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Feb. 8, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:38
You Are Being Manipulated | Ep. 1190
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Time Text
Time magazine acknowledges that elites manipulated the levers of power during election 2020 and the New York Times fires a reporter for not being racist.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment, and there is a lot of news.
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OK, so few quick notes to begin about last night's Super Bowl.
It is the only NFL game I have watched this season because of all the wokeness.
And I will say it was kind of astonishing how missing in action the wokeness was at the Super Bowl, which makes sense because the NFL is not stupid enough to try and cram that down the throats of 100 million Americans during their biggest broadcast of the year and the biggest event in American entertainment.
And so it was the usual stuff.
It was patriotism and unity and togetherness and all of the rest.
That's not to say that it didn't have its bizarre moments like the halftime show, but It was.
It was not a good game, but Tom Brady demonstrates once again that he is the greatest quarterback of all time at 10 Super Bowls.
He is seven and three in those Super Bowls.
And you just have to you just have to admire the quality.
I mean, you really do.
And you have to admire the quality, by the way, of defenses of Tampa Bay's defensive scheme.
And they really stymied Patrick Mahomes.
But that's enough sports talk.
We'll get to the cultural side of this.
I will say that the halftime show was super weird.
I know that it's not aimed at me.
I know that when people think of like Chief Demographic for The Weeknd, they don't think of me because I listen to classical music and read straight the lyrics of Cardi B. But with that said, I thought that even for a weird halftime show, this one was super duper weird.
I think my favorite part, there were a couple parts that were pretty great.
One was when he was The Weeknd, which I assume was his given name.
Like he was born, his mother looked at him and called him The Weeknd.
But in any case, I assume that he was stumbling through the mirrored halls with a camera up in his face.
That was like me after a second COVID shot right there.
And then, I don't know if this was meant to be like Joe Biden's COVID troops mask coming for you if you don't wear a mask, or what this was supposed to be.
But the creepy, red-coated, fascist marchers with no faces coming at you in the night was a vision.
Also, he should pay some royalties to Michael Jackson.
This is just the Thriller video, isn't it?
So we had him doing a little bit of Michael Jackson dancing, and then we have the Thriller video here, and now we have the COVID fascist troops coming for you, so that's exciting stuff.
It was weird.
It was weird.
And also, isn't this Bruno Mars' song?
No, a different song.
Okay, so, that's that.
Yeah, that's not Bruno Mars.
That's that's the weekend.
OK, so in any case, that was one sort of weird highlight of the show.
But when it came to the commercials, the commercial that everyone is talking about this morning, the commercial that's got everybody hot and bothered is this commercial narrated by Bruce Springsteen for Jeep.
Okay, so there's always one of these commercials during the Super Bowl where some major company is like, wouldn't it be great if America got together?
A few years back during the recession, Clint Eastwood did one for one of the car companies.
I'm trying to remember which car company, which shows you how successful the ad was in retrospect.
But Jeep had this ad with Bruce Springsteen narrating.
And when I think of people who represent middle America, I think of the guy from New Jersey with the earring.
Who votes Democrat all the time.
Quintessential Americans, I think of like people who represent the middle of America, the partisan middle of America.
I tend to think of Bruce Springsteen.
And he puts on a cowboy hat, which like that makes him the second most awkward person to have put on a cowboy hat.
I would be number one on that list after our company moved to Tennessee.
In any case, here was the ad for Jeep.
And a lot of people in the media were just in love with this.
Brian Stelter was like, I wish this could have gone on for an hour, an hour.
No, you don't.
Because the ad is super boring and it says nothing, and it just demonstrates sort of where we are politically, is that this sort of pap is now popular with the left, specifically because the ad says nothing.
It says that we are all supposed to be reunited.
The idea here is that Donald Trump is gone, of course, and therefore we can all reunite around shared values, like churches, that the left wants to invade and revoke its nonprofit status.
And also dirt, apparently.
Here's the ad.
There's a chapel in Kansas.
Standing on the exact center of the lower 48.
The middle has been a hard place to get to lately.
Between red and blue.
Between servant and citizen.
Between our freedom and our fear.
We need the middle.
We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.
To the reunited states of America.
And it sounds like super nice and bland and meaningless.
Like literally completely meaningless.
There's nothing there.
I do like when he likes dirt.
That is one of my favorite parts.
I don't know if that's the dirt that Beto O'Rourke ate after he lost to Ted Cruz or like the very soil we stand on is common ground.
Okay, well, yes, the entire earth, in fact, is made out of generally the same materials.
And so we therefore have common ground with, like, all the people.
Like us and Yemen.
Common ground.
Because we're on a planet together.
So that's exciting stuff.
