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Oct. 26, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:42
Chappelle’s “F*** You” Moment | Ep. 1362
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Dave Chappelle tells the cancelers to get lost, the media unify to take down Facebook for platforming conservatives, and the educational experts admit they're coming for your kids.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so we have now had in this country more controversy over Dave Chappelle making jokes about transness than we had over Joe Biden completely surrendering an entire country to the Taliban, which shows you where our priorities are as a nation.
But Dave Chappelle, for his part, is doing something quite important.
He's standing up and he's just saying no.
And that's really, really important.
It's important because most of the people who are targeted by the woke cancel culture crowd are not Dave Chappelle.
They're not one of the most powerful comedians on the planet who's worth a bajillion dollars.
Most people are people who are targeted inside their organizations, people who are outed for some comment on Facebook, people who have been ostracized from their social circles.
And when they see Dave Chappelle saying no, They too are empowered to say no because that's the thing about the cancelers.
You don't have to be cancelled if you don't want to be cancelled.
Now, that doesn't mean that you won't be fired.
It doesn't mean that you won't feel repercussions.
It does mean there's a whole side of the aisle out here waiting to embrace you if you decide that you don't care whether you are cancelled or not by people who despise you anyway.
So, Dave Chappelle did another comedy bit yesterday.
And in this comedy bit, he explicitly talked about meeting with the trans community, right?
This is something that many of the people who were protesting him demanded a meeting, a meeting.
They needed a meeting.
Now, I'm not sure what they think would get done at the meeting, other than they would get to lecture Chappelle and they think what, Chappelle was going to just sit there and apologize for his jokes, which comedians typically are not in the vein of doing.
Well, Chappelle did another comedy set last night, and he addressed exactly this complaint in demand.
To the transgender community, I'm more than willing to give you an audience.
But you will not summon me.
I am not bending to anybody's demands.
And if you want to meet with me, I'd be more than willing to, but I have some conditions.
First of all, you cannot come if you have not watched my special from beginning to end.
You must come to a place of my choosing, and a time of my choosing, And thirdly, you must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that he's funny, guys.
I'm sorry that he's funny and that he's going to continue to be very successful because he is funny.
Now, even Chappelle, who is, again, the most successful comedian on planet Earth.
Netflix pays him just oodles of cash in order to get him to do his specials with them.
Even Chappelle is now saying that he is at risk of being deplatformed.
He says he produced a documentary and many of the major Distributors will no longer touch his work other than his comedy specials.
They're happy to make money off his comedy specials, but they're not going to look at his ancillary work because he's just too offensive.
Here he was discussing this.
This film that I made was invited to every film festival in the United States, and some of those invitations I accepted.
And when this controversy came out about the close-up, they began disinviting me from these film festivals.
And now, Today, not a film company, not a movie studio, not a film festival, nobody will touch this film.
Thank God for Ted Sarandos and Netflix.
He's the only one that didn't cancel me yet.
Okay, so he's thanking God for Netflix.
We'll see how long Netflix lasts or whether they choose to undergo this controversy again.
Here's the thing, Dave Chappelle.
I'm sure that you and I disagree on nearly everything.
I'm sure that you have attacked people who work with Daily Wire.
I mean, I know you have.
You've done it publicly with, for example, Candace Owens.
I don't care.
I'd be happy to work with Dave Chappelle.
I'm sure Candace Owens would be happy to have Dave Chappelle working over here, too.
We don't care, because we are much more open-minded than the left is when it comes to jokes that target us.
Again, in Dave Chappelle's special, he tells two separate anti-Semitic jokes.
No one seems to care, including me, because the fact is that while I don't like the jokes and I don't really think they're funny, I am not the arbiter of what great humor is.
I'm not the sole arbiter, nor do I feel that people ought to be silenced on the basis of me not liking a particular joke.
So, if he's looking for distributors who are never going to cancel him, he will find himself on the right side of the aisle sooner or later, whether he likes it or not, because the left is just going to continue cordoning off all the areas where Dave Chappelle is allowed to work.
There is a great irony, by the way, in the fact that the vast majority of people who are very angry at Dave Chappelle are upper-class white liberals.
You have a black man who's become incredibly successful by telling jokes.
Coming from a background that was not wealthy.
And you have a bunch of upper-class white woke liberals who are very, very upset at Dave Chappelle because he noticed that a man is a woman.
That a man is a woman is a nonsensical statement.
Because he noticed that men are men and women are women and human beings are sexually dimorphous.
Because he noticed that, the white woke liberals are very mad.
Any other situation where you had a bunch of upper-class white folks attacking a black person, it would be totally unheard of.
