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April 25, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:10
Musk vs. Twitter, DeSantis vs. Disney, And The Fight Against Woke Inc. | Ep. 1480
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Joe Biden stuns the nation by mixing up mask mandates with Title 42 because he is no longer with us.
Controversy continues to swirl around Florida ending a special tax giveaway for Disney, and Twitter reverses course to reconsider Elon Musk's offer.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash, Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, over the weekend, a tragedy occurred when a Texas National Guard soldier Apparently died trying to save alleged drug smugglers in the Rio Grande River.
He was identified on Sunday as Specialist Bishop Evans 22 from Arlington, Texas.
This is according to the UK Daily Mail.
The search is still underway for Evans's body after he presumably drowned on Friday after jumping in the water, diving Texas and Mexico in an attempt to rescue, dividing Texas and Mexico in an attempt to rescue Two men from The Current.
Republican Texas Representative Chip Royce sent a quick rest in peace message on Twitter upon the release of the deceased's name.
Illinois GOP Representative Mary Miller tweeted on Sunday, praying for Texas National Guard SPC Bishop Evans and his family.
What a horrible tragedy for them to endure.
He was only 22 years old.
Evans' death comes only one month before Title 42 is set to end, which will cause an even greater migration crisis at the southern border where immigration agencies are already overwhelmed.
Apparently, what happened here is that this Border Patrol soldier, he was He was stationed at the border.
He saw two migrants who turned out to be alleged drug smugglers crossing the Rio Grande.
They started to struggle in the water.
He went out to save them, and in the process of saving them, he drowned.
The White House, as of Monday morning, had yet to comment on the entire situation, which just demonstrates what this White House is all about.
So you have a border patrol agent who, by the way, happens to be black, who apparently drowned in the process of attempting to save two drug smugglers crossing the Rio Grande River.
And the White House has nothing to say.
However, if there were a picture of this same soldier whipping his horse with reins, then presumably we would get a week-long news cycle about the outrageous nature of Border Patrol and the cruel vicissitudes of their evil visited upon migrants of brown color.
Because we got that last year.
And it turned out all to be false.
And the White House had no problem coming out and commenting on any of it.
Texas Republican Congressperson Tony Gonzalez wrote, quote, I'm heartbroken to hear of the death of a Texas National Guard soldier.
Our citizen soldier responds, the toughest challenge is including the border crisis.
As we've seen with the deaths of migrants and now the tragic loss of guardsmen, this crisis can be deadly for all involved.
The 22-year-old soldier went into the water near Eagle Pass, Texas on Friday, has not been seen since.
According to a Texas military department press release, it's now presumed that Evans drowned.
Preliminary investigation revealed that the migrants who are now in the custody of Border Patrol were involved in illicit transnational narcotics trafficking.
It's unclear if the military member knew of their alleged criminal activity when he jumped to their rescue.
The guardsmen had been assigned to Texas Governor Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star initiative aimed at combating illegal border crossings and drugs.
Divers were seen wading through the water in NBC News footage at this point.
As of Sunday afternoon, the soldier had still not been found.
Now, the reason this is relevant, of course, is because Joe Biden and the White House have decided that they are going to, as of late May, relieve Title 42.
Title 42 is the CDC regulation that essentially says that people who are applying for asylum at the border do not need to be processed while we still have a COVID emergency.
The Biden administration says they want to get rid of it.
It's fine if they actually have a process to actually process the people at the border and to reject the vast majority of them who are not actually here for any sort of Cognizable reason under U.S.
law.
But they don't.
Instead, what we are going to see is a mass influx of illegal immigrants.
The Border Patrol is estimating that it could be upwards of 10,000 people a day.
We're going to see this mass influx of illegal immigrants.
And again, the Biden administration has no plan to deal with any of this.
No plan.
And they've had no plan since they entered office.
The spike in illegal immigration under Joe Biden is historically large.
The border crisis is historically big.
And you can see in polling data that Americans care about this.
After the economy, the number one issue Americans say they have is immigration.
And there is a reason for that.
And it is because hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are arriving at the southern border every single month.
And they're overwhelming our nation's resources.
And Joe Biden not only has no plan for that, he doesn't even have to comment when a Texas National Guardsman goes missing while attempting to save illegal immigrant drug smugglers.
He has no comment on that.
But again, happy to comment on whether the Border Patrol are human rights abusers.
