Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 16, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

49:26

“You’re All Nazis, So We’re Going To Be Authoritarians” | Ep. 1298

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	The left accelerates its cultural authoritarianism with book bannings, big tech targettings, and institutional weaponization, while the Biden administration continues to push forward massive expansion of government.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Don't like big tech and the government spying on you?
	Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
	Speaking of which, you may have noticed that your privacy seems to be under assault these days.
	You may be using incognito mode, but you are not in fact incognito.
	You need a VPN to protect you from Frankly, your own internet service provider very often, but certainly from hackers and other people who want your data.
	I've been talking about ExpressVPN on this show for months.
	Why haven't you just done it?
	Go get a VPN right now.
	I'll tell you this, there's never been a more important time to protect your digital rights.
	That's why I and thousands of my patriotic listeners choose to secure our online data by using ExpressVPN.
	You believe a VPN isn't for you because you can just use the internet fine without one?
	Wrong you are!
	It's like leaving your car unlocked at night.
	Sure, most of the time it'll be fine, and then one day somebody just drives off with your car.
	Don't be that person.
	Are you confused about how it works?
	ExpressVPN is an app for computers and smartphones that encrypts your network data and reroutes it through a secure server.
	That means you can use the internet more anonymously without having your activity tracked.
	Do you think VPNs are complex only for tech experts?
	Wrong.
	With one button, you can download.
	With another button, you basically activate it.
	You're done.
	Now, you're protected.
	Take back your privacy at expressvpn.com slash ben.
	Get three extra months free on a one-year package.
	Again, that's expressvpn.com slash ben.
	To get three extra months for free, visit expressvpn.com slash ben right now.
	Alrighty, so.
	We are living through an extremely tenuous time.
	It is very obvious that the country is coming apart at the seams.
	It was happening before Trump.
	It did not decelerate during Trump.
	And despite the best attempts of the media to claim that Joe Biden is a unifying figure and that the country was going to come back together, in fact, the administration has not been a unifying force.
	There are centrifugal forces right now that are tearing apart the country in very serious ways.
	And it seems like that is not going to decelerate anytime soon.
	And it's weird because when you look at Joe Biden, sometimes he says the right things, frankly.
	Like yesterday, for example, he came out and he said, communism is a terrible system.
	It's failed everywhere it's tried.
	I don't think there's much of a difference from socialism.
	And you said to yourself, OK, well, this is the kind of reasonable Joe Biden that we were led to believe was going to be president of the United States in 2020.
	And then within 24 hours, Joe Biden will also be saying that if you are in favor of voter ID, it's because you're a Jim Crow style racist.
	Well, That sort of rhetoric is, in fact, what is going to tear the country apart, because there has been a movement brewing in America for a decade, at the very least, in which people, particularly the left, declare people of the right to be Nazis, and then they suggest it's okay to punch a Nazi.
	And on a broad institutional and governmental level, this has been the argument.
	People I don't like are white supremacists.
	People I don't like are Nazis.
	People I don't like are the worst of the worst of the worst.
	And therefore, we are absolutely justified in using every means at our disposal to shut this thing down, to prevent people from disseminating information, to stop people from using individual rights.
	Because individual rights, of course, can be a danger.
	In Germany, post-World War II, there was a particular tactic used by the government in order to quash the rise of Nazism in the post-World War II era.
	It was called Streitbeer Demokratie.
	And the basic idea was that you could not provide freedom of speech to, say, Hitlerian groups, because if you did, then they would then use that freedom of speech against the very freedoms of Germans, and they would take over the state again and pose a threat to the world.
	And so you had to quash them.
	You had to strangle it in the crib, so to speak.
	Now, never mind that that really had not worked very well during the Weimar Republic.
	Hitler was jailed after the beer hall pooch, and then Hitler emerged from jail, and he was more popular than he'd been before he was put in jail.
	And it turns out that very often, when you try to prevent bad rhetoric from gaining adherence, banning the rhetoric is a good way to make the rhetoric more appealing to more people, because then they feel that they are victims of some sort of transnational conspiracy.
	But beyond that, even if you believed that striped-bared democracy has been a success, that banning, for example, the sale of Mein Kampf in Germany has been a net positive for Germany.
	You have to be very careful how you use those principles because, of course, the question is really not whether Mein Kampf ought to be banned in Germany. It's who decides whether Mein Kampf ought to be banned in Germany. And when you take that to an American context, the question is who decides what ought to be banned. Now, the founders took a pretty robust view of political freedom in the United States.
	It wasn't unending.
	There were certain things that you could do, like try to overthrow the government of the United States, or you could speak in ways that were considered treasonous.
	And these things would not necessarily be covered by the First Amendment.
	There's a lot of case law on this.
	There's a lot of writing by the founders on this sort of stuff.
	But the freedom of speech and the ability to dissent has historically been extremely broad in the United States, and for good reason.
	Because the truth is that if you're a progressive leftist, if you're somebody who's a progressive leftist, your best protection as a progressive leftist, historically speaking, has been the First Amendment.
	If the conservative powers that be had actually been able to prevent you from speaking freely over the course of the 20th century, then many of the left's champion causes never would have come to fruition, ranging from same-sex marriage to radical centralization of governmental power.
	So, striped-bearer democracy is a power that has to be used sparingly, if at all.
	And in the United States, there really is very little precedent for striped-bearer democracy when it has been used.
	In the past, it's been used to pretty nefarious effects, ranging from the Alien Sedition Act of the John Adams administration to Woodrow Wilson using the Sedition Act in order to crack down on people who dissented from World War I. What we are seeing right now as a sort of institutional striped bear democracy where the government knows its own limits in the sense that the Supreme Court is not going to allow overt prevention by the government of speech.
	Instead, the government has realized that it can utilize the tools of institutional power that exist outside of the government in order to cram down its own agenda. It's essentially state-sponsored, state-initiated, and state-advocated striped bear democracy.
