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April 15, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:26
The Left Panics Over Elon Musk’s Twitter Power Move | Ep. 1475
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Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter, and the left goes completely insane.
With Biden's support collapsing, the White House doubles down on equity, and the media jump all over a white cop black offender shooting, but ignore the fact.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Elon Musk has now made an audacious offer to buy all of Twitter and to take it private.
The offer was apparently a $43 billion bid for the company and it also includes a threat.
The threat is that because Musk is a 9.2% stakeholder in Twitter because he owns the largest single chunk of Twitter of any investor, that if they don't allow him to buy the rest of the company, he will just start selling shares on the open market and tanking the stock price by flooding the market with Twitter stock.
The Thursday offer, according to the Wall Street Journal, was the latest in a will-he-or-won't-he saga between the world's richest person and the social media service. The offer was at once serious, Musk disclosed it in a federal filing, and at the same time tinged with humor as the offer was for $54.20 per share, a barely valid marijuana reference. Twitter confirmed it had received the offer, said its board would review the proposal.
It's also weighing a so-called poison pill.
That'd be a legal mechanism that would prevent Musk from significantly increasing his stake in the company.
According to a person familiar with the situation, investors apparently were unimpressed.
Twitter shares fell nearly 2% to $45.08 per share, indicating skepticism that a deal would happen.
Well, I mean, of course they're skeptical of this because the board has no interest in Musk taking over.
He will fire all of them.
Musk, for his part, has said that he wants to reorient Twitter away from the censorious ways that Twitter has been run in the recent past.
The corporate board over at Twitter has been very interested in using algorithmic censoring in order to prevent the spread of information that they don't like, which is why you saw, for example, in October 2020, the complete shutdown of the New York Post's Twitter account.
It's why you see the Babylon Bee having its account suspended for mentioning that men cannot be women and women cannot be men.
It's kind of sporadic enforcement.
So long as Twitter feels like it's not going to earn tremendous public blowback, it will kind of push back, it'll ban accounts, and everybody knows that Twitter is wildly biased to the left.
I mean, this is just something that anyone who engages with Twitter knows.
The Twitter trends are just left-wing trends all the time.
It's something I've personally noticed because as a rather notorious person, I trend on Twitter probably once every three weeks, and Twitter has this little game that they play where my name starts to trend for a good reason, and then they wait for about five hours, and then they wait for a tweet from somebody on the left, and then they trend that tweet.
So they make sure that the Twitter trend is always about something negative.
This is just something Twitter always does.
And if you look at the way that they describe the Twitter trends, Twitter always takes the left-wing point of view on any given issue.
So Elon Musk is trying to reorient away from that because he says, correctly, that the true value of Twitter lies in the idea that we are all supposed to be able to spread and share our opinions, barring maybe the most extreme opinions, the most violent opinions.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter executives spent years trying to promote what they called healthier discourse on the platform, adding content moderation largely on the argument that it is good for business.
Now, Elon Musk wants to take the company in a different direction.
In offering to buy Twitter for $43 billion, the world's richest man says he is intent on transforming the company into a bastion for free speech.
By taking it private, he says, he would remove the persistent pressure on the company from advertisers and shareholders about content that is potentially offensive to some users or could be deemed abusive.
He said in a federal filing on Thursday, Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.
That moderation light philosophy flies in the face of what Twitter has been attempting to do since about 2016, when both Salesforce.com and Walt Disney Company seriously considered offers, and their executives then said, we wouldn't offer it to Twitter because it was too open.
We need them to shut it down.
The nastiness is extraordinary on Twitter, said former Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger in 2019.
Like a lot of these platforms, they have the ability to do a lot of good in our world.
They have an ability to do a lot of bad.
I didn't want to take that on.
And this has always been the particularly peculiar narcissism and egoism of a lot of people in big tech.
You're engineers.
Your entire job is just to be a platform.
And yet, suddenly, because many people are using your service, because it is a platform, you now feel that God has tapped you on the shoulder in some way and told you that it is your job To increase the value of the discourse.
It's your job to make discourse better.
It's your job to nudge people in Cass Sunstein fashion and make them better human beings.
Mark Zuckerberg is not capable of making you a better human being.
Jack Dorsey is not capable of making you a better human being.
And Elon Musk is not capable of making you a better human being.
Nor are they truly capable of making the discourse in the country wildly better through their censorious efforts.
Instead, what ends up happening is they ban a bunch of accounts that ought not be banned, and then those people go, and they find other ways to distribute their information, and all the people who are disenchanted with the service think that the service is biased against them, because it usually is.
Musk does want to take that on.
Over the past two weeks, he's argued in a blizzard of tweets, and again Thursday in his securities filing, that censorship, not abuse, is the company's core problem, which again, As Musk is saying, this is true.
This has been true for a very, very long time.
As somebody who makes his living online, as somebody who has 4 million Twitter followers, And I would say maybe 10 million overall social media followers minimum.
I can tell you that when they switch over the algorithms without telling you what is going on in order to minimize the reach of particular posts, this makes everyone very suspicious of one another.
And it actually silos people off.
I would much rather that I see more left-wing content.
I do already.
I'd rather see more left-wing content, so long as it means I also get to see more right-wing content, than see exactly what Twitter wants me to see.
So, Musk did an interview at a TED conference in Vancouver over the last 24 hours, and he went off on the free speech orientation of Twitter.
