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Oct. 27, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

46:41

Musk Prepares To Battle His New Twitter Employees | Ep. 1598

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Time	Text
	Elon Musk visits Twitter headquarters as his purchase of the service prepares to close.
	Democrats freak out over their declining midterm chances.
	And even Cenk Uygur is sick and tired of Democrats governing Los Angeles.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Well, yesterday was a day of hilarity in the online space.
	Elon Musk arrived at the Twitter headquarters carrying an actual literal sink.
	He tweeted, let this sink in.
	I gotta say, like, the fact that Elon Musk is somewhere between an Atlas shrug character and a Bond villain is really one of the great things about American economic life these days.
	Here's what that video sounded and looked like.
	You can actually see Musk walking in.
	And, oh, I'm sick of standing.
	You just can't help it. That's the thing.
	Laughing with everybody carrying in the sink. No one knows what's going on.
	Pretty spectacular stuff.
	He then tweeted out that he was meeting some wonderful people at Twitter, and I can only hope that that means that all the people he is not meeting, he is going to fire.
	The reason that it makes rather a large difference, whether Elon Musk comes in, there's some economic reasons why it will be good for Twitter, and then there are some actual reasons why it will be good for the United States of America on an economic level.
	One of the reasons it might be good for Twitter is because Twitter, as far as I'm aware, has never run a profit.
	I'm not aware that Twitter is actually a money-making machine, and you can see why.
	A video was put out by one of the Twitter employees showing what a day in their life is like, and let me just say, it looks like a vacation spa.
	It looks like nobody does any work around there, and they all sit around playing foosball all day.
	Here is a video from one of the Twitter employees, not all that long ago, a day in the life of Twitter.
	My life as a Twitter employee.
	So this past week, went to SF for the first time at a Twitter office.
	Badged in.
	Honestly, took a moment to just soak everything in.
	What a blessing.
	Also started my morning off with an iced matcha from the perch.
	Then I had a meeting, so quickly scheduled one of these little pods.
	There are no words.
	So, there's that.
	They're literally noise cancelling.
	Took my meeting, got ready for a bunch.
	Look how delicious this food looks.
	Oh my goodness, I was so overwhelmed.
	Then made my way down to this log cabin area.
	I don't know what this is, but it was really cool.
	Played some foods with all of my friends to kind of unwind a bit.
	Went to the library to kind of get some more work done.
	So there's that.
	That's great.
	And by the way, it should be noted that the Twitter price tag to earnings ratio has been historically extraordinarily out of whack because Twitter has virtually no revenue, but it has a worth that is very, very, very high.
	And so what that means that they've been blowing through money like nobody's business.
	Well, that is just one of the many tech companies that have been Essentially propped up by an easy money policy that has been followed for the past several years.
	It's not just Twitter, of course.
	The New York Times reporting today that Google this week reported a steep decline in profits.
	Social media companies like Meta said that advertising sales have rapidly cooled off.
	Microsoft predicted a slowdown through at least the end of the year.
	Tech companies led the wave for the U.S.
	economy over the past decade and buoyed the stock market during the worst days of the COVID pandemic.
	Now, amid stubborn inflation and rising interest rates, even the biggest giants of Silicon Valley are signaling tough days may be ahead.
	The companies are navigating the same problems as the rest of the economy, pumped up by the aggressive consumer spending during that pandemic they invested to keep up with demand.
	Now, as the spending is slowing, they are trying to adjust, and it has not been easy.
	And it shouldn't be easy, frankly, because a lot of these companies don't actually earn the monies.
	There are certain companies, like Meta, where Facebook actually earned an enormous amount of money from advertising revenue.
	But if you're looking at Twitter, what exactly is the investment priority over at Twitter?
	How do they even make their cash?
	Nobody seems to understand this business.
	Well, Musk, having now paid well over market value for Twitter, is going to have to actually bring people into line.
	Well, the funniest thing about all of this is all of the Twitter employees shrieking at the sky over Elon Musk.
	Going to the Twitter headquarters and taking over.
	He also, by the way, changed his biographical description on his Twitter profile to Chief Twit and added his location as Twitter HQ.
	Leslie Berland, the chief marketing officer for Twitter, tweeted out, Elon is in the SF office this week meeting with folks, walking the halls, continuing to dive in on the important work y'all do.
	If you're in San Francisco and see him around, say hi.
	Well, this follows hard on a bunch of Twitter employees issuing a letter to Elon Musk and the board of directors.
	And I gotta say, the entitlement mentality of so many people in the tech sector is truly astonishing.
	Maybe they should go learn to code if Elon Musk fires them.
	Quote, we the undersigned Twitter workers believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.
	Elon Musk's plans left 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter's ability to serve the public conversation.
	A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users' and customers' trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	So if I buy a company and I decide that 75% of you are useless, that's worker intimidation?
	Well, I mean, I feel like all workers should be slightly intimidated that they might do their job if they are useless and not adding to the bottom-line productivity of the company.
	Again, Twitter's price-earnings ratio was, just a couple of months ago, at like 160.
	160, which is insane.
