Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 5, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

45:54

Biden Doesn’t Give Two Damns About Norms | Ep. 1347

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Joe Biden makes excuses for protesters following a Democratic senator into a bathroom, and Facebook goes down for six hours while the media prepare a full frontal assault on the company.
	In order to suppress conservative information, of course.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Stand up for your digital rights.
	Take action at expressvpn.com.
	Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
	First, here is your reminder you're paying way too much money for your cell phone coverage.
	And if you think to yourself, well, you know, I need to because I have Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile and those companies have really good coverage.
	Here's the thing.
	You can get the same coverage as one of the giant companies and save yourself a bunch of money in the process instead of paying for all of those companies and their thousands of retail stores and their added perks that you never use.
	Pure Talk USA will save you from all of that.
	They're not charging you for any of that garbage.
	Instead, they give you killer 5G coverage on the same 5G network as one of the big guys for about half the cost.
	The average family is saving over $800 a year.
	So what exactly is your excuse?
	I made the switch.
	You can keep your number, keep your phone, or get huge discounts on the latest iPhones and Androids.
	Get unlimited talk, text, and six gigs of data for just $30 a month.
	And listen, if you still want unlimited data, you can still get that and save a fortune over the other guys.
	Go to puretalk.com, shop for the plan that's right for you.
	They have a 30-day risk-free guarantee, so you literally have nothing to lose.
	Go to PeerTalk.com, enter promo code SHAPIRO, you will save 50% off your very first month of coverage.
	That is PeerTalk.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
	PeerTalk is simply smarter wireless.
	Alrighty, so as I have suggested, the Democrats eventually will get to some sort of agreement on spending here.
	I think it is very unlikely they come to no agreement with regard to spending, but that agreement is going to look a lot more like what Joe Manchin wants than like what the squad want.
	It's going to end up being about $2 trillion.
	This is something that President Biden is now saying.
	According to Politico, Biden summoned progressives to a virtual meeting to deliver a simple message per a senior White House official.
	He told them the end point would be about $2 trillion.
	He wanted their input on what that should look like.
	And so he's saying, I'm going to go with Sinema and Manchin because I really have no choice, but I'm going to let you guys write large sloths of the bill.
	It was part of a week-long project by Biden Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to gradually let it sink in with liberals.
	The reconciliation bill really will be dramatically scaled back.
	Now, remember, we're still talking about spending over $3 trillion between this $2 trillion spending bill, which undoubtedly will be closer to $3 trillion when you kick in all of the perks and you get rid of all of the games, the gaming of the accounting systems.
	When you add that together with the $1.2 trillion that's going to be spent on this infrastructure boondoggle package, you're talking about spending, again, $3 trillion.
	That's after Joe Biden earlier this year spent $2 trillion on the so-called American Jobs Plan.
	So that is a lot, a lot, a lot of money.
	But it's being treated as though it's sort of a moderate concession to go to $2 trillion.
	I'm old enough to remember when it was a big deal that the federal government every year was spending $4 trillion.
	Now we're spending $5, $6, $7 trillion.
	And everybody's like, wow, look how moderate we are.
	Look how much we've slowed this train.
	Uh-huh.
	Well, the real issue inside the Democratic Party, of course, is that there is a boiling battle between the far left and the so-called moderate caucus.
	And it is causing all sorts of chaos inside the Democratic Party because Joe Biden, all of his sympathies are with the radicals, but the practicalities are with the moderates.
	And if Joe Biden actually wanted to get a lot of things done, he should have come out earlier and just endorsed the moderate position and then put a lot of pressures on the progressives.
	Instead, he put a lot of pressure on the moderates.
	It went nowhere.
	And now he's being forced to go back to the progressives and basically beg them for their help.
	The Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to proclaim that they're getting things done, and it's only the Republicans who are obstructing things.
	Jamie Harrison, the head of the DNC, was on with MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle, and he says that the new slogan for the Democrats is that Democrats deliver and Republicans obstruct.
	Yeah, that's not going to work, guys, especially because the stuff you're delivering is stuff that pretty much nobody is demanding.
	Here is the head of the DNC, Jamie Harrison.
	We deliver for the American people.
	That is our message going in 2022.
	Democrats deliver.
	Republicans obstruct.
	Democrats are the ones who do set these deadlines, though.
	They're trying to protect the tax cut for Jeff Bezos when we're just trying to get the mom-and-pop shops on Main Street to make sure that they sell.
	Republicans are not in power.
	You are.
	Okay, and that in the end is going to be the problem for the Democrats, because they either own passing a giant boondoggle package that involves massive tax increases that are going to hamper the economic recovery, or they don't pass it and they look like obstructionists.
	So, it's a real problem for the Democratic Party.
	Now, what you'll hear from the media, the drumbeat for the next couple of weeks as the Democrats start to put together this $2 trillion package, is that every element is super popular on its own.
	Well, that's always true.
	Because if you ask Americans about free stuff, they will always tell you yes.
	And then you'll tell them about the attendant tax increases and the economic hampering.
	You'll talk about the inflation.
	You'll talk about the fact that the national debt is going up.
	And then they start to get a little bit less sanguine about each one of these individual programs.
	So what you're going to hear is propaganda from the media about how what we really need is universal child care.
	And what we really need is a full-fledged increase in the earned income tax credit, which really is not an earned income tax credit.