Here's what he had to say.
If in doubt, let the speech, let it exist.
It would have, you know, if it's a, you know, a gray area, I would say let the tweet exist.
I do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and just be very cautious with permanent bans.
Of course, he's exactly correct about all of this.
He said, any action should be made apparent, so anyone can see what is happening behind the scenes, so there's no manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.
Which, of course, is something we've been calling for here at the Delaware for quite a while.
If you're going to manipulate us, at least show us what manipulation is taking place.
Don't make us kind of shoot in the dark for how you are suppressing information or not suppressing information.
That suspicion, by the way, is what leads to the rise of conspiracism.
Because if I don't know what's happening behind closed doors, but I know you're doing something to screw with how my speech is distributed behind closed doors, this makes me more likely to believe conspiracy theories about exactly what it is that you are doing and what it is that you are thinking.
Musk continued by saying that it's important that we have broadly inclusive platforms, that the play that he's making for Twitter is not predominantly a profit-driven play.
Which, by the way, I'm sure is true.
And a lot of people saying, no, no, no, it is a profit-driven play for Musk.
Well, I mean, profit, I'm sure, is involved because Musk is a very, very wealthy man who doesn't make stupid economic decisions as a general matter.
However, there are better investments than Twitter.
I think that Musk actually does believe that he makes a world of difference by getting involved in platforms like Twitter and opening them up.
My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.
He is absolutely correct about this.
If we can't have platforms where we at least argue and discuss with one another, if there's a feeling that you have to be on a different platform in order to discuss politics, then Twitter, and Twitter is just for the left-wingers, it's amazing.
Everybody on the left is constantly worried about news siloing, about information siloing.
You guys created the silos.
You are the ones who are hardening the silos.
We know what you are doing.
On a business level, Musk says he's not sure that he's going to be able to acquire Twitter.
There's already been pushback from some of the investors, including a Saudi prince who's a major Twitter shareholder.
His name is Al-Waleed Bin Talal.
He took to Twitter to say he was already rejecting the entrepreneur's cash offer for the social media platform because it was apparently too low.
Musk, for his part, he then tweeted, you know what, why don't you ask the shareholders whether it's too low?
He said, quote, it would be utterly indefensible not to put this offer to a shareholder vote.
They own the company, not the board of directors.
He also pointed out in a filing that there's been Goldman Sachs reports showing exactly how much the company is worth, and I'm offering you more than the company is worth.
He posted the Goldman Sachs rating for the company according to Daily Wire.
He said, quote, which of course is true.
They lost a lot of money last year.
to shareholder interest they would be breaching their fiduciary duty. The liability they would thereby assume would be titanic in scale. And he posted a screenshot of Goldman Sachs' equity research rating for Twitter saying that the company was a sell stock as it was falling behind performance forecast, which of course is true. They lost a lot of money last year, they lost a lot of money the year before. According to Goldman Sachs, in analyzing Twitter's Q4 21 earnings report and forward operating commentary, a few key themes, many of them reiteration of the past year, were front and center.
First, Twitter management expressed optimism on the ability to grow users at an accelerated pace versus prior periods.
However, we remain below that forecast.
Second, Twitter remains in investment mode against goals aimed at user growth, product innovation, and advertising diversification.
So he's saying, you know, you guys keep saying that it's worth a lot of money, but I've noticed that you guys keep losing money.
And then when I offer to pay you a lot more money than the stock is actually worth, you're telling me no, right?
He is offering $54.20.
The stock is currently valued at somewhere between $43 and $47, kind of bouncing around a little bit.
So he's offering a pretty solid premium above what the actual public stock price is worth.
And a bunch of people are saying they don't want to sell their stock.
That has a lot less to do, I have a feeling, with people not willing to make profit because they really think the upward trajectory of Twitter is strong.
And a lot more to do with the simple fact that they don't like the idea that Musk is going to come in and open up the business.
And you can see this from the commentary.
So, for example, you have Scott Kessler, Vice President and Global Lead for Technology at Third Bridge, a research firm, quote, Sometimes when people are idealistic or aspirational, they don't think about the other side of these considerations.
Reducing harassment is something the company spent a lot of time and money on over the last couple years.
I think by many accounts, they've done a pretty good job.
Joan Donovan, Research Director at Harvard Kennedy's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, said reducing the harm caused by online campaigns targeting minorities and other vulnerable groups needs to be a priority in the C-suite.
Musk does not seem concerned with that.
Now, I've noticed that they keep quoting people who have never owned a business.
They're quoting a lot of people who are experts in academics, people who work for places like the Harvard Kennedy Shorenstein Center on Media, research directors, and you know what they aren't?
Billionaires.
And there is a reason they're not billionaires.
Now there's some equity analysts who are saying, no, no, no, the real reason that Twitter is doing this is because they want to be more advertiser friendly.
But here's the thing.
When you have as many users as Twitter has, advertisers will find a way to advertise on your platform and all these sort of gutlessness where they say, oh, you know, advertisers might run screaming away from our platform.
Yeah, no, they won't.
Advertisers will deal with it, and what they will say is the same thing that advertisers should always say, which is, we're not responsible for every comment on Twitter.
We just advertise on Twitter because that's where the eyeballs are, which is the way the business is supposed to work in the first place.
Musk did say he's not sure that he's going to be able to acquire Twitter because, of course, the board is attempting to put all these poison pills in the deal.
