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Nov. 18, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:28
Pelosi’s Out | Ep. 1614
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Nancy Pelosi says she will not run for House Minority Leader and leaves the playing field to the younger Democrats.
House Republicans prepare to take the majority and Elon Musk's Twitter enters into its most perilous period yet.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, we bid a fond farewell to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
In the next term of Congress, she will not be standing for House Minority Leader, which makes sense.
She is the only octogenarian to actually be leaving her job at this point in time.
And for that, she gets credit.
She's not getting a lot of credit for being A good force in American public life.
She was good at vote counting.
I will say that for Nancy Pelosi.
She was very good at keeping her caucus in line.
And if you look at sort of the periods of Nancy Pelosi's leadership, what you see is that there are a few sort of distinct periods in Nancy Pelosi's leadership.
First, she became a member of the DNC in 1976 and became chair of the California Democratic Party in 1981.
She joined Congress in 1987.
It wasn't until 2002 that she became House Whip and then Minority Leader in 2003, while George W. Bush was President of the United States.
She was Speaker twice, from 2007 to 2011, and then again from 2018 to 2022.
Now, folks who are saying that she's the most impactful Speaker in American history are missing out on Sam Rayburn, they're missing out on Newt Gingrich, they're missing out on a bunch of folks who are far more impactful than Nancy Pelosi.
But, what Nancy Pelosi was really good at was, during the brief periods of time when she actually ran the Congress, she was able to shove through extraordinarily large spending bills.
This was the thing that she was able to do.
And she was able to move her entire caucus to the left.
When she joined Congress, she was largely considered one of the most left-wing members of Congress.
Now, of course, she's been completely outflanked by the progressives, which in some ways is a sign of failure for her that she's not remained at the vanguard of her own movement, but in other ways is a demonstration of just how far left she's moved America.
When there's an entire left-wing movement that is now to her left and that is constantly critical of her, I will say that her handling of the progressive squad, just in terms of pure tactics, has been quite smart.
She's allowed them a lot of rope.
She's allowed them to go out there publicly and say stuff.
And then, behind closed doors, she beats them about the ears and forces them to vote for the things that she wants them to vote for.
Now, what are the things that Nancy Pelosi is going to be remembered for?
Well, first, she's going to be remembered for the fact that she has essentially tripled or quadrupled her net wealth while she was in Congress.
I mean, that's a thing that people are going to go back to, is the simple fact that she is now extraordinarily wealthy, like a lot more wealthy than she was when she entered Congress, because her husband, Paul, is apparently amazing at picking stocks.
just in coordination with political movements.
And it's not suspicious at all.
It's just that, it's good.
It's probably clean and good.
Everything is probably fine.
In fact, you'll remember that just last year, there was a bill that was put up to ban members of the House from owning stock so that it prevents any conflict of interest.
And she's like, no, no, no, I like when members own, yeah, I would imagine you do like when members own stock since you have radically increased your personal wealth.
Because this is a free market and people, we have a free market economy.
They should be able to participate in that.
We have a responsibility to report in the stock.
But if the people aren't reporting, they should be.
OK, but when you report, you know, three months in arrears of actually picking the stocks and you're picking the stocks while you're regulating exactly the companies that you're picking, that's a little bit suspicious.
The actual accomplishments of Nancy Pelosi, first of all, it is worthwhile noting here that the topsy turviness of who holds Congress has been very, very high since about 1994.
So between essentially 1930 and 1994, the Democrats just dominated the House of Representatives.
I mean, really, really dominated it.
And then Nancy Pelosi took over in Congress in 2006.
And within four years, she'd run herself out of power.
And now she was speaker again for four years and she ran herself out of power.
Which suggests that she has been too radical for the American people in terms of the policies that she's been promoting.
But she has no regerts because the way that she governed was always, OK, so I'm going to pass this giant, giant bill that restructures large parts of the American economy.
And then if they throw me out of office, it's too late.
I already did it.
And so her big accomplishments basically are when she was an opponent.
of George W. Bush.
She was largely elected on the basis of opposing the Iraq war in 2003.
And on the basis of Mark Foley, a Republican congressperson, who was apparently going after the male aides.
And so in 2006, you'll recall the Republicans lost the Congress in a massive sweep, where Democrats won 60 votes in the House of Representatives.
Her big move at that point was basically to block privatization of social security by George W. Bush and to yell about the Iraq war.