	It is really a disincentive for marriage.
	That's according to Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, both of whom are in favor of the earned income tax credit as a general rule.
	You're going to hear about all the wonders and glories of these programs, and the media are going to minimize all the costs of the programs by saying all the rich people are going to bear it, when in reality, everyone is going to bear it because the economy is completely interlaced.
	When your boss gets taxed, that gets passed down to you, just as when your company is profitable, it tends to raise wages.
	But the Democrats don't believe that, and so they're going to run full forward on this thing.
	The real campaign the Democrats are going to try and carry forward, however, and I don't think it's going to work because, again, they do have total power.
	There's a case to be made.
	And one of the worst things that has happened for the Democrats is that the Democrats actually won those Senate seats in Georgia because now people expect them to do stuff.
	But then the stuff that they are expected to do, people don't like very much.
	Joe Biden is trying to say that the Republicans are really bad for not raising the debt limit.
	And he's saying that this is just half of it is Democrats deliver, the other half is Republicans obstruct.
	Here's Joe Biden.
	Man, just every day he looks worse and worse.
	He really just looks decrepit at this point.
	We're not expecting Republicans to do their part.
	They made it clear from the beginning.
	We tried asking to no avail.
	We're just asking them not to use procedural tricks to block us from doing the job that they won't do.
	The meteor is headed to crash into our economy.
	Democrats are willing to do all the work stopping it.
	Republicans just have to let us do our job.
	Just get out of the way.
	If you don't want to help save the country, get out of the way so you don't destroy it.
	Republicans are going to destroy the country if they don't vote for an increase in the debt ceiling.
	By the way, Democrats can do it without Republican approval.
	All they have to do is add in the debt ceiling increase into the reconciliation bill.
	That's all they have to do.
	The problem for the Democrats is that they don't want to use the extra reconciliation process.
	They only get to do it two or three times a year.
	They don't want to use the reconciliation process on the increase in the debt ceiling.
	You know who knows this, by the way, is Joe Biden.
	Back in 2004, for example, Joe Biden actually said he would not vote to raise the debt limit.
	This is from the Congressional Record.
	November 17, 2004, quote, I was not able to participate in today's debate and vote on the extension of the national debt limit. Had I been here to vote, I would have cast a symbolic vote against an extension of the debt limit. Today's fiscal mess, the transformation of historic surpluses into record deficits is not an accident. It is the inevitable outcome of policies that consistently ignored evidence and experience. Many of us in Congress argued we could not afford to do everything and we needed a fiscal policy that matched our revenues with our expenditures.
	We're here today because that advice was ignored, those hard choices were ducked, and the bill for our decision will be sent to our children and grandchildren in the form of additional debt we will authorize today.
	My symbolic vote against raising the debt limit would have been a protest of the policies that brought us to this point and a demand that we change course.
	Senator Joe Biden, November 17, 2004.
	But now if Republicans say the exact same thing to Joe Biden, this means that they are ready to watch a meteor hit planet Earth.
	But again, all of this is really just a distraction from the fact that there's this large international warfare going on inside the Democratic Party.
	Joe Biden, for his part, is trying to pretend that the timeline doesn't matter.
	Yesterday, he was he was gruff with people saying it doesn't matter when we pass it.
	It could be in six days, six hours, six months or six years.
	We will eventually pass this thing.
	I'm telling you, we're going to get this done.
	It doesn't matter when.
	It doesn't matter whether it's in six minutes, six days, or six weeks.
	We're gonna get it done.
	All right.
	And what's interesting is to watch as the Democrats really do try to game the system.
	When I talk about gaming the accounting system, one of the things Democrats will typically do when it comes to a giant bill like this is they will use provisions In order to lower the estimated amount of debt that aren't real.
	So for example, they will say that a program kicks in in five years and then they'll only estimate the cost out to 10 years when the program continues beyond the 10-year limit.
	Or they'll say that a program begins in 2022 and sunsets in 2027, knowing full well that once a program has been established, Congress will likely vote to extend the program.
	This is why James Clyburn, for example, from South Carolina, is why he's been saying that we need to stop talking about tenure numbers at all.
	Instead, we should probably just, you know, we should probably just put these systems in place for a small period of time, and then we should pretend as though they're not going to have outlandish costs down the road.
	We need to stop talking about these 10-year numbers.
	That's what got people so out of whack.
	They don't realize that when you use that 3.5 number, you're talking about 10 years.
	People think in terms of budgeting, 1, 2, 3, sometimes 5 years, unless it's your house mortgage, you don't think in terms beyond that.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, you don't have to think about terms beyond that because that would actually require us to, you know, use some forethought.
	Bottom line in all of this, Joe Biden decided he was going to side with the progressives.
	The only thing that has stood in the way of Joe Biden getting his progressive dreams done is Manchin and Sinema.
	No less a personage than Alexander Ocasio-Cortez has claimed Joe Biden as one of their own.
	Here is AOC talking about how they have now essentially borged Joe Biden and he is now a member of the Sanders crew.
	I think that President Biden has been a good faith partner to the entire Democratic Party.
	He is in fact a moderate and we disagree on certain issues, but he reaches out and he actually tries to understand our perspective and that is why I am fighting for his agenda with the Build Back Better Act.
	So, it's fun to watch Joe Biden, who's now been completely hijacked by the radical left, to the extent that he is now giving the go-ahead to the most radical members of the radical left.