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Well, perhaps part of the problem here is that it actually makes a difference that the President of the United States is not with us.
Now, listen, I've been saying for a couple of years at this point that Joe Biden is no longer with us, that the late lamented Joe Biden obviously is in a state of mental decline.
He sort of stunned the country on Friday because he was asked a simple question about Title 42.
And he proceeded to give a discourse about the federal judge in Florida who knocked down the mask mandate.
So he clearly just mixes up in his feeble brain, Title 42 and the federal mask mandate, which are not remotely the same thing.
And he just starts jabbering about it as though this is an intelligible answer.
Because the wires are crossed up there.
There's nothing going on, which means that the people who are actually running the country, and I get this question all the time, who's actually running the country?
This guy clearly ain't.
So who actually is running the country?
What I say is in his lucid moments, Joe Biden makes big decisions, like pull out from Afghanistan, and then his team has to scramble to backfill.
So the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on this one is that Donald Trump would have these Moments of decisiveness.
And then his team would very often talk him out of it.
They would say, Mr. President, that's a bad idea.
Joe Biden has these moments of lucidity where the dumbest possible ideas crystallize in his feeble brain.
And then he says, get out of Afghanistan.
And then his team, instead of saying, that's a really bad idea, maybe we should wait, they rushed to do his bidding.
And so you have sort of occasional guidance from Joe Biden, but the administration in reality is being run by Ron Klain, who's the White House Chief of Staff, and Susan Rice, who's Domestic Policy Advisor, and Jake Sullivan over at the NSA.
Those are the people who are actually running the country.
All of them are brutally incompetent.
All of them are ideologically committed to the hard left.
And you can see it as it results in policy.
So it is a scary thing that the President of the United States is no longer with us.
And this clip should frighten you.
Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent, it should be of concern to you.
Listen, I remember when there was a lot of talk about Donald Trump taking office, should they invoke the 25th Amendment, and the idea was that he was crazy.
Well, he was no crazier when he was President than he was when he was running, but here you actually have... I don't know any other way to put this.
This is senility.
I mean, you're watching a man go senile while he is President of the United States.
Here's Joe Biden.
I'm Title 42, Mr. Are you considering delaying lifting Title 42?
No, what I'm considering is continuing to hear from my, first of all, there's going to be an appeal by the Justice Department.
Because as a matter of principle, we want to be able to be in a position where if in fact it is strongly concluded by the What is he talking about?
What is he talking about?
He immediately mixes up the federal mask mandate with Title 42 and then just jabbers about it for a couple paragraphs there.
extending Title 42.
What is he talking about?
What is he talking about?
He immediately mixes up the federal mask mandate with Title 42 and then just jabbers about it for a couple paragraphs there.
This should be wildly disquieting.
So the White House had to come out and clean up because again, the job of the White House press corps and the White House press secretary, they basically played Joe Biden's night nurse.
Every single night he craps the bed and every single morning they come in and they change the bedpan and they change the sheets.
And they make sure that there is some form of plastic over the mattress.
The White House had to issue a statement clarifying his remarks, quote, I want to clarify that in comments at the conclusion of my remarks this morning, I was referring to the CDC's mask mandate and there is no Department of Justice action on Title 42.
Well, yeah, we know.
The whole point here is that Joe Biden is no longer with us.
And so, all of these sort of humorous moments that are out there, where Joe Biden is shaking hands with thin air, or where Joe Biden is talking about... Okay, all of that stops being humorous when it turns out that this is the most powerful man on the face of the Earth.
And again, he has these sort of brain hiccups on a regular basis.
Over the weekend, he gave a speech where he announced that 80% of the people he grew up with had asthma.
80%.
Uh-huh.
When it came spring, I mean it came in the fall, this is the God's truth.
And you get in the car and there's a little frost on the window, turn on the windshield wiper, there'd be an oil slick.
Not a joke.
I have asthma and 80% of the people who in fact we grew up with have asthma.
That's what you call a fence line community.
I mean, this is the kind of person who's president of the United States.
I mean, over the weekend, he forgot, he was talking about how he brought nations together, a hundred nations together, couldn't even remember the name of the meeting that he brought the nations together for.
We saw new standards.
We set new standards.
We slashed methane and brought over 100 nations together when I was at the big meeting we had in Europe.
A hundred nations around the globe.
Okay, so who exactly is running the administration?
The answer is the radicals are running the administration.
