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Dec. 5, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:20
The Twitter Files | Ep. 1623
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Left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi releases Twitter files demonstrating just how and why the company shut down the Hunter Biden story before Election 2020.
The media rushed to attack both Taibbi and Elon Musk.
And Donald Trump calls for a suspension of the Constitution.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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While Elon Musk had promised that he would open up the Twitter files upon taking over, and so he has.
So, late Friday night, Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist, he's a left winger, but he's sort of been alienated from the left wing by their wokeness.
He released a long thread of information regarding the suspension of the Hunter Biden story in the month leading up to the 2020 election.
You'll all remember that in October, the New York Post came up with a story about Hunter Biden's laptop that contained all sorts of Brilliant information as well as some rather relevant information about whether Hunter Biden may have been picking up bags of cash using his daddy's last name and whether or not he was actually conveying some of that money over to quote unquote, the big guy that was testified to by Tony Bobulinski, a person with whom Hunter Biden was actually doing business.
He suggested that Joe was benefiting from his son running around the entire globe, picking up bags of cash in China and in Ukraine and in other parts of the world.
So, that story was suspended, you'll remember, from Twitter.
If you posted the story, you were suspended from Twitter.
And there was a concerted effort by social media platforms to shut down the distribution of the story, as well as those who were attempting to distribute the story.
You'll also recall that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, he actually said that he was approached by the FBI and told, That there was going to be a wave of Russian disinformation.
And maybe this was the Russian disinformation.
So basically the social media bros just decided we are not going to allow this information to be disseminated.
Did it make a difference in the election?
It didn't make no difference in the election, obviously.
Would that have been enough to make Donald Trump the president?
Nobody really knows the answer to that question.
I, on my own, somewhat doubt that given the margin of popular vote victory in the particular states at issue in Arizona and Georgia and Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and all the rest.
But with that said, Does that mean that the election was rigged?
Well, rigged again is different than stolen.
Stolen is where somebody actually loads the ballot box filled with all sorts of false ballots or they take a bunch of good ballots and they throw them in the river or something.
Rigged means that all of the factors in the election are corruptly changed in order to prevent the election of one candidate or another.
Does this thing count under part of rigged?
It certainly would.
When you have social media making an overt effort to aid one candidate at the expense of another candidate, that obviously is part of rigging the game.
Okay, well, here's what Matt Taibbi actually showed.
And the big question here is twofold.
One, what is the relationship between Twitter and the Democratic Party?
And two, what is the relationship between Twitter, the Democratic Party, and the FBI?
And that last part is not demonstrated by the Twitter files, as we'll get to.
But the Twitter files do show an extraordinarily warm relationship between, let's say, middle management at Twitter and high-ranking members of the Democratic Party.
And that, of course, is no surprise.
And the middle management problem is a very serious problem at a lot of these big social media companies.
This is true also at Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg, for example, he has sort of a congenital like for free speech.
He gave an entire speech in 2018 at Georgetown University talking about free speech.
That was pretty good.
And then his middle management has decided that they're not going to allow free speech.
And it seems like the same thing sort of happened over at Twitter.
They'll have a founder of a company and then when the founder of the company gives up control to a bunch of people who are the middle management, the middle management just do what they want to do.
So here's what Matt Taibbi showed.
He was given the files by Elon Musk and then he put them out there.
He said, the Twitter files tell an incredible story from inside one of the world's largest and most influential social media platforms.
It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human built mechanism grown out of control of its designer.
Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people, quote, the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.
As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers.
Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
Slowly over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools.
Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speeches, well, first a little, then more often, then constantly.
Says Matt Taibbi, by 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine.
One executive would write to another, more to review from the Biden team, and the reply would come back handled.
So you'd get the Biden Democratic campaign basically calling up Twitter and saying, here's a bunch of tweets we don't like, take a look at them.
And then Twitter's middle management wouldn't even elevate that to sort of the Jack Dorsey level.
They would just say, okay, we handled it, it's gone.
Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party, says Matt Taibbi.
And this includes people including, for example, James Woods.
Both parties had access to these tools, says Taibbi.
For example, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.
However, the system was not balanced.
It was based on contact.
Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain open to the left, well, Democrats, than the right.
And of course, this is part of the quote-unquote rigged game.
We as a company, we deal, Daily Wire does, with people at Facebook, we deal with people at Twitter, but let us just say that the modes of communication are rather narrow for right-wingers.
