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Oct. 28, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

43:15

Musk Frees the Bird | Ep. 1599

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	Elon Musk fires the Twitter executive team, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gets caught on a hot mic lamenting the state of Senate races, and John Fetterman gets the hero treatment for falling apart in the biggest debate of his life.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Well, Elon Musk is in at Twitter and he is firing everyone as he pledged to do.
	And I am here for it.
	I think everybody else who's been on Twitter for the past several years and is not of wild leftist bent is here for it as well.
	Twitter's moderation has been a bleep show for a very long time.
	They've been banning people willy nilly right and left.
	People ranging from Alex Jones to the Babylon Bee to Jordan Peterson for a wide variety of unspecified crimes.
	They can never quite be specific enough as to what exactly was violated.
	Their standards are incredibly loose.
	Somehow, the Ayatollah Khomeini, he's fine while he's railing about how the Jews should be destroyed.
	But somehow, Jordan Peterson is banned for saying that men cannot be women.
	Twitter's content moderation policies have basically been a weapon on behalf of the left.
	And what it's meant is that everybody has to skirt All of their rules.
	So there are things that you just can't say on Twitter.
	So, for example, when there was controversy over whether ivermectin was a good treatment for COVID-19, you couldn't even claim that ivermectin was a good treatment for COVID-19, even though it did work for a lot of people and is still controversial as to how well ivermectin works.
	You still could not say, even though the evidence showed that widespread masking did not stop the transmission of the virus.
	You weren't allowed to say that vaccines were not effective in stopping the transmission of the virus.
	These are things you were not allowed to say on Twitter.
	And if you said them on Twitter, then you would immediately have your account suspended.
	The number of personal friends that I have who have been suspended from Twitter is incredibly high.
	And we're talking about people who are not wild-eyed people.
	We're talking about people like Dave Rubin.
	We're talking about Babylon Bee, Libs of TikTok, Jordan Peterson.
	All these people have been suspended or banned outright from Twitter.
	Well now Elon Musk is back, he is in charge and he is firing everyone as well he should.
	He said he was going to fire 75% of the staff and frankly I think that's low.
	He needs to go a little bit higher than that because the simple fact of the matter is Twitter is a bloated bureaucracy.
	It's filled with people who had jobs like diversity, equity and inclusion manager.
	It is a platform.
	It is a platform for speech.
	Elon Musk understands that.
	Now, Elon Musk did say yesterday, and he is correct, that this does not mean that there are no standards at Twitter.
	It's not as though you should be able to get on Twitter and actively threaten violence against other human beings.
	And it's even possible that Elon Musk has his own Overton window.
	The Overton Window is the window of acceptable speech.
	And we all have it in our own lives.
	There are certain people we don't want to be friends with and we don't want over in our houses because their opinions are just too vile, right?
	You wouldn't want a skinhead Nazi over at your house with your kids because your Overton Window is personally not big enough to encompass that.
	Nor, in my opinion, should it be.
	You should not be forced to have that person over at your house.
	And if you own a platform like Twitter, presumably there will be an Overton Window beyond which there are certain opinions that are just too far.
	Go too far.
	But those should be as close to the legal line of free speech as humanly possible.
	Meaning that there are certain things that are not protected by free speech in the United States.
	Pornography is really not protected by free speech in the United States.
	And we like to pretend that it is, but historically speaking, it just was not.
	The idea of a violent threat, that is not protected.
	Full-on defamation is not protected by free speech in the United States.
	Well, if you're a platform, what you should try to do is hew as close to the First Amendment line as humanly possible, because indeed, that is what you were created to do.
	If the whole idea of Twitter is that it was a digital town square, then treat it like a digital town square, meaning that it is a neutral forum for discussion.
	And that's going to include crazy people who are over there on the side, standing on an Apple box and shouting at everybody at will.
	The good news is that unlike that town square where that person is noise polluting, In the digital town square, you have a mute button and you have the ability to algorithmically shape what it is that you wish to see.
	And I think that Elon Musk understands this.
	So the hue and cry at Twitter is just insane.
	People at Twitter are weeping openly online.
	You're seeing people from the left, the people in the media, who are just, we're going to abandon Twitter.
	We're going to run screaming from this place.
	What are we going to do?
	We're going to have to leave.
	Taylor Lorenz, of course, one of the worst actors online.
	She's leading that charge.
	Hilariously, she's actually like, you know, I'm, I need to tweet out my substack so people can see my stuff over there.
	Substack is also a free speech platform where a bunch of people Taylor Lauren's hates are, including libs of TikTok, by the way.
	Well now, according to the Associated Press, Musk has taken control of Twitter and ousted the CEO, CFO, and the company's top lawyer, two people familiar with the deal said Thursday night.
	The people wouldn't say if all the paperwork for the deal had been signed or if the deal had been closed.
	They said Musk is in charge of the social media platform he fired, CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Siegel, and Chief Legal Counsel Vijaya Gedi.
	Neither person wanted to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deal.
	Now, you saw Vijaya Gedi just get absolutely eviscerated on one episode of Joe Rogan.