	A crackdown on particular points of view.
	But the problem is that the people who are making these decisions have a very broad view of what it is that ought to be suppressed.
	And so it becomes extremely dangerous when you see people who are in very high positions of power talking about their fellow Americans as though they are full-scale Nazis.
	Talking about their fellow Americans as though they are on the verge of a Beer Hall Pooch.
	As though they are Hitler.
	And this struck me forcibly yesterday when I was reading this story from the Washington Post about General Mark Milley.
	So, I'll be honest with you, I really didn't know much about Mark Milley until the past couple of months.
	And it seems to me that Mark Milley is a fool.
	I don't know what else to take away from his comments in front of Congress that he's assigning how to be an anti-racist by Irma X Kendi to American troops because American troops need to know why the systems of the United States are inherently and unfixably racist and discrimination today is a remedy for discrimination yesterday.
	His statements about that were full-on asinine.
	And now there's an article that has come out based on the Carol Lennon and Philip Rucker book, I Alone Can Fix It, Donald J. Trump's catastrophic final year, talking about Mark Milley's view of January 6th and everything that led up to January 6th and post-January 6th.
	And Mark Milley's perspective on this is so unbelievably historically ignorant.
	And yes, dangerous, because when you characterize your political opposition in the worst possible way, without any true historical reference point, you are paving the way for exactly the sort of measures that normally have to be used for the world's worst people.
	Right?
	If the logic is the Nazis had to be fought on the beaches, and then you say, oh yes, and my next door neighbor is also a Nazi, the implication is that your next door neighbor needs to be treated like a Nazi should be treated.
	So here's what Mark Milley had to say, and this is so historically ignorant.
	I mean, it honestly looks as though he once read a Doonesbury cartoon about World War II, and this is his only historical reference for what happened during World War II and in the lead-up to the Hitlerian takeover of Germany and the Enabling Act of 1933.
	According to the Washington Post, Milley described a stomach-churning feeling as he listened to President Trump's untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany's Parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.
	This is a Reichstag moment, Milley told aides, according to the book, the Gospel of the Führer.
	Okay, now, the United States is not the Weimar Republic, circa 1932.
	It is not.
	There are a wide variety of dissimilarities, ranging from the fact that Germany had suffered a catastrophic loss in World War I, and then suffered an even more catastrophic peace under the Versailles Treaty, to the economic failures of the 1920s, to the failures of parliamentary government that ended, essentially, with the establishment of a proto-dictatorship under Figures other than Hitler in the early 1930s.
	There are a wide variety of factors that distinguish Weimar Republic Germany from America circa 2021.
	Like, many, many, many factors.
	And the comparison of Donald Trump to Hitler is, of course, particularly ridiculous.
	And it's also particularly ridiculous that Milley was suggesting that the January 6th attack on the Capitol was, in some sense, a Reichstag moment.
	Because if you know anything about the Rasteg fire, what you know about the Rasteg fire is that a deranged communist set fire to the Rasteg building and then Hitler used that as a pretext to round up communists and to have the German parliament push through an enabling act that essentially put all power of the state in his hands.
	So the idea was that there was a fire that was blown out of proportion by the ruling powers that be.
	Hitler was already chancellor at the time.
	And then that was used as the pretext to centralize even more power and basically get rid of the Reichstag entirely, like get rid of the entire German legislative body as an effectual part of government.
	Okay, well, what would the logic of that be with regard to January 6th?
	That a bunch of Trump supporters stormed, morons and droogs, stormed the Capitol building so that Donald Trump could, according to General Milley, invoke the Insurrection Act against the people who were on his side, purportedly?
	It doesn't make any sense.
	Internally, there's no logic to it.
	There's no consistency to it at all.
	Okay, so none of this makes any sense.
	But the Washington Post piece is basically all about how Milley thinks that not only was Trump Hitlerian, but that a huge number of his supporters were basically brownshirts.
	And he used this kind of language on a regular basis apparently, which is scary considering that he is the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
	So if you look further on in the article, He said that, Milley said he was determined to avoid a repeat of the siege on the Capitol a week after January 6th.
	He said, everyone in this room, whether you're a cop, whether you're a soldier, we're gonna stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power.
	We're going to put a ring of steel around the city and the Nazis aren't getting in.
	The Nazis aren't getting, really?
	The Nazis?
	Like, I'm just wondering, like, does he, it was like a couple of hundred idiots.
	Congress went about its business within two hours of the halls of Congress being cleared.
	He suggested that he feared an American equivalent of brown shirts in the street after Trump was speaking about the election between November 4th and January 6th.
	Brown shirts in the streets.
	Now, the brown shirts were a paramilitary force approved of by the ruling administration and encouraged to go perform acts like Kristallnacht in 1938, right?
	So, like, there's no historical precedent for what he's talking about.
	But again, it is the language that is being used about an entire side of the political aisle, because it's not even restricted to Trump's language is wrong.
	He is not telling the truth about the election.
	That is terrible for our democracy.
	It's not restricted to that.
	It's not restricted to the people who invaded the Capitol building on January 6th.
	Are not only idiots and droogs, but perform criminal acts and should go to jail.
	It's not bad.
	It's anybody who went to a Trump rally, anybody who voted for Trump, right?
	The extension outward toward, because here's the thing.
	If Trump is Hitler and a Hitlerian figure, anyone who voted for Trump by extension voted for Hitler.
	And those people are then complicit in Hitlerian crimes.
	And you can see this taken to its sort of full fruition when it comes to the comments that a guy named Miles Taylor made yesterday.
	Now, you never heard of Miles Taylor until the last five seconds.
	Miles Taylor was the guy who wrote this anonymous column in the New York Times talking about how there were people inside the administration resisting Trump.
	And there's a lot of times, who could anonymous be?