	I actually took their market cap and I divided that out, and it looks like my company here at Daily Wire may earn more on a yearly basis than Twitter does.
	Twitter has significant effects on societies and communities across the globe, say the workers.
	As we speak, Twitter is helping to uplift independent journalism in Ukraine and Iran, as well as powering social movements around the world.
	So what exactly were their demands?
	They actually made demands of the person who just bought their company and will presumably put them on the breadlines.
	Quote, we demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not, e.g.
	remote work.
	So we insist that you allow us to continue to work not from the office.
	We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.
	We demand dignity.
	Transparent, prompt, and thoughtful communication around our working conditions.
	We demand to be treated with dignity and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.
	Sincerely, Twitter workers." Aww, single sad tear for the Twitter workers.
	It's so sad.
	You demand to not be treated as pawns by the people who sign your paycheck?
	That's called being an employee.
	It's not being a pawn.
	It's like you're paid for your job.
	If you don't do your job, you're going to go away.
	That is what's happening here.
	And it is truly amazing to hear people who are paid to work at Twitter complain that they are pawns in game of life, like Mongo from Blazing Saddles.
	The reality is that for everybody who uses Twitter, many of us feel as though we are pawns in the hands of a vengeful group of petty and ridiculous gods in San Francisco who determine whether or not your freedom of speech will simply be rejected.
	At any random moment, if you say that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, your account could just disappear into the ether.
	It's happened to libs of TikTok about seven times at this point.
	The Babylon Bee is still suspended for noting that men are not women and women are not men.
	And really, this isn't about Elon Musk taking over Twitter and running it like a business.
	What this is really about is they're angry at Elon Musk's vision of free speech.
	Now, Elon Musk does not believe that there is no Overton window.
	Presumably, Elon Musk will still have policies on violence and harassment even after he takes over Twitter.
	But what Elon Musk believes, it seems, is that as many voices as possible should be heard and that the best recipe for a very, very bad voice is for everybody to basically get to sound off on that very bad voice.
	So, if Kanye West, or Ye, decides that he's going to tweet out something radically anti-Semitic, presumably, Musk would not then ban him from the Twitter service.
	He would just allow events to take their normal course.
	Which, by the way, is precisely what happens in the real world.
	Right?
	When Ye says a bunch of anti-Semitic crap and he just cancels his contract.
	Because, again, that's the way the real world works.
	And when it comes to Twitter, it's not Twitter's job to police everybody's speech.
	The baseline notion that so many tech companies have come up with, especially in the social media space, is our job to better conversation.
	We have a higher goal.
	A higher goal is that we're going to improve the quality of conversation.
	That's not what your shareholders bought into.
	It's not what your customers bought into.
	The reason that you use Twitter is not because you expect that Twitter is going to curate for you a wonderful dorm room conversation.
	That is not what Twitter was designed to do.
	You went on Twitter because it was a bunch of people who you thought it might be interesting to tweet with.
	And you were perfectly willing to allow for the fact that there were going to be a bunch of people who disagreed with you.
	This is why Twitter suggested from the very outset that it was a platform for speech.
	A platform, not a cultivator.
	A platform.
	You want a curated, cultivated platform?
	Daily Wire is a curated, cultivated platform.
	MSNBC is a curated, cultivated platform.
	New York Times is a curated, cultivated platform.
	Or rather, a publisher, right?
	This is what we normally call curated, cultivated platforms.
	We call them publishers.
	Twitter was never meant to be anything remotely like that.
	It was supposed to be a town square, and everybody knew that.
	And then, what always happens, with particularly the boards of these corporations, is they decide they have a higher goal.
	They get together in rooms, and they feel a little bit guilty about the fact That they've created companies that are wildly successful and they decide they have to have a higher goal.
	They now need to better the world.
	And the way they are going to better the world is by broadening out their mandates.
	You saw this at Facebook also.
	A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg did a speech over at Georgetown University.
	And he explained that his job was to basically allow the conversation to flow freely over at Facebook.
	It was not his job to decide whether a particular interpretation of events was misinformation.
	It was not his job to decide how broad the Overton window was going to be, other than maybe in some extraordinarily fringe cases.
	Right?
	That was not his job.
	And then, over time, his perspective changed, through social pressure, through a belief system created by an echo chamber of people.
	In the corporate world, in the media, in government, who have all basically gotten together and decided that there will be new rules for the road and that they are capable of shaping and turning the conversation in ways that are conducive to the public good.
	But their definition of the public good is not your definition of the public good.
	And this is why they are freaking about Elon Musk, because Elon Musk is the weasel in the henhouse here.
	Elon Musk is the guy who's got the same credentials that they do.
	He is richer than all of them, and he is walking directly into the henhouse, and he is saying, guys, you know, you all have your standards about how you're going to run everybody's life, and I don't have those standards.
	And we'll see who prevails.
	And you can see the hue and cry, I mean, the screaming, the rage.
	It's peace in the new republic today.
	By a human named Brin Tannehill, titled, Why Elon Musk's Idea of Free Speech Will Help Ruin America.
	It's going to ruin America if Elon Musk allows, for example, Donald Trump to come back onto Twitter.