And then after Barack Obama was elected president, she ran through with essentially no bipartisan support a bevy of bills.
And this is what she is most famous for, is keeping her caucus in line.
If you're going to talk about the polarization in American politics, Nancy Pelosi is a key figure in that.
Because when she took office in 2002-2003, when she took a leadership position, there was still some crossover between the parties.
There were still blue dog Democrats who were sitting in the Democratic Party caucus.
And now there aren't.
There are no blue dog Democrats in the Democratic Party caucus, certainly in 1987 when she was elected to Congress.
There's a wide variety of opinion inside the Democratic Party.
Nancy Pelosi's leadership has been extremely polarizing.
That doesn't mean she hasn't been successful in ramming through a bunch of stuff, mainly these giant spending plans we're talking about under Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act, where she said one of the most famous things ever said by a speaker, we have to pass the bill to find out what's in it.
Which is a hell of a statement, considering that when you are completely restructuring one-fifth of the American economy, you should probably know what you're doing before you pass the thing, but here's Nancy Pelosi saying just that.
You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one of the items.
But I don't know if you have heard that it is a legislation for the future.
Not just about healthcare for America, but about a healthier America.
Where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.
Prevention, prevention, prevention.
It's about diet, not diabetes.
It's going to be very, very exciting.
But we have to pass the bill so that you can I mean, it's such an astonishing statement.
We're going to have to pass the bill so we can find out just how amazing it's going to be.
As it turns out, what it's going to do is complicate the healthcare system in the United States even more and not lower costs.
So that's going to be just awesome.
She also helped to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
She passed the giant stimulus package that did absolutely nothing for the economy and led to the slowest economic recovery since World War II under Barack Obama.
Those were big accomplishments while Barack Obama was president.
That was with a D plus 40.
Majority in the in the House of Representatives has a huge majority.
So she's able to get a lot of that stuff done specifically because she had a huge majority.
But the truth is that the stuff that really is impressive in terms of what she's been able to get done is all in the last two years.
Because all the other stuff you would assume that any House speaker who has a 40 seat majority in the House of Representatives is going to be able to do whatever is necessary.
I mean, she had not only that majority in the House while Barack Obama was president, at least from 2008 to 2010.
She also was gifted 60 seats in the Senate for the Democrats and a Democratic president.
So you can pretty much do whatever you want at that point.
I don't think that takes a lot of tactical maneuvering.
And people say she's a great tactician.
No, her real great tactics stuff actually was in the last couple of years, not while Donald Trump was president.
While Donald Trump was president, her basic Again, her basic function was more political polarization.
You'll remember her saying, you'll remember during Donald Trump's State of the Union address, her literally getting up and ripping the State of the Union address in half and everybody cheering and clapping.
Oh, it's just amazing.
And then complaining about partisan politics and polarization in American politics.
Nancy Pelosi is a great force here.
Pretending that she is not is ignoring history.
And my fellow Americans, the best is yet to come.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.
Thank you very much.
And there she is, posing for the cameras, ripping up the speech.
Not once, but twice.
What a heroine.
She ripped up the speech.
And of course, this is what the Democratic Party base, love the batters that choose ripping up speech.
It's all performative.
You know, if you want to know how Congress became a performative area in American politics, Nancy Pelosi is a major figure in the performative politics of Congress and how it became less of an institution designed to actually bring together people to pass public policy and more of a place where people get famous for slay queen kind of antics like this.
And then Joe Biden became president and her legacy has essentially been to ram through the most spending in human history.
And here she did so with a D plus five majority.
So this is really where you have to keep things together.
This is where you have to be able to go to Pramila Jayapal and say to the progressive caucus, listen, I know you don't like this thing, but you're going to have to vote for it anyway, because it's increased spending.
And so her big legacy in the end is going to be this.
It's going to be that she helped bankrupt the United States of America.
So you can call her a great leader.
You just have to ignore the fact that what she did actually was not very good.
Under Joe Biden, obviously, passing the American Rescue Plan, the so-called American Rescue Plan, $2 trillion unnecessary inflation causing bill.
The Infrastructure Act, completely unnecessary, $1.2 trillion.
The Inflation Reduction Act, another trillion dollars.
All this sort of stuff, this huge spending agenda that Nancy Pelosi rammed through a Congress that was fairly narrowly divided.
Again, admire the tactical ability of Nancy Pelosi while also recognizing that her main legacy is going to be corruption in Congress.