	Was anonymous actually Mike Pence?
	Was anonymous actually maybe Melania?
	Was Anonymous Barron?
	There was all this idiot talk about who was Anonymous?
	Could Anonymous be a high-rank?
	It turns out that Anonymous was basically Anonymous.
	He was this low-level official in the Trump administration who then came out.
	First, he lied on CNN about it.
	He said, I'm not Anonymous.
	And then it turns out he was Anonymous.
	And he wrote this column about how Trump was terrible and he needed to be stopped from within.
	Well, yesterday, Miles Taylor appeared on MSNBC's Jason, with MSNBC's Jason Johnson, where he proceeded to explain That the biggest threat to the Republic is not ISIS.
	It's not Al Qaeda.
	It's not Chinese authoritarianism and communism.
	It's not Russian aggression.
	It's conservatives and Republicans.
	Those are the greatest threat to the Republic.
	They can see the move here.
	The move here is going to be your next door neighbor is the problem.
	And as we will see, this is going to justify the kind of crackdowns that Democrats have planned.
	If that happens, you can see why the country is on the verge of a split.
	Once your next door neighbor is no longer just a person who disagrees with you politically, but your actual enemy, like a Hitlerian enemy, what exactly are you supposed to do other than taking the measures that would have been necessary to stop Hitler in his tracks?
	Here was Miles Taylor saying one of the more despicable things I've heard in modern American politics.
	I'm a national security guy.
	I've worked in national security against ISIS and Al Qaeda and Russia.
	And the number one national security threat I've ever seen in my life to this country's democracy is the party that I'm in, the Republican Party.
	It is the number one national security threat to the United States of America.
	And I'll tell you this, if my party retakes the U.S.
	House of Representatives in the next cycle, it's going to become a haunted house.
	And the ghoul in the specter haunting that house is going to be Donald Trump.
	They're the biggest national security threat to the United States he's ever seen in his life.
	Now, Miles Taylor seems like a fairly young guy, but I'm 37, and the Soviet Union was still around for the first few years of my life.
	China, right now, is making aggressive, aggressive moves, not only with regard to Hong Kong, but with regard to Taiwan.
	On the tech front, they're making aggressive moves.
	But according to Miles Taylor, Republicans, your next-door neighbors, or maybe you, you are the true threats of the country.
	Writ large, you are the true threat.
	Now, what does this justify?
	If you say that everyone around you is a Nazi, this means it's time for some striped-beard democracy applied to you.
	And that's precisely what the Biden administration apparently is now going to push forward.
	They're not going to do it formally through the actual auspices of government.
	Instead, they're going to hijack, encourage, work hand-in-glove with private institutions in order to make sure that those private institutions do their dirty work.
	It makes it very difficult for those institutions to claim they are not state actors when, as we will see, the White House is openly acknowledging that it is directing non-state actors to do things the state actor itself could not do.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let's talk about your sleep quality.
	So, as you can tell, I'm recording from on the road.
	You know what that means.
	I did not sleep well last night.
	I didn't sleep well last night because I wasn't on my magnificent Helix Sleep mattress.
	Helix Sleep has a quiz.
	It takes just two minutes to complete.
	Matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
	Why would you buy a mattress made for somebody else?
	With Helix, you're getting a mattress that you know will be perfect for the way you sleep.
	Everybody's unique.
	Helix knows that, so they have several different mattress models to choose from.
	They've got soft, medium, and firm mattresses.
	Mattresses that are great for cooling you down if you sleep hot.
	Even a Helix Plus mattress for plus-sized folks.
	If you're looking for a mattress, take the quiz.
	Order the mattress you're matched to.
	The mattress comes right to your door shipped for free.
	You don't ever need to go to a mattress store again.
	Helix is awesome.
	You don't need to take my word for it.
	Helix was awarded the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by both GQ and Wired Magazine.
	Just go to helixsleep.com slash men.
	Take their two minute sleep quiz.
	And you will get that mattress matched to you, delivered directly to you.
	They've got a 10-year warranty.
	Try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
	You've got nothing to lose.
	It is a fantastic mattress.
	My wife and I have one.
	Helix is offering up to 200 bucks off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixsleep.com slash Ben.
	Go check them out right now.
	Okay, so the point here is that if the left declares that you are a Nazi, which increasingly seems to be happening, then The next move is you can use whatever resources are at your disposal in order to stop the Nazis from rising.
	And you can see how major institutions in Western society are being weaponized toward this.
	So let's take a quick and kind of amazing example.
	So yesterday, The ABA, which is an organization that is dedicated to selling books, the American Booksellers Association, which is an association of bookstores across the country.
	They put out a statement.
	The statement they put out was about Abigail Schreier's book, Irreversible Damage.
	Now, we've talked to Abigail Schreier on the show.
	I recommended her book.
	It is an excellent book.
	It is all about the damage done to young people by giving them hormone therapy and and genital surgeries on the basis of supposed gender dysphoria without proper diagnosis and without any sort of longitudinal data. The book is really well thought out. It is a very sensitive book. It is not a sort of hard charging wreck everything book at all. Okay, Abigail is a very considered person. Okay, so the ABA put out this statement, quote, an anti-trans book was included in our July mailing to members.
	It is not an anti-trans book.
	It is a book considering whether rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a problem.
	By data, it very clearly is.
	This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA's ends, policies, values, and everything we believe and support.
	It is inexcusable.
	We apologize to our trans members and to the trans community for this terrible incident and the pain we caused them.
	We also apologize to the LGBTQIA plus community at large and to our bookselling community.
	Apologies are not enough.
	We began addressing this today and are committed to engaging in the critical dialogue needed to inform concrete steps to address the harm we caused.
	Those steps will be shared in the next three weeks.
	OK, so you have an actual booksellers association apologizing for the violent act of distributing a book.
	And this is the mentality that has taken over with regard to major institutions throughout American society.