However, if you are on the left, you have a lot of friends who work at places like Twitter, places like Facebook, and so if you have a complaint, it gets handled in short order.
As Tayibi says, the resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you're about to read.
However, it's also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.
Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be unsafe.
They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases like, for example, child pornography.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who ceded to at least pretend to care for the next 20 days.
This led to public policy executive Carolyn Strom sending out a polite WTF query.
Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms policy team, who had little or less control over moderation, and the safety and trust team.
The safety and trust team, as we'll see, is led by Yul Roth.
Yul Roth is a far-left winger who's very fond of shutting down information he doesn't like.
Strom's note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company's quote-unquote hack materials policy.
And you'll remember that this was largely driven by quote-unquote intelligence experts who had decided that they were going to suggest that this was all Russian disinformation based on literally nothing.
And people like John Brennan, the former head of the CIA, out there saying, well, this is probably Russian disinformation.
On the base of nothing, there's a letter signed by 100 intelligence experts put out there by the Biden campaign saying that the Hunter Biden laptop really was, it was obviously a Russian plant or something.
They based that on nothing.
Although, according to Matt Taibbi, several sources recalled hearing about a general warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there's no evidence of any government involvement in the laptop story.
In fact, that might have been the problem.
The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal policy and trust Vijaya Gaddy playing a key role.
You'll remember Vijaya Gaddy from such shows as Joe Rogan's, where he just turned her in knots, along with Tim Pool over their failure of content standards.
They just sort of randomly suspend people for no apparent reason.
And again, this is the middle management problem.
You're Jack Dorsey, you hire a bunch of people to handle the day-to-day, and those people who handle the day-to-day do a bad job and shield you from all of the rough decision-making.
They just freelanced it, is how one former employee characterized the decision.
Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn't going to hold, but no one had the guts to reverse it.
You can see the confusion in a lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gaddy and former trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth.
Coms official Trenton Kennedy writes, I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe.
By this point, everyone knew this was F'd, said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of continuing to err.
Yoel Roth wrote, for example, Though as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear, given the severe risks here and lessons of 2016, we're erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.
I mean, given the lessons of 2016.
Again, this was part of the propaganda effort on behalf of Democrats in the media, which is that 2016 was decided by Russian disinformation.
And so they were like, we are not going to allow even the, even the remotest whiff of Russian disinformation.
And so we're going to shut down the story, even if there is no basis for calling it Russian disinformation.
Vijaya Gaddy said, what is the warning that will come up?
And Yoel Roth said, when you click the link, you'll see the generic unsafe URL.
Not ideal, but that's the only thing that we have.
Ian Plunkett, another member of the team, said, Whatever we do in the comms, let's make it clear we're proactively but cautiously interpreting this through the lens of our hacked materials policy and allowing the link with a warning and significant reduction of spread.
Former Vice President of Global Commons Brandon Borman asked, Can we truthfully claim this is part of the policy?
To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seemed to advise staying the non-course because quote-unquote, caution is warranted.
So basically they'd been intimidated over at Twitter, the middle management, into believing that it is better to shut down the material than to allow the dissemination of the material.
The burden of proof was to prove that the material was not Russian disinformation.
The burden of proof was not on Twitter to provide any evidence whatsoever that the Hunter Biden story was actually Russian disinformation.
Well, Taibbi points out that there was actually one humorous exchange on day one when Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna reached out to Vijaya Gaddy to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the backlash re-speech.
Khanna was the only Democratic official Taibbi could find in the files who expressed concern.
Ro Khanna, by the way, I will say this, nice guy.
He's been on my show before.
We had a good discussion about minimum wage.
He apparently emerges as the hero of this story.
Gaddy replied quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware that Khanna was more worried about the Bill of Rights.
So I kind of kept saying, like, isn't this sort of a First Amendment violation if you are doing this at the behest of government agencies?
And Twitter's like, no, no, no, this is Twitter policy.
And Khanna keeps trying to say, is this a First Amendment issue?
He said, hope you're well, Vijaya.
This seems a violation of First Amendment principles.
If there's a hack of classified information or other information that could expose a serious war crime and the New York Times was to publish it, I think the New York Times should have that right.
A journalist should not be held accountable for the illegal actions of the source unless they actively aided the hack.
To restrict the distribution of that material, especially regarding a presidential candidate, seems not in keeping with the principles of New York Times versus Sullivan.