Joe Biden always says what he thinks the center of the Democratic Party wants to hear.
The center of the Democratic Party has moved to the left.
But the simple fact is that on Title 42, every single senator who is in a vulnerable seat is asking Joe Biden not to end Title 42.
The White House still continues to push forward on ending Title 42, which would unleash a wave of illegal immigration like we've never seen in this country.
They have people in the center, the Maggie Hassans in New Hampshire and the Mark Kellys in Arizona, the sort of centrist-leaning Democrats.
And they are begging Joe Biden not to end Title 42.
But then you have Senator Elizabeth Warren, who's a crazy, radical left-winger from Massachusetts, talking about how we need to reverse Title 42.
And guess who wins this argument?
Title 42 is not consistent with our values and it doesn't keep us safer.
The Biden administration is putting plans in place to deal with people who are asking for amnesty and humanitarian relief at the border.
But keep in mind, we need comprehensive immigration reform.
Okay, so again, the fact is that when you have a feeble-minded president of the United States, the most powerful force inside the administration is what is going to end up taking over for that feeble-minded president.
That's what you have in Joe Biden, which is truly a frightening prospect because the people who are standing behind Joe Biden and his administration Are all more sympathetic to the positions of Bernie Sanders than they were to Joe Biden's position, say, even a couple of years ago.
In just one second, we'll get to Ron DeSantis and the continuing controversy over his attempt to end a special tax district for Disney.
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Okay, meanwhile, massive controversy continues to swirl around Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislator ending Disney's special tax break district in Reedy Creek.
The idea here is that Ron DeSantis is violating First Amendment principles by announcing that he has rejected a special tax district for Disney.
Number one, there's a difference between a special tax dispensation being erased and, for example, you not being allowed to do business in a particular area.
And number two, if Ron DeSantis had stated that the reason that we are doing this is that we don't give special tax breaks to companies that openly say that they wish to sexually indoctrinate children, Like, in their big all-hands-on-deck meetings, then he'd be on pretty solid ground.
Hey, here is Ron DeSantis announcing it last week.
And this is sort of a complex issue.
It really is.
And the reason it's a complex issue is because on a root ideological level, I'm very much in favor of government staying out of the business of whatever people have to say, right?
I mean, a First Amendment absolutist.
I think that the government has no business telling you what you ought to think.
I don't think the government has business telling you generally what you ought to say.
I don't think the government ought to be cracking down on corporations for political speech or anything like that.
However, However, and this is the big however, when it comes to what Ron DeSantis is doing, this is the predictable and necessary result of a left-wing push to politicize corporations with government pressure.
In other words, we are no longer in the arena of unfettered free speech and we have not been for decades.
We are now in the arena of government-sponsored speech by corporations, in which these corporations basically do the bidding of their government overlords.
And so if we are now in that area, if we are now in that arena, where corporations know they have to reflect the priorities of left-wing governmental actors and their media allies, or they will be destroyed, there has to be countervailing pressure.
If there is no countervailing pressure, we never get back to neutral.
We never get back to a position where everybody can speak freely.
Because here's the reality in this country right now.
Half the country cannot speak freely.
And if you're a corporate leader, you will be cuddled and bullied by a combination of media pressure and governmental threats into doing what the left wants you to do.
And so what Ron DeSantis is doing on sort of a natural neutral level, I'm not in love with.
I don't like government going after corporations for doing things the government disagrees with.
The problem is that these corporations are currently not doing what these corporations have an interest in doing.
They're doing what the left wants them to do because they are so afraid of government coming in and cracking down on them or they're so solicitous of government attention that gives them subsidies.
And so once that happens, you have to engage mutually assured destruction.
Here is Governor DeSantis announcing the bill dissolving Disney's special district.
These are the bills.
The Stop Woke, which passed during the regular session, and then the theme park carve-out from our Big Tech Bill and the Special Districts Bill.
We're going to put our John Hancocks on all of those right now.
We're going to take care of those.
But ultimately, this state is governed by the best interests of the people of this state, not by any one woke corporation.
We're not going to let them take over the state, and I think this is an example.
Okay, so, there is a case to be made, by the way, that Republicans should basically eliminate all special tax dispensations for all corporations.
No more crony capitalism, because it turns out that crony capitalism is the single best way.
That governments take control of corporations.
But in order to understand why so many conservatives, free market thinkers, have started to consolidate around the idea that response from people like Ron DeSantis is necessary, you have to understand the nature of where we stand currently in the United States.