Also, a lot of shots of churches there.
And the Equality Act, not very much in favor of the churches.
But this is the new unity, right?
The new unity is, get on board.
We're unified.
We're moving forward together.
And oh, by the way, if you disagree with us, you're not part of the unity.
You're not part of the unit.
That's the subtext there because when you think of unifying political figures Bruce Springsteen is a partisan Democrat has performed it like every DNC since 1873 that guy is is not a unifying figure in any way shape or form and so I Calls for unity that actually have content like why don't we recommit to our local communities and helping one like that would be nice But that's not what that's about right.
It's the reunited States of America because Trump tore us apart and And now, now we can be reunited.
Nobody mentioned that Trump won Kansas.
Don't tell him.
Don't tell him.
OK, in any case.
All of this is part of a broader manipulation that is currently happening in the United States, in which we are all supposed to have bought into the new golden age, the post-partisan age of unity, ushered in by Joe Biden's administration.
And it's going to be great, guys.
It's going to be great.
And in fact, we should celebrate the accession of Joe Biden to the presidency, and we should celebrate everybody who helped make that happen, including people who sort of manipulated the system.
Now, note what I am not going to contend here.
I'm not going to contend that voter fraud and voter irregularity decided the election.
I don't think they did.
I did not make that contention since literally day one.
I said that I did not think it was true.
I did not think there was evidence to back it, and the evidence was not brought.
However, I did say since day one that there are systems of power in this country, institutions of power controlled by the left at the top level, and those were in fact manipulated in order to Rig the body politic in favor of particular points of view.
And this can happen when you have an entire mainstream establishment media on one side of the political aisle.
This can happen when, for example, you black out an entire late-breaking story on the president's son and his relationship with foreign powers and what the president knew about that and when.
As did happen with all of social media to the New York Post story.
This can happen when you have the social media giants cracking down on people with dissenting points of view and downgrading traffic to particular websites that do not reflect that point of view.
If you have the institutions of power in the United States all controlled by one side of the political aisle and those institution of powers kick into gear, that is going to have an effect on the election, obviously.
You don't have to expressly suggest that people had their votes switched or their votes stolen in order to point out that when you have institutions of power that have a heavy impact on how people live and how people think and how people consume information, And that that certainly can have an impact on how an election goes.
And this is not a theory.
Molly Ball over at Time Magazine has a piece that the left is celebrating, but really should scare the living hell out of everybody.
Molly Ball, who is on the left, wrote a piece for Time.
It's called The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.
This is one of my favorite things that is happening in the media right now.
And when I say favorite, I mean least favorite.
You have members of the media who are openly acknowledging that blue America has taken control of the levers of power in every major institution and are wielding those levers of power against you.
In order to manipulate you, in order to change your life.
And then if you say, hey, wait a second, all of these institutions seem like they're controlled by the left and they're being wielded against me.
Then the same media will say, you're paranoid.
You're paranoid.
It's not happening to you.
They have Jim VandeHei from Axios literally writing that blue America is in control of every major institution in the United States, from Hollywood to sports, to corporate America, to social media, to government.
And that they are using that power in order to rethink how freedom of speech is done.
And then when people like me say that on the show, then Axios reports, Hey, look at these right-wingers.
This is their new narrative.
It's not my narrative, dude.
It's your narrative.
You literally wrote that narrative because you happen to be telling the truth about this.
We're going to get to what Time Magazine said actually happened during election 2020.
Because again, The institutional obstacles to open debate in the United States are massive, and they are becoming ingrained, and it's extraordinarily dangerous.
You're being manipulated.
You are being manipulated, and the left is sometimes openly admitting they are manipulating you.
We'll get to this in just one second.
First, let us talk about some of that manipulation.
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Okay, so Molly Bauhaus's piece in Time Magazine, and here is what she says.
She says, a weird thing happened right after the November 3rd election.
Nothing.
The nation was braced for chaos.
Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country.
Right-wing militias were girding for battle.
In a poll before election day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.
Then, an eerie quiet descended.
As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action, but crickets.
When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on November 7th, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the United States to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump's ouster.
A second odd thing happened amid Trump's attempts to reverse the result.
Corporate America turned on him.
Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump's candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede.
To the president, something felt amiss.
It was all very, very strange, Trump said on December 2nd.
Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still being counted.
In a way, says Molly Ballentine magazine, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.
Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.
The pact was formalized in a terse little-noticed joint statement of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day.
Both sides would come to see it as some sort of implicit bargain, inspired by the summer's massive, sometimes destructive racial justice protests, in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump's assault on democracy.
So she's talking about the post-election period there, but then she says, oh yeah, there's the pre-election period too, right?
