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July 9, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

58:30

Your Yoga Pants Can Never Be Woke Enough | Ep. 1293

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	Lululemon comes under fire for lack of diversity despite its woke virtue signaling.
	Trump sues big tech and Joe Biden hands Afghanistan over to the Taliban.
	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.
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	Alrighty.
	The bosses at Lululemon, they must have thought that they were going to be okay.
	They must have thought that everything was going to be fine.
	After all, they've spent the last several years virtue signaling on a wide variety of issues.
	You may recall that just last year, Lululemon came under fire after they tweeted out that it was time to decolonize gender.
	And it was time to resist capitalism.
	You remember, it was an event that was featured in an Instagram post in which Lululemon recommended other accounts to follow, including the host of the workshop, a person named Rebi Kern.
	That yoga instructor is a US-based brand ambassador for the firm.
	Now, a lot of people at the time pointed out Lululemon sells like $100 pairs of yoga pants.
	By the way, quick side swipe of yoga pants, not actual clothing.
	In any case, Lululemon sells these very overpriced yoga pants to middle-income to upper-income women with dispensable capital.
	And they were ripping on capitalism.
	And that's not where the virtue signaling, the woke virtue signaling, ended, of course.
	You'll remember that Lululemon was a big pusher in the Black Lives Matter movement.
	They started putting out the black square and they started telling everybody at their company, they had to sort of mirror the woke corporate message.
	Well, now, now the woke come for thee.
	Ask not for whom the woke come, they come for thee, Lululemon and thy yoga pants.
	According to Business Insider, in spring 2020, days after the murder of George Floyd, a high level Lululemon manager told a team of designers and copywriters she wanted to put All Lives Matter at the top of Lululemon's website.
	Amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations across North America, Lululemon had been scrambling in its Vancouver, British Columbia headquarters to craft a response to the events suddenly dominating the news cycle.
	Over the course of the afternoon on June 1st, the company put together a task force to develop copy and graphics to present to Top Brass and quickly publish to its website.
	The team of about 10 employees had spent hours mocking up a version of the homepage featuring Black Lives Matter as the headline because, you'll remember, it is very important in the modern age that every major corporation mirror whatever is the woke priority of the day.
	I know, most of you, you really didn't care whether a yoga pants company was signaling about Black Lives Mattering, particularly a yoga pants company that largely caters to upper-class white ladies.
	But it was very important to Lululemon that they do this.
	It was very important that they signal to everyone how much that company that makes overpriced, extremely tight-fitting bottoms, how they signal about systemic American police racism, supposedly.
	They were interrupted by a manager, however, according to four former and current employees close to the matter.
	It is so amazing how the inside-outside game now works at these corporations.
	It really is incredible.
	All you have to have There's a couple of employees who go and leak to the media, and then the media suggests that your company is racist or sexist or bigoted in some way, and then you're not allowed to fire those people because, of course, these are good-hearted whistleblowers.
	You're not allowed to look for the folks who are trying to destroy your company from the outside and run your company based on this inside-outside game.
	All you have to do is craft a media response from the inside, these leakers, and suddenly the entire corporate structure is going to be responding to 21-year-old interns.
	That's how all of this works.
	So that's the story, Lululemon.
	A bunch of people leaked to Business Insider.
	they said the manager, a director who they added had not been previously involved in the project, demanded that the group use new approved copy. Near the beginning of the proposed text, the phrase All Lives Matter appeared in capital letters. We are not writing Black Lives Matter, that's not where we're at, the director told the group, according to two employees present in the room. After significant debate, the employees, several of whom are black, indigenous, and people of color, agreed to create two designs to present to leadership. One, One with All Lives Matter, another with Black Lives Matter.
	While Black Lives Matter was ultimately selected, an employee who was involved in the homepage project said they felt triggered and traumatized and described it as one of the most disgusting moments in their time at Lululemon.
	My God, the yoga pants company, a person, their final policy mirrored the policy priorities of these people of color who are low-level staffers inside the company.
	Finally, the company agreed with the low-level staffers who are people of color.
	We're now leaking to the media.
	But the fact that somebody even pushed back, it was just devastating.
	You cannot have pushback in the corporate world.
	All must be ousted.
	All must be destroyed.
	After all of these black employees, all of these people of color said, we cannot go forward with this.
	And please don't make us have to mock this up for you.
	And her saying, we have to do it.
	It was a very traumatic experience.
	It's unbelievable.
	They had to write the words, all lives matter in a mock-up that they didn't use.
	Oh, oh, the heart flutters at the level of threat faced by these employees at a yoga pants company.
	Lululemon then ended up putting out an Instagram post that said, words have power, actions have more power.
	Many corporations stumbled in their internal and external communication after the murder of George Floyd, but even before Spring 2020, All Lives Matter had been widely recognized as a phrase that downplayed the Black Lives Matter movement.
	The director was given the chance to apologize to a group of about 200 copywriters, designers, and photographers on a conference call.
	Ah, the obligatory internal Maoist struggle session.
	We have to make sure that this director knew he had sinned and he will atone.
	Many of these copywriters, designers, and photographers were unaware of the events for which the director was apologizing, which, of course, is part and parcel of all of this.
	It's not directed just at the director, of course.
	It is directed at all of the low-level employees who will shut up or face the same treatment.
	The director left Lululemon shortly after the apology.
	So he made the apology, and then he left.
	So you didn't get the benefit of the apology then.
	From the outside, Lululemon exudes an aspirational lifestyle with its high-tech active wear and brightly curated 500 plus retail stores designed to reflect the company's core values of personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, honesty, courage, connection, fun, and inclusion, according to its website.
	Lululemon has $4.4 billion in sales every year.
	It has only accelerated its growth turn under CEO Calvin McDonald thanks to his strategic investments in growing categories like menswear, e-commerce, and connected fitness, including the acquisition of Mirror in June 2020.
	But according to 12 current and former Lululemon corporate employees who spoke with Insider, the company's image stands in stark contrast to their experiences behind the scenes at the company's corporate offices.