	The left loves the fact that Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter because, effectively, it silences Donald Trump.
	Now, this is coming from a person who thinks that many of Donald Trump's tweets were extraordinarily counterproductive and many of them were indeed stupid.
	Should the former president of the United States be permitted on a free speech platform to speak to millions of people?
	The answer, of course, is yes.
	And by the way, what the media really liked about the Twitter ban was that it allowed them to now become the filter for Trump.
	Meaning what Trump would do is he would go on very little-used sites like Truth Social, Or parlor?
	And he would put something out there and the media would decide whether it was newsworthy or not.
	So they, again, got to be the sort of middleman between you and what Trump was saying.
	If Trump goes back on Twitter, they're not the middleman anymore.
	You can just go and see exactly what Trump is saying.
	Good, bad, and ugly.
	So this is what Bryn Tannehill writes.
	This person doesn't like that.
	I'm not going to assume his or her gender.
	I just have no idea.
	Quote.
	After months of legal wrangling, Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter appears to finally be going through.
	Musk and the right see this as a great thing because it will restore free speech to Twitter.
	Any suggestion that the sort of free speech they envision can have highly undesirable consequences is met with hells of Libs hate free speech or other accusations of fascism.
	Well, no, I mean, I'm sure that many of the things that will be said online now that Twitter will be reopened.
	We'll have highly undesirable consequences.
	There'll be ugly stuff said.
	This is one of the things that happens when it comes to liberty.
	When it comes to liberty, sometimes liberty has really ugly results.
	And if you're talking about a space that is dedicated to the principle of free speech, then yeah, some people are going to say crap you don't like.
	In the United States, you do have the liberty to say the N-word.
	The N-word is ugly and terrible and awful, and it has ramifications for lots of people.
	Both the people who speak it, who bear social ramifications, as in many cases they should, and the people who have to hear it.
	Okay, but it's not illegal.
	And the reason it's not illegal is because once you give government, or really anybody, the power to essentially declare, not for themselves, not for their own outlet, but for the broader public, what can and cannot be heard, you get into extraordinarily dicey territory in terms of freedom itself.
	So I'm not denying that there will be bad people back on Twitter.
	I've said this a thousand times.
	I do not like Alex Jones.
	I think Alex Jones stinks.
	I think that what Alex Jones says is 70% of the time hot garbage.
	Should he be on Twitter?
	Sure.
	Should he be on Facebook?
	Absolutely.
	And will that have ramifications?
	Yes.
	But that is one of the costs of doing business when it comes to freedom of speech.
	I can name names.
	There are tons of these people, and I've defended nearly all of them.
	People have personally attacked me.
	People have viciously attacked my family.
	I've never called for these people to be banned from services like Twitter or Facebook, no matter how bad they are.
	And there's a reason for that, because once you give the power to the great arbiters of the truth, they can use that power however they please.
	Similarly, warnings that unfettered free speech results in dangerous misinformation spreading, says this columnist, are derided with, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the libertarian belief that in the marketplace of ideas, the best will always win out.
	Now, I don't even believe that.
	I don't believe that in the marketplace of ideas, the best will always win out.
	I'm not sanguine about the possibility that sometimes the worst people win out.
	But I know that the worst people win out when there is ultimate control given to a cadre of like-minded, left-leaning people to determine what can be said and what cannot be said.
	According to this columnist for The New Republic, these theories will be tested quickly.
	It is being reported that after the sale is finalized, Musk plans on laying off nearly three-quarters of Twitter staff and that one of the first things to go will be any corporate attempt at content moderation and user security.
	Musk also plans on restoring the accounts of high-profile sources of disinformation and violent messaging who were previously banned, most notably former President Trump.
	The pro-Musk arguments are complete nonsense.
	They're innumerable historical and modern examples of why social media platforms with nearly unlimited freedom of speech produce horrors.
	The Supreme Court decided free speech is an absolute long ago when Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted you can't shout fire in a crowded theater for obvious reasons.
	Oh my God!
	If I have to hear one more columnist cite the long overruled Schenck decision, which is one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, suggesting, by the way, that if you distributed communist pamphlets in 1919, you could be thrown in jail because it was akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater.
	This isn't, it's asinine.
	The fire in a crowded theater decision has long been seen in legal circles as a bad decision, yet it's cited every time somebody wants to quash somebody else's free speech.
	But, says this columnist, freedom of speech has caused untold death and suffering when used to disseminate hate or spread disinformation.
	The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fabricated anti-Semitic text that purported to expose a global baby-murdering Jewish plot bent on world domination.
	Mein Kampf was Hitler's autobiography, which blamed Germany's post-World War I woes on a global Jewish conspiracy.
	Both were readily available in the Weimar Republic, which had no First Amendment per se, but guaranteed freedom of speech.
	Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail, guys.
	And it turns out he then ended up taking over the entire country.
	This notion that free speech is to blame for Hitler's rise, as opposed to, you know, latent and pretty overt anti-Semitism that had been on the rise in Europe since the 1870s and 1880s, as opposed to the vast inflationary spiral in Weimar Germany, as opposed to the repayment plans that were negotiated by the Allies in Germany,
	As opposed to the complete unworkability of the German government and the delegation of tremendous executive power to the centralized branch of the chancellorship in the German government prior to Hitler.