	Now remember, we've been told that Joe Biden is a moderate, and the Democratic Party is a party of moderates.
	We were told that the only people who are into norm-breaking are the people on the right.
	Donald Trump was a guy who's going to violate norms, who's all about norm violation, shattering the norms.
	And there are some people who celebrated that.
	Joe Biden shattered norms.
	Barack Obama shattered norms.
	The dirty little secret of American politics is that when you grant all power to the executive branch, pretty quickly norms begin to be shattered.
	And when the American people are willing to run roughshod over norms to get to utopia, those norms end up being trampled.
	Joe Biden was Captain Norms when he was in the Senate, right?
	He was the guy who was working across the aisle, and he was the one who was upholding the filibuster and all this.
	Now he's talking about shattering the filibuster.
	Now he is talking about how the Democrats need to ram through every deal without any bipartisan support.
	Hey, this reared its ugliest head yesterday when protesters followed Kyrsten Sinema, who's the senator from Arizona, who, again, is sort of the Democratic John McCain in all of this.
	Protesters followed Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom.
	Here's a little bit of a view of what that looked like.
	We need a Build Back Better plan right now.
	We knocked on doors for you to get you elected, and just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don't support what you promised us.
	We need $7 million in citizenship for $7 million.
	We need the Build Back Better plan right now.
	I'm just going to point out here that it is my personal belief that everyone ought to be able to poop in peace.
	This is my personal belief.
	I want to live in an America where we can all take a dump in privacy and peace.
	If that's too much for you, well...
	You can find plenty of left-wing programs that will tell you differently.
	I was told that women's spaces were sacred spaces.
	Apparently not, if you're going to vote in favor of a bipartisan infrastructure act, but not in favor of a $3.5 trillion spending act.
	Now, the part of this that's amazing is how much kind of soft support the protesters receive for following Kyrsten Sinema into a bathroom.
	Imagine if it were Republicans following Kyrsten Sinema into a bathroom.
	There would have been talk of rape culture.
	There would have been talk of the fears that women have to experience when they go into a public restroom of assault.
	That these are private spaces.
	But when it's leftists following Kyrsten Sinema into a bathroom, very different story.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
	First, let's talk about a simple fact.
	One way to get yourself in serious financial trouble is to take out a credit card and then just keep spending on it without paying back the initial amount.
	You do that and you can find yourself really behind the eight ball.
	What you need to do is consolidate that credit card debt.
	You can do that with a credit card consolidation loan from Lightstream.
	Rates start at 4.98% APR with auto pay and excellent credit.
	Plus, the rate is fixed so it will never go up over the life of the loan.
	You can get a loan from $5,000 to $100,000.
	There are absolutely no fees.
	You can even get your money as soon as the day you apply.
	Lightstream believes that people with good credit deserve a better loan experience.
	That is exactly what they deliver.
	Just for my listeners, apply right now.
	You get a special interest rate discount and save even more.
	The only way to get that discount is to go to Lightstream.com slash Shapiro.
	That is L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M.com slash Shapiro.
	Lightstream.com slash Shapiro.
	Subject to credit approval rates range from 4.98% APR to 19.99% APR.
	They include a 0.50% auto pay discount.
	Lowest rate.
	Requires excellent credit.
	Terms and conditions apply.
	Offers are subject to change without notice.
	Visit lightstream.com slash Shapiro for more information.
	That's lightstream.com slash Shapiro.
	Okay, so the protesters follow Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom.
	And Joe Biden is asked about this yesterday.
	Now, you would imagine that Joe Biden, remember he ran for office.
	On the basis of he was a moral person who was going to restore the soul of the nation.
	No more norms violations.
	Back to norms.
	Back to conciliatory language.
	Back to unity.
	Well, Joe Biden was asked about people following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom.
	And here were his rather tepid remarks.
	Senator Sinema last time was chased into a restroom.
	Do you think that those tactics are crossing a line?
	I don't think they're appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody.
	From the only people it doesn't happen to are people who have secret service standing around them. So it's part of the process. It's part of the process.
	It's part of the process.
	It's inappropriate, but it happens to everybody and it's part of the process.
	Does it, though?
	Does it really happen to everybody?
	And is the response from the President of the United States the same way?
	It's amazing what sort of norm violation is considered totally okay or unworthy of further comment by the Democratic establishment and what sort of norm violation is deeply worthy of comment by the establishment.
	If Tucker Carlson does a segment about military uniforms for pregnant pilots, that is worthy of the worst sort of ire from the federal government.
	But if a sitting United States senator is followed into the bathroom by protesters, then that is worthy of a shrug, a little bit of a, you know, it happens, whatever.
	Again, it is incredible the sort of treatment to which the Democrats believe that people ought to be subjected so long as they are on the wrong side of a political issue.
	Remember, she's a Democratic senator.
	This is not even a Republican.
	But this goes all the way back to the Trump administration.
	This goes back to the notion that if you have the wrong sorts of views, then you ought to be browbeaten.
	If you have the wrong sorts of views, then you ought to be run out of restaurants like Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
	If you have the wrong sort of views, you ought to be intimidated in life.
	Like this, Kristen Sinema will be fine.
	She's a sitting United States Senator.
	But the problem is that this sort of attitude bleeds down to pretty much everything.