Again, getting very personally rich off her position.
It's going to be massive partisan polarization because I'm not aware that she has ever passed a serious piece of legislation with actual Republican support ever.
I'm not going to count infrastructure because infrastructure is basically just like, can you get a few Republicans to sign onto roads?
And the answer is maybe a couple.
Her biggest thing was, I polarized Congress, I took majorities for brief periods of time, and I ran through world-beating change that actually didn't benefit the American people.
And of course, she is very politically radical.
The main contribution, the thing for which she is, in the overall span of time, going to be remembered, is forcing the country dramatically to the left.
She is a radical politician, Nancy Pelosi.
I know we've all forgotten this.
She's a San Francisco radical.
Everyone used to understand this.
Now again, because she's been outflanked by the AOC crowd, everybody sort of thinks of her as moderate, which is bizarre.
She's not a moderate in any way, shape, or form.
It was just last year that she was talking about abortion and said it was sinful.
She used the word sinful to describe restrictions on abortion, which is a hell of a thing coming from a woman who calls herself a devout Catholic.
I may not be a Catholic, but I do understand that Catholicism does not see restrictions on abortion as sinful.
In fact, Catholicism has some things to say about sucking babies into things.
Here is Nancy Pelosi turning religion on its head as a devout Catholic.
The fact that this is such an assault on women of color and women of lower income families is just sinful.
It's sinful.
It's sinful.
It's wrong that they would be able to say to women what they think women should be doing with their lives and their bodies.
But it's sinful, the injustice of it all.
So thank you for making that central.
And you did too, Dr. Hugo.
Thank you so much for making that so important.
It's sinful.
So sinful.
Sinful.
Sinful.
Yeah, but don't worry, guys.
She is the moderate.
So, she gave a speech yesterday with a bunch of teary-eyed congresspeople there, just all tearing up, pretending that partisan politics doesn't matter.
Again, this sort of pomp and circumstance of American politics annoys me beyond all measure because we basically build golden calves, and these are our politicians, and then we worship them.
This is not a person worthy of worship.
In fact, I'm not sure I can think of a single politician who's ever been worthy of anything remotely approaching worship.
Certainly not Nancy Pelosi.
But again, credit to her for at least being the first member of the baby boober generation to step down out of politics, since we now have an entire oxygenarian generation running everything.
Here's Nancy Pelosi yesterday.
I was riding in the car with my brothers, and they were thrilled and jumping up and down and saying to me, Nancy, look, there's the capital.
And every time I'd say, I don't see any capital.
Is it a capital A, a capital B, or a capital C?
These elections, the people stood in the breach and repelled the assault on democracy.
They resoundingly rejected violence and insurrection, and in doing so, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
There is no greater official honor for me than to stand on this floor and to speak for the people of San Francisco.
This I will continue to do as a member of the House, speaking for the people of San Francisco, serving the great state of California, and defending our Constitution.
And with great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek re-election through Democratic leadership in the next Congress.
She's going to represent San Francisco.
By the way, remember that time when San Francisco was a nice city?
And she's been there for the entire downfall of the city of San Francisco, but she receives no blame for that whatsoever.
The person who is going to replace her as the House Minority Leader is, of course, going to be Hakeem Jeffries.
He is a congressperson from New York.
He is considered a sort of progressive centrist, I would say, which means slightly to the right of AOC.
Slightly to the right of the squad.
He's a self-described far-left Democrat.
He first assumed office in 2013.
According to Breitbart, he's served as chair of the House Democrat Caucus since 2019.
Now, he also happens to be an election denier.
He literally tweeted out in November 24th of 2020 about Donald Trump, quote, history will never accept you as a legitimate president, which I was informed is akin to treason if you say that elections are not to be accepted.
And then he suggested again, same time 2020, that his buddies in the Kremlin had gotten Donald Trump elected.
He tweeted out in 2018, the more we learn about the 2016 election, the more illegitimate it becomes.
America deserves to know whether we have a fake president in the Oval Office.
Hashtag Russian interference.
He is going to be a radical in the mold of Nancy Pelosi, but again, the Democratic Party has been pulled so far to the left that Hakeem Jeffries is now perceived as not nearly as radical as he actually is.
Meanwhile, the House Republicans are about to take over the majority.
Kevin McCarthy, I think not incorrectly, says one of the reasons that Nancy Pelosi is announcing that she's not running for leadership is because she doesn't want a picture of handing me the gavel because it's embarrassing to her.