	I mean, again, the historic ignorance is just astonishing.
	Well, probably if they just banned Mein Kampf, then Hitler never would have gained power.
	Or maybe he would have anyway, because it turns out that really bad ideas find a way of getting out there anyway, and when there's an attempt to quash them, very often, that actually adds flame to the fire.
	In modern times, lack of moderation on social media sites has repeatedly contributed to mass murder.
	The Christchurch, New Zealand shooter killed 51 Muslims at two mosques after being radicalized on YouTube 4chan and 8chan.
	The shooter killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh had been radicalized on the social media site Gab.
	Okay, so I just have a question.
	Is the basic idea here that we are now conflating actual violent threats and rhetoric with stuff you don't like?
	Because that's really where you're going, is it not?
	The carnage caused by misinformation spread by social media goes far beyond massacres by racist anti-Semitin Islamophobes.
	Over 1 million Americans have died of COVID-19, and at least 25% of those deaths were preventable if people had gotten vaccinated.
	Many others could have been prevented if people had worn masks, socially distanced, believed the disease were real, or otherwise behaved in a rational manner.
	Okay, you want to talk about misinformation and disinformation.
	How about the idea that if lots and lots of people had worn masks during the Delta variant, that would have saved a bajillion lives?
	Like, show me the evidence that that is the case.
	Seriously, I'm waiting for it.
	Because it turns out that mask mandates had precisely no impact in cross-country studies when it came to the transmission and disease and death that arrived from COVID-19 during the Delta wave.
	But again, the basic idea here is I don't like what some people are going to say, therefore I should shut down free speech.
	And this is why Elon Musk is super bad.
	And this essay goes on and on and on and on about the evils of free speech.
	He says we had free speech on Twitter until the fascist government he helped usher in bans it.
	So in the end, Elon Musk will bring fascism and then Twitter will be shut down.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	And this is not the only op-ed like this today.
	There's another op-ed from the LA Times and a person named Suzanne Nassl.
	And this op-ed says essentially the same thing.
	She is chief executive of PEN America and author of Dare to Speak, Defending Free Speech for All.
	But not free speech for all, as it turns out.
	Because today, quote, how Elon Musk's plans for Twitter could threaten free speech.
	So you're wondering how more free speech leads to a threat to free speech?
	Well, says Suzanne Nassel, quote, Disinformation, though largely protected by the First Amendment against government control, can imperil free speech itself.
	How can disinformation threaten free speech, if it is a form of free speech?
	To answer that question, we need to recall why we protect free speech in the first place.
	It's not just because people like to be able to spout their opinions, or because the founders thought it was important.
	Free speech is protected in the Bill of Rights and in global instruments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it has long been recognized as necessary to create open and democratic societies.
	When arenas of public discourse are flooded with disinformation, free speech begins to shed its value.
	If audiences lose their grip on what is true and what is false, they can become primed to distrust everything.
	It becomes impossible to persuade people, even with the most compelling argument or evidence.
	Now, who decides what's the most compelling?
	You?
	Suzanne?
	If platforms are riddled with propaganda and political falsehoods aimed to skew election results, prospects for genuine discourse on matters of public policy or local affairs evaporate.
	If the search for reliable information yields nothing but a morass of commingled facts and falsehoods, people eventually stop searching.
	That disinformation doesn't mean government should step in to ban it, right?
	She's not going to go all the way here, right?
	Now, the case she's making is what we would call, in law school, an argument that proves too much.
	She's basically saying that many types of free speech threaten free speech itself, therefore we shouldn't have total free speech.
	But she's not willing to go to a government ban.
	She says the First Amendment prevents the government from suppressing most forms of disinformation because the Supreme Court has recognized that if permitted to regulate such speech, authorities would not be able to resist the temptation to use that power in self-serving ways.
	But, but, even if the government can't do it, social media companies can.
	So I just have a question.
	All the people on the left have wild distrust for giant corporations.
	Why do they trust social media bosses to determine what you can and cannot hear?
	They love government and they hate corporations in every other area of life.
	When it comes to the government regulating free speech, because they are barred by the First Amendment from having the government do it, now they want the corporations to do it.
	Again, the idea that people won't use it in a self-serving manner if they own a corporation is absurd.
	All they do all day is complain that people who own corporations are greedy and terrible.
	Except apparently when it comes to free speech, when they are purely altruistic and will never censor information in their own best interest.
	This is the reason they're really mad at Elon Musk.
	The New York Times, by the way, has decided to go in a completely different direction.
	They wrote a hit piece yesterday titled, quote, How Elon Musk Became a Geopolitical Chaos Agent, which, by the way, sounds like an awesome title.
	I would have to add that to my Twitter bio.
	Geopolitical chaos agent?
	That is some pretty awesome sauce right there.
	The New York Times has, quote, While plenty of billionaire executives like to tweet their two cents on world affairs, none can come close to Musk's influence and ability to cause trouble.
