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Jan. 13, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:28
It’s Impeachment Day…Again! | Ep. 1172
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Democrats push forward with impeachment again in the House as Republicans argue over how to respond.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Before we get to any of the news, and boy is there a lot of news today because a day in 2021 is like 10 years in regular time.
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We'll get to all the news in just one second.
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Get the same coverage as the big cell phone companies, but don't pay the same bills that you would be if you were Okay, so we begin with the quick update on everything that is happening in terms of violence and prosecutions.
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Okay, so we begin with the quick update on everything that is happening in terms of violence and prosecutions.
The acting U.S. attorney Michael Sherwin said yesterday that from the DOJ that he's not sure that the federal government has seen something like this.
The wide variety of crimes that took place during the Capitol riots.
They are apparently considering sedition charges against some of the people who broke into the Capitol and were going in there to do bodily harm to members of Congress.
Here was the acting U.S.
Attorney Michael Sherwin.
The range of criminal conduct is really, I think, again, unmatched in any type of scenario that we've seen, the FBI or the DOJ.
We're looking at everything from simple trespass, to theft of mail, to theft of digital devices with inside the Capitol, to assault on local officers, federal officers both outside and inside the Capitol, to the theft of potential national security information or national defense information, to felony murder, and even
Okay, and apparently there's the possibility that this is not going to stop before the inauguration.
According to the Houston Chronicle, the Secret Service is going to launch a massive security operation to protect the Biden inauguration.
This is being reported actually from the Washington Post, Carol Lennig, Karen Demirjian, Justin Juvenal, and Nick Miroff.
They say the Secret Service and federal law enforcement agencies are spending the final days of the Trump administration bracing for a possible violent assault against the January 20th inauguration, launching a security mobilization that will be unlike any in modern U.S.
history.
On Wednesday, the Secret Service will take command of security preparations at the U.S.
Capitol and other federal buildings backed by as many as 15,000 National Guard troops, thousands of police and tactical officers, layers of eight-foot steel fencing.
The high alert security posture is starting six days earlier than planned in order to coordinate rules for the FBI, National Guard, U.S. Marshals Service, and a host of other federal agencies that will fall under Secret Service command. One Secret Service official said everyone can just rest assured they're throwing the kitchen sink at this event. Now, the reality is that many of the people who would be interested in engaging in violence actually would like to engage in violence with members of Capitol Police, with members of the Secret Service, because they are looking for That, of course, is not a reason not to have the security there.
The security there should be there.
It shouldn't be just there.
Everybody who is involved in any act of violence, and this has been my consistent standard for literally my entire life, should be arrested and locked up and the key thrown away.
Veteran Secret Service and Homeland Security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share their worries described a level of concern unlike anything in their careers.
Threats they fear include a plot by armed groups to encircle the White House or U.S.
Capitol and the inauguration event, as well as the possibility that gunmen could stage coordinated attacks against less fortified targets in the city.
Apparently, House Democrats were briefed.
By the new Capitol Police leadership on Monday night about threats to the inauguration from groups supporting Trump, the new security measures they're putting in place to avoid a repeat of last Wednesday's riot.
Apparently, the threats included promises to execute members of Congress.
The most dangerous came from a handful of extremist groups.
On Tuesday, police in the Chicago suburbs arrested a 45-year-old named Luis Capriotti, charging with making threats to lawmakers last year, in which authorities say he promised to kill any Democrat who attempted to enter the White House on inauguration day.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut said in an interview the threats are real but will not stop the transfer of power, which of course is true.
And Vice President Mike Pence is planning on attending the inauguration.
President Trump, of course, has said that he is not going to attend the inauguration.
Okay, so meanwhile, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs wrote a letter to members of the armed forces telling everybody that Biden would become the 46th president.
This is not necessary, but the fact that people even think it's necessary is really sad, obviously.
The Joint Chiefs wrote a letter to everybody in the armed forces saying, the violent riot in Washington, D.C.
on January 6th was a direct assault on the U.S.
Congress, the Capitol building, our constitutional process.
We mourn the deaths of two Capitol policemen and others connected to these unprecedented events.
As service members who must embody the values and ideals of the nation, we support and defend the Constitution.
Any act to disrupt the constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values, and oath, it is against the law.
On January 20th, in accordance with the Constitution confirmed by the states and the courts, certified by Congress, President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander-in-Chief.
So that is obviously the military basically just making clear to everybody, including the media, guys, there's not going to be a coup attempt here, right?
Nothing is happening here.
Okay.
Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing forward toward impeachment in the House.
So here's some updates, by the way, on the arrests being made around the Capitol Hill rioters.
You should check out Matt Walsh's show today.
He's going to be covering this at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern over at dailywire.com.
Meanwhile, the big news of the day, of course, is the Democrats are pushing toward impeachment.
They do have a majority in the House that will certainly support impeachment today.
The real question is whether Republicans are going to support that effort.
The impeachment resolution has only one charge.
So that single article of impeachment is all about incitement.
The actual text of the impeachment resolution suggests that President Trump is responsible for the riots because he incited the riots.
The actual text suggests that he reiterated false claims that we won the election.
He willfully made statements that in context encourage and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol, such as, if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore, thus incited by President Trump, says the incitement charge.
Members of the crowd he had addressed in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the joint session's solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced members of Congress, the vice president, and congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.
Trump's conduct on January 6th, this is all in the incitement charge that's going to be used as the basis for the impeachment in the House.
Followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2nd, 2021, during which President Trump urged the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to quote-unquote, find enough votes to overturn the Georgia presidential election results and threaten Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.
In all of this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government.
He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a co-equal branch of government.
He thereby betrayed his trust as president to the manifest injury of the people of the United States, says the impeachment charge, whereby Trump by such conduct has demonstrated he will remain a threat to national security, democracy and the constitution if allowed to remain in office and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law.
Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial removal from office disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.
Okay, so that is the charge that is being put forth for impeachment.
And so this requires us to now take a close look at what exactly are the rationales for impeachment and what are the rationales against impeachment.
Because what we just saw is indeed unprecedented in modern times.
President Trump spoke to a crowd of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C.
Some of those people then went and invaded the Capitol building with, in some cases, blood on their mind.
Clearly.
People were going in there with zip ties.
There was actual blood spilled.
They were attempting, obviously, and first and foremost, to disrupt the constitutional working order.
They were going there with lies in mind, right?
Lies about the election being stolen.
Lies that the Congress of the United States had the power to overturn state-certified electoral results.
So what happened on Wednesday, as we talked about all of last week, and we'll continue to talk about, was absolutely egregious in every way.
The question is whether this amounts to an impeachable charge against Trump.
