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Feb. 23, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

49:15

The Authoritarian Left Is On The March | Ep. 1201

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	Democratic Congress people seek to purge media outlets they don't like.
	And President Biden holds a commemorative event for the 500,000 Americans who have died of COVID.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash Ben.
	We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Okay, so.
	It is kind of fascinating that in America's narrative discourse, there's a lie that is told.
	It goes something like this.
	The great threat to American democracy lies on the authoritarian right.
	The authoritarian right is the biggest threat to American democracy.
	This is something that you hear very often in the media.
	You hear it a lot from Democratic Congress people.
	And they like to use as their example what happened on January 6th.
	Now, January 6th was an act of criminality.
	It was an act of evil.
	And there was something authoritarian to people attempting to stop the democratic processes from taking place and going forward and working.
	For sure.
	You don't have to deny the presence of an authoritarian right to also recognize that the centers of power in American life, the centers of institutional power in American life, do not lie with the authoritarian right.
	They lie with the authoritarian left.
	Now, it is worthwhile at this point to define our terms.
	So, The very term authoritarianism is very often used kind of vaguely.
	What exactly does it mean to be authoritarian?
	People use it simultaneously to mean fascist and totalitarian.
	Authoritarian has a little bit more of a specific definition, typically.
	when you are talking about the characteristics of authoritarianism.
	So, let's talk about that for a second.
	So, there have been a bunch of studies on what authoritarianism actually looks like.
	What does it mean to be authoritarian?
	So, there's a guy named Theodore Adorno, and he very early in 1950 wrote a book.
	He was a Frankfurt School member, he was a Marxist theorist, and he wrote a book about authoritarianism.
	And his basic suggestion is that authoritarianism was a naturally right-wing phenomenon.
	See, as a Marxist, of course he thought that anybody who disagreed with him was sort of an authoritarian.
	His idea is that America was ripe for the plucking.
	America was about to fall into authoritarianism because America wasn't left-wing enough.
	Okay, so he wrote this very famous book called The Authoritarian Personality, in which essentially he suggested that anti-Semitism and authoritarianism were outgrowths of a particular mindset that also sprang from capitalism.
	Now, this was untrue, but it did lead to a lot of study as to what an authoritarian personality would look like.
	And there was a Harvard social scientist named Robert Altmeier.
	He created a right-wing authoritarianism scale.
	He was attempting to detect three particular character traits.
	These were character traits of the authoritarians.
	Character trait number one of an authoritarian was authoritarian submission.
	Willingness to submit to established and legitimate authorities.
	You're willing to just go along with whatever the boss says.
	Two, authoritarian aggression.
	Right, you're going to perform aggressive acts on behalf of the authoritarian.
	And three, conventionalism.
	Right, you are going to abide by all of the approved social conventions.
	This was right-wing authoritarianism.
	And for a long time, social scientists, who tend to be very left-wing, thought there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism.
	Left-wing authoritarianism just did not exist.
	Because left-wingers were progressive and wonderful and anti-violence and pacifistic.
	Okay, well, it is very clear at this point there is left-wing authoritarianism.
	And in fact, social scientists have found that left-wing authoritarianism is quite common.
	When University of Montana social psychologist Lucian Conway created a scale to mirror Altmeier's scale, what he found is that the highest score for authoritarianism was for liberals.
	Liberals had the highest score for authoritarianism.
	And he described authoritarianism this way.
	Here's what they said, these particular social scientists from University of Montana, about what left-wing authoritarianism looked like.
	Left-wing authoritarianism, if right-wing authoritarianism was about submission, and aggression approved by the bosses, and conventionalism, a belief that your traditional morality is the only approved social convention, and that you get to shut down everything else.
	Then left-wing authoritarianism is sort of the mirror image.
	Left-wing authoritarianism believes in revolutionary aggression, that the system has to be torn down.
	The hierarchy of power has to be destroyed.
	Top-down censorship, they simultaneously believe in.
	In order to achieve utopia, you have to shut everybody else up.
	And finally, anti-conventionalism.
	Which these social scientists described as, quote, In other words, they're gonna cram down a particular moral worldview that says that you are evil because you disagree.
	of conservatives as inherently immoral.
	An intolerant desire for coercively imposing left-wing beliefs and values on others and a need for social and ideological homogeneity in one's environment.
	In other words, they're gonna cram down a particular moral worldview that says that you are evil because you disagree.
	So those are the three characteristics of left-wing authoritarianism.
	Revolutionary aggression and approval for it, which you saw over the summer when virtually the entire left-wing winked and nodded at the most damaging rights in American history.
	Top-down censorship directed at group authority.
	Right, group authority as a means of regulating right-wing beliefs and behaviors.
	We have to have the bosses shut everybody else up.
	Right, this is the diversity training you see inside your corporations, or as we will see, Democrats in Congress trying to shut down free speech.
	And anti-conventionalism, a belief that everybody who disagrees with you is inherently a moral lesser person, a morally lesser person, a bad person.
	These characteristics of left-wing authoritarianism are extraordinarily common.
	Not only are they common, they are dominant in our institutional culture.
	Dominant.
	And you see it every single day, those particular factors.
	You see it at work every single day.
