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April 29, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:49
Yes, The Left Lost Its Mind | Ep. 1484
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Elon Musk tweets that the left has gotten more radical and the media are enraged.
America is now one quarter away from recession and the Biden administration continues to pursue insane economic policy.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Bench Bureau Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, it has been very clear for a long time in the United States that the left has moved further left over the course of the last 20 years than the right has moved right.
And this is clear in pretty much every area of politics.
You'd be hard pressed to find an issue on which the right has actually moved right, meaning the Republican Party has moved right.
You can make the case that the Republican Party has gotten tactically More radical.
So, for example, holding up the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
But that was in direct response to Harry Reid nuking judicial nomination filibusters.
For example, you can say that the right has gotten more radical in terms of how it interprets elections.
But that followed a pattern of Democrats doing exactly that in 2000 and 2004.
And then again in 2016.
So you can say that the right has gotten more reactionary in terms of its tactics.
But in terms of actual political positioning, there is no question That the right has not gotten more radical, and the left has gotten significantly more radical over time.
The reason this comes up today is because Elon Musk put out a tweet, and it's a tweet of a meme.
And it demonstrates how people perceive American politics to have gone, and the left is just wildly upset with this meme.
So here's what the meme shows.
It shows a spectrum, left, center, and right.
The year, 2008.
It shows conservatives standing on the right.
The center, located at the center of the line.
And it shows a stick figure labeled me, Slightly to the left of center, and then my fellow liberal all the way on the left.
2012.
Shows same spectrum, now it's wider, the spectrum.
The conservative is still standing on the right.
The center has actually moved to the left, and where it says me, still slightly left of center, and says my fellow liberal, and then all the way to the left, like running to the left.
And then it says 2021.
Over on the right, the conservative is still where the conservative always was.
And he says, LOL.
And then the center has now moved way to the left, and me is now center right, and woke progressive is way the hell out to the left, far away from everyone, shouting bigot at everybody else.
This is an accurate meme.
It is.
The reason that independents largely poll like moderate Republicans now is not because the right got more right and the left got more left.
It's because the right is basically stagnant in terms of its positions.
In fact, there's a good case to be made that the right is actually more socially liberal and economically liberal than it was back in 2008.
In 2008, it was the position of both major political parties.
The traditional marriage was the actual way that marriage was to be done in the United States.
In 2008, it was the position of both major political parties that the police were good.
In 2008, it was the position of both major political parties that America was at root a place of liberty and decency and that the American story was a good one.
Barack Obama ran on this platform in 2008.
By 2021, the left had abandoned virtually all of those issues and has now embraced radicalism on every one of those issues.
And by the way, so have many Republicans.
The untold story of the Republican Party is that the Republican Party, there are members of the Republican Party who voted in favor of the so-called Equality Act, which enshrines gender identity in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
There are members of the Republican Party who have embraced gay marriage in total, including, by the way, President Trump, who basically did so.
Hey, that is the Republican Party moving left on social issues.
And yet the media are wildly upset with this meme.
They suggest that Elon Musk has it all wrong.
The left hasn't moved left.
The right moved right, and the left moved left, and that's why the polarization happened.
No, that is incorrect.
The left moved left culturally.
The right actually moved left culturally, but not nearly as fast as the left did.
The center moved left.
The difference is that the left is moving so far, so fast to the left, that the reaction is now very, very strong, and the left has left a lot of people behind.
If you actually spent some time last night reading through the 2008 Republican platform, there is nothing in the 2008 Republican platform that has massively changed other than the strong defense of traditional marriage in the 2008 Republican platform.
In 2020, that plank had been somewhat watered down, shall we say.
But other than that, platforms are virtually identical.
You can say, by the way, fiscally, that the Republican Party has gotten more liberal.
Fiscally, the Republican Party has stopped talking about deficit reduction.
The Republican Party has stopped talking about balanced budget amendments.
The Republican Party doesn't talk about spending anymore.
And that is a legacy of President Trump, because he realized that that was a political liability.
He left that behind.
So, the only problem with the graphic that Elon Musk tweeted out is that it shows that the right is stagnant.
That's not correct.
The right actually moved to the left, the center moved to the left, and the left moved way the hell to the left.
But it's when you look at the 2008 Democratic Party that you see how far this party has moved.
Let me read you a section from the 2008 Democratic Party platform.
Okay?
This is from the Democratic Party platform.
Quote.
At a time when our nation's officers are being asked both to provide traditional law enforcement services and to help protect the homeland, taking police off the street is neither tough nor smart.
We reject this disastrous approach.
This is the Democratic Party Platform 2008.
We support and will restore funding to our courageous police officers and will ensure that they are equipped with the best technology, equipment, and innovative strategies to prevent and fight crime.
Circa 2020, the Defund the Police movement was part and parcel of the Democratic Party.