So there's two questions.
One, is impeachment warranted for Trump?
And two, is it prudent?
So these are two separate questions.
They're not quite the same.
The first relies on what your concept of impeachment is.
And this is a serious question.
What exactly is impeachment for?
So if you want to say that impeachment is for High crimes and misdemeanors, meaning that an actual legal violation has to be found, it's going to be difficult to impeach Trump along those lines, as we'll get to in just one second.
If you say that it is a political remedy to a political breach by the president, well then, impeachment looks more legitimate.
But here is the problem.
There are some complicating factors.
So we're going to get to all of this in just one second.
Really analyze it.
We're going to try and be as dispassionate as possible and try to steelman some of the arguments in favor of impeachment and not strawman them.
We're going to try and suggest what exactly are the arguments that folks are making and why exactly are those arguments flawed if they are flawed.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so there are really three rationales for impeachment, and then we'll get to the three rationales against impeachment.
So, the three rationales in favor of impeachment.
The first is what Democrats are claiming, which is that Trump actually committed a crime.
The incitement charge is the suggestion that Trump committed a crime.
And that crime was incitement.
That was the crime of incitement.
That is what the actual article is.
It's a one article charge.
Article one, incitement of insurrection.
The Constitution provides that the House of Representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment and that the President shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
Further, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States from holding any office under the United States.
So they're trying to link this with the 14th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment was specifically written in the aftermath of the Civil War in order to prevent people who had been Confederate handmaidens from serving in the government.
It was to prevent Jefferson Davis from coming back as a senator.
The notion that Trump falls under the 14th Amendment is an extraordinary stretch, just legally speaking.
He doesn't fall under the 14th Amendment, neither does Josh Hawley, neither does Ted Cruz.
That does not amount to an insurrection under the 14th Amendment.
And so Ilhan Omar makes the dumb person's case this way.
United States in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of the United States and to the best of his ability, preserve, provide, protect, defend the Constitution, they say that Trump engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors by inciting violence against the government of the United States. And so Ilhan Omar makes the dumb person's case this way.
She says that this is like holding a murderer accountable.
I know that some have likened the reaction that we are getting, obviously, from the president and some of, you know, Democrats and some of Republicans in Congress to someone saying, you know, if we were to hold a murderer or someone who's committed violence accountable, there will be more.
And to me, it is Okay, so first of all, there is some grave irony to Ilhan Omar, who went extraordinarily soft on riots around the nation, talking about holding murderers accountable because you just have to hold people accountable for their violent actions.
It's also supremely ironic from Ilhan Omar, who literally wrote a letter to a judge recommending that a recruit of ISIS ought to be let out of prison early.
Because that person had been impacted by their social circumstances.
So it's always weird to hear Democrats talk about crime and punishment in this way.
At least Democrats like Ilhan Omar.
In any case, what is the actual legal standard?
So, if you're talking about legal incitement, the standards on legal incitement are really, really loose.
In order to be considered responsible for incitement of violence, there is something the Supreme Court put in place in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969.
It's called the Brandenburg Test.
The Brandenburg test was established to determine when inflammatory speech intending to advocate illegal action can be restricted.
In the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, according to Cornell Law School, a KKK leader gave a speech at a rally to his fellow Klansmen.
After listing a number of derogatory racial slurs, he then said, quote, Okay, the court found that this was not actual, the speech has to be directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action.
Like, it has to be pretty clear, right?
You want to incite lawless action right now, and the speech is likely to incite or produce such action.
So, examples of things that are not actually applied under the Brandenburg Test would be Hess versus Indiana, 1973.
The Supreme Court said that an Indiana University protester who said, we will take to the effing street again, The Supreme Court said that that was protected under the Brandenburg test because the speech amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time.
And the court said since there was no evidence or rational inference from the import of the language that his words were intended to produce or likely to produce imminent disorder, those words could not be punished by the state on the ground.
They had a tendency to lead to violence.
In NAACP versus Claiborne Hardware, 1982, the Supreme Court found that a person named Charles Evers threatened violence against those who refused to boycott white businesses.
The Supreme Court, applied Brandenburg, found that the speech was protected.
They said strong and effective extemporaneous rhetoric cannot be nicely channeled in purely dulcet phrases.
An advocate must be free to stimulate his audience with spontaneous and emotional appeals for unity and action in a common cause.
When such appeals do not incite lawless action, they must be regarded as protected speech.
So, the Supreme Court has had a pretty broad standard, and virtually all lawyers agree that what Trump did does not amount to legal incitement, right?
You couldn't charge him in a court of law with incitement.
That's specifically true because, again, you can argue that Trump was urging imminent action, right?
He literally said, I want you to go to the Capitol building and march with me.
But he also said, peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
So he didn't say, I want you to go to the Capitol and invade the Capitol.
He used a bunch of charged language.
It was highly charged.
I don't think it was great.
None of this is to argue that what Trump has been doing for the past couple months is appropriate, decent, or good.
But in order to meet the test of legal incitement, which is the crime that you would want under high crimes and misdemeanors, the test is a little bit higher.
That test is, did he mean to incite imminent lawless action?
That is the Brandenburg test.
Well, if he did, it would be weird for him to say that you should peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
Here was President Trump saying just that at the rally the other day.
We've come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated.
Lawfully slated.
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity.
Okay, so again, peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard is not quite the same thing as I want you to go over there, invade the Capitol building, and beat a police officer to death.
That doesn't seem like quite the same thing.
So in any Senate defense against impeachment, obviously that is going to be Trump's defense.
Listen, if you wanted to impeach me for all the stuff that I've said since the election, then you'd have to find the grounds upon which you could impeach me.
You can't find those grounds, and to suggest that I incited the violence as opposed to raising the temperature is a different thing.
Now, listen, I've had that standard for a very long time, right?
I've said this a thousand times on the show.
When Barack Obama said over and over and over again that the police were racist across the country, that the policing had a systemically racist problem, that blacks in America were at existential risk, and then a Black Lives Matter supporter went and shot to death six Dallas police officers in 2016, I didn't say that Obama was responsible.
I said that Obama was responsible for increasing the temperature in the country, and that was really bad.
But was he responsible for the man shooting six police officers?
No.
Bernie Sanders spent years claiming that if you didn't back Medicare for All, it's because you wanted people to die.
That Republican attempts to stymie Obamacare were designed at killing people.
And then a Bernie Sanders supporter went and shot a bunch of members of Congress, including Steve Scalise, almost to death.
I said at the time, Bernie Sanders was responsible for raising the temperature.
Did he deserve to lose his office for quote-unquote incitement?
No, that's not the way any of this works.
