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Nov. 1, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
41:42
Bombshell Report Exposes Government-Social Media Collusion | Ep. 1601
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Leaked documents show coordination between the government and major social media sites to crack down on supposed misinformation.
Details emerge in the Paul Pelosi attack and the Supreme Court considers killing affirmative action.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Remember when you were a kid, it was a big deal how you separated the recyclables from the garbage.
This is a big deal.
They would teach it to you in third grade, in second grade, in first grade.
You would come to school and you'd brag to your teacher how you'd taken all the plastic bottles and you'd put them in one container and you'd taken all the trash and you'd put it in the other container because recycling was how we were going to save the world.
Well, now there is a report out from the Boston Globe that plastic recycling is a myth.
This study comes courtesy of Greenpeace.
Quote, of the 51 million tons of plastic waste U.S.
households generated in 2021, just 2.4 million tons, or 5%, was recycled, according to new research.
Because, of course, it turns out that the vast majority of plastic you can't separate out from the other garbage.
When plastic is burned in garbage incinerators, it produces even more planet-heating pollution.
Studies show that even discarded plastic gives off methane and other powerful greenhouse gases.
The simple fact is that there was no good way to actually recycle this stuff.
Research has long shown that most recycling facilities do not accept five of the seven classifications of plastic, including plastic, foam, and PVC, because they're particularly difficult to sort and are often contaminated with toxins.
But the new report shows that even the two most common plastics that have long been considered recyclable are only reprocessed 21% and 10% of the time, according to the report.
For all the other types of plastic, the reprocessing rate is even lower at less than 5%, according to the authors.
Why are we talking about recycling?
The answer is because for literally my entire lifetime, from the time I was a child until now, if you had gone out there and you had said, recycling plastic is a giant waste of time, it is a giant waste of resources, this was seen as fringe.
It might have been seen as misinformation.
Because this is the way our informational ecosystem works.
Very often, there are these myths that are created on behalf of left-wing interests, and these become the prevailing narrative.
And this narrative can never be crossed.
We saw this with COVID, where vaccines were told that you had to take a vax in order to stop your best friend or your grandma from getting COVID.
When it came to masks, masking children in the classroom was necessary in order to keep them safe.
If you said anything differently, then you might be quashed on social media for misinformation.
If you suggested that Black Lives Matter was predicated on a lie, the lie being the police are systemically rounding up black people for no apparent reason, rather than simply targeting criminality.
And it turns out that criminality in the United States, especially violent criminality, is disproportionately minority.
That if you if you pointed that out, there was a good shot that you were going to be silenced on social media or throttled on social media.
If you said that a man could not be a woman and a woman could not be a man, you might end up like the Babylon Bee and you might end up banned from Twitter.
Now, the reason I bring all this up is because some of us were saying, this does not look like the simple free market at work.
This looks a lot more like governmental actors acting in collusion with the government in order to promote preferred narratives.
That sure, there are left-wing heads of places like Twitter or Facebook, Jack Dorsey's or the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world.
But if you look at how they originally articulated their visions for their companies, they suggested that these big social media companies were designed to be free speech platforms.
These were places where all speech was going to thrive.
A thousand flowers were going to bloom.
Sure, there would be limits.
If you were like an open Nazi advocating for genocide, they would ban you.
But if you were just somebody who questioned, say, recycling plastic, or if you were somebody who said, perhaps BLM's narrative is wrong, or if you were somebody who said that men are men and women are women, and that you can't become a woman if you are a man, if you said that sort of stuff, you would not be quashed.
If you read everything that Mark Zuckerberg said until about 2018, this is what he said pretty openly.
Jack Dorsey, same thing until about 2017.
And then something changed.
Then something just suddenly all the social media sites in unison started working with each other, colluding in order to silence certain accounts.
And so you'd see every single major social media site simply ban the President of the United States on coordinated queue after January 6th.
Or you would see even people that I don't like.
People like Alex Jones, who I think is despicable in very many ways.
You'd see people like Alex Jones.
Suddenly, bam, he was gone.
Just disappeared.
Just un-person from all the social media at the drop of a hat.
Not because of any specified sin, but because there was collusion in order to just get rid of him.
So did that look as though that was the normal corporate competition at work?
It did not.
