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Nov. 15, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:12

Tim Pool | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 107

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	Everyone I've talked to who said they used to be a liberal, who then became conservative, voted for Trump, or are just, you know, no longer part of the woke cult or whatever, it was because they started doing their own research.
	They started reading the quotes.
	They started watching the videos.
	And so while social media may create incentives for people to create, you know, to push cancel culture and exacerbate the problem, it also creates the opportunity.
	The political bias of the legacy media becomes more and more obvious every day as they seek to deceive the American people.
	In response, the public has begun to turn to members of replacement media, those who bring with them the truth without a covert agenda.
	One of the most popular voices to arise from this movement is our guest today, journalist, commentator and YouTuber Tim Pool.
	Tim first came into the public view with his on-the-ground journalism, live-streaming the Occupy movements of 2011.
	Whatever was happening seemed to be important.
	It seemed to be interesting.
	A lot of people were talking about it.
	A few years later, he would join Vice Media, field reporting from conflict areas around the world.
	His work has found new traction recently, however, now that the conflicts have come to the home front.
	Tim has spent the last few years largely focused on the rise of the Antifa movement, or perhaps more so on the media's complete lack of attention to the violent and fascist tactics that movement employs.
	Tim has been on the front lines of exposing the radical left and the lying media.
	A former Bernie Sanders supporter, Tim raised eyebrows this year with his emphatic support for Donald Trump.
	While not condoning all of the president's actions, he saw Trump as a vital bulwark for the country.
	He dives in on this choice in our conversation.
	Tim and I also discuss the propaganda war raging across the country as we wait for the results of the election, including the latest defenses from legacy media and big tech, and what the future may hold for the country under a new administration. Hey, hey, and welcome to This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Tim Pool.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	So head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, and you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	We're going to get to Tim in just one second.
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	Tim Pool, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Thanks for having me.
	I really appreciate it.
	Yeah, I know this has been long awaited on the interwebs, is this final, final confrontation.
	So let's talk about what's going on in the world right now.
	Obviously, aside from the fact that everybody is still locked in their basement because of COVID, which we'll get to, we're still in the middle of an election.
	This has been declared over by the media.
	The media have said that this thing is over.
	Not only have they declared that Joe Biden is the president-elect, they have declared that anybody who refuses to call him the president-elect, even though he's not actually yet the president-elect, is engaged in some sort of coup.
	What do you make of all of this?
	I mean, it's kind of a tradition that the media would say, hey, here's the winner.
	It's projected.
	And they just go along with it.
	But I think it's kind of a millennial bias.
	We're so used to seeing his elections, aside from Bush v. Gore, where the results are kind of clear.
	You know, Mitt Romney didn't get nearly enough votes.
	So he just says, OK, I concede.
	But this is a really, really close race.
	I mean, we're within recount of numbers for certain states.
	Georgia just announced a hand recount.
	So it's not necessarily, it doesn't really make sense to say Joe Biden won when there's a legal process happening.
	Several states are too close to call still.
	The media has just decided, this is it, Joe Biden won.
	It's over.
	Meanwhile, I think they're starting to wake up to the fact that Trump has, I think he actually has a legal path to victory.
	There was an article put out by Vox recently showing all the ways that Trump is still planning on taking this to court, maybe disqualifying certain votes, maybe getting a victory through the electoral college by having Republicans at the state level certify their own electors.
	So Trump's certainly not out of this.
	And I gotta tell you, it's kind of weird seeing these two different realities where you have one media apparatus saying President-elect Joe Biden announces his COVID plans.
	Then you see another one saying Donald Trump is in court right now challenging, you know, the results in certain states or impropriety at a certain level.
	So it's almost like they're trying to tell us, Joe Biden 1, to convince us Because it's not over.
	Certification hasn't happened for the states yet, let alone for the election as a whole and then choosing the electors.
	The level of hysteria to me is the thing that really stands out, and it seems to me that the media are basically addicts, that Donald Trump is their cocaine, and they can't let go of it, and so they require just this constant addiction, that they require a constant supply of chaos.
	I also think there's something else going on here too, which is they keep saying that Trump is about to participate in a coup, that let's say the electors vote for Joe Biden, he's gonna hole up in the Oval Office like Al Pacino at the end of Scarface, he's gonna be doing blow and firing guns through the door while shouting, say hello to my little friend.
	And I think this has much more to do with the media's pathological need to paint Trump as Hitler so they can do whatever they want than it does with reality.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I mean, I will say when I think it was Michael Moore who said it a while ago, Trump's not going to leave even if he loses.
	And I was like, get out of here.
	That's ridiculous.
	I mean, I think right now what's happening is they're they're putting forth this media narrative.
	The election's over so they can now be like, see, look, he's not leaving, even though the election's over when it's not.
	But I will say Trump's taken some actions.
	It appears that he's not planning on leaving.
	This could just be because he's going through the legal process.
	And until all of his legal tactics have played out, he's going to operate as though he's going to get elected.
	But I do think at this point, the idea that, yeah, like you mentioned, Trump's going to be locked in the Oval Office, the Secret Service is going to kick the door in, is just...
	Ridiculous.
	But at this point, I got to be honest, I'm ready to believe anything.
	You know, just the amount of absurdity we've seen throughout 2020.
	We're in a global pandemic.
	They're starting to lock down different states now.
	So maybe it really is just going to be the craziest election we've ever seen in our lives.
	But I don't know.
	I feel like life is more boring than that.
	Yeah, I do too.
	I mean, I think that one of the things that we find out the more we're into the political sphere is that politics is a lot less like House of Cards and a lot more like Veep.
	There's this assumption on the part of people who are outside the world of politics that people know what they're doing, that there are these very sophisticated plans, and that people have thought three steps down the road and they're all playing 4D chess.
	And it turns out that just like in every other industry, when you hit the top of the industry, you realize that everybody's an idiot just like you.
	And that is pretty much, I think, how it works in politics.
	Yeah, especially, I think, when I was younger, I was talking about this recently, I used to look up to all these adults.
	They must be so good at what they do.
	They must be the best of the best.
	And man, when I'm older, now I'm, you know, in my mid-30s, and I'm like, everyone's as dumb as they've always been.
	You know, it's just people doing people stuff.
	You think that you walk into this election center and you're gonna see a whole bunch of experts with their badges and they're wearing gloves and everything's perfect.
	No, you got some regular guy who's volunteering and he's confused.
	You get sworn affidavits from some people because they don't know what's going on and it's just humans.
	It's not like a well-oiled machine necessarily.
	It's not like a computer.
	It's a bunch of people with different perspectives and different understandings and different skills trying to work together.
	So I think for the most part, though, when you put enough people together, you get some really amazing stuff.
	But you'll see errors, you'll see impropriety and stuff.
	And so I think, you know, especially now with the election, one of the biggest mistakes the media is making, which I think could actually lead to serious chaos, maybe conflict, is that Recognizing humans are imperfect, you're gonna find a bunch of people saying in a sworn affidavit, I saw this thing happen.
	You can't just ignore that and say, we will do nothing.
	You have to let people know we're doing everything in our power to clean up any potential errors, so they view this election as legitimate.