Again, in a vacuum, starting tabula rasa, government should never interfere in what corporations have to say on political matters.
They should not.
Because corporations are just groups of people who have legally organized.
This is why there have been a bunch of free speech cases that have suggested that when you have a corporation, it has political speech rights because the rights of the people who actually comprise the organization are then carried forward into the corporate form.
And I agree with that logic.
What you have to understand right now is that these corporations are no longer just private entities.
In order to guarantee free speech rights, you have to have a hard division between public and private.
There is what the government does, and then there is what corporations do, and they are not the same thing.
And corporations are separate from government, and government is separate from corporations.
Once you have governmental structures that are meant to insinuate themselves into corporate governance, once you have governmental structures that are meant to cudgel corporations into doing their bidding, once you see that the government has attempted to weaponize Corporations on behalf of democratic political viewpoints, then you are no longer in the realm of unfettered free speech.
You are no longer in the vacuum where political power does not matter.
You are now just asking whether essentially A government-subsidized entity, namely these major companies, are doing the bidding of governmental actors.
And once that happens, you are now squarely in the political free-for-all.
Once you're in the political free-for-all, you shouldn't be surprised when there's pushback.
And by the way, there should be pushback.
Because again, there's only one thing worse than having nuclear weapons, and it's when your opponent has nuclear weapons and you don't.
And mutually assured destruction is necessary here.
So maybe Ron DeSantis should have phrased this better.
Maybe Ron DeSantis should have come out and said, this isn't just about Disney and them getting involved in the Parental Rights and Education Bill.
We became aware of their sexualization of children or attempts to sexualize children in their own content because of what happened with the Parental Rights and Education Bill.
But the bottom line is this, there are a bunch of people on the left right now who are gonna complain, oh, this is fascism, oh, this is terrible.
Okay, if it is, if it's terrible, it's fascist, I just have one question for you.
Why have you guys been openly pushing it for 20 years?
Longer than that, we're going back 50 years.
Why have you been pushing for government takeover of corporate speech for 50 years and weaponization of corporate speech against political viewpoints you despise?
You don't get to play the free speech and free markets card when you oppose both.
You don't get to do that.
You can make the argument that I should be more consistent in my free speech and free markets attitude.
But I'm freely willing to admit that in a vacuum, what is happening right now in Florida is not something I would love.
We are not in a vacuum.
We are in a place where you guys have taken out the mace and chain and you have clubbed corporations into doing what you wish them to do.
And then you are saying that no one else should be able to offer a counter incentive for corporations to stop doing your bidding.
It's a cynical ploy by you, in other words.
When you do it, it's good.
When other people do it, it's fascism.
How about this?
It's bad when both sides do it, but it needs to be done now by both sides because you ain't going to stop doing it until you learn, until you realize that corporations need to be left alone.
If corporations are only going to be left alone because they realize, they stand up, they get up on their hind legs and they say, listen, we are not going to engage in doing the bidding of either side because if we do the bidding of one side, the other side is going to come after us.
That is a good result.
I want to trace the history of this because, again, the claim that's currently being made is that Ron DeSantis is launching a first strike against Disney here.
Wrong.
That is not how any of this has worked.
Christopher Caldwell has an excellent book called The Age of Enlightenment, and he talks about the fact that since the 1960s, the relationship between government and the private sector has radically changed.
He talks about the simple fact that the government decided to mold the whole of society down to the most intimate private acts around the ideology of anti-racism.
The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions.
Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted.
In other words, before the Constitution said government can't get involved in this space.
And then in the 60s, there's a complete revision in the constitutional bargain and government got involved in all of these spaces and started pushing private actors to do things government never had the right to do before.
As Caldwell writes, Corporate leaders, advertisers, the great majority of the press came to a pragmatic accommodation with what the law required, how it worked, the euphemisms with which it must be honored.
Chief diversity officers and diversity compliance officers working inside companies carried out functions that resembled those of 20th century commissars.
They would be consulted about whether a board meeting or a company picnic was sufficiently diverse.
We have government that intimately involved in the workings of business.
You can't then complain when government gets intimately involved in the reverse workings of the business in order to tell businesses to stay out of the actual political sphere.
You can't be surprised by that, nor should you be.
And again, it's become more and more brazen and more open over time.