	You must apologize if you cross the left.
	You've committed an act of violence by simply allowing for the distribution of a book.
	They weren't pushing the book.
	They weren't saying that the book is the only book on transition.
	There are many books pushed by the American Booksellers Association that are fully in tune With the far-left cultural zeitgeist that suggests that boys can be girls and girls can be boys, and that you should propaganda that that's a kid, right?
	I am jazz is the kind of stuff that the ABA also sells and promotes and loves.
	Okay, but if there is one book they don't like, it can be banned.
	Same thing with Ryan Anderson's book, When Harry Became Sally, which was banned from Amazon.
	You literally cannot buy it on Amazon.
	Because it is quote-unquote anti-trans.
	This sort of institutional takeover is extremely dangerous.
	And when it becomes clear that it is not just coming from wokes inside particular corporations, encouraged by the media.
	I've talked a lot on this program about how corporations have basically been hijacked by their woke staffers.
	The bosses are too chicken bleep.
	to actually stand up to their staffers and say, no, we're not going to do any of that.
	So the media have militarized this.
	The far left media have decided what they will do is they will find a couple of employees, disgruntled employees inside a company, and they will get those employees to talk about how offended they are by something that the company is doing.
	And then the company responds by doing what the disgruntled employees want.
	So you have a couple of Amazon employees who will complain about Abigail Schreier.
	NBC News will do a story, like a full story about two Amazon employees quitting.
	We talked about this yesterday.
	Two Amazon employees out of 800,000 American Amazon employees quitting.
	And then they will put pressure on Amazon to get rid of Abigail Schreier's book.
	So that is one problem.
	A far larger problem in terms of formal problems and problems that should scare the living hell out of you are governments actively attempting to use The chief means of distribution of information in our society, the social media companies, in order to set boundaries on what information you can consume.
	Now, remember, the original good of social media companies was that it was a marketplace of ideas.
	It was a town square of ideas.
	Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was explicitly directed at providing a greater forum for these sorts of fora to actually grow.
	You wanted Facebook to exist so that people could exchange ideas.
	In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg talked very clearly about this.
	By the way, so did Jack Dorsey, right?
	The idea over at Twitter, the idea was that these were going to be places for exchange of ideas, where there would be discussions, where you could access all sorts of information you never would have gotten if you just subscribed to the New York Times, for example.
	And people took that seriously, and they started consuming their news via social media.
	So instead of just going directly to the New York Times or to the Daily Wire, they started going to their news feed on Facebook.
	And then media members started attempting to push and ram Facebook, in order to circumscribe what kind of material you could access through your newsfeed.
	So you get Kevin Roos from the New York Times saying, too many people are visiting Ben Shapiro's Facebook page.
	You need to curtail that.
	You need to make sure that the traffic to Daily Wire goes down, for example.
	The only sources that should be trusted are the New York Times.
	And now you have the federal government of the United States that is pushing this as well.
	And again, the ideology here is that there are people who know better than you.
	And those people not only have better moral standards than you, they know what constitutes, on a quote-unquote objective level, disinformation.
	Now, I have my own ideas about what disinformation constitutes.
	I, for example, think it is an overt and abject lie when Joe Biden says that the voter ID laws of Georgia are somewhat akin to Jim Crow.
	There's not only no evidence for it, it's a lie.
	It's just not true.
	Facebook ain't gonna crack down on any of that.
	But I wouldn't expect Facebook to crack down on that, nor do I think that they should, because that's not their job.
	But the left believes it is their job.
	Because here's the thing.
	I don't think that Joe Biden is Hitler.
	But Joe Biden does think that people like you, people like me, apparently people like 60, 70, 80% of the American population that's in favor of voter ID, are like Jim Crow segregationist racists.
	And therefore, why shouldn't Facebook crack down on them?
	So this mentality was pushed forward yesterday by the former Prime Minister of Denmark, And a member of Facebook's oversight board, she kind of expressed the general overlying theory here.
	She said, here's the thing.
	All these platforms, yes, they're for freedom of speech, but this must be balanced with other concerns.
	Here's what she had to say.
	What we're trying to find, of course, I think many of us who are engaging in this conversation, is that middle road.
	How do you moderate content?
	And how do you find that balance between human rights and free speech, which is a human right, but also other human rights?
	Because obviously, free speech is not an absolute human right.
	It has to be balanced with other human rights.
	And that is what The Oversight is there to do.
	Okay, so again, Facebook has now integrated itself with this idea.
	That's Hal Thorning-Schmidt, who is, again, a former prime minister of Denmark, and is promoting the idea that Facebook needs to balance freedom of speech with other concerns.
	Well, really, they shouldn't, right?
	The reality is, it's not really Facebook's job.
	But as we'll see, governments are going to use this, this inroad, as a way to silence voices they don't particularly like.
	We'll get to that on a formal level in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that if you've got a medical problem, you really should just go get it solved.
	This is particularly true if it's something that really affects your life, like erectile dysfunction.
	With Roamin, you can get a free online evaluation and ongoing care for ED, all from the comfort and privacy of your home.
	A U.S.
	licensed healthcare professional will work with you to find the best treatment plan.
	If medication is appropriate, it ships to you free with two-day shipping.
	The whole process is straightforward and discreet.
	Getting started is super simple.
	Just go to GetRoamin.com.
	Complete an online visit.
	Take care of your ED without leaving your home.
	Complete that online visit today to connect with a healthcare professional and get it taken care of.
	Go to GetRoman.com slash Ben right now.
	You get 15 bucks off your very first month.
	It is really time to take care of your ED.
	Remember, get started today.
	You'll save 15 bucks on your first order of ED treatment.
	That is GetRoman.com slash Ben.
	G-E-T-R-O-M-A-N dot com slash Ben right now.
	You get 15 bucks off your first month of treatment.