It would be really wrong, right?
Just another element of the intersectional hierarchy of privilege rearing its ugly head.
But when it's Dave Chappelle telling jokes about a community that is supposedly at the top of the intersectional hierarchy of victimology, then Dave Chappelle must be brought to heel.
So good for him for saying no on all of that.
As he pointed out, he said, I've been, it's been said in the press, I was invited to speak to the transgender employees of Netflix and I refused.
That's not true.
If they'd invited me, I would have accepted it.
Although I'm confused about what we would be speaking about.
I said what I said and boy, I heard what you said.
My God, how could I not?
You said you want a safe working environment at Netflix.
It seems like I'm the only one that can't go to the office anymore.
And then he continued, he said, this really isn't about the LGBT community.
He says this has nothing to do with them.
It's about corporate interests and what I can say and what I cannot say.
For the record, I need you to know that everyone I know from that community has been loving and supporting, so I don't know what all this nonsense is about.
I'm sure that is right, by the way.
I'm sure the vast majority of LGBTQ people who watch the Chappelle special are like, eh.
Or they laughed.
Or they don't care.
But the activist class are the class that run our media and run the corporate boardrooms.
So Chappelle happens to be right about that.
So it's very important what Chappelle is doing right now.
Now, is it enough to actually create a groundswell of ignoring these folks?
I doubt it.
I mean, he praises Ted Sarandos over at Netflix.
Sarandos already offered a quasi-apology for airing Chappelle's Special.
He said, well, yeah, we should have aired Chappelle's Special, but I should have told the offended employees that I understood their feelings.
That is always the prelude to the alligator taking off an arm.
Netflix already fed them a finger.
Now it's just a matter of how far they allow the alligator to go.
Whereas Chappelle is cutting it off at the beginning.
So good for him.
Because we need more of this in our society.
More J.K.
Rowlings.
More Dave Chappelle's again.
I disagree, I'm sure, with J.K.
Rowling and Dave Chappelle on nearly everything.
But, as I've said before, the future of this country, and indeed of civilization and freedom, rests not with people on the right who have already made our call that we are in favor of individual freedom, nor does it lie with the radical left, which has made their call that they don't care about individual freedom so long as they are pursuing quote-unquote, redistributive justice.
It lies in the middle, with people who may have sympathy for the agenda items of the radical left, but who believe that individual rights take precedence, and that a force to choose between individual rights and preservation of their durability And the agenda items of the left, they will choose individual rights and the preservation of their durability, even if it takes longer to get to their policy preference.
All right, meanwhile, speaking of folks who are trying to shut down the pipelines of information, you've seen this coordinated assault on Facebook from the media, and it is truly coordinated.
We've seen something like 17 newspapers all releasing different parts of these so-called Facebook papers.
Now, from where I sit, this is basically a nothing burger.
Facebook is a giant corporation.
It does business in hundreds of countries around the world.
It has billions of constituents.
And it turns out that Facebook's main thrust when it comes to news or when it comes to people talking with each other is to not get in the way.
This has been Zuckerberg's position since literally Facebook started.
The difference is that the media used to believe that and now they no longer believe that.
Now the media are fully ensconced in the notion that Facebook should shut down the information the media don't like.
As I've been discussing for a while here now, there was an elite coterie in the media that felt that it could monopolistically dominate the dissemination of information.
And for most of the 20th century, they were right.
You had three news networks, ABC, NBC, CBS.
The third one of those only cropped up much later in terms of its serious TV presence.
You had radio networks, which were also dominated by just a couple of corporations.
You had a couple of nationally distributed newspapers.
And then you had your local newspaper.
That was it.
There were no other means of dissemination of information.
And so for a long time, that oligopoly of information prevented the American people from seeing the truth behind their institutions, which is that most people who run most institutions are idiots.
Because most people you know are idiots.
And the beauty of a free market is that the idiotic parts of what you do during your day are kind of shuffled out, right?
Basically, there's the wheat to your day and there's the chaff to your day, right?
The wheat being the productive part of your day and the chaff being the unproductive part.
This is true for all decision-making.
What the markets do is they focus in on the wheat and they maximize the wheat.
I can't trade my chaff for your wheat.
The useless stuff that I do, the bad decisions I make, that is of no value to you.
So I can't trade my chaff for the productive stuff that you do.
I can only trade the productive stuff that I do for the productive stuff that you do.
What markets do is incentivize good decision-making.
Hey, our institutions.
So what that means is that a free market allows for a lot of idiocy, right?
We can all individually be idiots, but our collective knowledge about our own situations is much higher than any one centralized source of information.