In just one second, we'll get into the timeline of just how the democratic media complex has infused itself into the corporate world.
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So take for example, I want to just go through a quick timeline of the amount of left-wing direct intervention in the market economy to punish corporations that it doesn't like.
Because they do it all the time.
And they've created an entire superstructure, an entire cultural conversation around the idea that if you're a corporation and you don't do what we want you to do, we'll find a way to punish you.
Through government-led boycotts, through government-subsidized media attacks, So, for example, in 2010, you'll recall that the IRS openly targeted conservative 501c3s.
And there was no punishment for Lois Lerner.
She retired with her dignity and her pension fully intact.
Remember that happened right before the 2012 election.
Between 2010 and 2012, Lois Lerner, the career official at the center of the IRS scandal, started issuing orders from the top of the IRS basically telling them to hold up any application for a conservative 501c3.
And that happened as a direct result of Barack Obama and his colleagues specifically saying that 501c3s that were conservative-oriented were corrupt and they were bad.
And the idea was that Tea Party organizations had to be stopped.
And so the IRS picked up on that, and they went ahead and started regulating all of these conservative organizations.
And according to the left, this wasn't just not a bad thing, it was a good thing.
Remember, in 2012, there were multiple mayors of Democratic cities who vowed to keep Chick-fil-A out of their cities.
Why?
Because it turns out that Chick-fil-A president, Dan Cathy, was a conservative who backed traditional marriage.
And Chick-fil-A had a charitable grant foundation that gave charity to some conservative organizations.
There were no allegations of discrimination by Chick-fil-A against any customer.
There was no allegation that gay Americans were being turned away from Chick-fil-A.
But because the boss of Chick-fil-A was pro-traditional marriage, government started to target Chick-fil-A.
You remember this?
Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston told the Boston Herald he doesn't want a business in the city that, quote, discriminates against the population.
He wrote an entire letter to Chick-fil-A Telling them they were not welcome in Boston.
Former Barack Obama, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, tried to kill Chick-fil-A's plans to build in Chicago.
Remember this.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said, quote, Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.
They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents.
This would be a bad investment since it would be empty.
So they had no problem cracking down on Chick-fil-A circa 2012.
In 2013, Barack Obama went out of his way to target the American Legislative Exchange Council.
ALEC is a large-scale lobbying group that took donations from a wide variety of major corporations, ranging from places like Allstate to Coca-Cola, and they've been pushing back against Obamacare because it was extraordinarily burdensome for major American businesses.
And so Barack Obama and his colleagues at the White House, they went after ALEC.
But they didn't go after ALEC on the basis of ALEC's lobbying.
Instead, they suggested that ALEC was responsible for the killing of Trayvon Martin, because ALEC had supported stand-your-ground laws.
Now, if you recall the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman situation, stand-your-ground was never invoked.
It was never even invoked in court.
It was a self-defense argument.
But the entire media, spurred on by Barack Obama, went after the American Legislative Exchange Council and caused major corporations to pull their support from ALEC.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights examined the gun lobbies and American Legislative Exchange Council's influence in creating and promoting these laws.
That'd be the Democratic Senate Judiciary Subcommittee.
That's Senator Dick Durbin going directly after ALEC as a political opponent.
Remember in 2014, Barack Obama attacked Hobby Lobby attempting to force them To pay for birth control for female employees and pay for abortion care for employees.
Remember this went all the way up to the Supreme Court because Hobby Lobby was bad and Hobby Lobby had to be punished.
It didn't stop there.
Remember that around the same time, Barack Obama attacked the Little Sisters of the Poor because even nuns had to pay for birth control or refer out to pay for birth control.
Remember in 2006, in 2017, The attacks on Facebook and social media began from the left after Donald Trump won election because the idea was these social companies had to be reined in.
And Senator Dianne Feinstein literally saying to social media, either you fix yourself or we will fix it for you.
She said, you have to be the ones who do something about it or we will.
The idea being do what we want or we will bludgeon you to death.
And this has been the consistent theme of the left for 50 years.
Do what we want or we will cudgel you to death.
Do what we want or we will bludgeon you.
And so, if you're a corporation, because this is the big question, right?
Everybody always asks, these corporations, what interest does Disney have in the Parental Rights and Education Bill?
What interest do companies like Coca-Cola have in voter ID in Georgia?
Or MLB, what does that have to do with voter ID in Georgia?