And the simple fact is that we have known for a very long time that these social media sites have been throttling particularly conservative opinion makers.
I can tell you on a personal level, now listen, I have 4.7 million followers on Twitter.
As of about four days ago, I had less than 4.5 million followers on Twitter.
And then Elon Musk took over Twitter and suddenly my follower count shot through the roof.
And you can see it in my engagement as well.
Facebook very often changes its algorithm, and those algorithmic changes benefit legacy media at the expense of startup media.
Well now, as it turns out, the DHS was in fact coordinating with social media in order to quash particular types of stories.
This was most obvious, of course, when it came to the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco right before the 2020 election.
It became clear that the FBI was actively coordinating with social media sites in order to quash that story.
Mark Zuckerberg openly admitted that.
He said the FBI was calling us and they were telling us about the possibility of Russian disinformation on the laptop story.
And so we decided, you know, best best practice.
We'll just quash the thing.
Well, now, according to The Intercept, which is a left wing source, Ken Klippenstein, a left winger and Lee Fang reporting, quote, The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous.
An investigation by The Intercept is found.
Years of internal DHS memos, emails and documents obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents, illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clear view earlier this year when DHS announced a new Disinformation Governance Board.
Remember that we talked about this Disinformation Governance Board.
It was run by a crazy lady who was singing Mary Poppins tunes about misinformation and disinformation.
The Disinformation Governance Board was a panel designed to police misinformation, false information spread unintentionally.
Disinformation, false information spread intentionally, and malinformation, factual information shared typically out of context with harmful intent that allegedly threatened U.S.
interests.
While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate, the War on Terror, has been wound down.
Behind closed doors, says The Intercept, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S.
government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.
According to Meeting Minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt, a Republican who's also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February, quote, Platforms have got to get comfortable with government.
It's really interesting how hesitant they remain.
And the idea is that they're supposed to be working hand-in-glove together.
Now, this is not what is supposed to be happening in the free speech realm.
Once private corporations become tools of the government, the First Amendment is implicated.
And a lot of people on the left have said, well, you don't like the way that Facebook polices misinformation.
Build your own Facebook.
You don't like the way that Twitter polices its information.
Build your own Twitter.
And then, of course, immediately, once parlor starts, then the first thing that happens is that after January 6th, all of its server space is denied to Parler.
It's essentially deplatformed.
But it's worse than this.
And when it comes to the government actively colluding with private institutions in order to quash speech, that is First Amendment activity that is being violated by the government.
When the government offers incentives and disincentives to quash speech, this is a violation of First Amendment principles.
In a March meeting, according to The Intercept, Laura Demlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S.
government.
Demlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.
Now, I'll tell you that the scariest part of that particular sentence is JPMorgan Chase.
The reason that is particularly scary is because one of the things that we have seen over the course of the last couple of years is serious talk about debanking people who disagree.
So we saw during the trucker convoy protests in Canada that people who were financially supporting the truckers in any way, shape or form saw their bank accounts frozen in Canada.
Could JPMorgan Chase work with the government along those lines?
And you say disapproved things and suddenly you no longer can bank?
We've seen this, by the way, with some credit card companies who refuse to allow you to use their credit cards to purchase, say, firearms legally under the Second Amendment.
And this sort of effort to cut people out of the regular modes of conversation and indeed market action, it's nefarious.
And it's tyrannical.
And the government promoting that in the name of corporatism is really terrifying or should be.
A spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept, quote, I highly doubt that, given again, the obvious coordination between Twitter and other social media groups when it comes to taking down various actors, some of whom I think are terrible, but it doesn't matter.
You don't just get to take people down because you don't like their opinion.
There's a formalized process for government officials, according to The Intercept, to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.
At the time of writing, the content request system at Facebook is still live.
DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment.
The FBI declined to comment.
DHS's mission, according to The Intercept, To fight disinformation stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election began to take shape during the 2020 election over efforts to shape discussions around VAX policy during the COVID pandemic.
Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.
According to a draft copy of DHS's Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS's Capstone Report, outlining the Department's strategy and priorities in the coming years, the Department plans to target quote, inaccurate information on a wide range of topics including quote, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S.
support to Ukraine.