Okay, so my standard for incitement has been completely consistent across time for Democrats and Republicans.
I cannot say the same for most of the people in the political sphere.
And again, it is worth noting, politics is replete with all sorts of, I would say, violent rhetoric, rhetoric that exacerbates the tensions, that raises the temperature, passionate rhetoric that Is it implicit with sort of violent imagery?
I mean, how many times have you heard a politician say that we need to fight, fight, fight, fight, fight?
I mean, that's Republican and Democrat.
In fact, here's a little montage of various Democrats using some rather inflammatory language just over the course of the past couple of years.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be.
People need to start taking to the streets.
This is a dictator.
You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there is unrest in our lives.
Enemies of the state.
Show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless... When they go low, we kick them.
How do you resist the temptation to run up and wring her neck?
The biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right.
I thought he should have punched him in the face.
Even if he lost, he insulted your wife.
He came down the escalator and called Mexicans rapists and murderers.
He said, well, what do you think I should have done?
I said, I think you should have punched him in the face and then gotten out of the race.
You would have been a hero.
I'd like to punch him in the face.
So, as far as the first rationale for impeachment, which is that Trump committed a crime, it's going to be very difficult to meet that test.
Okay, so that brings us to the second argument in favor of impeachment.
And this one is at least more honest.
The second argument in favor of impeachment Is that this was a challenge to the legislative branch, that the legislative branch of government cannot abide challenges from the executive branch of government.
If the executive branch of government attacks the legislature in the way that Trump attacked the legislature, rhetorically speaking, that the legislative branch needs to fight back, particularly if that culminates in an actual attack by armed supporters of that person on the Capitol building.
It's not a criminal argument.
It is now a political argument.
Our sole method of protecting ourselves against the executive branch is for us to strike back with impeachment.
This is the angle that's being taken by Liz Cheney, the number three House Republican.
A lot of people very angry at Liz Cheney today.
Again, I think the differences, as always, my opinion on this is the differences of opinion are acceptable within the Republican caucus and within the Democratic caucus.
I think we should we have to take the argument at least seriously, even if we decide at the end that the argument lacks.
So here's what Liz Cheney said.
She said she's going to vote to impeach Trump today.
She says on January 6th, a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol to obstruct the process of our democracy and stop the counting of presidential electoral votes.
This insurrection caused injury, death and destruction in the most sacred space of our republic.
Much more will become clear in the coming days and weeks.
What we know now is enough.
The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.
Everything that followed was his doing.
None of this would have happened without the President.
The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence.
He did not.
There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.
I will vote to impeach the President.
Okay, so basically, the argument here is not even...
Criminal incitement, right?
The argument here is that on a broad sort of causal level, without Trump, none of this happens, which is very likely true, right?
On a broad causal level, it's true that James Hodgkin, the congressional baseball shooter, doesn't go and shoot a bunch of people if Bernie Sanders isn't saying what he's saying.
It's on a broad causal level.
Lots of rhetoric is endemic to violence that happens in the nature of politics.
Right, so the reality here of what she's saying, which is that this is a challenge to the legislative branch that culminated in violence, that's an actual argument, and that's an argument that I've heard from a lot of good-hearted Republicans and a lot of conservatives who have called for impeachment.
I heard the Wall Street Journal editorial board made a similar argument last week.
Which of the legislative branch has to defend itself.
And that's an argument worth taking seriously.
Now what's sort of interesting about the argument is that the argument that Trump was making originally is that he was imputing powers to Congress that Congress does not actually have.
It's sort of a bizarre situation because usually when the executive challenges the legislature, it's to deprive the legislature of powers that the legislature does have.
Usually when you hear presidents attacking the legislature, it's the do-nothing Congress.
If you don't do what I want to do, then I'm just going to use the pen and a phone.
The legislature is an institution that is not worthy of respect, and so we're just going to take its authority and use it here in the executive branch.
In this particular case, Trump was doing the very odd, bizarre, and constitutionally incorrect thing of suggesting that the legislature, the federal legislature, had the power to actually overturn state electoral results.
He was imputing power to Congress that Congress doesn't actually have.
Nonetheless, The president urging people to go march on the Capitol building, even if not to do violence, is a unique thing.
We haven't really seen that before.
Is that impeachable?
I wonder whether that's impeachable.
Again, that comes down to whether Trump actually incited.
So the broad causal argument, I'm not sure sustains all the way through.
In other words, did Trump tell people?
I think that the legal incitement standard is not just for me a legal incitement standard.
I think it's sort of a moral incitement standard, too.
When it comes to the issue of causation, you can say that, broadly speaking, Trump caused everything that followed.
But I think that on a moral level, can you say that Trump is Responsible to the extent that he wanted people to go invade the Capitol building and attack Mike Pence physically and harm people.
I think that is going to be a bit of a stretch.
So, does that mean that it's completely out of bounds for Liz Cheney to say what she said?
I don't think it's completely out of bounds.
I just think that her argument is too strong and proves too much.
Because you can certainly see a point in the past or in the future where the presidency attacks a co-equal branch of government in extraordinary language And as long as he's not urging people to openly attack that institution, that's still an attack on a co-equal branch of government.
That sort of stuff happens pretty regularly in American politics.
The issue here is that a bunch of fringe wackos decided that they were going to invade the Capitol building under those auspices.
And then finally, we'll get to in just a second, the third, the third rationale for impeachment.
And the third rationale for impeachment is just pure politics.
So the first was something criminal happened.
I don't think that's correct.
The second was this was a challenge to the legislative branch's authority.
I think there's a lot of truth to that one.
But I also think that that's an argument that applies broadly to a lot of people in the past.
So maybe we should impeach presidents more often.
Maybe it would be the comeback.
Then the third is just pure politics, which seems to be why Democrats are doing what they are doing right here.
Not all Democrats.
I think some Democrats are participating in the first two standards.
They think an actual violation of law happened.
Some Democrats are suggesting that it's a violation of the prerogative of the legislative branch.
I get that.
But It's hard to look at the actions of Democrats in leadership over the last 48 hours, last week, really, and not see an attempt to play politics.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so...
As I say, there are three reasons why impeachment is being pursued.
One is that some people think that Trump actually committed a formal crime.
I think that that's a very difficult standard to uphold.
Very few lawyers would say that it counts as legal incitement what Trump did the other day.
Number two is the overall challenge to the legislative branch.
I think there is some legitimacy to the idea that Trump challenged the authority of the legislative branch who's sending people to march on the Capitol building.
I also think that that has been a long time move by a variety of presidents.
This is just a much more extreme version of it.
I mean, FDR suggested that he was going to pack the Supreme Court because he didn't like the outcome of the Supreme Court.