I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.
of systemic racism inside police.
That's a pretty wide gap.
In 2008, Barack Obama went to Saddleback Church to speak with Rick Warren, and he had this to say about his definition of marriage, 2008.
I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.
Now for me as a Christian, for me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union.
God's in the mix.
Okay, that's bigot Barack Obama.
Tear down all the statues.
Obviously that man is a homophobe and a transphobe of epic proportion.
That was Barack Obama Circuit 2008.
By the way, it was Barack Obama's presence on the ballot in 2008 that probably got Prop 8 to pass in California.
Black voters showed up in droves to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 in the presidential election, and they simultaneously voted to enshrine traditional marriage in the Constitution of the state of California.
Which Democrats then appealed, and Kamala Harris refused to defend, and all the rest of this.
Okay, so Elon Musk's tweet is correct.
And the reason it matters, folks, is because when you look at how the political spectrum is shifting, the left has to insist, they have to gaslight you, they have to lie.
They have to insist that the right is radical.
The right has gotten more radical.
Now, again, when it comes to tactics, you can make the case that the right is more radical because, of course, President Trump is very Trumpy.
President Trump said things about the rule of law that I disagreed with and criticized him for.
President Trump said things about the election of 2020 that I disagreed with him about and don't think are backed in evidence.
But when it comes to the actual political positions, which is what people typically vote for, when people vote for the generalized political perception of each party, the right has not gotten more radical by any stretch of the imagination.
The right has embraced in large part Obamacare.
Remember that time when they said they're going to repeal Obamacare?
The Republican Party never did that.
Remember that time that the right was suggesting it was for balanced budgets and not blowing out the deficit and then spent $7 trillion in 2020?
So the right has got more left too.
But the media can't, they can't allow this argument.
The Elon Musk argument cannot be allowed because, again, if you go back to the meme that Elon Musk put up, the natural consequence of the argument that Elon Musk puts up is that Democrats are going to lose and they're going to continue to lose a lot.
Because here's the problem.
The woke progressives now rule the roost.
We've gone through the stats before.
If you actually examine the constituency of the Democratic Party, Only about 10 to 15% of the Democratic Party considers itself woke progressive.
But those are also the most active and the youngest contingent of the Democratic Party.
Those are the people most passionate about Democratic Party politics.
And so the Democratic Party is beholden to those people.
So if you follow this pattern, right, if Elon Musk's meme tweet is essentially correct, And the woke progressives continue to move to the left and the right just kind of continues to hover where it is.
And the center continues to be dragged to the left.
And everything right of center votes for the right.
You're going to end up with waves of Republican elections from here on out.
And that is precisely what you're seeing in the polls right now.
What you're seeing in the polls in swing districts is voters believe that Democrats are the party of defund the police.
That they are the party of abortion to and past birth.
That they are the party of men can be women and women can be men.
That they are the party of America is systemically racist and true anti-racism is in giving government complete and total power over your life?
And that we shouldn't indoctrinate your kids in radical genderqueer theory at the age of six?
People believe this is what the Democratic Party is about, mainly because this is what the Democratic Party is about.
And to pretend that that is not a radicalization is completely incorrect.
This is why there are moderate liberals, even somewhat progressive liberals, people ranging from Roy Tishera to David Shore, who are saying to the left, are you guys insane?
What are you doing?
But the media, who are the Praetorian Guard for the Democratic Party, they're very angry at Elon Musk for noting this.
This is the real reason they oppose Musk.
Because it's not... Elon Musk is not a right-winger.
By any stretch of the imagination.
He is maybe a quasi-libertarian.
Maybe.
But Elon Musk is not a traditional conservative.
He's not a down-the-line Republican voter.
I believe he donated to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Elon Musk is not quote-unquote, one of us here on the right.
Neither is Joe Rogan.
One of us.
Joe Rogan and I disagree on, I would say, at least 60% of our policy prescriptions.
The difference is that we are not crazy.
And the left has gone completely, utterly, bat bleep, insane.
And so what they are afraid of is that Elon Musk is going to come in at Twitter and he's going to allow people to say these things.
Because the left relies on we have to shut down the conversation so that you don't realize that the left has moved to the left.
If you can move the center to the left and you can foreclose the right in order to make this chart even for the Democrats, if Democrats are going to win, then you have to go to that 2021 line, right?
That shows that the center Now excludes both me and the conservative and that all of those people are to the right.
If you can just cut off that chart before it gets to conservative and reorient the center, then you can reorient American politics completely.
So you have to censor.
You have to shut down.
You have to toss the right wingers off the cliff.
Make them not part of the Overton window.
That's all you have to do.
And this is their focus.
So the left is focused in laser-like on rebutting the true idea that the left has moved radically to the left.
And this is nonsense.
Well, if we're talking about nonsense, you know what's nonsense right now?