The NCAA, what does that have to do with trans bathrooms in Charlotte, North Carolina?
And the answer is nothing.
They just know that if they Whimper and cower before the power of the almighty media and the democratic power complex.
They're more likely to receive more subsidies.
They're less likely to be punished by government.
And they are more likely to receive media benevolent ignoring.
So that's the entire power structure that has been set up here.
And it's literally every day from the left.
It's nothing new.
This is every day.
It's a continuing effort for 50, 60 years in this country.
In 2020.
Gavin Newsom announced that he was going to force all California companies to remake their corporate boards.
I don't know how that's anything but political.
I mean, isn't that political cuddling of major corporations?
According to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, circa October 2020, in a move that continues California's push for increased diversity on corporate boards, Governor Gavin Newsom on September 30th signed into law a bill that requires publicly held companies headquartered in California to include board members from underrepresented communities.
The action follows passage of a similar law in 2018 mandating that public companies headquartered in the state have at least one woman on their boards of directors by the end of 2019, etc, etc.
The law significantly expands the diversity categories to include LGBTQ plus IA, etc, etc.
And this does not, like, it never waivers the consistent mission of the Democratic Party and their allies in the media because the media are just, it's a, it's a complex.
As my friend Andrew Breitbart used to say, the Democratic Media Complex is in fact a complex, like the Military-Industrial Complex that Eisenhower talked about.
They're part of one and the same organism.
That Democratic Media Complex is focused full-time on grabbing the power of business and utilizing it for their own ends.
Which is why Barack Obama, for example, is threatening social media companies with regulation.
Here's Barack Obama over the weekend.
He was speaking at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.
And he was talking about how we need to regulate social media platforms into the ground because, of course, they are responsible for quote-unquote disinformation.
By disinformation, Barack Obama means stuff that he personally disagrees with.
So don't you lecture me about the evils of Ron DeSantis getting involved in First Amendment protected activity.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that in a vacuum, I don't like it.
We are not in a vacuum.
We're in an environment where for decades, corporations know that they have to do the bidding of the left or they will be destroyed.
And so it is good for corporations to realize and recognize that if they don't do the bidding of the left, not only will they not be destroyed, that might be their only way of surviving.
Perhaps there are punishments on both sides of the aisle.
So either get the hell out or start lobbying for a full free speech, free market contingent in the United States.
Here's the dirty little secret about corporations, folks.
They ain't pro-free market.
They're pro-profit.
If that profit comes in the form of Democrat media government subsidies, they will do it.
Here is Barack Obama railing against social media platforms.
Authoritarian regimes and strongmen around the world, from China to Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, have learned to conscript social media platforms to turn their own populations against groups they don't like.
People like Putin.
And Steve Bannon, for that matter.
Understand, it's not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions.
You just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage.
You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.
Okay, and the answer here, of course, is that Barack Obama should tell them what to believe.
Like if you like your doctor, you ought to keep your doctor.
First of all, I am not a Steve Bannon fan, as everybody knows.
I mean, he used to be my old boss at Breitbart.
He and I do not get along.
Steve Bannon is not Vladimir Putin, and equating the two is pretty despicable here by Barack Obama.
Beyond that, Barack Obama talking about the spread of disinformation?
This guy was the font head of disinformation for eight years in the White House.
This guy lied routinely from the White House.
His own national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, bragged that he had spread disinformation, active disinformation about the Iran deal to willing Pathetic, mewling lackeys like Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic.
For years, an echo chamber as described by the Barack Obama administration.
So what he really means is I wish to control the methods of distribution of information in the United States.
And we have to do this because people are dying.
This is where Barack Obama continues.
Around one in five Americans is still willing to put themselves at risk and put their families at risk rather than get vaccinated.
People are dying because of misinformation.
Or maybe people did die because of misinformation about their doctor.
And maybe it turns out that some people make different decisions than you when it comes to vaccines because they are younger or healthier.
But none of this matters.
The bottom line is, again, this is part and parcel of a thoroughgoing fabric of ideology that the left has been promulgating for decades.
And that is they will force business to do what they want them to do.
And businesses know this.
They don't actually have to await formal legislation.
They don't have to wait a formal subsidy.
They just know that if they don't do what the left wants them to do, they will be punished.
Which is why Google has now adopted inclusive language functions to cut down on politically incorrect words according to the UK Daily Mail.
Quote, Google has launched an inclusive language function designed to avoid the use of politically incorrect words.