And here's what she says, Molly Ball.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election, an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote, but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.
For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America's institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless panic and an autocratically inclined president.
So the way that Molly Ball is pitching this is that all of these left-wing institutions, they threw themselves into high gear in order to ensure free and fair and wonderful and clean elections.
And wow, what an amazing job they did.
And the result of that amazing job is Joe Biden as president.
Now, to somebody who's not on the left, What that actually looks like is, hey, look at all these institutions of power that kicked into high gear in order to sometimes suppress opinion, in order to downgrade particular informational dissemination, in order to change the rules of voting.
So they had universal mail-in voting five months early in many of these states before much of the information for the election was actually relevant or available.
But remember, Molly Ball's on the left, so this is a celebratory article, right?
She says, Well, actually, it was kind of more like the Trump victory.
These people, generally speaking, were pretty concerned with the outcome of the vote, not merely the mechanisms of the vote.
That is a lot of revisionist history right there.
Says Molly Ball, their work touched every aspect of the election.
They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.
They fended off voter suppression lawsuits.
Voter suppression lawsuits are also things like voter ID and lawsuits that challenge whether votes should be cast in a particular way.
Things like vote gathering, ballot harvesting.
They recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
That's just called voter turnout.
Right?
That's a political campaign.
campaign. They successfully pressured, here's the part that's great, they successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. Oh, you mean they rigged the levers of informational determination in the United States so that they would be the sole arbiters of what information should actually be spread during the election. Sounds on the up and up.
They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days and weeks.
After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure Trump could not overturn the election.
So here, what exactly does that mean?
So, Malibal says, the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream. A well-funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information.
They were not rigging the election.
They were fortifying it.
Oh!
That's what was... By the way, if Trump had won and they'd done all the exact same things, do you think Molly Ball would be writing about the fortified election?
Or do you think she'd be writing about how corrupt the election was?
So, what kinds of stuff did they do in order to, quote-unquote, fortify the election?
Fortify the election?
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Molly Ball writing in Time Magazine.
And she talks about how all of these groups basically got together in order to quote-unquote fortify the election.
So what exactly did that fortification look like?
Well, it looked like an alliance between the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce.
And one of the heads of these unions was a guy named Mike Podhorzer.
He was the senior advisor to the president of the AFL-CIO.
He put together a memo, and he started making connections with people.
On March 3rd, Podhorzer drafted a three-page confidential memo titled, "'Threats to the 2020 Election.' Trump has made it clear this will not be a fair election, that he will reject anything but his own." They kicked into high gear for rapid mail-in voting.
he wrote on November 3rd to the media report.
Otherwise, he will use the right wing information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.
The memo laid out four categories of challenges, attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on his political opponents, and efforts to reverse the results of the election.
So what did they do?
They kicked into high gear for rapid mail-in voting.
And by the way, they started, and this is the part that's scarier to me, they started securing the methods of informational distribution.
So according to Malibal, time. Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new.
For decades, campaigns have grappled with everything from anonymous calls claiming the election has been rescheduled to flyers spreading nasty smears about candidates' families.
But Trump's lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media, and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote.
Okay, so there's something you have to understand about the whole disinformation, misinformation nonsense that's been pushed by the left.
Since 2016, the left has completely flipped On social media.
So, in 2012, social media was a godsend.
Why?
Because the Obama administration knew how to use it.
They were micro-targeting people.
They were using data in new and innovative ways.
Then, Trump used that same information in very similar ways in 2016, and the meme became, the reason that Trump won in 2016 is because Facebook and Twitter and YouTube didn't shut off the mechanisms of informational distribution and misinformation had decided the election.
How would we define misinformation?
We define it as, quote, not from the New York Times, not from CNN, not from MSNBC.
Anything that comes from a partisan outlet on the right must be disinformation or misinformation.
And this needs to be stopped.
The spigot needs to be closed.
So, says Time Magazine, Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalyst, began studying this problem a few years ago.
She piloted a nameless secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.
One component was tracking dangerous lies that might otherwise spread unnoticed.
Researchers then provided information to campaigners or the media to track down the sources and expose them.
Okay, so first of all, what that sounds like is that the media are just doing the work for progressive groups.
She's a progressive operative.
She runs Catalyst.
Catalyst will send these media updates to members of the media, who will then ram them into their fact checks, the same way that Media Matters does.
The most important takeaway from Quinn's research, says Time, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse.
When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say this isn't true.
But the more engagement something gets, the more popular, the more the platforms boost it.
The algorithm reads that as, oh, this is popular, people want more of it.
Okay, so this is where it gets good.
So instead of countering the information, instead of somebody putting out something that you disagree with, and you counter the information, which by the way, you see all the time in the media, and by the way, half the time the media calls something false, it actually isn't false.