	He has sometimes waded into situations even after he was advised not to.
	And he's already left behind plenty of messes.
	While the bulk of Musk's wealth comes from his stake in Tesla, his influence stems largely from his rocket company, SpaceX, which runs the Starlink satellite network.
	Starlink can beam internet service to conflict zones and geopolitical hotspots.
	It has become an essential tool of the Ukrainian army.
	Which you would think is actually a good thing, right?
	But apparently it's bad because he's about to take over Twitter.
	That's the real problem.
	Technology has become central to geopolitics.
	Said Karen Kornbla, a director with the German Marshall Fund and a former advisor to Barack Obama.
	It is fascinating and it is messy and there is Elon Musk in the middle of it.
	Well, you wouldn't want that.
	We can only trust the government with these sorts of powers, apparently.
	He's not allowed to have opinions or, by the way, to provide Starlink for free to Ukraine, losing money in the process.
	He should basically just keep providing all the monies and all the resources, but he should have no opinions on these particular issues.
	This month, Musk confirmed he faced pressure from Beijing.
	He told the Financial Times the Chinese government had made it clear it disapproved of his offering Starlink services in Ukraine.
	Beijing sought assurances he said he would not offer the service in China.
	He offered a way of easing the tensions, handing some control of Taiwan to China.
	Now again, bad idea.
	I don't agree with Elon Musk.
	But the fact that Elon Musk is considered a quote-unquote geopolitical chaos agent, but George Soros, who donates literally billions of dollars to different left-leaning and radical groups in a bevy of Western countries, is not considered a geopolitical chaos agent, you can see why this is.
	And the answer is because Elon Musk disagrees with you guys sometimes.
	That's really what this is.
	So, pay no attention to all of the assininity coming from the media, the screaming to the sky.
	The real reason, as always, that they are very upset with Elon Musk is because Elon Musk removes them in their gatekeeper role.
	They can no longer police the dissemination of information in the way that they would love to do.
	This is why you watch over the next couple of years as Facebook begins to move away from its news feed, for example, the media will turn and suddenly they will suddenly start liking Facebook again.
	All of their ire will turn on Musk, who's allowed people to actually see things that the media don't want them to see.
	Elon Musk has just released a letter to all of Twitter's advertisers and here's what he says, quote, I wanted to reach out personally to share my motivation in acquiring Twitter.
	There's been much speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I think about advertising.
	Most of it has been wrong.
	The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner without resorting to violence.
	There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far-right-wing and far-left-wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.
	In the relentless pursuit of clicks, much of traditional media has fueled and catered to these polarized extremes, as they believe this is what brings in the money.
	But in doing so, the opportunity for dialogue is lost.
	That is why I bought Twitter.
	I didn't do it because it would be easy.
	I didn't do it to make more money.
	I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.
	And I do so with humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility.
	That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.
	In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.
	I also very much believe, says Elon Musk, that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain, or inform you.
	It can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed but is right for you.
	For this to be true, it is essential to show Twitter users advertising that is as relevant as possible to their needs.
	Low-relevancy ads are spam.
	Highly relevant ads are actually content.
	Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.
	To everyone who has partnered with us, thank you.
	Let us build something extraordinary together.
	Well, that sounds terrible and threatening and like he's going to unleash the gates of hell upon any who step into this realm.
	Again, this is, it's amazing.
	All Elon Musk is saying right here, by the way, is that if you don't like the most contentious stuff on Twitter, there will be controls so that you yourself can choose not to see that stuff.
	People already have that capacity, by the way.
	It's called the mute button.
	I use the mute button a lot on Twitter.
	I never block anybody because everybody should be able to see the things that I have to say if they so choose.
	But I do mute people, frankly, because I think that it's hilarious to know that people are screaming into the void at me and I don't have to listen to them.
	So Elon Musk is going to presumably allow for algorithmic controls that you are able to implement yourself.
	He's also going to allow for advertisers to better target their potential consumers.
	This is considered super bad by the entire left-wing media.
	This is what's going to destroy the Earth.
	Okay, meanwhile...
	The Democrats are cruising for a bruising in the polls right now.
	There are a couple of polls that actually have a cut in Democrats' favor in the last couple of days.
	Those polls are showing a bizarre uptick for Democrats in the House generic congressional poll.
	There's an Economist YouGov poll that actually shows Democrats up four.
	There's a Political Morning Council poll that shows Democrats up five.
	But there's also a Democracy Corps poll, which is a Democrat voting group, showing Republicans up two.
	So the polls are a little bit all over the place, but the trend lines are fairly obvious.
	And the trend lines are that the Republicans still have a two-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot.
	In terms of the specific Senate races, virtually all of them have grown a lot tighter.
	And the ones that are getting less tight tend to be the ones that already favored Republicans.
	Democrats, unsurprisingly, are freaking out.
	And they are particularly freaking out over the performance of John Fetterman in his Pennsylvania Senate debate, which was one of the most disastrous performances in the history of American politics.
	He got up there.
	He clearly is not functional after his stroke.
	It's a serious problem.