	I mean, if Joe Biden really does get certified as the winner, he gets inaugurated, but they don't look into this stuff, it would undermine his presidency.
	Because you've got 72.2 million people now who have voted for Donald Trump.
	I think everybody deserves to look at these affidavits or these whistleblowers and just say, you know, is it is it going to change the election?
	Maybe it won't, but we should investigate.
	And I will also add to I think.
	You know, Donald Trump's legal path to victory right now, it's almost like he's dangling fraud over to his left.
	And you got all the media saying there's no evidence of fraud.
	You got the activists saying fraud.
	But Trump's lawsuits are about impropriety.
	His lawsuits, in Pennsylvania at least, is about the Equal Protection Clause under the 14th Amendment.
	That has nothing to do with fraud.
	It has everything to do with They didn't count ballots properly, or they created an alternate track of ballots, or they violated a court order.
	So while you've got these people over here dancing around screaming fraud, Trump is actually taking a legal battle over whether or not he can disqualify hundreds of thousands of votes due to, you know, failure to uphold election standards.
	I think there's also something else going on here, too, which is that because we always live in the stupidest possible timeline until we break down into these binary positions, the positions have now become, on the right, voter fraud is widespread.
	It is in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of votes.
	And on the left, there's no such thing as voter fraud.
	I've never heard of this voter fraud thing you're talking about.
	Voter irregularities don't exist in the slightest.
	And it's amazing how those positions completely reversed from about a month ago.
	When a month ago, all we were hearing from Democrats is that Donald Trump was personally going around and burning mailboxes in order to prevent people from depositing their votes, because he was that committed to voter suppression.
	He had Louis DeJoy screwing with the machines that the votes wouldn't be properly delivered or accounted.
	He was defunding the post office.
	And now everybody who was saying one month ago that the election was going to be totally screwed up is now saying, look what an amazingly clean, unbelievably awesome election we had.
	And everybody a month ago was going, you know what?
	The election is probably going to be OK.
	They're all like, God, that was just the worst, most fraudulent election I've ever seen in my life.
	It's crazy is when we did the primaries where we had these mass mail-in voting, we had a massive amount of rejected ballots.
	I think the Washington Post had like 500,000.
	Where are all of those right now?
	That's what I was wondering.
	You know, shouldn't shouldn't we be getting these same reports we got from the Democratic primary?
	We're not getting those.
	So I think You got human error, you're going to get some level of failure, but I think you hit the nail on the head.
	There's this weird tribalist polarization that we see, and it's happened in other places in the world when you get people... I don't want to get too specific because I don't want to call any specific regions out, but there are some instances where you're like, how does that one group believe the exact opposite of the other group when neither position makes the most sense?
	So I think a better real-world example is when COVID first hit the US.
	I knew a bunch of conservatives saying, get your masks, like you've got to wear your masks.
	But we were seeing, you know, Fauci and I think the surgeon general saying, no, no, no, don't don't get masks.
	Then it completely flipped.
	Now you see videos of, you know, Trump supporters saying, I'm not going to wear a mask.
	I shouldn't have to.
	And you've got people on the left saying everyone should wear a mask.
	It seems like for tribal reasons, somehow it flipped.
	Just whatever you say, I'll do the opposite of.
	So you're really on reverse course here and kind of provide some background on you for people who may not have heard your show or or seen your YouTube videos.
	So you're really heterodox thinker.
	You don't really fit into any box.
	People will call you on the left.
	People have called you progressive.
	People called you right wing.
	It all depends on who is doing the characterization.
	So why don't we talk first about sort of how you came to do what you're doing right now?
	And then we'll talk about how your political views were formed over time, because they do seem to to move and evolve over time and in a way that's really unique in the space.
	So first, I think that, you know, to talk about, you know, kind of how you came to prominence in this space in the first place, my first experience seeing some of your stuff was during the Occupy Wall Street protest when you were the only person who was out there actually taking footage and covering that stuff.
	But how did you get started in this area?
	Well, it started with Occupy Wall Street.
	So I had been doing nonprofit work.
	I had, you know, I've been hanging out with hackers and this was back in like the days of Anonymous and some other hacker groups.
	And so the big core ideology behind what we did and why we did it, and it was mostly other people, I wasn't super active, was making sure people had access to information, be it get them the internet or give them the key details as to what's going on.
	And then all of a sudden you had these journalists say, well, that's journalism.
	You're sharing information.
	You're disseminating that stuff.
	So for me, I ended up on the East Coast.
	And then when I saw Occupy Wall Street happened, I was just some, you know, I had just left California.
	I'm just some guy who's skateboarding and making videos.
	And I decided to go and start filming, eventually start live streaming.
	And while I'm streaming, I'm giving my thoughts on what's happening and essentially doing this raw live commentary.
	I had this big moment where I did a live stream for 22 hours straight.
	People were like running up to find me to give me batteries to keep it going.
	And then I started just covering conflict and crisis.
	From there, I went from some guy who's live-streaming these protests to actually working for Vice.
	I was the founding member of Vice News, the actual vertical, where I went on the ground to various countries, like Venezuela, like Turkey, Brazil, went to Egypt, watched the revolution happen, and I was just covering the conflict and crisis stuff there.
	Eventually, the conflict and crisis came to the U.S.
	So I ended up working for a company called Fusion.
	They started out trying to be like Vice.
	And this was at a time, it was 2014, when these companies all started getting super woke.
	I've never been particularly interested in, you know, the weird cultural far-left stuff.
	Even though I saw it at Occupy Wall Street, I was like, I think that's kind of ridiculous.
	So I ended up working for this company, but within seven or eight months, they got a new editor-in-chief.
	All of a sudden, everything they're doing is woke.
	So they essentially put me in what we call golden handcuffs.
	I was paid really well to work for this Disney company, but they didn't want to use real on-the-ground conflict reporting because they wanted to do video segments about woke stuff, I guess.
	But ultimately, my contract ended.
	I started doing my own YouTube channel, and I started by actually traveling around.
	So I went to Sweden.
	I did a two-week daily vlog from Sweden, interviewing people, seeing what was going on.
	This was when Donald Trump did that famous moment where he said, last night in Sweden, you see what happened?
	And the media went nuts.
	That was a crazy moment for me because all of a sudden, I had my colleagues from Vice, who used to help me go to these countries, messaging me saying, don't go to Sweden to cover this story.
	And I was confused.
	Why wouldn't I?
	Like, I went to Egypt.
	I went to Ukraine.
	I went to a bunch of countries.
	No, no, no, but don't do this one.
	Trump's lying.
	And I'm like, I don't know.
	I don't know anything about this.
	I don't know anything about Trump or what he's talking about.
	I just heard there are some claims about, you know, refugees and crime.
	I'm going to go investigate it.
	They got really, really mad at me.
	And that was when I could see, like, this weird split starting to emerge.
	So from there, I come back to the US and I started covering the conflicts we see on the ground in the US.
	You know, Proud Boys, Antifa, that kind of stuff.
	And of course, what do I see?
	99% of the time, you get some Trump supporters waving little American flags and Antifa shows up and attacks them.
	I would report it.
	Antifa would get really mad at me.
	So they started threatening me, doxing me.
	Someone posted a photo of my mom at one point.