	My god, I can't wait to tell you about the sorts of oppression happening at the yoga pants company.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second, because it is indicative of how companies are now being run, and it is indicative of the authoritarian moment that we are currently experiencing, and that is stretching out across the corporate landscape, and in some cases, being facilitated by government.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	All right, back to Lululemon.
	Again, the way that this works is you get a couple of your fellow employees to go and talk to Business Insider, and then you pressure a company that does $4.4 billion in sales every year.
	To mirror your corporate woke priorities.
	Some corporate employees said they felt that the rapid growth of the company had hindered its ability to implement changes, particularly in areas like diversity and inclusion that have long plagued Lululemon.
	The employees who spoke with Insider did so on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their current and future employment opportunities.
	By the way, you should fear jeopardizing your current and future business opportunities when you talk out of school about a company that is paying you.
	Just a general rule, when the company is not violating the law, when you just don't like the priorities of the company, if you talk out of school about that, they have every right to fire you.
	There's nothing in employment law that suggests that when you bitch and moan about their diversity policies, this means they must listen to you.
	It is an absurdity of the highest order that these corporate heads don't just run their companies how they should normally run their companies.
	Again, I'm the head of my company.
	You know what would happen if one of my producers started talking out of school about the company, all the problems we have, we have lots of procedures.
	We have an HR department for any problems inside the company.
	You start going outside the company and talking to members of the media about how terrible the company you work for is, the boss has every right and nay, an obligation to fire your ass and put you on the unemployment line.
	In any case, Business Insider, the suggestion is that Lululemon is deeply racist because they acquiesced to the left wing.
	They were woke enough for the left wing for a brief period of time.
	But you can never be woke enough.
	That is the dirty secret.
	According to Business Insider, according to one of the copywriters present in the room, several employees reported the director who demanded the All Lives Matter homepage design.
	So they reported him after the director's tearful apology.
	A copywriter who had left the company the year prior said she was notified of the incident by her former colleagues and felt compelled to send an email urging members of management to fire the director.
	Okay, so you have somebody, a copywriter, who no longer even worked at the company.
	Emailing the heads of the company to urge the firing of a person she had no relations with and was not even involved in the procedures with.
	You're the bad guy here.
	You're the bad guy.
	Copywriter who no longer works at the company trying to get somebody to lose their job for the great sin of proposing an All Lives Matter post as opposed to a Black Lives Matter post?
	You're the bad guy.
	You're a jerk and an authoritarian to boot.
	The email was sent on June 8, 2020 with the subject line, Racism, Privilege, and Inaction at Lululemon.
	It is my ask of you, on behalf of many others who have complained and who do not feel able to speak on this issue publicly, out of fear for their employment, that you remove this person from your company immediately, she wrote in the email, which has been reviewed by Insider.
	The former employee told Insider she didn't receive a response, but said the director left Lululemon shortly after her email was sent.
	Stacia Jones, a vice president and head of inclusion, diversity, equity, and action at Lululemon, which is a filler of a job, says as a matter of company policy, we do not comment on individual employee situations.
	If anyone at Lululemon has a negative experience, we have several ways for employees to share their concerns and feedback.
	We take feedback very seriously.
	But there was another incident involving racial insensitivity just weeks prior at the height of the global coronavirus outbreak in April 2020 when art director Trevor Fleming posted a link to a t-shirt on his personal Instagram account.
	The t-shirt had the title of bat fried rice with a picture of a Chinese takeout box of bat wings on the front and the words no thank you on the back and right sleeve.
	As in like don't eat the bats because it started the global coronavirus pandemic according to early reports before it turned out it was actually probably just a Chinese governmental lab leak.
	In an email to Insider, Fleming said sharing the t-shirt, which was designed by an acquaintance of his, was a momentary lapse of judgment and an incident he had, quote, spent the past year regretting.
	I fully understand the insensitivity associated with the design he made and deeply regret the pain I caused.
	The scandal followed an even earlier incident.
	Man, these are brutal incidents.
	It used to be that companies in the United States actively discriminated against members of racial minorities.
	Now, a director posts a mildly insensitive Instagram and suddenly all hell breaks loose.
	That scandal, a scandal of epic proportions, followed an earlier incident in Lululemon's history when founder and then-CEO Chip Wilson wrote in a since-deleted post that the company's name was chosen as a marketing ploy to attract Japanese customers.
	A Japanese marketing firm would not try to create a North American-sounding brand with the letter L because the sound does not exist in Japanese phonetics, Wilson wrote on the company's blog.
	By including an L in the name, it was thought the Japanese consumer would find the name innately North American and authentic.
	It's funny to watch them try and say it, he added.
	Okay, well, that's a dumb comment.
	A dumb comment does not mean the entire company is, of course, deeply racist.
	But everything has to be taken as though it is a massive issue.
	And of course, We'll have the obligatory struggle sessions.
	There'll be donations to various interest groups.
	Ibram Kendi will get a million-dollar donation from Lululemon, probably, in order to ensure that they are anti-racist enough.
	They'll participate in the system of woke indulgences.
	And none of us will buy them anything, except for a notion that the next time any employee has a problem, they immediately run back to Business Insider.
	And this is the entire goal now with regard to corporate America.
	You too can pressure your bosses into doing the bidding of the left.
	All you have to do is find some member of the journactivist media to cover it and you are good to go.
	Because this is what journalism has become.
	The story here isn't about a bunch of woke employees who can't keep their mouths shut and violate their confidentiality agreements.
	It is not about that.
	The story is truly about a media that is designed and created in order to be an activist wing of the Democratic Party.
	There is no difference at this point between business insider Or Daily Beast and Media Matters.
	They are all part of the same ecosystem.
	Their entire design is to pressure institutions that they believe they can pressure into doing the bidding of the left.
	That is what all of these stories are about.
	They're about can you get an institution to do what you want?
	It's not about covering something that is innately newsworthy.