And all the people around you might be dolds, but you can still work with each other because you understand what that guy over there, that idiot, he has one productive thing he does all day and it's fix cars.
You know to bring your car to him when you want your car fixed, but you're not going to take life advice from that guy.
Okay, so you can survive in a free market system understanding that most people are kind of dumb.
What you cannot do is centralize all power in institutions with the same dumb people at the heads controlling all aspects of your life.
Doing all the things that make them dumb are now part and parcel of what you have to accept from them.
Okay?
And this was the great lie.
This is the lie from the beginning of the progressive era.
Is that if you give power to the so-called experts, many of whom happen to be idiots, Then they will fix all of your problems.
And the media were fully in line with this because they, too, then got to be the great expositors.
They got to be the most powerful, informational, mind-shaping people on planet Earth.
Problem is, they, too, are idiots.
So, when the 20th century came to a close and the Internet started to rise and suddenly the oligopoly was broken and suddenly you could actually see behind the curtain Instead of Americans reacting by saying, okay, well, maybe we should take power away from the institutions.
The institutions reacted and they made Americans face each other.
And they said, okay, well, we're not the problem.
You're the problem.
And so you, you uninformed rubes, the big problem is that you've got too much access to the information.
You've seen behind the curtain and you must never see behind the curtain again.
We must foreclose your ability to access information.
The original thought of a lot of these elitists in our society Was that the rise of the internet would facilitate all sorts of conversations that would ensconce them in power.
That would re-enshrine their power.
And then it turns out that when people saw Behind the Curtain, their first reaction was, whoa!
Has it always been like this?
Has it always been this dirty and this ugly?
And the answer is yes, it's always been this dirty.
It's always been this ugly.
The difference was these people didn't have that much power over your life.
Then over the course of an entire century, they took tremendous control over your life.
But they were still the same idiots.
And now we see they're idiots.
But those idiots have to maintain their power somehow.
The way they've chosen to maintain their power is to now shut off the spigot of information.
To re-institute their oligopoly, their control over what you can see and what you can hear.
Because here's the problem, when it comes to assessing your own rights, when it comes to assessing your own place in the world and who should control you, you're not an idiot.
You're actually pretty good at this part.
But they don't like that because you might come to a conclusion different than the conclusion they have for you.
This is why they've been so angry that people are able to go online and get information and make their own risk assessments with regard to COVID, for example.
It's why they're so mad that people have been able to go online and actually view stories about Hunter Biden and corruption inside the Biden family.
It's why the people who are the oligopoly, they understand that every time the institutions that they have built up crack, they are that much closer to crumbling.
And so they're going to shore them up with the cement of censorship.
That's what these Facebook papers are about.
They're not about making Facebook better.
They're about making Facebook more closed.
Because they care about the internet becoming more closed.
Because they want their control.
We'll get to this in just one second.
First, let's talk about another podcast you should give a listen to.
That is the Jordan Harbinger Show.
It's a podcast you should try out.
I know every day somebody tells you that you should listen to another podcast.
You're like, I don't have time for another one.
This one you should make time for.
Jordan's Show, which Apple named one of its best of 2018.
is aimed at making you a better informed more critical thinker so you can get a sense of how the world actually works and come to your own conclusions about what's happening even inside your own brain.
Each episode is a conversation with a different fascinating guest and when I say there's something for everyone here I mean it.
It's always eclectic and fascinating.
Jordan talks for example to a hostage negotiator from the FBI in one episode who offers techniques on how to get people to like and trust you.
Another episode tells the story of a pimp and mafia enforcer who talks about mind manipulation techniques, right?
I mean, it's weird and interesting and offbeat, and you'll always learn something.
I recommend our listeners check out Jordan's conversations with Colonel Oliver North or Kobe Bryant.
I don't always agree with Jordan, but you don't have to to learn something.
We here at The Daily Wire enjoy the show.
We know you will, too.
Check out jordanharbinger.com slash start for some episode recommendations or search for The Jordan Harbinger Show.
That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Okay, so the big breaking news from Facebook is via the Wall Street Journal, quote, Facebook internal chat boards show politics often at center of decision making.
In June 2020, when America was rocked by protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, a Facebook employee posted a message on the company's racial justice chat board, Get Breitbart out of NewsTab.
NewsTab is a feature that aggregates and promotes articles from various publishers chosen by Facebook.
The employee's message included screenshots of headlines on Breitbart's website, such as Minneapolis Mayhem, Riots and Masks, Massive Looting, Buildings in Flames, Bonfires, and BLM Protesters Pummel Police Cars on 101.