	And so that was like, for me, I think I already had some personal biases going back to my upbringing in Chicago.
	But now, all I'm trying to do is cover what's happening on the ground.
	And by telling the truth, these extremists and Antifa-type people were attacking me and threatening me.
	I mean, it was kind of, I guess, to be expected.
	But it did set me off on a path where, for one, I couldn't actually go on the ground anymore.
	So I slowly stopped doing it because it was getting more and more dangerous.
	So then I started doing more and more news commentary and analysis to kind of make up for the fact that I couldn't be on the ground, you know, aggregate more of the people who actually are doing the work.
	And I kind of feel like it's not a completely uncommon track for journalists to go from field reporter and then eventually later in their career, they find themselves as like a news commentary kind of person.
	And then once it just became completely obvious that, you know, it happened when I went to Portland.
	I had some guy chasing me around yelling, like while I'm trying to film.
	And I'm like, OK, clearly I got, you know, too many people know who I am.
	They're seeking me out.
	They're causing trouble.
	They're trolling or they're actually attacking me.
	So I'm going to have to stop coming to a lot of these events.
	And then just report to the best of my abilities from the desk.
	I just started increasing the amount of work I started doing.
	I started doing multiple segments per day.
	Now I think I do an hour and 45 minutes of direct commentary and I do a total of like, I do an additional two hours of a live podcast show, which brings me to this position where now I'm kind of this, I think, as you mentioned, like a heterodox individual don't really fit necessarily anywhere.
	Although I think I've been classified as like cultural right wing, whatever that means.
	But my political positions are kind of just like where Democrats used to be.
	It's a weird position to be in.
	I will say, I think the easiest way to explain that I'm not orthodox, I suppose, in some capacity, like I'm a heterodox personality is whenever they try and smear people who are, you know, like, like right now you got a lot of people on podcasts and YouTube, for instance, that are saying the election's not over.
	You get these articles saying, or CNN for instance, you've got the right-wing media lying, claiming the election's not over, but they never mention me.
	Because if they do, they show you like, you know, my segments are actually fairly I don't know.
	I don't want to say bland, but the joke is that I'm a milquetoast fence sitter.
	I will tell you we have a sworn affidavit from numerous, you know, poll watchers, but I'm not going to come out and scream the election was stolen and Trump won.
	I'm just going to say we should investigate this.
	It doesn't really work very well for the mainstream media to smear me as some kind of conspiracy theorist when I don't make an assertion beyond here's a fact.
	So ultimately, I find myself in this weird position where, for one, if you go to like my flagship channel with the most subscribers, it's like basically the media is trash and the Democrats are too.
	So then people see that and they say, Tim Pool must be right wing.
	But then when it comes to actual policy, Like, my politics are probably, you know, independent center-left, and I disagree with conservatives on a lot of core issues that result in Trump supporters getting mad at me.
	It's a weird position, I don't know, but ultimately that's where I'm at now, and then I guess at some point Ben Shapiro hit me up and asked me to come on his show, so...
	So I want to talk with you about, you know, you obviously were covering Antifa, you've covered in detail Black Lives Matter, and you mentioned sort of the woke phenomenon.
	I want to talk about the phenomenon and then I want to talk about what I think is actually a more important issue, which is the meta-phenomenon of how social media and the media refuse to cover this phenomenon.
	How they have decided that certain narratives are worth cultivating, and certain narratives must be barred, certain narratives must be suppressed, because to me, that is the scarier phenomenon.
	It's sort of the mainstream deciding what we can and cannot see.
	There's the radicals, and they're scary, but they're kind of a small proportion of the population.
	Then you actually have this mainstream phenomenon of attempting to quash any discussion of the radicalism, which effectively makes them enablers.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	So let's talk about Antifa.
	So you covered Antifa on the ground.
	We've been told by the media that Antifa are alternatively World War II era allied troops storming the beaches of Normandy.
	We've been told by Joe Biden that they are not in fact a group, that they are in fact just sort of a philosophy, you know, sort of like, sort of like cubism or something like an artistic movement.
	What exactly is Antifa since you've covered them on the ground?
	It's a, I mean, it's not necessarily wrong to say that they're a movement or an idea, but it's the individual selves that we're talking about.
	I think what you're talking about and what they do is the mainstream media uses a semantic argument to try and act like they don't exist.
	So to put it simply, Antifa is the symbols they use, the ideology.
	Typically, you'll find that many of these people are authoritarian communists.
	And I'm not trying to exaggerate or do some stupid, oh, they're all communists.
	No, like, they're literally, they believe in authoritarian communism.
	But it's rooted in pre-World War II Germany, Weimar Germany, where you had the Communist Party, had their anti-fascist action, and it was challenging the fascists.
	They use the same symbols, they create small individual groups with, they say no leaders, they have leaders, they do.
	And then they coordinate for various actions, they call them nationwide.
	So ultimately what you have are political zealots who believe in the use of violence for political gain and terror.
	uh, for political gain. What they'll do is they'll tell you and they'll have allies in media tell you there's no such thing as Antifa. It's not a group. Well, that's a semantic manipulation. They're playing a game here. If I say Antifa came out in Portland and attack people, I'm talking about Rose City Antifa.
	It's a legitimate group.
	They have membership.
	They have membership drives.
	They put out, you know, flyers and they put out a website saying, here's how you join our group.
	They have their own merchandise that says Rose City Antifa on it.
	So it would be like, you know, the media is trying to use wordplay to trick you into believing that these various groups don't exist.
	Because if I said, you know, I went to Portland and Antifa came out, then I went to Boston and Antifa came out, they say, aha, see, that proves it because there's no connection between those two groups.
	But it's the general idea is they hold that same ideology.
	Wearing all black, they use similar tactics, they use the same symbols, and they typically agree with each other on their cause and their means to the end.
	So you actually have a loose-knit group of various cells that coordinate with each other, using violence against their political opponents, for the most part instigating it outright, to win.
	And it works for them.
	You know, the example I often give to people, why is it that social media is so willing to censor right-wing individuals, but Antifa is literally organizing violent riots online, even probably right now.
	They've been doing it, you know, all year and for the past several years.
	And it's simple.
	Antifa in, say, San Francisco in the Bay Area, they'll show up to the headquarters of these big tech companies and they'll trash the place.
	So these companies say, well, well, you know, leave them alone.
	But there's not going to be a conservative group marching to Twitter HQ with pitchforks and torches.
	So long as big companies keep giving Antifa what they want or showing them their tactics work, they'll keep doing what they do.
	As for the lucinate nature of what they do, it's all on purpose.
	The reason why they don't have an official nationwide organization, it's actually really easy to understand when you look at the Proud Boys.
	Obviously, the Proud Boys and Antifa are not the same things, but there are similarities in that you have these groups that fight on the ground.
	The Proud Boys have a chairman, Enrique Tarrio.
	Well, they've banned him from dozens of banks, they've banned him from all the different platforms.
	You give someone a leader, they use that to actually try and discredit the rest of your group.
	Antifa knows this.
	I've actually talked to people going back to Occupy Wall Street who have straight up said, no leaders.
	As soon as you put someone up, they'll smear, they'll character assassinate.
	So it is on purpose they say they don't have leaders.
	However, law enforcement knows who the individual cell leaders are, I would imagine.