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So there were a bevy of think pieces yesterday about how wrong Elon Musk is.
So you have a piece from Philip Bump, the national correspondent for The Washington Post.
What Elon Musk's polarization graph gets wrong?
And here's what he says.
So the guy who was poised to buy Twitter once again successfully drew attention to Twitter by offering a visual analysis of how American politics has changed in recent years.
And then he shows Musk's tweet.
The unsubtle point is in keeping with most of Musk's other non-Rocket related tweets, since it was announced that Twitter would accept his buyout bid.
The American left had run him up, literally to the left in the illustration, leaving even one-time allies behind.
Meanwhile, the right had just been sitting there watching its opponent's head to the fringe.
One can see how this is appealing to Musk, who has leaned into the idea that Twitter is dangerously influenced by extreme left-wing thinking, and whose recent engagement on the platform has been to express sympathy toward overt right-wing trolls.
But the illustration is simply wrong.
It's not a misinterpretation.
It's not.
It is not a differential interpretation.
It is just wrong, according to Philip, but factually incorrect.
Not solely in its obvious exaggeration for effect, but in its understanding of how the country has changed over the past decade or two.
And then Philip Bump drags out a couple of measures that are just ridiculous.
One is the average ideological score using a metric called DW-Nominate, shown for each party's caucus in each chamber of Congress.
The score runs from a minus one to plus one, with lower scores representing more liberal ideologies, as expressed in votes centered on support for government power.
The biggest changes have been in the Senate, where since the start of the 111th Congress in 2009, the Republican caucus has gotten 0.13 points more conservative on average.
In each of the other caucuses, the shift has been about 0.04 points toward the polls.
That's not what DW nominate does.
Okay, the idea of the DW nominate is some sort of objective metric on ideology.
That's not correct.
They basically just look at how they bootstrap their own standard errors.
There are deep problems with this particular measurement.
Basically, it just looks at the center of the parties and it looks how often parties vote in unison.
If parties vote in unison more often, it assumes they are more ideologically rigid.
Democrats were always ideologically rigid and they always voted in unison.
Republicans increasingly have voted in unison.
Therefore, it looks like Republicans have moved more.
That doesn't mean Republicans move more.
The center of the Republican Party is basically where it always was.
It's just that they are voting more often against the Democrats together.
They say there are a lot of valid criticisms of DW-Nominate in general that we could examine, but it's not a great measure of what Musk is talking about anyway.
Well, then why did you bring it, Philip Bump?
So instead, he says, let's consider how Americans actually identify their own politics.
Luckily, we have a metric for that.
Evaluations of ideology, as measured in the biennial General Social Survey.
The survey asks people to score their identity on a scale from one, extremely liberal, to seven, extremely conservative.
In the middle is four, moderate.
And then it shows how Americans have shifted.
And what it shows is that Democrats are more often identifying as liberal and Republicans are more often identifying as conservative.
But that doesn't actually measure the positions of the parties.
Again, conservative people on the right are identifying more as conservative in opposition to people on the left who are in fact saying and doing more woke things.
The actual change in ideology is a real thing.
But they can't allow this to be the case.
They can never acknowledge this.
Because then, they can try to claim that it's the right that's getting more right for no reason at all.
Which is why you've seen, simultaneously, an attack on Ron DeSantis in Florida.
How dare Ron DeSantis in Florida?
He's creating these divisive, polarized political issues.
No, he's not.
He's reacting to the fact that you guys lost your damned minds.
It didn't used to be a controversial position that cops should be paid and that you should back them.
That is Ron DeSantis' position in Florida.
It didn't used to be a controversial position that you shouldn't indoctrinate seven-year-olds, that a penis doesn't mean you're a boy.
These did not used to be controversial positions.
Ron DeSantis articulating those positions does not make him more radical.
He has not moved the spectrum.
He has just continued to stand there and you're angry that he's standing there.
So in what is clearly an echo chamber environment in the media, there are several simultaneous hit pieces out there about Ron DeSantis today.
Two from the Washington Post, one from the New York Times, all about how the right is moving, they're running, screaming toward the right.
Not true.
The right is just standing here.
That's all we've been doing the whole time.
And the way that you can tell this, by the way, the way that the media treat it as a revelation every time, for example, the Pope says he still believes in traditional marriage demonstrates the case.
The Pope, as it turns out, has had this position on marriage since literally the inception of the Catholic Church a couple of thousand years ago.
This has been the position of every major world religion for several thousand years at this point.
And yet every time a major religious thinker says something like, men and women make a marriage.
Men are not women and women are not men.
The media immediately come out and they say, my God, they're getting more right wing.
Or perhaps what we have here is the Doppler effect.
And you are in the car that's speeding away and everything sounds different because you are speeding that way.
Maybe this is your problem.