	What the hell is newsworthy about a thing that happened in 2020 that is not even mildly worthy of news coverage that a director said all lives matter in 2020?
	By the way, this was the featured story at Twitter yesterday.
	And this is not just me bringing up a story that is random on the internet.
	This was the featured story all day on Twitter.com.
	And they actually put it in their news feed on the right side of the page.
	Because again, all of the journalistic entities that you know and love are activist entities.
	Now some of us in the conservative side of the aisle will say we're conservative.
	We cover the news from a particular angle.
	But the thing is that the media ecosystem that proclaims that it is in fact a sort of objective news ecosystem is not.
	It is designed in the same way as Media Matters.
	They run stories specifically in order to pressure these corporations.
	They run stories specifically in order to Begin boycott.
	Why do you think it is that every time a controversial comment is made, you get somebody from the Huffington Post calling up advertisers of Tucker Carlson's program and saying, do you know you advertised with Tucker Carlson?
	That question is not designed to elicit a response.
	That question is designed to elicit inaction.
	Namely, the advertiser getting scared and canceling Tucker Carlson.
	Right?
	That is what this is designed to do.
	That is, this insider story is designed in order to get Lululemon to do whatever the left wants it to do, because this is not innately newsworthy stuff.
	It's not the president of Haiti being assassinated in his home.
	It is not the United States pull out from Afghanistan.
	It is a couple of woke employees from Lululemon who are frustrated with their day jobs and bored in their New York apartments.
	But this is how the game works right now.
	And it has predictable impacts in terms of politics.
	Because it turns out that typically, when corporations are involved in politics, it's because, for example, they want to get people elected who are friendlier to their business positions.
	But now the polarity has been reversed.
	Politicians, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, are able to activate members of the media to now make the corporations do what the politicians want them to do.
	It used to be the notion that corporations supported politicians because they wanted to get politicians elected who would be beneficial to their agenda.
	Now it is actually precisely the opposite.
	It is politicians who are cuddling businesses into doing what they want them to do in the social sphere.
	It's fascinating.
	And they're doing so with the help of a not compliant, a complicit media, an activist media that is deeply involved in every aspect of this.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second, because this is becoming very clear with regard to, for example, Toyota.
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	All right, so it's not just Lululemon, of course.
	This entire sort of debacle is designed in order to push corporations to do what the left wants them to do. The latest element of this, of course, is Toyota has now announced it will stop any donation to any Republican member of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. Now, presumably, Toyota is not going to do this. For example, Jamie Raskin from Maryland, who you'll remember last time around in 2016, voted against certifying the election.
	But according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the company's PAC has given $56,000 to 38 members of Congress who objected to the certification of the election on January 6th.
	And it is a very short step from this particular thing.
	Listen, I don't think that anyone should have voted against the certification of the election.
	I don't think there is a legal basis to do so.
	I've been very, very clear about this.
	With that said, I don't think that corporations should be forced to boycott politicians who agree with their particular business agenda because those politicians also supported a thing with which the company was not involved.
	So, for example, I do not think that companies should be forced to stop giving money if they are into giving money to Democrats based on their economic agenda for some reason.
	I don't think that there should be a lot of social pressure to force those companies to stop giving money to Democrats based on the fact that Democrats support, broadly speaking, crackdowns on religious freedom.
	It's a company that's not involved with any of that sort of stuff.
	I don't really think those two things are related.
	But we have now come to the point where anything that becomes a leftist talking point is an excuse to push corporations to not give to Republicans overall.
	That is the goal.
	January 6th is just the excuse.
	And if it weren't January 6th, it would be something else.
	It would be anybody who supported Donald Trump cannot be supported by any sort of corporation.
	Because if they do, then they are supporting all of the evils and excesses of Donald Trump.
	In a statement issued on Thursday, Japan-based automaker said it had, quote, decided to stop contributing to those members of Congress who contested the certification.
	Toyota is committed to supporting and promoting actions that further our democracy, said Toyota.
	This is the same thing that Stacey Abrams finally accomplished in Georgia when he saw corporations divesting from the state of Georgia because Georgia passed a law shoring up voter ID, for example.
	And then she realized, oh, this was a bad idea and tried to back off of that.
	Toyota says our company has long-standing relationships with members of Congress across the political spectrum, especially those representing our U.S.
	operations.
	Our bipartisan PAC equally supports Democrats and Republicans running for Congress.
	In fact, in 2021, the vast majority of contributions went to Democrats and Republicans who supported the certification of the 2020 election.
	We understand that the PAC decision to support select members of Congress who contested the results troubled some stakeholders.
	We are actively listening to our stakeholders, and at this time we have decided to stop contributing to these members of Congress who contested the certification of certain states in the 2020 election.
	The reason I pause on the word stakeholders is because this is deeply indicative of a perverse view of how business is supposed to work.
	There are two views of how business is supposed to work.
	One is what is called shareholder capitalism.
	Pushed by people like Milton Friedman.
	And the basic idea here is that a company's main duty is to its shareholders.
	You buy stock in a company, and now the company has a duty to you.
	The company has a duty to create a program that will allow for long-term earnings.
	The company has a duty to ensure that your stock price over time does not go down, that they make good business decisions.
	That's what shareholder capitalism is all about.
	That the people who actually own a share of the company are the people to whom the company's board is responsible.
	Stakeholder capitalism is a very different thing.
	Stakeholder capitalism is a term that's been coined by quote-unquote intellectual elites to suggest a system in which corporations are answerable not just to their own shareholders, but to the public at large, which really means to government actors.
	And the media.
	Stakeholders are people who do not own shares in the company.
	Who don't own any.
	They don't buy Toyota cars.
	They don't have a share of Toyota stock.
	They're just anyone who's affected by Toyota.
	Meaning a person in the world.
	And so if a person in the world has a complaint about Toyota, Toyota will now respond to those people.
	Which of course means they are not responding to economic concerns.
	They are not focusing in on what makes their product better.
	And less expensive for the consumer?
	Instead, they are focused in on pleasing particular political actors who are the loudest.
