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Feb. 4, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:01
The Fact-Checkers Are Full of S#!t | Ep. 1188
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Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was not in the main Capitol building during the January 6th riots, but her story is still the one leading the news.
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy slams Marjorie Taylor Greene, but will not remove her committee assignments.
And Liz Cheney passes a test within the Republican caucus with flying colors.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so the big story of the evening last night and of the morning this morning is this whole blow up over Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's story with regard to the January 6th riot.
We're gonna break this down in all of its aspects, because some of what she's saying is true.
Much of what the media is saying is not true.
And this really goes to how our fact-checking industry works.
Our fact-checking industry, here in the information dissemination space, is extraordinarily corrupt.
Extraordinarily corrupt.
And today is like a classic story of how our fact-checkers get it wrong, and they get it wrong deliberately.
It's pretty incredible.
Okay, so let's begin at the beginning.
January 6th, riots happen.
They're awful, they're evil, they're acts of criminality.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, this week, she put out a 90-minute Instagram video in which she explained her harrowing experiences, and it would not be difficult to conclude if you did not know the geography of the area that she was in the Capitol building itself.
Now, let's bring up a quick map, okay?
Because Capitol Hill actually is a bunch of places, right?
Capitol Hill is not just the Capitol Building.
Capitol Hill is a bunch of different places.
So, for example, the Capitol Hill, like the actual Capitol Building, not all congressional offices are actually located inside the Capitol Building.
Some of the Congressional offices are located in what's called the Longworth Building.
Another set of Congressional offices are located in the Cannon Building.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez's offices are located in the Cannon Building.
In this map, you can see the Cannon House Office Building that is located all the way down First Street.
And across Independence Avenue.
It's a little bit of a walk.
It's about 0.3 miles.
It's not like right next door, but it's also not super duper far away.
There are tunnels that connect the U.S.
Capitol Building to the Cannon House Office Building.
There's also the Longworth House Office Building, and that houses a bunch of different congressional offices.
There's also the Rayburn House Office Building.
All of these are located along Independence Avenue.
They are not part of the Capitol Building.
They're part of what's called the Capitol Complex, meaning that it includes everything In the immediate area that is connected via tunnels.
Okay, so.
I've taken those tunnels.
They exist.
On the day of January 6th, Cannon House Office Building was not breached.
Okay, the rioters did not breach Cannon House Office Building.
They did not breach the Longworth House Office Building.
They did not breach the Rayburn House Office Building.
They breached the Capitol Building itself.
Okay, so if you watched AOC's livestream, she never says that she's in the Capitol Building.
So let's be clear about this.
She didn't lie and say that she was in the Capitol Building.
Some people are saying that she lied.
She didn't.
What she says is that she felt like she was in imminent fear of her life.
Hey, and listen, you are entitled to your feelings.
It doesn't mean that your feelings are entirely justified, as we will see when you watch Katie Porter, who is in literally the same office because as he ran to her office, they seemed to have very different attitudes about what was going down that day.
Here was Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez describing her experiences on the day of January 6th.
And so I hide behind my door like this.
Like, I'm here, and the bathroom door starts going like this.
Like, the bathroom door's behind me.
Or, rather, in front of me.
And I'm like this, and the door hinges right here.
And I just hear, WHERE IS SHE?
WHERE IS SHE?
And, um, this was the moment where I thought everything was over.
Okay, and then she continued, and it turns out that the person who was banging on her door was actually a Capitol Police officer.
Now, we know from the day of that Capitol Police officers were, in fact, getting people to leave the Cannon House building and move to safer locations.
But Ocasio-Cortez, what she said, and she'll continue on in that video, she said that after the Capitol Hill police officer came into the office, she said, quote, things weren't adding up.
Like, she added, there was no partner there and no one was yelling.
He wasn't yelling like, this is Capitol Police.
He was looking at me and all this anger and hostility.
She said, did he not say he was Capitol Police on purpose?
Was he trying to actually put us in a vulnerable situation?
All these crazy thoughts go through your mind.
Are some offices safer than others because they have white-sounding names or male-sounding names?
Okay, so this is the way that she tells the story.
Okay, now, she heads on over to Katie Porter's office, which is right next door.
So, here is Katie Porter on MSNBC describing the exact same set of circumstances, except from her perspective.
First, she saw me and we waved.
I went into my office and a couple seconds later she knocked and she said, you know, could we come in?
And I said, of course.
And she began to deal.
Her staffer was trying to describe what had happened.
And Alex is really usually like unfailingly polite and very personable and she wasn't even really talking to me.
She was opening up doors and I was like, can I help you?
Like, what are you looking for?
And she said, I'm looking for where I'm going to hide.
Okay, so here's the thing.
Katie Porter's reaction when Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez bursts in is not, okay, let's get in here, let's barrier up all the doors.
They're out there, they're coming.
It's like, what's going on now?
Why are you doing this?