So in the New York Times today, you have a piece called How DeSantis Transformed Florida's Political Identity.
Maybe he didn't do it.
Maybe you guys did it.
Maybe by insisting that Andrew Cuomo was a godsend and that kids should be indoctrinated in radical gender ideology and critical race theory, maybe you did it.
But here's what the New York Times says.
Again, this is a reported piece, not an opinion piece.
Quote, Florida feels like a state running a fever.
It's very identity changing at a frenetic pace.
I'm sorry that it feels that way to you.
Oh, the New York Times.
Oh, I'm so sad for you.
I'm so sorry that you lost a congressional seat in your state because you guys suck at everything.
I'm sorry about that.
It doesn't feel like Florida's running a fever because it feels great.
I live here.
It's fantastic.
We're not running a fever.
You guys are just insane.
If I got a fever, the prescription is more.
Once the biggest traditional presidential battleground, it has suddenly turned into a laboratory of possibility for the political right.
Ooh.
Ah.
Now, I love this description.
You ready?
Discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity prohibited in early elementary school.
This is a state apparently moving to the right.
Let me read that again.
Discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity prohibited in early elementary school.
Now a sane and rational person might read, wait a second.
You were trying to teach sexual orientation and gender identity to elementary school students?
That's what a sane person would read.
To the New York Times, if you wish to prohibit this, this means that you are running a political fever and you are implementing your fascism from the right to prohibit such things.
Math textbooks rejected en masse for what the state calls indoctrination.
Well, I mean, were you trying to push critical race theory about how every disparity, racial disparity in America is a result of American racism in math books?
Because yeah, that's what that is.
And no, that shouldn't be taught in schools.
Schools and other employees limited in what they can teach about racism and other aspects of history.
Tenured professors in public university subjected to new reviews.
Oh my God, tenured professors who actually have to be reviewed for their work.
That's crazy.
Abortion's banned after 15 weeks.
Oh, the radicalism!
You mean that Florida says that you shouldn't be able to stop the murder of unborn children?
Unborn children who are nearly four months old in the womb?
That's so radical.
By the way, this also happens to the position in nearly every civilized country.
America is a wild outlier in what it allows with regard to abortion.
A congressional map redrawn to give Republicans an even bigger advantage.
I mean, all terrifying stuff.
And perhaps most stunning of all, Disney, long an untouchable corporate giant, stripped of the ability to govern itself for the first time in more than half a century in retaliation for the company's opposition to the crackdown on LGBTQ conversations with young school children.
It does have the feeling of, oh, what the hell just happened, said Kristen Arnett, a novelist and Rolando native who now lives in Miami.
It's overwhelming.
Here's the thing.
The left never thought it was going to lose again.
They never thought they were going to lose again.
They thought that everyone was just going to go along with them on this crap forever.
That is what they thought.
And they are stunned to learn that Americans didn't move.
They just moved.
But this is the line of the left, and this is why Democrats are going to get their asses handed them in November.
I mean, they're just going to get clocked.
There are new polls out today showing Republicans have a generic ballot, 10 point congressional advantage.
To put that by way of contrast, in 2010, a Republican wave election, going into the election, they had like an R plus 4, R plus 6, not R plus 10.
It's going to be a wipeout.
But again, the media cannot handle this because the media are the people who have driven this to the left.
They are the ones who have taken this Cadillac and they are driving it off the cliff with Joe Biden in the passenger seat.
It's insane.
Alrighty, so again, the left's contention is that it's the right that has moved right.
This is a lie.
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So you got Amber Phillips, staff writer over at the Washington Post.
How Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wages his culture wars.
Perhaps no politician has been as effective at waging today's culture wars as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
He didn't initiate the culture war.
You guys did.
Who initiates the culture war matters.
If you punch me and then I punch you back, I didn't initiate the fight.
You initiated the fight.
And if I finish the fight, good for me.
But again, the left has to portray the Republicans as the aggressors here.
There is not a single social issue in America where Republicans are the aggressor over the course of the last 30 years.
Not one.
This country has been moving progressively to the left on social issues for decades on end.
You cannot name a social issue on which the American governmental structure has moved to the right.
It does not exist.
It just doesn't.
I challenge anybody on the left to bring me one issue Where the governmental structure of the United States, the legislative structure of the United States, has moved to the right over the course of the last 30 years.
The only case you can make is in some states on abortion, and that's only because there was an artificial quash on abortion law put in place in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe.
Every other issue, literally all of them, we have moved to the left.
Every single one.
But the idea is that if Ron DeSantis says no, this means that he is the aggressor now.
Or maybe you guys are the aggressor.
Again, Amber Phillips says, DeSantis acknowledges critical race theory is not part of public school curricula in Florida.
Though it originated as an academic construct that argues that racial inequality is woven into society and its systems, the term has become a catch-all on the right for teachings or discussions about race conservatives oppose.