Users typing landlord will see a warning it may not be inclusive to all readers with the suggestion they should try property owner or proprietor instead.
The word humankind is a suggested alternative to what the online giant apparently sees as the controversial term mankind.
Gender-specific terms like policeman or housewife should also be replaced by police officers and stay-at-home spouse.
According to the new Google Documents-style program, it is now being rolled out to what the firm calls enterprise-level users.
Nudging users toward woke language is seen by critics as a step too far.
Tests on the system have also thrown up major flaws.
A transcribed interview with ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, in which he uses offensive racial slurs and talks about hunting black people, prompted no warnings.
But it suggested that John F. Kennedy's inaugural address should say, for all humankind, instead of for all mankind.
But the reason Google is doing this is, of course, because they wish for the subsidies, and because they wish for the government largesse.
And alternatively, they are very fearful of government regulation.
And they should be, because Europe is already regulating.
If you talk to people like Mark Zuckerberg, the reason that they are pre-regulating their outlets is because they are begging for regulation.
Those regulations create market barriers to competitors.
Those regulations regularize, as regulations are generally meant to do, they regularize the rules.
And once that happens, it is very hard to challenge the dominance of groups like Google or Facebook or YouTube.
Because algorithmically, those places are designed to cater to the needs of left-wing social values promulgated by governments and media And so corporations just mirror that sort of stuff.
So you now have corporations that are doing the business of government.
Once you have corporations doing the business of government, and it's so clear that this is what is happening right now, that corporations are doing the business of government, encouraged by the media.
Once you have that, you don't get to play the game where you're now very upset that your special tax district got revoked by another political actor.
Because again, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
If you decide that you are going to do the bidding of government, like all of these corporate, here's the thing, every single one of these corporations, Disney, Coca-Cola, MLB, the NCAA, all of them could have just said no.
They could have just said no.
They could have said, come and regulate us.
If you think that you can regulate us based on our politics, go for it.
And by the way, I still think that there's a pretty good shot, just legally speaking, that the Florida attempt to get rid of the special district may be struck down on First Amendment grounds.
If so, alright.
I understand the legal argument.
I get it.
I do.
But there's one thing that has happened that is pretty clear, which is corporations now know that there is weight on the other side of the argument.
Because for 60 years, there has been no weight on the other side of the argument.
For 60 years, the ratchet has moved in only one direction.
And so for conservatives who are saying, well, you know, we can never compromise our classical liberal values by getting down in the dirt.
We can't get down in the mud.
We can't fight back.
We can't do the things that are necessary to push back here because that would get rid of the values.
Understand, the values are held by you and they are held by nobody else.
And that's, I like those values too.
But if you actually wish to preserve those values, corporations are going to need, they're going to need to be separated off from their government sponsors or from their government torturers.
They're going to need to be separated off by some sort of incentive structure.
And if that incentive structure is not constructed, we will continue down this primrose path where corporations just act as the arm of left-wing government, period, end of story.
That is the only choice here.
So, do you wish for mutually assured destruction, or do you wish to be destroyed?
Those are the only two choices before you.
There is no third choice where everything goes back to normal, and everybody has their corporate free speech, and the government leaves them alone, and the government is happy-dappy-do, and the media stop calling for boycotts against Publix, or Coke, or whatever the company of the day is at the behest of Democratic politicians.
It ain't going back to that.
So, corporations have two choices.
Either go apolitical and stay out of it, or start trying to elect politicians who are actually going to minimize the power of government in your life.
Start recognizing that the future of your corporation does not lie in pleasing left-wing politicians by giving them what they want, or right-wing politicians by giving them what they want.
The future of your company lies in electing people who do believe that you should be able to say whatever you want.
Until corporations do that, they should expect more of this.
And frankly, more of this will probably be necessary because, again, the left ain't disarming on this.
Alright, coming up in just one second, Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post continues to target a random account on Twitter because it's a very, very bad account.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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The first episode debunks the common leftist talking point, the rich don't pay their fair share.
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So if you've been waiting for Debunked Season 2, check out this sneak peek.
You look at guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and... Scrooge McDuck.
Exactly.
When it comes to taxes, the rich do not pay their fair share, man.
It's a familiar scene, isn't it?
A liberal friend, co-worker, cousin home from college, uses your dinner party to serve up a word salad of leftist mantras.
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Well, what is a fair share?