There's probably some truth to this.
Here's Kevin McCarthy last night.
Alright, Nancy Pelosi is retired from the leadership.
Steny Hoyer is retired from the leadership.
They're going to have to have somebody hand the gavel over to you.
That's the ultimate change in power.
The symbolism is huge.
Are they going to put somebody up there to do it?
Yeah, it has to be the minority leader, which I believe they'll be Hakeem Jeffries, but it's interesting.
I had a friend text me.
So I just saw Nancy Pelosi's finally been fired, but I think she's leaving because she's still staying in Congress.
She just doesn't want to have to hand me the gavel.
Probably that's the reason.
I mean, maybe, maybe not.
But the bottom line is that she is definitely She's definitely out.
So the question becomes, okay, now the Republicans have a shot at it.
What can they learn?
Because you want to learn something from everybody.
This is what the wise of the world do.
They learn from everybody.
What do you learn from Nancy Pelosi?
And number one, keep your caucus in line.
Keep your caucus in line.
Every Republican speaker of the past 20 years Has made the signal error of thinking that if you do debt ceiling fights or government shutdowns, it's going to redound to your benefit.
This has not worked well at all.
That performative politics is somehow going to achieve what you want it to achieve.
And politics was nationalized by Newt Gingrich.
There's a point that my friend John Podhoris makes at the New York Post today.
Politics was nationalized in Congress by Newt Gingrich.
Before that, everybody was sort of representative of your district and the way this was supposed to work is everybody came to Congress.
They brought their priorities to Congress.
They sort of backscratched each other.
You ended up with these bills that were overall fairly moderate, but also included a bunch of pork for like a post office named after you in your hometown.
And then in 1994, Gingrich ran on this nationalized platform in which all the Republican Congress people basically ran on the contract with America, and he won a sweeping victory.
And this nationalized politics.
And Gingrich was able to get a few things done, right?
Like welfare reform, he was able to get done, which is a pretty major thing.
He was able to work with Clinton to lower taxes in certain areas.
And then Nancy Pelosi really took it to a tight.
She nationalized every election.
Every election under Nancy Pelosi was nationalized.
While Republicans, they can nationalize things, If you're going to nationalize the elections, if every election is going to be about national issues and not about what's happening in your local district, then you're also going to have to run your congressional caucus the way Nancy Pelosi did with an iron rod.
You're going to have to make sure that everybody is on board and that when you bring up a bill, you don't get all of the public fighting and arguing.
You have to be good at vote counting.
You have to be good at whipping your vote.
You have to make sure that everybody's on the same page and you have to pick fights that you know you can win.
So take some actual tactical Ability here.
We'll see whether Kevin McCarthy has any of that tactical ability.
The first people out of the gate, unfortunately for the House Republicans, the first people out of the gate are people who are announcing investigations.
Now, I'm not anti-investigations.
I think investigations are perfectly fine and in many cases legitimate.
In fact, some of the investigations that members of the House are announcing I think are worthwhile.
But there's no question that this is crowd-pleasing, base-pleasing stuff because congressional investigations overall are generally useless.
When is the last time you had a congressional investigation that actually ended with any sort of congressional activity that was worth its salt?
The answer is it almost never happens.
It's a posturing exercise.
Now, sometimes that posturing is necessary for political gain.
Sometimes the posturing is useful for the American public.
Most of the time, it's just a way for people to get on TV.
And when it comes to getting reelected, when it comes to your caucus actually being successful in getting things done, it's a lot less about the posturing and a lot more about what it is that you want to get done.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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So let's talk about what it is that the House is going to try to get done.
The Wall Street Journal has a good rundown on what exactly Republicans are looking to do.
They say the end of the unified democratic government will prevent Biden from following through on key 2020 campaign goals, including raising taxes on corporations and high income households.
Some tax legislation is still possible, thanks to bipartisan momentum for expanding tax breaks for retirement savings.
There could be a deal to extend expired tax breaks and prevent some business tax increases scheduled to take effect under a law passed in 2017.
There are some provisions of the 2017 law that are scheduled to expire after 2025.
Democrats are probably not going to push forward any sort of Extension of that, but Republicans are going to obstruct the Democratic attempts to raise taxes, which is definitely a positive for the American people.
There's gonna be talk about, for example, debt limits.
And raising spending.
That is going to have to be discussed.