He also directly takes on the left's allegations that the focus is inherently rooted in white grievance.
DeSantis said, quote, it's required in Florida statutes to teach about all segments of American You have to teach about the Holocaust, African-American history.
You teach about the institution and the abolition of slavery.
You teach about the failure of the post-Civil War amendments to take hold and how you need to fight for civil rights.
We teach that because it's real history and it's important.
What we will not do is let people distort history to try to serve their current ideological goals.
This apparently is radical.
Deeply radical stuff.
How dare he?
Another piece from Paul Waldman in the Washington Post.
The new Republican statism.
You see, the Republicans are now statists.
They've moved radically to the right.
Guys, this gaslighting, it's not working.
Because Elon Musk's chart, it rings true.
It is correct.
So Paul Waldman says, when a Republican state legislator unashamedly announces his intention is not only to ban books from school libraries across the state, but to burn the offending books, you know something has changed.
Wait, hold up a second.
So the idea is that Republicans who are now asking that school libraries pre-screen their books for young children, that this is something that has changed?
This has been part of local governmental structure for literally all of time.
Not every book is available in every library in the United States, and left-wing school districts ban books just as right-wing school districts do when it comes to the library.
But, says Paul Waldman, there might not be state-sponsored book burnings in Tennessee in the near future, but who knows?
Perhaps more profound than even the fury of the new right-wing culture war is the way it appears to be completely reconfiguring what we understood American conservatism to be.
It's manifest in the ongoing wave of speech-restricting gag laws being passed by Republican states.
That's not where it's going to end.
These laws are being passed at a furious pace.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a group of laws on Thursday to restrict what teachers can say about race, gender, and sexuality, as well as forbidding transgender children from playing sports.
I have a question.
How is that Republican statism?
That's a reaction to the fact that you guys now say that boys should race girls.
If you mistake the reaction for the initiation of the fight, You're going to lose because you will continue to make excuses for why you haven't moved.
Anybody again, anybody who argues that the left hasn't moved just the Republicans have been saying this about JFK for decades, right?
If you if you look at JFK's platform in 1960, it looks like the Republican platform circa about 2004.
And if you look at the Democratic platform circa 2008 on policing.
If you look at Barack Obama's comments on marriage circa 2008, if you look at how Democrats talked about gender in 2008, there's not anybody in 2008 in the Democratic Party who would have recognized as a White House related notion that small children should be given access to puberty blockers.
You guys did this.
You dug the hole and you won't stop digging.
And let me be clear about this.
The more you protest, the worse it's going to get for you.
The more you protest that those of us who say no are the offenders, the worse it is going to get for you.
Again, the Democratic Party has gotten more radical.
It used to be about local governance for the Democratic Party in some way.
School boards mattered.
Parents still mattered.
Now they're just rushing to the left because they think they'll never lose an election again.
They're about to find out the hard way.
That ain't true.
So, for example, literally yesterday, Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education, he came out and he says that he is concerned that parents are holding schools accountable.
This is your party, guys.
This is a far-left position.
We are concerned with some of the policies that are less curriculum, more about division, more about bringing politics into the schools.
I said at the onset, our schools should not be the place for for culture wars.
The school should not be a place for culture wars.
You guys initiated the culture wars.
You did.
We didn't do it.
It was you.
You guys said that you can't teach prayer in the public schools, but you can teach boys that girls have it.
That was you.
And then you're like, oh, well, you know, we didn't rush to the left.
It's all you guys.
This is why they're so angry at Elon Musk.
They're deeply afraid that if Elon Musk allows people to say these things out loud, things will get worse for the left.
Because again, the only solution to this is censorship.
The only solution to the fact that you guys have rushed way to the left and you left the mainstream behind, you left the center behind, you pushed everybody to the right, and you forced people with views as politically disparate as me and Brett Weinstein and Joe Rogan and Bill Maher into the same corner.
Me and Bill Maher in the same corner.
That's on you.
And the only way that you can avoid the consequences of your own action is to silence the right.
It's to pretend that people like me are the aggressors, or Ron DeSantis is the aggressor, or maybe Bill Maher is the aggressor, or Joe Rogan is.
I mean, they go after Joe Rogan and Bill Maher with similar alacrity to the way they go after people like me.
So if you just keep slicing off that, if you just keep moving the Overton window to the left, then you can pretend that there isn't anybody outside the Overton window.
Problem is all those people vote.
All those people vote.
When you wish every single other person you don't like out into the cornfield, it turns out there'll be a lot of people out in that cornfield, and they will grab pitchforks, and they will come for you.
And that's what's happening politically right now.
And this is why they are so afraid of what Elon Musk is about to do at Twitter, because he's about to open the Overton window again.
And my God, if the right is allowed back into the Overton window, the left has no chance whatsoever politically.