	And I think some of them got doxed recently.
	So it's really, it's not, you know, their tactics aren't perfect, but I will say the left is much, much better at street level organizing than the right.
	And so you end up with a media narrative that can't understand what Antifa is or outright defends them on purpose.
	I think there's two things.
	You've got the activist media that hates Donald Trump.
	And they're saying, you know, oh Antifa is no big deal, but they're saying it because they want to protect Antifa.
	You then have these local reporters, these people who are probably, you know, they have good intentions, they're trying to be objective and fair, but they can't grasp the concept of Antifa as a group because Antifa has specifically obfuscated what they really are, so you can't report on what they are.
	Then you get someone like, say, Andy Ngo or Elijah Schaefer.
	Someone like, at one point, what I was doing.
	And we can actually accurately break it down and report on the ground.
	They get really angry about that.
	And we all saw what happened to Andy Ngo, you know, when he was out there in Portland and they physically beat him.
	They left him bleeding and covered in, you know, milkshake and stuff like that.
	Those are the people they're really worried about.
	Long story short, they're radical far left.
	They typically are authoritarian communists, but not all of them.
	Some of them might just be... they might be like left anarchists.
	I know there's a big debate over whether or not anarchists can actually be left or right, but they view themselves that way.
	They'll view themselves as socialists.
	But the big issue I see with Antifa is that you might find someone who will try and lie and justify, no, no, we don't believe in violence, it's self-defense.
	But these are the narratives they like to use to get away with what they do.
	And so long as you have these mainstream resistance-type Democrats who hate Trump, they won't call these groups out.
	And that's been something I've experienced going back to Occupy Wall Street, where the peaceful, legitimate protesters are told by these groups to respect their, quote, diversity of tactics.
	It's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.
	The idea that you're going to engage in some kind of strategy against a big system but diversify what that strategy is makes no sense.
	You want to have a cohesive plan as to how you're going to make change happen.
	The reality is, these groups say, respect our diversity of tactics because that's code for getting violent and hurting people.
	And then you get these good-natured protesters who just want to, you know, wave their little signs and banners and be heard, now standing back as Antifa messes with people, knocks them down, starts fires.
	So, I will say, I think Antifa, for the most part, is a colloquial term we use to describe the far-left extremists who use what's called the black block tactic, where, you know, they wear hoodies, they wear masks.
	I don't know what we'll call them in the future.
	We just called them the Black Block Anarchists, you know, 10 years ago.
	Now they're Antifa.
	They're still here.
	They're still rioting.
	Apparently, the media calling it for Joe Biden did nothing to change their minds.
	And in fact, I think it's only likely to escalate if we do enter a Joe Biden administration, because certainly Joe Biden won't be strong enough to deal with these groups that are pressuring him and attacking him and getting violent.
	And we already saw this.
	I believe recently they attacked a DNC headquarter saying, F Joe Biden.
	Anyway, there you go.
	I think I've ranted too much on what Antifa is, but we can, you know, follow up.
	That's, I think, very useful for people who sort of have a vague idea, but not a very specific idea.
	And then, meanwhile, we've seen the media basically decide that you are never allowed to criticize not only Antifa, but also Black Lives Matter.
	Black Lives Matter itself is considered to be a wonderful movement.
	There's been a game that you mentioned there, this sort of semantic overload that has been placed on the term Black Lives Matter, which, as I've pointed out in my show, means three separate things.
	One of which is completely unobjectionable, and two of which are rather objectionable.
	One of which is the idea that black people's lives matter, which of course everybody agrees with unless you're a complete piece of human dreck.
	Second, the Black Lives Matter actual organization, which is a far left communist organization in its inception and openly states its goals.
	And third, the basic underlying idea that America is systemically racist, evil since root and that all inequality is at root inequity, which I think is both counterproductive and But we've been told that to even question Black Lives Matter is to itself be racist, and that if you are to pay attention to any of the riots around the country, that's just exaggerating the problem.
	I mean, after all, only 7% of the Black Lives Matter protests erupted into riots, which is a pretty shocking only.
	That word only is doing a lot of work in that particular sentence.
	Right.
	And they also didn't explain that I think of that 7%, there was like numerous cities constantly being besieged by this.
	So they were like, you know, I could be wrong about this, but counting one city's widespread rioting as just one protest.
	But yeah, I think it's funny if you said something like, you know, John Smith only kills 7% of the people he encounters, you'd be like, that's ridiculous.
	Or maybe killing people is a bit extreme.
	What if he said, don't worry about Bill.
	He doesn't punch 93% of the people he encounters.
	I'd be like, he shouldn't punch any of them.
	It's really weird how they tried.
	Oh, it's 93% peaceful.
	I'm like, so you're admitting it's not?
	That's weird.
	These are violent riots.
	And another thing that they didn't mention is that In many of these cities where they say there were peaceful protests, they would separate when the riot happened from the protest and act like, oh, no, this day was a peaceful protest even though the same people were there doing much of the same thing on this day.
	The police didn't say there was riots or there was violence.
	And so it's really difficult to weed through.
	Exactly what's going on.
	But I will say, peaceful protests are awesome.
	It's foundational to this country.
	The First Amendment says, you know, peaceably assemble.
	And I think it's fantastic when people go out and do so.
	And to varying degrees, I'm totally cool with even civil disobedience.
	If they want to block traffic, okay, you get arrested, you're fine, you slap on the wrist, you made your point, we heard you.
	We want to make sure there's room for people to actually express themselves, protest.
	And so early on, we did see with Black Lives Matter, there were things where they would just lay in the street with their hands behind their back.
	I thought that was really cool.
	Everybody knew it was coming.
	They expected it.
	They avoided certain routes.
	Then these people went home and they made their point.
	And that actually benefits them in the polls.
	It generates public awareness, as it's supposed to, and it makes people sympathetic.
	But then we get these extremists who think they're, you know, La Résistance, fighting against Orange Hitler to, like, take down a federal building which is made of, like, hundreds or thousands of tons of concrete.
	They're throwing fire, like, you know, mortar shells at it.
	It's like they're playing a game.
	They're live-action role-playing.
	They're not aware.
	They're not actually doing anything.
	But I will say what I find funny about the Black Lives Matter stuff we've seen this past year is they're mostly white.
	It's mostly upper middle class, suburban, white, young progressives saying they're fighting for minorities.
	You end up with these videos where there's two black women walking up to these two white women who are vandalizing a building and they're like, why are you doing this?
	And they're like, don't worry, we're doing it for you.
	And it's like, there's no intention, in my opinion, You know, when we talk about the three different Black Lives Matter you mentioned, it's mostly used as some kind of shield for radical far-leftists who are trying to convince people, we're the good guys because racism is bad.
	But when they go out and they destroy businesses in black neighborhoods, they clearly don't care.
	When they accuse actual outspoken black people, say Candace Owens, of being a white supremacist, they clearly don't care.
	They're using race as a shield while they engage in racist or violent behavior.
	It's a really, really clever trick that these leftists do.
	Anti-fascist.
	You know, we're anti-fascist.
	Therefore, if you oppose us, you're pro-fascist.
	It's like, dude, you're walking around beating people.
	Then they say, we're for Black Lives Matter.