I saw that last week when Snopes decided to fact check The idea that AOC was in the Capitol by admitting that she was not in the Capitol building, but saying that it was mostly false to say that she had exaggerated her account because she was not in the Capitol building.
It was an amazing fact check.
Because the way the fact checkers typically work is that if conservatives say something false, they fact check it as false, which is correct.
If the left says something false, they fact check it as mostly true.
And if conservatives say something true, they fact-check it as mostly false.
That's the way these fact-checkers often work, and they do it by biasing exactly what they're fact-checking, as we discussed last week.
Okay, but here's the thing.
What the left was pushing for was not more engagement, or even more of a boost to content that rebutted things they thought were not true.
Instead, the solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread misinformation, and by aggressively policing it in the first place.
The platforms have certain policies against certain types of malignant behavior, but they haven't been enforcing them, she says.
Quinn's research gave ammo to advocates pushing social media platforms to take a harder line.
In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked.
Here's the best part of this entire article.
You ready?
It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement, says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others.
It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem.
Was it enough?
Probably not.
Was it later than we wanted?
Yes, but it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.
So remember that I said the person who said that last quote is a person named Vanita Gupta, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who's saying, we got the social media platforms to mirror our recommendations and start taking down content we didn't like.
Gupta is Joe Biden's current nominee to Associate Attorney General.
Does that sound a little corrupt to you?
A little corrupt to you?
That people who are about to enter the Biden administration and were essentially part of the adjunct Biden campaign were bullying and pressuring social media companies into taking down and banning information they didn't like?
Isn't that kind of a problem?
Isn't that just a little bit of a problem?
So when people say that they feel like the election was not honest, that can take two forms.
One is, oh, it was voter fraud.
Oh, it was people cheated on the vote.
Or it could be the reality, which is that there are a lot of people who are pushing at the top levels from powerful positions in order to pull every lever of influence they could, including ones that have an impact on you and have an impact on me daily.
That is, they call it fortifying the election.
Sounds a lot like rigging, does it not?
I mean, rigging can, again, for the third time, I'm not talking about voter fraud or voter irregularity, when you pull every lever of power in order to achieve a particular result and you do it top down, does that sound like respect for the American people?
Or does that sound like you want to run the place?
Okay, you are being manipulated.
And the manipulation continues on a daily basis.
This is not about unity.
It's not about neutral principles that can be applied broadly across the spectrum.
This is about creating a monopoly of informational distribution, a monopoly on who gets punished by the rules.
And we're gonna get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so the manipulation continues apace because the members of the media have an agenda.
This is why when you see ads like the Bruce Springsteen ad from Jeep, When that pretends that that's an apolitical ad, it's not an apolitical ad.
The suggestion that we need reuniting after the age of Trump, as opposed to, you know, during the age of Obama, when we actually did have race riots, when we did have an extraordinarily slow recovery, when we had incredible divisions in the body politic.
Actually look at the polls.
When race relations in America started to go south, it was under Barack Obama.
We didn't hear about how he was dividing America.
He was a unifier.
And then Trump came along and he was a divider.
And now, America is reuniting.
And you know what unites us?
Apparently, churches in the middle of the country that the left doesn't particularly like.
And also dirt.
Those are the things that unify us.
But the real answer is, what unifies us is that you listen to the left.
What unifies us, what's supposed to unify us, is that you agree with the precepts of the left.
And here's the thing.
This is directed at my friends who are liberal but not leftist.
I make this distinction every single day on the program.
There's a reason that we sell leftist tierist tumblers, not liberal tierist tumblers.
I explicitly rejected liberal tierist tumblers because I think liberals are just people who disagree with me about politics.
I think leftists are people who want to see everybody else banned in the search for an authoritarian unity.
The left is ascendant.
The left is moving, and they're moving in strong fashion in order to subject you, the citizen, to the curtailment of your rights so they can reach the sort of unity that they wish.
Okay, and this is happening inside supposedly liberal institutions.
I mean, this is an unbelievable story.
Okay, over at the New York Times.
The New York Times is just getting purged right now.
You remember the story about James Bennett, who was their op-ed editor?
And you remember that they had an internal staff rebellion because he had the temerity to publish a column by Tom Cotton.
You remember that?
It was good times.
Okay, well now, they've decided they're going to purge another person.
This person's name is Donald McNeil Jr.
Now Donald McNeil Jr.
is apparently a health reporter, and he has a long history of being an excellent reporter.
He was nominated for a Pulitzer for his COVID work.