The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities, the report states, which are often the targets of false or misleading information, such as false information on voting procedures targeting people of color.
Now again, look at those, look at those issues right there, that list of issues.
The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So what exactly would be the misinformation or disinformation?
I doubt that they are talking about the Chinese government promoting the idea that the Americans started COVID-19.
My guess is that it has much more to do with the probably true allegation by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas that this thing was a leak from the Wuhan lab.
How about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines?
For most of the last two years, you could be banned on social media for suggesting that the vaccines, while effective in preventing death and serious disease among older people, might have some negative side effects for younger people and did not prevent transmission.
In fact, it's quite possible that this particular segment of today's show will be cut from YouTube.
Racial justice, like what exactly about racial justice would have to be throttled?
Do you think that it would be people saying that It is not disproportionate arrest statistics to actual criminal activity?
You think that's what they would throttle?
What do you think they would throttle?
They would throttle every conservative position.
U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan?
What is the misinformation associated with that?
The answer, of course, is that there is no misinformation associated with U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It was horrifying.
And of course, DHS is trying to crack down on the dissemination of this information.
This is why it's very dangerous to give government this much power.
According to The Intercept, how disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated.
The inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.
DHS justifies these goals, which have expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically by claiming terrorist threats can be, quote, exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online.
The laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been used to conceal political maneuvering.
So again, the simple fact that these insane DHS regulations are designed to pressure social media on issues of great public import, it should be incredibly scary.
Prior to the 2020 election, according to The Intercept, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives.
According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative still ongoing between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.
Of course, all of this was the obvious The obvious reaction to Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election.
The left never got over it.
They decided that the reason she had lost the election was because of horrifying, evil social media sites that had allowed disinformation to flourish.
In June, a DHS advisory committee, which included Twitter head of legal policy, trust and safety, Vijaya Gadi, who was just fired by Elon Musk, and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the information ecosystem.
The report called on the agency to closely monitor social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper-partisan media, talk radio, and other online resources.
They argued the agency needed to take steps to halt the spread of false and misleading information with a focus on information that undermines, quote, key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors, such as the financial system or public health measures.
To accomplish these broad goals, according to the report, SIZA should invest in external research to evaluate the efficacy of interventions, specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread.
Jeff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at SISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing non-profits as a clearinghouse for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.
So instead of just saying, the government, we need to shut down information because it's bad, because that'd be a First Amendment violation, they're going to launder this information through third-party non-profits.
All the places that like to fake-fact-check places like Daily Wire.
No wonder Gaddy was just thrown out unceremoniously from Twitter.
The Biden administration did try to actually make this part of the public infrastructure in announcing that disinformation governance board.
Eventually it was scrapped, but it seems that DHS is going to bring this back under another heading, which of course is not a particular shocker.
Okay, so all of this is frightening.
It should be frightening.
This is not the government's business.
It is one thing for the government to protect you against threats.
It is another thing for the government to actually throttle information that the government does not like because it might cut against their interests.
It's pretty incredible stuff, this Intercept report.
It really is.
During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security, in an email to an official at Twitter, forwarded information about a potential threat to critical U.S.
infrastructure, citing FBI warnings, in this case about an account that could imperil election system integrity.
The Twitter user in question had 56 followers, along with a bio that read, DM us your weed store locations.
Hoes be mad, but this is a parody account under a banner image of Blucifer, a 30-foot-tall demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance of the Denver International Airport.
We're not sure if there's any action that can be taken, but we wanted to flag them for consideration or to state official on the email thread.
The Twitter representative responded, we will escalate.
Thank you.
Each email in the chain carried a disclaimer.
The agency quote, neither has nor seeks the ability to remove or edit what information is made available on social media platforms.
That, of course, is an absurdity.
If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages, said Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU, there's no doubt we'd call it censorship.
Yeah, no bleep.
Well, this, of course, raises the question of the midterm elections.
So you can see that the Democrats are about to get their butts handed to them in this election.
According to the latest data, the GOP is poised to just wreck the Democrats in this election.
According to the Wall Street Journal, voters are giving Republicans a late boost in support just ahead of the midterms.
The Wall Street Journal survey conducted two weeks before Election Day suggested that abortion rights are less important in voting decisions than voters indicated in the summer.