The employees said they were emblematic of a concerted effort at Breitbart and similarly hyper-partisan sources, none of which belong in NewsTab, to paint black Americans and black-led movements in a very negative way.
According to written conversations on Facebook's Office Communication System, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, many other employees chimed in to agree.
In the same chat, a company researcher said any steps aimed at removing Breitbart, a right-wing publisher popular with supporters of former President Trump, could face roadblocks internally because of the potential political blowback.
At best, it would be a very difficult policy decision, the researcher said.
Facebook chose to keep Breitbart on NewsTab.
A spokeswoman for the tech giant said the company makes a judgment based on the specific content published on Facebook, not the entire Breitbart site, and that the Facebook material met its requirements, including the need to abide by its rules against misinformation and hate speech.
Many Republicans from Mr. Trumpdown say Facebook discriminates against conservatives.
The documents reviewed by the journal didn't render a verdict on whether bias influences its decisions overall.
They do show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank-and-file.
The documents viewed by the journal, which don't capture all the employee messaging, didn't mention equivalent debates over left-wing publications.
Okay, so, is this a leak that paints a bad light on Facebook?
What this leak actually shows is that the Facebook higher-ups were demanding that employees show where Breitbart was wrong in their headlines because none of those headlines were false.
Cities were burning last summer.
People were pummeling police cars on the 101 last summer.
There was video that was attached to all of these articles.
But some Facebook employees were mad.
They were mad because Facebook was allowing too much speech.
Because as our left-wing oligarchs suggest, too much speech allows for the rubes to actually view things they shouldn't be viewing.
And we have to restrict what the rubes can see and what the rubes can hear.
And if we close their eyes and we close their ears, then they will speak the words we want them to speak, namely the nostrums of the Democratic Party.
Now, Facebook, for its part, didn't remove Breitbart News from that News tab.
What they have done, and we've talked about this on the show before, is they've taken soft measures to reduce the reach of right-wing content on their site.
We know this because we can see our own internal metrics.
Right Bart, their traffic got taken down 20%.
That is because of interior agitation at Facebook, promoted from the outside by the media.
Because guess what?
The New York Times loves when Facebook shuts down right-wing speech.
Right-wing speech competes with them.
See, the media has been faced with a real problem.
As one of the institutions that has been proved to not be competent at their jobs, which was to just provide you the facts, as an institution that has lost trust with the American people, they have two choices.
One is they could look in a damn mirror and recognize that the rise of right-wing publishers is a direct result of the lack of institutional trust in them.
That would require them to change their business model.
It might require them to hire somebody who, for example, voted for President Trump in the last election cycle.
I'm not certain that there's one member of the editorial page board over at the New York Times, for example, who voted for Trump.
I'm not aware there are any.
That might require them, if they wanted to take seriously the needs of the readers, It might require them to get outside their box.
Or, alternatively, they could just look to Facebook and notice that they aggregated all the eyeballs and then just try to strangle all the information that wasn't coming from the New York Times and re-establish their monopoly.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook employees, as seen in a large quantity of internal message board conversations, have agitated consistently for the company to act against far-right sites.
In many cases, they've framed their arguments around Facebook's enforcement of its own rules, alleging that Facebook is giving the right-wing publishers a pass to avoid PR blowback.
As one employee put it in an internal communication, we're scared of political backlash if we enforce our policies without exemptions.
Except that that's not policy enforcement.
You have to point out where Breitbart was lying in order to get them banned.
It's never about policy enforcement.
It's specifically about the fact that these employees don't like Breitbart or don't like Daily Wire.
That's what this has always been about.
Hey, CNN reported for, like, weeks that Joe Rogan was taking horse dewormer.
He was not.
They maintain that he was taking horse dewormer.
He was not.
Has CNN been dinged by Facebook on any of that?
Of course not.
The Facebook employees aren't in control of the company, and this is what they're angry about.
So they went outside the company to try and gain control of the company.
That's what this so-called whistleblower, who really is just A ridiculous left-wing activist attempting to grab control of the reins of power herself.
That's what she is doing.
It's the reason why Democrats are upholding it.
Why do you think that these specific documents were leaked?
Not to places like Daily Wire or Daily Caller or Breitbart.
Why do you think they were leaked to all of the legacy media outlets?
Because the legacy media outlets are in on it.
The legacy media outlets love it.
Anything that reestablishes their stranglehold on information is good for them.
So this Facebook former employee went to a PR manager and they tranched out these really non-revelatory documents.
To a bunch of outlets that are sympathetic to the idea that Facebook needs to stop disseminating information that is not the legacy media outlets.
It's a power grab.
It's that simple.
It's not about principle.
It's simply about power as always.