	If you have the wrong views in American life, you can be bullied out of your job, you can be ostracized from your social community, you can be treated like garbage, and a lot of people will just kind of shrug and go, well, you know, you deserved it.
	You had the wrong sorts of views.
	That's really, really ugly stuff.
	And unfortunately, you saw a lot of blue checks on Twitter yesterday who are basically talking up that sort of position.
	And most famously, Jezebel, which is of course a radical left site, they put up a piece titled, The Senator is holding all of us back and some of her most vulnerable constituents are rightfully sick of it.
	This is by a columnist named Ashley Reeves, quote, the effectiveness of certain kinds of protests will always be up for debate.
	So naturally, a group of activists pursuing Senator Kyrsten Sinema around Arizona State University campus over the weekend and controversially somehow briefly following Sinema into a public restroom to note that their family members were deported is bound to prompt some pearl clutching.
	On Sunday, social justice organization Living United for Change in Arizona uploaded a video of activists asking Sinema to defend her opposition to President Biden's Build Back Better Act.
	Democrats at large support the bill, but Manchin and Sinema do not.
	It's no wonder her constituents, who don't understand what the F she's doing any better than the rest of us, are piping mad.
	Mad enough to pester her after she finished teaching a class at ASU.
	Lucha's video shows a group of activists waiting outside Sinema's classroom.
	When she emerges, they ask if they could talk to her briefly about the importance of Build Back Better.
	She says, actually, I'm heading out.
	And then she went down to a bathroom.
	We knocked on doors for you to get elected, said an activist named Blanca, and just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don't support what you promised us.
	Cue the sounds of toilets flushing.
	Apparently, the only thing not right was following Sinema into the bathroom.
	Just, wow, just terrible.
	Just terrible.
	How could, you know, how could people be upset that this would happen?
	So Jen Psaki yesterday, she tried to walk this back because even some of the members of the Biden administration are like, this is a little much.
	So here's Jen Psaki trying to walk this back a little bit.
	What happened this weekend was that her classroom, her students, and the safe and intellectually stimulating environment she's worked to create during the years of teaching at ASU was breached.
	That's inappropriate and unacceptable. And I think the context of what happened here is important, despite the fact that, of course, we stand for, the president stands for, the fundamental right of people to protest, to object, to criticize, as they often do outside of the gates of the White House.
	Okay, so the question for the Democratic Party is going to be whether they actually Because remember, we can pretend that this is sort of an isolated incident, but main large parts of the Democratic Party last year were fine with people burning down entire cities.
	We spent an entire year pretending that riots weren't happening in America's major cities so that the media and Democrats could pretend that the protests over George Floyd's death had not, in fact, morphed into riots.
	Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, the current President of the United States, Vice President, I make the mistake, the same mistake Joe Biden makes, Vice President Kamala Harris is tweeting out bail funds for people who are burning things down in places like Minnesota.
	So when we talk about norm violation and rule breaking and where we go from here, we have to understand that if the norm, in many cases, the norm violation is happening inside the House and it has now hijacked many of the people who used to be considered moderates, including Joe Biden.
	And that is very scary for the future of the country.
	It matters an awful lot more than how much money we spend in the next month or so.
	That matters an awful lot.
	But I'll tell you what matters even more is the fact that we have now reached the point in American politics where huge swaths of the American people are just like, you can do whatever you want to do so long as it helps you achieve the purpose you want to achieve.
	That is a recipe for the country falling apart.
	Meanwhile, Yesterday's big story is that Facebook had gone dark.
	So Facebook went dark for about six hours yesterday and the Facebook stock dropped.
	It apparently was some sort of hack.
	Facebook and Instagram were down for some amount of hours yesterday.
	And this prompted a lot of talk about Facebook and its evil.
	This was also prompted by a Facebook whistleblower named Frances Haugen, who was on 60 Minutes.
	This is all in preparation for a democratic full frontal assault on Facebook.
	This Facebook whistleblower was talking about how Instagram in particular had done internal research and they found that, shock of shocks, teenage girls were not doing well after using Instagram.
	Now, this has been true of pretty much everything in media for as long as I've been alive.
	It turns out the research shows that girls looking at glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan, not particularly good for self-image, that any sort of chat room for girls, any sort of interconnection for teenage girls that is outside of sort of the interpersonal, really is not great for mental health.
	But Frances Haugen over at Facebook is now a whistleblower and she's a whistleblower because there is an attempt right now by Democrats to basically take Facebook down a peg.
	The story of Facebook is kind of fascinating in the sense that it used to be celebrated by the left.
	Now it has become Persona non grata, enemy number one for the left.
	We'll explain that in just one moment.
	First, let us talk about a simple fact.
	And that is that right now, it's a very difficult time to hire.
	If you're an employer, you would have thought, well, look at all these people who are unemployed.
	I mean, that's a huge pool of people to choose from.
	But right now, actually, there are more job openings than people who are actually seeking the jobs.
	This means you need the best.
	And this is where ZipRecruiter's Invite to Apply comes in.
	It gives you, the hiring manager, the power to pick your favorites from top candidates.
	And right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
	How does Invite to Apply work?
	Well, when you post a job on ZipRecruiter, they send you the most qualified people for your job.
	Then you can easily review the candidates and invite your top choices to apply for your job.
	Lauren Webb, SVP of Talent Acquisition for Manzula Health, raves about ZipRecruiter's invites to apply.
	She says, I love that feature.