Here was Musk yesterday.
And I'm not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it.
And I should also say, the intent is to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the law in a private company, which I think is around 2,000 or so.
So it's definitely not from the standpoint of letting me figure out how to monopolize or maximize my ownership of Twitter.
Musk also said that there might be a plan B if plan A fails, meaning if he does not have his offer accepted, then there might be something on the horizon here.
So, you don't like to lose.
If, in this case, you are not successful in, you know, the board does not accept your offer, you've said you won't go higher, is there a plan B?
There is.
I think we would like to hear a little bit about plan B.
For another time, I think.
Another time?
Yeah.
All right. Well, good for him. Good for him. Well, the left is highly disappointed in the fact that Elon Musk might open up Twitter, but I'll tell you what's disappointing for you. Heading on over to that auto parts store. Very, very disappointing. You're going to wait in line for a long time.
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So a lot of people on the right are celebrating Musk.
A lot of people on the left are very angry at Musk.
I mean, listen, I think Musk is doing amazing work.
I mean, first of all, he's an amazing entrepreneur.
He's revitalized the space program in the United States.
Tesla is an incredible company.
And he is one of the great entrepreneurial stories of the 21st century, maybe the best entrepreneurial story of the 21st century.
And the fact that he is now dipping his toe into these waters in an attempt to broaden freedom of speech makes him somewhat heroic.
I'm not going to put any sort of shine on this.
It is a heroic act to take your money and put it where your mouth is.
If you believe that Twitter is doing a bad job in preventing content from being disseminated to the public, and then you decide to take billions of dollars and plop them on the table, This is an act of actual free speech heroism.
And the people he's fighting are all on the board.
Twitter's CEO, Parag Agarwal, according to the Wall Street Journal, declined to discuss specifics of Musk's offer, only saying the board was considering it.
He said the company had a strong culture of protecting its users and that, quote, no one man can change that.
Well, I mean, he can if he actually just takes over the company.
Now, the left has lost its mind, and this just shows you where they are in free speech.
They hate the idea of a platform that is not moderated by a bunch of left-wingers sitting in offices in Silicon Valley.
They cannot deal with it.
And they cannot deal with the idea that the algorithm should be public.
It's amazing.
I've said for a while that we are now in an unbelievable, sort of a bizarre period in which the press are the leading advocates of censorship.
Members of the press, members of the left wing, people who were the liberals, the people who supposedly said back in the 1970s that we may not agree with what you say, but we will die for your right to say it.
Well, now the idea is we may not agree with what you say, and we will kill you if you try to say it.
That's the basic idea.
So members of the media have been losing their minds over the idea that Elon Musk is going to come in and open up Twitter, because after all, it might hurt their feel-feels.
So you have Axios.
Here's a headline from Axios, quote, Elon Musk goes into full goblin mode.
The world's richest man, someone who used to be compared to Marvel's Iron Man, is increasingly behaving like a movie supervillain, commanding seemingly unlimited resources with which to finance his mischief-making.
You see, it's mischief-making.
If you take a- By the way, Jack Dorsey is a very, very wealthy man.
Mark Zuckerberg over at Facebook, incredibly, incredibly wealthy.
I've also noticed that nobody had any problem whatsoever when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.
Democracy dies in darkness, guys.
So billionaires, it turns out, own a lot of things, including major media outlets, including major social media outlets, and they control these things.
It's just that you like the way that they've been controlling things so far because you like the fact that things like the Hunter Biden story get buried.
You like the fact that accounts that you don't like get banned.
And now, when the shoe's on the other foot, let me just say this, go build your own.
Go build your own, right?
That's what we've been told.
We've been told if you don't like Twitter, go build your own Twitter.
Okay, fine.
Well, if Elon Musk takes over Twitter and you don't like how it's run, go build your own and see if everybody likes left-wing Twitter better than they like a more open and free Twitter.
Axios, again, a press outlet complaining that he's a movie supervillain.
Since when is it a movie supervillain move to buy a supposedly free speech outlet and make it more pro-free speech?
It's incredible.
It really is.
I mean, the hatred of free speech these people hold is insane.
MSNBC's Katie Turrer was on the air warning panicked viewers.
Oh my god, don't worry.
It'll probably be okay.
But I mean, Musk is a scary guy.
He's a scary dude with his free speech and stuff.
There are real and devastating consequences for using that platform to lie.
And we've seen it.
We've seen it happen.
I wonder, you know, when talking about this, it's, you know, it's kind of funny.
Oh, Elon Musk wants to buy it.
But there are massive Life and globe altering consequences for just letting people run wild on the thing.
Oh my god, it's just a life and globe altering con... What about the life and globe altering consequences of having a bunch of ninnies from the left wing decide what you can and cannot see?
By the way, as someone pointed out, no one on the left seems to have a problem with the fact that they Saudi Prince, who's not exactly famous for allowing free speech.
I mean, five seconds ago, we were being told by the left wing that the Saudi Arabian government was the apex of all evil because they had Jamal Khashoggi murdered.
the Muslim Brotherhood fellow traveler who used to write for the Washington Post.
They had him murdered at the Turkish embassy.
And so the Saudis were the worst people in the entire world.
Now they have no problem, but the Saudis owning a large chunk of Twitter and allowing left-wing censors to actually crack down on content.
But if Elon Musk takes over, that's a huge, huge problem.
We cannot allow this.