	If you have a medical problem like erectile dysfunction, I know it's embarrassing to talk about.
	I know it's something you wish would just go away.
	The reality is it's not going to go away until you get it taken care of.
	Go to GetRoman.com slash Ben.
	Get a consultation, complete an online visit, and then get the medication you need.
	GetRoman.com slash Ben.
	Get 15 bucks off your very first month.
	If, once again, you can label all of your political opponents extremists, unworthy of public debate, then you can militarize private institutions to stop them.
	And this is exactly what the White House basically announced they were doing yesterday.
	This is an unbelievable thing.
	It really is.
	And it should scare the hell out of everyone right, left, and center.
	Because if the Trump administration had said, we've called up Facebook and we've told them we think that they are distributing misinformation, and we need them to take down that misinformation right now for the good of the Republic.
	And also, if they don't, you know, we do have oversight power with regard to Facebook.
	And now Democrats have been making these sorts of signals for a while.
	You'll recall that Dianne Feinstein called, the senator from California, called Mark Zuckerberg before a Senate committee, and she said, if you don't stop this sort of stuff, we will.
	Which is a direct and open threat that we are only going to give you a level of immunity as long as you do what we want.
	Which does make them a quasi-state actor in the sense that they are now operating at the behest of the government.
	And government cannot use state actors or quasi-state actors, private institutions, that are operating under the explicit direction of the government in order to violate your rights.
	The government does not have the power of, for example, unreasonable search and seizure.
	So if the government hires a private contractor and says, I want you to break into that guy's house and look in his house, they are now a government contractor.
	Or if they say, you know what, unless you break into that guy's house and ransack his safe, we are probably going to prosecute you.
	The government would be the actor in that particular scenario.
	The government is verging very closely on that when they say things like, we are directly telling Facebook what kind of content we want to come down.
	That is extremely, extremely dangerous.
	Whether I agree with the kind of content that they're attempting to take down or not.
	And as we'll see, the reality is that whatever the left declares misinformation, very often it's not misinformation.
	So yesterday...
	The Surgeon General of the United States blamed Big Tech for COVID misinformation.
	He said, oh, well, you know, if Big Tech had just cracked down on COVID misinformation, there'd be less vaccine hesitancy.
	Hey, let's be clear about something.
	People who are vaccine hesitant are vaccine hesitant for a wide variety of reasons.
	One of those reasons is the public health debacle that has been the messaging from the Biden administration.
	The Trump administration was no great shakes when it came to public health information.
	There were a lot of conflicting messages from the Fauci, no one should wear a mask, to the Fauci, everyone should wear a mask.
	But the Biden administration has not only been no better, in many ways they've been worse.
	Since the advent of the Biden administration, Anthony Fauci has said that if you get a vaccine, you still can't take off your mask.
	He's still suggesting right now that three-year-olds ought to be wearing masks around in public, which is patently crazy.
	Okay, so all of this creates vaccine hesitancy.
	And then when you have the Biden administration pause J&J, the J&J vaccine, after six cases of some sort of rare blood clotting disorder, after 7 million doses, a lot of people go, wait, hold up a second.
	You know, the risk to me on COVID, it ain't that great.
	It looks like there might be a risk to me from the vaccine, so maybe I'll wait.
	Now, I'm a huge advocate of the vaccines.
	I think they are miraculous in nearly every way.
	I see no reason why I should inject my seven, five, or one-year-old with the vaccine at this point.
	They are not subject to serious risk from COVID, and it's up to the adults to get vaccinated.
	Kids have never been at serious risk from COVID, statistically speaking.
	Kids are more likely to be killed by a lightning strike in the United States than they are to die of COVID.
	Something like 311 people under the age of 18 total in the United States have died during the entire COVID pandemic, compared with well over 600,000 Americans of other age groups who have died, most of them in the older age range.
	Okay, but putting that aside, Here is the point.
	Much of what has been distributed about COVID, that is misinformation, has been coming directly from your government.
	Anthony Fauci was saying overtly false things, repeatedly, on a wide variety of topics, ranging from schools should stay closed, to don't wear a mask, to you need to wear a mask even after you're vaccinated, right?
	Like that sort of stuff was going out.
	So should the administration of the United States be the body that determines what Facebook should leave up and what Facebook should take out?
	Here's the Surgeon General of the United States blaming big tech for not taking down what the White House wanted them to take down.
	Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users.
	They've allowed people who intentionally spread misinformation, what we call disinformation, to have extraordinary reach.
	They've designed product features, such as like buttons, that reward us for sharing emotionally charged content, not accurate content.
	And their algorithms tend to give us more of what we click on, pulling us deeper and deeper into a well of misinformation.
	First of all, the idea that confirmation bias only exists because of Facebook is nuts.
	Confirmation bias exists when a liberal New Yorker subscribes to the New York Times.
	It's confirmation bias.
	When Biden fans watch CNN or MSNBC, that is confirmation bias.
	Confirmation bias is an inevitable fact of life, okay?
	And people tend to seek out news that they agree with from sources that they already agree with.
	Okay, that's a negative.
	It's why on my show, I've recommended many times they listen to this show, and then you listen to shows that disagree with me, and you see who you like better and who you think is telling you the truth more.
	I've noticed that many shows that disagree with me do not provide the same sort of notification of their own bias.
	But having the Surgeon General of the United States blame Facebook For COVID misinformation and for vaccine hesitancy is crazy.
	It's the exact same tactic that the Democratic Party took in the aftermath of 2016 when they suggested the real reason Hillary Clinton lost was because of Facebook.
	It was not because Hillary Clinton was a crappy candidate.
	It's because of misinformation and disinformation on Facebook.
	The reason they said this is because they want to bring Facebook under their control.
	They wish to bring big tech under their control.
	They wish to use these as instruments of the Democratic Party.
	And if they can do so informally, then they can effectively end around the First Amendment of the United States by weaponizing institutions as governmental agents.