They are screw-ed.
They're in serious trouble.
Which is why you see the Twitter moderate.
So again, the left angle is that we have to stop Elon Musk.
And the best way to stop Elon Musk is we will whine about it.
We will just cry and we'll just whine.
A piece from the New York Times today.
Inside Twitter, fears Musk will return platform to its early troubles.
Now, let me just be clear.
I was on Twitter pretty early.
Twitter was a much better place early on.
It was.
You could actually tell jokes and you could say wild things and you could have thought experiments.
In fact, you want to know why there's a lot of quote-unquote resurfacing of old tweets?
Because Twitter wasn't the kind of place in 2008 that it is in 2022.
In 2008, you could put out a wild idea as like a thought experiment, and nobody would take it super seriously.
Or, you could make an irreverent, edgy, terrible joke, and everybody would go, eh, it's just a joke.
Then came 2022.
The future rushed along, and now we unsurface those old tweets, and then we hold you to account.
And maybe we ban you for a tweet that's 10 years old.
So how, you know, oh my God, we can't have jokes anymore.
We can't have, we have to stop this.
And the Twitter moderators know best.
They know best.
According to the New York Times, Elon Musk had a plan to buy Twitter and undo its content moderation policies.
On Tuesday, just a day after reaching his $44 billion deal to buy the company, Musk was already at work on his agenda.
He tweeted that past moderation decisions by a top Twitter lawyer were, quote, obviously incredibly inappropriate.
Later, he shared a meme mocking the lawyer, sparking a torrent of attacks from other Twitter users.
Mr. Muck's personal critique was a rough reminder of what faces employees who create and enforce Twitter's complex content moderation policies.
His vision for the company would take it right back to where it started, employees said, and force Twitter to relive the last decade.
Oh, God forbid!
Gaia forbid!
Ha!
Twitter executives who created the rules said they had once held views about online speech similar to Musk's.
They believe Twitter's policies should be limited, mimicking local laws.
But more than a decade of grappling with violence, harassment, and election tampering changed their minds.
Now, many executives at Twitter and other social media companies view their content moderation policies as essential safeguards to protect speech.
Well, yes, which is why Twitter is a failure and why Musk is coming in to fix it.
Twitter employees wrote in an internal list of questions they hope to ask Musk, quote, You have said you want more free speech and less moderation on Twitter.
What will this mean in practice?
Another question asks, Some people interpret your arguments in defense of free speech as a desire to open the door back up for harassment.
Is that true?
And if not, do you have ideas for how to both increase free speech and keep the door closed on harassment?
So again, the line here is going to be that Twitter is going to be terrible and horrible and no good and very bad because people will be allowed to talk and people can't be allowed to talk because the far left has to be perceived as the new center.
That's the only way this is ever going to work.
Well, the problem is that eventually the truth gets out.
Well, when the left is losing, there's one solution for them and that's to shut everybody up.
We'll get to that in a moment.
First, do you notice when stores are trying to sell products they know next to nothing about?
Maybe they're pushing the shoes that are the most popular rather than ones that actually fit your feet.
Or maybe it's your doctor who's been told by some pharmaceutical salesperson to try and sell you this thing.
Well, you don't want that happening with your auto parts.
This is why you should go to rockauto.com.
They know auto parts and all they sell is auto parts and related tools.
Rock Auto is a family business founded by automotive engineers over 20 years ago.
Their original goal was, and still is, to make auto parts available and affordable so customers can keep their daily drivers and classics safely on the road.
RockAuto.com is an online parts catalog.
It's uniquely easy to use.
You quickly see all the parts available for your specific car, SUV, or truck.
There are photos, specs, and installation tips to help you pick the best parts to meet your vehicle's needs.
RockAuto.com will not only have that part, but usually will give you several trusted brands to choose from.
RockAuto kits, they're popular because they bundle together all the parts needed for a successful repair.
You don't get halfway through installing a timing belt, and then you realize that you need another pulley.
Whatever that means, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but RockAuto is, that's the point.
Go to rockauto.com, get the brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, or any other part you need.
Be sure, when you check out, write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us, Fox, so they know that we sent you.
Alrighty, folks, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a daily Wire member.
Today, it's the account PoliticsInMyBoxers.
On Twitter, who sums up Elon's Twitter takeover perfectly.
In the picture, the world's greatest beverage vessel is overflowing with sweet, sweet and salty leftist tears.
They're pouring out of an iPhone.
The caption reads, gonna need a bigger tumbler today, boys.
Hashtag leftist tears tumbler.
Pure gold.
And yes, we may need to offer a leftist tears big gulp, or like an actual bucket.
Thanks for the pick.
Thanks for being a Daily Wire member.
Here at the Daily Wire, we've started our own publishing wing called DW Books.
You've seen our books topping the publishing charts, actually.