Okay, so is Katie Porter reacting inappropriately?
I don't think so.
In fact, AOC describes how she walks in, I believe, and Katie Porter's sipping coffee.
Right.
And so and then Katie Porter is being told by AOC, I'm looking for a place to hide.
And AOC is saying, I'm afraid I'm going to die today.
I always wanted to be a mother.
And then apparently AOC didn't have sneakers.
She was wearing high heels.
And so she said to Katie Porter, do you have any sneakers?
And Katie Porter went to one of her staffers and had her give her her sneakers, which like imagine you're that staffer.
Like if you actually think that the danger is that grave outside and it's like, OK, you know, staffer.
I know that you're wearing sneakers right now, but let's be real about this.
AOC has a lot of Instagram fans, and you are a no-name staffer in Katie Porter's office.
I'm gonna need you to give those sneakers to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, because let's be real here, she has huge Twitter following.
I mean, the woman has an enormous media presence, and you, you anonymous staffer, you just have sneakers.
So you know what?
I'm gonna need you to turn over those sneakers.
In any case, What AOC says is not actually lying, right?
So I've said this already.
Her emotional response may not be well calibrated.
I mean, that's possible.
Or maybe it's really well calibrated and maybe she's just, maybe that's how she responds emotionally.
People respond emotionally in crisis circumstances differently.
Okay, to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.
Some people react like Katie Porter does and they sit there and they're like, I don't even know, what?
And some people react like AOC and have a heightened sense of panic.
Fair.
Okay, that's, okay.
You're allowed to do that, for sure.
Hey, Nancy Mays, who is two doors down, the representative, she said AOC made clear she didn't know who was at her door.
Breathless attempts by the media to fan fictitious news flames are dangerous.
She said, my office is two doors down.
Insurrectionists never stormed our hallway.
Egregious doesn't even begin to cover it.
Is there nothing the MSM won't politicize?
Because here's the way that Newsweek covered what AOC said.
Here's Newsweek.
So the media immediately spin up AOC's story.
She didn't lie, again.
her office, forcing her to take refuge inside her bathroom after her legislative director, Geraldo Bonilla Chavez, told her to hide, hide, run and hide.
As members of the mob banged against the door, Ocasio-Cortez believed this was the moment where I thought everything was over.
OK, so the media immediately spin up AOC story.
She didn't lie again.
AOC's original statement may be an maybe a in out of out of proportion, emotional response to the events that were actually happening immediately surrounding her.
That's not a lie, right?
It doesn't make it a lie.
The media immediately began spinning this up.
The media immediately began spinning this into, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez was in her office, the rioters were right outside her office, they're trying to bang down the doors.
Now, here's the thing.
Why was Alexander Ocasio-Cortez's story leading the news for several days here?
And there were several Washington Post editorials about how brave she was and how wondrous she was.
Why was she leading the news?
Of all the people who had relevant stories to tell on January 6th, she is like somewhere near the bottom of the list.
Because again, she was not in the Capitol building itself.
There were legislators who were in the Capitol building itself.
If you were looking for personal harrowing experiences, presumably you would start with them.
Just to be completely objective and fair, you would start with the people who are in the most immediate physical danger, and then you would move on down the list, right?
But that's not the way that the media treated this.
And the media treated this this way because Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is willing to say completely unhinged things Not about her own personal experiences per se, but she's willing to say unhinged things about other people.
Right?
So she will just throw out implications like Ted Cruz wanted to murder me.
Or like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are just like the person who sexually assaulted me.
And the media lapped this crap up.
The media want to make that the number one story.
They love the implication.
Right, so they don't fact check where she was at the time.
That's not important.
What is important to the media is the stuff that is not fact checkable, meaning her implication, which is that all Republicans are incipient murderers who wanted her personally killed and or are like rapists who want their victims to just forgive and forget.
That's the part that the media loves.
That's why the media spun it up.
If Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who just described her circumstance and said, listen, I was in the Cannon House office building.
It's located about 0.3 miles away.
It's like a six minute walk.
There's some Capitol tunnels, but those were protected by cops.
Building wasn't breached at any point, but I was in fear because I know that I'm really famous and I know a lot of people send me death threats and it freaks me out.
And so when that happened, I went and I hid in Katie Porter's office and listen, I was scared.
Do you think that would have made the same headlines?
Of course it wouldn't have made the same headlines.
The reason it became a headline is because she said she was a sexual assault survivor and therefore the people who were not on her political side of the aisle that she dislikes are just like the person who sexually assaulted her.
That's why it made headlines.
That's why you got the bravery of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez routine from the media.
That's the reason.
Not because of the actual circumstances that surrounded her.
And this is why you have a piece from thelily.com saying, in Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, these survivors found a voice.
I felt with her the deeply vulnerable pain of telling someone.
Right, this was also linked by the Washington Post.
Ocasio-Cortez's explicit language around So it was all the ancillary stuff that AOC said, which really, truly was, I believe, immoral.