The reality is that there is very little appetite inside the Republican caucus or by the American people more broadly.
I mean, I wish there were, but politics is a game of reality.
It's not a game of I wish.
And the American public, I've yet to see a situation in which there's a government shutdown and the American public is super happy about it, even though I may be totally sanguine about it.
When it comes to foreign policy, there are going to be some battles over the war in Ukraine.
Presumably, Kevin McCarthy is going to be shepherding Congress into continuing funding, but I would assume with more oversight.
That's going to be important.
There will be attempts to block Democrats from enshrining abortion in federal law.
Most of what's going to happen for the next couple of years is going to be obstruction.
And there, I think that McCarthy actually has a fairly easy road.
He's just going to be able to look at Joe Biden and say, no.
The question is going to be, what happens when Republicans actually take power?
What sort of legislation are they going to be able to push forward?
And more than anything, for the next couple of years, can you project A feeling of sobriety in your caucus.
Because that's what this midterm election was really about.
The reason the Republicans won a handful of seats instead of a wave of seats in a year in which Republicans across the country were plus four.
That usually says wave.
There was no wave.
One of the reasons is because many Republican candidates, in particular congressional districts, did not feel sober to the public.
What you need is a feeling of calm and sobriety.
Can Republicans get their act together enough to actually project this?
This is my concern about some of the focus on the investigations.
Again, not that there shouldn't be investigations, but that they're actually done in a sober and Thought out manner as opposed to let me just go and shout in front of the cameras.
So yesterday there was an announcement by Representative James Comer that there will be an investigation to Hunter Biden.
Again, this is sort of promises made, promises kept sort of stuff for Republicans.
They said they would investigate Hunter Biden.
That's all fine.
I'm not sure that I would make that like the first thing that you say you are going to do after being elected to the majority simply for political expediency.
Like if you're going to do it, do it.
But don't make it like we're taking power, we're going after the current president of the United States' son.
That's like our top priority.
I don't think it should be Republicans' top.
It should be a priority, sure, to investigate any sort of corrupt foreign affairs that are happening here.
But is this what is meant to project a sense of sort of calm and stability to the American people going into 2024?
I'm not sure that it is.
Anyway, here is Representative James Comer of Kentucky.
We are releasing a report today that details what we have uncovered.
We're also sending letters to the Biden administration officials and Biden family associates renewing our request for voluntary production of documents relevant to this investigation.
This is an investigation of Joe Biden, the President of the United States, and why he lied to the American people about his knowledge and participation in his family's international business schemes.
Committee Republicans have uncovered evidence of federal crimes committed by, and to the benefit of, members of the President's family.
These include conspiracy or defrauding the United States.
Wire fraud.
Conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
Tax evasion.
Money laundering.
And conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The Biden family's business dealings implicate a wide range of criminality from human trafficking to potential violations of the Constitution.
Yeah, I just have a question.
Why is this your lead?
Why is this what you're leading with?
Like day one, you announce you have a majority.
You're like, we're going after Hunter.
Is that the priority of the American people?
Maybe the priority of the base.
Again, I'm happy to see an investigation.
This is your lead?
Republicans performed poorly in the general election because 13% of Republican voters in key states defected over to the other side.
And also because independents voted for the Democrats in the last election cycle.
And so your first move is let's do this thing that appears to be super partisan to everybody.
I just don't understand the tactical.
Where's the tactics here?
Where's the tactical brilliance?
And if you have a bunch of members who are going to use Congress, see, here's what Nancy Pelosi basically did.
What Nancy Pelosi basically did is she let AOC and Ilhan Omar and all these people go out there and shout about anything, but they had no power inside the caucus.
They didn't do anything.
They got and did two interviews, or Instagram stories, or be on the cover of Rolling Stone.
But they didn't actually have any power.
And so if McCarthy's gonna run his caucus well, what he's gonna have to do is say, okay, you wanna go out, you wanna sound off to the press, you wanna do it?
Fine.
But the way this place is gonna run is it's gonna run like a smoothly oiled machine in which we pursue actual real issues the American people care about as a first priority.
And we can walk and chew gum at the same time, but the walking is much more important than the chewing of the gum.
At least in the public mind.
I just don't understand why you would lead with this day one.
It doesn't make any sense to me and it doesn't bode well for the tactical brilliance of Republican leadership at this point.
By the way, there are certain things that you could say that would please the bays and would still be things that are worthwhile doing.