	You have a much higher follow-through rate if I invite candidates.
	It's easy for me.
	It's easy for them.
	In fact, according to ZipRecruiter's internal data, jobs where employers use ZipRecruiter's invite to apply get on average two and a half times more candidates, which helps make for a faster hiring process.
	See for yourself, just go to this exclusive web address, ZipRecruiter.com slash D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E to try ZipRecruiter for free.
	That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Daily Wire.
	ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
	Okay, so again, Facebook went down yesterday, and that was kind of the big news.
	But the really big news is the coordinated assault on Facebook that is now happening by Democratic media and politicians, right?
	It is a coordinated assault.
	So, to understand exactly what they're doing with Facebook, you have to understand why Facebook is a danger to the democratic media complex.
	So, before 2016, Facebook was a darling of the left.
	Facebook had been used to great success by Barack Obama in 2012 to mobilize all the people who were going to vote for him and to organize on the ground.
	Facebook was this great godsend.
	If you go back and look at the media coverage of Facebook circa 2010, 2011, 2012, it was very largely positive.
	And then something happened.
	Something that happened was 2016.
	In 2016, Donald Trump won.
	And when Donald Trump won, the left started to look for a bogeyman.
	They couldn't blame Hillary Clinton.
	They couldn't blame themselves.
	Because they had convinced themselves after 2012 that they had a durable, never-to-lose coalition.
	They had a coalition that would never be defeated electorally again.
	It was a coalition of the dispossessed.
	There was African Americans for Barack Obama, and gays for Barack Obama, and Hispanics for Barack Obama, and college-educated white liberals for Barack Obama.
	And this coalition, when you put them all together, would never lose again.
	And then Trump won.
	And for a brief moment in time, in the media, there was this moment where they said, maybe we've missed something.
	Maybe we should go out and actually talk to people, instead of just considering them evil, horrific, deplorables.
	And then the moment ended and they decided, no, it can't be us who's wrong.
	We are not wrong.
	It's the children who are wrong.
	They did a full principal Skinner from The Simpsons.
	And they decided Facebook was the problem.
	It had been Facebook, because if Facebook had not allowed all of this dissemination of speech, then presumably Hillary Clinton would have won.
	And the way that they tried to cover for the fact that they don't like freedom of speech is by saying it was Russian interference on Facebook.
	Now, anybody who actually looked at the stats on Russian interference on Facebook understands that the amount of actual dissemination of Russian material was extremely low.
	In the number of people actually affected by Russian disinformation, the Senate did a full report and they were putting up posts that were supposedly the election shifters that had like a thousand shares.
	I had more shares for my Facebook page in a month than the entire quote-unquote Russian operation had in over a year.
	Did I shift the entire election in favor of Donald Trump?
	Of course not.
	It's very silly.
	But the media had to go with this narrative because, of course, somebody had to pay.
	And it turns out that this narrative also allowed the Democratic media establishment to try and re-establish the monopoly on informational dissemination that they have been seeking since the rise of alternative media.
	Back in the 60s, 70s, there were only a few daily papers that were national, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal.
	There were only a couple of channels that were national, ABC, CBS, NBC.
	That's where you got your news.
	And there were some local news channels.
	That was it.
	And then with the rise of the internet, there came this ability to actually critique and find alternative viewpoints on stories and sometimes find alternative stories that were just not covered by the media.
	And this started to eat into the media's market share.
	And so the media had two choices.
	And you've seen them take both.
	One was they could double down on their base.
	This is why the New York Times is now indistinguishable from Salon.com.
	and, right, because they did both, they could attempt to crack down on the methods of dissemination of information and reestablish a media monopoly.
	And the way they would do that is by cuddling Facebook into suppressing traffic from their competitors.
	The idea was if we can reestablish the dominance of legacy media, then things will go back to normal.
	It'll help us.
	It'll help us, the media, in our quest for oligarchic control of informational dissemination and market share.
	And it'll help Democrats because, of course, all of the major outlets, the legacy media outlets in American life, those outlets all slant to the left and coordinate pretty openly with the Democratic Party.
	Okay, so the latest assault on Facebook is part of this.
	Understand nobody in the media truly cares about Instagram and its effect on teenage girls.
	It's been the right largely that has been very critical of kids using the internet in these ways for years and years and years and years.
	I'm not letting my kids use the internet until they're essentially 18.
	I have no intention of letting my kids traffic around on Instagram.
	With that said, the Democrats were kind of happy with all this stuff, right?
	Social media is where you go for approval when you're gender transitioning.
	Social media is where you go when you come out of the closet.
	Social media is where you go when you're looking for support for a fringe left-wing position.
	Social media is where you go when you're coordinating the revolution.
	Social media is how you escape the bonds of your confinement at your home and find a more sympathetic audience.
	These are the things that many members of the left have been saying for years and years and years.
	Now they're very upset, however, with these exact same services on a very selective level.
	So understand that the attack on Instagram really is not about Instagram.
	The left is not looking to crack down on Instagram in any serious way.
	What they're looking to do is force Zuckerberg and force Facebook and force all of these outlets into compliance with what they believe should be the informational dissemination rules.
	So the latest element of this attack is the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
	She was on 60 Minutes talking about how Facebook had information that Instagram was damaging to teenage girls and they continued to operate their business.
	Frances Haugen plans to testify before Congress this week.
	She believes the federal government should impose regulations.