If his supporters had then gone and marched on the Supreme Court, it would look like something very similar.
So, once you separate out the incitement issue and you get into the challenge to the legislative branch, then that looks bad and ugly.
I'm not sure that it looks impeachable.
I understand the countervailing logic, by the way, which is the Liz Cheney logic, which is the legislative branch cannot stand for this sort of infringement on its authority.
And in fact, you know, I'm kind of happy to see if the legislative branch wants to stand up to the executive just on a broad level.
My problem is I think it's partisan, but if the legislative branch wants to far more often stand up to the executive branch, I think that'd be a welcome development.
Finally, there's the third rationale for impeachment, and this one seems like it's the most cynical.
It's also probably the most accurate because we live in a very cynical time, and that is just pure politics.
This is not really about principles so much as it is about the pure politics of the situation.
The way that you can tell There's a lot of truth to this, is the way that the Democrats decided that they wanted to move forward with the impeachment.
The first thing that they did is they pushed for Mike Pence to use the 25th Amendment.
They passed a resolution trying to push Mike Pence to use the 25th Amendment.
Now, that's unconstitutional.
Okay, the 25th Amendment is an executive branch remedy for the president being incompetent.
It was originally put into law after Woodrow Wilson essentially went brain dead while he was president of the United States, and his wife, Edith, was essentially running the country.
And so, Congress, the states, they decided, you know what?
We're going to need a solution to this, and that is the cabinet can declare that the president is incompetent and then replace him with the vice president.
But that is an executive branch remedy.
It has to then be greenlit by the legislative branch.
It's a very complicated process, but It's generally not the legislative branch threatening that if the executive branch doesn't do what it wants, then they are going to impeach.
That would be the legislative branch now encroaching on the territory of the executive branch, right?
So it's sort of the reverse of the argument that was being made a second ago about why Trump needs to be impeached for violating the prerogatives of the legislature.
So Nancy Pelosi tried to pass a resolution suggesting use of the 25th Amendment and Mike Pence slapped that down.
He wrote a letter to Pelosi.
He said he's not going to invoke the 25th Amendment.
He said, Every American was shocked and saddened by the attack on our nation's capital last week.
I'm grateful for the leadership you and other congressional leaders provided in reconvening Congress to complete the people's business on that very same day.
It was a moment that demonstrated to the American people the unity that is still possible in Congress when it is needed most.
But now, with just eight days left in the President's term, you and the Democratic Caucus are demanding that the Cabinet and I invoke the 25th Amendment.
I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our nation or consistent with our Constitution.
Last week, I did not yield to pressure to exert power beyond my constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election.
I will not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the life of our nation.
So Pence is saying, like, I can see the politics here, lady.
Like, we know exactly what you're doing.
Which is right.
As you know full well, the 25th Amendment was designed to address presidential incapacity or disability.
Just a few months ago, when you introduced legislation to create a 25th Amendment commission, you said, quote, a president's fitness for office must be determined by science and fact.
You said then, we must be very respectful of not making a judgment on the basis of a comment or behavior we don't like, but based on a medical decision.
Madam Speaker, you are right.
Under our Constitution, the 25th Amendment is not a means of punishment or usurpation.
Invoking the 25th Amendment in such a manner would set a terrible precedent.
After the horrific events of last week, our administration's energy is directed to ensuring an orderly transition.
The Bible says, for everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven, a time to heal, a time to build up.
That time is now.
In the midst of a global pandemic, economic hardship for millions of Americans, and the tragic events of January 6th, now is the time for us to come together.
Now is the time to heal.
I urge you and every member of Congress to avoid actions that would further divide and inflame the passions of the moment.
Work with us to lower the temperature and unite our country as we prepare to inaugurate President-elect Biden as the next President of the United States.
I pledge to you that I will continue to do my part to work in good faith with the incoming administration to ensure an orderly transition of power.
So help me God.
By the way, Mike Pence's behavior during this whole debacle has been extraordinary.
I mean, really, really good.
I mean, Mike Pence has done what he was constitutionally supposed to do under heavy pressure from Trump to violate his constitutional oath of office.
There are apparently now stories emerging that Trump had said directly to Pence when it came to whether he should count the duly certified electoral votes that you can either be a patriot or you can be a p-word.
See how I say P-word even if it's not a Cardi B song?
Apparently that's what Trump said to Pence, and Pence decided actually to be a patriot, which is to do his constitutional duty.
Okay, but the fact that the Democrats were attempting the 25th Amendment, as opposed to impeachment first, suggests that politics were being played here.
Also suggesting that politics are being played here, that this is a lot about democratic political game, is who Nancy Pelosi is now appointing to be the managers, the House impeachment managers.
So, included among their number, Eric Swalwell.
Who most recently was seen screwing Chinese spies, apparently, and being on the intelligence committee at the same time.
So that is good times.
That's really solid.
Other people.
Jamie Raskin of Maryland is going to serve as the lead impeachment manager.
Jamie Raskin did indeed, in 2016, challenge 10 of 29's Of Florida's 29 electoral votes, saying that they violated Florida's prohibition against dual office holders.
So it's interesting that, you know, the apparent push by Trump to challenge electoral votes.
Jamie Raskin is going to be leading the way on the impeachment, despite the fact that Jamie Raskin did the exact same thing back in 2016.
Meanwhile, as far as playing politics goes, the Democrats are not stopping at Trump, of course.
Their suggestion is that it's time to expel members of Congress who challenged electoral votes.
So, Democrats are now pushing that measure.
According to the New York Times, Progressive House Democrats on Monday introduced legislation that would allow a committee to investigate and potentially expel Republican lawmakers who had participated in efforts to subvert the results of the November election.
I don't like what they did either, okay?
I don't think the electoral votes should have been challenged.
issue a report on lawmakers who had sought to overturn the election and determine if they should face sanction, including removal from the House of Representatives.
That sounds like playing politics.
You don't like what they did, so now you're going to expel them.
They're duly elected members of Congress.
You're going to expel them from the House of Representatives.
Now I don't like what they did either.
OK, I don't think the electoral votes should have been challenged.
I don't even think there's a ground for the challenge of the electoral votes.
And this time apparently in the minority when it comes to the House of Representatives, where a bunch of Republican House members actually issued the challenges.
But just because I don't like something doesn't mean that you get to expel the member.
Again, Jamie Raskin did the exact same thing in 2016.
I don't think he should lose his House seat because of that.
He should if he's... I mean, I don't think he should hold a House seat based on electoral results, but I don't think he should be expelled.
The Democrats' attempt to expand the definition of the 14th Amendment to include challenges to electoral votes is really, really crazy, and super political, obviously.
Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter Democrat, right?
I mean, that's literally how she got her start, as a Black Lives Matter activist.
She said, even if it's just a few, we have to make sure the message is clear.
You cannot be a sitting Congress member and incite an insurrection and work to overturn an election.
Work to overturn an election?
Okay, now we get into, like, super political territory, because the Democrats worked for four years to overturn the results of the 2016 election with all of the Russia nonsense.
Democrats refused to accept that Trump had been elected President of the United States in 2016 in any serious way.
So, like, this is the third rationale for impeachment and it seems like, frankly, the most obvious, which is the purely political.
Sherrod Brown, the Senator from Ohio, he suggested that the Senate of the United States should move to expel Josh Hawley under the 14th Amendment.
I'm not a big Hawley fan.
I think what Hawley did here was really, really bad.
I thought it was really cynical.
I think Hawley knew that the election was not, quote-unquote, stolen.
I think Hawley knew that there was not sufficient evidence of voter fraud or voter irregularity to overturn any electoral results.
In fact, he said as much.
I think that's bad.
Do I think that that is insurrection under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution?
No, not unless you're a nut.
Here is Sherrod Brown being a nut.
The public humiliation doesn't seem to matter much, even some of their allies.
Senator Hawley, his sort of mentor, former Senator Danforth, has said that he wished he hadn't encouraged him to run for the Senate.
They're hearing that, but the Senate as a body needs to take action, and I know Senator McConnell won't.
But we should, if he's not going to resign, which of course they won't, they continue to be like Trump and take no responsibility for anything, even though we saw their words, we saw the picture of Holly, who George Will said there's a huge chasm between his ambition and his achievement, then we should take action on expulsion.
Okay, so again, that looks super duper political.
So those were the three rationales in favor of impeachment.
One is the super political.
One is the challenge to the legislative branch.
That's the only one that I think has any legitimacy at all.
And the third is the incitement charge, which again, is legally specious.
Okay, so in a second, we're gonna get to the three cases against impeachment.
Like why impeachment would not be the proper remedy here.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, we're going to get to the three cases against impeachment in just one second.
First.
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All righty, so now we get to the three arguments We did the three arguments in favor of impeachment.
Namely, he committed a crime.
Secondly, a challenge to the legislative branch.
It needs to be rebutted by the legislative branch.
And third, this is just pure politics and we need the pure politics of the situation.
Okay, finally, here's the rationales against impeachment.
Okay, number one, and this is just true, there's no time, okay?
Realistically speaking, the impeachment is not going to have any effect because it is already, by the calendar, January 13th, one week from today, Joe Biden will be the president of the United States.
He will not be the president-elect, he'll be the president one week from today.
The Democrats are slated to vote on impeachment today.
Let's say they pass it.
Let's say they get it to the Senate.
The Senate is not supposed to come back into session until January 19th.
Okay, like the day before the inauguration.
Even if the Senate were to reconvene in order to hear the charges, you would then have to have an actual defense for due process purposes put up by the Trump team.
That would take longer than a week.
Okay, so realistically speaking, there will be no impeachment before the actual inauguration of Joe Biden, at which point impeachment becomes a moot point.
This is a point that's made by Michael Luttig, a former judge on the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
He made a convincing case.
It's not even constitutional to impeach a former president.
Some of the Democrats have been saying, you know what we should do?
We should just keep the impeachment going, and then we'll impeach him after he is no longer in office, and that will bar him from running again.
And now, first of all, that looks purely political, because at that point, Trump is not even in office.
So what exactly are you getting done?
I guess you're passing a bill saying that he can't run for office again, kind of, but you don't need an impeachment in order to do that, presumably.
You could theoretically just pass a bill to that effect, I think.
Okay, but here's what Ludwig says.
He says, the crux of my argument is that the very purpose of an impeachment power is to remove an incumbent official.
That seems to me to be crystal clear and inescapably true under the text of the Constitution.
Here's the relevant portion.
The president, vice president, all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The House of Representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment.
So judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the The party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to law.
It's pretty obvious that this is designed to remove the president from office.
A secondary purpose is to disqualify a president from holding office.
Again, Ludwig says it's the impeachment that is the authority for the disqualification.
A former president cannot be removed from office because he is not in office.
Also, the Constitution says that if you actually want to go after him, the Constitution says specifically he will still be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to the law.
Democrats are saying they can start this thing now and they can finish it later.
Okay, so that is just not going to happen.
So realistically speaking, there is no time to get this done, just on a purely realistic timeline level.
So that is a prudential argument, it is also a legal argument.
Okay, second, there's the sort of broader narrative argument.
So the broader narrative argument, which is the counterpart to the argument in favor.
The argument in favor is Trump did a bunch of bad stuff that resulted, broadly speaking, what happened at the Capitol building.
The countervailing narrative is that the attempt to impeach Trump is really just the camel's nose, right?
That what it really is about is not Trump.
It's about trying to lump Trump in with every one of his supporters and then lump all of those supporters in with what happened at the Capitol riots.
That's really what this is about.
So the argument is, it goes something like this.
What you guys are really trying to do with impeachment is you're trying to suggest that Trump's actions resulted directly in what happened at the Capitol building.
And that because Trump has not changed over the past five years, all of that was 100% foreseeable.
And that if you're saying that it's 100% foreseeable, that means that everybody who voted for Trump, anybody who backed anything Trump ever did, anybody who suggested that Trump would be better for the country than the countervailing Democrats, anybody who voted, all 75 million people voted for Trump, All of those people should have known, and in fact did know, what exactly was going to go down at the Capitol.
Or at least, they were okay with what went down at the Capitol.
Because of course, it was completely foreseeable.
Because Trump has not changed.
His folks have not changed.
And this was completely foreseeable.
And so what impeachment is really about, politically speaking, is about smearing every Trump supporter with the stain of what happened at the Capitol building.
Right?
That is the political argument against impeachment.
Okay, so.
That argument is not true for every Democrat.
It's not true for everybody who's liberal.
There are a lot of Democrats and liberals who say, listen, the people who did that, they're responsible for what they did.
Trump's actions are unsustainable on a personal level, but I'm not going to suggest that every Republican knew this was coming.
I'm not going to say that every Republican is responsible for this.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of credibility to this argument for people who oppose the impeachment because Democrats keep saying over and over and over again that they're lumping all Republicans together, which, by the way, is extraordinarily dangerous for the country.
There are many dangerous things happening in the country right now.
One is a group of people who are disconnected from reality doing violence at the Capitol building and maybe threatening further violence down the road here.
That's extraordinarily dangerous.
Another extraordinarily dangerous thing.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Many dangerous things can happen at once.