	So when people say, you know, right-wing authoritarianism is dominant, again, you don't have to deny the presence of right-wing authoritarianism to recognize that the institutional power in our country is dominated by authoritarian leftists who seek top-down censorship, who believe that their progressive worldview is the only worldview that matters, and who believe in a revolutionary aggression designed at tearing down the quote-unquote hierarchies of power.
	That describes to a T what so many members of the Democratic Party are doing today.
	The reason I bring this up is because two members of Congress have now issued a series of letters to a variety of platforms and common carriers designed to shut down dissent.
	One member of Congress is named Anna Eshoo, the other is named Jerry McNerney.
	They issued this letter, and this is just full authoritarian stuff.
	We have a First Amendment for a reason.
	It says, Congress shall make no law.
	Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
	So what have our members of Congress decided to do?
	Instead of making a law, they're going to essentially create agents in the private sphere to do their bidding.
	They know they can't pass a law that abridges freedom of speech or it'll get struck down by the Supreme Court.
	Instead, what they do is they say, we will punish you if you do not do the censorship we wish you to do in the private sphere.
	This is the new model, not top-down censorship just from government, but top-down censorship with government actors using as a cudgel their power in order to beat corporations into submission and force those corporations to adopt the precepts of the authoritarian left and to censor from the top.
	We'll get to what I mean by this in just one second, because we really are living in an authoritarian time.
	This is an authoritarian moment that we are watching unfold before us right now, and it is deep, and it is threatening, and it has been creeping in American life.
	And unfortunately, the authoritarianism of the left was fostered in general and in very strong ways by the reaction to things like January 6th.
	It was an opportunity for the authoritarian left to get the upper hand in American discourse.
	Because free speech is now bad.
	Free exchange of ideas is now bad.
	It could be incitement.
	If you say something they don't like, it could be dangerous.
	And so now is a great time to shut down free speech, to shut down individual rights, and to use all powers that they have at their disposal in order to do so.
	I'll explain in just one second.
	Again, the fact that this is happening in the United States should scare the living hell out of everybody who believes in individual rights, right, left, or center.
	I'm not saying everybody on the left is a member of the authoritarian left.
	I'm saying there is an authoritarian left, and it is becoming the dominant mode in the Democratic Party.
	And that's a very frightening thing.
	Get to more of it in one second.
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	Okay, so, these two members of Congress have now issued a series of letters Two common carriers telling them they want them to essentially boot Fox News off the air, and OANN, and Newsmax.
	And this is the same sort of top-down censorship that you are seeing called for by our establishment media against social media.
	Let's force social media not to disseminate information we don't like.
	And there are a variety of games they play in order to shut down stuff they don't like.
	You'll notice one of the things that they have done, and this is a pretty clever sleight of hand.
	A lot of this debate really started after the 2016 election.
	In fact, nearly all of it.
	Before 2016, there was a basic acknowledgement that there were alternative points of view that were going to be presented online.
	There are alternative points of view.
	We're gonna be presented on podcasts and talk radio.
	And that was annoying to the left, but they understood that, you know, you sort of had to just deal with it.
	And then after 2016, there was this moment where the left decided, you know what?
	We shouldn't have lost that election.
	In fact, we didn't lose that election.
	The only reason we lost that election is because of Russian disinformation.
	Now, disinformation, you know, foreign intervention, using false information in order to pervert the political process, is in fact not something that That the government has to just leave alone.
	Foreign disinformation.
	is something the government can step into.
	It does have First Amendment consequences, but there's some precedent for the government stepping in and stopping foreign actual interference with disinformation.
	But you'll notice that there's a verbal sleight of hand that went on where the media and Democratic members of Congress and Democrats in power, they decided to shift from Russian disinformation to misinformation.
	Now, there's a difference between disinformation and misinformation.
	Disinformation is active promotion of false material by a foreign government.
	That's what disinformation typically is, right?
	You do disinformation on the Soviets or the Soviets do disinformation on you.
	Misinformation is information that you perceive to be mistaken.
	There's no obvious intent for somebody to lie.
	It's just something you perceive to be mistaken.
	And so what the left does is they declare everything they don't like misinformation.
	If there's a narrative they don't like, that's misinformation.
	So they've now shifted over from fringe sort of issues when it comes to speech Foreign disinformation, the Russian government promulgating falsehoods in the middle of an election, to core political speech, which they then term misinformation.
	And then, they set up a whole body of fact-checkers, whose sole design, apparently, is to label anything they don't like, not only misinformation, but mostly false.
	And this is what you see at PolitiFact.
	PolitiFact will label Barack Obama's statement that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor half-true for several years, and then only later will they be like, oh yeah, that was the lie of the year.
	It becomes misinformation when it is convenient for them.
	And then they use those fake fact-checkers, those pseudo-fact-checkers, as an excuse to shut down outlets they don't like on social media and to suppress their reach.
	Or they go to YouTube and they say, you know what?
	We know that there are a lot of people out there who like conservative material, but we are afraid that that conservative material will lead to incitement.
	How?
	Well, it's not even.
	That those people are doing anything that incites violence.
	It's not that Jordan Peterson does anything that incites violence.
	It's that you might watch a Jordan Peterson video, and then maybe you'll get dragged into a rabbit hole of right-wing extremism.
	Okay, so they're consistently broadening out exceptions under American law that do exist to free speech, and then they're letting the exception eat the rule, right?
	So they will say incitement is illegal.
	It's true, incitement is illegal.