Now, he has resigned and apologized for his quote-unquote extraordinarily bad judgment over his use of the n-word after his Pulitzer Prize winning colleague Nicole Hannah-Jones threatened to launch her own investigation of him because she is the de facto editor-in-chief of the New York Times now.
This pseudo-journalistic, lying, fictionalized, anti-American... Nicole Hannah-Jones, like, Honestly, she's a figure who deserves contempt.
She deserves intellectual contempt.
She's a person who has rejected any criticism of her own project as racist.
She's gone back and self-edited her own project and changed the nature of the project.
She has made accusations that are completely unfulfilled about a wide variety of journalists, from liberal to conservative.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is everything that is wrong with modern-day American journalism.
She's an activist opinion hack masquerading as something more, and she's not.
And by the way, a lot of what she says is just plain wrong.
It's just anti-factual.
Okay, so here's what happened.
In a letter to staff on Friday, Donald McNeil Jr.
announced he was standing down from the paper after 45 years, saying he, quote, originally thought the context in which I use this ugly word could be defended, but now realized it cannot.
So it sounds like he had, you know, called someone the N-word, right?
I mean, usually when you have a scandal and you get fired for using the N-word, it's because you called somebody the N-word, right?
That's not what happened here.
That's not what happened here.
Do you know how insane that is?
That standard?
We don't tolerate racist language regardless of intent.
Understand what is packed into that small phrase.
Okay, normally, when you accuse somebody of being a racist, it's because they have racist thoughts.
Right?
It's all about intent.
quote, we do not tolerate racist language, regardless of intent.
Do you know how insane that is?
That standard?
We don't tolerate racist language, regardless of intent.
Understand what is packed into that small phrase.
Okay, normally, when you accuse somebody of being a racist, it's because they have racist thoughts.
Right, it's all about intent.
Racism is all about intent.
Because there are actions that can be interpreted a wide variety of ways.
When a cop pulls over a black person for speeding, is that cop doing something racist?
Or is the cop pulling somebody over for speeding who happens to be black?
We don't know until we search the officer's intent.
Until we know something about the officer.
But according to the New York Times, racist words do not need to have intent attached to them.
They are on their face racist.
So we can disconnect racism from intent.
Okay, what this really is, is the Ibram X. Kendi idea.
That what is truly racist is not intent.
Racism has nothing to do with intent.
You can be a racist without intent.
What does it take to be a racist without intent?
Not mirroring the priorities of Nikole Hannah-Jones.
And not taking the perspective of the woke staffers.
That is racist.
Right?
And we don't need to prove intent.
We don't need to prove you're a racist.
All we have to do is find an instance in which you said a not racist thing.
That's all we have to do.
If you used a word in a not-racist context, we will still say that you are a racist, even if it is provable that you are not a racist.
So what exactly happened?
Well, the ousting of the man, as according to the Daily Mail, who is the paper's star COVID-19 reporter, came after a group of 150 staffers sent a letter to the executive leadership Wednesday saying they were deeply disturbed by the paper's handling of the incident and demanding a full investigation into quote-unquote newly surfaced complaints against McNeil.
Hannah Jones, the reporter behind the 1619 Project, also vowed to call parents and students who took part in the trip in question to find out what McNeil said and in what context, sources told the Daily Beast.
So here's what happened.
The Daily Beast first reported last week multiple students and parents had lodged complaints against McNeil back in 2019 after he allegedly used the N-word, said white privilege does not exist, and made disparaging comments about black people during a company-sponsored school trip to Peru.
Now, there's only one thing there that really got him fired.
The thing that got him fired is that he said that he doesn't believe in the concept of white privilege.
That's what got him fired.
It was not the use of the N-word.
Because you know what the context was when he was using the N-word?
You know what actually happened?
What actually happened is this.
Here is his letter.
Quote.
I was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur.
To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title.
In asking the question, I used the slur itself.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
That's the whole thing.
Right, this report, a person asked, a high school student asked, I know a 12-year-old who used the N-word, and McNeil said, oh, well, did they use the word bleep as like a rap lyric, or did they use it not as a rap lyric?
That should make it, right, that is literal, what he is literally saying is, what was the intent?
What was the intent?
Was the intent racist, or was the intent not racist?
That makes a difference.
The Times has rejected the standard, however, to even say the N-word to clarify means that you have done something racist.
Even if you are attempting to clarify, like, if I were to get on the air today and say that N-word is a racist term that should never be uttered by anyone, but I would actually say the N-word, the left would demand that I be cancelled.
That's the way that this works now.
If you use the N-word to condemn the N-word, you will now be cancelled.
That's how insane this is.
These are the people you're supposed to unify with?
How?
Like, how?
That's my question.
I want Bruce Springsteen to tell me how I'm supposed to unify with this.