All of the furrowed eyebrows and the worried faces and the carousel-ishers of the world.
Oh my God, what if Elon Musk would take over?
And then people might get more abusive on Twitter.
Here's the thing, Twitter does not ban abuse.
It just bans a particular type of abuse.
Twitter, in many cases, is the abuser.
Twitter will allow people to simply trend people for no reason based on 10-year-old posts, 15-year-old posts.
Twitter is an abusive place.
As I've said before, it is a place to dunk and be dunked upon.
That is all Twitter is.
And yet everybody on the left is acting as though it's sacrosanct territory.
Sort of reminiscent of that time that I wrote the Politico playbook about a year and a half ago, and the entire Politico newsroom had to have an all-hands meeting in order to assuage the feelings of all of the weeping children who constitute their editorial staff.
It's the same thing, except the entire press.
The entire press is now, oh my god, Twitter?
You know, our playground?
The place where we develop policies like boys can be girls and girls can be boys?
You're saying that you might not ban the people we want you to ban?
That has life and globe-altering consequences.
Well, yes.
That's Elon Musk's point.
That when you guys set the standard, you alter the way that politics is run.
And maybe you ought not be the final arbiters.
Maybe you ought to let the people decide.
And if there are going to be algorithmic changes or algorithmic demotions of particular content, maybe that ought to be transparent so that we can all see what's going on.
These advocates of freedom and openness of information, it turns out they're not interested in free and open information.
They're interested in funneling the information they want directly into your skull.
And if anybody gets in the way of that, including Elon Musk, this makes him really bad.
And you can see the fun in all the people on the left who have now flipped on this.
Trump was a fascist, but if I don't get exactly what I want, democracy dies in darkness.
So you have Robert Reich.
Former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and he tweets out, Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his First Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms.
Someone should remind him there are private companies to which the First Amendment doesn't apply.
That is in July of 2021.
Fast forward less than a year, quote, we are watching a hostile takeover of Twitter by the richest man in the world who regularly tries to silence critics.
This is what oligarchy looks like.
So it's a private company that can do whatever it wants when it was banning Trump.
When it's Elon Musk saying, I want to unban people, then it's a hostile takeover of Twitter by a rich man who is an oligarch.
It's just, it's pathetic.
You have David Levitt, a journalist who has written for CBS.
Here's what he tweeted out.
If Elon Musk successfully purchases Twitter, it could result in World War III and the destruction of our planet.
Don't overstate the case there, David.
I mean, my goodness.
Woo!
World War 3 and the destruction of our planet if Elon Musk takes over.
By the way, these people are so up their own asses, it's unbelievable.
Their heads are so far up their colon, it's coming out their face again.
You have to really live on Twitter if you believe that Elon Musk taking over Twitter is going to destroy the Earth.
Really?
We have hundreds of thousands of people who are murdered in wars every single year around the planet.
Elon Musk takes over a social media service where people jabber and send memes to one another, and suddenly this is World War III and the end of our planet.
But you can see, the panic is real.
And the panic, again, is because their institutional control is threatened, and Musk is threatening their institutional control, and they cannot take it.
If Musk does nothing else, the fact that he is exposing left for the anti-free speech force it is, is totally worthwhile, even if he doesn't end up taking over Twitter.
It is perfectly clear.
You can see who's out there defending Twitter as it currently stands, by the way.
Anybody who says that Twitter is not a left-wing biased company, you can see exactly the political breakdown.
Everybody on the left is freaking out over Musk changing the rules, which suggests they know that the rules are rigged in their favor.
Okay, but it's not just Robert Reich or Axios or David Levitt.
It's Matthew Roja from Salon.com.
So he tweeted out, quote, Dear Parag, this is the current CEO of Twitter.
If you're reading this, right now the world needs to know that you are stronger, smarter, and more tenacious than Elon Musk.
Spoiler alert, he isn't.
He thinks he can beat you.
The free world needs to know he is wrong.
Yours truly, a lifelong and long verified Twitter user.
Lifelong?
In Twitter, Is he 17?
When did Twitter open?
It was like 2005, maybe?
So, lifelong and long verified Twitter.
By the way, that's how you should sign on.
I'm going to sign all of my letters from now on.
Like that.
A verified Twitter user.
Ooh.
A blue check.
Ooh.
Then you have David Rothkopf.
of the Daily Beast, quote, we are the assets of Twitter.
If we walk out the door, the moment Elon Musk takes it over, it is nothing.
And I can tell you, I for one, have no desire to participate in the social engineering experiments of that particular out of control megalomaniac.
You on Facebook, David?
Who owns Twitter right now?
I guess it is It's just, it's unbelievable.
By the way, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Jeff Jarvis, this may be the single funniest tweet.
This is a professor at CUNY.
He's a professor, one of our great intellectual luminaries.
Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.
Yes, it is just like when a billionaire takes over a private company and seeks to open it up to more free speech that's just like Hitler.
I can see how you could make that mistake.
The only thing separating Elon Musk from Hitler is apparently the mustache and the fact that Hitler murdered his political opponents and gassed millions of people and started a world war.
Other than that, the same.
It's just like the end of... I don't like these people.
Then you have Max Boot, who... It's kind of sad to watch people who 20 years ago actually wrote good stuff just kind of destroy themselves.
This includes people like Ann Applebaum over at the Washington Post and now Max Boot.
Max Boot, who lost it because of Trump.
