spread through a typical feedback loop.
	Links from Fox News hosts and other right-wing figures aligned with Trump, like Dan Bongino, often dominate the top links in Facebook's news feed for likes, comments, and shares in the United States.
	Though Fox News is far smaller than Facebook, the social media platform has helped Fox attain the highest weekly reach offline and online combined of any single news source in the United States, according to a 2020 report by Reuters Institute.
	Again, this is all tied into the New York Times' attempt to prevent social media from disseminating information they do not like.
	Better to force social media to shut off those spigots?
	Better to cut against the First Amendment directly?
	Emily Bazelon just goes right for it.
	So points for honesty to Emily Bazelon in New York Times Magazine.
	She's not just ripping on social media and saying social media should crack down on free speech.
	She's saying we should all crack down on free speech.
	The government should rewrite its own doctrines on free speech, according to Emily Bazelon.
	Quote, it's an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that government should regulate it as little as possible.
	But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
	They think our formulations are simplistic and especially inadequate for our era.
	Censorship of external critics by the government remains a serious threat under authoritarian regimes, but in the United States and other democracies, there's a different kind of threat, which may be doing more damage to the discourse about politics, news, and science.
	It encompasses the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract.
	Do you understand the insane danger that Emily Bazelon is proposing as policy here?
	She is saying that because you get to speak freely, you might say something Emily Bazelon doesn't like, and therefore that Emily Bazelon categorizes as speech from an extremist that smears and distracts.
	She's saying there is a bigger threat from you speaking freely than there is from the government controlling speech.
	That is a patently absurd, absurd, disgusting perspective on your rights as an individual American citizen.
	It's disgusting, it really is.
	It is top-down fascism.
	It is a suggestion that you cannot be trusted with your own liberty, therefore the government will stop you from speaking freely, or should stop you from speaking freely, or should prevent the dissemination of information that Ben Rhodes and Emily Bazelon and your betters at the New York Times don't like.
	This concern spans the ideological spectrum.
	Along with disinformation campaigns, there's a separate problem of troll armies, a flood of commenters, often propelled by bots, that aim to discredit or to destroy the reputation of disfavored speakers and to discourage them from speaking again, says Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor at Harvard.
	This tactic may be directed by those in power.
	Either way, it's often grimly effective at muting critical voices.
	And yet, as Tim Wu, a progressive law professor at Columbia, points out in the same book, the use of speech as a tool to suppress speech is, by its nature, something very challenging for the First Amendment to deal with.
	These scholars argue something that may seem unsettling to Americans, that perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way.
	At the very least, we should understand it isn't the only way.
	Other democracies in Europe and elsewhere have taken a different approach.
	Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic.
	In fact, they've created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what's true from what's not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be.
	Here in the United States, meanwhile, we are drowning in laws.
	So presumably, she would like the sort of hate speech regulation you see in Scotland, where if you're a religious person, you could be thrown in jail, depending on what you have to say about LGBT issues.
	Presumably, she would like the sort of hate speech regulations you see across Europe, where if you say something quote-unquote Islamophobic, you could theoretically be prosecuted.
	Your outlet could be shut down.
	Okay, this is what the left in the United States would like.
	Now, the ACLU used to say that they would fight to the death for your right to say something with which they disagreed.
	Now, the ACLU and the entire leftist infrastructure say precisely the opposite.
	They want the government to crack down on speech they do not like.
	They're becoming clear and open about this.
	Emily Bazelon's piece here, it's just the tip of the spear.
	This has been going around in leftist circles for a while.
	There was a New York Times piece maybe a year ago, year and a half ago, by an Obama administration official arguing the exact same thing.
	We should pursue hate speech regulations in the United States that prevent the dissemination of information and perspectives that members of the left do not like.
	Emily Bazelon says facts and transparency are the intended pillars of the modern First Amendment.
	Since the nation's founding, the Constitution has guaranteed the government shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press.
	For more than a century, however, these limits on the state's power were worth little.
	From 1798 to 1801, more than two dozen people, including several newspaper editors, were prosecuted by the administration of John Adams under the Alien and Sedition Act.
	Prosecutors were also jailed for criticizing the government during World War I.
	Okay, this is hilarious.
	She's now defending some of the darkest periods for free speech in America's history.
	Most people who study the Constitution think the Alien Sedition Act were bad.
	Most people who study the Constitution think that Woodrow Wilson cracking down on the dissemination of ideas during World War I was bad.
	Emily Bazelon says, well, maybe it's good.
	Maybe it's good.
	So, again, this is what happens when you believe that you have a sheer majority and through the power of compulsion you can get people to shut up.
	This is the attitude of many in media.
	Do not make the mistake of thinking that just because there are people in media who purport to believe in free speech, that that is the dominant ideology inside the media.
	It is not.
	And there are many pieces of evidence for this that are happening in real time, not just the Emily Bazelon article.
	So yesterday, Maggie Haberman tweeted out that New York Post piece.
	Apparently that was evil.
	Okay, and everybody on the left went nuts.
	Journalists went nuts.
	How could Maggie Haberman tweet out a link from a major American newspaper alleging a thing about Joe Biden?
	he alerted the feds to their existence. Okay, and everybody on the left went nuts. Journalists went nuts. How could Maggie Haberman tweet out a link from a major American newspaper alleging a thing about Joe Biden? How could that happen? Kimberly Johnson, who is some sort of left-wing author, She writes for Huffington Post, for example.