	That's what they are attempting to do here.
	Jen Psaki made this absolutely clear yesterday.
	I mean, this is wild authoritarian garbage.
	Here's Jen Psaki saying, you know what we've been doing?
	We've been actually notifying Facebook what we think is disinformation and telling them to take it down.
	That is, you really want the White House doing that?
	You want the White House going to, like, if the White House came to the New York Times and said, we need you to take down that story.
	It's disinformation.
	Do you think the New York Times would do it?
	Obviously not.
	If the Biden White House came to us here at Daily Wire and they said, you know that story that you have up?
	We think it's disinformation.
	Take it down.
	We might evaluate whether it is in fact disinformation, but we would then use our own independent judgment in taking it down.
	We wouldn't take the White House's word for it.
	The White House is attempting, and the White House doesn't have power over us.
	The White House has a lot more power over, for example, Facebook, than it does over our news website.
	But here's Jen Psaki pretty much openly admitting that the power of the White House is now being used to leverage private companies into subverting free dissemination of information.
	We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's office.
	We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
	We're working with doctors and medical professionals to connect two connected medical experts who are popular with their audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content.
	I mean, this is insane.
	They're basically saying we want to run these social media platforms from the White House.
	From the White House.
	And if you don't let us, well then, I mean, I'm not sure we can hold back the antitrust regulators, guys.
	I'm not sure we can.
	Barack Obama did some of the same stuff with regard to corporate America in the immediate aftermath of the economic crash of 2007-2008.
	He famously said to a bunch of banking CEOs, I'm the only thing that stands between the mob and you.
	And they're out there holding pitchforks.
	You need to do what I want.
	You know, using the power of the government to force private industries to do what you want them to do makes them quasi-state actors and removes the defense that these are private actors who can do what they want, because they obviously can no longer do what they want.
	It makes that defense very, very tenuous.
	The HHS released a full statement yesterday on what technology platforms can do to strengthen the monitoring of misinformation.
	Platforms should increase staffing of multilingual content moderation teams and improve the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms in languages other than English.
	Since non-English language misinformation continues to proliferate, platforms should also address misinformation in live streams, which are more difficult to moderate due to their temporary nature and the use of audio and video.
	Prioritize early detection of misinformation super spreaders and repeat offenders, and impose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies.
	And who determines?
	Who determines what is misinformation?
	The White House?
	This White House?
	Trump's White House?
	Like, who's White House?
	Who determines what's misinformation?
	The fact-checking apparatus that is solely run at this point by members of the left?
	Factcheck.org, which is always willing to grant a half-true rating to anything a Democrat says, but a four-Pinocchio, wholly untrue statement to openly true things that people on the right say?
	In the area of information, there has to be open discourse.
	Otherwise, the truth doesn't come out.
	If it had been up to the Biden White House, let's say Biden had been president last year, and the Biden White House would have been pushing very hard, presumably, For Facebook to take down quote-unquote misinformation about the COVID lab leak theory.
	In fact, they didn't even need to.
	Many of these technology platforms were banning people and censoring people for doing just that, for speculating that the COVID virus started in a lab leak.
	Well, now it turns out, according to the Washington Post, that the WHO said it will fix several unintended errors in a joint report with China on the origins of the COVID crisis and will look into other possible discrepancies.
	In response to questions from the Washington Post, the WHO is changing the virus sequence IDs associated with three of the 13 early patients listed in the chart in the report, and will clarify the first family cluster was not linked to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, a spokesman said.
	So the entire narrative that this thing started a wet market in Wuhan was nonsense from the beginning.
	The WHO covered it up, and now the WHO is uncovering it up, but If the informational determination had been completely cut down last year, you'd never find out about this, of course.
	The danger of people controlling these streams of information is extraordinary.
	Remember, for years we were treated to the idea that the Steele dossier might in fact be fact.
	And now it turns out, of course, that the Steele dossier was sheer patent nonsense that was come up with by a kind of discredited spy on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, laundered through Fusion GPS.
	But for years, that was reported on these platforms as true.
	So you're going to trust these platforms to determine what's true and what's not true?
	And more importantly, you're going to trust government actors to tell these platforms what is true and what is not true?
	There's an entire article in New York Magazine today by T.A.
	Frank titled, quote, The Steele dossier was a case study in how reporters get manipulated.
	To pick the worst press failure of the past half decade would be a daunting assignment, but the coverage of the Steele dossier would have to be high on any list.
	The document, penned by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, was commissioned in 2016 by the private research firm Fusion GPS, in turn working for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.
	The aim was to dig up dirt on Donald Trump, especially regarding any ties he might have had to Russia.
	Steele delivered, alleging a long-standing conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin, and offering details that proved to be as unfounded as they were spectacular.
	Although they were almost certainly specious, these claims spawned countless news stories, including at New York Magazine, and prompted government investigations into possible ties between Moscow and Trump.
	The Steele dossier is just one recent instance of the media presenting the public with information that originated in a vast and opaque industry of private spies and operatives for hire who do business without all the rules and ethics of traditional media outlets, but who often inject their version of events into the mainstream press by feeding tips and scoops to reporters.
	And this is what happened with the Steele dossier.
	For example, now we are finding out, by the way, that when the tech platforms shut down all of the talk about Hunter Biden, we're now finding out, according to Politico, that last summer, in the middle of the summer, federal officials in Delaware already had enough information to seek search warrants and issue grand jury subpoenas in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation.
	Last summer.
	If the New York Times, if the New York Post mentioned that a month before the election, they were kicked off the tech platforms.
	This is extremely dangerous stuff.
	And again, it is ends-justified-the-means kind of thinking.
	Donald Trump had to go.
	This justified not only overt misinformation like the SEAL dossier and the Russian ramp-up and all of that, it justified bans on the New York Post a month before the election cycle, and it justifies the White House now telling these tech platforms what they can leave on and what they have to take off.