He's actually written some good books on guerrilla warfare, and I've praised his books before.
Max Boot tweeted out, he's just lost his mind.
I mean, maybe he feels special because he wears a fedora in his little profile photo there.
Like he's a hard hat.
Hard-nosed journalist walking the beat in Chicago in 1921.
He tweets out, quote, I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter.
He seems to believe that on social media, anything goes.
For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.
Democracy dies unless you moderate the content exactly as I want.
Unless there is top-down imposition of content moderation, democracy dies.
Um, maybe you don't understand the word democracy, but it seems to me like you just don't like the oligarch who is attempting to open things up.
You just want things more closed.
It is astonishing to watch.
It really is.
Our press, the left wing, they have all decided that Elon Musk opening up Twitter is a really, really bad thing.
Business Insider tweeted out the headline, Elon Musk's attempt to buy Twitter represents a chilling new threat.
Billionaire trolls taking over social media.
I mean, if billionaires owned social media, wouldn't that be such a problem?
That would be so bad if billionaires owned social media, man.
That would suck.
Like, every social media company is owned by a billionaire.
Just gonna point that out.
But, oh my goodness, these folks.
So, let it never be said again that Twitter is an unbiased source as it currently stands, because you can see precisely who's coming out of the woodwork to defend Twitter as it currently stands, and it is all the people who hate all conservatives and wish them all to be banned from social media.
It's really, really amazing.
Okay, meanwhile...
Joe Biden's approval rating continues to tank.
He's down to 33%, according to Quinnipiac Poll.
His support among young people collapsed by double digits in his first 14 months in office, according to John Regalizzo over at dailywire.com.
According to a report from Gallup, over the course of Joe Biden's presidency so far, his approval rating declined by 19 points among millennials, from 60% approval to 41%.
21 points among Generation Z, from 60% to 39%.
Older generations, meanwhile, had changed their opinions significantly less.
As a result, older Americans are now more likely to approve of the president than younger Americans are, which is an incredible statistic.
Because, after all, his entire drive was supposed to be, young people will support me, college-educated liberals will support me, and minorities will support me, and he's losing pretty much everyone.
During Biden's honeymoon period, according to Gallup, 60% of both Generation Z adults and millennials approved of the job he was doing.
By the summer, Biden had lost significant support among Generation Z millennials and Generation X, ranging from 7 to 10 percentage point drops.
All generational groups have become less approving of Biden since the summer after the troubled U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan in late 2021.
Older generations were less inclined to change their opinions of Biden, perhaps because they have some sympathy for him as an older gentleman.
Baby Boomer's opinions of Biden didn't change much.
Their approval of Biden stood at 53% during the honeymoon phase and dropped to 52% during the summer of 2021, dropped to 46% in fall of 2021 and early 2022. Traditionalists, the generation before the baby boomers, didn't change their opinion of Biden much at all.
Their opinion was at 48% after Biden took office.
It was 47% in the summer.
It is now back at 48%.
Part of that is, again, because people who are older tend to have more experience, and so they really don't shift their opinions quite as quickly as people who are younger.
Bottom line, though, is that Joe Biden is falling apart, and it is clear that he is falling apart.
Every one of these gaffes is now painful to watch.
So, yesterday, Joe Biden, he suggested that we are cutting down all of our forests.
I don't know where he is getting this information, but here is Joe Biden talking about environmentalism or something.
For the rest of the world, one of the proposals I have and will go into now is to build back a better world.
So all those countries in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, who don't have the capacity to make it better for themselves.
We cut down all our forests.
We're doing fine.
Guess what?
We're part of the reason for the global warming.
We did.
We cut down all of our forests because we didn't.
I'm just going to point that out.
We did not cut down all of our forests.
We have a lot of trees here in the United States.
But that was just the beginning.
Joe Biden also gave us a Jeb Bush please clap moment.
He explained that you can cheer for him.
Well, the problem is no one wants to, Joe.
No one.
Here we go.
Thanks for making a difference for the families here in North Carolina, Governor.
You're setting an example all across the country.
Thank you.
And look, you can cheer.
It's all right.
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
But that wasn't the worst because the worst is he finishes this speech and Joe Biden literally starts shaking hands with no one.
No, nobody like people who aren't there.
He's shaking hands with ghosts.
It's as though Patrick Swayze is just standing on the other hand here, like, like from ghost, just speaking to him.
It's corn pop.
It's the ghost of corn pop.
I will describe this to you if you're just listening and you can't watch it, but you really should watch the clip.
It's amazing.
He finishes his speech.
He literally puts out his hands.
You shake hands with a person who is not there.
Our president is seeing things.
Here we go.
God bless you all.
He finishes, he turns to his right, and he proceeds to put out his hand as though he's going to shake hands with somebody.
And then he turns to the back as though he's going to shake hands with somebody.
Corn Pop is in neither place.
And then he just wanders around the stage aimlessly until somebody directs him offstage.
He is, uh, he's definitely with it.
So, this Biden administration, which is in serious, serious trouble, they've come up with their new plan.
Wait, wait, guess what it is?
Guess what it is?
Yes, they're doubling down on the equity garbage.
That's what the plan is.
The plan is, we're losing everybody, double down on what pleases college-educated, white, liberal women who want C.R.I.
Rao over to dinner to explain to them their racial flaws, and also black Americans.
This is like, this is his plan.