In fact, usually they do.
The other extraordinarily dangerous thing is labeling half the country people who support violence and then seeking to quash their ability to speak freely.
Morally, morally extirpating them, right?
That's a dangerous thing too.
Many dangerous things can happen all at once.
So in favor of the argument that what impeachment is truly about is targeting his supporters, all you have to do is look at the Democratic side of the aisle where they keep saying this kind of stuff over and over and over again.
So for example, AOC says that we need to rein in our media environment.
The natural consequence of this should be to rein in our media environment.
We need like a truth and reconciliation commission like South Africa.
Hint, we don't.
South Africa was an actual apartheid state, gang.
You want to say we needed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in, like, 1966?
Okay.
You want to say we need one in 2021?
I'm sorry, but no.
But AOC says we need to rein in the First Amendment, essentially.
Well, that's lumping everybody in together, is it not?
Here was the estimable Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, D-Twitch.
But what I can say is that there's absolutely a commission that's being discussed, but it seems to be more investigatory I'm in style rather than truth and reconciliation.
And so I think that's an interesting concept for us to explore.
We're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation.
She didn't just say that, by the way.
She also said that we can only begin to heal if southern states become democratic.
So it seems almost as though this is purely political and about targeting Trump supporters.
Here was the estimable Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez once again.
That southern states are not red states.
They are suppressed states, which means the only way that our country is going to heal is through the actual liberation of southern states The actual liberation of the poor.
The actual liberation of working people from economic, social, and racial oppression.
That's the only way.
Or take, for example, the tweets of Chris Hayes of MSNBC.
So Chris Hayes tweeted out, in the aftermath of all of this, a picture of Trump with Amy Coney Barrett.
Quote, wonder if Amy Coney Barrett has pictures like this framed and up in her house or not.
It's a picture of Coney Barrett with Trump.
So the idea is any remote association with Trump means that you are in favor of the Capitol riots, right?
Everyone is guilty.
Every single person is guilty.
Amy Coney Barrett is guilty.
She was just a judge.
And now, she's gonna be appointed, she's on the Supreme Court, put there by Trump.
That means everything Trump ever did, anything he ever touched, anybody who's in favor of those things is bad.
Right, so the case against impeachment here is that when you're impeaching Trump, what you're really doing is you are setting the predicate for an argument, which is that, again, not only is he responsible for quote-unquote incitement, but everybody who voted for him knew that this sort of stuff was gonna culminate in what happened at the Capitol building, which is an absurd contention.
It's an absurd contention.
Okay, but that is, you know, what much of the Democratic left is pushing.
You have Nicole Hannah-Jones saying the same thing, right?
She basically just says, well, you know, those Capitol rioters, essentially, they're just reflecting the generalized Republican point of view, right?
Because she believes that all Republicans are basically racists who are seeking to impose white supremacy on the nation.
Here was the excreble, awful, terrible liar, Nicole Hannah-Jones.
The racial divide has always been, since the American Revolution, when the British exploited the racial divide against the colonists, the sharpest tool in the arsenal.
Reaction to the stoking of that racial divide.
And it never benefits low-income white Americans.
It only benefits the elite.
And we saw what happened with that this past week.
Oh, so it's about benefiting the elite.
You see, it's all part of the same kind of broad-writ Republican evil conservative coalition.
Another point in favor of this idea that impeachment truly is about going after Trump supporters.
And this has become a big talking point on the right.
And given the reaction of the left, there's some credibility to it.
It is not completely specious.
Hey, Forbes magazine put out an article today suggesting, quote, a truth reckoning.
Why we're holding those who lied for Trump accountable.
This is Randall Lane of Forbes staff.
He says the insurrection was rooted in lies.
He says, from day one at the White House, up has been down, yes has been no, failure has been success.
He cites Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway.
He says, as American democracy rebounds, we need to return to a standard of truth when it comes to how the government communicates with the governed.
The easiest way to do that, from where I sit, is to create repercussions for those who don't follow the civic norms.
Trump's lawyers lie gleefully to the press and public.
Those lies magically almost never made it into briefs and arguments.
So, what's the parallel in the dark arts of communication?
Simple.
Don't let the chronic liars cash in on their dishonesty.
Press secretaries like Joe Lockhart, Ari Fleischer, and Jay Carney, who left the White House with their reputations in various stages of intact, made millions taking their skills and credibility to corporate America.
Trump's liars don't merit the same golden parachute.
Let it be known to the business world.
Hire any of Trump's fellow fabulous above, and Forbes will assume everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.
So Jay Carney is now the standard of truth, according to Forbes.
So we're going to excise everyone who worked with Trump, not just Trump, everybody who worked with Trump is going to be excised.
Meanwhile, YouTube is cracking down on Trump.
According to the Washington Post, YouTube has now suspended Trump from uploading new videos to his official account for at least a week, joining Twitter and Facebook and shutting the president out of his account due to concerns his posts will incite violence.
So again, they've not made the case that his post did incite the violence in any sort of legal fashion, doesn't matter.
They're just gonna take what Trump says and they're just gonna remove it.
Okay, and everybody on the right is going, okay, so you can now make the argument that anything that I say is going to incite violence as well and just remove that willy nilly.
So when the left uses this as a tool, as a political tool to club into submission, all the people on the right, then I don't think the right is wrong to look sideways at impeachment and say, I'm doubting some of your motives here.
I'm doubting some of your motives, which brings us to the third case against impeachment.
OK, the third case against impeachment goes something like this.
If you wish for the country to reunite, then Democrats are going to have to show some magnanimity and victory here.
And it would be magnanimity, right?
They're going to have to say, listen, we're a week out.
Trump got what he deserved.
He got not elected.
If we have criminal charges to bring, we'll bring them against the people who actually violated the law.
And in order to move forward here, we're going to recognize there are a lot of Republicans across the other side of the aisle who disagree with us on impeachment, but who stood with us in the face of threats to democracy, right?
Mike Pence stood with us.
Mitch McConnell stood with us.
This is not a right-left divide.
This is an American versus anti-American divide.
First of all, if they said that, I think there might actually be more support for impeachment.
It's the fact they're lumping everybody together that's creating the backlash.
However, If they continue along these lines, what they're actually going to create is a backlash in favor of Trump, right?
This is another of the arguments against impeachment.
It creates a backlash in favor of Trump, right?
Trump is already stoking that.
He says this is a continuation of the witch hunt.
Here's President Trump.
On the impeachment, it's really a continuation of the greatest witch hunt in the history of politics.
It's ridiculous.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
This impeachment is causing tremendous anger.
And you're doing it, and it's really a terrible thing that they're doing.
Okay, so, you know, that is going to start generating more and more support the more that the left continues to lump in everybody with Trump.