I say this is a total Biden partisan.
Convinced he didn't do anything wrong.
The story now has become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails.
It's become a bigger deal than it would have also been.
This is correct.
Ro Khanna was actually correct.
Within a day, the head of public policy, Lorne Culbertson, received a ghastly letter, report, from Carl Szabo of the Research Firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of Congress, 9 Republicans and 3 Democrats, from the House Judiciary Committee.
To Representative Judy Chu's office.
Netchoice let Twitter know a bloodbath awaited in upcoming Hill hearings with members saying that this whole thing was a tipping point.
Jabba reported to Twitter that some Hill figures were characterizing the laptop story as tech's Access Hollywood moment.
Jabba's letter contained chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers' attitudes.
They wanted more moderation.
And as for the Bill of Rights, quote unquote, it's not absolute.
Apparently the Democrats were complaining the company was inept, that they let conservatives muddy the water and made the Biden campaign look corrupt even though Biden was innocent, and they linked this to Hillary Clinton's email scandal.
They said that because she did nothing wrong and that ended up affecting the 2016 election, now we have to shut down the information.
So what exactly does all of this show?
Well, what it shows is a very, very warm relationship between Twitter's middle management and everybody in the Democratic Party, except for apparently Ro Khanna.
What it doesn't show is full-on First Amendment violations in the nature of the government itself intervening and telling Twitter that it had to turn off the spigot on First Amendment activity.
And that is not what the Twitter files show.
However, that is the dog that's not barking here.
Andy McCarthy has a very good piece in the New York Post pointing this out.
He says, stop looking for a smoking gun.
That's not how this game works.
Just as it did in 2016, the Democratic Party colluded during the 2020 presidential campaign with FBI leadership, its like-minded transnational progressives, and the loose-lipped community of current and former national security officials and the media.
The objective in 2020 was to try to drag a weak, deeply compromised Democratic candidate across the finish line.
The scheme worked in 2020, where it failed in 2016.
A big part of the difference was Democrats and their collaborators put 2020 emphasis on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
The result was the systematic suppression of the Biden family corruption scandal.
The staggering millions of dollars that are now known to have been poured into the Biden coffers from agents of such authoritarian, anti-American regimes as Russia and China and corrupt ones like Ukraine.
Eddie McCarthy says Joe Biden is in it up to his neck, although the media Democrat complex continues branding the scandal as the Hunter Biden probe to obscure Joe Biden's complicity.
He says, don't look for a smoking gun.
We're not going to see an FBI document that says, tell Twitter the Biden evidence is Russian disinformation.
When the new chief twit, Elon Musk, released the so-called Twitter files over the weekend, Matt Taibbi's consequent thread of reporting observed there's no specific evidence of a specific warning to social media that Biden information was sourced to Russia or hacked.
However, there is significant evidence of FBI collusion in the scheme.
Because the FBI doesn't actually have to issue a specific warning.
They just say, by the way, there's lots of Russian disinformation going around.
And then all the social media bros, they pick up on this and like, well, you know, we did get really, really bashed around for Russian disinformation last time around.
So all you really need is a bunch of former or current intelligence officials going public and saying, this could be Russian disinformation.
And all the social media tech bros pick up on this.
Did the FBI actually say the Biden evidence was Russian disinformation?
It came pretty close, says Andy McCarthy.
On Joe Rogan's podcast, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook restricted the Hunter Biden revolutions due to an FBI warning.
Just as there had been a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, Facebook should be on high alert that there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that, which is exactly what the FBI said.
And that's how the game is played.
It's will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest style stuff.
We don't actually have to have the FBI issue a specific Sort of warning about the Hunter Biden laptop story, all you really have to do is just have the FBI issue a generalized warning, and then you have people whispering that this is the manifestation of that theory.
So again, the collusion is not perfectly out in the open, which is the game.
So the reaction is half the story here.
So Elon Musk says that liberal journalists should be looking in the mirror.
The reason that they should be looking in the mirror is because many, many, many liberal journalists immediately came out and decided that the problem here is Matt Taibbi.
Matt Taibbi should not have distributed this material.
These are the journalism experts, guys.
These are big, big, big journalists, the journalism people.
So for example, Ben Collins, who you'll remember from such things as the Colorado nightclub shooting is the fault of all of the right-wingers until it turns out that the guy who did it actually claims that he is a gender non-binary person.