I don't think that comparing fellow congresspeople to rapists is a useful enterprise.
I don't think suggesting that Ted Cruz wants you dead is a useful enterprise.
But the media love that kind of stuff, right?
That is the reason why her account became the account.
Okay, so.
Over the course of last night, a bunch of people pointed out, by the way, she wasn't in the Capitol building.
And some people...
Went further and said, you know, and that means that she was exaggerating what she was saying.
She was exaggerating her experiences again.
She could have legitimately felt what she was feeling.
Doesn't mean the feeling was totally justified, but she could certainly have felt that.
I'm not doubting the veracity of her feelings at the time.
And her account is accurate so far as I can tell.
She just, it's somewhat misleading in that if you are reacting as though there are Capitol rioters directly at your door and the closest they are is three-tenths of a mile away and you are protected by several layers of police, It's not quite the same thing, right?
And you can see why people would draw that conclusion.
Like the entire media drew the conclusion that she was actually in the middle of sort of the most dangerous area here from her description.
So, here's what happens.
This starts to trend, right?
On Twitter, the hashtag Alexander Ocasio-Smollett starts to trend, as in Jussie Smollett, right?
Jussie Smollett, the actor who described how he was lynched with the noose in the streets of Chicago by a couple of MAGA hat guys, and it turns out to be complete nonsense.
Now, that's an exaggeration in and of itself, right?
I mean, she's not Jussie Smollett.
She didn't claim that the rioters had bussed in there, right?
She describes her feelings throughout the ordeal, and you can think that those feelings are unjustified?
I hear that.
But her feelings are her feelings.
It doesn't mean she lied.
I keep saying that over and over because I want to be very clear about what is true and what is false, unlike the fact checkers we're going to get to in just one second.
OK, so.
Here is where things go wrong for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
We're gonna get to where things actually go wrong in terms of where she moves not just beyond the pale with regard to her accusations against fellow members of Congress and throwing out implications like police officers trying to get her killed or that people are going office by office looking for non-white, non-male names in order to attack and all.
We'll get to where she actually started to get into a very dicey territory last night via how she approached this social media problem in just one second.
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Okay, so here is where Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez starts to really lose it.
Okay, so she sends out an email from Team AOC to her entire email list.
And her email asks her constituents to contact anybody in the fact-checking world or in the social media world and try to get them to censor and remove tweets that suggest that she was not in the Capitol building.
I'm serious.
Here is what she wrote.
As we speak, right-wing operatives with millions of followers on social media are spreading flat out lies and misleading information about Alexandria.
But with your help, we can force Twitter and Facebook to take action and enforce their own rules.
What's so frustrating about these attacks is that once the truth comes out, so few people get to hear it.
Hundreds of thousands, or potentially millions of people have already seen or shared the misleading tweets or fake news articles.
Okay, so first of all, the irony of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a person who has said on national television that actual facts matter less than moral truth.
There is some irony here.
This is a person who has spent the entirety of the last several weeks claiming without evidence that fellow congresspeople, so far as I'm aware, she's provided no evidence of this, that fellow congresspeople were in on the riots, that Ted Cruz wanted her murdered, attempted to have her murdered, that Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are like her own sexual assaulters.
And here she is being like, oh, I can't believe people are putting out misleading information.
That's really upsetting.
But here's where it gets dicey.
What is the misleading information?
Hey, apparently the misleading information is that she was not in the Capitol building.
So she keeps insisting that she was in the Capitol building because in fact, she was part of the Capitol complex, right?
This is what she tweets out.
She tweets out, well, you know, guys, I mean, it's connected by tunnels.
She says, this is the latest manipulative take on the right.
They're manipulating the fact that most people don't know the layout of the Capitol complex.
We were all on the Capitol complex.
The attack wasn't just on the dome.
The bombs Trump supporters planted surrounded our offices too.
Okay, so a couple of things there.
One, we have yet to find the evidence of who actually planted the bombs.
She can make an assumption it was Trump supporters, but that actually is not publicly available information.
So that in and of itself is misleading information.
Okay, when she says that we were part of the Capitol Complex and therefore they were trying to attack the Capitol Complex in general, Nancy Mace was on the same floor.
She says the rioters did not breach the building.
Okay, reporters at the time said the rioters did not breach that building.
Again, this is not to say that she couldn't have been justified or at least she couldn't have felt legitimately and authentically in danger.
Again, people react to crisis in different ways.
But what she is now saying, which is that, oh yeah, you know, people are saying I wasn't in the Capitol building.
How dare they?
Well, I mean, were you or were you not in the Capitol building?
It's called the Capitol building.
It is not called the Capitol complex.
When people say the rioters stormed the Capitol building, they mean the Capitol building.
Like a building.
Because They don't mean the complex, right?
I mean, so she is now, now she's misleading.
So she puts out this email and she says, we need your help.
Here's what you can do to help us combat this campaign of disinformation and others in the future.