	Yes, your senator should be able to understand and speak English.
	The fact that Fetterman has good days and he has bad days is really a bad, it's a big problem.
	I mean, put aside the fact that he's a radical and he never should have been the nominee in the first place, and Democrats are idiots not to nominate Conor Lamb.
	The simple fact is that after the stroke, all of those issues become secondary.
	The way that the media are trying to spin John Fetterman as a possible candidate here is really extraordinary.
	The New York Times has a piece today, it is titled, Fetterman's debate showing raises Democratic anxieties in Senate battle, quote, The debate performance on Tuesday night by Lt.
	Gov.
	John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, left party officials newly anxious, injecting a fresh dose of unpredictability into one of the country's most important contests less than two weeks before Election Day.
	At times, Fetterman seemed to pause to seek the right words or offer a jumble of sentences to express his positions.
	In some cases, he contradicted himself or appeared to state the opposite of his actual view.
	The contentious matchup between Fetterman and Oz was a kind of political duel rarely seen in American life, upending the traditional pageantry of rapid-fire debates.
	Federman's performance thrusts questions about health and disability into the center of the final weeks of a nearly deadlocked race.
	And this is the best line in the piece.
	You ready for this?
	And this is what they tweeted out.
	This is what the New York Times tweeted out, quote, Even as doctors and disability rights advocates praised his delivery, saying that his speech did not reflect any cognitive impairment, and that he had offered an inspiring model for others with disabilities.
	Some Democrats worried that ordinary voters might see it differently.
	Can you imagine if a Republican showed up to a debate and could not speak sentences in English with words in their proper order?
	And then all the coverage from the media was like, well, it was stunning and brave.
	And disability advocates say this was a wonderful, groundbreaking moment.
	What in the actual, what?
	Are you kidding me?
	Let's not pretend that if this guy weren't, or if he were a Republican, he would be disqualified from the race by nearly everyone in the media at this point.
	One senior Democratic official in the state described an intense level of anxiety and awareness the debate could be decisive.
	Republicans clearly saw an opening.
	No!
	No!
	Again, I love the Republicans' pounce line here.
	You trot out a candidate who had a stroke before the primary, and you spent months hiding him on the campaign trail.
	And then when he is on the campaign trail, you have him speak for like five minutes, and then you drag him away.
	And then you have his wife explain that it is ableist to ask him to do interviews.
	And then you say that Republicans see an opening?
	Shock.
	No, no.
	Say it's not so.
	Democratic officials and campaign operatives in Pennsylvania quickly seized on a statement by Dr. Oz that abortion decisions should be up to women doctors, local political leaders.
	He meant not the federal government.
	I love that they leave out all the context for what Dr. Oz actually said.
	On Wednesday, the Fetterman team turned Dr. Oz's remark into an ad for TV and digital platforms and blasted it across social media.
	It ain't gonna help.
	It's not.
	I'm sorry.
	Abortion is not going to drive enough people to the polls in Pennsylvania to overcome the fact that you guys ran somebody who is not capable of holding the office.
	Meanwhile, the Washington Post is panicking as well.
	Have an entire piece titled Democrats Scramble into Defensive Posture in Final Stage of Midterm.
	Democrats on Wednesday pumped at least $6.3 million worth of advertising investment into a trio of congressional districts in New York and New Jersey where President Biden won by at least 8 percentage points.
	We're going to see some surprises in a couple of weeks and all those surprises are going to move in a Republican direction.
	You'll see some Republicans who you thought might win lose.
	And there are a lot of close Senate races and a lot of close House races.
	But overall, you're going to see some very odd races where Republicans who are 8, 10 points out start winning.
	I already told you my sleeper pick is Lee Zeldin for governor in New York.
	I think that New York Democrats have no reason to show up for the polls for Kathy Hochul.
	I think she's in serious trouble in that race and everybody is whistling past the graveyard on the Democratic side of the aisle.
	According to the Washington Post, less than two weeks before the midterm elections, Democrats have moved into a defensive crouch, scrambling to shore up the party's candidates as Republicans charge deeper into their terrain.
	The scope of their challenge has come into sharper focus in the past 48 hours, when much of the attention of the party has been on protecting swaths of the country where Democrats have long enjoyed more support.
	Late summer talk of Democrats going on offense by running on abortion rights, while Biden's approval rating ticked up, has run headlong into the harsh reality Republicans are well positioned to make potentially large gains on November 8th.
	Now, who said that at the time?
	Who said at the time that abortion would not be the decisive issue in the midterms?
	And the reason was perfectly obvious because it was like a double bank shot.
	It wasn't just a bank shot.
	The bank shot of abortion would be you are not pregnant, you are not getting an abortion, but it should be your top issue.
	Inflation hits everybody.
	Inflation is the rain that hits all who are outside.
	Abortion It turns out that in the vast majority of cases, your personal activity has something to do with the origin of the abortion story.
	There are cases where that's not true, obviously.
	Rape and incest.
	But the vast majority of abortion stories start with people having consensual sex and then conceiving a child.
	So what that means is that for a lot of people, abortion is not going to be their top issue because they don't believe that they're going to be sitting around one day at the kitchen table and boom, they're unwontedly pregnant.