We are proud to publish books that actively fight the left's lies and their monopoly on storytelling.
So, one of our new books, Fiery but Mostly Peaceful, the 2020 Riots and the Gaslighting of America by Julio Rosas.
In it!
Rosas exposes the Black Lives Matter riots that broke out across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, for the sham that they were.
Rosas, who is reporting from the ground, gives his first-hand experience.
He tells you about the media's attempts to lie to you, to tell you that these destructive riots were mostly peaceful.
Check out the trailer.
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They did not give you the full story.
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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.
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So meanwhile, again, the reason the left has to silence everybody is because they've moved so far to the left.
It's also because, again, when the news is bad, if you can just sort of shut down the news, then you do.
When Donald Trump suggested that the news is the fake news, in one way, he was wrong, right?
Sometimes they would report things that were true, and he would label it fake news.
But in a broader way, he was totally right, which is that the journalismers are journalismers.
They are not, in fact, journalists.
They're journalism, getting that hot, sticky journalism all over the place.
And that hot, sticky journalism invariably is ghouly left-wing.
So, for example, we are supposed to pretend that Joe Biden is still with us.
Joe Biden, the late lamented Joe Biden, has been dead for at least a year.
And now he's just walking around and his neurons are randomly firing.
And it is a it is a deeply depressing sight.
Here yesterday was the non-functional president of the United States attempting to say the word kleptocracy.
We're going to seize their yachts, their luxury homes and other ill-begotten gains.
Of Putin's kleptocracy.
Yeah.
Kleptocracy.
The guys who are the kleptocracies.
Ha ha ha ha.
Mm-hmm.
Things are going great, guys.
guys.
And by the way, Joe Biden also says he's not worried about a recession, which is weird because everybody's worried about a recession.
As we found out yesterday, the US GDP fell at 1.4%.
The economy shrank for the first time since early in the pandemic.
There is no rationale for why the economy should be shrinking right now.
When he took office, I suggested we were going to have a two-year boom because the vaccines were in place.
The economy is ready to open back up.
People have money to spend.
People want to get back to work.
And somehow, this idiot has managed to plunge us into the face of a recession.
We are one quarter away from an official recession.
A recession is defined as two quarters of negative growth.
We now have one.
This last quarter of GDP failure did not take into account fully the Ukraine war.
It did not take into account fully the new COVID wave in China that is shutting down supply lines.
It took into account massive government spending that has continued under Joe Biden, which contributes to GDP growth.
GDP is not a wonderful stat because it takes into account government spending as overall spending.
So you can actually jack around with the GDP stats by basically ratcheting up government spending.
This is what China does on a routine basis to jog those GDP stats.
It doesn't take into account the fact that the interest rates are about to increase dramatically, that mortgage rates are spiking.
It doesn't take into account any of those things.
So things are about to get worse.
Pretty much everyone now estimates that we're going to hit a recession sometime inside the next year and a half.
I think it's going to be sooner rather than later.
The estimates range from maybe six months from now, full-blown recession, to a year and a half from now, which would be the worst case scenario for Joe Biden.
It would be going into a presidential election.
Presidents do not survive actual recessions on their watch.
I mean, I don't mean physically survive because I'm not sure that Joe Biden has already physically survived his presidency.
But here was Joe Biden yesterday saying he is not concerned about a recession.
Because why would he be?
He's not concerned about anything.
He's the happiest man in America.
Every morning somebody wakes him up and tells him he's president and he's excited about it.
How concerned are you about a recession given the GDP reports today show the contraction of 1.4% of the forest program?
Well, I'm not concerned about a recession.
I think what you're seeing is enormous growth in the country that was affected by everything from COVID and the COVID blockages that occurred along the way.
Oh, he's not worried about it at all.
He's not worried.
Everything is great.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, another of your geriatric There's something wrong with a country where your entire leadership class is 80.
Really, that is a problem.
I don't care if it's right-wing or if it's left-wing.
When your entire leadership class is two generations removed from the national average age, that is a problem.
Some of these folks are older than the boomers.
Holding on to power this way is not indicative of a healthy body politic.
Here is Nancy Pelosi explaining that actually they're doing an excellent job lowering costs at the pump and at the table, which comes as a shock to everyone who has gone shopping in the last year or anybody who buys gas ever.
There are many aspects to this, but the price of gas and the price of oil have an impact on the price of many other things, including the price of food.
So lowering costs at the pump, lowering costs at the kitchen table, That's what Democrats are about.
Oh, is that what you're about?
Is that what you're about?
Well, it's going very poorly for you then.
And what is their answer to things like gas price inflation?
Here's another dullard, Chuck Schumer, soon to be my minority leader, saying that it's the oil companies.
If we yell at the oil companies, then probably that will fix things.
Oil companies last year made record profits.
They're vultures.