Republicans have a plus-two lead over the Democrats in the generic congressional ballot and a much larger lead in a lot of the purple areas.
Not only that, voters lack confidence in Biden's economic leadership.
Only 27% say his policies have had a positive impact on the economy.
54% said they've had a negative impact.
A majority of voters, 55%, disapprove of Biden's overall job performance.
Only 43% approve.
The GOP has seen a shift in its favor among several voter groups, including Latino voters and women, particularly white suburban women.
That group, which pollsters said makes up 20% of the elected, shifted 26 percentage points away from Democrats since August and now favors the GOP by 15 percentage points.
It's going to be a brutal election for the Democrats.
And so naturally, they're doing precisely what you would think they're doing.
They're already preparing to blame misinformation and disinformation for their incipient ass kicking.
According to the New York Times, for example, they put out a piece today about the race in Pennsylvania, quote, letters, tweets, TV, how midterm disinformation has washed over Pennsylvania.
One State's Experience underscores how pervasive false and misleading information has become in the country's electoral process, online and off.
This is a piece by Stephen Lee Myers, who covers misinformation for The Times.
So he points out that there are a bunch of people who have been saying false things about a variety of candidates.
But here is the point of the article.
Quote, Pennsylvania, with about 13 million people, is by no means unique when it comes to the problem, but as a swing state narrowly won by President Biden in 2020, it has become a disinformation battleground ahead of the midterms on November 8th.
The result has hardened the state's partisan divide and deepened distrust not only of politicians, but of the political process itself, since the way ballots are cast and counted has been at the heart of much of the disinformation swirling around.
The idea here is going to be that if the Republicans win, then presumably you will be able to blame disinformation.
If the Republicans do better than expected, then they will blame disinformation.
So remember that time that elections were sacrosanct and we were not allowed to do elections in any way, shape or form.
And this was undermining the institutions of our public.
Now we have the New York Times suggesting that the level of quote unquote disinformation in Pennsylvania may be skewing the election results.
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Well, all of this also explains exactly why the left, why Democrats, why members of the Biden administration are freaking out about Elon Musk taking over Twitter.
Because again, if the idea is the government was working hand in glove with companies like Twitter, In order to throttle misinformation.
Now, Musk isn't going to go along with that.
That is a major problem for them.
Which is why you have a major article in the Washington Post titled, quote, as Elon Musk expands his reach, Washington worries.
Oh, you mean, go build your own Twitter, I thought.
I thought if you don't like how he's handling the Twitters, then you could just go build your own.
I mean, what business is yours?
It's a completely private company.
Or maybe you guys were coordinating with the people who used to run Twitter and now the new guy does not want to play in your sandbox.
Quote, between launching four astronauts and 54 satellites into orbit, unveiling an electric freight truck, and closing in on taking over Twitter this month, Elon Musk made time to offer unsolicited peace plans for Taiwan and Ukraine, antagonizing those countries' leaders and irking Washington too.
Musk, the richest man in the world, then irritated some Pentagon officials by announcing he didn't want to keep paying for his private satellite service in Ukraine before later walking back the threat.
As Musk, 51, inserts himself into volatile geopolitical issues, many Washington policymakers worry from the sidelines as he bypasses them.
Why, I've never seen articles like this in The Washington Post about, say, George Soros, a billionaire who routinely intervenes in politics, both foreign and domestic.
I've never seen this about Bill Gates.
I've never seen this about Jeff Bezos in the pages of The Washington Post, since The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos.
A two-decade partnership between Musk and the federal government helped the United States return to global dominance in space and shift to electric cars and made the tech geek an internationally famous CEO.
But many in Washington, even as they praise his work in areas of national security, now see Musk as too powerful and too reckless.
Citing Musk's public ridicule of those who snub him, the billionaire has called President Biden a damp sock puppet and said Senator Elizabeth Warren reminds him of my friend's angry mom.
Accurate.
Many of the two dozen top government officials interviewed for this article would only speak about Musk on condition of anonymity.
Yeah, they're cowardice.
Knows no bounds.
Nearly all described him as being erratic and arrogant, as he is brilliant.
He sees himself as above the president, said Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian who hosted podcasts on Musk.
Musk declined to comment for the story.