Scan your social media to find posts with this misleading information, especially those using the trending hashtag.
Mm-hmm.
It's funny how Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's, you know, her emergency mode kicks in when she's trending for the wrong reasons on Twitter.
As somebody who trends on Twitter frequently, like once every three weeks, once every month, I can tell you that the best thing you can do with a Twitter trend is basically ignore it.
That's pretty much the best thing you can do with a Twitter trend, but she is, instead, she says she wants all of her followers to basically spam Facebook and Twitter and get a bunch of stuff taken down, which is not a great look for a sitting congressperson.
She says, don't tweet any hashtags yourself because we don't want them to spread further.
Identify any posts that are threatening or harassing and use the built-in report features to flag them for the moderators.
Facebook and Twitter both have built-in tools for reporting posts and tweets that break the rules.
The sad thing is that a lot of damage has already been done.
People have already been misled and radicalized.
They believe the lies to a point where their hatred could someday boil over into violence.
Ah, so now she's going to say that if you point out that she was not in the Capitol building itself, that you are one of the kinds of people who distributes information that ends with the January 6th riot.
I mean, that's pretty manipulative stuff right there.
She says, we can keep calling out Photoshop tweets, fake news articles, misleading posts when we see them.
Okay, now here is where the fact checkers get involved.
Okay, so it used to be that fact checkers checked facts, right?
That was the thing that they used to check, was the facts, not implications.
They didn't fact check.
Emotional suggestions.
They didn't check.
Fact-check.
Subjective takes.
What they used to fact-check was, you know, facts.
And there are many things that could be fact-checked here.
So, for example, you could fact-check whether she was actually in the Capitol building at the time.
Or you could fact-check Whether she lied that she was in the Capitol building at the time.
The answer on the first issue is not in the Capitol building at the time.
And two, I don't see evidence that she lied about being in the Capitol building at the time.
Both of those things can simultaneously be true.
But that is not what the fact-checkers do.
Because the fact-checkers are just Democratic operatives.
They are just completely full of crap.
So here is how the fact-checkers do their business.
This is how they have decided that they are going to pervert the system.
And understand, it matters what the fact-checkers do.
Because when we are talking about how you receive information, You will see that sites like Facebook and like Twitter, they use left-wing fact-checkers in order to knock down right-wing sites, knock down conservative sites.
And those left-wing fact-checkers are taken as though they are objective metrics for the news.
Facebook was using, during the month after the election, they were using what they called their trusted news metric.
It's like this quality news metric.
And the way that they measured that is they went to basically a bunch of left-wing fact-checkers, and then they would downgrade any news source that got fact-checked a lot.
So naturally, CNN never got fact-checked, but Daily Wire got fact-checked a lot.
Because it turns out that the people at places like Snopes and PolitiFact hate the Daily Wire but love CNN.
Because it's all subjective.
And so here is the fact check from Snopes.
It's a perfect example of how the fact checkers are just, they just lie by implication and sometimes openly.
It's pretty amazing.
Okay, so Snopes puts out a piece on this whole silly debacle, right?
Here's what they say.
Did AOC exaggerate the danger she was in during the Capitol riot?
Okay, so first of all, you can't fact check that.
There's literally no way to fact check that particular question because that is a matter of subjective opinion.
Did AOC exaggerate the danger she was in during the Capitol riot?
So you could say, no, she didn't exaggerate the danger that she was in during the Capitol riot because the Capitol rioters were violent.
They were looking for Congress people.
Theoretically, they could have gotten in and they could have hurt her.
Or he could say, no, she absolutely exaggerated the danger she was in considering no one breached that building.
There were other Congress people on that level.
None of them are acting like AOC did.
So maybe she did exaggerate.
So there's really no way to fact check that, right?
That is a subjective matter of opinion.
Whether Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the physical danger that she was in in the account that she told of what was going on.
Now, again, there are fact-checkable things that Snopes could do here.
They don't do that.
They frame the question as a fact-check about emotional response.
You can't fact-check emotional response, which is why I have said over and over and over that AOC did not lie.
That is a fact-check.
AOC did not lie.
You may think that her emotional response is off-kilter.
That is not.
That does not mean that she lied, right?
There are ways to fact-check that are objective.
That's not what the fact-checkers are doing.
Snopes says AOC was targeted with another round of bad faith smears after giving an emotional firsthand account of her experiences during the Capitol riot.
Okay, so let's get to the actual fact check from Snopes because it is so indicative of how exactly Snopes and these fact checkers operate.
So here's what they do.
They say claim, this is Snopes fact check of the whole AOC silliness.
Claim, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the danger she was in during the January 6th, 2021 Capitol riot and that she quote, wasn't even in the Capitol building when the rioting occurred.
Okay, well, those are two claims that you are now fact checking and you are lumping them together so that you can pretend that a factual claim is a non-factual claim, right?
There's two claims that Snopes is now fact-checking.