	Then they will say, that stuff that you're saying, you know, like normal political stuff, that's incitement.
	Or they will say, yeah, we understand that your narrative is opinion and it's protected, but it's really misinformation.
	And misinformation is really kind of like disinformation, and disinformation is something that the government can fight.
	So really your speech is like Russian disinformation.
	This is the way that the left goes about their top-down censorship.
	And it is tied into an ideology that suggests revolutionary aggression against the system because the system of individual rights is inherently discriminatory according to the woke left.
	The woke left says that individual rights are biased because the people who are in a position to best exercise their individual rights are the powerful in our society.
	And those people must be brought to heel.
	So individual rights take a backseat to what the collective requires.
	Individual rights take a backseat to equity.
	This is the language that you hear from the left.
	Again, these are the elements of authoritarianism.
	Revolutionary aggression.
	Top-down censorship.
	And certainly the most prevalent feeling on the left is that if you disagree with them, it is because you are a moral lesser.
	It is because there is something wrong with you.
	It is because you believe in brutality.
	You're a phobe.
	You're a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
	You're a hater.
	And the authoritarianism on the left in the United States is very, very dominant at this point in American life, and it's becoming more dominant every day.
	So here's this letter from these two members of Congress, again, directed at taking down political opponents.
	Here's a letter to John Stanley, Stanky rather.
	Stanky is the CEO of AT&T.
	Dear Mr. Stanky, and again, this comes from two sitting members of Congress, our country's public discourse is plagued by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies.
	Look at the conflation there.
	Some of those things, like Russian disinformation, are things the government has a say in.
	Misinformation is not, because you can define that however you want.
	Conspiracy theories.
	Depends on what you think is a conspiracy theory, right?
	And lies.
	Well, I mean, the left lied throughout the summer that America's police are systemically racist.
	They don't seem to care about that lie very much.
	These phenomena undergird the radicalization of seditious individuals Who committed active insurrection on January 6th, and it contributes to a growing distrust of public health measures necessary to crush the pandemic.
	Right, so the idea here is that we would have crushed the pandemic if it were not for misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies.
	Weird, because every single Democratic member of Congress, so far as I'm aware, backed mass protests in the middle of a pandemic because they said that racial issues were a public health problem.
	In any case, these members of Congress say we are concerned about the role AT&T plays in disseminating misinformation, misinformation, again, it's that slight of hand, misinformation, to millions of its U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV subscribers.
	And we write to you today to request additional information about what actions AT&T is taking to address these issues.
	Now notice, Congress does not have the power to regulate AT&T into shutting down free speech.
	That'd be a violation of the First Amendment.
	So instead, they will send nasty, threatening letters to places like Comcast and AT&T, and they will basically say, You know, nice company you got there.
	It'd be a real shame if something happened to it.
	Real shame if something happened to AT&T over there.
	You know, we have been looking into these other sort of antitrust issues, and I can tell you that if you weren't doing this fostering of misinformation, well then, maybe we would stop looking into that.
	I'm not threatening you or anything, of course.
	It's not a threat.
	I mean, this is the way the game is played now.
	Nearly half of Americans get their news primarily from TV, say these two members of Congress.
	However, not all TV news sources are the same.
	Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm.
	Now we get the incitement argument, right?
	Is if there's information that you don't like, or if there are even things that are not true that are said that you don't like.
	That those aren't necessarily incitement.
	That's not true.
	Lots of things are said in American public discourse every day.
	And we have laws against things like slander and libel.
	So you can sue people based on some of those things.
	We have incitement statutes that are on the books.
	Those incitement statutes require actual incitement, not just people saying things that are false.
	You will also note that these Democrats have no problem with the radical level of things that are not true being said on places like CNN and MSNBC.
	For full-on a year, we heard that Andrew Cuomo was the greatest governor on planet Earth.
	CNN reported that the kids from Covington Catholic were vicious racists.
	Covington, the mainstream establishment media, pushed the idea that Brett Kavanaugh was a rapist.
	None of those things ended up being true.
	Doesn't matter.
	It's only one type of quote-unquote misinformation you'll note that they're very upset about.
	Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues, in our public discourse.
	And so, again, the idea is that if you allow things I don't like, then the public discourse is polluted.
	Okay, well, it may very well be polluted.
	Seriously.
	I'll acknowledge that there's information in the public discourse that I think pollutes the public discourse.
	For example, if a member of the SNL cast puts out the overt lie that the state of Israel has been not handing out vaccines to its Arab citizens, that seems like something that pollutes the public discourse.
	Do I have any right to call for SNL to be canceled on that basis?
	Should I call for, if I were a member of Congress, would I have the ability, constitutionally speaking, to regulate that?
	Of course not.
	There's a lot of stuff in the public discourse that is chaff, and then there is some that is wheat, and it is your job to distinguish between the two.
	But the authoritarian left believes it is their job to distinguish for you and then use their power to cram down in censorious fashion exactly what they like.
	So, say these Congress people, experts have noted that the right-wing media ecosystem is quote-unquote, much more susceptible to disinformation, lies, and half-truths.
	Well, I mean, if they say so, wow, I mean, amazing how they came to that conclusion.
	It's just the right-wing media ecosystem that's susceptible to disinformation, lies, and half-truths.
	Doesn't matter that for four long years, a vast bulk of Democrats believed that the 2016 election was stolen.