	Tim Pool just destroyed her on Joe Rogan, right?
	Just asking her about how exactly you make these decisions as to what is bannable and what is not.
	She had no answers whatsoever.
	Agrawal has presided over the widespread feeling that Twitter is a forum for the left.
	And if you say anything that violates the most strictly held standards, then you will be banned.
	A few hours after the firing, Musk tweeted, the bird has been freed.
	You know, just from a pure objective level, Musk is a lot of fun.
	I mean, is it okay to say that a billionaire is fun?
	I know that we're supposed to believe that billionaires are very dour or world controlling.
	They'll have to be do-gooders like Bill Gates, who I guess is having fun on the side of his pool house.
	But aside from that, he's supposed to be, you know, a person who's out there to, you know, very serious people.
	I love the fact that Musk is not totally serious.
	I think that is a wonderful, wonderful thing for the world.
	The departures came just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday.
	She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
	Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves have been widely expected.
	They are almost certainly the first many changes the Tesla CEO will make.
	Must privately clash with Agrawal in April immediately before deciding to make a bid for the company, according to text messages later revealed in court filings.
	About the same time he used Twitter to criticize Gaddy, the company's top lawyer.
	His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gaddy from other Twitter accounts.
	This is one of the garbage lines the media like to use, is that if you tweet about somebody, and then a lot of people don't like what that person said, and they harass that person, that's your fault.
	Hey, as probably one of the most harassed people on Twitter, I've never complained about that because guess what?
	I've got a mute button.
	I have the ability to not look at Twitter.
	I have many.
	Like Twitter is a wonderful outlet for me to be able to tweet my thoughts.
	It's also a place filled with stupid people and annoying people.
	And you know what I'm able to do?
	I've never called for a single person to be banned from Twitter.
	I have not because I have a thing.
	It is called a mute button and I can use it whenever I please.
	For Gady, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynist attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her.
	On Thursday after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.
	This notion that you are responsible if you criticize a person and a bunch of other people decide to act in bad fashion against that person, you are then responsible for this?
	This ends political speech in the United States.
	Because guess what?
	We all criticize each other.
	And yes, there are a bunch of people out there who act in stupid fashion and then harass those people.
	Does that mean that you are responsible for the harassment?
	This is the game that the media love to play.
	The media are particularly angry here because you have to understand what the game here was, particularly for the mainstream media when it comes to these big social media platforms like Facebook or like Twitter.
	And it's true for all of them.
	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok.
	The media have their standard.
	Here is what happened.
	Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were only three major media outlets, the TV outlets.
	And you had some newspapers, like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
	Nothing else had mass readership.
	Then the rise of the Internet happened in the 1990s, particularly the late 1990s, started by Drudge Report.
	Then all of a sudden you had a wide variety of outlets that people could access for their news.
	And I'm old enough to remember the beginnings of the news internet in the late 1990s, early 2000s, when suddenly everybody could get their information from different places.
	And the way that you would access that information typically is you would bookmark like 10 pages and nobody has ever used a bookmark.
	In the next generation.
	I'm talking about my generation, the Millennials.
	The Millennials, what we would do is we would actually just bookmark like 10 pages.
	You'd go in the morning and you'd check your bookmark for Fox News, your bookmark for Drudge Report, your bookmark for Town Hall or Hot Air.
	This is what you would do.
	Then these big social media platforms sprang up and they started garnering billions of eyeballs.
	And so all of these news outlets started to move their feed onto the social media platforms.
	These became the place where you would access your news.
	So from now on, if you wanted your cultivated news feed, it was much simpler than hitting 10 different bookmarks to just have a cultivated news feed that brought up all the news you otherwise would see.
	And there was some algorithmic programming that allowed you to see some news that maybe you hadn't clicked on before.
	That's the way that the newsfeed work and the same thing was true of Twitter, right?
	You would follow all the accounts of those of those people you were already bookmarking and then you would get the news from Twitter.
	What this allowed is for the possibility because it was all via Facebook or all via Twitter or all via Instagram.
	It allowed for the possibility that all of those major outlets would just turn the spigot and suddenly All the places that you were following would just be silence.
	And suddenly you were getting your news again from the mainstream media.
	All the people that you had been attempting to avoid for 20 years, suddenly you were getting your news from them again.
	You had to hear from the Washington Post or the New York Times.
	You couldn't hear from Daily Wire or from Breitbart or from any of the other right-wing outlets that you normally would follow.
	And the mainstream media loved this.
	This was their favorite thing in the entire world.
	They loved it because it reestablished a media monopoly that they had lost with the rise of the internet.
	And naturally, it ticked a lot of people off.
	And one of those people was Elon Musk.
	And you ticked off the wrong billionaire.
	Because it turns out, it's going to be hilarious, because 100 years from now, when the history of the United States is written, an inflection point is going to be Twitter banning the Babylon Bee for a headline about how men are not women.
	That's an actual historical inflection point.
	Because the left got so crazy over their skis on this.
	They got so bullying and vicious to the heads of the social media companies that the heads of the social media companies decided that they were basically going to crack down on anything that violated left-wing scruples.