Ben Collins of NBC News, who is a propagandist extraordinaire.
He put out a tweet saying, imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world.
Humiliating bleep.
It's humiliating for Matt Taibbi to actually release this information.
These are journalists.
These are the people who want you to have all of the information, except for you.
You shouldn't.
They should be the ones who filter the information.
And then he tweeted out, speak truth to power.
But then he put a bunch of asterisks and he says, what this really means is it tweets selective leaks from the richest man in the world for power.
So basically Matt Taibbi was was being used by Elon Musk.
Now, are we better off having this information?
Sure, we are.
But not according to Ben Collins.
It's very good to suppress information.
You are too stupid to understand the information.
It would be bad for you to understand the information.
Chris Hayes of MSNBC tweeted, watching some of the most famous, most powerful and richest men red pill themselves into disaster.
Pretty wild.
Most powerful and richest.
Red pill themselves in disaster pretty well.
Mehdi Hassan, who used to work for Al Jazeera, so he knows a fair bit about taking money from rich oligarchs.
He put out a tweet saying, imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world's richest man on a Friday night in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives and then pretending you're speaking truth to power.
Well, maybe you guys are the power.
Maybe when it comes to the media infrastructure, you guys are the power.
Maybe the former power or the heads of Twitter and the management level who are shutting down information.
And then Manny Hassan can't stop himself.
He continues, oh, and doing it at the end of the same week, the richest man alive unbalanced, unbanned a bunch of neo-Nazis on this website.
But sure, the laptop, the laptop, man, the distraction tactics from these folks is astonishing.
They have to distract because that's all they have.
Because again, they can't acknowledge that this story is a big story.
It is, in fact, a big story when Twitter is working with the Democratic Party in order to shut down major stories damaging their candidate just before an election at the vague behest of the FBI.
That's a pretty massive story and a pretty serious First Amendment violation, at least in spirit, if not in actual practice.
But again, these are the journalism-ing experts.
They're not enemies of you.
They want you to have the information, but the information that they want you to have is the information that you should get.
If Jason Schreier from Bloomberg, quote, this thread should be taught in journalism school as evidence of the importance of editors.
Because otherwise, you know, the editors, they're the ones who make sure you don't get the information.
Wajahat Ali, world's worst columnist, he says, Elon Musk is the richest white nationalist on earth.
Did you know he's a white nationalist, Elon Musk?
I didn't know that.
But Wajahat Ali knows that because he's a moron.
I don't know.
Is it worth it to work for Al Jazeera, Wajahat?
White nationalist on earth.
Elon Musk is the richest white nationalist on earth.
Did you know he's a white nationalist, Elon Musk?
I didn't know that.
But Wajahat Ali knows that because he's a moron.
Well, he'll eat well for the rest of his life, I guess.
But is it worth it, says Wajahat Ali?
I don't know, is it worth it to work for Al Jazeera, Wajahat?
I don't know.
Wesley Lowry, who is the wildly partisan reporter formerly of the Washington Post, said an article really would have worked better I mean, just, uh, wow.
That's, uh, that's great, Wesley.
Thank you.
And you have John Neffel from the, um, from the Media Matters for America crew.
He says, the Taibbi thread is a great example of overwriting when you don't have the goods, but you don't want to admit you're just doing PR for the world's richest person.
Or Hannah Geist from the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, tweeting out something similar.
I mean, all of the left-wingers, blue checks, were out there doing this routine.
So, Hannah Geist tweeted out, I just have a question.
Everyone writing for the Washington Post is working for Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world.
on a site that they own and are desperate to drive traffic to.
I just have a question.
Everyone writing for the Washington Post is working for Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world.
Turns out the owners of the New York Times, pretty rich.
But again, these journalism experts, they don't want...
This is the whole point that they're proving the point.
The point is that the journalism mechanisms are broken and they are essentially run by Democratic partisan hacks and social media is run by similarly minded Democratic partisan hacks and so they can shut down the free flow of information.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So Elon Musk responds to all of this.
He says that these liberal journalists who are slamming Matt Taibbi, they should be looking in the mirror because I thought that they were all about making sure that you had all the information you needed.
A lot of liberal news reporters came out and really slammed Matt Taibbi, which was really shocking.
What was your response to that?
Well, I think those people should be looking in the mirror and wondering why they were deceptive.
Why did they deceive the American public?