So for example, Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio, he says, one of the things we're going to be doing is we're going to be overseeing Joe Biden's DOJ.
Like this is an actual thing that seems worthwhile to me.
Because again, this is a function of Congress is to oversee the executive branch and make sure that it doesn't overstep its boundaries.
Here's Jim Jordan yesterday.
Is the FBI going to quit interfering with elections?
2016, they spied on President Trump's campaign.
2018, it was the Mueller investigation.
2020, they suppressed information about the Hunter Biden story.
2022, they raided the President's home 91 days before an election.
Maybe it'd be nice...
If the FBI and the Justice Department just stayed out of it and let we the people decide who we think should represent us, who we think should lead us, that's supposed to be how America works.
So this is the focus on the Judiciary Committee, the political nature of the Justice Department, and the linkage now to what was happening with the Hunter Biden story.
Again, just 15 days before we have a presidential election.
Okay, again, I just have a question.
Why couldn't you just say, listen, the DOJ, one of our first tasks over the Judiciary Committee is to oversee the DOJ, which has been targeting parents.
Why wouldn't that be the lead?
Why is Hunter Biden the lead?
Why is the 2016 election the lead?
This is all the stuff the American people in 2022 were like, eh.
But it turns out there is stuff the DOJ is doing that pisses off the American people.
And those things include going after parents.
And going after people who are critical of school boards.
Tactical competence, guys, is going to be a necessity here.
I don't know how many times Republicans can pull defeat out of the jaws of victory, but they seem to be up to the challenge.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
Again, McCarthy better get this thing in order or he's not going to be worth his salt as Speaker.
It's that simple.
The one thing that you can say for Kevin McCarthy is that when you climb the greasy pole and you make it to the top, this means, theoretically, that you're supposed to be tactically smart.
Again, Paul Ryan was sort of thrust into this position when he was made Speaker of the House, simply because he was famous and he'd run for Vice President under Mitt Romney, and because he had these ideas about restructuring entitlements.
But it wasn't as though Paul Ryan was known as a tactician in Congress.
That wasn't his thing.
He was an idea guy in Congress.
Kevin McCarthy, theoretically, should be known as a tactician.
He's the only young gun left.
I remember when there was a triumvirate of the young guns.
It was Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor.
The only one who's left is Kevin McCarthy.
And now he's gonna be Speaker of the House.
So, show the tactical maneuvering capacity of a Mitch McConnell or a Nancy Pelosi and you'll be successful.
That's your job.
Your job is not going to be to allow your caucus to run free and wild, shouting about things the base loves, but the American people are not particularly entranced with.
Okay, meanwhile, over at Twitter, complete mayhem.
According to the media, people are freaking out over the current activities over at Twitter.
So what exactly is happening over at Twitter?
Well, CNN's Oliver Darcy has now branded it Twitter's last gasp.
Which is a radical overstatement of the case.
Basically what happened is that Elon Musk put out an ultimatum that all of his employees should come to work extremely hardcore.
Basically he said we are not going to be doing this routine where employees get to run the place.
You need to commit to working long hours and working hard and fixing this or leave.
This is a couple days ago.
He issued an ultimatum to Twitter employees.
He said, commit to a new hardcore Twitter or leave the company with severance pay.
Twitter is shifting to an engineer-driven operation, one that will need to be extremely hardcore going forward, according to the midnight email obtained by the Washington Post.
Employees were asked to click an icon and respond by Thursday if they wanted to stay.
He said, this will mean working long hours at high intensity.
Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.
By mid-Wednesday, members of Twitter's trust and safety team Which of course is the most ideologically driven part of the Twitter company.
They were discussing a mass resignation and then apparently they engaged in a mass resignation.
According to the Washington Post, hundreds of people working at Twitter said that they were going to leave.
They refused to sign a pledge to work longer hours.
According to the Washington Post, the number of engineers tending to multiple critical systems had been reduced to 2, 1, or even 0.
So it went from like 20 in a particular department to 2 people in a particular department.
Now, people on Twitter who don't understand how Twitter works, they think what this means is that basically engineers are in the back room, and every time you tweet, What happens is that they take your tweet, they retype it onto a floppy disk, they take the floppy disk, they upload it into like a computer from 1950 that fills a room, and then that's how your tweet goes up.
And so if you don't have people, a thousand Twitter employees, who every day are just re-inputting the tweets, the thing's just going to break down.
In 24 hours, it's going to shut down.