He says he weighs in on important problems and describes his mission as enhancing the future of humanity.
But Musk's freelance diplomacy is angering allies.
At the same time, he bids $44 billion to take over a media platform with hundreds of millions of users.
Senator Dick Durbin said, quote, the bottom line is people hang on his every word because he has delivered so many times.
I hope he shows some respect for that responsibility.
So again, this article goes on and on and on and on.
And the basic idea here is that Elon Musk is a very bad, very bad man because he's intervening in things that are beyond his purview, which is totally fine for billionaires who are Democrats.
But Elon Musk is not a Democrat, and therefore he's very, very bad.
Democrats are more vocal on the need to rein in Musk.
Oh, shocker.
I mean, what, are we supposed to be surprised?
Of course, Democrats want to reign him in.
Especially now that he's taking over Twitter.
With him taking over Twitter, they're freaking out that he's not going to work hand in glove with the DHS to shut down information that the left would like purveyed.
That the left would like quashed, rather.
So Elon Musk is actually taking Twitter well in hand.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he's quickly setting to work a group of advisors, investors, and employees from elsewhere in his business empire to help him reimagine Twitter in his first days as new owner.
The group is working on a range of initiatives to try to bolster the platform's user experience and revenue, according to people involved in the effort.
While Mr. Musk continues to publicly float potential changes in a series of tweets.
Musk's team outlined three pillars of its plan for the platform before the deal's completion.
According to Ross Gerber, chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, that is an investment firm that put up under a million bucks as an outside investor in the takeover.
The plan includes changing the platform by expanding user verification and improving the subscription offerings to become less reliant on advertisers.
It would also add ways for content creators to make money on the platform so they could earn a living on it like many creators do on TikTok and YouTube.
The other day he suggested perhaps restarting Vine, which would make sense considering that TikTok is a Chinese front group.
Again, so much of what is going on right now is about Democrat fear that Musk is not going to play by their rules.
So Ro Khanna, very nice guy, Democratic congressperson from California.
We've had him on the show before.
He is obviously terrified of Elon Musk taking over Twitter.
Well, I hope what Elon Musk will do is create an independent governance structure for Twitter.
I agree that we need to remove the many bots on Twitter.
That actually is a problem in the conversation.
But beyond that, just like CNN doesn't have corporate owners making decisions of who can come on your news program, and just like the Washington Post isn't run by Jeff Bezos, we need to make sure that Twitter isn't run by the corporate owner but has independent governance boards and principles.
Oh, so he's glad that Musk bought it so long as he then hands it over to a bunch of people who agree with Democrats and Ro Khanna, presumably.
NBC's Ben Collins, again, a legacy media reporter who spends all day on the Twitters putting out left-wing information.
He says he's very worried that our reality is Elon Musk allowing people to talk.
That would be just, just terrible.
Here's the reality.
Here's what happened.
A man with a hit list went and hit Nancy Pelosi's husband in the head with a hammer in his home.
And, uh, she was on that hit list.
The inverted reality, uh, supposes a, an elaborate, uh, sex scheme involving, uh, a conspiracy theory about a coverup of, uh, some sort of like sex party or something.
And that was pushed out by the richest man in the world.
That is, uh, within 48 hours of that man taking over their website.
He believed it.
He didn't say I'm sorry.
He didn't say anything like that.
That's not what this is about, Tam.
This is about some sort of political game, Tam.
So I would be worried.
This is our reality now.
This is where we're about to head.
Okay, so here's what happened.
Musk put out a tweet, as I mentioned yesterday on the show, in which he retweeted a story that was unverified about Paul Pelosi, implying that Paul Pelosi was involved in some sort of sexual tryst with the guy who hit him in the head with a hammer.
As I said yesterday on the show, there was no evidence of this.
It was an un-evidenced report.
People had questions.
Those questions seemed to be fairly easily answered by the police report, and now by the suspect's confession.
And you know what happened?
Elon Musk realized that was wrong, because this is how free speech works, and then he took it down, because people pointed out that what he was purveying was not true.
By the way, DePapey, the guy who actually hit Pelosi in the head with a hammer, he put out a confession via the police in which he said he was going to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and talk to her.
If Nancy were to tell DePapey the truth, he would let her go.
If she lied, he was going to break her kneecaps.