And instead of trying to redirect blame to Matt Taibbi, they should be accepting some responsibility themselves for not being truthful to the American public.
Well, yeah, but they're not going to do that, of course.
By the way, it is worth noting that many of the former Twitter people, many of the former tweets before Elon Musk took over and fired pretty much everybody, many of them just say this sort of stuff out loud, that they actually shut down information they don't like.
So, for example, Yoel Roth, who's one of the worst actors here, Vijay Gady is one of them and Yoel Roth is another of them.
Yoel Roth basically said the reason that we shut down Donald Trump's account is because moderators were experiencing all sorts of trauma.
So, I mean, like people were mean to them on Twitter and sending them mean DMs.
You shut down the account of the current.
I mean, at that time, Donald Trump was the president of the United States, the most powerful person on Earth.
You shut down his account because your moderators were having mean tweets sent to them.
Here is y'all Roth.
Donald Trump.
That one I don't think was a mistake.
January 6th.
So it starts on the 6th, but it also starts prior to that.
The events of the 6th happen.
And if you talk to content moderators who worked on January 6th, myself included, the word that nearly everybody uses is trauma.
We experienced those events, not some of us as Americans, but not just as Americans or as citizens, but as people working on sort of how to prevent harm on the internet.
How to prevent harm on the internet.
Trauma.
You, you whiners.
I mean, honest to God, you whiners.
It's amazing.
If you're gonna talk about people who've been targeted on Twitter before, I'm at the top of that list, okay?
In 2015, 2016, I was hit by a non-stop wave of garbage on Twitter.
By the way, I've been hit by like a non-stop wave in the last couple of weeks on Twitter because of Kanye West deciding for some reason that I am his worst enemy or something.
So I've been hit by like a nonstop wave of this garbage.
And then I say that Kanye West should not be banned from Twitter, even though he's personally targeting me on Twitter.
Why?
Well, because as it turns out, being insulted on Twitter is not the equivalent of somebody doing you violence.
That's not how any of this works.
And if you're a moderator, it is literally your job to wade through the sewage.
I mean, this is the equivalent of your garbage man whose job it is to pick up your garbage and throw it into the giant truck being like, man, I can't be near this garbage.
It really smells like, like we know this is literally your job.
You're a moderator experiencing trauma.
Again, that is not the standard.
The standard is not whether your moderators are insulted, whether your purple haired interns with a neck tattoo are very insulted by the fact that there are people on Twitter who are mean to them and give them the feels.
I don't like those people.
I think those people are jerks.
Also, your moderator is what you're paid for.
You don't ban the President of the United States based on that.
But they did.
And notice the appeal to the feelings here is really amazing.
You're the head of safety and moderation at one of the biggest social media platforms in the history of mankind.
And because you got the feels, you got the sads, because people were mean to you on the tweeters, now you have to ban accounts?
This is how it was run?
Are you worried about these Twitter files coming out?
What was that experience like having Kellyanne, who's always in control of herself, siccing this mega trolls on you?
It's terrifying.
All of a sudden we apply a misinformation label to Donald Trump's account and I'm on the cover of the New York Post.
And that is a deeply terrifying experience.
And I say this from a position of Unquestioned privilege as a cis white male.
Like, the internet is much scarier and much worse for lots of other people who aren't me, but it was pretty f***ing scary for a long time.
Good lord, this dude.
Good lord.
As a cis white male.
First of all, anybody who uses that phrase should be unemployable for the rest of their life.
Cis white male.
As a cis white male.
I mean, it was scary for me.
Imagine how it was for all of the other people.
First of all, there are a lot of people who are cis white males, as you say, who are targeted online.
And then it turns out that a lot of people targeting those people are not cis white males.
Like, what is this stupid game that we have to play?
But again, this is the game.
A bunch of woke lefties like Yoel Roth deciding who gets to speak and how.
I pointed out last week that since Elon Musk took over, I personally on my Twitter account have gained at this point 800,000 followers in like three weeks.
The reason for that is suppression.
There's no other rationale for this because of people like Yoel Roth, who's very insulted by the fact that people have other opinions.
Yoel Roth defended, by the way, banning the Babylon Bee for the great crime of noticing that Rachel Levine, who is the Undersecretary of Health and Human Services, is a dude.
And Yoel Roth is like, we have to ban the Babylon Bee.
I mean, after all, it's mean and nasty and tells jokes I don't like.
Okay, Babylon B, which is what got him to buy the thing, I think.