	Right-wing media outlets like Newsmax, One American News Network, and Fox News all aired misinformation about the November 2020 elections.
	For example, both Newsmax and OANN ran quote incendiary reports of false information following the elections and continue to support an angry and dangerous subculture that will continue to operate semi-openly.
	As a violent mob was breaching the doors of the Capitol, Newsmax's coverage called the scene a sort of romantic idea.
	Fox News, meanwhile, has spent years spewing misinformation about American politics.
	Notice the conflation there, right?
	Fox News is exactly the same as Newsmax is exactly the same as OANN.
	And I do love that, that apparently Newsmax calling the scene a quote-unquote sort of romantic idea, which is not a good thing to say.
	That that apparently is the sort of offense that should get Newsmax taken off AT&T.
	However, CNN, which overtly promoted riots in the middle of the summer, I mean, Chris Cuomo went on television and he said, where does it say in the Constitution that protest is supposed to be peaceful?
	And somehow that didn't promote, right?
	It's only one side of the aisle, you'll note.
	These same networks say these Congress people have also been key vectors of spreading misinformation related to the pandemic.
	A media watchdog found over 250 cases of COVID-19 misinformation on Fox News in just one five-day period.
	Economists demonstrated Fox News had a demonstrable impact on noncompliance with public health guidelines.
	They actually didn't.
	We studied that at the time.
	The evidence that Fox News was directly responsible for people not wearing masks, for example, is exorbitantly weak.
	They couldn't even link the people who are not wearing the mask to people who are watching, for example, Sean Hannity.
	One online platform suspended and demonetized OANN's channel online because it was spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
	Newsmax has amplified allegations that members of the Chinese Communist Party helped develop the COVID-19 vaccine.
	Really, that's the big one that you came up with, Newsmax?
	Is it Newsmax said that maybe the CCP has something to do with the development of the virus?
	In reality, there is a fairly good amount of information that this thing, while not created by the CCP, was in fact leaked from a Wuhan lab.
	There's more information to that suggestion than there is to the idea that it came from the wet markets, as we were originally told, and some idiot ate a bat.
	Oh wow, you quoted last week tonight with John Oliver.
	Amazing.
	If John Oliver says it, it must be true.
	television show aired a segment about OANN last April that included a dire warning.
	The kind of misinformation OANN is spewing right now could end up getting people killed. Oh wow, you quoted last week tonight with John Oliver. Amazing.
	If John Oliver says it, it must be true because John Oliver is a super reliable source. We'll continue with the censorship that the Democrats are now pushing.
	This is authoritarian stuff.
	And it can come with a happy face, but the happy face does not make it any sort of... It does not mean that these people are in favor of liberty.
	They absolutely are not.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Alrighty, so now we get to the crux of the matter from these Democratic Congress people.
	So they've spent most of this letter so far yelling about how they don't like Fox News and OANN and Newsmax and how they're spewing misinformation.
	Now, I've talked about some of the things I think that OANN and Newsmax in particular were pushing about the election that were not true, that I saw no evidence for.
	And in fact, OANN has been forced to back off some of its allegations with regards to Dominion, same thing with Newsmax.
	Okay, all of that is true because there are slander and libel laws in the United States.
	Both of them, I believe, are currently being sued by Dominion.
	That is the system working.
	I'll tell you what is not the system working.
	Sitting members of Congress looking to have platforms de-platform things they don't like.
	That's dangerous stuff.
	That's authoritarian stuff.
	That's top-down censorship in full authoritarian leftist mode.
	So here's what these Congress people say.
	Remember, this is a letter to the head of AT&T.
	Yet, to our knowledge, the cable, satellite, and over-the-top companies that disseminate these media outlets to American viewers have done nothing in response to the misinformation aired by these outlets.
	AT&T currently carries Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV.
	As a company that serves 17 million Americans, AT&T plays a major role in the spread of dangerous misinformation that enabled the insurrection of January 6th and hinders our public health response to the current pandemic.
	In other words, if you don't mirror what we believe, we believe that you should shut them down.
	Notice what they're doing.
	Again, Congress cannot pass a law restricting freedom of speech, but members of Congress can pressure companies like AT&T into restricting freedom of speech.
	They're essentially turning these companies into their agents in order to shut down free speech, which is authoritarian stuff.
	It really is.
	It is government working hand in glove with corporations to shut down your freedom of speech.
	Corporations know this, by the way.
	Why do you think that Coca-Cola is doing diversity training?
	They're doing so for fear of liability.
	They're doing so because they're afraid they're going to be sued and that you're going to get some lefty judge who decides that discrimination has taken place because they didn't insulate themselves by buying a $20,000 Rob and D'Angelo bullcrap course.
	The reason Coca-Cola is doing this is that the Democrats leave them alone.
	The reason that all of these corporations are caving to the woke mob is because the woke mob has the levers of power in a wide variety of institutions right now.
	Not just at the top of corporations, where there are a lot of people who head corporations who are sympathetic to the woke mob, but they have the whip hand when it comes to the media.
	They have the whip hand when it comes to the social media companies.
	And most of all, they have the whip hand when it comes to members of Congress who are willing to shut down free speech.
	Not formally through passage of a law, but through simple outside pressure.