DePapey was certain Nancy would not have told the truth.
In the course of the interview, DePaypey articulated he viewed Nancy as the leader of the pack of lies told by the Democratic Party.
He also later explained that by breaking her kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other members of Congress there were consequences to actions.
He also explained generally he wanted to use Nancy to lure another individual to himself.
He explained he broke into the house through a glass door using the hammer.
After he encountered Paul Pelosi, the speaker's husband managed to call the police.
When they arrived, both men were grappling over the hammer.
The police announced also that there is no truth to the notion that Paul Pelosi knew this guy at any point.
Here's the San Francisco police chief saying as much.
Clear it up once and for all.
Did Paul Pelosi know his attacker?
There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Pelosi knew this man.
As a matter of fact, the evidence indicates the exact opposite.
And again, you know, it really is sad that these theories are being floated out there.
Baseless, factless theories that are being floated out there.
And they're damaging.
They're damaging to the people involved.
They're damaging to this investigation.
And, you know, people are running with this stuff, and whether they believe it or not, These theories can influence the way people think about everything that's happening here, so I will be clear on this.
There is absolutely no evidence of that at all.
Okay, so we now know all the rest of the information, and you know what happened.
Musk put out a bad tweet, and then he deleted the bad tweet.
So should he be banned for life?
Under the old Twitter rules, that's what would have happened.
Should they have suppressed his original tweet?
Because under the old Twitter rules, they apparently would have suppressed that original tweet from Musk as quote-unquote disinformation.
And then people would have said the reason that it was being suppressed was specifically because it was true, right?
This is the game that gets played on Twitter a lot because it is impossible to tell from Twitter whether they're suppressing disinformation based on it being true or whether they're doing it based on it being false.
This is one of the big problems, but actually, free speech worked the way it was supposed to.
Musk said a dumb thing, that dumb thing was taken down, and that was the end of the story.
But the idea here is that that's a threat to everyone.
We must prevent people from hearing the dumb thing in the first place, rather than seeing the dumb thing, and then seeing the dumb thing rebutted.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue with their line that the reason that Paul Pelosi was hit with the hammer is because of Kevin McCarthy or something.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
I will remind you, Gavin Newsom is the governor of the state where this happened.
So might this have to do more with California's criminal policy?
Because it turns out that the person who actually hit Paul Pelosi, David DePapey, it turns out that he overstayed his visa.
Isn't California a sanctuary state?
According to the New York Post, The man accused of attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer was in the country illegally, according to ICE.
He was born in Canada in 1980.
He was in the U.S.
as early as 2001.
His social security number was obtained in Hawaii, but he was in the country well past the legal threshold.
So, California is a sanctuary state.
California is very loose on crime.
But here is Gavin Newsom blaming the person who's truly to blame, presumably the Republicans, maybe Jesse Waters or something.
Distinguished member of Congress, Democrat from Michigan, tells Axios someone will be killed who is a lawmaker.
Is she wrong?
I don't want to feed that by even suggesting that's possible, but what evidence suggests it's not.
I mean, I wasn't a baby in the 60s.
I mean, I wasn't, you know, like, look, I know what over the last three years has come in my inbox.
Trust me, you don't.
Because I'm not sharing it.
I don't even share it with my wife.
I got four kids.
So I know a little bit about this.
Okay, yes, I also know about being threatened.
It's happened to me, the FBI's arrested people.
Does that have to do with Nancy Pelosi or Democrats or various critics on the left saying mean things about me in the onlines?
No, it really doesn't.
Turns out crazy people go crazy.
And if we take this to its logical endpoint, the idea is we have to suppress speech in order to protect people.
So Gavin Newsom got more specific.
He went after Jesse Waters on Fox News for some reason.
Nancy Pelosi?
I don't think anyone's been dehumanized like she has consistently.
I mean, I watched this one guy, was it Jesse Waters or something on Fox News?
What he's been saying about Paul Pelosi the last five, six months?
Mocking him?
Consistently?
Don't tell me that's not anti-embedding all this.
Of course it is.
They're sowing the seeds of creating a culture and a climate like this.
I mean, look online.
Look at the sewage that is online that they amplify on these networks and in social media to dehumanize people like Nancy Pelosi.