Tim Scott has put out a tweet thread suggesting why he is not in favor of impeachment.
He tweeted, A lot of people saying, well, you know, if he deserves impeachment, then like you're talking unity, but nobody was talking unity last week.
That's true.
But that's the point about unity.
Somebody is going to actually have to step forward and be the uniting figure.
Biden posed himself as that person.
So at a certain point here, he is going to have to step forward and he is going to have to stump in favor of unity.
Now, if Trump had been isolated here?
If Trump had actually committed criminal conduct, like actual prosecutable criminal conduct, I think this would be a lot easier.
But when people on the left say, ah, you're calling for unity now?
You weren't calling for unity five minutes ago.
Well, some of us were actually kind of calling for unity for a long time here, at least around fundamental American principles.
And the left was rejecting a lot of those fundamental American principles.
We were saying, how about we unify around violence is bad?
And a lot of folks on the left were like, well, it depends on what the violence is for.
And some of us were like, you know, what if we unified around the principle that claims require evidence?
And the left was like, well, it depends which claims.
So, here's the thing about unity.
Unity requires some sacrifice on both sides.
Okay?
Unity requires for the right to recognize baseline truths.
Like, some of the truths I've said.
Violence is bad at the Capitol.
I think most Republicans agree with that.
That unevidenced allegations are not sufficient to support action.
I think that the right should agree with that.
In fact, there have been some of us who've been saying this since the day of the election, when President Trump declared himself the victor.
I said immediately, he does not have the evidence to back that.
I got a lot of flack from the right for saying that.
But we should all agree on that.
On the left, the same agreement has to take place.
What does that have to do with impeachment?
Well, it means that you have to make clear the grounds of the impeachment.
You can't lump people together if you're going to pursue it.
And again, you have to explain why it's necessary to do this when it's not going to get done before the election.
Why this isn't a political tool?
Because it looks like a political tool.
That's what it looks like.
Especially in the midst of this massive backlash against people of the right on tech platforms, in the midst of removing Parler from Amazon Web Services, and all the rest.
So what exactly would be the proper response here?
Some people are like, okay, well, you're saying no impeachment.
What's the proper response?
Well, it seems to me, number one, that the generalized sort of Republican leadership position, which is Republicans should vote whatever their conscience decides, is not a bad impulse.
I think that when Republicans do that, I'm generally in favor.
I don't think that you need a lot of top-down direction inside Republican circles.
I think it sort of cuts against the nature of conservatism.
So, you know, Mitch McConnell not rallying support against the cause again, because I think that there's some legitimate claims here.
I don't think that that's bad.
I don't agree with him if he is in favor of impeachment.
But I think the idea that Republicans have to decide based on their own conscience is where they stand on this thing.
And they have to weigh all of the varying sort of narratives here is.
Good people can come to different conclusions, is, I guess, what I am saying here.
I know.
Shocking conclusion.
But what do I think is the actual proper response?
I think the actual proper response is what Brian Fitzpatrick, the Republican congressperson from Pennsylvania, suggested.
He was moving for an act of congressional censure.
Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, was also pushing for congressional censure of President Trump's behavior.
That seems proper to me because, again, the president did not commit a crime, but that doesn't mean you can't censure him for his language.
You can't censure him for his actions.
That seems perfectly appropriate.
It has nothing to do with the impeachment process.
It can get done before the election.
Democrats have rejected that out of hand because they want something obviously more dramatic.
And again, a lot of this is about holding over the heads of conservatives the threat that if you ever say anything in the future, we just say, well, you voted for Trump and Trump resulted in the Capitol riot.
That's going to be the line from Democrats from here to the end of time.
Republicans know it, which is why so many Republicans are knee-jerk against what Democrats are trying to do here.
Okay, meanwhile, one of the things that is forwarding a lot of the ire on the right is, again, that vast wave that you are seeing from the left.
You're trying to lump everybody together and suggest that every Trump supporter knew this was coming, and that if you voted for Trump, this was part of the bargain.
It was riots at the Capitol building, which is just not true.
Again, if the policing had been sufficient, that would not have been the outcome there.
A lot of people would have gotten arrested.
In any case, the next move is the social media attempt to shut down all dissenting speech.
And this is the thing that's scaring the hell out of everybody, right?
We have seen YouTube and Twitter and Facebook all move in coordination to censor the President of the United States.
You don't have to like what Trump says.
I've been condemning it consistently.
That does not mean that the best move here is for social media to literally shut off the tap for the President of the United States.
The social media companies should not be held responsible for people posting content that is then misused by fringe people to go do violence because that literally justifies the removal of any controversial speech ever.
Ever.
As somebody who's in the business of political speech, it is not difficult to find, for people who have very, very large audiences, nutjobs who will misuse their words to go do bad things.
This is true right, left, and center.
The left doesn't seem to care about it, though, because they know they're not going to be held accountable for it, so if they hold the right accountable for it, this means they can also deplatform sites they don't particularly like.
So Amazon Web Services takes down Parler, and then Amazon Web Services put out a brief Pointing out all of the bad things that have been said on Parler.
All the violent things that have been said on Parler.
Okay, just a note.
Twitter has exactly that same kind of content.
There's plenty of evil, terrible content on Twitter that they're remiss in taking down.
The same thing is true on Facebook.
So Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, she said, you know, these riots were not organized on our platform.
Then she adds, as far as we know, I'm not sure how far that is.
I would assume that many of the people who, I mean, stopped the steal was still on Facebook up until about 24 hours ago.
So I assume that a lot of the activity actually was coordinated in places like Facebook because Facebook is a hell of a lot bigger than Parler is.
And Facebook has billions of users.
Parler, at its height, had like three and a half million users.
Anyway, here is Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook saying, no, we've never, no, nothing bad has ever happened at Facebook.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Well, we know this was organized online.
We know that.
We, again, took down QAnon, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, anything that was talking about possible violence last week.
Our enforcement's never perfect, so I'm sure there were still things on Facebook.
I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our Okay, so she can't be sure?
Also, just a note, there were mass riots in the summer.
How many of those do you think were organized on Parler?
How many?
Really?
Can't imagine tons of them.
that might be leading to this and making sure we get it down as quickly as possible.
Okay, so she can't be sure.
Also, just a note, there were mass riots in the summer.
How many of those do you think were organized on Parler?
How many?
Really?
Can't imagine tons of them.
I'm not sure Black Lives Matter was using Parler as its organizing weapon.
If the idea is that platforms are now responsible for people misusing the platforms, that's the, I mean, honestly, that's a bigger argument against free speech.
And that is the argument that people on the left are now making.