By the way, black Americans are not buying this, increasingly.
He's down with everybody except for college-educated white women.
So now the Biden administration, this is their new plan to win people back.
They trotted out domestic policy advisor Susan Rice, who was a garbage heap while she was serving in the Obama administration as national security advisor.
Now she's back as domestic policy advisor.
And apparently he is going to advance racial equity.
He's going to advance racial equity.
And some of the steps that they are pushing are promoting fair housing policies, which presumably means spending more government money on affordable housing, which of course ends generally with rent control or crappy affordable housing, because that's what the government does, strengthen the nation-to-nation relationship with Native American tribes and Alaska Natives, We're going to have to explain how that works.
End private prisons, which presumably means the closing and shuttering of prisons, which will exacerbate the crime rates.
And combat xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, without mentioning who exactly is committing the vast bulk of hate crime against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
And the answer is not white people.
So that's going to be kind of awkward for the Biden administration.
More than 90 federal agencies released their action equity plans on Thursday.
They were ordered by President Biden during his first days in office.
All cabinet level agencies unveiled what senior Biden officials called an ambitious equity and racial justice agenda around labor, housing, the environment, healthcare, broadband, and law enforcement.
With police reform and voting rights legislation stalled in Congress, according to Axios, the Biden administration's executive actions are aimed at doing what it can to fulfill a promise to address systemic racism.
Details released by the White House also included plans to make national parks more accessible to people with disabilities and reduce discrimination against LGBTQIA2 plus minus plus equal sign, caret sign, command sign, hashtag tilde.
People.
Senior Biden officials said agencies would simplify grants programs and government documents to make services easier to access for people of color and tribal communities.
So every single department of the government is now going to be oriented toward the idea that America is systemically racist and only reverse discrimination is capable of rectifying that discrimination.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development vowed to examine how to reduce bias in home appraisals.
The Department of Commerce promised to spend $50 billion on broadband infrastructure in rural and tribal communities.
By the way, broadband infrastructure is definitely going to solve the problems in rural and tribal communities which have, unfortunately, an extensive rate of crime and alcoholism and abuse.
Probably more internet is going to fix that.
That's where we need to put our focus.
The Department of Veterans Affairs said it will work to improve the social and economic determinants for the health of LGBTQIA plus minus divided by assigned veterans.
Because that's, with our military shrinking, we need the Department of Veterans Affairs really focused in on, you know, the vast bulk of our soldiers who are, in fact, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, etc.
NASA said it would release Earth science data in more accessible formats to show environmental challenges in underserved communities.
Because that's what NASA does.
They don't explore space anymore.
Instead, they release reports on how racist the environment is.
Here, for example, is NASA explaining its new magical equity plan.
We are no longer going to worry about, you know, getting to Mars.
We're going to worry about whether there are enough black astronauts or something.
At NASA, all of our missions, whether it's in space or here on Earth, they're going to require equal opportunity.
And so today we're releasing NASA's 2022 Equity Action Plan.
It outlines this agency's strategy to improve fairness and to try to give more opportunities for Americans across the country.
Diversity in space!
Yeah, I'm sure we're freaking out the Chinese with this stuff.
I mean, if we don't have a lesbian little person in space by the year 2025, I think America has failed.
I mean, honestly, we've had first black woman vice president, first black female Supreme Court justice, although we don't know what a woman is, but until we have a lesbian transgender woman who's a little person, who's black, who has one foot in space, so that we have equal opportunity, I think NASA has failed.
That's really where things are at.
So this is all exciting stuff.
Well, the media and the Biden administration, they're very focused on equity, equity, equity, equity.
But here's the thing.
All of that is a lie.
What they're actually focused on is just lying to you.
We're not going to do that here at Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is intent on changing the culture, which is why we are actively changing it in literally all the ways we can possibly find.
Now we've started our own publishing wing called DW Books.
We are proud to publish books that actively fight the left's monopoly on storytelling, like fiery, but mostly peaceful.
The 2020 Riots and the Gaslighting of America by Julio Rosas, who pulls back the curtain on the Black Lives Matter riots that broke out across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd's death.
Rosas was reporting from the ground firsthand, and he gives his experiences and exposes the media's attempts to convince Americans that fatal and destructive riots were actually mostly peaceful.
Check out the trailer.
The media gaslit the American people for all of 2020 as the riots unfolded.
They did not give you the whole story.
I was there.
Philip Floyd, Kyle Rittenhouse, Rayshard Brooks, Chaz in Seattle.
I saw all the riots with my own eyes.
Windshields being smashed, giant rocks that were being thrown, businesses that were starting to be looted.
The crowd started to become hostile.
All the cops were trapped and surrounded.
Police were being ordered to retreat.
I experienced the tear gas.
I experienced the smoke.
This was very real to me.
The mainstream media, they were trying to call them protests.
CNN with that chyron saying, fiery but mostly peaceful.
They're trying to push a narrative of don't believe your lying eyes because they were trying to appease a very dedicated Antifa movement that's there.
When you read my book, Fiery But Mostly Peaceful, you will get the full story.
You will learn what actually happened during the riots of 2020 and what the media did not want to tell you.
Buy my book, Fiery But Mostly Peaceful.
Everywhere books are sold.
Yeah, I mean, the media lied so unbelievably much in 2020 and Julio really does pull back the curtain because he was there.
The book is available for pre-order on Amazon or anywhere you buy books online.