That's wrong.
What the engineers are there to do is they are there to stop an emergency meltdown.
So somebody hacks the system, for example, or there's a major bug that crashes the system.
Instead of having 20 guys, you now have two.
So that means that the critical systems, if they come under attack, that could be a problem.
But the way the media are treating it, it's like, oh my God, tomorrow it's going to go dark.
It's just going to wind down.
That is not right.
In an early sign, the number of those declining to sign was greater than anticipated.
Musk eased offer a turn to office mandate he'd issued a week ago, telling employees Thursday they'd be allowed to work remotely if their managers assert they are making an excellent contribution.
But apparently several workers are saying that the precarious position has been reached.
A former employee said, quote, I know of six critical systems, like serving tweets level of critical, which no longer have any engineers.
There's no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system.
It will continue to coast until it runs into something and then it will stop.
Okay, that would be an implication regarding the possibility of an emergency.
So how many people are still remaining?
Apparently, somewhere between 75 and 88% of all the people working at Twitter, when Musk took over, are basically gone at this point.
Musk eliminated roughly 50% of the 7,500 person workforce when he first took over.
A former Twitter executive told CNN that this was a mass exodus.
I asked about the situation.
A former executive said Elon is finding out he can't fully top senior talent.
They have lots of options and they won't put up with his antics.
They will struggle just to keep the lights on.
That assessment was universally shared by a half dozen current and former employees that spoke with Oliver Darcy on Thursday.
Now, you would imagine they would say that, right?
Everybody who leaves the company says about their old company, the place is going to fall down without me.
Darcy says Twitter management was in panic mode hours before the deadline passed.
People familiar with the matter said, explaining senior leaders were scrambling to convince talent to stay on at the company.
Now, while all of this is happening, Twitter is reaching new heights in users.
Twitter continues to have massive traffic.
They're gonna have to go out, they're gonna have to hire back some engineers.
What this is, is Twitter's most perilous moment in terms of how you actually rebuild Twitter.
There was gonna come a moment where everybody who's not ideologically aligned and enthusiastic about working for Trump was gonna have to leave.
That moment has just been accelerated.
So instead of sort of a slow walk, To this point, where a Twitter engineer that Musk didn't like was let go and a new one replaced him.
Instead of that, basically everybody who Musk would have fired anyway is leaving at the same time, which means they're short-staffed right now.
The question is going to be whether they can staff up quickly enough to prevent the ship from running into the iceberg.
That's essentially what's going on right now.
Jeff Siebert, a former head of consumer product at Twitter, said, according to the New York Times, that the company's situation was, quote, sad and disappointing, and that Mr. Musk's leadership had caused confusion for users, advertisers, and employees.
Of all the companies that don't need more drama, it's Twitter, said Siebert.
Now, the media are going nuts over this because the media spend literally all day on Twitter.
In which case, probably, you know, they also say learn to code.
Maybe they should learn to weld.
Maybe that's the thing that needs to happen right here.
But, you know, the notion that Twitter is about to go under forever, or that even if Twitter went under for 24 hours, you think that they wouldn't get it back up and running?
It'll become more buggy, it'll become worse for a moment, and then it'll get better.
Honestly, I think it will get better.
And the reason I think it will get better is because I do not actually, I actually believe that a lot of these tech companies are wildly overstaffed.
There's no way that Twitter needed 7,500 employees.
That is not a thing that was necessary in the first place.
And a lot of what's going on right now is also that members of the media, forget about the sort of chaos inside, members of the media are eager to see Twitter fail because they don't like Musk and they don't like what Musk has done to Twitter, which has opened the place up.
They're very angry.
In fact, they're rooting for Democratic lawmakers to restrict Twitter.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
The celebration in the media, you can sense it, over Twitter's troubles.
It really is about Musk, right?
They hate Musk.
They don't like the fact that Musk disagrees with them politically.
And so they are fully excited about the fact that 90% of the workforce over at Twitter is gone.
Now, that excitement is going to turn to sheer rage and tears if it turns out that Musk has sufficiently cleared out the place that he's able to hire back new employees.
Twitter keeps running, except on a fraction of its old budget, and suddenly it looks profitable.
Because it turns out you didn't need 7,500 employees over at Twitter.
Maybe you only need 700 employees over at Twitter.
Or 1,000 employees over at Twitter.
It saves you a lot on the other end.