	That's our group.
	If you oppose us, you think they don't.
	It's like, well, clearly that's not the case.
	You're going around smashing things and beating people and actually hurting the black community.
	It's all just clever wordplay.
	And I think it's all built upon manipulating the media.
	They want the media to... Actually, let me stop.
	I'll put it this way.
	I decided I'm going to start an organization called the Weak and Vulnerable Grandmothers.
	That way, when my organization of, you know, 30-year-old men go around yelling things, the media will report Antifa attacks Weak and Vulnerable Grandmothers.
	That's like an idea of what they're doing.
	So it's a trick.
	Most people just read the headline.
	They don't actually investigate what the story is.
	So I get people telling me things all the time like, oh, but they're anti-fascist.
	They're the good guys.
	I'm like, did you see the video of them beating the old woman?
	They're like, oh no, I didn't actually read it.
	Well, that's the name.
	It's the name, anti-fascist.
	It's not the action.
	And the actions are what you need to look for.
	So I want to talk about the broader danger of these movements, which I don't think is the actual movements.
	I think it is the mainstreaming of the movements by more mainstream groups, the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and social media.
	To me, what's happening in a lot of left-wing politics right now, it's almost like the stories that you read in the newspapers and online about some elderly Hollywood star who's aging and doesn't like aging and so has hired a 20-year-old And is now siphoning off their blood in order to cycle it through their system in the belief that the oxygenated blood will make them more healthy over time.
	I feel like right now, that's sort of the Democratic Party with the woke and with the radical.
	Like, well, this is where all the energy is, and we don't want to quash the energy.
	So we're going to allow that energy to fester.
	And they'll leave us alone because we mostly agree with them.
	So long as we direct that energy, you know, at the bad people, at the orange Hitler, at the orange man bad, and at all the conservatives, and at all the people online we don't like, well then, you know, they're really, maybe they're overzealous, but they're doing the right things, and eventually they'll grow out of this, and they'll stop messing around with this.
	It's a really dangerous thing.
	Yep.
	It's not going to stop.
	They're playing with fire.
	And, you know, I got to be honest, I don't even think it's the youthful energy.
	I think it's Twitter.
	I think you've got hyperpolarization due to places, you know, social media platforms like Twitter.
	I think Twitter is the worst.
	It's really hard to get a complex idea out on Twitter.
	So I've mostly just given up.
	I just roll with it.
	I laugh when people take things the wrong way.
	It's like, yeah, well, whatever.
	But someone will put something out, it'll be interpreted in completely the wrong way.
	And what Twitter does is it encourages people to be as nasty as possible.
	What I see happening is, it's also with Facebook, it's with keyword stuffing and algorithmic boosting that we see through Facebook.
	Certain posts that have certain words are more likely to get shares and more likely to appear.
	You end up with a very small faction of hyperactive internet users posting on Twitter trying to get likes.
	And so what happens is, You'll see ridiculous stories like there was one from the Huffington Post that said, there may be a video of Donald Trump in an elevator doing something.
	What is that thing?
	We don't know.
	Where is the elevator?
	We have no idea.
	And does the video exist?
	We're not sure that they actually wrote that article in a desperate bid, a desperate attempt to just write something that will get clicks and shares salacious, but they didn't have anything.
	So they just wrote nothing.
	But what ends up happening is, you also get cancel culture.
	People are rewarded and cheered for when they're like, look at this person who's a bigot.
	All of a sudden now, we've gamified this process on social media.
	You get more points, you get more retweets, you get more followers, and in fact, you can make money doing this.
	You'll see people say, here's a thread about why Ben Shapiro is a Nazi, and then they'll put at the bottom, here's my PayPal link, give me money.
	They'll take everything you say out of context, The more people share it, though, the more misinformed they're becoming.
	Then you get the Democratic politicians who think Twitter is real life and they see those Twitter threads and they say, I'm going to campaign on this issue about weird social justice cancel culture.
	Then you get some, you know, 38 year old mother who's like, are my kids going to school?
	Why is the guy on TV talking about some Twitter thread?
	What's happening?
	I think to an extent, Republicans also fall victim to this as well.
	I think it's funny when they're talking about Twitter censorship, you see like, you know, Ted Cruz bring it up.
	I appreciate it because I use the internet.
	But I have to wonder if we have only about 22% of this country using Twitter and only, I think, it's like 10 or so, 8% of those are actually active.
	It must be really weird to be a regular American turning on the news and then hearing them talk about social media culture war issues that mean nothing to you.
	Which I think may explain, you know, why the Republicans took so many seats in the House this time around.
	And even why Donald Trump is losing to Joe Biden as it stands so far.
	I think regular people are like, I don't care about Twitter.
	I don't care about these culture war issues.
	But I do think for the most part, it's the Democrats that are mostly susceptible to it.
	Because they're looking for the youth vote.
	Like you mentioned, they're looking for youthful energy.
	They're finding it on social media where the young people are extremely active.
	And instead of telling them, hey, just because your tweet went viral doesn't mean it was correct or good, they're saying, I'll just go with it and say what they're saying.
	And then you end up with really weird policy positions like, you know, Bernie Sanders in 2015 says, we can't have open borders.
	It's a Koch brothers proposal.
	That was an interview with Vox.
	Now he's on the debate stage, you know, just this past year saying moratorium on deportations and decriminalized border crossings.
	He completely flips on what his principles are, and it's because of the things, you know, people are posting on social media.
	It doesn't represent America.
	I think it's interesting Trump won in 2016 on a message that seemed to fly in the face of what, you know, social justice was pushing on social media.
	And it, in my opinion, shows with PC culture being one of the big aspects that people cite when they say why they voted for Trump.
	Regular people don't care about this.
	Democrats have walked themselves into a corner.
	I don't see how they get themselves out now.
	You see AOC is attacking the Democrats saying, you know, the House would have fared better if you just let me lead and be progressive.
	Now you got Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying, let progressives take over.
	And I can only imagine that would end up with them losing in the most absurd defeat ever, because then the Republican Party becomes the big tent.
	You end up with people like Jeff Van Drew, who was a Democrat, switches to the Republican Party, wins re-election.
	These people don't realize, you know, Ocasio-Cortez may have 10 million followers on Twitter, But those 10 million people don't live in like one city.
	She doesn't have command over one massive district.
	She has little pockets of individuals from various jurisdictions that don't hold political power in those areas, and they're trying to legislate based off of the fact that they've created a community of political zealots on social media that doesn't represent this country, but they think it does because they've gathered in this one online space.
	So long story short, expect more as the aging Democrats don't know what they're doing, as Nancy Pelosi tries to placate the squad and then gives them what they want, refuses to denounce socialism.
	Once Nancy Pelosi and Feinstein and Schumer and Nadler, they're all out.
	All that's going to be left is the Twitter politicians, the people who want to be celebrities, who want to do Instagram live videos, get as many clicks as possible.
	I don't see them legislating.
	I see them trying to do things that are funny and get them clicks and shares on Twitter and social media.
	And I think AOC exemplifies, you know, I'll put it this way, just to make everybody angry.
	I think AOC is very much like Donald Trump in that she tweets bombastic things, gets a bunch of attention for herself, and she loves it.