	So, say these Congress people, it is for these reasons we ask you provide us with responses to the following questions about AT&T's policies toward content carried on U-verse Direct TV and AT&T.
	What moral or ethical principles do you apply in deciding which channels to carry or when to take adverse actions against a channel?
	They're deliberately, these are not questions directed at eliciting answers, of course.
	These are questions elicited at, directed at eliciting a response, namely the cancellation of all of these outlets that Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney don't like.
	Two, do you require through contracts or otherwise that the channels you carry abide by any content guidelines?
	If so, please provide a copy of the guidelines.
	How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3rd, 2020 elections?
	Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel.
	And you know, that is the predicate for them setting up some sort of liability argument, as though AT&T is liable for damage done at the Capitol building because there were morons who decided to commit criminal acts on the basis of speech that may or may not have been true, but certainly did not meet the standard of legal incitement.
	What steps did you take prior to, on, or following the November 3rd, 2020 elections to monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans?
	Please describe each step that you took.
	Have you taken any adverse actions against a channel, including Fox News, for using your platform?
	Have you ever taken actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate disinformation?
	Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN?
	These are members of Congress who are overtly attempting to shut down the dissemination of information because they don't like these channels.
	All of this led to Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr calling this effort a chilling transgression of free speech.
	He wrote a letter to them.
	He said, by writing letters to cable providers and other regulated entities that carry these news media outlets, the Democrats are sending a message that is as clear as it is troubling.
	These regulated entities will pay a price if the targeted newsrooms do not conform to Democrats' preferred political narratives.
	This is a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys.
	He says debate on matters of public interest should be robust, uninhibited, and wide open.
	More speech is better than less.
	Yet the concerted effort by Democrats to drive political dissent from the public square represents a marked departure from these First Amendment norms.
	A newsroom's decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them.
	He says to the House Democrats that use their official letterhead to launch this inquiry, I would say this.
	Your demand to know the quote-unquote moral principles that guide a private entity's decision about what news to carry cannot be reconciled with bedrock principles of free speech and journalistic freedom.
	I call on my FCC colleagues to join me in publicly denouncing this attempt to stifle political speech and independent news judgment.
	But here is the thing.
	The Biden administration is happy with this sort of stuff.
	The Biden administration has never sounded off in favor of free speech principles.
	And this doesn't apply even internally to media outlets on the left.
	Media outlets on the left are happy to fire people who cross them.
	And whether you're talking about the New York Times deciding to get rid of Don McNeil for the grave sin of using the N-word in a conversation about why you shouldn't use the N-word, or today, the big story, is that Slate decided they were gonna get rid of a guy named Mike Peska.
	Okay, now Slate is a very left-wing outlet.
	Mike Peska committed a sin, a grave sin.
	What did he do?
	He used the N-word in describing why you should not use the N-word.
	According to defector.com, Mike Peska, host of Slate's daily podcast, The Gist, has been suspended from the company indefinitely.
	Sources confirmed that Pesca's indefinite suspension is without pay, and that his access to the company's Slack and email channels had been revoked.
	The memo announcing Pesca's suspension, sent by Slate CEO Dan Check, refers obliquely to a conversation that took place in Slack last week.
	Defector has obtained images of the Slack conversation that Check's memo refers to, in which Pesca argues a point he has previously gotten to hot water for arguing, that in some contexts, white people should be allowed to say the N-word.
	Okay, again, this was in a discussion of the Don McNeil story from the New York Times.
	So, Pesca argued that McNeil's journalism made The Times more valuable to more Americans than having ousted him in 2019 would have.
	would have. He said, my points are his internal conduct was in a gray area. You guys don't think it was. He said, expressing the views, not the word, the views he did on that trip are not fireable, worthy of talking to, or what are you doing as a representative of the times, but nothing requiring much angst among management or staff or no.
	Should the Times discipline staffers who question the idea of white supremacy or who express retrograde ideas on mass incarceration?
	The question is, is an out loud utterance of that word in a work environment fireable, censurable, etc.?
	Even as a point of clarification to a question exactly about the use of that word.
	And this led to him essentially being fired.
	Pesca made a final point.
	I don't think it's proper to use it in casual conversation, the n-word.
	I'm in no position to tell black New York Times workers they shouldn't be worried it's gonna pop out of a colleague's mouth at some point.
	If you want my opinion, it's that there are some limited reasons why a non-African-American journalist or professor would use that word when conveying a quote in the name of clarity or factualness.
	But it's not a comfortable point to even pursue right now.
	If I had the opposite opinion, I know a hundred ways I could make the opinion I actually have seem horrible and racist, and you know what?
	Maybe it is.
	So that's when the boss chimed in and said, maybe we should stop this conversation.
	And a slate staffer said this, quote, I feel outraged.
	I cannot believe I had to watch him enthusiastically provoke people on whether or not it is appropriate to use a racist slur.
	Other slate staffers that spoke to Defector expressed frustration and anger at Pesca's insistence on having that particular conversation, quote, I don't want to be in a workplace where people feel emboldened to have this argument.
	People's humanity is not an intellectual debate.
	Okay, Slate Editor-in-Chief Jared Holt then posted a message in Slack saying he didn't ever want to see a similar argument in Slack ever again.
	Ever again.
	He said, while we are a workplace where people argue about things all the time, it's also a workplace where we must think very hard about the lived experience of colleagues whose experience is different than ours.