All right, so according to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook employees focused special attention on Breitbart, the document's show, criticizing Facebook for showcasing the site's content in NewsTab and for helping it sell ads.
They also alleged Facebook gave special treatment to Breitbart and other conservative publishers, helping them skirt penalties for circulating misinformation or hate speech.
Right-wing sites are consistently among the best-performing publishers on the platform in terms of engagement, according to data from NewsWhip.
That is one reason Facebook is often criticized by people on the left, who say Facebook's algorithms reward far-right content.
Facebook says it enforces rules equally and doesn't consider politics in decision-making.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said, quote, we make changes to reduce problematic or low quality content to improve people's experiences on the platform, not because of a page's political point of view.
When it comes to changes that will impact public pages like publishers, of course, we analyze the effect of the proposed change before we make it.
Now, again, the the goal here with this entire tranche of stories from the media are to push Facebook to do more censorship.
This is why when you hear people on the right and they're like, yeah, Facebook does a bad job because they are censoring right-wing speech.
There's truth to that.
There really is.
I mean, again, I know the internal metrics.
There's truth to the notion that they have specifically targeted right-wing sites by changing policies.
Like for example, the people who are the most engaged, they have prevented those people from having their engaged posts reach a lot of people.
They've also changed the way that the stories are distributed by measuring how much of a site's traffic comes from Facebook.
If too much of a site's traffic comes from Facebook, they ding the site and they reduce its reach, which of course benefits legacy media outlets like the New York Times or CNN, which have existed for a much longer time and have been able to gain market share long before Facebook arrived.
And so it is simply true that Facebook has dinged right-wing traffic.
This is well known in the industry.
But when the right complains about that, and then they say, we can make common cause with Elizabeth Warren and the left.
No, you guys have diametrically opposed solutions.
The right says, Facebook needs to open up more and allow more speech and leave us alone.
And the left says, you must never leave the right alone.
You must shut down all of those sites.
And then they use all sorts of ridiculous, Jerry-rigged studies in which they penalize you for openly stating your bias.
So for example, if you go to Newswhip, Newswhip will say that my site, The Daily Wire, is ranked less, lower on trust than, for example, CNN or the New York Times.
Why do they say that?
We literally had a call with them.
And on this call with Newswhip, we explained we are overtly conservative.
And they said, right, but that means you're biased.
And we said, well, actually, it means we're honest and we're overtly conservative.
And they said, well, this means you're less trusted.
I said, hold up.
So if we're honest about our own bias, whereas the New York Times lies clearly and openly about its own bias, they're considered more trusted and they're considered more honest.
We label every one of our stories.
At the bottom of the story, it says that we are a conservative news site.
And this makes us less honest than the New York Times, which just lies about things routinely because of its left-wing bias?
So, Facebook tends to use studies from outside groups like Newswhip, or they tend to use the fact checks of politically motivated groups like PolitiFact in order to ding right-wing publishers.
This is the entire goal.
Breitbart was included in the News tab, which was launched in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The product contains a main tier with curated news from publishers, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post.
Those get paid for their content.
All of the big guys are already getting paid directly by Facebook.
Daily Wire is not paid directly by Facebook.
Breitbart is not paid directly by Facebook.
Breitbart is part of a second tier of news designed to deliver news tailored to a user's interest.
It is not paid.
Facebook said it requires sites included on NewsTab to focus on quality news reporting and bars those that repeatedly share what it deems misinformation or violate its public list of community standards.
Asked about the inclusion of Breitbart, Mark Zuckerberg said at the time of the launch that the aim was for NewsTab to have a diversity of perspectives.
Again, this is the game.
The game is re-establish the monopoly.
Re-establish the monopoly.
understood factual progressive and conservative leaning news organizations both needed to be represented. Both needed to be represented but that could be done without including Breitbart. Again this is the game.
The game is re-establish the monopoly. Re-establish the monopoly. And again the way that they crack down most on the conservative publishers, the way they crack down most is they put in place tools that are specifically designed to only hit conservative publishers.
So they, for example, looked at their informed engagement and sparing sharing tools, and then they used those metrics and they jiggered those metrics to lower right-wing traffic.
And the idea is that they're a pro-right-wing site, according to these folks.
Again, it's all about the control.
It's all about the control.
And they're just saying ridiculous things.
I'm sorry.
Is it the town square's fault if people use the town square in a way that you don't like?
In essence, the argument against Facebook allowing distribution of information is the argument against the First Amendment.
So Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, in a dissent in a case in the early 20th century, that when we discover that there are people of many fighting faiths who have to argue with one another, and that that argument allows the truth to out, that view on the First Amendment has been completely rejected by the left.