	The difference is I think Donald Trump is naturally like this.
	I think he really did have plans and he wanted to do things for this country and we had a great economy over the past several years.
	We have these historic peace agreements.
	And then you have AOC who, in my opinion, seems to be just trying to get as many followers and, I guess, attention as possible.
	The backlash that we saw in the last election to defund the police, to talk about socialism, to all the focus on supposed systemic American racism.
	I think that backlash really did materialize.
	I think that there was also a pretty significant backlash to exactly the sort of council culture that you're talking about.
	I think most Americans, you're exactly right, don't Turn on the news at night and wonder what somebody said on Twitter.
	But they do see at their own companies, the ones that they work at, that so many of the elites at the top of our corporate world have decided to buy into the cancel culture mentality, where unless you personally post a black square on your Facebook page, you are now called into question.
	If you don't repeat, if you don't see and repeat and believe, then you are now a suspect.
	And if you say the wrong thing at the office, the cancel culture comes for you.
	You might find yourself on Twitter one day.
	So it's not that Twitter is a place for gathering and trading ideas.
	Twitter is a place for coming after you.
	And so whoever uses Twitter that way, whoever uses the political mechanism that way, I think there's a huge backlash brewing to this because the left has decided that they're going to shut the Overton window.
	They're going to shut it tight.
	They're going to wish all their enemies out into the cornfield.
	And then they believe that this is somehow going to achieve them a majority.
	I think that Trump was just the beginning of the backlash.
	He may not have been a great vehicle for the backlash because he's such a flawed character in and of himself, but the backlash is not going to stop just because Democrats believe they've defeated Trump.
	I completely agree.
	Yeah, I think you're right.
	I think to kind of just clarify my point, I think regular people don't care about these specific issues of white patriarchy and recognizing your white privilege, but now they're being subjected to it, like you said.
	So they end up going to work, being brought into these training sessions, and they don't like it.
	I mean, it was a trope for so long.
	We make fun of the sexual harassment workplace videos.
	It's a comedy bit.
	But now you've got people actually being forced to live through this, and they are scared of cancel culture.
	And that's the big problem I see with the Democrats.
	They're entertaining it at a policy level, as if anybody likes this.
	I gotta be honest, I don't even think the leftists who participate like it.
	I think they're all standing in the mob with pitchforks, nervously shaking, wondering which one is going to point the finger at them, and they're safer in the mob than being the target of the mob.
	I totally agree with this.
	And this is where social media really does get dangerous, not just because of its ability to mobilize mobs.
	I've stated that when it comes to social media, it used to be that in order to form a mob, you usually had to have a cause.
	Very often it was a horrible cause, but you had to have at least a point of commonality.
	And then it was like, okay, let's get together the mob and let's go do X bad thing.
	Now social media is just a mob waiting for a cause.
	It's just a bunch of people milling around waiting for a... it's almost like a badly motivated immune system where we'll just identify the cell.
	Everybody swarm!
	And that is a huge problem obviously.
	I'm also deeply concerned about the way that social media has decided that they are simply going to suppress information they don't like.
	And this goes back to the points about Antifa and BLM.
	You had this very famous exchange with some of the big tech heads on Joe Rogan's show where you were just pointing out to them that they have no consistent standards by which they suppress certain people and suppress certain content.
	That they are just doing this basically Out of their ass.
	I mean, they're just coming up with this policy completely out of nowhere and then just implementing it.
	But it seems to always skew to one side.
	It's never as though they make the mistake of, oops, we banned Louis Farrakhan.
	It's more like, oops, we banned this person.
	We banned James Woods for a day.
	I guess we shouldn't have banned James Woods for a day.
	OK, fine.
	Well, I guess we can bring back James Woods or you know what?
	Let's all get together.
	And, you know, Alex Jones, he's been bothering us for a while.
	So we will all together at the same time decide just spontaneously.
	That we are getting rid of Alex Jones, not because he has necessarily violated our policies, but because we have decided that we don't like Alex Jones anymore.
	Now, listen, as everybody knows, I am no Alex Jones fan, but you don't just all get to get together and decide that you're going to change your standards randomly and then ban Alex Jones because you don't like Alex Jones that day and expect that we are going to have trust in your objectivity or your status as a neutral platform for ideas.
	Yeah, it's the Ben Shapiro and Tim Agree Show.
	Thanks for joining us.
	But I agree, I agree.
	Alex, think about this.
	Why was Alex Jones banned from all these platforms?
	It's because of one thing he said, one topic he brought up, and he brought it up a couple times, about Sandy Hook.
	Because of this, years later, they resurface these claims and demand he be censored from every single platform.
	I think Jones has been around for three decades.
	I think he said some really crazy things, especially on Joe Rogan's podcast.
	But the idea that you could have three decades of work purged from the internet for saying one bad thing on a few occasions, that's crazy!
	Imagine if you get a scientist who's talking about the importance of, you know, mask wearing or best ways to prevent COVID.
	And then, you know, a month later, he says some off-color joke, so they purge him completely from social media.
	All of the important things he's done are gone as well.
	Not that I'm here to defend Alex Jones's body of work.
	I honestly don't really watch it or know much about it other than when I see those viral clips of him saying kind of crazy things.
	But the idea that you would eliminate someone from the internet forever And just over saying one thing one time, or even if it was like three strikes and you're out, I think that's crazy.
	You know, one of the things that Jack Dorsey said to me when I was talking to him on the Joe Rogan podcast was, we talked about a path to redemption.
	Never happened.
	It's crazy to me that you could break the rules on Twitter and they say you're permanently banned for life.
	It's like we don't even do that in the real world for most things.
	You go to prison, we give you a time limit, and then you can come back later on.
	They don't allow that.
	I think the other really important thing though when you bring up the You know, Twitter's arbitrary rules is, I think, one of the big reasons why they're banning conservatives more than they ban the left is because they live in that bubble.
	They're all very far left in Silicon Valley and, you know, wherever, where they make the rules.
	They don't interact with conservatives, or even moderates for that matter.
	So when they have parents who are moderates and they say they're far right or whatever, to them, it's abnormal and it's offensive, and we must remove the offensive things.
	The best example of this, which I brought up to Jack Dorsey, and this is now, what, like two years ago almost, the misgendering policy on Twitter.
	They said if you misgender someone, you can be banned.
	But that's a worldview of a very tiny percentage of people.
	You're basically creating a rule that upholds the worldview of 8% of the population.
	If we go by the YouGov data, then about 8% are progressive activists.
	The rest are not.
	So if you're telling people, this is the real world, do things this way, and you don't realize that you actually represent the extreme minority, well then you're going to start banning regular people, calling them far-right.
	You're going to say, we're not biased.
	We're only getting rid of those who break the rules.
	But your rules would be broken by literally anybody.
	I mean, if you go to a regular person, an average person just walking down the street, and ask them about misgendering, they're gonna say, I don't know what that is.
	If they sign up for Twitter, they'll get banned right away.
	And I've met people who this has happened to.
	I've met so many people who have only a small amount of followers, maybe a couple dozen, maybe a hundred or so, with their friends and their family, and they'll post something and get banned and have no idea why.
	We don't live in this far-left woke bubble with these people.