One is that she exaggerated the danger.
That is not fact-checkable.
And the other is a fact-checkable statement that she was not in the Capitol building when the rioting occurred.
It is true.
She was not in the Capitol building when the rioting occurred.
How do I know this?
Because Snopes acknowledges this.
Here is what Snopes says.
First of all, they say it's mostly false.
Okay, the claim is, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the danger she was in during the January 6th, 2021 Capitol riot, and that she wasn't even in the Capitol building when the rioting occurred.
Rating, mostly false.
Mostly false.
Okay, here's what they say.
What's true?
Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate chambers are located.
Wait, what now?
So, literally you are fact-checking the question of whether she was in the Capitol building, and then you say it's true she wasn't in the Capitol building, but you rate the claim mostly false.
Here's the best part of this.
I love this.
So they fact-checked one of the tweets that came from Daily Wire, because of course the idea here is to keep dinging and downgrading conservative sources, even when they are telling the objective truth.
So here is the Daily Wire tweet that they called misleading.
Why is it misleading?
By the way, it's misleading because a conservative site put it out.
Here's what the Daily Wire tweeted.
You ready for this?
This is what they are fact-checking as misleading.
Quote, report, AOC was not inside Capitol building during breach on January 6th.
That's the entirety of the tweet.
to tweet, report AOC was not inside Capitol building during breach on January 6th.
Now let me read to you again from what Snopes says is true.
Quote, Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building.
Why it's almost as though it's true when you say it, but misleading when I say it, so you're just foolish.
That's the impression I'm getting from you Snopes.
Like I'm getting the impression that you fact checkers very often are more interested in fact-checking implications than fact-checking facts because you want to come up with a preordained conclusion, and that is that anyone who criticizes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't just wrong, they are a liar.
They are saying untruths.
No, that is not the way any of this works, but this is a dangerous thing that is happening right now in the country, because what you are seeing, I've been talking about this for a while, the shift from Disinformation to misinformation.
It's misinformation, you know?
It's information we don't like.
That shift is so dangerous, and what the left has been doing, what the fact-checkers have been doing, what the social media sites have been doing, is they've been fact-checking implications.
Whenever you see a fact-check that says, needs context, you know this is now a political, it's now a political exercise.
Because either a claim is true, or it's not.
When you say that a claimant needs context, that is a claim that I will discuss on the show, right?
I mean, that's what the show is for, is to give context to various claims.
We'll discuss it.
But context is a political argument.
There are various takes on what context is appropriate to place things in.
There are certain things in life that are factually true and certain things in life that are factually false.
It is factually true.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was not in the Capitol building.
Then, there is the secondary claim, which is, did she exaggerate what happened to her?
And there, you have to really examine her emotional response.
Was it appropriate for the time?
How are other people at the area responding?
All of that is a matter of opinion.
But instead, what the fact-checkers do is they wrap all that up in a ball and then call it false, a thing that is objectively true, which is that she was not in the Capitol building at the time.
Now, why am I making a big deal out of this?
I'm making a big deal out of it for a couple of reasons.
One, the manipulation of truth actually matters.
It matters an awful lot.
And when you say that there are fact-checking sites that are out there to fact-check, and when you say that objective truth is really just your opinion, that is Orwellian kind of stuff.
The redefinition of truth to mean anything I like And the redefinition of falsehoods mean anything that I disagree with is a dangerous thing, especially when you have the mechanistic power, when you have the institutional power to ram down your version of truth, meaning your opinion, on everybody else.
That is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
It also happens to be that the media have people that they love, and the fact-checkers have people that they love, and they will manipulate the stats in order to achieve a given end.
And you see this with Joe Biden.
If Joe Biden lies or Jen Psaki lies, it's not a lie.
It just requires a little bit of context.
You're just not getting the full idea.
And if Republicans say something that is true, but has the wrong implications according to the media, it becomes a missing context or mostly false statement.
And then that is used to downgrade your ability to access the information.
It is a mind F. Okay, that is what is going on right now.
And it's really something that we all need to watch out for because it's, again, when this stuff is used to censor, when you have, by the way, active Congress people sitting in the federal government asking for censorship of claims that they don't like that happen to be true, that is not a good look.
That is not a good look at all.
Okay, meanwhile.
Controversy is not restricted to one side of the aisle.
Last night, the House Republicans decided not to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from any of her committee assignments.
Now, there's been a sort of rich debate inside Republican circles about whether Marjorie Taylor Greene ought to be removed from her assignments on committees.
Normally, the way that this works inside Congress is that each party decides which members sit on what committee.
Now, the way that it actually works in actuality is that the majority of the House has to vote in order to seat somebody on a particular committee.
So the committee assignments are put forth, the House as a whole votes on that question.
So theoretically, if you have a House Republican majority, they can decide to deny a seat on a particular committee to a particular Democrat.
But historically, that's not the way this is done.