They're basically saying free speech is inherently dangerous because free speech can be misused.
Yes, that's true.
Free speech can be misused.
And you know what's even worse?
The government cracking down on free speech or...
In the cultural sphere, social media, which was supposed to be the public square, cracking down on free speech, particularly from apps that centralize conservatives.
That is a very, very dangerous thing because there is no consistent standard.
This is the point that I'm making.
It is not that Parler did an amazing job of policing its content.
I don't think anybody's making that argument.
The point is that there is no consistent standard being applied.
It is not as though if a platform allows violent rhetoric, To fester.
That this is what causes Amazon Web Services to take down the app.
Twitter's still up.
Plenty of gross stuff on Twitter.
It is that when it is located in quote-unquote conservative or Trump-supporting circles, and it seems to centralize those supporters in one place, then it's super bad and becomes targeted by the entire tech bro infrastructure.
There's a reason for that.
The tech companies are dominated by the left.
They're dominated by it.
And they do not have, overall, a great commitment to free speech.
I think the most ironic tweet of yesterday, it was getting passed around an awful lot, was this tweet from Twitter Public Policy.
So, according to Twitter Public Policy, ahead of the Ugandan elections, they said they were hearing reports that the internet service providers were being ordered to block social media and messaging apps.
They said, we strongly condemn internet shutdowns.
They're hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the open internet.
And then they added, access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversations on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.
Oh, Twitter.
Oh, Twitter, you stupid, stupid app.
I was, I mean, I'm old enough to remember because I'm more than six months old.
When you for a month suspended the New York Post in the run up to an election because you didn't like that they printed a true story about Joe Biden's son's laptop.
And so do I trust you guys being a free speech outlet?
No, I do not.
Now, there are a lot of people who are saying, well, you know, you have a lot of followers and a hundred percent.
I have a lot of followers on Twitter.
Does that mean I trust them to interpret standards properly?
No, I do not.
I have a huge following on Facebook.
Do I trust that Facebook is going to be consistent in its standards or that they are not going to morph their standards in order to excise conservative speech?
No, I do not.
And I'm not sure why you would either, considering they have been utterly opaque as to what their standards are.
They've not been clear about what those standards ought to be.
They've not been clear with people when their accounts get taken down, why those accounts are getting taken down.
This is scary stuff.
It should frighten people.
Many bad things can be happening at once.
Many bad things, okay?
And among those bad things is indeed the domination of social media, which is effectually our public square by the left.
By the way, if you think that it is any sort of coincidence that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube all started doing the bidding of Democratic politicians the minute that Joe Biden won, You're a fool.
It is purely obvious, and I know this from... I have many friends who work inside various tech companies.
It is perfectly clear that the minute that Joe Biden won, and particularly the minute that the Republicans lost the Georgia Senate races, that the movement inside tech was going to be to please Democratic senators who are putting overt pressure on the tech bros to crack down on speech they don't like.
That is a threat to the Republic.
So, when we're talking about threats to the Republic, people storming the Capitol building, yes, that is a threat to the Republic.
It also happened to be a couple of hundred people who are violent and evil and ought to be put in jail.
When you're talking about institutions that govern the lives and free speech patterns of hundreds of millions of people deciding arbitrarily what their free speech standards are, and doing so on the basis of politics and pressure from Democratic actors, Democratic senators claiming that they're gonna break up companies unless those companies do what they want, That seems to me like a threat to the Republic as well.
That is a super dangerous thing.
And it is not a coincidence that so many members of the incoming Biden administration are tech bros.
According to the Daily Caller, at least 14 people who Biden had picked to serve either in his administration or advise his transition have worked for big tech firms that cracked down earlier this week on President Trump.
Apple's top lobbyist was a chief advisor to the Biden transition.
A former Facebook executive will serve as staff director in the Biden White House.
A former Twitter executive will serve as chief spokesperson for the National Security Council under Biden.
Current and former executives at those firms and two others, Google and Amazon, fill out other positions in the incoming Biden administration.
By the way, if you ever look at the donations of tech companies, I was looking this up the other day, donations by employees of the various tech companies, there is not a major tech company in the United States outside of Qualcomm, so far as I'm aware, that does not donate in extraordinary proportions to Democrats.
There's a reason that Susan Rice, the Obama admin staffer who lies to the American public about Benghazi, now the newcoming domestic policy advisor for no reason in the Biden administration, she was on the Netflix board.
Okay, as of 2018, 99.6% of all donations from Netflix employees went to Democrats.
Adobe, 93% of all donations in 2018 went to Democrats.
employees went to Democrats.
Adobe, 93% of all donations in 2018 went to Democrats.
In 2016, it was 99%.
This is according to CNBC.
IBM went 90-10 for Democrats.
Salesforce went 89-11 for Democrats.
Google went 88-12 for Democrats.
Microsoft went 85-15 for Democrats.
Apple went 84-16 for Democrats.
PayPal went 84-16 for Democrats.
Cisco went 80-20 for Democrats.
And Amazon went 77-23 for Democrats.
How about Facebook?
for Democrats. Cisco went 80-20 for Democrats and Amazon went 77-23 for Democrats.
How about Facebook? 77-23 for Democrats.
Of course, Sheryl Sandberg previously worked for Larry Summers, who is the Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton.
Intel, by the way, also, 68-32 Democrats.
The tech companies are dominated by the left.
It's perfectly obvious.
So why would you trust them to have any sort of consistent standard when they won't be transparent about those standards?
And what we are watching, and all of this doesn't happen in a vacuum, right?
When bad things happen on the right, very often there's a corollary on the left, and vice versa, and vice versa.
There is a mishmash of bad information.
And I will tell you the kind of lie that is the worst right now.
There are lots of lies all over the place.
There are lies told about this election by President Trump.
There are lies told about this election by the media.
The worst kind of lie is the double standard.
The worst kind of lie is the double standard because it assumes that the person who is of your political ilk ought to be treated with absolute reverence and the person on the other side, for doing the exact same thing, ought to be torn down to the ground.
It is double standards that undermine the Republic more than any other kind of lie.
There are lots of lies out there.
Misinformation is nothing new.
It's the double standard in American politics where you hold somebody to a different standard than you would if they were a member of the other party.
That is the real danger to the Republic right now.
And when that is applied formally in terms of policy at both the governmental and non-governmental levels inside major tech corporations that control how you speak and how you think and how you communicate with others, We are at an extraordinarily dangerous moment in the life of the American Republic.
All righty, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more of the outcome of the House impeachment vote, which is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
We'll also get to how the Senate is going to respond, I am sure.
In the meantime, stick around for our other shows, as well as the second hour of The Ben Shapiro Show, coming a little bit later today.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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