Go pre-order your copy today.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Here's the thing.
All of this equity stuff, it's not going to work, and Democrats know it's not going to work, which is why they're running headlong away from this sort of stuff.
So, for example, yesterday, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, he actually called out Black Lives Matter, saying, I noticed that you guys don't have anything to say when black civilians are being killed by other black civilians, and if you actually cared about black lives, you might comment on that.
That used to be a quote-unquote right-wing talking point.
The reason Eric Adams is saying it is because it turns out the equity agenda of Joe Biden and company is garbage and people don't like it.
I thought Black Lives Matter.
Where are all those who stated black lives matter?
Then go do an analysis of who was killed or shot last night.
I was up all night speaking to my commanders in the Bronx, in Brooklyn.
The victims were black.
Many of the shooters were black.
Okay, so when you have people like Eric Adams who are now mirroring talking points that were used by Republicans in 2020, you know the Democrats have gone down the wrong path here.
The polls, by the way, show the Democrats have gone down the wrong path.
They keep saying equity, equity, equity, and we need to mainline a bunch of this garbage into teaching your kids.
We need to teach your kids that America is a systemically racist country.
We need to teach your kids about gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten.
And it turns out Americans generally don't like this sort of stuff.
There's a new poll out from the Associated Press and what it found is that Americans are quote-unquote very split about how much children in K through 12 schools should be taught about racism and sexuality.
About 4 in 10 Republicans say teachers in local public schools discuss issues related to sexuality too much.
Only about 1 in 10 say too little.
Among Democrats, those numbers are reversed.
Meaning that they think that teachers should talk about sexuality more.
I'm looking at the stats right now, and here is what it says.
Partisans split over parent and teacher influence on school curricula.
But it finds that all adults, 50%, say that parents have too little influence on what is said in the classroom.
About 50%.
That's 38% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans.
How about teachers?
51% of all adults say teachers have too little input on what goes on in the classroom.
So I think people just don't understand this question.
62% of Democrats, however, say that teachers have too little input.
So they say, Democrats are fairly consistent here.
What they say is 38% of Democrats think parents have not enough impact.
62% of Democrats think that parents, that teachers have too little impact.
So they want teachers, not parents, Democrats do.
For Republicans, those numbers are reversed.
65% of Republicans say parents should have more power.
40% of Republicans say teachers should have more power.
But here's the thing about this poll.
When you look at the downline numbers, this is not a poll of parents.
This is a poll of all Americans.
And it wildly undersamples parents.
And for people for whom this is the top priority, what gets taught in schools, I guarantee you, people who have kids, they're not siding with Democrats on these issues.
So you have a bunch of single ladies up in San Francisco who are saying, yes, teachers definitely should be teaching what they want to teach and not what parents want.
And then you have parents who actually make this their number one issue, saying the opposite.
Democrats are fools to embrace this issue.
And yet they do embrace this issue.
And I honestly, I think so much of Democrats embracing these issues is about their mirroring of what the media say.
And you have practical examples of this, of course.
And you remember last year that the Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into the Del Rio sector horse patrol unit on the border because the media pretended that members of the border patrol were whipping migrants.
They were not whipping migrants.
They were actually using the reins to control their horses.
And you remember that Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, promised a speedy investigation into the so-called whipping, as according to Breitbart.
He said it would be completed in days, not weeks.
Well, that happened months ago.
That was in September of 2021.
Now they've completed the investigation, and they've quietly leaked the fact that none of it was true.
There was no whipping.
Okay, but this just demonstrates how this administration runs.
It just mirrors whatever they think the media want from them.
And this is true on matters of equity as well.
The media actively downplays the real problems of real Americans in favor of racial wokeness.
There's a study from the Washington Free Beacon came out yesterday, which confirms what everybody knows.
Which is that the media dramatically undercover the race of suspects if the suspects happen to be black.
The Washington Free Beacon points out that the man arrested for Tuesday's New York City subway shooting is a black nationalist and outspoken racist who railed against whites, Jews, and Hispanics.
A careful reader of the New York Times could be forgiven for overlooking that.
In a nearly 2,000-word article on the attack, this suspect's race was not mentioned.
The same was true for coverage offered by Reuters.
The Washington Post only mentioned the race of the suspect in relation to his condemnation of training programs for low-income black youths.
Media critics on the right say the conspicuous omission of race from these news reports illustrates a trend among prestige papers, which de-emphasize or omit the race of non-white criminals while playing up the race of white offenders.
But is it a real pattern?
Yes.
A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds the papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning the race much later in articles than they do for white offenders.
These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender's race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020 and the protests that followed.
The Free Beacon collected data on nearly 1,100 articles about homicides from six major newspapers, all written between 2019 and 2021.
Those papers included the Chicago Tribune, LA Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star Tribune.
For each article, we collected the offender's and victim's name and race and noted where in the article the offender's race was mentioned, if at all.
The data suggest an alarming editorial trend, in which major papers routinely omit information from news reports, presenting readers with a skewed picture of who does and doesn't commit crime.
These editorial choices are part and parcel of the racial reckoning that swept newsrooms in the wake of Floyd's murder, which saw journalists dramatically overhauling crime coverage to emphasize the view that the criminal justice system is racist at the root, perhaps at the expense of honesty about the individual offender's crimes.
So they looked at which paragraph the offender's race was mentioned in.