It's all about the suppression of information.
You're not allowed to disagree with Nancy Pelosi.
You're not allowed to make fun of her.
You're not.
Gavin Newsom is allowed to run ads in Florida talking about how Rhonda Sands is the worst person ever.
But if he blinks really, really fast in his interviews, in preening fake moral indignation, then we probably have to suppress information.
We have to suppress Jesse Waters.
We have to suppress social media.
We can't allow that sort of criticism of Nancy Pelosi to be out there in the ether.
It might cause crazy people to do crazy things.
The entire media, by the way, the legacy media bought into this.
Wolf Blitzer asked the head of DHS.
These are insane questions.
Wolf Blitzer of CNN asked Alejandro Mayorkas, how much do you blame Republicans for what just happened with Paul Pelosi?
As you know, Republicans have been vilifying Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, for years and years.
So far, very few Republican leaders have forcefully condemned the attacks that preceded the assault on her husband at his home in San Francisco.
Donald Trump Jr.
even mocked the assault.
How much blame do you place on the Republican Party leadership right now for amplifying dangerous rhetoric?
Well, I think dangerous rhetoric is something that divides our country, regrettably, and that division is itself can be a threat that our adversaries, nation states, exploit.
Russia, Iran, China, and the spread of disinformation.
There we go.
And this is precisely the rationale behind the DHS coordinating with social media companies in order to quash information, which is an actual threat to the First Amendment, an actual threat to your freedoms.
You want to talk about causing polarization?
How about people actually believing the reason that they are no longer allowed to speak freely on social media is because there are members of government behind the scenes tweaking the knobs?
It's a violation of law.
It is also a violation of what it means to have a common compact.
If the idea behind free speech in the United States is that people who speak freely and say dumb things will be called out for it, which seems to happen an awful lot in this country, then and that that process has to be stopped short because people are just too stupid to take part in free speech.
And so we have to have masters among us from the government telling us exactly how this stuff works and how it works is always how the left would like it to work.
You wonder why things are getting more polarized.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden is out there stumping on his own behalf for the midterms, and he's doing a terrible job.
We'll get to his oil policy in one second.
Well, folks, the corporate media agenda means the news is presented in a very biased way.
You know it.
I know it.
We all know it.
Thankfully, there is a way to get the most important news of the day without the narrative.
And that is by listening to one of the top news podcasts in America, Morning Wire.
New episodes are available every morning, seven days a week.
They cover stories other media outlets won't touch.
And every Sunday until the midterm elections, you can also tune into ElectionWire for in-depth coverage, candidate interviews, and more.
John Bickley and Georgia Hads do a wonderful job on this show, and they're going to give you all the information you need to know.
on the extraordinarily important midterm elections.
Republicans look like they are headed for a big red wave.
You'll find Morning Wire and Election Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Daily Wire Plus, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Now, speaking of the election, Joe Biden is just falling apart in the polling with regard to the economy.
Particularly 71% of Americans say the economy is moving in the wrong direction, which is an insane number.
So his solution, of course, is to yell at oil companies.
Now, this is a president who has shut down oil and gas leases.
It's a president who's actively told people not to invest in the oil and gas sector.
He's a president who has encouraged the oil and gas sector itself to get out of the production of oil and gas into green energy or whatever.
And here he was yesterday yelling at the oil companies.
Oil companies record profits today are not because they're doing something new or innovative.
Their profits are a windfall of war.
The windfall from the brutal conflict that's ravaging Ukraine and hurting tens of millions of people around the globe.
At a time of war, any company receiving historic windfall profits like this has a responsibility to act beyond the narrow self-interest of its executives and shareholders.
I think they have a responsibility to act in the interest of their consumers, their community, and their country.
To invest in America by increasing production and refining capacity Because they don't want to do that.
They have the opportunity to do that.
Lowering prices for consumers of the pump.
You know, if they don't, they're going to pay a higher tax on their excess profits and face other restrictions.
Okay, Joe Biden looks worse and worse.
By the way, that Botox needs a re-up pretty quickly here because that face is not looking amazing there.
Here's the problem with what Joe Biden is saying.
Everything.
So first of all, he says we're in a time of war, so the oil companies have to pay up.
Did I forget the part where America declared war?
When did that happen?