	Stakeholder capitalism, again, is just a way of saying that your corporate overlords ought to be responding not to market incentives, but to non-market incentives.
	They are not responding to the demands of the market.
	They are responding instead to the loudest political actors out there, which is a form of corporatism in which corporations act hand-in-glove with the government and with the Democrat media complex in order to cram down institutional power.
	My new book, The Authoritarian Moment, is all about this.
	It's about how the institutions of power have been hijacked and weaponized by the left.
	Stakeholder capitalism is a very big aspect of this.
	And this is why you are seeing the media cover Lululemon, because you're a stakeholder in Lululemon, you see.
	You don't own stocks.
	You don't even own Lululemon pants.
	You're a dude.
	But still, you have a stake in what Lululemon does.
	Same thing with Toyota.
	You have a stake in what they do.
	Therefore, you ought to run their company.
	This is not a recipe for economic success or political health for a nation.
	All of this has culminated in a wide level of distrust of major institutions in the marketplace.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	A lot of what is going on right now has been made much worse by, of course, the presence of social media.
	Social media is a combination between corporations and the media ecostructure, right?
	So on the one hand, there are corporations who say they are no longer answerable to their shareholders.
	They're only answerable to stakeholders, right?
	Broader political actors.
	And so they're very much subject to media pressure and to being cudgeled into place, beaten into place, clubbed into place by members of the government.
	Also, these are the main mechanisms by which people consume information.
	So this creates a very bizarre situation where social media are both the people who control what you see and are in turn controlled by government incentive programs and by outside media coverage, which can shape how political actors work.
	There's this iron triangle that I've talked about before between social media, media, and the Democrats.
	The Democrats don't like that social media has been historically free and open and has allowed people to post a lot of material that they don't like.
	And so they go to the media, and they say that these social media companies are responsible for every bad thing in the world.
	If there's a violent attack, it must be social media.
	If there is a story they don't like that's getting out, a Hunter Biden story, for example, that's social media, and it needs to be stopped.
	The media then cover these social media companies as though they are evil.
	The more open they are, the more evil they are, according to the media.
	It's amazing.
	Who could have foreseen that the press, being, of course, a political actor and not an actor that is in favor of free speech in the United States, the press has become the chief They're the chief rooting interest in favor of shutting down free dissemination of information.
	It's unbelievable.
	I think this is something that the founders probably could not have foreseen.
	When they said freedom of the press, they assumed that people who took advantage of the press would be in favor of a free press.
	Wrongo!
	It turns out, members of the quote-unquote press are the people who are most interested in shutting down open debate on social media.
	So you have the Democrats.
	They launder their message through media.
	The media whip up all of this fervor about how social media is to blame for all the problems.
	The Democrats use that fervor in order to threaten social media.
	And social media, in order to avoid regulation, then shuts down free speech, right?
	This is the game.
	This is the game they've been playing for quite a while.
	The heads of these companies will routinely talk about... It's amazing how the messaging has shifted.
	Again, I talk about this a lot in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
	It's out in about two weeks now.
	It is incredible how the messaging on social media has shifted.
	In 2012, social media was seen as a godsend by Democrats, by Republicans.
	It was very popular.
	And the reason it was popular in sort of opinion polls, Democrats saw it as a way of reaching audiences they'd never reached before.
	Also, Barack Obama was brilliant at it.
	He was amazing, able to manipulate social media and get to audiences who had never seen his message before.
	You remember that there was this whole wave of stories about how brilliant Obama's campaign was in 2012 using social media.
	And social media was great, right?
	Social media was making the world more interconnected, better, friendlier place.
	Then 2016 happened and Trump won.
	And the Democrats had to come up with some excuse for why it wasn't their fault.
	Why it wasn't their fault that Hillary Clinton, the heir apparent, and the person who'd been pushed for the presidency since essentially 1992 by the Democratic Party and the media, why she had lost to this real estate Reality TV star who was wild and bombastic and said anything that came into his head.
	How could you possibly have lost?
	And they came up with a couple of solutions.
	One was, of course, Russian collusion.
	It was the evil Ruskies.
	And the second was social media.
	Social media had allowed messages that never should have been allowed.
	If only social media had somehow stopped Trump from winning, the country would have been so much better.
	Facebook was bad.
	Facebook had allowed for Russian collusion to happen.
	Now, as it turned out, statistically speaking, the amount of Russian propaganda put out on Facebook was extraordinarily minimal.
	If you actually look at the stats, not big stats, as somebody who's in the Facebook stats like every single day, I can tell you, The amount of Russian messaging during the 2016 election and the impact thereof via Facebook was minimal on a percentage basis.
	Like the total number of impressions created by the Russians for like a period of two years was equivalent to about the number of impressions I create for my personal Facebook page in the course of maybe a couple of weeks.
	Okay, so no, it was not a big deal, but that was not the point.
	The point was we have to get social media now to shift, right?
	Social media has to move from being in favor of broad, open dissemination of information.
	Social media now has to move into being the content police.
	And so you saw Mark Zuckerberg giving speeches in 2018, as late as 2017, 2018, talking about how he wanted to cut in favor of free speech.
	He wanted to cut in favor of open dissemination of information.
	And then you would see them testify before Congress and saying we're responsible for the information on our platform, which of course is not true.
	The minute you say you're responsible for the information on a social media platform, now you should be liable for the information on your platform.
	We here at Daily Wire, we have legal liability for the stuff we print.
	Our comments section is governed by section 230, which means it is a platform.
	We are not liable for the stuff that appears in the content section.
	And I will say that openly.
	If somebody posts a bad comment on Daily Wire, not our fault, not our problem.
	We tried to police some of that stuff to make sure that the comment section doesn't turn into a sewer, but that's about it.
	And if somebody does post something that's really bad in our comments section, we didn't edit it.
	So you know what?
	We're not responsible under Section 230 or morally speaking, but Facebook has started to treat itself more like the editorial side than they have treated itself like a platform.
	And that's because Democrats decided you must treat yourself like you're an editorial site.