	Because that's what happened here.
	I mean, if you actually look at the difference from what Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, used to say about free speech to what he started to say about free speech about four years in, five years into his tenure at Twitter.
	You look at the difference between how Mark Zuckerberg used to talk about free speech versus how Mark Zuckerberg talked about free speech just a couple of years later.
	You can see a radical shift that happened.
	Both Dorsey and Zuckerberg used to talk about free speech in exactly the same terms that I'm talking about free speech.
	It should be the broadest possible window that allows for all people to have conversations.
	And if you don't like it, you can turn it off.
	I keep citing the speech that Zuckerberg gave at Georgetown in 2018, I believe, in which he talked about this, right?
	He openly talked about we need to have a broad platform for speech.
	I'm not the great arbiter of what's true and what's not.
	It is not my job to determine what you should see and what you should not see because you're an adult.
	And then, because of all the pressure that was brought to bear in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, all of these social media companies collapsed.
	Because you started to see Democrats and members of the media start blaming all these social media companies for all the ills of the world.
	Now all these social media companies, which were treated up till then, as wonderful, wonderful things, because after all, these wonderful, wonderful social media companies had allowed for things like the Arab Spring, you remember this, or they'd allowed for the election of Barack Obama.
	Remember all the talk in 2012 was about how genius the Obama team was for manipulating the data via Facebook in order to win re-election.
	It was a genius team.
	And of course, when Trump's team did it with Cambridge Analytica, then all these social media platforms became super bad.
	And Facebook then became very bad.
	So in the aftermath of Trump being elected, which was a world shattering event for the left, they started to push really hard on the social media networks.
	Because it couldn't be that Hillary lost because she was a crap candidate, She must have lost because the social media networks had been penetrated by the Ruskies or the social media networks were too broad minded.
	And, you know, free speech, free speech is a real dangerous thing.
	Free speech could be undermined by free speech.
	And so they started to clamp down and the social media bros, because they were weak, need also started to clamp down.
	They pressed on that pressure.
	To the user.
	Yeah, Dianne Feinstein openly threatening Mark Zuckerberg, senator from California, saying, if you don't regulate yourself, we will regulate you.
	And so Zuckerberg and team would say to these legislators, OK, fine, please regulate us, right?
	Create a system of regulation that makes for an even playing field.
	And Democrats say, no, no, no, it's up to you.
	You have to please us.
	Dance to our tune.
	And many of these social media platforms did.
	And then along came Elon Musk.
	Elon Musk said, I'm not going to dance to that tune.
	I think that your tune is stupid.
	I think that your tune is monopolistic.
	And this is why the panic has set in.
	This is why the media are now attempting to treat Elon Musk as though he is some sort of threat to freedom.
	I love their line.
	Their line is, Elon Musk is a threat to freedom.
	Billionaires.
	Billionaires in charge of major platforms are a threat to freedom.
	Except for, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and George Soros and, you know, all the billionaires we like.
	Those guys are not a threat to freedom.
	No matter how many billions of dollars they set into the Western democratic system.
	Those are the good ones.
	But Elon Musk is a bad one.
	Why?
	Because he disagrees with us.
	That means he might break our monopoly.
	That's why you're seeing coverage like this from the Associated Press.
	Oh my God, people were mean to the former lawyer for Twitter online because Elon Musk criticized her.
	That means that Elon Musk is mean.
	And that means that Elon Musk is bad.
	And that means that people shouldn't advertise on Twitter.
	This is the goal.
	Musk's changes, according to the Associated Press, will be aimed at increasing Twitter's subscriber base and revenue.
	In the first big move earlier on Thursday, Musk tried to sue the leery Twitter advertisers, saying he's buying the platform to help humanity and doesn't want it to become a free-for-all hellscape.
	The message appears to be aimed at addressing concerns among advertisers that Musk's plans to promote free speech by cutting back on moderating content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and driveway users.
	Now, again, that is not what's happening with these advertisers.
	These advertisers are not afraid that tons of people are going to stop using Twitter as a service.
	The reality is that Twitter's numbers have been inflated for a very long time.
	There's a small cadre of people who are very active on Twitter.
	They tend to be professionals like me who are in the Twitter space disseminating information.
	The number of people who actively use Twitter, who actively tweet is much smaller than the number of people who are Twitter subscribers, right?
	The number of people who have accounts on Twitter.
	So they're not afraid of mass drop-off.
	What's happening right now is left-wing pressure groups are going to advertisers and saying, you should not advertise on Twitter because we are going to then initiate boycotts against you.
	We'll initiate secondary boycotts against you.
	Now, here's what advertisers should say.
	They should throw up the bird.
	They should free the bird against these against these left-wing activists.
	This is what left-wing activists always do.
	Left-wing activists are constantly going to advertisers and telling them that advertisers should basically be the free speech police.
	They should advertise on Pods of America, but they definitely, definitely should not advertise on shows like this one.
	This is what left-wing activists do.
	And so what advertisers should do if they have stones is say, no, we're going to advertise however we like.