So good-hearted liberals, how can you unify with this?
Okay, McNeil says, quote, I should not have done this.
First of all, number one, never apologize to the mob.
Never apologizing to the banged jackass mob.
Never apologize to the woke mob.
There is never anything good that has ever come from apologizing to a woke mob for doing nothing wrong.
He didn't do anything wrong here.
And the fact that he apologized I understand he was doing it to try to keep his job.
It's an act of cowardice.
He shouldn't have apologized.
And by the way, the minute that you apologize, they will take your head.
That is the way that this works.
Originally, said McDill, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended.
I now realize it cannot.
It is deeply offensive and hurtful.
The fact I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgment.
For that, I apologize.
To the students on the trip, I extend my sincerest apology.
But my apology needs to be broader than that.
Not just to the students.
He needs to apologize to aliens who have not yet visited Earth.
My lapse of judgment has hurt my colleagues in science, the hundreds of people who trusted me to work with them closely during this pandemic, the team at The Daily that turned to me during this frightening year, and the whole institution which put its confidence in me and expected better.
Just apologize to the world.
Kneel before Zod.
Kneel before Zod.
So I have a question.
Liberals, do you feel like kneeling before the woke diktats of Hannah Nicole Jones?
Is that the world you want to live in?
Is that the unity that you are willing to achieve?
That you're willing to go along with people who get people fired from their jobs for saying things that are not racist because you don't like their political point of view?
That's the way that this works now?
And by the way, the woke will continue along this mission.
And they don't need evidence.
Evidence!
Don't be silly.
They don't need evidence.
All they want to do is ruin people.
That's all this is about.
It's about castigating people they disagree with as evil.
This is why Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times, who basically just reports on like things happening at TikTok, Journalism-ing.
Incredible journalism-ing at the New York Times these days.
So, you know what she tried to do the other day?
She tried to go after the Silicon Valley investor, Marc Andreessen.
She suggested that he use the R-word.
The R-word is a reference, historically, to people who had mental disabilities.
I'm not even gonna say it because, as we know, once you say the R-word to even clarify what the R-word is, you get canceled.
That's the way this works.
Okay, so, there's only one problem.
Marc Andreessen never said it.
That's all that happened.
Marc Andreessen never said it.
Taylor Lorenz tried to smear him.
According to Glenn Greenwald, who has emerged as a voice of sanity.
I mean, this is how wild things are.
Glenn Greenwald, who I disagree with about, like, all the things, is now a voice of sanity when it comes to this sort of stuff.
He says the profound pathologies driving all of this were on full display on Saturday night as the result of a reckless and self-humiliating smear campaign by one of the New York Times' Star Tech reporters, Taylor Lawrence.
She falsely and very publicly accused Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Mark Andreessen of having used the slur word during a discussion about the Reddit GameStop uprising.
Lorenz lied.
Andreessen never said the word.
And rather than apologize and retract it, she justified her mistake by claiming it was a male voice that sounded like his, then locked her Twitter account as though she was the victim.
It's like unbelievable.
By the way, you know how this happened?
Because there was an app called Clubhouse.
I've been invited to use that app.
I haven't joined it for specifically this reason.
And I told, by the way, the people who created it, this would happen.
Clubhouse was supposed to be a place for people who are prominent to be able to have open conversations.
People like Taylor Lawrence then logged in in order to find gotcha moments so they could go after famous people.
Because this is what the new left lives for.
And they're not doing it because they care about Marc Andreessen.
They're not doing it because they care about Donald McNeil.
They're doing it because they care about you.
They're doing it because they hate your guts.
Because let them be an example.
Let us put this head on a pike, like Game of Thrones, to warn off all of those who might dissent.
It could be your head on that pike next.
Okay, that is what is going on.
And by the way, it could be your head on the social media pike next.
I'll give you the greatest example of this in just a second.
It truly is.
It truly is astonishing.
By the way, again, they will go after anyone.
And it's places that were formerly liberal and now are leftist.
The ACLU, right?
The American Civil Liberties Union, right?
They're all about civil liberties, right?
Like free speech, and they'll die for your right to say it, even if they don't agree with what you're saying.
Now they have this ridiculous human being, Chase Strangio, Who is one of their lawyers.
He's one of their lawyers.
The most famous lawyer, maybe.
Tweeting out that J.K.
Rowling and Abigail Shrier, quote, and the rest of them, are closely aligned with white supremacists in power.
Their rhetoric in turn creates dangerous policy proposals and eventually laws.
We have a lot of mobilizing to do.
Always good when you have the ACLU, their lawyer, calling for the censorship of people they disagree with and smearing them as white supremacist fellow travelers.
Again, the warning is to you.