That's the one which was not particularly funny.
The Babylon B's man of the year is Rachel Levine.
Twitter's written policies prohibit misgendering.
Full stop.
And the Babylon B, in the name of satire, misgendered Admiral Rachel Levine.
You know, we landed on the side of enforcing our rules as written.
Wow, I mean, well, you landed on the side when they threatened it.
This sort of garbage is the reason why Elon Musk is releasing all of the information.
This is the reason and the journalists are mad about it.
They're upset about it and all the rest.
OK, so.
This prompted Donald Trump to sound off as it should.
It's amazing how often the left forces people into sympathy with the former president of the United States.
This was the great theme of his presidency and his campaign in 2015, 2016, when people seem to be attacking Trump unfairly in many ways.
A lot of Americans said this is unfair and they sided with Trump.
And then when he was president, he was with the Russian collusion stuff.
A lot of people like this seems unfair and they sided with Trump.
And now all of these revelations are coming out that the Twitter middle management was basically dominated by Democrats who were working hand in glove with the Joe Biden campaign.
At the sort of vague behest of governmental powers like the FBI.
And they're sympathetic to Trump.
And here's the thing about President Trump.
He has the unique gift of turning victory into defeat because I don't understand what he is thinking here.
I understand his feeling.
I get it.
His feeling that he was jobbed in the 2020 election by a media that was designated as his enemy.
I don't think that he's wrong about that.
I think that the media intervened in unique, extraordinary ways in the election of 2020, particularly as a reaction to 2016.
They didn't want Trump to win.
They thought he was definitely going to lose.
He didn't lose.
And then they all decided they were just going to become open partisan hacks on behalf of his opponents, up to and including pressuring social media networks to shut down the dissemination of information, even if it meant suppressing fellow journalists at the New York Post.
So I understand Trump's outrage.
I agree with Trump's outrage.
I even agree that the Democratic Party and members of the left-wing media have no problem with subverting the Constitution itself.
They don't say so openly.
What they like to do is instead gut the Constitution, then wear around its face as a mask.
This is their favorite thing, is the Hannibal Lecter Constitution.
And they like to take all of the content of the Constitution, rip it out, and then just wear around the Constitution saying, well, at least we still stand for the... This is like Joe Biden saying, it's unconstitutional for me to abolish student loan debt, and then him just doing it.
Or Barack Obama saying, I don't have the power to actually just relieve immigration law when it comes to the Dreamers, and then just doing it.
Or I have a pen and a phone.
Or we can get rid of the Electoral College.
Or let's abolish the Senate.
Or Stacey Abrams is the actual governor of Georgia.
All the institutions, they gut them, and then they pretend they haven't gotten them.
So that's the game.
They tend to be a little more subtle about how exactly they gut the Constitution.
They pretend that the Constitution, for example, doesn't protect religious freedom to the extent necessary where a Christian baker does not have to bake a transgender cake or something.
They'll say that the Constitution doesn't protect that guy.
The left is perfectly willing to put aside the Constitution, ignore the Constitution, hate the Constitution.
Some of them are pretty open about this.
But generally, they tend to be a little bit more subtle.
I get all of that.
That still does not explain why Donald Trump does things like he did.
So, December 3rd, right?
This is Saturday, right?
So the story has emerged on Friday night.
And Donald Trump, then, because he is strategy-free, because he has the unique gift of turning victory into defeat, Donald Trump tweets out on Truth Social, quote, So, with the revelation of massive and widespread fraud and deception in working closely with big tech companies, the DNC, and the Democratic Party, do you throw the presidential election results of 2020 out and declare the rightful winner?
Or do you have a new election?
A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.
Our great founders did not want and would not condone false and fraudulent elections.
Okay, so here's the thing.
That last sentence is true.
Our founders did not want and would not condone false and fraudulent elections.
Also, the election process was certified.
Votes were cast.
Those votes were not fraudulent.
Again, all of the efforts to prove that there was massive, widespread, hundreds of thousands of votes fraud in the 2020 election, Donald Trump failed to prove all of that in court.
He didn't even allege that in court, by the way.
But so I understand the passion.
I understand his outrage when he says that we have the capacity to throw the results of the election out and declare him the rightful winner.
Or hold a new election.
And we get to suspend the Constitution.
All he's doing is granting to his opponents their premise about him, which is that he actually wants to suspend the Constitution.