	Facebook has demonstrated they cannot act independently.
	Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety.
	It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety.
	I'm hoping that this will have had a big enough impact on the world that they get the fortitude and the motivation to actually go put those regulations into place.
	Okay, so understand, the whistleblower didn't whistleblow on anything.
	She didn't actually give you any information you didn't already have.
	Was there anybody in America who is unaware that Instagram is damaging to teenage girls?
	It's been known for quite a while.
	But again, teenage girls online in a wide variety of settings, coordinating with one another is very typically not a wonderful thing.
	Teenage boys too, right?
	Teenagers generally coordinating with each other, like teenagers are not fully developed brain-wise and they tend to make really dumb decisions.
	And when they're networked with each other, the decisions get dumber and dumber.
	And this has been true for a very long time.
	But why are the media playing this up?
	So Facebook responded to this report from 60 Minutes.
	They said, every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place.
	We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content.
	To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.
	They said, we've invested heavily in people and technology to keep our platform safe and have made fighting misinformation and providing authoritative information a priority.
	If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.
	We have a strong track record of using our research to inform changes to our app.
	They say hosting hateful or harmful content is bad for our community, bad for advertisers, and ultimately bad for our business.
	Our incentive is to provide a safe, meaningful experience for billions of people who use Facebook.
	And they say that the goal of meaningful social interactions, there's a metric called meaningful social interactions, which is what they use to boost traffic on particular posts.
	They say the goal of the meaningful social interactions ranking change is in the name.
	Improve people's experience by prioritizing posts that inspire interactions, particularly conversations between friends and family, which research shows is better for people's well-being, and deprioritizing public content.
	Research shows polarization has been growing in the United States for decades.
	So, again, what Facebook is saying here, because most of what this report has been focused on in the media is Instagram, but the other part of the whistleblower talk is how Facebook is prioritizing quote-unquote hate speech, and how they're incentivizing hate speech.
	Okay, understand why the media is covering that?
	They're saying that because when they say hate speech, what they mean is shows they don't like, and people talking they don't like.
	They mean the New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
	They mean shows like this one.
	They mean information disseminated from the Daily Wire.
	That is what they mean.
	That is very clearly what they're attempting to do.
	It is no coincidence that the Facebook whistleblower is a longtime Democratic donor.
	According to the National Pulse, she donated 36 times to Democrats, including to AOC.
	That is not a shock in any way, shape, or form.
	It is also not a shock that the top Democratic operative Bill Burton is advising the Facebook whistleblower.
	According to the Washington Free Beacon, she's getting strategic communications guidance from a top Democratic operative.
	Burton is now deeply integrated with an emerging infrastructure on the left comprised of individuals and organizations, including the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, seeking to press Facebook to more aggressively police political content.
	In Hogan's public testimony, industry and political insiders see a sophisticated communications campaign intended to put Facebook on defense from a steady trickle of leaked internal documents that fueled a Wall Street Journal investigative series dubbed the Facebook Files to the blockbuster 60 Minutes interview to congressional testimony scheduled to begin on Tuesday.
	Hogan's 60 Minutes interview kicked off a media feeding frenzy with the story mentioned at least 200 times on cable news since the segment aired.
	Burton's involvement helping to manage Hogan's public debut suggests her argument is part of a broader Democratic initiative.
	This, of course, is exactly true.
	Because, remember, the goal of the Democrats is to get Facebook to crack down on information that Democrats do not like.
	That is the goal.
	And it's coming from the White House, by the way.
	This is coordinated.
	Here is Jen Psaki explaining that what this whistleblower interview shows is that, quote-unquote, self-regulation isn't working.
	Okay, now, as Facebook says, what sort of regulation would actually work here?
	It's very funny.
	There are people on the right who say, well, you know, we on the left and the right, we can agree that Facebook needs to be regulated.
	What you don't understand if you say that is that the way that the right wants to regulate Facebook is by forcing Facebook to allow more content.
	The way that the left wishes to regulate Facebook is by forcing Facebook to allow less content.
	That is a fundamental debate that is not going to be bridged here.
	Here's Jen Psaki essentially calling for censorship.
	In our view, this is just the latest in a series of revelations about social media platforms that make clear that self-regulation is not working.
	That's long been the president's view and been the view of this administration.
	They validate the significant concern that the president and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed about how social media giants operate and the power they've amassed.
	Okay, understand that what this really is, is government control.
	Okay, they are looking for government control.
	Margaret Sullivan, the columnist for the Washington Post, she says, what we really should be pushing for here is, get ready for it, a new federal agency focused on the digital economy.
	Hey, more federal government, that'll be the solution.
	Remember that part where it said, Congress shall not abridge freedom of speech?
	Remember that part?
	Yeah, that's gone.
	We need a new federal agency that is given the power to effectively just slap any company that disseminates information That Democrats don't like, I guess is presumably the way this would work.
	The idea comes from none other than a former FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, who maintains that neither his agency nor the Federal Trade Commission are nimble or tech-savvy enough to protect consumers in a volatile and evolving industry.
	You need an agency that doesn't say, here are the rigid rules, when the rules become obsolete almost immediately, said Wheeler.
	So, if we really want to think about the public interest in the fast-paced digital world, it will be necessary to revise the, quote, cumbersome, top-down rulemaking process that has been in place since the industrial era, Wheeler wrote in a Harvard-Schornstein Center paper.