It's not to J.K.
Rowling.
It's not to Abigail.
It's to you.
The warning is to you.
And I'll explain how much of the warning is to you in a second with this incredible piece from the LA Times.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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All right, we're gonna get to more of this in just a second, because this campaign, the misinformation campaign, the real misinformation campaign, the real manipulation, it is aimed at you and shutting you up.
But first, you probably heard me talk about our All Access membership before.
For those of you who have not, it is our most elite membership level here at The Daily Wire.
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Let me show you this Tumblr, okay?
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So the manipulation of the body politic, it's about you.
It's about mobilizing people against people like you if you disagree.
And again, I'm not talking about if you're conservative.
I'm talking about if you dissent from the woke orthodoxy in any way.
And you think you're safe if you're a liberal.
If you agree with the left on some of their policy priorities, you think you're safe.
You're not.
You're not safe for one moment in time.
The minute you become inconvenient, they run you over.
So here's the thing about the left.
If you are a normal human being, Then generally, you're a little uncomfortable about the idea of the mob, but you like people individually, right?
You like people on an individual level.
You want those people to be treated decently.
But the idea of the mob, you know, the idea of the people collectively being the big deciders, that's a little bit uncomfortable, right?
That's why we like checks and balances in the United States.
If you are on the left, they love, quote-unquote, the people, but they hate individuals.
And if you are in their way, they will run you over as though they're in a Ford F-150 truck, and you are just standing out there in their way.
That is, that is, All that the left is.
I mean, the left is just a machine for running people over in their pursuit of utopia.
And so if you believe, as a good-hearted liberal who just disagrees with me about tax rates and about abortion and about key issues, right?
We can have those key disagreements.
But if you agree with me about individual rights, like freedom of speech and the ability to disseminate information and have discussions with people across the other side of the aisle, Then you're gonna have to make a decision.
Do you wish to move along with the woke left because you'll agree with them on policy and run over rights in the process?
Or do you wish to preserve rights and maybe it'll make it a little bit tougher for you to convince people of your political agenda, but at least you'll have preserved the rights.
That's the decision that's going to be up to people who are liberals but not leftists.
Okay, that's your choice.
Not up to me.
It's up to you.
Okay, because they're coming for everyone.
Okay, I'm gonna give you an example, and it doesn't matter how nice you are.
This is a perfect example of individuals not mattering, all that matters.
See, here's the thing.
On the left, what they actually believe is that your belief system, it's so weird.
They believe that your belief system is what makes you good or bad.
You can be a perfectly crappy human being, but if you believe the right things, this makes you a good human being.
Normal people believe that it's the things you do on a daily basis that make you a good human being.
It's your aspiration to continue to do more good things on a daily basis.
That's what makes you a good human being.
Folks on the left, On the hard left, they believe that you can be the nicest person in the world, but if you believe the wrong things, they will run you over.
So, here's a perfect example.
This column just struck me so hard over the weekend.
It's a piece by a woman named Virginia Heffernan.
Virginia Heffernan.
writing for the Los Angeles Times.
It's called, What Can You Do About the Trumpites Next Door?
Quote, Oh, heck no.
The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.
How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?
On some level, of course, I realize I owe them thanks.
And man, it really looks like the guy backdragged the driveway like a pro.
But how much thanks?
These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives.
And there aren't a lot of anything other than white lives in this neighborhood.
Oh my god, they like cops.
Holy... They like cops.
This is also kind of weird.
Back in the city, people don't sweep other people's walkways for nothing.
Maybe it's like what Eddie Murphy discovered in that old Saturday Night Live sketch, White Like Me.
He goes undercover in white makeup and finds that when white people are moving among their own, they pop free champagne and live the high life.
As Murphy puts it, Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free.
The favors Hezbollah does for people in the cities Tyre and Sidon probably don't involve snowplows, but like other mafias, Hezbollah tends to its own.
The Shiite, sick, elderly, and hungry.
They offer protection and hospitality and win loyalty that way.
And they also demand devotion to their brutal us-versus-them anti-Sunni cause.
Some of us are family, the favors say.
The rest are infidels.
The same is true with Louis Farrakhan, who currently helms the Nation of Islam.
This person is crazy.
This person needs to be in a rubber room, like, immediately.
Like, put this person in a straitjacket and drag them to the hoo-hoo house.
This is like... While the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies him as a dangerous anti-Semite, much of his flock says he's just a little screwy and unfailingly magnanimous.
To them.
When someone helps you when you're down or snowed in, it's almost impossible to regard them as a blight on the world.
In fact, you're more likely to be overwhelmed with gratitude and convinced of the person's inherent goodness.
You might end up like the upper-class family I stayed with in France as a teenager.