By nearly every measure, the U.S.
has the most progressive system of taxation in the world.
I mean, the top 40% of earners pay 95% of all federal income tax.
So they actually pay more than their share of income.
So what part exactly do you think is unfair?
I think they should just pay more.
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So meanwhile, the left continues to target corporate America with all of their regulatory power and with their Democrat media firepower.
Anyone, by the way, who does not like this sort of stuff will then be targeted and destroyed.
Taylor Lorenz, who works for the Washington Post, which is a massive, massive media conglomerate owned by a billionaire, and Jeff Bezos.
She says it's deeply necessary for her to go after a rather small TikTok, libs of TikTok account on Twitter.
Very, very necessary because, of course, it's very hateful.
So you now have the specter of corporate protected and sponsored speech going after smaller actors because, after all, we have to make sure that free speech is shut down because free speech is scary.
Here we go from Taylor Lorenz.
So there are several arguments against your article.
One is that this person's identity was simply not newsworthy, that it doesn't matter who this anonymous conservative woman is, and that you naming her is targeting her, trying to hurt her.
What do you say to those folks?
Well, first of all, this woman is targeting LGBTQ folks.
I mean, she brags about getting multiple teachers fired.
You know, the entire goal of the account is to direct hate to trans and LGBTQ people.
So, in other words, I don't like it, so I'm going to target this person using this giant corporate conglomerate newspaper.
Makes perfect sense.
Okay, so there are a couple of ways that conservatives have decided to fight back against all of this.
One way is what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida, where he's providing a countervailing interest in setting up an incentive structure.
The other way is build your own or take it over.
And this is why the story about Elon Musk taking over Twitter is so big.
So apparently, Twitter is now reconsidering the possibility of Elon Musk buying the place.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter is currently in discussions to sell itself to Elon Musk and could finalize a deal as soon as this week.
People familiar with the matter said, a dramatic turn of events just 10 days after the billionaire unveiled.
his $43 billion bid for the social media company.
The two sides met on Sunday to discuss Musk's proposal and were making progress, though still had issues to hash out.
There's no guarantee they will reach a deal.
Twitter had been expected to rebuff the offer, which Musk made on April 14th without saying how he would pay for it, and instead they wanted to put in place a poison pill to block him from increasing his stake.
But after the Tesla chief disclosed he had $46.5 billion in financing and the stock market swooned, Twitter changed its posture and then opened the door to negotiations.
Musk has said from the start that his $54.20 a share offer was his best and final.
He reiterated to Twitter Chairman Brett Taylor again in recent days he's not going to budge on the price.
The conversation between the two sides were expected to focus on issues including what Mr. Musk should pay if an agreed deal fell apart before being consummated.
And it appears that Elon Musk has the upper hand in this particular battle.
He tweeted out a couple of days ago from Conan the Barbarian, what is best in life?
Which of course is a quote from Conan the Barbarian, in which Conan, the baron of Schwarzenegger, what is best in life?
To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
So, obviously, Elon Musk feeling pretty frisky at the moment.
So again, the fact that Elon Musk is now on the verge of buying Twitter scares the living hell out of all of these people.
Either corporate America changes and woke capital is denied, or woke capital continues to rule the roost.
Because it used to be everyone was afraid of corporate capture of government.
What about government capture of corporations?
That's what we've been watching for the past several decades.
And so either corporations decide to stand up for themselves and take themselves back from government and become independent again, or other actors in government are going to try to do the same thing.
Because otherwise, only one side controls the ratchet.
So good for Elon Musk.
I'm very optimistic.
I'm very hopeful that Elon Musk will change the rules over at Twitter.
But mostly, it's very important for these left-wing companies to understand that if they do the bidding of the Democratic media complex, there will be consequences for that sort of stuff.
And Elon Musk is part of the blowback.
I mean, there are a lot of investors who are saying Twitter should engage with Musk, obviously, because it's never generated a profit, and this absolutely is correct.
Maybe Musk can actually have it generate a profit by stopping its shadow bans on accounts and its strangulation of content that it doesn't like.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Molls Show.
Today, he discusses an environmentalist celebrating Earth Day by lighting himself on fire, which is quite the celebration.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Democrats try a radical new strategy to stop Trump from winning re-election.
Florida Democrats meltdown after Republicans punish Disney.
And an environmentalist celebrates Earth Day by lighting himself on fire to protest air pollution.
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