	And only then when you treat yourself like an editorial site will we give you immunity.
	So they've created this bizarre reverse situation in which it used to be.
	Legal immunity had been provided for platforms in order to facilitate open information.
	And then the Democrats decided that these open platforms should become closed, edited platforms in order to retain their immunity, which of course destroys the entire purpose of the immunity in the first place.
	The whole purpose of the immunity is to incentivize open conversation.
	It is not to shut down open conversation.
	Okay, so all of this has culminated in a lawsuit that President Trump is now filing against, it's a class action lawsuit that he is filing against Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and he's doing this on the basis that they have banned him but he's suggesting that their censorship procedures affect a broad swath of people.
	There's some problems with the lawsuit, there are also some interesting things about the lawsuit and I think that you're, on the one side you're hearing people say this is the greatest lawsuit since sliced bread, which it is not.
	On the other side, you're hearing people say, this is absolute crap and there's no basis for it whatsoever.
	Not quite that either.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so President Trump has now filed a lawsuit against YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, all of whom have banned him, which is frankly an unbelievable thing.
	It is incredible that the sitting president of the United States was banned from the three largest social media services in the United States.
	Okay, so here it was.
	President Trump said in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, one of the gravest threats to our democracy today is a powerful group of big tech corporations that have teamed up with the government to censor the free speech of the American people.
	This is not only wrong, it is unconstitutional.
	To restore free speech for myself and for every American, I am suing big tech to stop it.
	Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers, and television networks were in prior generations.
	The internet is the new public square.
	In recent years, however, big tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information, and people on social media, banning users, deplatforming organizations, aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.
	No longer are big tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence.
	They're manipulating and controlling the political debate itself.
	Consider content that was censored in the past year.
	Big tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true.
	In the middle of a pandemic, big tech censored physicians from discussing potential treatments like hydroxychloroquine, which studies have now shown does work to relieve symptoms of COVID-19.
	In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post, America's oldest newspaper, for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden's family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute.
	Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social media accounts of the sitting president.
	And if they can do it to me, they can do it to you.
	And believe me, they are.
	Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher, was banned from Facebook for sharing an article questioning whether mandatory masks for young children are healthy.
	Later, when her brother went missing, she was unable to use Facebook to get the word out.
	Colorado physician Kelly Victory was deplatformed by YouTube after she made a video for her church explaining how to hold services safely.
	Kayan Michael of Florida and her husband Bobby lost their 21-year-old son in a fatal collision caused by a twice-deported illegal alien.
	Facebook censored them after they posted on border security and immigration enforcement.
	It says this flagrant attack on free speech is doing terrible damage to our country.
	That is why in conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I filed class action lawsuits to force Big Tech to stop censoring the American people.
	Our lawsuits argue that Big Tech companies are being used to impose illegal and unconstitutional government censorship.
	In 1996, writes Trump, Congress sought to promote the growth of the Internet by extending liability protections to Internet platforms, recognizing that they were exactly that, platforms, not publishers.
	Unlike publishers, companies like Facebook and Twitter can't be held legally liable for the content posted to their sites.
	Without this immunity, social media companies could not exist.
	Democrats in Congress are exploiting this leverage to coerce platforms into censoring their political opponents.
	In recent years, we have all watched Congress haul Big Tech CEOs before the committees and demand that they censor, quote, false stories and disinformation, labels determined by an army of partisan fact-checkers loyal to the Democratic Party.
	Further, Big Tech and government agencies are actively coordinating to remove content from the platforms according to the guidance of agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
	This coercion and coordination is unconstitutional.
	Okay, so here is where Trump is right and here is where Trump is wrong.
	So he is not wrong when he says that there are certain activities that can be undertaken by private companies that are coincident with government action and that have been deemed by the courts in the past to be government action.
	There's an article just back in January by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld.
	Rubenfeld is a former professor over at Yale.
	In which they specifically talk about the fact that private companies can, in fact, be deemed state actors if proper government leverage is applied.
	So for example, it is axiomatic the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison that the government quote may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish. You see that's what Congress did by enacting section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.
	The justices have long held that the provision of such immunity can turn private action into state action.
	In Railway Employees Department v. Hanson, for example, they found state action in private union employer closed shop agreements, which force all employees to join the union because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law.
	In other words, if Congress gives some sort of immunization to liability, and then in order to maintain the immunity, Congress cudgels companies to do a thing, that can be deemed state action.
	In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association, the court again found state action in private party conduct, drug tests for company employees, because federal regulations immunized railroads from liability if they conducted those tests.
	In both cases, with Section 230, the federal government didn't mandate anything.
	It merely preempted state law protecting certain private parties from lawsuits if they engaged in conduct Congress was promoting.
	Okay, so this is the part where Trump is not wrong, for example.
	So, If these social media companies were granted immunity from liability by Section 230, because Section 230 was designed to basically promote open speech on the internet and, yes, to allow social media companies to curate content.
	Now, the idea behind Section 230 is that you shouldn't be punished as a publisher if, for example, you started curating your comment section to get rid of things like pornography, if you curated your comment section to get rid of obscenity or violence or other maybe First Amendment-protected activities, but you just want to clean the comment section.
	Okay, and Section 230 does in fact protect, for example, even a sort of partisan cleansing of platforms, right?
	If you go through and you get rid of all the anti-Trump commentary in the comments section of a particular website, this does not relieve Section 230 liability.
	Or Section 230 immunity, right?
	You can still do that, but this changes once the government starts applying pressure.
	Once the government starts applying pressure and saying, we are going to remove your immunity, that immunity is going to go away.
	Unless you censor the kinds of content we want you to censor, now that looks a lot more like state action.
	And so the Trump argument in the lawsuit is a little too broad for my liking.
	He says that Communications Decency Act Section 230 is fully unconstitutional in that particular lawsuit.
	He says that that basically created a section of immunity from liability that is not constitutional in the first place, which is questionable at best.
	I don't think that that's right.