For white offenders, the race of the suspect was mentioned between 30 and 40 percent of the time.
In the first 10% of the article.
And another 30-40% of the time in the second 10% of the article.
So, in other words, in the first couple paragraphs of the article, if it's a white offender, it was gonna get mentioned like 70% of the time.
Black offender?
Black offenders, 70% of the way down in the article is where the plurality of racial mentions happen.
All racial mentions were backlogged in these articles.
That is not a shock, because of course, the media have an agenda.
And then the Democratic Party mirrors that agenda.
And you can see it in individual cases.
The media will go out of their way to cover certain crime stories as national crime stories, and they will go out of their way to downplay certain crime stories as national crime stories.
So as I mentioned yesterday, there was a black man who went around attempting to ram Orthodox Jews with his car in Lakewood, New Jersey.
It is not a national news story.
You don't know the name of the man unless you listen to the show.
You don't even know about the story unless you listen to the show.
However, there is a full-scale, long piece in the Washington Post today about a man who was shot by the cops.
His name was Patrick Loyola.
He was killed by a police officer in the western Michigan city of Grand Rapids.
Here's the way the Washington Post describes it.
Quote, what began as a traffic stop ended with Leoya shot in the head.
The latest police shooting of an unarmed black man to shake the nation.
He was 26 years old, a father of two.
The headline from the Washington Post is family of man shot by Michigan police.
A son was quote, killed like an animal.
Sounds like rather inflammatory coverage, does it not?
I mean, it sounds as though this person was just killed for no reason at all.
Well, fortunately, there is tape of the incident.
And what the tape of the incident actually shows is that this particular suspect not only resisted arrest, but grabbed the officer's taser and then proceeded to wrestle with the officer on the ground continuously for minutes at a time.
In fact, we have some of the tape.
This is disturbing, so if you're disturbed by this sort of thing, don't watch it.
But you can see the suspect repeatedly grab, like put his hand on the officer's taser.
Rule of thumb, if you grab an officer's taser, you're going to get shot.
That is the rule of thumb.
And you are no longer unarmed.
If you grab an officer's taser, or you attempt to take a taser away from an officer, you are attempting to become armed.
That is the goal of grabbing the taser in the first place.
No officer of the law anywhere in the United States will allow you to take a weapon off them without shooting you.
Simple, simple fact.
And yet the Washington Post covers this as though this person, you read the first few paragraphs, And what you get is that this guy was shot for no reason whatsoever.
His mother, Dorcas Leoya, said through tears, quote, I'm surprised and astonished to see that it's here that my son has been killed with a bullet.
That was my beloved son.
I'm sure that's true.
But that does not change the underlying facts, which is if you resist arrest from a cop by trying to grab his weapon, you're going to get shot.
The department released four videos on Wednesday that showed the incident from various vantage points, including from the passenger riding with Lillia and the officer's body camera, which turned off as the men struggled and didn't capture the shooting because of the pressure on the camera, presumably.
And then, of course, you get the obligatory paragraphs about the local authorities who were troubled by the footage and how the video was painful to watch.
Yes, it turns out that virtually all police footage is very difficult to watch, particularly when someone dies on camera.
But the tape shows Lillia grabbing repeatedly for the weapon.
Here's some of the tape.
You can see.
Look, look.
He takes his hand.
He has it.
He's grabbing the officer's taser right now.
He's not letting go of the officer's taser.
Right?
Let go of the taser!
Okay, you can see.
He's gonna yell, let go of the taser.
Okay, and then he shoots the suspect.
And the reason he shoots the suspect, and it's horrible to watch.
It always is horrible to watch somebody die on camera.
Terrible, terrible stuff.
That's The difficulty of being a police officer when someone is trying to take a taser off of you.
Family said the video showed he was not posing a threat when he was killed.
They described it as difficult to watch with Leoya's brother, Thomas, calling it the quote, most horrifying thing I've ever seen in my life.
Well, I'm sure it is a horrifying thing to watch, but the notion that he was not posing a threat.
He's repeatedly grabbing the taser.
Now, the reason that I point this out.
Is because every single case like this is covered by the media as though it is just purely a case of an innocent person being shot by the cops for no reason at all without resisting arrest.
And then it is treated as an aspect of criminal justice racism.
That is not criminal justice racism.
There is no evidence of racism in this tape.
There's not even evidence that the cop was violating the law in this tape.
But this is a national news story.
And I guarantee you the Biden administration will speak about it.
You'll have the president of the United States make comments about it.
And they will just continue to mirror bad priorities, largely because of the media coverage.
And this is the thing, overall.
The left has now created an echo chamber of its own making.
It's actually very damaging for the left because they're out of touch with the rest of Americans.
And if anyone, from Elon Musk to the Daily Wire, if anybody threatens that monopoly on informational dissemination, they get very, very, very angry.
I'm perfectly happy to read you articles from the Washington Post and the New York Times and from the L.A.
Times.
I do it pretty much every day on this show.
However, the left wishes for you only to hear those points of view.
And because they've created this monopoly on information, I think they don't even understand the damage they are doing to themselves.
They've now walled themselves off from the rest of the American public, and they're going to pay the price electorally in 2022 in really, really heavy ways and beyond.
Alrighty, we have another hour of the show later today, but first, you cannot forget to end your week by tuning into The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew shows every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you, as always.
Head on over to dailywire.com, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central, and tune in.
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