	Pesca's been suspended for a week, and then it has been suspended, upgraded to indefinite.
	This is insane.
	This is insane.
	And by the way, according to Holt, he said that if Pesca had actually used the N-word, he didn't even use the N-word, by the way, in this conversation, so revision.
	He didn't even use the N-word.
	He said there might be situations in which using the N-word is not a fireable offense because you are quoting somebody, for example.
	Holt said that if Pesca had used the N-word, he definitely would have been fired.
	This is insane!
	Okay, and that Stafford shock apparently was not because people were upset about what the bosses were doing.
	It's because Pesca had actually said the N-word at work.
	Why?
	He said the N-word at work because he was quoting somebody.
	So then they've suspended him or fired him from Slate.
	Hey, this is the authoritarian left at work.
	And they have the upper hand in major corporations.
	On the left, not just on the left, in major corporations across the board.
	So for example, Ryan Anderson, an excellent thinker over at the Heritage Foundation who writes on trans issues, It's a really, really good book.
	We've talked about it on the show.
	It's called, When Harry Became Sally, Responding to the Transgender Movement.
	And it is a logical point-by-point debunking of many of the myths surrounding transgenderism and gender identity and the idea that gender is entirely malleable.
	He goes through all the science.
	Amazon pulled his book this week.
	So the best description of that would be a digital book burning.
	When you actually remove a book from Amazon, that is a digital book burning because the goal of a book burning is to remove that book from circulation.
	They just removed it.
	That comes on the heels of just a few months ago, the attempt by Amazon to remove Abigail Schreier's book from their shelves.
	So now they're doing it to Ryan Anderson's When Harry Became Sally.
	Encounter Books, which is the publisher, they said, if Amazon, which controls most of the book sales in America, has decided to delist a book with which some of its functionaries disagree, this is an unconscionable assault on free speech.
	It will have a chilling effect on the publishing industry and the free circulation of ideas.
	It must not be left to stand unchallenged.
	That is 100% right.
	But again, the authoritarian left is on the march.
	The authoritarian left has cuddled corporations into doing the censorious work government cannot do.
	They've gotten corporations to mirror their authoritarian priorities.
	We already know that the media mirror their authoritarian priorities.
	They cheer this stuff on day after day.
	We know that social media has begun mirroring those authoritarian priorities because they're being pushed into it.
	By the way, it differs by corporation.
	Twitter is enthusiastic to do it.
	Facebook, I think, reluctantly does it.
	But the reality is that when you have Congress sitting on your neck and saying they're gonna break you up unless you do their bidding, well, you end up with... I mean, Dianne Feinstein literally said that.
	She literally said to the heads of social media, if you don't police this content, we are gonna have to do something about it ourselves.
	Okay, that is a violation of First Amendment principles, but the authoritarian left is in control.
	So, when people say that there is an authoritarian right and that is a grave threat to the country, there is a fringe authoritarian right.
	I'm not going to pretend that there aren't people on the right who believe in authoritarian principles and who don't like democracy very much or who think that democracy is so improperly functioning and we need to overthrow it or stuff like that.
	There are some people who believe that.
	That is a small number of people.
	The mainstream Democratic Party apparently believes that it is okay to use the positions of power they have in American corporations, in American institutions, at universities, in the media, and in government, in order to cram down an anti-First Amendment, anti-free speech, anti-liberty position.
	That is a mainstream left position.
	The authoritarian left went to war with the liberals, and the authoritarian left apparently won.
	That is where things currently stand.
	Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to be getting to Joe Biden, who apparently is a good president, according to the press, because he is very empathetic.
	That's all that matters, that he's empathetic.
	Doesn't matter that he's pushing policy that makes no sense.
	He's empathetic because that's all we care about these days.
	We'll get to more of that in just one second.
	First!
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	Alrighty, we're gonna get to the Joe Biden commemoration for 500,000 lives lost.
	First, it's that time of month when I get to sit down with some of my favorite people in the world.
	For an episode of Backstage.
	Yeah, you can tell, I'm enthused.
	But, watch me suffer as I join Jeremy Boring, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clavin, and yes, the execrable and unthinkably awful Michael Knowles tomorrow night, 7 p.m.
	Eastern, as we roundtable about current events and big picture issues like, I don't know, probably cancel culture.
	So, join us at dailywire.com or on the Daily Wire YouTube to watch.
	Again, that is 7 p.m.
	Eastern, 6 p.m.
	Central.
	Going any further, I want to tell you all about a new show coming out this Friday, hosted by moi.
	Now, I told you at the beginning of the year we had all sorts of excellent content that was coming to Daily Wire, right?
	You know that later on this year, we're going to have on Candace Owens.
	Candace is going to have a new show here at Daily Wire.
	You already know that we're making a movie with Gina Carano.
	We already brought out Run, Hide, Fight.
	We have all sorts of amazing content for you.
	Now, I am bringing out a new series, and this series is going to be so useful for you.
	It's going to be incredibly useful for you.
	What is it?
	Basically, I just debunk a leftist myth every week.
	The left is constantly making arguments that are filled with fallacies and anti-factual assertions.
	Well, every Friday in 15 minutes or less, exclusively for our Daily Wire members, I have a new show.
	It's called Debunked.
	Every week, I'll take a fact and logic position and put it up against a popular leftist argument, the kind you see your friends post and share all over the internet.