	There's no immunity to that.
	Liability is not written into the Constitution.
	There's nothing in the Constitution that says you are definitely liable if you don't print X or Y, of course, because free speech still applies to private corporations.
	However, once the government starts forcing corporations with threat of legislation into censoring what they want them to censor, now that looks like compelled state action.
	Now that looks like these companies have basically become mercantilist Free speech outlets for the Democratic Party.
	And that's why it is so troubling when you see people like Dianne Feinstein threatening Facebook, if you don't stop this, we will.
	But once you say that, then what is Facebook exactly going to do in order to maintain their own business?
	They're going to have to do what Dianne Feinstein wants them to do.
	And this means that you have to start treating these people like state actors, or maybe you do, right?
	That legal theory is not nearly as wild as the media are making it out to be.
	The media are like, well, it's a private company, they can do exactly what they want, which is weird because the media have yet to, the same media that will tell you that Lululemon cannot do what it wants because there are three woke employees who are pissed off at a guy who left the company a year ago, those same people will tell you Facebook can do exactly what it wants in censoring content as long as that content that they are censoring is the right content to censor.
	Well, there is actually a fairly large difference between even Lululemon doing what it wants and Facebook doing what the government tells it to do in order to maintain its immunity from liability.
	And that is the case that Trump is making.
	Clarence Thomas has sort of hinted at this in the past.
	So it's not quite as wild a lawsuit as people are suggesting.
	Now, do I think that the lawsuit is actually going to go all the way?
	I doubt it.
	Trump says that he's going to sit for a deposition.
	I can't imagine he will, because if he has to sit for a deposition, no lawyer in the world is going to allow Donald Trump to sit for a deposition.
	He is the worst legal client on planet Earth.
	There's a reason he's gone through every lawyer in America, to the point where he ended up like Sidney Powell, right?
	He went through every lawyer because the first rule of being a lawyer is tell your client to shut up.
	And Donald Trump, He knew that.
	So he ain't going to be sitting for a deposition.
	He says he will, but he probably won't.
	But when you hear people on the left suddenly dismissing that, oh, well, companies can do what they want.
	I swear, the same people who say Facebook can do what it wants in censoring content demand that Facebook censor content.
	That is not a coincidence.
	Kara Swisher is like, how dare you suggest that Facebook isn't a private company?
	Also, Facebook should definitely censor the content I want them to censor or they should be regulated.
	I'm sensing a bit of a conflict there.
	All righty, meanwhile, in just a second, Joe Biden continues to futz around.
	I am amazed, honestly amazed, that we are about to surrender in Afghanistan to the Taliban, and nobody seems to care.
	That is amazing to me.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let's talk about the fact you don't need to go to the auto parts store.
	Who needs to go to the auto parts store?
	Nobody.
	Rockauto.com, okay?
	Rockauto.com is a lot easier than going to the auto parts store.
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	Finally, the guy behind the counter, he finally asks you a bunch of questions, you type something into the computer, it's like, oh yeah, we don't have that part in stock, we're gonna order it, come back in three weeks.
	You're like, my car doesn't even work right now, what are you talking about?
	Like, oh yeah, and also we're gonna upcharge you by 25%.
	Or, you can go to rockauto.com, you get the product delivered directly to your house, and then you can just do it yourself, right?
	This is what rockauto.com does.
	They always offer the lowest prices possible, rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like airlines do.
	Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
	They're a family business, serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
	Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
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	Quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brands, specifications, and prices you prefer.
	Go to rockauto.com right now.
	See all the parts available for that car or truck Ray Shapiro in there.
	How did you hear about us, Pac?
	So they know that we sent you.
	Again, that is rockauto.com.
	Go check them out right now.
	And again, remind them that you heard about them here on the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Also, quick announcement.
	Would you like to work here?
	Well, now is your chance.
	The Daily Wire is hiring a web marketing specialist to do, well, a bunch of technical stuff that I don't understand and that I'll pay you to do.
	But seriously, if you know how to optimize a website experience, if you've done A-B testing before, if you're a data-loving nerd, that I am, then this is the job for you.
	So, head over to dailywire.com slash careersapply right now, as you know.
	We are the fastest growing conservative media company in the country.
	We are not slowing down anytime soon.
	It seems like there's a new employee around here every single day.
	Like, it takes me, as everybody here knows, it takes me like five times meeting you before I even know your name.
	And it's getting worse because we have so many employees.
	Maybe the next employee whose name I won't know would be you.
	Again, that is dailywire.com slash careers.
	Go apply today.
	Also, from pronouns to microaggressions, language has been turned into a tool used by the political left to silence dissenters and ostracize them from friends and family.
	That's why Michael Knowles took it upon himself to write a book about it.
	The book is called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
	If you have not picked up a copy, now would be a good time to do so.
	The book will take you through the origins of political correctness, why it is essential we stand up and fight its insidious spread into every public institution in America.
	Because if we don't, the consequences are waiting for us and our kids in the very, very near future.
	And here is the thing.
	The book is good, and also it has sold a bajillion copies, and it is just being boycotted by the New York Times.
	It just is demonstrative of how the left shuts down anything that it doesn't like.
	The book was the number one nonfiction bestseller in the country going into the July 4th holiday, according to Publishers Weekly.
	It didn't even hit the New York Times bestseller list at all.
	Last week, the New York Times number one bestseller sold a grand total of 6,900 copies.
	Speechless sold 6,600 copies.
	It wasn't on the top 15.
	So, if you don't know the history and relevance of political correctness already, you're about to find out.
	Just go pick up a copy of Speechless.
	Controlling words, controlling minds.
	It's available everywhere right now.
	If you don't feel like making a trip, it's available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle edition.
	You are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	♪♪ Meanwhile, Joe Biden is just losing Afghanistan.
	He's just decided to surrender in Afghanistan.
	And what's unbelievable about this, truly, is that Afghanistan was in a state of stasis.
	It wasn't a war that was won in any realistic sense.
	The Taliban was still around, obviously, but the country had not been ceded to the Taliban.