	So that was a bank shot in the first place.
	Then it's a double bank shot because it turns out that it's not a federal issue in the first place.
	The Supreme Court basically just delegated all of it, not basically, they did.
	They just delegated it back to the state and local level.
	So it's a double bank shot.
	You're supposed to elect your United States Senator on an issue that does not personally affect you and that is not a federal issue anyway.
	So you're going to have to explain how that was going to motivate tons and tons and tons of people to go to the polls in waves that were going to withstand any of this.
	Democrats are in serious trouble in all of this.
	The fact is that the Fetterman story, that was a close race even before that debate.
	Because they ran a bad candidate.
	Because Fetterman is a far-left candidate.
	And they're completely disconnected, the Democrats are, from the top priorities of Americans.
	By polling data, Americans are mostly interested in things like the economy, jobs, The inflation rate, immigration, crime, those are the top issues.
	Democrats are focused in like a laser beam on transing the children, climate change, and January 6th.
	I'm sorry, that ain't gonna do it.
	Which is why Nevada is in play.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Nevada's in danger of turning red.
	Nevada Republicans stand in their strongest position in years.
	Polls show them with a solid chance to win multiple midterm races in a state where high prices on everything from gas to rent are driving voters away from Democrats.
	The state's top Democrats, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Governor Steve Sisolak, are essentially tied with their respective GOP challengers, Laxalt and Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, according to the 538 poll averages.
	Multiple recent surveys of the state show the two Republicans with leads in the low single digits.
	Cortez Masto is considered by strategists in both parties to be the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the 50-50 Senate.
	By the way, I would guarantee you that some of this is people escaping from California to the low-tax state of Nevada.
	And the people who are running away are not blue.
	The people who are running away are red and purple.
	So the shift of Nevada from purple to red would be a ground trip, by the way, in favor of the presidential race in 2024.
	Because Republicans have not won Nevada in the past couple of presidential races.
	So, how are Democrats dealing with all of this?
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Give them a call 866-721-3300 or visit AmericanFinancing.net Well, folks, I just watched an amazing new three-part series by Jordan Peterson.
	It's called On Marriage.
	Jordan's wonderful, and it is his definitive series on matrimony.
	It is exclusively over at Daily Wire+.
	You're not going to be able to see it anywhere else.
	And whether you're married, whether you're not married, you need to see it.
	In 2018, marriage rates hit an all-time low in the United States.
	That is a very bad indicator for the future of the country.
	And Jordan is trying to inject some reality into how people talk.
	Also tonight, 8pm Eastern, my book club, Ben Shapiro's book club, because I am indeed Ben Shapiro.
	Peterson's On Marriage. There are two more episodes coming out soon. Tonight, 7pm Eastern, Jordan Peterson will also be hosting an All Access Live.
	You can ask him directly your questions about marriage. That Q&A is only available to All Access members. So if you're not yet a member, go to dailywire.com slash Ben and join today. Also tonight, 8pm Eastern, my book club, Ben Shapiro's book club, because I am indeed Ben Shapiro. This month's book is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The book is a tremendous look at what society has become.
	It was written prospectively for looking.
	It now looks like a history of the United States.
	You must be an All Access member to join in on the fun.
	Head on over to dailywire.com become a member today.
	Okay, so Democrats are cruising for bruising.
	They have a real problem on their hands and their best strategy apparently is to pretend that none of it is happening.
	So Corinne Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary, she was asked specifically by Wolf Blitzer about John Fetterman's medical health.
	She said, we're not concerned about it at all.
	He looks hunky-dory to us.
	And we look forward to seeing... Now, let me just say, of course Karine Jean-Pierre has to say this.
	Her boss does not look healthy.
	The door is wide open here, by the way.
	If John Fetterman loses his race, and if Democrats lose the Senate, and if they get whomped in the House, the questions about Joe Biden's health are going to be just flying at him from all sides, including the media, which are going to have decided that Joe Biden is a loss leader, and that they need to throw him out in favor of a young, hotter candidate.
	And then they look to the bench, and it's like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.
	Anyway, they're not thinking that far.
	If this turns out to be a big, big year for Republicans, All the questions about Joe Biden's age and health are going to rise to the top of the pile because they are very fair about him and they are very fair about John Fetterman.
	But for now, the White House has to pretend that it's not an issue at all.
	So here's Karine Jean-Pierre, untalented press secretary.
	You have said that the president finds the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman to be impressive and a capable individual.
	After last night's debate, does he have any concerns about Fetterman?
	Not at all.
	Look, Fetterman, as we know, he's also lieutenant governor.
	He's been able to serve in that role.
	He is, I've also said, the president sees him as an authentic advocate for the middle class.
	But I do want to be careful.
	I'm not going to get into political matters from here.
	I always preface that because I just want to be safe here.
	We do care about the rule of law here.
	So I just want to say that.
	But I will say this.
	The President looks forward to working with the Lieutenant Governor when he is in the Senate.
	The president will probably still think that John Fetterman is in the Senate, even if John Fetterman is not in the Senate.