	Now, I think for people like you and me, Ben, we can see their world.
	We watch the news.
	We see what they're saying, so we get it.
	Most people don't, and so these rules make no sense for the average person.
	Long story short, you end up with advertising brands that see how people are behaving on social media, and they assume this is popular discourse.
	These ideas make sense.
	But they don't, and regular people are confused by them.
	But once you get advertising agencies buying into this stuff, once you get movies buying into this stuff, it can cause a cultural shift.
	I am starting to wonder, though, if the get-woke-go-broke phenomenon is going to cost, you know, so much money for these companies, they realize we can't keep chasing after the woke crowd on Twitter.
	I certainly hope that that's the case.
	I think that may only be the case if enough Americans are offended enough not to actually go buy the products, because we do have a process of what Nicholas and SeemTolib called renormalization happening, where you have a small minority that is extremely motivated, and everybody else is just not as motivated.
	And so the small minority can move the entire train just by basically saying, we care super a lot about this issue, and we're going to irritate the living crap out of you.
	And if you guys just leave us alone and just give us what we want, then we'll basically go away.
	And I think that you're seeing this taken to the extreme.
	There will come a point, however, when I think people are just like, you know what?
	No, it doesn't matter that this is a quote unquote minor offense.
	You stack up the minor offenses and eventually you get to this is just one giant basic major offense against my sense of truth and the facts and propriety.
	And I think that's what's happening right now.
	I think the media have also picked up on the mainstream media, particularly the establishment media.
	They've picked up on the Silicon Valley bias and now they are using it to their advantage. They're woke staffers inside the Silicon Valley outlets.
	And these woke staffers are running the show.
	They really are in the same way that the woke staffers of The New York Times are running the show and getting op ed editors fired for printing U.S.
	senators op eds at.
	If you talk to any of the people in the top levels of tech, they will tell you that their woke staffers are driving them up a wall and that they are creating all sorts of problems.
	They're creating liability issues for them, and yet they won't stand up to the woke staffers.
	And so what you get now is not just the pressure from inside.
	You have this inside-outside game that I've identified since, obviously, I run a major conservative publication, and we've had our experiences being suppressed at extreme depth by social media.
	There's this inside-outside game that's being played now, where members of the mainstream media, people like Kevin Roos over at the New York Times, people like Kara Swisher at the New York Times, or Judd Legum, right, where they spend their days attempting to, quote-unquote, ask questions of tech bros that go something like this.
	Here is a bad thing a conservative said, why don't you ban them?
	And it's every single day.
	And very often it's not even a bad thing that a conservative said, it's just, you guys are helping conservatives.
	And they tie this all into Orange Hitler, right?
	They always talk about orange man bat.
	Facebook got Donald Trump elected.
	Therefore, that's because you allowed conservative content to fly free on Facebook.
	You really should suppress conservative content.
	And so just this week, we saw this incredible exchange with Kevin Roose of the New York Times, where he tweeted out four headlines.
	And he said, these headlines are misinformation and they're flying around.
	They're flying around Facebook.
	Every single headline was true.
	All four headlines were true.
	It was two from Breitbart.
	It was one from Daily Wire.
	And I believe it was one from Daily Caller.
	All four were true.
	And when I said to him, dude, all four of those are true.
	Those are not misinformation.
	He said, even if they are factually true, they can push a narrative that is untrue.
	And so they are misinformation, which just gives away the game.
	I mean, we basically have establishment media saying, if you don't mirror our political priorities, you are now deemed misinformation.
	And we'll use our fact-checking brand to fact-check you.
	And we will use our power in order to leverage all the social media outlets into shutting down anyone who is not the New York Times I love it because Kevin Roos ran this story for the New York Times.
	It was a front page story about how YouTube radicalized some guy to the alt-right.
	When in reality, if you actually read the story, it was about a traditional conservative who went on YouTube, started watching videos, and then eventually became a liberal because YouTube moved him left.
	There's a lot of data that actually shows YouTube has a left bias.
	A lot of these people, like Roos, don't want to admit it because they want power.
	This guy, Kevin Roos, is an activist.
	He's not a journalist, and I know him personally, and I can attest to this.
	When I worked for Fusion, he worked there as well.
	I think he was the managing editor.
	There was an issue that came up where there was an unprecedented, I believe unprecedented, social media ethics violation that occurred from the New York Times.
	It was when Ellen Pao was the CEO of Reddit and she stepped down.
	The story was breaking news.
	The New York Times wrote a story that said, Ellen Pao CEO resigns.
	That was basically it.
	It became one of the highest ranking posts on Reddit of all time.
	But overnight, the New York Times changed the entire article to something like Silicon Valley 2, Social Justice 0, or Feminism 0, and then the whole article wasn't breaking news.
	They used the same URL to turn it into an analysis op-ed about sexism in Silicon Valley.
	That's an ethical violation, a journalistic violation, and an internet violation.
	You don't just change the URL, but news organizations do this a lot.
	They're supposed to put, updated, you know, editor's note, here are the changes we made, and let people know.
	It's one thing, in my opinion, if a news outlet says, you know, here's a headline, and then we add information and put, we updated to add this.
	It's another thing when they changed 85% of the article, turning a factual news article into an op-ed.
	So I see this story and I reach out to some moderators at Reddit and I ask them what the rules are on various subreddits for news outlets that do these things.
	And they said straight up, this is a huge violation and we don't know what to do.
	It was like the third most upvoted story ever.
	And so they determined ultimately it had to be removed.
	The New York Times violated like this core tenet of journalism and internet, I guess, ethics.
	When I said, at Fusion, I found this big story, this is crazy, look what's happening, Kevin Roos told me, don't report it because we do the same thing and we don't want to get called out for our unethical behavior either.
	To paraphrase.
	So this guy, in my experience, has routinely and repeatedly engaged in activities that are not intended to inform people, but to misinform people.
	When he did that New York Times story on YouTube radicalization, they had this graphic Where when you loaded the website and scrolled down, they had a big collage of YouTubers that would slowly disappear.
	And my favorite was that Philip DeFranco was on it.
	And Philip DeFranco is a very... I don't know how to describe him other than a straightforward pop culture and news personality on YouTube.
	He's not very political at all.
	But they made it so that periodically when you're scrolling down, it said, I had been radicalized, and then it shows Philip DeFranco clearly misleading people.
	So then they had to go in and say, oh no, that was a mistake, they had to change it.
	But the point was, their narrative was completely false.
	What I see there was that he wrote an article trying to smear his competition, because the New York Times is losing viewership to Facebook video, to Facebook posts, and to YouTube videos.
	So the New York Times has a vested interest in targeting their rivals, plus he's an activist.
	He's very clearly aligned with the ideological left, and you can even, if you look at him on Twitter, you can see he interacts with far-left and Antifa-type people all the time.
	When you have news organizations that are more interested in culture war rage bait to make money, or when they're infiltrated by activists, then things are going to start getting bad because you don't know what's true anymore.
	You get a guy like Kevin Ruth saying, these stories are misinformation.
	Now people who follow him see it and they say, oh, those dangle right-wingers putting out lies again.
	Even though it was all true.
	And I think one of the craziest stories that just happened recently was Washington Post saying that, I think Richard Hopkins is his name, the Postal Service whistleblower recanted his allegations.