	The Taliban did not have control of the entire territory.
	It could not really provide safe havens for wide varieties of terrorist groups.
	It was still being fought to a standstill at the very least by the Afghan government.
	And we are pulling out at a time when we are spending approximately $50 billion a year in Afghanistan. That's how much money that we've been spending in Afghanistan as of like 2019.
	That represents approximately 1.3% of a $4 trillion budget.
	And now that we're talking about spending, you know, one bajillion dollars, well, it represents a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. The number of American soldiers who were being killed in combat every year was in the the single digits. This was not an endless war. In other words, it's not.
	I'm sorry.
	It doesn't count as a war when single-digit number of your soldiers are being killed in it every single year.
	There are more cops who are being killed on the streets of Chicago every year than soldiers being killed in Afghanistan every year.
	So that does not count as an endless war in any realistic sense.
	The only reason that Joe Biden is withdrawing is because he wants to suggest that he did it.
	And the left will never blame him for the fallout.
	And there will be fallout.
	I mean, tens of thousands of people will undoubtedly be made into refugees.
	You'll see thousands of people murdered.
	You'll see anyone who worked with the American government killed outright.
	You'll see women forced back into effectively chattel slavery, which is what they were living like in Afghanistan before the United States got there.
	And this notion that long-term occupation of countries has no positive effect is just silly.
	And the United States still has bases in South Korea.
	And guess what?
	After the Korean War, we should note that after the Korean War, it was not as though the U.S.' 's presence was widely appreciated in South Korea.
	It was not as though South Korea immediately transformed into a successful market democracy.
	It took a long time.
	There was a full military dictatorship In South Korea for a fairly significant period of time and an extraordinary amount of corruption in South Korea before the so-called Sixth Republic was founded.
	There's a reason it was called the Sixth Republic because it took a lot of go around in order to get to anything remotely resembling an actual republic in South Korea.
	There's still high levels of corruption in South Korea.
	It is also a thriving market economy.
	So the notion that when America pulls out, things get better just doesn't, it's not true.
	And guess what?
	Long-term occupations that don't have tremendously high costs to the United States actually are not a horrible thing.
	They are not.
	You know what's the worst thing?
	Ceding control of a country to the Taliban.
	We used to actually understand this sort of stuff in the United States.
	I know that there's this weird idea in the aftermath of World War II, the United States basically just everyone came home.
	And that's not true.
	A huge percentage of soldiers did come home because the active military combat was over.
	But there are still a bunch of soldiers who are sitting around in Germany.
	There's a bunch of soldiers sitting around.
	There are still a bunch of soldiers sitting.
	It is now 2021.
	World War Two ended in 1945.
	It has been nearly 80 years since the end of World War Two.
	We still have bases in Germany and Japan.
	The Korean War ended in the early 50s.
	We still have bases in South Korea.
	So this bizarre notion that we win anything by pulling out of Afghanistan is weird.
	It is a weird thing.
	And it's not only weird, it is stupid.
	Because again, it will be treated by all of America's worst enemies as a big win for the Taliban, as though they drove the United States out.
	What they really did is they just waited for the United States to get bored, and then we unilaterally pulled out when there was really no effective reason to.
	Joe Biden, like an idiot, says the United States has achieved its objectives, which of course is not true.
	Yesterday, speaking after the withdrawal of nearly all U.S.
	combat forces, and as the Taliban surge across the country, Biden spoke directly to critics of his order to bring an end to American participation in a conflict born from the terrorist attacks of September 11th.
	He said, let me ask those who want us to stay.
	How many more?
	How many thousands more American daughters and sons are you willing to risk?
	How long would you have them stay?
	What do you mean thousands more are you willing to risk?
	Since where are thousands of Americans dying in Afghanistan?
	Like, really.
	You can say thousands of Americans died in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war when we were responding to, you know, the murder of 3,000 Americans in New York and Washington, D.C.
	But when we're losing, like, single-digit soldiers per year in Afghanistan, in an active combat situation, um, that is, like, he has to exaggerate for a fact.
	It's the only way that he can justify what he is doing.
	Because a lot of people have been pointing out quite correctly that Joe Biden's policy here is indistinguishable on every available level.
	I mean, truly indistinguishable from pulling out from Saigon in 1975 and handing the entire country over to the Viet Cong, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing, many of them literally getting in boats to get out of Vietnam and the fall of Cambodia and the murder of two million people by Pol Pot in Cambodia.
	He's going to have This sort of withdrawal leaves blood on American hands in the same way that there was blood on American hands when we made promises to the Kurds in 1991, and then just let Saddam Hussein go in and slaughter them.
	There's blood on American hands when you make promises to people, and those people rely on those promises.
	And then, to prevent not even a high-cost scenario, to prevent a very, very low-cost scenario, relatively speaking, with regard to American foreign policy, you withdraw all troops.
	Joe Biden's position here makes no sense at all.
	Well, yesterday, Joe Biden, he got slightly tongue-tied announcing the Afghanistan withdrawal because, again, Joe Biden is in a running gun battle with the teleprompter.
	Here was President Biden getting a little confused about the Afghanistan withdrawal yesterday.
	We're going to continue to work for the release of detained Americans, including Mark, excuse me, Ferex.
	I want to pronounce the name correctly.
	I misspoke.
	So that he can return to his family safely.
	Um, yeah, that is, again, him versus this doddering old fool is now going to lead to the fall of Afghanistan again.
	And there will be long term downstream effects.
	There will be.
	I mean, the fact is that the United States' troop presence in Germany prevented not only the Russians from taking over Western Europe, but also ended up forestalling the possibility of Germany turning back into something horrific.
	The same thing in Japan.
	The same thing in South Korea.
	I point this out because people seem to have forgotten basic American history.
	And there seems to be this bizarre left-wing Noam Chomsky opinion that anywhere American boots go, things get worse.
	That is not true.
	Generally, where American boots withdraw, things get massively worse.
	I mean, the United States got involved in the Haitian situation in the 1990s.