Historically, for purposes of comedy, basically you have Democrats decide who they want on a particular committee, and Republicans decide who they want on a particular committee, and then everybody just sort of votes For whatever the parties have already assumed to be true.
And so, for example, when Ilhan Omar, who is a garbage human being and anti-Semite, when she was being openly anti-Semitic, the Republicans did not respond by saying, OK, well, we can't seat her in a committee.
We're going to deny her a seat on a committee.
They didn't do that.
Just a sense of reality here, okay?
That did not happen.
The Democrats right now are talking about doing that with Marjorie Taylor Greene, but last night was more about what the Republicans did.
So the Republicans had a choice.
Do we take away the committee assignments for Marjorie Taylor Greene, or do we allow her to have her committee assignments?
And there's sort of interesting debate there, which is, can you punish somebody by taking away their committee assignments for stuff they said before they were elected to Congress?
There's some people that I respect who are like, no, you can't really do that because that's just a bad precedent.
You really don't want to be doing that.
Or, you know, we have to give them a chance to actually perform.
If they do this while they're a congressperson, then we can remove them from their committees.
And then there are folks who say, listen, just because somebody gets elected to Congress doesn't mean that the party has to honor them with particular committee assignments.
I tend to fall into the latter category, which I believe that parties should hold their own members accountable with committee assignments for stuff that they do.
I think that the Democrats should have denied Ilhan Omar a committee assignment.
And I think that the Republicans should have denied Marjorie Taylor Greene a committee assignment.
Kevin McCarthy didn't put it up to a vote.
He decided instead that he was going to avoid that particular controversy.
But he did put out a statement blasting Marjorie Taylor Greene's old statement.
So according to the New York Times, Representative McCarthy, the top Republican on Wednesday, condemned Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's past conspiratorial and violent comments.
He declined to take any action against her on the eve of a vote forced by Democrats to remove her from congressional committees.
McCarthy said in a lengthy statement, past comments from and endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, police violence and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House.
I condemn those comments unequivocally.
In the same statement, McCarthy criticized Democrats for moving unilaterally to kick Greene off the Education and Budget Committees, calling the action a partisan power grab.
Are you saying, OK, well, we're not going to kick her off because we have debate inside the halls here, but you guys don't get to kick her off because that really does break with all past precedent.
And he pointed out, by the way, you guys didn't kick out your own folks.
He says, you know, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, still sitting on committees.
Cynthia McKinney, who was a blatant anti-Semite who believed in conspiracy theories, sat on powerful committees.
We let you guys put her on the committees you wanted to do.
The House majority typically does not deny the House minority the ability to assign people to its own committees.
Okay, so that's McCarthy's statement.
On this particular matter.
And this, of course, leads the entire media to say, OK, well, now this is the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
No, when you condemn her comments and when you rip on her comments and when you say that she's a cancer in the Republican Party, as Mitch McConnell did, or when you condemn wholeheartedly her statements as McCarthy did, it is hard to say that this is a person who is the entirety of the Republican Party.
Does that mean that they did the right thing in allowing her to keep her committee assignments?
I don't think so.
And for folks who are saying, well, yeah, but the Democrats, the Democrats let Ilhan- Right, but I'm not a Democrat.
I'm a Republican.
I would like for the Republican Party to actually hold its own members accountable so they don't say stuff like this in the future.
And so they stop all this.
If she wants to earn her way back into committee power, well then she can show how about six months of like not saying this kind of stuff.
How about that?
And that seems like that would be a good indicator.
She did issue an apology yesterday.
Apparently she went in front of the House members and she talked about how she was drawn into conspiracy theories and all this kind of stuff.
And that's nice, but I'm a truth but verify kind of guy, which is, okay, trust but verify kind of guy.
Like, okay, that's nice.
Now show me that you actually believe this.
And then we'll talk about this a couple of months down the road.
So, Marjorie Taylor Greene told the House Republicans that her statements did not represent her.
Apparently, she received some sort of standing ovation from a small contingent among the House Republicans.
Steny Hoyer of the Democrats, however, is going to ram this thing down because, again, for Democrats, the goal isn't to Abide by any sort of common rules, even if those rules cut against your interest.
The goal is to just ram home this idea that the entire Republican Party is the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Which, by the way, is the reason I think that the Republicans should disassociate from having her on the committees.
I think that it's been a boon for Republicans.
I mean, as a political matter, I think it is very good for Republicans that Democrats refuse to oust Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from their committees.
I think the Democrats should own it.
You want to put her on the cover of Rolling Stone with Nancy Pelosi?
Go ahead and do it, man.
Because at least that way we know where you stand.
I think for that reason, that it was important that Steve King be denied his committee assignments, for example.
Anyway, Steny Hoyer is ramming this forward.
He says, I spoke to Leader McCarthy this morning.
It is clear there is no alternative to holding a floor vote on the resolution to remove Representative Greene from her committee assignments.
The rules committee will meet this afternoon.