	Meanwhile, the media coverage on Fetterman is just amazing.
	So, there is a medical analyst for CNN named Jonathan Reiner, and he correctly ripped into the Fetterman campaign.
	He was like, why are you guys even putting him out there and not disclosing how serious his neurological injury is?
	This is correct.
	And then wait till you see how he swivels.
	But he's obviously had a pretty significant neurologic injury.
	Do you think that, um, Like, in a year from now, this will all be in the rearview mirror if he does the work he needs to do?
	You know, it's hard to know.
	And part of the problem is that, you know, the campaign was opaque at the very beginning.
	They didn't really disclose the degree of his illness.
	We don't really know how sick he was.
	In fact, his treating physicians were never made available to the press or the public, so we don't really know Okay, all of that is true, but then the CNN medical analyst goes on to say the real problem in that debate was not, it wasn't really Fetterman not being functional, it's the fact that Dr. Oz talked too fast.
	So this is a going theory now, is that Dr. Oz deliberately talked fast so that the closed captioning transcribers could not keep up with how fast he was talking in order to screw up John Fetterman.
	Uh, what?
	Like, that's your defense?
	Is Dr. Oz talked too fast?
	Dr. Oz doesn't even talk as fast in that debate as I talk at like .75 speed, so no.
	But this is, I guess you gotta go with something, man.
	I admire his courage to go on that debate last night.
	He had to know that he was facing basically a fast-talking TV doctor who at times seemed to be talking almost intentionally faster in the face of Mr. Fetterman's difficulty speaking.
	Sometimes it appeared almost cruelly faster.
	Cruelly faster?
	How dare Dr. Oz speak?
	At a speed that the fast fingers of the transcriptionists couldn't keep up with.
	That's it.
	That's their case, in the end.
	It's ableist for Dr. Oz to talk.
	That's it.
	I mean, after all, what we really should have done is he should have written down on a piece of paper all of his responses, and then Fetterman could have read those, and then Fetterman could have written his responses, and it would just be a written debate, but they would stand there in front of cameras, and John Fetterman would continue to look like Uncle Fester, and that would be the debate.
	It would be amazing.
	Some of the people on the left are actually just saying the quiet part out loud.
	There's a guy named Michael Luciano who has a piece over at Mediaite.
	It is titled, quote, Now we've seen this sentiment a lot, right?
	John Fetterman's stroke matters more than how he'd vote in the Senate.
	Now, we've seen this sentiment a lot, right?
	The sentiment is basically, it doesn't matter whether he is no longer functional.
	He's just gonna be a vote for what he wanted to be a vote for.
	He's a rubber stamp for whatever the Democrats want.
	Okay, well, if that's the case, guys, we may as well just get rid of all representative government entirely.
	Because we now have the ability in the United States to take flash polls, right?
	We could theoretically have an election every week, and we could vote in direct democracy for exactly what the people want.
	We could theoretically do that.
	We now have the technological means.
	It means that we're not available for nearly all of human history.
	The whole idea of representative government, as Edmund Burke suggested, was that when you elect a representative, it is to exercise their independent judgment.
	They're not supposed to be just rubber stamps for whatever their party wants them to be.
	Kyrsten Sinema is a better example of what a legislator was supposed to look like in sort of traditional philosophy than would be a person who is not with us, John Fetterman, a person who has been damaged neurologically, John Fetterman, who's just sitting there and somebody's manipulating his hand.
	And it's not the way the Senate is supposed to work.
	But apparently, according to the left, nothing matters so long as you get what you want.
	And so they're going to continue moving forward with that.
	Now, meanwhile, the other very, very, there's several tight Senate races.
	The two that people are really keeping eyes on are obviously Oz versus Fetterman in Pennsylvania and also Walker versus Warnock in Georgia.
	Now, all the focus in Georgia has been on Walker.
	And the reason it's been on Walker is because Walker is a wild candidate, right?
	Walker keeps getting hit with different allegations that he paid for abortions back in the 80s and 90s, or even in the 2000s.
	He keeps getting hit with with comments that he made 20 years ago.
	It is important to recognize right now that Raphael Warnock is the sitting senator from Georgia and he says crazy crap all the time.
	He has his own personal issues, including evicting people from his apartment buildings, apparently without proper justification, while complaining that the rent is too high.
	But also, Raphael, and obviously he has marital issues as well, he also says stuff like this.
	Here's Raphael Warnock not that long ago talking about how America needs to repent its worship of whiteness.
	No matter what happens next month, more than a third of the nation that would go along with this is reason to be afraid.
	America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness on full display.
	Repent its worship of whiteness.
	So that's your Democratic Senate candidate.
	And everybody is focusing in on sort of the personalities of the candidates and they're forgetting that John Fetterman was a radical.
	Raphael Warnock is a radical.
	That's going to make a very large difference in moderate to red states like Pennsylvania and in Georgia.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We will get into Hershel Walker's the latest allegations against him.
	We'll also get into Kathy Hochul, a governor I think is actually particularly vulnerable in New York, saying that she would fire unvaxed workers again, even though a court just told her that she couldn't.

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