	We're going to reach users of all different political bands.
	In the end, by the way, I think that is what will happen.
	It'll be a little upset right now.
	People will get a little dyspepsia.
	And then it will be over.
	Musk wrote, quote, the reason I have 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.
	He continued, there's currently great danger social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.
	That, of course, is correct, because if Twitter continues along the lines that it is continuing, then you are going to see people of the right move to other platforms.
	You are going to see people of the right... You've seen this, by the way, in the video space, right?
	Rumble has become a rather successful company because people fear the predations of YouTube.
	Musk has previously expressed distaste for advertising and Twitter's dependence on it, suggesting more emphasis on other business models like paid subscriptions that won't allow big corporations to dictate policy on how social media operates.
	On Thursday, he assured advertisers he wants Twitter to be the most respected advertising platform in the world.
	Pinar Yildirim, an associate professor of marketing at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, says the note is a shift from Musk's position.
	Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content.
	But it's also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business.
	Well, he never said there shouldn't be no content moderation.
	He just said that the Overton window that's been created by a bunch of left-wing activists in executive positions at Twitter is not in consonance with good business practice.
	So, Musk, again, making these moves, firing everybody, shows that he intends to radically change the direction of the company, and that is a very good thing for Twitter.
	It is also a very good thing for the world.
	Musk intends to do away with permanent bans on users because he doesn't believe in lifelong prohibitions.
	That means people previously booted off the platform might be allowed to return, a category that would include former President Donald Trump.
	It's unclear if Trump would be allowed back on Twitter in the near term.
	I guarantee you Trump is coming back.
	There is no way that Musk takes over and Trump is not going to be allowed back on the platform.
	How would Musk even be able to justify that to himself?
	There's no way that Trump is not going to be allowed to return.
	By the way, the media will celebrate that because Trump is the media's lifeblood.
	The media have been losing money hand over fist since Trump left office, which is why they keep clinging to January 6th and going on Truth Social and finding Trump's random statements.
	The billionaire, according to Bloomberg, will bring immediate disruption to Twitter's operations, in part because many of his ideas for how to change the company are at odds with how it has been run for years.
	He said he wants to ensure free speech on the social network.
	More broadly, Musk's initiatives threatened to undo years of Twitter's efforts to reduce bullying and abuse on the platform.
	Again, that whole shtick, the bullying and abuse, those are very vague terms, because what Twitter has now said is that it is bullying or abuse to say that Elliot Page is a woman.
	Elliot Page is a woman.
	That is not bullying or abuse.
	That is a statement of fact.
	But according to Twitter, if I say Elliot Page is a woman, I might end up in a ban for life, the way that Jordan was.
	This is what the media fear.
	Again, they are losing their monopoly.
	They don't like losing their monopoly.
	And so they're going to put extraordinary pressure on advertisers, on Musk, on everybody, to punish Twitter for not reestablishing the monopoly.
	That is precisely what they want to do.
	I don't think that Musk is going to cave to that, nor do I think he should cave to that.
	I think, as always, it is a left-wing toddler tantrum that is happening right now.
	And in the end, advertisers will continue.
	Advertising users will continue.
	Using all the people you see, the blue checks are like, I'm leaving Twitter for... No, you're not.
	You're not going anywhere.
	We all know you're not going anywhere.
	You're a joke.
	You can't live without you and your echo chamber over at Twitter.
	No way.
	Taylor Lawrence is not abandoning the platform.
	Who else would she whine to while drinking wine out of very large glasses and stroking her seven cats?
	Who exactly would she whine to without Twitter?
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Also, there's been a massive spike in crime in the United States.
	It's affecting nearly everyone.
	Nancy Pelosi's husband actually got injured in a home break-in last night.
	I mean, this is amazing, amazing stuff happening in the country, and it's terrible.
	It's one reason why many Americans are buying guns.
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	You have to know how to use it.
	You have to know when to use it.
	You have to know your legal rights when you do use it.
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	Meanwhile, the real reason that the must take over of Twitter is quite important is because you can't trust the mainstream media.
	By all available polls, most Americans do not trust the mainstream media.
	In fact, a huge percentage of Americans say that the mainstream media is actually a danger to democracy.
	In the polls asking, which is the biggest danger to democracy?
	Something like 84% of Republicans say mainstream media is a danger to democracy.
	So do 54% of independents.
	So most Americans actually believe that the mainstream media is the danger and not Twitter, the mainstream media.
	There's a reason for that.
	One reason for that became clear in a column by Eric Wemple over at the Washington Post.
	Wemple is kind of an interesting media columnist.
	He's definitely of the left, but he is occasionally an honest journalist.
	He has a piece today titled, James Bennett Was Right.
	James Bennett, of course, was the editor, the op-ed editor over at the New York Times when he ran a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, claiming that in the middle of riot summer 2020, perhaps the federal government should call out the National Guard in order to quell the rioting.
	According to Wemple in the Washington Post, controversy over an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton consumed the New York Times in June 2020 and claimed the job of then-editorial page editor James Bennett.