The House will vote on the resolution tomorrow.
Hours later, McCarthy answered Hoyer's action by announcing no new repercussions for Greene with a statement that amounts to a slap on the wrist for the first term Republican and spent more time criticizing Democrats than her past comments questioning if the Pentagon was struck by a plane on September 11th or advocating for the assassination of top Democrats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
McCarthy said that her past statements do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference.
He said he would hold her to her word that she'd be more careful with her comments going forward, which really does smack of the kind of almost exactly the reaction that Nancy Pelosi had to Ilhan Omar.
Oh, well, she sort of half walked it back and said she was misinterpreted.
So we'll let it go.
I don't like that kind of activity on either side of the aisle, and I'm not going to hold Republicans to a different standard than Democrats on this one.
I will say the Democrats are holding Republicans to a different standard than they hold themselves, for sure.
They are moving to oust Taylor Greene from the committees that Republicans have assigned her to, while meanwhile elevating Ilhan Omar, a blatant open anti-Semite, to the House Foreign Affairs Committee where she sits.
We'll get to more of that in a second because two things can be true at once.
One, the Republican Party should have done something about it.
Two, the Democrats are the world's biggest hypocrites on this kind of crap.
I mean, it's truly hypocritical and astonishing.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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All right, in a second, we're gonna get to the Democrats and their absolute raging, fiery hypocrisy.
On getting rid of their own bad actors and how they are taking advantage of the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing to push politically.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Alrighty, so meanwhile, the Democrats, they are pushing forward with their agenda with regard to this sort of stuff, right?
They're just blatant and raging hypocrites when it comes to holding their own members to account.
I'm getting very tired of the argument from the left that we are so good at holding our members to account.
You guys never hold your members to account.
Name the last Democrat who's held to account.
Seriously, can you name one?
I cannot name one.
Hey, there have been Democrats who have resigned because they're alleged to have actually done things, but it's not because they were being held to account by their own caucus.
And in fact, a lot of them have now buyer's remorse.
Like the only person who comes to mind in the recent past is maybe Al Franken.
And now Franken has buyer's remorse.
And he's like, I really shouldn't have done that.
By the way, the reason they capped Al Franken way back when is because they were attempting to establish a Me Too standard they couldn't actually uphold because they wanted to go after Trump.
In any case, Nancy Pelosi puts out a statement calling Kevin McCarthy QCA.
Okay, because of QAnon, get it?
He's not RCA.
It's like when I call Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez D-Twitch, because I think that her actual constituency is on Twitch, not in New York.
So, according to Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy is now an advocate of Q, which is weird since he has condemned Q many, many, many times.
But in any case, she puts out a statement saying, after several conversations and literally running away from reporters, minority leader Kevin McCarthy, QCA.
Like, I can't believe these are the adults in the room.
These are the adults in the room.
Slow clap for unity and adulting here.
First of all, there's no such thing as an esteemed House committee.
They all suck.
representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
As a result, the House will continue with the vote to strip Greene of her seat on the esteemed House Committee on Education and Labor and the House Committee on Budget.
First of all, there's no such thing as an esteemed House Committee.
They all suck.
McCarthy's failure to lead his party effectively hands the keys over to Greene, an anti-Semite, QAnon adherent, and 9-11 truther.
As number two, Senator Republican John Thune warned Tuesday, McCarthy has chosen It's insanity.
The party of conspiracy theories and QAnon and Representative Green is in the driver's seat.
Okay, the irony of Nancy Pelosi saying this after turning over her entire party to Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib is beyond the pale.
It's insanity. It's insanity.
Okay, so here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
When Nancy Pelosi makes the contention that Republicans are now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene because they didn't strip her of committee assignments, let me just point out, Ilhan Omar was on the cover of, like, is McCarthy gonna pose on the cover of Rolling Stone with Marjorie Taylor Greene?
I think not.
And yet, Nancy Pelosi did exactly, then she took like a vacation, she took like a congressional junket with Ilhan Omar, and they did like cutesy little Instagram videos.
Meanwhile, Ilhan Omar is trying to run away from the implication that she is anything like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She says, you know, I'm not like that.
They're just scapegoating me because I'm black and because I'm Muslim.
Nope, it's because you're an anti-Semite.
That's why, because you are a not good person who's anti-Semitic, radical in every incarnation I can think of.
That is why people went after you.
Hiding behind the identity politics ain't gonna work here.
But my favorite thing here, I love this.
She says, they're doing this because they're trying to scapegoat me because they are misogynists and racists and Islamophobes.
She put out a statement, she said, let's be clear, this is a desperate smear rooted in racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.
Uh, no, no.
Also, if it's rooted in misogyny, I'm just wondering, uh, why exactly are you guys going after Marjorie Taylor Greene?
She's a woman.
Is that rooted in misogyny or is it legit?
Seriously, real question.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has incited violence against her fellow members of Congress, repeatedly singling out prominent women of color.