	Digital platforms like Facebook and Google have become pseudo-governments that make the rules, said Wheeler.
	So instead, what they need are a bunch of people in government who don't actually have to say what the rules are.
	They can just go around and do exactly what they want.
	It's kind of an incredible thing that they're calling for.
	I mean, they're calling for pretty much top-down tyranny.
	You know, the rule of law requires that you have easily interpretable, neutrally applicable rules.
	What's being called for by Margaret Sullivan is a government agency that has no rules, but has nearly unlimited power over this area of American life.
	Now listen, Facebook has made its own bed here in some ways.
	Because for years, Facebook stood up to the left and then Facebook started to collapse to the left.
	I mean, back in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg said at Georgetown University, quote, people no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard.
	That has important consequences.
	I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people's hands.
	This is when Zuckerberg was a big free speech advocate.
	And then the left put so much pressure on that Facebook started to suppress information.
	Apparently in the belief that if they were nice to the left, the left would leave them alone.
	Wrong!
	Once the left's got its foot in the door, now the left is going to go the rest of the way.
	And they are going to go after Facebook.
	And, you know, we on the right, again, a lot of people on the right are very skeptical of Facebook.
	I think that skepticism is in many ways justified, as I'll discuss in a moment.
	But understand that if Facebook gets shut down, or if Facebook gets restricted by the federal government, the outlets that are going to suffer are not the New York Times, or CNN, or MSNBC.
	The outlets that are going to suffer are all of the competitive brands.
	Because those competitive brands have been using Facebook as a distribution platform in new media.
	All these other platforms we're talking about have been around for 30 years.
	DailyWare has been around since 2015.
	That's why there is a coordinated campaign against the spigot.
	If Facebook is the spigot, the goal of the left is to shut off the spigot, your access to information.
	That's what this is really about.
	You don't have to love Zuckerberg to believe that.
	You don't have to love Facebook to believe that.
	You can be very critical of Facebook's willingness to concede to exactly the people seeking to shut off the spigot, which we'll discuss in a moment.
	But you gotta understand what exactly they're trying to do because it is perfectly obvious at this point.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	First, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you probably heard me talk about my Helix mattress.
	It is the greatest mattress because it is made just for me.
	But now, we have exciting news.
	Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas.
	They just launched a new company called Allform.
	They're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped directly to your door.
	So, what makes an all-form sofa really cool?
	Well, for starters, it's the easiest way you can customize a sofa using premium materials and at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores.
	You can pick your fabric, and it's spill, stain, scratch resistant, the sofa color, the color of the legs, sofa size, shape.
	Make sure it is perfect for you and your home.
	They've got armchairs and loveseats all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, so there's something for everybody.
	And you can always start small and buy more seats later on if you want your all-form sofa to grow and change with you when you move.
	For my family, I picked out the three-seat sofa with chaise and the sand color with espresso legs.
	It is fabulous.
	Honestly, it is the greatest sofa to nap on.
	I need a nap right now.
	And now that I'm thinking about it, I really want to go home and just climb on my Allform sofa.
	If getting a sofa without trying it in store sounds risky, don't worry.
	You got 100 days to decide if you want to keep it.
	That's more than three months.
	And if you don't love it, I'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund.
	They also have a forever warranty, literally for all time.
	To find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com slash ben.
	And Allform is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners at allform.com slash ben today.
	Go check them out.
	Alrighty, we'll get to more on this in just a moment.
	First, The legacy media has dominated the podcast world until now.
	Our newest podcast, Morning Wire, is here to bring you the facts to start your day.
	It's the only daily news podcast that values your time and the truth.
	And while we're working overtime to bring you the news you need to know, we need your help to keep the facts trending toward number one.
	So please subscribe.
	Start listening now to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
	Leave a five-star review.
	If you like what you hear, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	And if you're a big fan of the show, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	And if you like what you hear, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	And if you like what you hear, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative So, a few weeks ago, Facebook put out a notice as to how they distribute content, their content distribution guidelines.
	So, here at the DailyWare, over the last year, right, just before the election, it became very clear that Facebook had changed its standards and was now suppressing content.
	We could see it in our traffic stats.
	We could see how Facebook had started to suppress our traffic, essentially.
	And now they are admitting exactly how they do this.
	And the way that they do this is by setting standards that explicitly benefit the legacy media.
	And so there's a certain irony to the legacy media now using that as a foot in the doorway to just ram through all the way and destroy Facebook wholesale.
	As always, cowardice is met not with some sort of conciliatory approval by those who are seeking a concession.
	Cowardice is met with abject humiliation.
	If you are a coward, they will come and they will destroy your business.
	If you are a coward and you give one inch to the left, the left will come in and they will break you.
	They will destroy what you have built.
	So Facebook gave much more than an inch.
	Remember, Facebook's original pitch was, we are here to allow as many people as possible to engage with as many sources as humanly possible, because you live in a world of choice, and this will allow people to actually get access to information and social networks they otherwise would not have been a part of.
	And then Facebook shifted.
	In 2018, 2019, 2020, they started talking about their responsibility to call out information that they thought was bad.
	Not information that was overtly false.
	Not information that was so far outside the Overton window that it bordered on the violent, right?
	Not any of that.
	They decided they were going to call out mainstream information and they were going to suppress mainstream information so long as that information came from a non-approved political point of view.