	Whether it's climate change or universal healthcare, I'm gonna help you completely dismantle those particular arguments.
	So, if you're not already a Daily Wire member, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, use the code debunked, To get 25% off.
	The first episode drops this Friday.
	So head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe today.
	It's a great resource for you.
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	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden did a commemorative event for 500,000 American lives lost to COVID-19.
	Obviously, that is a massive tragedy.
	Every one of those lives lost is indeed a tragedy.
	And the goal here was really twofold.
	One was for him to demonstrate empathy.
	As you will see, this is the Biden line, right?
	This is the line all throughout the campaign, is that Donald Trump had no empathy, but Joe Biden is a man of empathy.
	And this is what the media like about him, is that he is capable of emoting.
	I mean, that is his right.
	It's his thing.
	And I'm not saying it's not genuine.
	Sure, I'll give him that.
	I'm sure that a lot of his emotion is genuine.
	That's fine.
	Emotion doesn't happen to solve problems.
	Very often, emotion gets in the way of solving problems, and I don't judge presidents on how much empathy they have.
	I judge presidents on how well they do in doing the things they are supposed to do.
	I don't care whether my plumber has empathy, I don't care whether my lawyer has empathy, and I don't care whether the president has empathy.
	I've been clear about this since the get-go.
	In fact, there are good studies to show that sympathy is useful in politics because it allows you to think about a wide variety of people who are not you, but empathy is actually a problem.
	Empathy is where you put yourself in somebody else's shoes.
	Sympathy is where you sympathize with somebody else's positions.
	Empathy makes you elevate certain people above other people because you are empathizing with them, right?
	So empathy can actually be a problem in politics.
	There's a great book called Against Empathy by a psychologist all about this, about how in politics it's kind of a problem.
	In any case, Joe Biden does this event, and in the middle of the event, the goal of the event is not only to demonstrate empathy, but then to suggest that people who disagree with his agenda, that people who don't agree with the way he's approaching policy are non-empathetic.
	That is what politics usually is, is trying to create A level of moral superiority for yourself and make your opponents seem morally inferior.
	So Joe Biden does this event and he says, for example, it's time to end the politics and the misinformation.
	OK, as we've been talking about for weeks at this point, Joe Biden has been a chief purveyor of COVID misinformation since his accession to the office of president.
	He has put out the idea that there was no COVID plan.
	A lie.
	He has suggested that the COVID vaccine plan did not exist.
	A lie.
	He has had people promoting the idea that teachers cannot go back to school safely right now.
	A lie.
	The President of the United States has been overtly using Teachers Union talking points and just shoving them into CDC standards.
	Which is disinformation.
	And misinformation, as the left likes to say.
	Okay, but here is Joe Biden nonetheless saying that his opponents are the ones who are promoting politics and misinformation.
	He's the president.
	He doesn't get to do this routine anymore.
	Now's the time for you to actually do your job.
	We must end the politics and misinformation that's divided families, communities, and the country.
	And it's cost too many lives already.
	It's not Democrats and Republicans who are dying from the virus.
	It's our fellow Americans.
	It's our neighbors, our friends.
	Okay, that is such a string of platitudes.
	What does that mean?
	What does that mean?
	husband's wives.
	We have to fight this together as one people, as the United States of America.
	Okay, that is such a string of platitudes.
	What does that mean?
	What does that mean?
	Can we get specific here?
	If people are saying that you should go out and you should congregate with other people and there's no risk of COVID if you without vaccination or anything, and that you should not wear a mask and not socially distance.
	Yeah, that's going to spread the virus.
	Okay, so if you say that, then that would be, and you say it's not gonna spread the virus, that's misinformation.
	But if we are talking generally, as Joe Biden says, that misinformation is the cause of the virus spreading, I noticed something, which is that Andrew Cuomo, your favorite governor, literally lied to the American people, to his own constituents, to the families of people who died.
	He lied to his fellow Democratic legislators, and your administration won't even say that.
	And then you have the temerity to get up at one of these events and say something like, we have to stop the misinformation in the politics?
	I don't believe you.
	I don't believe that you are interested in that, President Biden.
	I wish that I believed you, but I don't.
	But again, the goal here is just to get the media to cry over him, which he did successfully.
	Here was CNN's John Kang saying, you know, he's empathetic.
	That's really the thing that matters is the empathy, the empathy, the empathy.
	You know what I noticed is actually more important than the empathy?
	Reopening the schools and getting people the vaccines they need.
	And also not telling people that the vaccine is not going to allow us to get back to regular life.
	You want to talk about putting out misinformation?
	How about the idea that we believe that you're going to transmit the virus at the same rates whether or not you get the vaccine?
	Okay, that suggestion has been put out there.
	It is absolutely evidence-free.
	That's misinformation.
	The vaccine does lower not only your risk of death to something like 99%, Your risk of death goes down.
	Your risk of serious illness goes down by like 95%.
	But also your risk of transmission goes down by something like 90% according to the latest studies.
	It's misinformation to suggest otherwise.
	But we don't care about that.
	All we care about is that Joe Biden is a caring person.
	He cares about you.
	Here's the thing.
	Let me just tell you a little secret.
	Joe Biden may be a caring person.
	The government doesn't care about you because the government doesn't know your name.
	You're a taxpayer.