That he doesn't like the Constitution, that he hates the Constitution, that he wants to rip it up, that he's a fascist, that he's an authoritarian.
And what he's really doing is granting the media a get-out-of-jail-free card, because all the questions this weekend, and for the foreseeable future, should have been about why the media was complicit in the silencing of members of its own journalistic body.
And members of the fourth estate, like why is it that the media were perfectly willing to subjugate their own press interests on behalf of Democratic Party interests?
That's what every question was going to be about.
And you know what Donald Trump could have done here?
What Donald Trump could have done is he could have said, so with the revelation of massive deception and working closely with big tech companies, the DNC and the Democratic Party, shouldn't you give me another shot in a clear, fairly run election?
I mean, he's running for the nomination right now.
Gary declared.
Couldn't he be saying, the predicate of me running in 2024 is to correct the error, failure, and sin of 2020.
People voted on a false basis.
Give me another shot.
And I will go in there.
And I will make sure that, for example, the FBI is restructured so that they don't intervene in elections in this way as they did in 2016 and in 2020.
They won't do that anymore.
Right?
Couldn't he do that?
But he's not doing that.
Instead, because he doesn't think through what comes out of his fingers, because there is no brain-finger barrier for the president, the former president of the United States, instead he tweets this out.
And so what does that allow?
That allows for the Democrats to swivel and hit him and hit other Republicans.
And so the story this weekend, because Donald Trump stepped directly on the rake, The story this weekend was not about Twitter.
The story was not about the despicable collusion between Big Tech and the Democratic Party and the FBI.
That was not the story.
The story this weekend was about whatever dumb crap Trump decided to put on Truth Social.
That is a strategic error.
Even if you are sympathetic to him, as I am, I'm sympathetic to what happened to him in the last month of the election.
Frankly, I'm sympathetic to him for the last year of the election.
In the last year of the election, it was just lies upon lies upon lies.
Ranging from the lies of Black Lives Matter, that America was systemically racist, driven by the white supremacy of Trump, to the lies about COVID, that Donald Trump was uniquely badly handling COVID while everybody else around the world was handling it absolutely wonderfully.
Donald Trump was the real disaster.
I'm very sympathetic to all of that.
What I'm not sympathetic to is bad strategy.
What the president is doing right here, creating an entire news cycle on behalf of his political opponents.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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So again, as I say, the story today should be about Twitter and its suppression of information leading up to the 2020 election.
Instead, the media were handed a gift on a platter of President Trump saying that we should cancel the Constitution, hold the new election, make him president or something.
None of those things are available in the Constitution.
The proper solution for this would be theoretically impeachment of the current president, which is not going to happen, or a new election to be held at its allotted time because this election was legally held.
Again, not like a lot of things about what happened in the last election, how it went, the suppression of stories leading up to it.
I agree with a lot of that.
The election's been held.
Biden's the president.
Now Trump is running again.
So now would be a good time for him to use this as the basis for his relaunch, but he's not doing that.
Instead, he's out there fuming on Truth Social about how we need to overthrow the Constitution, which allows for this kind of crap.
So the entire weekend was now dominated by news anchors asking random Republican politicians what they think of Donald Trump wanting to cancel the Constitution.
The art of politics, folks, is making it very difficult to vote for your opponent and making it very easy to vote for you.
The problem for Donald Trump is that he makes it very, very difficult to vote for his opponents.
It makes it very, very difficult for people to vote for him or to support him because he says dumb crap.
And when he says that sort of stuff, it puts people in a bad position, including sitting Republican Congress people who are now forced into the position of having to answer questions as to whether they support the guy who says we should cancel the Constitution and just had dinner with Nick Fuentes, which is exactly what the gankers want.
This is what the media want.
Do not feed, don't feed the trolls.
The media are the trolls.
Stop giving them what they want.
But that's what they wanted, and that's what they got.
So here's Margaret Brennan on CBS grilling Representative Mike Turner on Trump's statements about the Constitution.
A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.
Should the standard bearer for the Republican Party, the frontrunner for the nomination for the presidency for your party in 2024, say this?
Well, you know, I vehemently disagree with the statement that Trump has made.
Trump has made, you know, a thousand statements in which I disagree.
There is a political process that has to go forward before anybody... Constitutional conservatives are pretty clear about where they value the Constitution.
Right, exactly.
Is there any scenario with suspending the Constitution?