	Two and a half years later, Bennett has shared some thoughts about the episode and, in particular, the role of Times publisher A.G.
	Sulzberger.
	Quote, he set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me, is what Bennett told Ben Smith of Semaphore.
	This is why I was so bewildered for so long after I had felt like all my colleagues treated me like an incompetent fascist.
	Lempel says that might sound like the angst of a guy who's still disgruntled at losing his job.
	And it is for a compelling reason.
	Bennett is right.
	He's right about Sulzberger.
	He's right about the Cotton Op-Ed.
	He's right about the lessons that linger from his tumultuous final days at the Times.
	Because Bennett came under such heavy scrutiny for even running the Tom Cotton Op-Ed that he was essentially fired from his job and thrown under the bus.
	And here's what Wemple said, this is amazing.
	Quote, his outburst in semaphore furnishes a toehold for reassessing one of the most consequential journalism fights in decades.
	To date, the lesson from the set to that publishing a senator arguing that federal troops could be deployed against riders is unacceptable will forever circumscribe what issues opinion sections are allowed to address.
	It's also long past time to explain why more people who claim to uphold journalism and free expression, including the Eric Wemple blog, didn't speak out then in Bennett's defense.
	It's because we were afraid to.
	That's an unbelievable admission by Eric Wemple.
	We didn't speak out for James Bennett and the fact that he was publishing an op-ed that was purely within the mainstream of American thought.
	In fact, polls showed that a plurality or majority of Americans thought the National Guard, if necessary, could be called out to quell rioting.
	But no one came to Bennett's defense.
	And Wemple admits the truth.
	It's because we were afraid to.
	So you ask, OK, afraid of what?
	What exactly were you guys afraid of?
	So here's what Eric Wemple writes.
	He says, after the cotton op-ed was published, a backlash swiftly combusted.
	The Times staffers at the forefront of the critique, Nicole Hannah-Jones, creator of the Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project, tweeted that the paper should have done a news story to push back against cotton ideas, as opposed to, quote, simply giving over our platform to spew dangerous rhetoric.
	Instead, W. Herndon, a national politics reporter, made a similar point, tweeting that, quote, if electeds want to make a provocative argument, let them withstand the questions in context of a news story, not unvarnished and unchecked.
	There were other persuasive broadsides against the decisions to publish Cotton.
	No, they were not persuasive.
	Many times, staffers, however, forwent the rigor of argumentation and tweeted out the following line or something similar to express their disgust.
	Quote, running this puts black New York Times staff in danger.
	The formulation came from the internal group of Black NYT and received the blessing of the News Guild of New York as legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety.
	The danger tweets, along with a letter from Times employees slamming the op-ed, landed with impact.
	Although Sulzberger initially defended publication as furthering the principle of openness to a range of opinions, he bailed on that posture within hours.
	By the afternoon after publication, the paper had determined that the piece failed to, quote, meet our standards, according to a statement.
	As Sulzberger flip-flopped, an astonishing up-is-down moment unfolded at the paper's upper regions.
	Whereas media elites typically develop arguments to defend work that comes under attack, the opposite scenario played out over the Cotton Op-Ed.
	Top Times officials, according to three sources, scrambled to pulverize the essay in order to vindicate objections rolling in from Twitter.
	A post-publication fact-check was commissioned to comb through the Op-Ed for errors, according to the sources, even though it had undergone fact-checking before publication.
	The paper's standards desk spearheaded work on an editor's note.
	By the way, this is true.
	I've written op-eds for the New York Times.
	They make you go through a rigorous and ridiculous fact-check process.
	I mean, it is the most extraordinary extended fact-check process I've ever gone through for any op-ed.
	And my op-ed was just an obit for Rush Limbaugh.
	Deputy Page Editorial Director James Dow, who pushed for publication, spent more than an hour on the phone with a Cotton aide that Thursday night to inventory alleged problems.
	Dow says the aide was pointedly unenthusiastic about the pursuit.
	It sounded like he had a gun to his head and he had to find something, the aide, who is no longer with Cotton's office, told this blog.
	The review did not deliver the factual bloodbath alleged by critics.
	The fact check flagged a misquotation that should have been rendered as a paraphrase.
	It also examined objections to Cotton's claim that cadres of left-wing radicals like Antifa were infiltrating protest marchers to exploit Floyd's death for their own anarchic purposes.
	That topic was the focus of various conflicting official statements and news stories, some of them published by the Times in the run-up to the Cotton op-ed and extending well beyond it.
	The Editor's Note asserted that claims about Antifa have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned.
	Such was the spirit of the Editor's Note, which went heavy on regrets about tone, process, and other squishy considerations, while asserting that the op-ed failed time standards, says Eric Wemple.
	It also claimed that the essay's arguments were, quote, a newsworthy part of the current debate, a line that Dow championed, according to two sources.
	Elsewhere, it said the op-ed should have undergone greater scrutiny, even though at least five opinion editors participated in editing, according to sources.
	Although Bennett said he hadn't read the piece, he was involved in some early decisions about it, including the deletion of a criticism of Hannah Jones.