	That's how the government cares.
	That's all the government cares about.
	You are just a tool for them.
	You are a widget to the government.
	Phil Graham, the former senator from Texas, he was once told in a hearing by some witness that that witness cared about his children.
	And Phil Graham said, really?
	What are their names?
	That is exactly how you should respond.
	When someone from the government says, I care about you, your first response should be, no, you really don't.
	You care about me in the same way that a plumber cares about me paying him to fix my toilet.
	Why should we pretend that our politicians are the most caring and wonderful of people when we all know that this is precisely the opposite?
	But again, you have to promulgate the notion that Joe Biden is full of empathy so that you don't catch on to the fact that he's actually foolish.
	Here's John King from CNN.
	You have a president who has shaped Joe Biden, whether you're a Democrat or Republican or an Independent out there watching, he's been shaped by the personal tragedy in his own life.
	He understands what it is like for a family to suffer, for a family to lose, and for a family to have to get up and recover.
	And that's why this is his M.O.
	and his D.N.A., Wolf, to be an empathetic president and to not try to hide from these numbers.
	He inherited a mess from the Trump administration, but he is now accountable.
	In what way has he been held accountable by you and the media?
	Seriously, have you seen one headline holding Joe Biden accountable for the 100,000 Americans who have died since he took office?
	Every day there's a headline.
	It's unthinkable how many Americans... 83 Vietnam Wars that have happened under Donald Trump.
	100,000 Americans have died since Joe Biden took office.
	I haven't seen one of those headlines, not one.
	But you know he's empathetic, so that's all that matters.
	Dana Bash did the same thing on CNN.
	Trump was a very non-empathetic character, but we know that Joe Biden is empathetic.
	He's all empathy all the time.
	What an event that the White House put on for the American people and for the world to memorialize the half a million people who have been taken by this virus.
	And, you know, I don't want to do a lot of looking back, but at almost the same location where his predecessor came back from the hospital having the virus himself and ripped off his mask.
	What a difference just a few months makes in having somebody who, as my colleagues have said, you know, wants to emote and to empathize and to sympathize and to grieve with this country.
	Okay, I'm not looking for a psychologist.
	I'm not looking for a priest.
	I'm not looking for a rabbi.
	I'm looking for a guy who's actually going to do what he promised and crush the virus.
	He's not doing any of that stuff.
	In fact, he's enthralled to a bunch of people whose policies are completely non-empathetic, because they don't actually care about Americans.
	Let me give you an example.
	Ro Khanna is a Democratic congressperson, and he says he was asked about minimum wage, right?
	The minimum wage is in the Joe Biden COVID relief bill.
	Here is his response about minimum wage killing small businesses.
	Does this sound empathetic to you?
	Because when it comes to the policy, this crap ain't empathetic.
	Here is Ro Khanna.
	How does this, in your view, affect mom-and-pop businesses who are just struggling to keep their doors open, keep workers on the payroll right now?
	Well, they shouldn't be doing it by paying people low wages.
	We don't want low-wage businesses.
	I think most successful small businesses can pay a fair wage.
	So I love small businesses.
	I'm all for it.
	But I don't want small businesses that are underpaying employees.
	It's fair for people to be making what they're producing.
	And I think $15 is very reasonable in this case.
	Sounds empathetic.
	He knows how your business runs better than you do.
	And if you don't agree with him, he's perfectly happy for your business to go under.
	That's all that matters to him.
	Right?
	It sounds empathetic to you, doesn't it?
	Super empathy.
	Empathy.
	He's empathetic.
	He's empathetic.
	Also, if your business goes under, he doesn't care.
	Also, if your kid can't go back to school, he doesn't care.
	You want to know what the actual underlying emotivism here is about?
	It is all about garnering sympathy for political positions that are completely non-empathetic.
	We all know this.
	The Biden administration is mirroring all of the priorities of the American Federation of Teachers when it comes to reopening schools.
	Here, by the way, is what the American Federation of Teachers president, Randy Weingarten, had to say about whether kids are going to recover from missing an entire year of school, not being with their classmates, experiencing significant mental health disorders.
	Really, I know many people who have had kids who are suffering with this sort of stuff.
	Here is the very empathetic Randy Weingarten on this topic.
	I believe that kids are resilient.
	Oh!
	And kids will recover.
	Oh!
	But we as adults have to meet their needs, their emotional needs, their social needs, their learning needs.
	And that's who America's educators are.
	But at the end of the day, we have to believe that this is recoverable.
	And we have to believe that virtually all our kids will thrive with the opportunities that we put before them.
	Okay, so what she just said is, F the kids.
	Okay, let me translate that very quickly.
	She said, F the kids.
	That's what that meant.
	Okay, so for all of the empathy and the emotivism, what it really comes down to when it comes down to policy is, which constituency can I please today?
	Recognize this is true for all of your politicians, Democrat, Republican, all of them.
	Anybody who looks for, you want sympathy?
	Get a dog.
	You want empathy?
	Get married.
	You want your politicians to bring you these things?
	You're looking for love in all the wrong places, and you deserve to have whatever ridiculous policy they promote shoved down your face.
	Because if that's where you're looking for your love, my goodness.
	Get a life.
	Get a community.
	Get friends.
	All right.
	We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	Otherwise, coming up soon is the Matt Wall Show that airs at 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check that out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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