The First Amendment, according to the left, is a problem.
And the reason it's a problem is it allows people to say things you don't like.
We need to lower the risk that people might believe things you don't like by lowering the ability to hear things via the First Amendment.
They believe this on a broad level and they believe it on a narrow applied level over at Facebook.
And so what you do is instead of blaming the people who purvey misinformation, for purveying misinformation and calling it out, instead you blame the fact that there is a First Amendment, or that there is a Facebook.
This is why you see the ridiculous specter of Francis Hogan, the so-called Facebook whistleblower, who again is just a left-wing activist who is revealing essentially nothing new.
Going in front of British lawmakers and saying that in 60 years there will be women walking around with brittle bones because of choices that Facebook made now.
Or maybe they'll be walking around with brittle bones because of choices they make now.
I'd notice that Facebook doesn't do anything except allow people to see information.
I'm extremely worried about the developmental impacts of Instagram on children.
Because of Facebook.
Not because of their parents.
Not because teenagers are making decisions that are bad all the time.
osteoporosis for the rest of your life, right?
There are going to be women who are walking on this earth in 60 years with brittle bones because of choices Facebook made now.
Because of Facebook, not because of their parents, not because teenagers are making decisions that are bad all the time because of Facebook.
By the way, she was honest about this like a few weeks ago.
She said that she wishes that there was an oversight body that she was the head of.
So basically, she doesn't like how Zuckerberg's running a place, so she wishes to run the place.
And you see that the, again, Facebook must be blamed for everything.
So Facebook was blamed in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump winning the 2016 election.
The media quickly shifted from Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate to it was the Russians and Facebook that won Donald Trump the election.
And so they're really, really bad.
And now they're trying to blame Facebook for January 6th.
To the beginning, they blamed Parler and then they knocked Parler offline.
Now they're blaming Facebook because, hey look, a convenient target.
So, for example, you have CNN reporting, quote, not stopping, not stopping, stop the seal.
Facebook papers paint damning picture of a company's role in insurrection.
Just days after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6th, Facebook's Chief Operational Officer Sheryl Sandberg downplayed her company's role in what had happened. We know this was organized online. We know that, she said in an interview with Reuters.
We took down QAnon. Proud Boys stopped the steal anything that was talking about possible violence last week. Our enforcement's never perfect. I'm sure there are still things on Facebook.
But internal Facebook documents reviewed by CNN suggest otherwise.
The documents, including an internal post-mortem and one document showing in real-time countermeasures Facebook employees were belatedly implementing, paint a picture of a company that was in fact fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize, and that only truly swung into action after the movement had turned violent.
Asked by CNN about Sandberg's quote, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the greater context.
She'd been noting the January 6th organization happened largely online, including but not limited to Facebook's platforms, the spokesperson said.
One of Hogan's central allegations about the company focuses on the attack on the Capitol.
In an SEC disclosure, she alleges, quote, Facebook misled investors and the public about its role in perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection.
Facebook denies the premise.
They say, quote, the responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6th lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.
We took steps to limit content that sought to delegitimize the election, including labeling candidates' posts with the latest vote count after Mr. Trump prematurely declared victory, pausing new political advertising, and removing the original Stop the Steal group in November.
But again, the idea is that if Facebook didn't stop every bad thing from happening, Facebook must be stopped itself.
And the person who should be in charge is Frances Hogan, who will stop all bad things from happening.
How?
By giving her and her friends total control.
This is not whistleblowing.
It is just a power grab, as always.
As always.
And the media are pushing it full scale.
I mean, it's pathetic.
The Washington Post has an entire piece titled, quote, you've decided to quit Facebook.
Here's how to migrate your online life elsewhere.
Okay, so again, they're just encouraging people to quit Facebook.
Listen, if you want to not be on Facebook, you're prerogative.
But let's not pretend that this is anything but a coordinated hit designed to destroy conservative publishers by forcing Facebook into compliance with left-wing demands.
For his part, Zuckerberg did an earnings call in which he said, what we're seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.
He said, the reality is these questions are not primarily about our business, but about balancing different social values.
This, of course, is correct.
He is right about this.
But you have to understand that the institutions will not let go of their power.
They won't.
Anything that disseminates power more broadly, anything that opens up is a threat to the New York Times.
It is a threat to CNN.
It is a threat to the Democratic Party.
That's a threat.
You are a threat.
You having information is a threat.
And so whenever you see a story about a shark Basically, blood in the water and the sharks coming for a company like Facebook.
Understand, it's not really directed at Facebook, it's directed at you.
It really is, because that's the angle.
That does not say Facebook has handled this perfectly.