	And now they're making that perfectly clear, right?
	So here are their standards that they admitted to having for the past year.
	And this kind of stuff does affect elections, gang.
	What did they do?
	They said that they were going to suppress content from domains with limited original content.
	They said they were going to crack down on content that, quote, contains a large amount of content from other publishers that has been copied or only slightly modified, usually for the purposes of increasing web page volume and driving traffic.
	Now, that is explicitly directed at places that don't have massive journalistic budgets.
	Because the reality is that most sites rely on a certain amount of aggregation.
	In fact, even the mainstream media relies on a certain amount of aggregation.
	How many times have you seen a story from the New York Times laundered into the Washington Post as a rewrite of the New York Times story?
	It happens all the time.
	But Facebook was only going to crack down on one type of site for this sort of activity.
	Then, Facebook said they were going to crack down on traffic rooted in fact-checked misinformation.
	So they downgraded, quote, content that has been debunked as false, altered, or partly false by non-partisan third-party fact-checking organizations who partner with Facebook and have been certified by the International Fact-Checking Organization.
	So as we've detailed expansively on this show and at Daily Wire, fact-checking organizations who have been approved by the so-called International Fact-Checking Network are almost entirely left-wing propaganda agencies dedicated to the upholding of left-wing lies and the suppression of right-wing truths.
	So, if you say things that are true, fact-checkers will very often suggest that you have said something that is false.
	This sort of stuff happens, like, all the time.
	They will say that you are missing context.
	They'll admit openly that what you're saying is true in the body of the piece, and then they will say, mixed.
	Their rating will be mixed.
	Meanwhile, if you're a leftist and you say something overtly false, like the cost of the Build Back Better agenda is zero, they will say that it's mostly true because it's covered by tax dollars.
	The fact-checking organizations are propaganda outlets.
	So basically, Facebook outsourced to a bunch of left-wing propaganda outlets the ability to suppress traffic from anybody who disagrees.
	Facebook also said they would cut down on quote-unquote inauthentic sharing.
	According to Facebook, link posts will be reduced when they are shared a high number of times, and the majority of that sharing comes from accounts that recently and repeatedly engaged in hyper-sharing content relative to the average person who uses our service.
	So in other words, if the most excited people tend to retweet Daily Wire articles or repost them on Facebook, then the content will be suppressed.
	You have to have the average Joe, who may not be all that politically aware or informed, tweeting out stuff or putting it up on Facebook in order for Facebook to allow the traffic to aggregate.
	Facebook cut down on traffic from links to domains and pages with a high quote-unquote click gap.
	According to Facebook, they restricted, quote, links to websites that receive a particularly disproportionate amount of their traffic directly from Facebook compared to the amount of traffic the websites receive from the rest of the internet.
	It is a perfect example of so-called regulatory capture by the legacy media.
	The legacy media has existed for literally over a century.
	They've built up this wellspring of people who are subscribers and who click on their stuff organically.
	For those of us who had to start our companies in the last 10 years, a large amount of our traffic comes from the place where the eyeballs are, Facebook.
	Facebook is now saying, if too high a percentage of your traffic comes from Facebook, we will crack down on your traffic.
	So we are explicitly cracking down on the places that are new media in favor of the places that are old media.
	It's like a billboard agency deciding to reject advertisements from a startup restaurant because too many customers on a percentage basis are coming into the restaurant based on the billboard rather than coming in based on quote-unquote organic traffic.
	That would obviously cut very much in favor of legacy organizations like a McDonald's or KFC and not in favor of the new startup restaurants that is simply trying to get people to come in by using billboards.
	Facebook says they're going to suppress articles that are coming from quote Non-transparent authorship.
	So if you use a staff byline or somebody uses a pseudonym online to avoid the evil political climate we've created where people are targeted in their homes, then they're going to crack down on that.
	And they cut down on posts from, quote unquote, broadly untrusted news publishers.
	What exactly is broadly untrusted?
	How exactly ought that to be decided?
	Broadly untrusted, according to Facebook, means that you have to have people from all sides of the political aisle that say that they trust you.
	Who do you think that's going to benefit?
	That's not going to benefit the new media, who are overt about their biases.
	It's going to benefit the old media, who lie about them.
	Hey, and they said they were gonna suppress content that was borderline to the community standards, including content that does not violate COVID-19 or vaccine policies, but which shares misleading or sensationalized information about vaccines in a way that would be likely to discourage vaccinations, which means they really should be cracking down on Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, but instead they're cracking down on the right.
	The point that I'm making here is that Facebook has already spent years attempting to placate the left, and now the left is seeking to destroy Facebook all the way.
	They're seeking to destroy Facebook wholesale.
	If you can't spot what it is they are trying to do.
	You're gonna miss exactly why all of a sudden there's all this information that is coming out about Facebook.
	It has nothing to do with the goodwill of the media and the attempts to crack down on bad behavior by massive social media companies.
	It's not about that.
	It's about cracking down on your ability to access the information that you want by the Democrat media complex in coordination with some insiders and Facebook itself.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
	The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
	Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
	Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
	Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
	Host Producer Justin Barber.
	The show is edited by Adam Sajevitz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Christina.
	Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
	On the Matt Wall Show, we talk about the things that matter.
	Real issues that affect you, your family, our country, not just politics, but culture, faith, current events, all the fundamentals.

▲