You do get to pick the questions, but I do get to pick my answer.
I know, I'm trying to get you to answer the question I'm asking.
There is a political process that has to go forward before anybody's a frontrunner or anybody is even the candidate.
I mean, look how eager Margaret Brennan is.
His answer doesn't matter.
Look how eager Margaret Brennan is.
The question here is the media.
The media are loving this.
They're loving it.
Don't feed the media.
Same thing from Jake Tapper at CNN.
He's questioning Representative Mike Lawler from New York on Trump's Constitution statement.
All these Congress people were booked in order to talk about what the future Republican agenda is going to be come January.
And instead, they get questions about Donald Trump and whether he wants to overthrow the Constitution, which again, he doesn't have the power to do.
He wouldn't have the power to do even if he were the president.
He certainly doesn't have the power to recall the election.
So it's just foolish.
What exactly was the tactic?
There is no tactic.
And all the people who think it's 40 underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry hippos, it ain't.
It ain't.
Here's Jake Tapper grilling a Republican congressperson, making Republicans look bad again.
What is your reaction to Donald Trump calling for the termination of the U.S.
Constitution?
Well, obviously I don't support that.
The Constitution is set for a reason, to protect the rights of every American.
And so, I certainly don't endorse that language or that sentiment.
I think the question for everyone is how we move forward.
You know, I ran for Congress to address the challenges that we're facing Uh, and be forward looking.
Uh, frankly, I think people are tired of looking backwards.
I think people are tired.
Okay, so again, this is like, then the media are doing what they want to do here.
ABC's George Stephanopoulos, again, spent the weekend grilling Republican Congress people who were booked, not to talk about this, on this.
So when those Republican Congress people saw Trump's truth socially, they must have been like, oh God, now I have to deal with this on the Sunday shows.
Here's George Stephanopoulos grilling Representative Dave Joyce from Indiana on Trump's statements about the Constitution.
Can you support a candidate in 2024 who's for suspending the Constitution?
Well, again, it's early.
I think there's going to be a lot of people in the primary.
I think at the end of the day, whoever the Republicans end to pick, I'll fall in behind because that's... Even if it's Donald Trump and he's called for suspending the Constitution?
Well, again, I think it's going to be a big field.
I don't think Donald Trump's going to clear out the field like he did in the 60s.
That's not what I'm asking.
I'm asking you, if he's the nominee, will you support him?
Okay, so again, this is the game they want to play.
This is the game they want to play.
Okay, now again, the game that they want to play is, will you preemptively disavow a person who may be quite likely to win the nomination of your party based on comments that he's giving today?
This is the game the media would love to play, because again, the whole game here is For the media, they want Trump to be nominated, because then they want Trump to run against Joe Biden, and they think that Trump will lose again.
They might be wrong.
Maybe Trump bucks all odds, and that's not what happens.
But that is what they want, and they want to make people uncomfortable.
So don't give them that.
Now, the hypocrisy is absolutely galling.
I will say that.
The hypocrisy for the Democrats on this sort of stuff, it does stick in my craw, because them claiming that they love the Constitution is just such vomitricious nonsense.
It's nausea-inducing.
Joe Biden doesn't give a bleep about the Constitution.
He doesn't care.
This is a guy who routinely disregards the Constitution over and over, whether it's an OSHA VAX mandate or whether it is relieving student loan debt.
This is a president who just does whatever he wants and then pretends that he cares about the Constitution.
But all of this allows him to play this game.
So Joe Biden over the weekend slammed President Trump.
He put out a statement.
Saying the American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country.
The Constitution brings the American people together, regardless of party, and elected leaders swear to uphold it.
It's the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights.
Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned.
You cannot only love America when you win.
Again, this sort of language from Joe Biden is so galling because Democrats Very often, only love America when they win.
Look at the polling data.
When Democrats are president, Democrats love America.
When Republicans are president, Democrats are very wishy-washy on the United States.
But don't feed them.
Don't give them that.
One of the things that is most galling about this, honestly, is that again, Democrats do not If Republicans ran on the Constitution, they would win.
Handing that baton to the other side because you are miffed over what happened, correctly miffed over what happened in 2020, is an act of foolishness that allows Democrats to escape the consequences of their own malaction.
It's very, very frustrating.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be taking your phone calls.
Plus, we will be getting into the Democrats recapitulating their 2024 primary schedule, lining it up for maybe Kamala Harris.
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