	She tweeted out, what is wrong with you?
	You know they're calling you Maggie Haberman, right?
	And you deserve it.
	Shame on you.
	We saw other outlets complaining about how it was terrible that Maggie Haberman had had the temerity to tweet out a link.
	How dare Maggie Haberman.
	How dare Maggie Haberman.
	Kevin Cruz, who is just another one of these joke commentators.
	He wrote a really kind of crappy piece for the 1619 Project.
	So Kevin Cruz, he put out a tweet about Maggie Hamer that said, Why are you amplifying this pathetic hit?
	How dare you tweet out a link?
	She literally just tweeted out a link.
	And then later she followed up on it by trying to walk it back.
	She said things that are sketchy in the New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
	Why wasn't this in Ron Johnson report if it's been in possession for a while?
	When did Giuliani acquire it?
	Giuliani has been everywhere on this, but this has been kicking around since late last year and unreleased until now.
	Okay, David Corn, meanwhile, suggested that this was disinformation.
	Again, members of the media, very angry at Maggie Haberman, because again, in the end, all that matters is that the information disseminated is something that members of the left don't like.
	So Maggie Haberman is bad.
	you Kevin Cruz, my goodness.
	Okay, another example of this.
	NBC staffers are fighting mad because NBC scheduled a Trump town hall tonight.
	So there was supposed to be a debate tonight.
	The Commission on Presidential Debate, which apparently is just another organ of the left, and there's no other way for me to interpret their cancellation of a debate a week in advance because Trump had COVID.
	I don't get it.
	They literally did not consult with a single member of the medical community, apparently.
	They just decided we can't have an in-person debate.
	How stupid was this policy?
	Tonight, Trump is going to be doing open rallies with the advice of his doctors that he is no longer capable of transmitting COVID-19.
	So Joe Biden is going to do a town hall on ABC.
	NBC is scheduling a counter town hall with Donald Trump.
	And NBC staffers are mad.
	Instead of NBC being like, oh, you know what?
	It's kind of newsworthy.
	The president of the United States doing a town hall.
	And on the other network, they have the candidate for president doing a town hall.
	So why the hell not?
	Instead, NBC staffers are angry.
	They're dismayed.
	Over a dozen staffers from NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC have now expressed anger over this decision.
	That report comes just several hours after NBC announced the town hall and ABC indicated the network will not move its scheduled event with Biden.
	Why are they angry?
	Like, what is the idea of them being angry?
	They're angry because they don't want people to remove attention from Joe Biden.
	That's really what this is about.
	So they're angry at their own network for doing a newsworthy thing, broadcasting a town hall with Trump.
	They're angry at their own network.
	These are news people, supposedly.
	And you see this again across the left.
	So Wolf Blitzer, we played you yesterday, this amazing exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Nancy Pelosi, in which Pelosi absolutely loses whatever is left of her mind and starts yelling at Wolf Blitzer, suggesting, we feed poor people, you're mean, all because Wolf Blitzer asked her a very simple question, namely, why don't you just sign off on a $1.8 trillion relief package in the middle of COVID?
	Pelosi couldn't answer it for 14 minutes.
	So instead, she decided to berate Wolf Blitzer.
	Here's what that sounded like yesterday.
	We know them.
	We represent them and we know them.
	Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as they say here in Washington.
	Madam Speaker.
	It's always the case, but we're not even close to the good.
	All right, let's see what happens because every day is critically, critically important.
	Thanks so much for joining us.
	Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents' needs.
	I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food, begging for money.
	Madam Speaker, thank you so much.
	Have you fed them?
	We feed them.
	We feed them.
	She was awful, right?
	She was awful.
	So how did members of the left respond to Nancy Pelosi being off on Wolf Blitzer?
	They got angry at Wolf Blitzer!
	Here was Joy Behar yesterday on The View yelling at Wolf Blitzer for having the temerity to ask Nancy Pelosi a simple question.
	Wolf, I love Wolf.
	Who doesn't love Wolf?
	We all love Wolf, but he was out of line.
	He doesn't know what's going on behind closed doors.
	He's not in on the deal.
	You know?
	See if you're in front of the camera, Don.
	The Democrats have a real long-term deal going on, and we all know we're going to be in this for another year.
	We all know that.
	Where's the money for a year?
	That's the question.
	So, Trump, so Wolfie, calm down and let Nancy do her job.
	Okay, absolutely.
	Absolutely crazy.
	But this is the attitude of many members of your traditional left.
	Nancy Pelosi has to do her job.
	Stop asking her tough questions.
	We like Joe Biden.
	Don't print any stories about Joe Biden.
	Social media should stop conservatives from being able to disseminate information or they should be downgraded as bad sites because partisan fact-checkers have downgraded them.
	We are in a war of information, of the ability to even disseminate the information.
	And that war just got hot.
	It was cold.
	It has now gotten extremely, extremely hot.
	These social media platforms, they better get right with the First Amendment.
	They better get right with principles of free speech and dissemination of information, or both the government is gonna come after them from both sides, and other outlets are gonna come after them, and they absolutely should.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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