They did not attend a citywide celebration for the 100th birthday of Charles de Gaulle, the war hero who orchestrated the liberation of his country from Nazi Germany in 1944.
They did have several portraits of Philippe Petain, Nazi collaborator, on their wall.
When I screwed up the courage to ask how it was for them during the occupation, the lady of the house replied we were happy because the Nazis were very polis.
I didn't know the word, so I excused myself to consult a French-English dictionary.
I was in tears when I found the entry.
Polite.
So when I accept generosity from my pandemic neighbors, acknowledging the legitimate kindness with a wave or a plate of cookies, am I also sealing us in as fellow travelers who are very polis to each other, but not so much to them?
Now let it be said, there are certain perspectives on the world That can actually make you a bad person, right?
If you believe that slavery is a good idea, this can make you a bad person.
If you believe in the murder of all members of X group, this can make you a bad person.
But she is currently likening a Trump supporter who plowed her driveway for her to Hezbollah, Louis Farrakhan, and the Nazis.
I have a feeling that this person's beliefs are making her an actual, honest-to-goodness, in-daily-deed bad person.
As this person says, loving your neighbor is evidently much easier when your neighborhood is full of people just like you.
I love that she's just throwing it.
Like, how does she know?
If she were black, how does she know the neighbors wouldn't come over and plow the driveway?
Does she know that?
She has no evidence of that whatsoever, other than her own unjustified moral superiority and belief that her next-door neighbors for being Trump supporters must be vicious Nazi racists who would only do this for a person living next door who is white.
She's thrusting that on them.
She doesn't know them at all.
Literally, the only two things she knows about them Or that they're nice, and plowed her driveway for her, and did her a favor, and that they voted for Trump.
So instead of her saying to herself, instead of her saying to herself, you know, maybe it's possible that some Trump supporters are nice people, and I've miscast and mischaracterized many Trump supporters and their belief systems.
Instead of her thinking that, it's, no, it must be they who are wrong.
It must be I who am the morally wonderful one.
Okay, I don't care what dirt this person lives on with me, we ain't in the same country.
This is wild stuff.
She says, what do we do about the Trumpites around us?
Like Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who spoke eloquently this week about her terrifying experience during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, Americans are expected to forgive and forget before we've even stitched up our wounds or gotten our vaccines against the pandemic that former President Trump utterly failed to mitigate.
My neighbors supported a man who showed near murderous contempt for the majority of Americans.
They kept him in business with their support.
But the plowing...
On January 6th, after the insurrection, Senator Ben Sasse issued an aw-shucks plea for all Americans to love their neighbors.
At the time I seethed, the Capitol had been just desecrated.
But maybe my neighbor heard Sasse and was determined to make a bid for reconciliation.
So, here's my response to the plowed driveway for now.
Politely, but not profusely, I'll acknowledge the Sassean move.
With a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust, I'm not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.
I also can't give my neighbors absolution.
It's not mine to give.
Nobody asked you for absolution, you crazy person.
What are you absolving them of?
Is it a nice thing for you and have different views on politics?
And your answer is they're asking you for absolution but you can't give it?
Honestly, if I was this lady's neighbor and I read this piece, I would take my snow plow, I would go out into the street, I would gather as much snow as humanly possible and dump it directly on her driveway.
I'd plow that sucker like eight feet high and she can dig that out with a trowel for all I care.
What a nasty piece of goods.
Seriously.
But this is the world.
Do you feel the unity?
Do you feel it?
I feel the unity.
And I especially feel the unity when elites in our society mirror this perspective and then mobilize the levers of power in order to push forward this perspective, such that if you disagree with them, it's because you just want to break the country.
I love this.
She says, So in other words, I don't care that you did a nice thing for me.
make amends, not with a snowplow, but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration, and more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed.
So in other words, I don't care that you did a nice thing for me.
Only when you bow before Zod, only when you agree with me, will you be deemed one of the morally elect.
This is the woke priesthood at work.
So, which side do you want to be on, liberals?
This is my question.
Do you want to be on the side of Virginia Heffernan?
Does she sound like somebody that you want to live next door to?
Or, would you like to live in the same neighborhood as the Trump supporter who disagrees with you on tax rates and immigration, but also might plow your driveway once in a while and recognizes that you actually are brothers in arms against many of the myriad ills that wreck countries all over the world historically?
There can be no unity with this.
There can't.
And if people who agree with this sort of stuff control the levers of power, there will not be any unity.
It's just going to get worse.
It's just going to be worse from here on in.
Alrighty.
So, Michael Molls is guest hosting Hour 2, and you can listen to his show today.
It should be up very, very shortly.
In the meantime, I will see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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