	So they actually took out a criticism of one of their columnists from the piece.
	And then she whined about it.
	Sulzberger seemed disappointed upon being told that the post-publication fact check hadn't punctured the op-ed, according to a source involved in the process.
	The Eric Wemple blog asked the Times for another example of an editor's note apologizing for non-factual issues.
	The Times didn't answer that question, among others.
	The editor's note teed up Bennett's firing, technically resignation, as editorial page director.
	Media coverage of his departure noted, the op-ed was one of several storms under Bennett's management.
	Others included a June 2017 editorial that triggered a defamation lawsuit from Sarah Palin, an anti-Semitic cartoon, and personal fiascos.
	The cotton thing seemed like the final straw, except in hindsight, it wasn't a straw at all.
	In initially sticking up for the Times role in publishing controversial affairs, as Eric Wimple, Sulzberger, had it right.
	Okay, so why exactly didn't anybody in the media actually say this?
	At any time.
	Well, says Eric Wempel, the Twitter chain claiming danger to time staffers suffered from the same journalistic failings leveled at the op-ed.
	It was an exercise in manipulative hyperbole brilliantly calibrated for immediate impact.
	I actually knew what it meant to have a target on your back when you're reporting for the New York Times, Bennett told Smith, because he actually used to report for the New York Times in the Middle East.
	The Eric Wemple blog has asked 30 Times staffers whether they still believe their danger tweets and whether there was any merit in Bennett's retort.
	Not one of them replied with an on-the-record defense.
	Such was the depth of conviction behind a central argument in Le Fair Cotton.
	Our criticism of the Twitter outburst comes 875 days too late.
	Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennett was immediately apparent, we responded with an even-handed critique of the Times flip-flop, not the unapologetic defense of journalism the situation required.
	Our posture was one of cowardice and mid-career risk management.
	Without a doubt, we pile one more regret onto a controversy littered with them.
	So good for Eric Wemple for admitting it.
	But what he was really afraid of, he was afraid of Twitter.
	He was afraid of the Twitter mob, the left-wing Twitter mob that has been left in charge of that service.
	This is why Musk taking over is so good.
	Because finally, finally, the pushback will be allowed.
	I mean, there was great fear on places like Twitter during BLM that if you said things like, rioting is bad, the National Guard should be called.
	That you might be banned from places like Twitter.
	And the media culture that's been created by the left is unbelievably ideologically monopolistic.
	So Musk breaking that is a very, very good thing.
	And that Eric Wemple op-ed is just astonishing.
	And it just shows you how much of our mainstream media Okay, meanwhile, we are about to hit a midterm election in just about a week and a half right here, and Chuck Schumer was caught on a hot mic assessing the state of play.
	Told Joe Biden.
	He should know, first of all, that he's on mic.
	He said the state where we're going downhill is Georgia.
	It's hard to believe they'll go for Hershel Walker.
	So he's admitting that.
	You can actually hear him doing that.
	The audio quality isn't very good, but you can actually hear Chuck Schumer doing that.
	He also suggests that they're optimistic a little bit more about Pennsylvania.
	He says we're picking up steam in Nevada.
	This is this is him whistling past the graveyard right here.
	The reality is that the polls right now show that Democrats are in serious trouble in all three of those states.
	They're in serious trouble.
	in Pennsylvania because of John Fetterman.
	They're in serious trouble in Georgia because, contrary to popular opinion, Raphael Warnock is a terrible candidate for the United States Senate, and he would have lost last time if President Trump had not personally intervened to drive away votes for the Republican candidate in Georgia.
	And right now in Nevada, Adam Laxalt is opening up a not insignificant lead.
	There's a new poll from Trafalgar that shows Laxalt up by four.
	In fact, of the last polls, virtually all of them have Laxalt up.
	And it is fair to say that many of these polls are going to be skewed Democrat, because this has been true for every average polling error that we've seen over the past 10 years, essentially.
	It always tends to oversample Democrats.
	So right now, I'm just reading you the RealClearPolitics polling average in the Senate.
	Fetterman is up 0.3, which means dead heat, which means Oz is up.
	In fact, the latest polls show Oz up by three in the Insider Advantage poll.
	That's the one that's out today.
	Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire is up apparently only 3.4 in the American, in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
	The last two polls show that race within margin of errors.
	That could be a surprise race, especially because Democrats really intervened to get Don Baldick to be the nominee because Baldick is considered more extreme and they were hoping Maggie Hassan would have an easier run.
	Bud in North Carolina is up big.
	He's going to win that race.
	Laxalt, as I said, Nevada is up.
	I think he will win that race.
	In Arizona, Mark Kelly is within margin of error in every single poll that has been taken right now.
	And it is quite possible that Carrie Lake, who is wildly overperforming that governor's race, partially because she's good on TV and partially because Katie Hobbs is an awful candidate, that she could drag Blake Masters over the finish line in that very tight race.
	Herschel Walker, right now in the polls, He's up.
	There's a Rasmussen poll that has him up five right now, despite all of this, right?
	Despite all of the scandals surrounding Herschel Walker and the fact that perhaps half the population of Georgia is biologically related to Herschel Walker.