	If you don't think that that is authoritarianism, I don't know what to tell you.
	That is authoritarianism.
	It is authoritarian.
	It is state-run in the same way that the Chinese government props up full corporations and then steps in and delists them from the New York Stock Exchange when it sees fit to do so.
	If private companies in the United States are subjected to the regulatory oversight of the people who are telling them what to do with their actual content moderation, now this is a state-sponsored enterprise.
	And now you have to start wondering, who is actually running the show?
	Is this free and fair competition?
	Is this free and open dissemination of information?
	Or is this a backdoor violation of the First Amendment in the name of striped-bear democracy and stopping the Nazis who live next door?
	We'll get to more of this in just one second, because it all comes with a friendly face, of course.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	First, let's talk about the fact you don't want to go to the auto parts store, because who wants to go to the auto parts store?
	Instead, you should head on over to rockauto.com.
	It's so much easier than walking into a store, waiting in line forever, finally getting to the front of the line, answering very specific questions about your vehicle, and then finally the person behind the counter is like, hey, you know what?
	We don't have that in stock.
	I'm going to order it.
	Instead, head on over to RockAuto.com.
	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.
	The catalog is unique.
	It's remarkably easy to navigate.
	You can quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brands, specifications, and prices you prefer.
	Head on over to rockauto.com right now.
	See all the parts available for your car or truck.
	Write Shapiro in there.
	How did you hear about us, Fox?
	So they know that we sent you.
	Again, that is rockauto.com.
	Get the best prices, best inventory, rockauto.com right now.
	See all the parts available and write Shapiro in there.
	How did you hear about us, Fox?
	So they know.
	Alrighty, we'll get to more on all of this in just one second.
	First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout-out to a Daily Wire member.
	Today, it's Andrea Jessup on Twitter, who understands the importance of quality craftsmanship.
	In the pic, the majestic left-to-steers tumbler is resting comfortably on the back of a pickup truck that has just arrived on a job site as the sun begins to rise.
	The caption reads, My husband just sent me this, the world's greatest beverage vessel, held on his entire way to work.
	Also, my coffee tastes amazing when I use this tumbler.
	Hashtag leftist tears tumbler.
	You see, folks, there is no substitute for the best.
	This happy couple knows it.
	Thanks for the pic.
	Thanks for being a Daily Wire member.
	Meanwhile, as you may have noticed, the institutions of our society, as I've been discussing, have been weaponized against you.
	They've been weaponized against normal, everyday Americans.
	And it's every institution, from Facebook and Twitter to the scientific Authorities who are now masking up again in LA.
	All of these institutions have been corrupted, renormalized, and weaponized against you.
	My book, The Authoritarian Moment, is about how this happened.
	And more importantly, you have to understand how it happened so we can now reverse it.
	It's available for pre-order right now.
	The book, again, is The Authoritarian Moment.
	It helps you understand how we got here, why it feels like you are under assault, and how we re-normalize, make normal again, those institutions that have been taken over and weaponized.
	I'll be doing a live signing of my book in the coming weeks.
	So, if you want to pre-order your signed copy and ask me some questions, And seriously, unless you would like to live under the authoritarianism that seems to be rising in the country, it's time to start reading up and fighting back.
	If you preorder a copy, don't forget to type whatever your burning question may be into the prompt or when you check out.
	And seriously, unless you would like to live under the authoritarianism that seems to be rising in the country, it's time to start reading up and fighting back.
	Also, if there's one person in America who is not afraid to speak her mind, it is Candace Now she has an entire show where she does just that here at The Daily Wire.
	It's called Candace.
	Every episode features her fearless brand of political commentary and in-depth interviews with interesting guests.
	Her latest episode, Cuba, Communism, and the Democratic Death Cult is available right now on demand for Daily Wire members.
	If you haven't subscribed yet, get 25% off a new membership with code Candace at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	Now the wonderful thing for the Democrats and for Joe Biden is that if their political opponents are so unthinkably terrible, if they are just the worst people in the world, you never ever have to work with them.
	And increasingly, this is the perspective of the Biden administration.
	So yesterday, the Democrats, in a rather little-noticed change, They just got rid of the Hyde Amendment.
	So the Hyde Amendment is a longstanding bipartisan agreement between Democrats and Republicans that there will be no direct federal funding of abortions.
	That if there's money that goes from the federal government to, for example, Planned Parenthood, it has to go into their non-abortion activities.
	Now, it's a bit of a legal fiction in the sense that all money is fungible.
	So if you fund Planned Parenthood's rent, they take the money they were going to use for their rent and then use that for abortions.
	But at the very least, the federal government was not going to be directly involved in the funding of abortion.
	And this was agreed to for decades, literally You know who's a big supporter of this, Joe Biden?
	Well, yesterday, House Democrats on Monday took steps to advance a new spending bill for the DHHS without the Hyde Amendment.
	In moving the spending bill to the full House Appropriations Committee for a debate and vote, Democrats followed through on President Joe Biden's proposed budget, which also did not include the amendment.
	House Democrats had indicated they would go this route, and in doing so have effectively guaranteed that abortion access will be a central focus of government funding negotiations between Democrats and Republicans, who do have the votes to block the Democrats' measure from passing the Senate without changes.
	The full House panel is expected to approve the bill and send the measure to the chamber for a vote.
	It's not yet clear if the measure can clear the narrowly divided chamber without the Hyde Amendment, given Democrats' slim majority.
	You'll remember that in 2018, Joe Biden was in favor of the Hyde Amendment.
	And then he reversed his stance because, of course, he was running to the left in order to try to fend off Bernie Sanders.
	The idea was that the federal government, abortion was so threatened by the states, the federal government had to step in and they had to fund abortion.