That's what's going on here.
We have the Ukraine tragedy, we have the COVID tragedy, and do they try to make things better?
No, they come in and make record profits.
They're vultures, right? That's what's going on here. It's all the oil companies that are vultures.
You guys can't escape the fact that your economic program created this.
You did this.
This is on you.
And the continuation of bad economic policy is also on you.
I have to say, the regressive nature of democratic economic policy is truly incredible.
It really is.
I mean, it's not just that they are pursuing economic policy that sinks the possibility for future innovation and investment.
It's not just that regulation and tax policy recommended by this administration, the fundamental belief that governmental spending is somehow superior to private sector spending.
It's not just that that is deeply damaging to the economy.
It's that even the governmental policies they pursue are actually regressive.
So, for example, they're now talking very seriously about student loan relief.
This benefits the laptop class.
This benefits all the people who waited to pay off their loans.
Not people like me.
I paid off my loans and I paid off my wife's loans.
It benefits people who did not pay off their student loans.
They took out $100,000 to get a gender studies degree from NYU so that they can become a professional useless person at a diversity, equity, and inclusion symposium for Rochester University or something.
It helps those people.
The professional laptop class, the younger laptop class, who now owe student debt.
Because if you're 45, you probably paid off your student debt.
It's really if you're 25, this is 4.
So Joe Biden is openly talking about that.
And these, by the way, are the people who, as an economic contingent, are the people with the highest income potential in the United States if you're talking about college graduates with student loan debt.
Here is Joe Biden talking about how he wants to relieve that student loan debt in the middle of an inflationary cycle as we are about to enter a recession.
I am considering dealing with some debt reduction.
I am not considering $50,000 debt reduction.
But I'm in the process of taking a hard look at whether or not there will be additional debt forgiveness.
And I'll have an answer on that in the next couple weeks.
Okay, so they're thinking about relieving student loans.
Meanwhile, this unbelievably regressive, I mean, it really is amazing, this unbelievably regressive administration is now moving to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes.
Now, I'm not an advocate of cigarettes.
I don't like cigarettes.
They annoy me.
The smoke bothers me.
However, if you are looking at policies that directly target the poorest Americans, particularly black Americans, banning menthol cigarettes is actually the way that you do that.
According to the New York Times, the FDA on Thursday announced a plan to ban sales of menthol-flavored cigarettes in the United States, a measure many public health experts hailed as the government's most meaningful action in more than a decade of tobacco control efforts.
The ban would most likely have the deepest impact on black smokers, nearly 85% of whom use menthol cigarettes, compared with only 29% of white smokers, according to a government survey.
If effective in reducing smoking, the ban could significantly diminish the burden of chronic disease and limit the number of lives cut short by one of the most hazardous legal products available.
Now again, I'm not a fan of cigarettes.
I also am going to point out here that it was Democrats who used to claim that the killing of Eric Garner in New York City, which was because he was selling what are called Lucy's, and he was selling Lucy's because of the high tax on cigarettes in the city of New York.
They're now proposing more restrictions that will lead to presumably more illegal activities for the large number of black people who use menthol cigarettes.
So this administration's position right now is relieve student loan debt on rich white people and ban the sale of menthol cigarettes for poor black people.
Genius stuff from the most progressive administration in modern American history.
Meanwhile, other wonderful policies that they are pursuing.
Jen Psaki says, you know what, maybe in order to relieve inflation at this time, perhaps we should get rid of some tariffs on the Chinese.
Genius!
Genius!
So the Chinese are providing the sole economic outlet for the Russians right now.
We are in effectively an economic proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
We're trying to cut them off at the knees.
Meanwhile, China has cast its eyes upon Taiwan.
China is militarizing faster than ever before.
China is cutting itself off from the rest of the world in an attempt to weaponize up.
And this administration's policy is, what if we help them out by getting rid of the tariffs because our own inflationary policy is too crappy?
Here is Jen Psaki announcing this one.
I mean, these folks are so incompetent.
They are cruising for an extraordinary bruising in November.
To what extent are you looking at cutting tariffs on Chinese goods as a way to ease inflation?
Well, there's an ongoing review of that, led by Ambassador Tai at USTR, and we are certainly continuing to look at where these tariffs put in place by the prior administration don't make sense.
And one of the factors that we're looking at as a part of this review is certainly the impact on jobs and wages.
We're also looking at where we have concerns about the economic policies and approaches of China, but I don't have any Amazing, amazing stuff.
So this administration is a disaster area, which is why, again, they must focus on shutting down your ability to speak inside the Overton window.
It has to happen because if people actually realize how far left the left has moved, the left will just not win.
They will not win.
They will pay an extraordinary political price.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you can't forget to end your week by tuning into The Andrew Klavan Show.
Bruce shows every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
So head on over to dailywire.com at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central, and tune in.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
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