She actively encouraged the insurrection on the Capitol that threatened my life and the life of every member of Congress and resulted in multiple deaths.
She ran a campaign ad holding an assault rifle next to my face.
She came to the Capitol demanding that me and Representative Tlaib and I swear in on the Christian Bible instead of the Quran.
Granted, I don't like any of those things.
Those things are all bad things.
You should not have committee assignments.
Also, you're a blatant, routine anti-Semite who says insanely radical things, and you also should not have a committee assignment.
The House Republican Caucus, instead of holding her accountable, is now fanning the flames.
Again, the irony here is just too much to bear.
I'm sorry.
Ilhan Omar calling out the Republican Caucus for not ousting their most radical members by a mirror lady.
Seriously.
Ilhan Omar then went on MSNBC and said their entire Republican base is Looney Tunes.
The entire Republican base of grifters, cowards.
There are no words.
There are no words.
Here she was on MSNBC.
Their party is destroyed.
Their base now is conspiracy theorists.
It's cowards.
It's opportunists.
It's grifters.
And sadly, they're becoming the Looney Tunes.
You know, these are people who we can't take serious.
Rashida Tlaib did the same thing, so another blatant anti-Semite said, you can't compare Ilhan Omar to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She said, let's be clear, this false equivalency is a pathetically desperate smear rooted in racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.
My favorite thing is when Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar just literally copy each other's statements and tweets.
That's always fun.
But Rashida Tlaib should not be on committees either.
So that's fun.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party did take a vote last night on Liz Cheney's.
There's been a lot of blowback against Liz Cheney, the number three in the House, the representative from Wyoming.
There was this vote in the House Republican Caucus about whether she should be stripped of her title as House GOP conference chair.
It was a secret ballot.
Now, the reason it was a secret ballot is because, unfortunately, there are too many Republican congresspeople who are afraid of their own constituents and believe their constituents would be mad if they found out that they voted in favor of Liz Cheney.
That's silliness.
It shouldn't have been held anonymously, and they should have voted exactly the same way.
But in any case, the vote was held.
It was not particularly close.
The way the media characterized this is Cheney holds on to House leadership position.
No, she didn't hold on.
The vote among House Republican members was 145 to 61, not to strip her of the position.
Meaning the vast majority of Republicans are like, okay, I may disagree with you on impeachment, but that is not a reason why you should lose the number three seat in the House GOP coalition.
Cheney spoke briefly to reporters after she held on to her title.
She said, we really did have a terrific vote tonight, a terrific time this evening, laying out what we are going to do going forward, as well as making clear we're not going to be divided.
We're not going to be in a situation where people can pick off any member of leadership.
It was a resounding acknowledgement that we need to go forward together and we need to go forward in a way that helps us beat back the really dangerous and negative democratic policies.
So the this is a rebuttal to the argument that's been made by the media that Liz Cheney was going to that this is the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and not Liz Cheney.
There was only one vote that was held last night, and it was on Liz Cheney, not on Marjorie Taylor Greene.
If there had been a vote held inside the Republican caucus on Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think there's a good shot that Marjorie Taylor Greene would have lost her committee assignments.
I think McCarthy didn't hold that because he doesn't like dividing the caucus.
He wants to hold together the caucus in the same way that Pelosi wants to hold together her caucus.
McCarthy is concerned with some of the Republican base.
Only about 30% of the, again, only about 30% of the Republicans voted against Liz Cheney retaining that particular seat.
My guess is that it wouldn't be a significantly higher number saying that Marjorie Taylor Greene should retain her committeeship.
But in any case, it does kill the democratic narrative, which is that this is not the party of Liz Cheney anymore, it's the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The answer is, right now, for better or for worse, I think for better sometimes and for worse sometimes also, it is the party of both.
And that means that the party needs to do a better job of dissociating from the radical belief system of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She did apologize.
She did say that she doesn't believe that stuff anymore.
So that is better than not apologizing.
Now let's just see some proof in the pudding.
Meaning, how about not saying crazy crap for several months or ever again?
That would be a good way to go.
That is where things stand inside the Republican caucus.
As of now, the Democrats are going to take a vote in the House today to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments.
The goal of that is to get Republicans on record voting either for or against stripping Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments.
This is why I think it was a bad move by McCarthy not to just strip it preemptively from Marjorie Taylor Greene, because now they're going to be forced on record anyway.
The talking point is going to be, you voted in favor of the QAnon lady.
And that is not a talk.
Again, I'm always bewildered by Republicans who are like, yeah, but the Democrats don't strip Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Yeah.
And what a talking point that's been for conservatives, has it not?
That has been a pretty solid talking point.
I mean, Donald Trump thought that was a solid talking point for conservatives.
It's the reason he kept saying this is the party of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
So how about this?
How about stand up against the crazies in your own party?
This should hold true on both sides.
Unfortunately, it seems to hold true on neither more often than not these days.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
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