	And now they're going to ram through your taxpayer dollars, funding other people's abortions at the federal level on a sheer party line vote.
	Because the people who are standing in the way of that are so bad, you definitely cannot work with them.
	So they're getting rid of the Hyde Amendment totally, right?
	You see, the House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut said, "...allowing the Hyde Amendment to remain on the books is a disservice to our constituents." Alexis McGill-Johnson, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement her organization was thrilled.
	Has it though?
	Because all it says is that I'm not paying for your abortion.
	It doesn't ban abortion in any way.
	of a personal health decision for many people with low incomes.
	Has it though?
	Because all it says is that I'm not paying for your abortion.
	It doesn't ban abortion in any way.
	It says I will not pay for your abortion, nor should the taxpayer.
	But the broader point here is pretty simple.
	Democrats have basically decided they no longer wish to work with people on the other side of the aisle.
	And their excuse for not attempting to negotiate, for not attempting to be bipartisan, is those people are just so bad we can't even talk to them.
	This is why Jen Psaki is now saying that, you know, Joe Biden has changed his mind.
	He would love to have amnesty in this gigantic $3.5 trillion budget bill.
	He would love that.
	Sounds great to him.
	Now, you may be saying to yourself, wait a second, it's a budget bill.
	What is that?
	Like, shouldn't there be a separate immigration bill that's negotiated?
	Especially because, in the past, there have been these sort of Gang of Eight scenarios, Gang of Twelve scenarios, where Republicans and Democrats have put together a framework for what to do, for example, about the so-called Dreamers, people who were brought to the United States as children, and their parents were illegal immigrants.
	The Senate and House Democrats say that they want to put a citizenship pathway into the reconciliation package.
	There has been some attempt at bipartisanship on this in the past.
	Now Democrats are like, those Republicans are just so terrible.
	We won't negotiate with them.
	We're just going to ram this thing through.
	Here's Jen Psaki saying, yeah, you know, after all old Joe here, he would love amnesty in the budget bill.
	The Senate and House Democrats say that they want to put a citizenship pathway into the reconciliation package.
	Is the White House supportive of that strategy?
	Yes.
	And not only that, Chuck Schumer has now signaled that he is going to force a vote on the quote-unquote bipartisan infrastructure plan negotiated by Mitt Romney on the one side and people like Kyrsten Sinema on the other.
	This is a $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan.
	Schumer's plan here is force the Republicans to vote on the bipartisan plan before they get to this $3.5 trillion plan they plan to shove down at the same time, which they're going to do on a share party line vote.
	Mitt Romney needs to say, I will not vote for this unless I have assurances from Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that they do not vote for the boondoggle plan.
	Basically, this whole silly game was created by the Democrats in order... Think of a water balloon.
	If you squeeze one end of the water balloon, all the water just goes to the other side of the water balloon.
	This is basically what they've done with their two-part strategy, their two-part legislative strategy, right?
	What they've said is, here's the bipartisan bill.
	Bipartisan bill was $2 trillion.
	And here was the sheer party line vote bill.
	And let's say that that bill was going to be $3 trillion.
	Well, if we squeeze out like a trillion bucks here in the bipartisan bill, it'll just inflate the partisan bill over here and it'll get larger.
	And so in the end, the combined bills will be the exact same amount of spending.
	It's just that Joe Biden will have been able to say that he did it with the veneer of bipartisanship.
	This needs to stop now.
	Romney needs to make clear that it's going to stop now unless Manchin and Sinema kill the $3.5 trillion boondoggle that Biden is pushing forward.
	But again, this is not about productive conversation for the Democrats.
	It's about hard-nosed politics.
	Their political opponents are evil, and you will ram everything you can through on a sheer party-line vote.
	And by the way, radically change the way that government is done in the United States.
	Without necessarily killing the filibuster.
	Now, the Democrats are really, pretty openly, and have been for a while, calling for the end of the filibuster, because after all, the Republicans are just so terrible, they're just such Jim Crow segregationists, that we can't have the filibuster anymore.
	That needs to completely go away.
	Well, what does this result in?
	What this results in is more and more Americans feeling like, you know what?
	I don't have a ton of commonality with people in the rest of the country.
	If the federal government sees me as the enemy, if the institutions weaponized by the federal government or in coordination with the federal government, in coordination with the media, if those institutions are weaponized against me, if I'm the guy that is going to be called by the Joint Chiefs of Staff a Nazi because I voted for Trump, if that's who I am, well, then I don't wish to share a country with you.
	There's a new poll out.
	Showing support for, essentially, regional unions.
	And it's a pretty fascinating poll.
	This poll is courtesy of YouGov.
	And what the poll shows is that 66% of Republicans in the Southeast, ranging from Texas to Florida, say that they would be interested in seceding from the United States to join a new regional union.
	Now, this is sort of paralleled by the Northwest.
	In the Northwest, 47%, like basically the West Coast, 47% of Democrats say that they would like to secede from the United States to join a new regional union.
	In other words, where people are living in more red states or more blue states, they feel more alienated.
	But particularly, people in red states right now feel like they are under assault, which is why they are seeking more state-level action.
	More strong governors in order to stand up against federal predation.
	This is just going to continue.
	It's just going to continue.
	And all the unity that Joe Biden promised, it doesn't exist so long as Joe Biden refuses to say to his own base that your neighbors are not the enemy.
	And he refuses to, if he doesn't refuse to characterize his neighbors as the enemy, this is going to get much worse.
	Much, much more quickly.
	All righty.
	We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	First, you can't forget to end your week by checking out the Andrew Klavan Show.
	Drew's show is every Friday.
	He's got an exciting evening planned for you, as always.
	Head on over to dailywire.com at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, 6 p.m.
	Central.
	Tune in.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
	Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Bluver.
	Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
	Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
	Post Producer Justin Barber.
	The show is edited by Adam Sievitz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
	Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
	You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
	But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

▲