	The dude puts out a video right away saying, no I didn't.
	The Washington Post still runs the headline saying he did.
	I think the media in this country, for a variety of reasons, has become completely invested in just activism.
	So I will tell you, There's one thing that does excite me if Joe Biden ends up, you know, being the actual inaugurated president, is that the media will spiral out of control and implode with nothing to write about anymore.
	Yeah, this I think their greatest fear, and I think they're going to have to craft a whole set of new villains, but none of them are ever going to be able to take the place of President Trump, who of course was the apotheosis of all evil on earth, an orange miasma of sin and terribleness, and actually the physical embodiment of COVID.
	That was my favorite narrative over the course of this past year, is we have a disease that kills Hundreds of thousands, now over a million people worldwide.
	And it's all Trump's fault.
	According to both Joe Biden and the Democratic media, if it were not for Donald Trump, no one in America would have died.
	Actually, zero people in America would have died.
	Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, is absolutely incredible at handling COVID.
	In fact, he wrote an entire book about how great he is at handling COVID.
	And made an entire poster that you could buy and put on your wall about how amazing he is at handling COVID.
	Also, by the way, New York is now having a second spike that is necessitating, apparently, a lockdown.
	Let's talk about COVID policy for a second because you've covered it, again, in sort of a straightforward and heterodox fashion.
	There was all this talk very early on about the necessity for lockdowns.
	Quickly, this thing became quite politicized, as I mentioned here.
	The media's narrative was, this is all the right wing's fault.
	And it's all Donald Trump's fault because Donald Trump is not focusing in on mask wearing because mask wearing is apparently a silver bullet.
	And also, Trump was doing public events.
	It depends on the public event.
	COVID is an extraordinarily woke and wise virus.
	It only affects right-wingers and Orthodox Jews.
	Those are the only people that COVID affects.
	If you are a black person who is protesting the systemic cruelty of the police, it does not affect you.
	If you are a white lib who is Look, I think we can clearly see the spikes.
	supposed victory by drinking out of the same champagne bottle as three others.
	It doesn't affect you either.
	So obviously, you know, the American trust in the media on COVID is at an all time low.
	I think it should be at an all time low.
	What do you make of of the media coverage of COVID?
	Where do you think we're at on this thing?
	I think I look, I think we can clearly see the spikes.
	There's a very real data showing that this year we had way more expected mortality than normal.
	You know, I'm not a big fan of these, you know, like the conspiracy theories and stuff.
	There's obviously, you know, COVID going on.
	And I think it's ridiculous that I even have to say that, but we're at that point.
	The problem is, I blame the mainstream media for this.
	Because if you've got, you know, there's viral videos going, you know, memes showing all of these celebrations for Joe Biden being declared president-elect.
	And like you mentioned, they're sharing champagne.
	I love it when Joe Biden pulled his mask down to cough into his hand.
	They don't take this seriously.
	They don't know what they're doing.
	They don't care, even.
	I think it was a World Health Organization doctor saying, no more lockdowns.
	Should be a last resort.
	Let's not do this again.
	It's really dangerous because economic damage leads to death as well.
	Now you've got Cuomo and Murphy in New Jersey instituting more lockdowns.
	It doesn't quite make any sense.
	It's almost like They're locking things down because they're scared of the media, not the actual virus.
	They don't want to be said that they're responsible for the death because, hey, if we lock down, then any problems that arise in the lockdown is because we had to do it.
	But if they don't lock down, they'll blame them for virus tests.
	I think we've created a mass hysteria around this.
	If you look at the mortality rate of COVID, it is bad.
	It's a bit worse than the flu.
	I'm not going to pretend like it's substantially worse, but it is higher.
	It's not the same as the flu.
	It's a lot higher and there's lingering effects that come from it.
	But for the most part, you're only allowed to tell people the end is nigh.
	I remember early on on YouTube, they made a rule that you couldn't talk about COVID at all.
	They would demonetize you.
	The only news we end up getting is going to say something like, people are going to die unless we lock things down.
	If you come out and say, well, I think the lockdown could be worse, they say you want to kill grandma or something.
	So the media has created a social pressure to encourage people to claim we must take the most extreme action possible.
	That's not healthy.
	If we can't have someone come out and say, hey, we looked at the data.
	Here's what we found.
	We should chill out.
	You can't really do that.
	I mean, you kind of can, but the incentive is to claim the world is burning down.
	So what happens?
	Politicians respond to it by locking things down.
	Regular people put on masks when they're in their own bathrooms, and they panic.
	I've seen some people react in crazy ways over mask wearing.
	I was just riding my bike.
	I'm in a forest preserve, essentially, alongside a river.
	There's no one anywhere, and I see people riding bikes with masks on.
	I just found that to be very strange.
	You're by yourself in the woods, riding a bike.
	You need to breathe, but you put a mask on.
	It's because the only news they're getting is, this is the end.
	I'll tell you what's really funny about all this.
	I've invited numerous leftists to come onto my podcast, Timcast IRL, which is a sit-down conversation, you know, kind of like what we're doing here.
	Conservatives will do it in two seconds.
	Moderate right-wing individuals, even disaffected liberals who find themselves, say, voting for Trump, they'll say, fly me out.
	We take all the precautions.
	We treat it seriously, but we're not cowering from it.
	But I reach out to some of these prominent leftists on social media and stuff, and they say, I'm too scared of COVID to travel.
	So it's clearly affecting Democrats and the left.
	Well, I don't want to say actual liberals, but whatever the resistance left has become, they're mortified of this.
	I don't know what's going to happen, but I tell you, if you've got two factions, I don't want to act like everyone on the right or even anti-woke crowd, they agree on everything.
	If they can agree on the fact that we can still do our jobs and function, they're going to generate more wealth, they're going to be more successful, they're going to live their lives and be happier.
	These people on the left who are terrified of the virus because of what they're hearing in the media over and over again, they're not going out and working.
	They're demanding government, you know, cut checks to them.
	I imagine they're not going to succeed, not going to improve their skills.
	In fact, sitting inside locked up all day is probably going to dull their abilities.
	I think it's going to create this weird disparity in skill cap and wealth at some point.
	But ultimately, I think it's just the media trying to make money.
	And they're going to chase after the horrifying narrative until they drive off the cliff.
	You're certainly seeing that with regard to the schools, where the only people who currently are going to schools are people either in red states or people who can afford to send their kids to private school.
	And if you are poor and living in Washington, D.C., you are just screwed.
	They are going to force you to put your kid on a Zoom school that your kid will not attend and they will learn nothing.
	And apparently the media just don't care.
	So Tim, I want to ask a few final questions, starting with, you voted for Donald Trump.
	You're an independent center left guy.
	I want to ask why you voted for Donald Trump.
	But if you'd like to hear Tim Pool's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
	Go to dailywire.com, click join at the top of the page.
	You can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
	Well, Tim Pool, it's been a pleasure.
	Thanks so much for coming on the show and I'm going to direct everyone to go and check out Tim's stuff on YouTube at TimCast and TimCast IRL as well as TimCast.com.
	Tim, really appreciate you stopping by.
	Thanks so much.
	Thanks for having me.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
	And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
	Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
	Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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