	Since America has not been so involved in Haiti, how have things gone over there?
	Have things been, like, great over in Haiti last time I checked?
	Okay, Joe Biden, he's basically admitting at this point that the mission is failing.
	It's incredible.
	He says, don't worry, the mission hasn't failed yet.
	Okay, that's always a great indicator.
	It's always very encouraging when the president of the United States says, well, we're withdrawing from Afghanistan.
	Come on, man.
	And we haven't failed.
	Checks his watch, looks.
	Yeah, very encouraging stuff here from the President of the United States.
	How serious was the corruption among the Afghanistan government to this mission failing there?
	Well, first of all, the mission hasn't failed yet.
	There is in Afghanistan and all parties, there's been corruption.
	The question is, can there be an agreement on unity of purpose?
	Okay, it's amazing.
	We haven't lost yet.
	Great.
	Great.
	You know, we hadn't lost yet when they started pushing American helicopters off the top of the U.S.
	Embassy in Saigon.
	We hadn't lost yet.
	Except we did.
	Except we did.
	And then Biden was asked, well, aren't you going to be responsible for what happens next?
	Considering the fact that our cost of remaining in Afghanistan was very low by historic American standards.
	And considering the fact that when we abandon Afghanistan, thousands of people will undoubtedly be murdered.
	Don't you bear some responsibility?
	No, man, I've never borne responsibility for a damn thing.
	Get me on Amtrak.
	Here's the president of the United States.
	Will the United States be responsible for the loss of Afghan civilian lives that could happen after the military exit?
	No, no, no.
	It's up to the people of Afghanistan to decide on what government they want, not us to impose the government on them.
	No country's ever been able to do that.
	That's insane.
	Keep in mind, as a student of history, as I'm sure you are, never has Afghanistan been a united country.
	Not in all of its history.
	Okay, we can't impose a government on Afghanistan.
	They have to choose the government they want.
	Is he suggesting that when the Taliban completely overruns the place, that this is the government that the Afghan people want?
	That they are desperate to have the Taliban back in power?
	This is the same sort of argument, again, that the left used to use during the Vietnam War, that the Vietnamese clearly want communism.
	They clearly do.
	Just as the South Koreans presumably wanted communism, except they didn't.
	Yes, clearly.
	Here's the thing.
	The United States has actually allowed for elections to take place in Afghanistan.
	That is much more a reflection of quote-unquote what the people want than, you know, an armed terrorist group running over the country and then stuffing women in burqas and taking them out of school.
	Like that.
	It is incredible how the President of the United States is currently doing the propaganda work of the Taliban.
	He is.
	When he says that they get to choose the government that they want, and, you know, if we walk away and the Taliban take over, probably that's the government that they want.
	That is some ugly, ugly stuff.
	The reality is the only thing on the ground allowing the Afghans to make any choice at all is that baseline presence of American troops.
	And so Biden, predictably enough, was asked if he trusts the Taliban.
	No, I don't trust the Taliban.
	So then why are you so then why are you suggesting that the Afghan government, which is weak and has historically been weak?
	Because, again, there isn't he's correct that there's been no history of democracy in Afghanistan before the United States got there.
	There's been no history of security in Afghanistan before the United States got there, which is why it takes a long time.
	And why democracy can't be simply grafted on to Afghanistan's roots.
	But that doesn't mean that safety and security and the value of human rights can't be grafted on to those roots over time.
	Over time being the key word.
	And he's just removed the timetable.
	Here is the president of the United States saying, well, no, no, I don't trust the Taliban.
	I'm just going to hand over the entire country to them.
	You trust the Taliban.
	It's absolutely a serious question.
	Do you trust the Taliban?
	No, I do not.
	No, I do not trust the Taliban.
	Will you amplify your answer, please, while you don't trust the Taliban?
	It's a silly question.
	Do I trust the Taliban?
	No.
	But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.
	No, he doesn't.
	No, he doesn't.
	I mean, he really doesn't.
	I mean, and if he does, he's an idiot.
	If he thinks that the Afghan government is going to suddenly hold up in the face of the Taliban right now, then there would be no controversy.
	And this is, again, this is disconnected from reality.
	All he wants is a cheap political win.
	It's not really even going to be a win.
	Because let me just tell you, five minutes after we leave and the headlines come out about how the Taliban are rounding up women who are going to school and slaughtering them in the streets, those headlines ain't going to look good for Joe Biden.
	In fact, Jen Psaki's basically acknowledging as much, right?
	She says, we're not going to have a mission accomplished.
	This is a war that hasn't been won.
	So what are you accomplishing by withdrawing then, exactly?
	Explain.
	In terms of plans for the end for our men and women coming back, I don't have anything to preview, but we don't, we're not going to have a mission accomplished moment in this regard.
	It's a 20 year war that has not been won militarily.
	Um, so she's admitting that they haven't won anything.
	So there's no gain here.
	It is all just politics, which is pretty, pretty horrifying.
	But you know what?
	It's okay.
	Everything's fine.
	The Biden administration is, um, the Biden administration is Friendly with the media, so it really doesn't matter.
	Yesterday, Jen Psaki, she did the outreach to the media that they so deeply crave.
	She gave them the attention they so deeply want.
	She led a singing of happy birthday for Reuters' Steve Holland.
	Now, listen, she can be as friendly in the press room as she wants to be.
	That's nice, okay?
	What is not as nice is the fact that the media then reciprocate by slobbering all over the Biden administration.
	Here was Jen Psaki dealing with, frankly, her propaganda wing.
	Who's with me?
	Someone here has a good voice.
	Happy birthday to you.
	Happy birthday to you.
	Happy birthday dear Steve.
	Happy birthday to you.
	Alright.
	I will also note Brian Durham's excellent voice.
	Oh, Brian Cameron.
	Oh, isn't it nice?
	And well, I guess they don't have to cover the news anymore.
	I mean, after all, so refreshing.
	How refreshing is Jen Psaki?
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
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	Tune in.
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