It also means that a lot of these tech companies are going to look at their own employee base and go, wait a second, do we need this many people working for us?
We're already head into a tech recession.
Forget about whether there's a generalized recession.
Tech leads the way because so much of the extraordinary amount of money that was flowing through the economy was invested in tech that you created another tech bubble.
It's very reminiscent of like 1999-2000 when Pets.com was a massive, massive stock.
And you're seeing that now with Facebook.
I mean, Facebook's stock is down just meta.
Their stock is down unbelievably.
And they're laying off tens of thousands of workers.
And the same thing is happening even at Amazon, which is an actual profitable and solid company, one of the biggest companies in the country.
They're laying off tens of thousands of workers.
So if Musk is able to lay off this much of his workforce, you think other big tech companies aren't going to look at their own workforce and go, guys, we are way overstaffing and we got a lot of people learning to weld if that is the case, but a lot of people rooting against Moscow, obviously.
And that includes.
A bunch of people in the government.
The simple fact of the matter is that the members of the left would love to see Twitter go down.
They would love to see Musk go down.
This is why Democratic lawmakers are calling for an investigation of Elon Musk.
Now, I've yet to see them call for an investigation into, for example, Jeff Bezos, a billionaire, buying the Washington Post.
But it's really, really bad.
to allow Musk to basically run his company until you have Democrats like Ed Markey going after Elon Musk.
On Thursday, seven Democratic senators called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company had violated a consumer privacy agreement with the agency since Musk took it over.
The letter followed the resignations of Twitter security executives last week after Musk appeared to change some of the company's data security practices.
So now they're going to investigate him.
It's funny, they're perfectly happy, by the way, to work hand-in-glove with other big tech companies.
I mean, in fact, as we learned yesterday in a public hearing, Chris Wray, the head of the FBI, he says that the FBI might actually be gathering their actual private Facebook data without a warrant.
That apparently does not warrant any sort of congressional upset or investigation.
But must changing data practices internally at Twitter without government involvement, that's totally fine.
Here is Chris Wray admitting, basically, that Facebook is allowing backdoor data grabbing from the federal government.
Director Wray, is Facebook or any other social media company supplying private messages or data on American users that is not compelled by the government or the FBI?
Um, not compelled.
In other words, not in response to the legal process.
No warrant, no subpoena.
They're just supplying you information on their users.
Uh, I don't believe so.
But, uh, but I can't sit here and be sure of that as I, as I sit here.
Okay, so that's great.
That's great.
No congressional investigation there under the Democratic Senate.
But they are definitely going to go after Twitter.
Again, their hatred for Twitter knows no bounds.
A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment.
The agency previously said it was tracking recent developments on Twitter with deep concern.
Jeff Siebert, the former head of consumer product at Twitter and apparently full-time commentator for the New York Times.
He's like the only person who they talk to.
Called the company's situation sad and disappointing, of course.
So, those are his favorite words.
Meanwhile, I'll tell you where they're not having heartburn.
Where they're not having heartburn in the media is over the fact that CNN is preparing mass layoffs.
That apparently is totally fine.
So, mass layoffs at Twitter demonstrate that the company is on the ropes and might collapse.
Mass layoffs at CNN, that's just the way it goes over there.
According to Just the News, CNN chief executive Chris Licht announced this week Announced this week, layoffs at the news company as a cost-cutting measure amid the network's financial woes and unsuccessful foray into streaming.
Teams not essential to the network's core mission are likely to see their positions disappear, Lick said in a town hall with employees, according to the UK Daily Mail.
Lick did not detail which teams or how many jobs were on the chopping block.
The network's CEO has been tasked with cutting $100 million from the network's budget from superiors at Warner Bros.
Discovery, the outlet noted.
He previously claimed in June that layoffs were not on the table.
Well, so much for that.
Apparently, mass layoffs are now on the table, which is not a shock because CNN had sunk an awful lot of money into CNN+, which was a giant fail.
But this does not merit any sort of media freakout.
What merits a media freakout is an internal staffing issue over at Twitter that, by the way, is likely to be solved because most problems with staffing eventually can be solved with money and good job offers, which presumably is what they're doing over at Twitter headquarters today.
We'll find out whether Musk can pull a rabbit out of the hat this time.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into L.A.
doubling down on the stupid by electing a person who is not going to solve homelessness.
Plus, Arthur Brooks from the Harvard Kennedy School stops by to talk about happiness leading up to Thanksgiving.
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