	At this point, it doesn't matter.
	Herschel Walker looks like he's going to win that race walking away.
	And part of that, by the way, has to be due.
	Credit is due where credit is due to Brian Kemp.
	Brian Kemp is running away with his race against Stacey Abrams, the president of the universe.
	Right now, Brian Kemp, in the Real Car Politics polling average, is up 7.4 points.
	The Rasmussen poll has him up 10.
	So he is dragging Herschel Walker along with him to victory.
	In Ohio, JD Vance is going to pull away with that race.
	In Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, who was once expected to lose that race, is going to win that race.
	Marco Rubio is blowing out Val Demings in Florida to the desperation of Democrats who have been hoping that Val Demings might overperform there.
	So you can see why Democrats are freaking out.
	And they're freaking out about other races as well.
	I've said that my sleeper pick in this particular midterm election is that Kathy Hochul goes down in New York.
	And you're starting to see the New York Times come around to that position.
	According to the New York Times, as governor's race tightens, a frantic call to action among Democrats.
	You don't need to consult the most recent polls to realize the race for New York governor between Governor Kathy Hochul and Representative Lise Eldon appears to be tightening.
	Just follow the string of Democrats' calls to action this week, says the New York Times, with just 12 days until Election Day.
	Democrats and their allies are mounting a frenzied push to keep HOKL in office, pouring millions of dollars into last-minute ads, staging a whirlwind of campaign rallies to energize their base amid concerns their typically reliable bedrock of Black and Latino voters might not turn out.
	Labor unions have been going into overdrive, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV and radio ads to control those voters to turn up for HOKL.
	The HOKL campaign has even turned to former primary adversaries for help, including the Working Families Party.
	HOKL is still leading most of the major polls, With that said, those polls are not particularly encouraging for Kathy Hochul at this point.
	She's up about 6 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, but the last polls were done about 10 days ago, and they had Hochul up somewhere between 4 and 6 points.
	So that race has tightened dramatically.
	And even the New York Times is recognizing the Democrats are having to pour money down the rat hole of that race.
	Recent polls show Zeldin Drawing closer to Hochul, their head-to-head debate went very poorly for Kathy Hochul because she's never actually had to do a major debate for any rational reason.
	Meanwhile, the GOP looks like it's in good shape in Oregon.
	For the first time in 40 years, Oregonians might choose a Republican governor.
	It's a three-way race.
	That race is being thrown in the air by Betsy Johnson, a former Democratic state senator.
	She ran as an independent.
	She's drawing an average of 14% in the polls.
	Former Democratic state senator, House Speaker Tina Kotech, and former Statehouse GOP leader Christine Drazen are running evenly at just under 39%.
	Jessica Taylor, an editor at nonpartisan Cook Political Report, says Republicans have a lot of things going their way in this race.
	And one of those things is that Portland is located in Oregon.
	And Oregon might not like how Portland is governed.
	And Portland is a Democratic city.
	The last time Oregonians chose a Republican for governor was 1982.
	Democrats hold every statewide office in Oregon.
	Biden won the state by 16.
	But voters don't like the crime.
	They don't like the homelessness.
	They don't like the public drug use.
	It turns out that major city governance has a rather large impact on how people think the state ought to be governed.
	So it could be that Oregon ends up with a Republican governor, which would, again, be a great shocker, obviously.
	As I mentioned before, Black Democrats are meanwhile very, very upset because it turns out that a bunch of Black female politicians are completely failing in their races and the DCCC and the DCSC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, DSCC, they've been doing Basically, no fundraising in a lot of these races that were supposed to be big wins for black Democratic women.
	Stacey Abrams has spent a ton of money.
	She's getting her ass kicked in Georgia.
	Belle Demings is spending money, but they're not dedicating a lot of money to her because she's getting her ass kicked in Florida.
	Remember, she was supposed to be the great hope for the Democratic Party in Florida.
	She's getting whomped in all the polls.
	The Democratic Senate Majority PAC, a group affiliated with the party leadership and its partners, had spent 10 million bucks since May against Ted Budd in North Carolina.
	And meanwhile, Bud is just running away at the race.
	So, it's fun to watch the precriminations from the Democratic Party.
	Black members of the Democratic Party are like, you're racist, that's why you're not spending money there.
	Far be it from me to defend the Democratic Party against charges of racism, but the reason that they are not spending money in these races is because those candidates are going to lose.
	It is not because the candidates are black.
	All right, coming up, we'll get to John Fetterman, because the Democrats are desperately trying to pull out that race at first.
	Well, folks, I just watched an amazing new three-part series by Jordan Peterson.
	It's called On Marriage.
	It's his definitive series on matrimony exclusively at DailyWirePlus.
	You're not going to see it anywhere else.
	And believe me, everybody needs to see it.
	Married, unmarried.
	In 2018, marriage rates hit an all-time low in the United States.
	Marriage is on the rocks in the United States, which means the future of the country is on the rocks because the simple fact of the matter is that marriage and family are the bedrock of Western civilization.