Again, we've been dinged by Facebook, we've lost traffic for no reason on Facebook, and we're pretty pissed about it.
But the overarching attack here from the left is designed to prevent you from viewing shows like this one.
It's designed to get companies like YouTube to take down content that you like.
That's the goal.
In just one second.
Speaking of the attempt to maintain control over you and your life and your children, Remember that time the left said they weren't teaching critical race theory and that they were not teaching radicalism?
Now they're like, even if we are, you need to shut up about it.
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Alrighty, so as I say, there are people who want to control you.
They want to control your right to see information.
They would also love to control how you raise your kids.
There's a piece in the Washington Post.
It was retweeted by the American Federation of Teachers head, Randy Weingarten, who's one of the worst people in America.
I mean, her absolute scorn for the parents of America is truly astonishing.
She retweeted this piece.
The piece is titled, quote, Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids' school curriculum.
They don't.
Um, yeah, we do, actually.
It's written by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Jennifer Berkshire, a freelance journalist and co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.
And the idea is that only school boards, only government actors, only the wise will determine how your children are to be educated.
Now, what's kind of amazing about this is that the rise of the public education system in America, if you actually look back historically, was Not particularly a bad thing, but it also was kind of an anti-Catholic thing.
If you look at how public schools were supposed to operate, they were almost designed to operate as anti-Catholic indoctrination centers.
And people talked pretty openly about this at the time.
So from the very beginning, there's been open debate about how kids are to be taught in schools, and whether schools are simply supposed to convey reading, writing, and arithmetic, or whether they're supposed to impose values.
But parents have always had the ability to take their kids out of school, to homeschool their kids.
But the left would like this not to be the case.
I recently did a discussion slash debate with Anna Kasparian of the Young Turks and she openly said that she would love the Finnish model in which there are no private schools and homeschooling is forbidden.
In which basically you must send your kids to a government indoctrination center.
Well that's the underlying case here in the Washington Post.
In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of quote-unquote parents' rights.
In Indiana, Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita recently introduced a Parents' Bill of Rights, which asserts that education policy and curriculum should accurately reflect the values of Indiana families.
In Florida, the legislature passed an even more comprehensive bill assuring that the state and its public schools cannot infringe on the fundamental rights of parents.
Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere.
Yet what's actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed.
This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught.
A common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents.
In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, this effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself Is what children do.
Except that's not what you're talking about.
It's not about children learning to think for themselves.
It's about parents wanting their kids to have their values and to pass their values on to their kids.
It's literally my number one priority in life.
And about educators who have a different set of values.
This is not a value neutral proposition.
Which is the reason why I pick where my kids go to school.
And I specifically ask the principals where my kids go to school if my kids are being taught values that I agree with.
And I will not send my kids to a school where the values that I agree with are not taught.
When do the interests of parents and children diverge, according to these columnists?
Generally, it occurs when a parent's desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain.
To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently.
As the political scientist Rob Reich has argued, minimal autonomy requires, especially for its civic importance, that a child be able to examine his or her own political values and beliefs, and those of others, with a critical eye.
If we value that end, the structure of schooling cannot simply replicate in every particularity the values and beliefs of a child's home.
The law has long reflected this.
Consider homeschooling.
Although it is legal across the country, states still regulate its practice.
Such regulations aren't often enforced, but they are certainly on the books.
Homeschooling parents can be required to establish minimal academic qualifications, to submit examples of student work to school district administrators, or even to adopt a state-approved curriculum.
The sudden push for parental rights, then, isn't a response to substantive changes in education or the law.
It's a political tactic.
And then they say that it's a paranoid style of politics, quoting Richard Hofstadter, one of the most overrated historians of the 20th century, talking about how it's just paranoid to think that these people want to indoctrinate your kids.
They have no political values.
They just want you to have kids who challenge everything that you believe.
In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing Napalm to the fight.
That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor.
But as with any scorched earth campaign, the cost of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops.
Parents may end up with a new set of rights, only to discover they have lost something even more fundamental in the process.
Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake up from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
This was retweeted again by the American Federation of Teachers said that you shouldn't worry about the fact that they are teaching your kid radical crap in school.
And the school library is filled with pornography, which is actually the case in Loudoun County, for example.
No, what you should actually worry about is your own authoritarian fascism in wanting your kids to be inculcated with your values.
Hey, so the plan is to hijack your kids.
I mean, they're openly saying that the plan is to hijack your kids and that you really should have no say in the matter.
I mean, it makes sense on a sort of demographic level, right?
There's one group in the United States that is having lots of kids, namely religious parents.