My understanding was we were supporting an ally in its war.
I was not aware that the United States had actually declared open war on Russia at this point.
If so, that seems like that probably should go through some sort of congressional review.
Second, the basic economic argument that the oil companies in whom you have pushed systemic disinvestment, systemic disinvestment, Those oil companies ought to pay an excess profits tax because there is now low supply and high demand.
That is precisely the opposite of what you would wish to do if you actually wish to increase supply.
Larry Summers, Democrat, right?
Bill Clinton, Treasury Secretary.
He tweeted out today, quote, I'm not sure I understand the argument for a windfall profits tax on energy companies.
If you reduce profitability, you'll discourage investment, which is the opposite of our objective.
If it's a fairness argument, I don't follow the logic, since even with the windfalls, Exxon has underperformed the overall market over the last five years.
No, don't let facts get in the way of a good story there, Larry.
Gotta let Joe Biden continue to lie that what's really happening here is that you're getting jacked by the oil companies, when in reality, it is the left which has pushed massive boondoggle investments to the tune of $1.2 trillion in, quote, Green New Deal nonsense just over the past year alone.
That that has nothing to do with the oil companies losing profitability.
Refineries are not going back online.
The reason they're not going back online is because John Kerry is out there saying you should not invest in refineries.
At the same time, Joe Biden is yelling at the oil companies for not investing in refineries.
At the same time that Jennifer Granholm is out there saying this is all going to spur a brand new, wonderful green energy revolution.
Joe Biden is standing literally in that video where he's yelling at the oil companies.
He is flanked by Jennifer Granholm, who has said that this is an opportunity to switch away from oil and gas and toward green.
And then you wonder why there's underproduction?
It's ridiculous.
But of course, it's never been about anything except for the demagoguery.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the White House has for months been weighing endorsing a proposal to tax what the president and his advisors call the windfall profits of oil and gas companies, according to administration officials.
A group of progressive Democrats introduced legislation earlier this year that would impose a per barrel tax equivalent to 50% of the difference between the current price of crude oil and the average price between 2015 and 2019.
So you mean during the four year period where they did not make money?
You now want to take that and use that in order to claw back them making money in a time when there's absolute demand?
Like, how do they think pricing mechanisms work here?
The reason the pricing mechanisms have jacked up the price is because, again, lack of supply.
Future supply is down.
Futures affect current price when it comes to the oil markets.
The American Petroleum Institute said oil companies do not set prices.
Global commodities markets do.
Increasing taxes on American energy discourages investment in new production, which is exactly the opposite of what is needed.
Yeah, but again, it is not about actually generating lower gas prices for people.
It's about yelling at the gas companies so that Joe Biden doesn't have to be held responsible for his own garbage policy.
This is precisely the reason why Joe Biden is absolutely falling apart in this election.
Because everybody can see through this.
Nobody believes that if Joe Biden yells at the oil companies enough, magically the oil prices are going to drop.
Nobody believes that Joe Biden's massive inflation is the fault of the oil companies.
But he's gotta say something, I suppose.
I mean, you gotta give him credit for trying, man.
That dude is still out there and he is still trying.
As we say, the elections look like they are shifting dramatically in Republicans' favor.
I called earlier that Lee Zeldin was my sleeper pick for governor of New York.
There's a brand new poll out from Trafalgar that actually shows Lee Zeldin in the lead over Kathy Hochul at this point in New York.
Democrats have dropped millions of dollars in New York into a race that is D plus 20.
D plus 20.
That is an excellent indicator.
That is a red flag.
I mean, it's not just a red flag.
That is a giant, huge bell that is ringing in the ears of every Democrat everywhere.
There are going to be a lot of Republican congresspeople who are considered fringe, people Democrats helped get elected in primaries.
Thinking that it would be easy to run against the MAGA, ULTRAMAGA, SUPERMAGA, DUPERMAGA Republicans.
Why are those people going to end up in Congress?
Because it turns out, this election is in fact a referendum on the people in power.
The people in power have done a terrible job, and so those people are about to get thrown out on their ear.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We're going to get into the Supreme Court, which held a hearing yesterday on ditching affirmative action, finally at long last.
Plus, Israel is holding its election today, its latest election.
They have one every seven minutes or so.
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