	Jordan is trying to restore faith in the institution and he's going to encourage you to both better your marriage if you're already married and get married if you are not married.
	Daily Wire Plus members can watch the first episode of Jordan Peterson's On Marriage with two more episodes coming out soon.
	If you're not yet a member, go to dailywire.com slash Ben, join today.
	Also, in case you missed it, last night was my book club, Ben Shapiro's book club.
	We discussed Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's masterpiece, which basically is the world according to the left.
	We're talking artificial insemination.
	We are talking about sexual fluidity.
	We're talking about the complete takeover of the Freudian id as the only rationale for human happiness.
	Basically, it's the left, their world as they wish to construct it.
	I still am waiting for the left to explain what they don't like about Brave New World.
	You must be an All Access member to watch.
	Head on over to dailywire.com become a member today.
	Okay, meanwhile.
	John Fetterman, as expected, is falling apart in polling.
	WIC Insights has now a new post-debate poll from Pennsylvania.
	The polling has been limited in the aftermath of the debate.
	All the polling shows that Fetterman has lost ground.
	This poll shows Oz at 47.6 and Fetterman at 45.9.
	Now, there's been some early voting in Pennsylvania.
	This is one of the reasons why early voting is super duper bad.
	Like, I voted early because it is available to me.
	I wish they would change the rules and it would not have been available to me and that you'd have to vote within like three days of the election unless you have some sort of excuse.
	The fact that people are voting months out from an election en masse is really bad, because then there is late-breaking information that might change your vote.
	In fact, one of the Google searches that was most highly trending in the aftermath of that Oz Fetterman debate was, how do I change my vote in Pennsylvania?
	You figure there have been something like 500,000 to 700,000 early votes in Pennsylvania.
	There will be 5 million votes probably in that election.
	The vast majority of people who vote early probably were dedicated partisans.
	Not a lot of independents showing up to vote early.
	They tend to vote day of.
	What that means is that if the early votes in Pennsylvania are even remotely even, which they seem to be at this point by party ID, then Oz will win that race.
	Now, Democrats are struggling to come up with some sort of rationale for why precisely you should vote for John Fetterman, considering the fact that he is not fully functional.
	Again, it is not mean to say this.
	It is not ableist to say this.
	Ableism is you say that a blind man is not capable of being a lawyer.
	It is not ableism to say that a blind man is not capable of being a pilot.
	Hey, John Fetterman cannot speak sentences.
	He cannot understand verbal sentences.
	It has to be written down for him.
	This is a major handicap in terms of whether you can perform your job in the United States Senate.
	That is not mean.
	That is just fact.
	And anybody who tells you differently is lying to you and assuming that you are a stupid person.
	But they've come up with another narrative.
	The narrative is now that John Fetterman is a hero.
	See him going on that stage and performing in the worst possible fashion, justifying everybody's fears about his health, justifying everybody's fears about his brain function.
	That actually was an act of heroism.
	And Fetterman, he actually grew a third arm to pat himself on the back here, talking about what a hero he is for even going to debate in the first place.
	Now, here's the thing.
	Going to debate, that is a prereq for being in the Senate.
	And you tried to avoid it for as long as you could.
	The fact is that if Fetterman had avoided the debate, everybody would have understood the exact same thing they understood after watching the debate, which is the man is not fully functional.
	He has not recovered from his stroke.
	And that, by the way, stroke recovery is really difficult.
	It's a very long process.
	There are good days and there are bad days.
	And not just that, it is quite possible that we've already seen the best that John Fetterman has to offer.
	And on good days, he can string together about a five minute speech.
	And on bad days, he looks like that debate performance.
	So John Fetterman had a debate.
	He did not have a political choice, but here he was declaring himself a hero.
	No, it wasn't going to be easy after, you know, having a stroke after five months.
	In fact, in fact, in fact, I don't think that's ever been done before in American political history before, actually.
	It's never been done.
	Well, I mean, that's true.
	And also it was terrible.
	There's a reason that stroke victims typically don't do debates.
	Because stroke victims typically don't run for Senate after they've had the stroke months later.
	The Democratic Party should have stepped in and they should have made Conor Lamb the nominee.
	And by the way, if they had done so, Betsy would basically be guaranteed to the Pennsylvania Democrats right now.
	Instead, it looks like they're going to lose to Mehmet Oz.
	Because the reality is that Federman is still struggling while he's out there declaring himself a hero.
	Here he was at a rally yesterday, and again, he's having trouble.
	Actually, this is him in an interview yesterday.
	Again, still having a lot of trouble.
	No, and you know, you talk about the liver, the liberty of a statue has never had an inscription inside that said, you know, send your, your tired 100 masses and put them on a bus and turn them into a chief political stunt.
	My goodness.
	My goodness.
	Yeah, but that's true heroism.
	True heroism is your party using you in order to win a seat, even if you are not capable of doing the job.
	Alrighty, we'll get to much, much more in just one second.
	We still have to get to Joe Biden celebrating an extraordinarily tepid and actually quite negative economic report.
	We'll get to more on John Fetterman being hailed as a hero.

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