There's another group that is having almost no kids, namely highly secularized parents.
Highly secular people in the United States are having very, very few children at this point, and people who are religious are having lots of kids.
Which means that down the line, if parents actually teach their kids their values and those kids live with those values, you're going to get a more right-wing, more religious country.
Left doesn't like that very much.
So one of those solutions is take those kids and indoctrinate them in your ideas.
Put them in government indoctrination factories and churn out good little liberals.
And then tell parents they have no rights.
Because after all, you're just teaching them how to think.
You're just teaching them to be broad-minded and open-minded and to challenge parental authority.
But if your authority is challenged in any way, then it's really bad.
And by the way, we know this is the case whether it comes from parents or whether it comes from students.
You know how many letters I receive from public school students who say, I'm afraid to speak up in class because my teacher is going to punish me if I disagree with the teacher?
Don't give me that high school teachers are teaching children how to think in the main.
They're teaching their own opinions very often.
And where you send your kid is going to determine what opinions are taught.
It is that simple.
But again, the idea here is the institutions must be upheld.
And if that means curbing First Amendment rights, fine.
If it means curbing parental rights, absolutely.
The left is simply willing to do this.
And standing up is key at this point.
They also, of course, would like to curtail economic rights as well, which is why they are now pushing an unconstitutional wealth tax.
By the way, it is unconstitutional.
When you hear the Democrats are trying to tax unrealized gains at the federal level, there's nothing in the Constitution that allows for this.
The Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States does not allow for this sort of taxation, which is why you had to have a constitutional amendment.
That constitutional amendment to allow the income tax only allows the income tax.
It does not allow direct taxation of unrealized gains.
But Democrats are pushing this because, again, economic control, ideological control, control over your kid's education.
Did it ever occur to these people that maybe we don't want to be controlled?
Maybe the entire premise of American liberty is that we are not controlled and we get to make our own decisions?
And that when you maximize the control of morons over every aspect of your life, your life gets materially worse.
I've been talking a lot in recent days about risk and risk allocation, about the fact that human beings tend to want to minimize risk.
We don't like risk.
At the very least, we don't like loss.
Right?
And so what we are prone to is handing over authority to people who pledge that they are going to minimize our risk.
But here's the thing.
This is what the institutions are learning.
And we learn it anew every time there's a major unexpected recession, for example.
You can push off risk.
You can pretend that reality entails no risk.
You can empower experts to minimize risk.
But all they can do is build dams against risk.
The waters of risk do not go away.
The best way to deal with the endemic risk in life is to incentivize people to make good individual decisions in terms of how to mitigate risk.
And maybe local level decisions on how to deal with risks if they materialize.
But when you pledge that you can stop all risk from happening, when you pledge that if you give somebody complete informational control, they will make your life better, or you give people complete control over your kids, it will make your life better and your kid's life better.
All you're doing is building a dam that holds back the waters of risk.
And when that dam collapses, There is a tsunami.
Not a trickle of risk that is handleable, not a stream of risk that you can tranche off, or that you can redirect, or that you can use to power your economy.
Instead, you create a dammed-up flood of risk.
And when that dam bursts, the risk overwhelms the entire civilization.
And that is what is happening right now.
The institutions are cracking.
Those institutions were a dam meant to prevent you from exercising your freedom to assess risk.
And now, as that dam bursts, they're desperately trying to shore it up by more control.
It's not going to work.
They'd be better off lessening the power of the water behind the dam by allowing us to actually make individual assessments about things that matter to us, by allowing us to speak freely and access information freely, by allowing us to educate our kids as we see fit.
But they're not going to do that, because to do that would, in fact, undermine their entire project, which is the control.
Whether they believe it or not, Whether they believe that they are making your life better if you give them more control, or whether they just want the power is irrelevant.
The effect is that they are going to control every aspect of your life from soup to nuts if they have the chance.
And they're openly bragging about it.
I mean, the New York Times is talking about Joe Biden creating cradle-to-grave welfare programs.
The phrase cradle-to-grave used to be a pejorative in American politics.
It was something the Republicans said about Democrats, that they wanted cradle-to-grave care, demonstrating that they were enervating the American public.
Now it's used as a piece of braggadocio by the left.
The agenda is pretty much out there in the open, which means that we have the obligation to fight that agenda.
It's the reason why it is so necessary to look at what big cities like Chicago are doing right now in implementing universal basic income and say to yourself, what is this designed to do except to make people more dependent on government?
Except to continue to foster the lie that the more control you give these people, the safer they will keep you.
They're not going to keep you safe at all because eventually reality always intervenes.
And when it does, it gets really, really ugly.
All righty, 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.
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