Elon Musk takes on Anthony Fauci to the consternation of the White House, FTX scamster Sam Bankman-Fried is arrested, and the Biden administration announces a massive celebration of same-sex marriage at the White House.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Well, the big news of the morning is that FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried has now been arrested in the Bahamas.
There are some people who suspected that he actually would not be arrested because he gave tens of millions of dollars to Democrats in the last election cycle.
But the actual strategy here apparently is he can give tens of millions of dollars to the Democrats in the last election cycle.
After the election, we will arrest him, as it turns out.
According to the New York Times, Sam Bankman Freed, the disgraced founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday after U.S.
prosecutors filed criminal charges.
Quote, SBF's arrest followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition, the government of the Bahamas said in a statement.
The arrest was the latest stunning development in one of the most dramatic falls from grace in recent corporate history.
Bankman Freed was scheduled to testify in Congress on Tuesday about the collapse of FTX, which was one of the most powerful firms in the emerging crypto industry until it imploded virtually overnight last month after a run on deposits exposed an $8 billion hole in its accounts.
Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York confirmed that Bankman Freed had been charged and said in an indictment that it would be unsealed on Tuesday.
Separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a statement it had authorized charges relating to Mr. Bankman Freed's violations of our securities laws.
Now, the criminal charges against Bankman Freed included wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering, said one person with knowledge of the matter.
Hilariously, there was apparently a WhatsApp group chat that included Sam Bankman Freed and his girlfriend, who ran Alameda Capital, which was the hedge fund connected to FTX, and it was called wire fraud, which is like...
I'm sorry, that's like the person whose password on their computer is still password.
I wasn't committing wire fraud.
I just had a group that was called Wire Fraud where we talked about committing wire fraud.
Yeah, that's awkward, guys.
If you're gonna commit the criminal activity, you probably Should not actually label your group chats by the name of the criminal charge.
Bankman Freed was the only person charged in the indictment.
He was taken into custody by the Bahamian authorities, according to a person.
He was arrested shortly after 6 p.m.
at his apartment complex in the Albany Resort in the Bahamas, according to a statement from Bahamian police.
It was cooperative during the arrest.
So we're going to find out more today on what exactly the charges are.
But to recap this particular story, for those who missed it, FTX was the second largest crypto exchange in the world.
It was basically built on sand.
It did a good job of allowing people to exchange, buy and sell crypto, but people were not taking their money out of crypto and then putting it in their crypto wallets.
They're just leaving it in the exchange.
They're letting it sit there on the exchange.
And then Sam Bankman Freed was apparently taking that money and handing it over to Alameda Capital, which was this associated hedge fund.
Alameda Capital was using that money to buy up FTT, which was the cryptocurrency issued by FTX.
So they were artificially inflating the price of FTT, and then Sam Bankman-Fried and company were taking their shares of FTT, this cryptocurrency, and they were borrowing against those in terms of real money.
So it looks like money laundering.
It looks like embezzlement.
And then he was going around and doing like full New York Times deal book seminars with folks afterward.
It's just amazing, the gall of Sam Bankman-Fried.
It is also amazing that regulators had nothing to say about this until it all collapsed overnight.
When the largest cryptocurrency exchange, which owned a share, a large share of the second largest cryptocurrency exchange, basically spurred a run on the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, in which everybody said, I want my money out.
And Sam Bankman-Fried was like, well, your money isn't here anymore.
Oopsie.
And it turns out that billions and billions of dollars went missing.
So Sam Bankman-Fried is going to face criminal charges in the United States.
Meanwhile, in other tech news, Elon Musk continues to roll out more and more information about how Twitter was run.
We now have a fifth part of the exposure of old Twitter.
Musk has handed it over to my friend, Barry Weiss.
Barry is, I think it's fair to say, a political centrist.
She's certainly no conservative, despite the best attempts of the media to paint her as such.
Barry has more details on Donald Trump's banning from Twitter.
Again, this is highly relevant because, as we discussed yesterday, the big tech companies have largely been run by people of the left, and they've been using technology as a way to obscure the biases that they've been implementing in policy.
So Barry Weiss has an entire thread that she put out yesterday talking about exactly how Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, and the answer is it's really, really ugly.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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So here's what Barry White says, quote, On the morning of January 8th, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweeted twice, First, he tweeted, the 75,000 great American patriots who voted for me, America first, and make America great again, will have a giant voice longing to the future.
They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form.
And then he tweeted again about an hour later, to all those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th.
Barry White says, for years, Twitter had resisted calls of both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate.
They said, for example, quote, our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly.
This is in 2019.
Twitter said that its aim was, quote, to protect the public's right to hear from their leaders and told them to account.
But after January 6th.
Pressure grew both inside and outside of Twitter to ban Trump.
There were dissenters inside of Twitter.
In fact, one of the dissenters was from China and said, quote, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation, but voices like that one appeared to have been a distinct minority within the company.
Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset Trump hadn't been banned earlier.
After January 6th, says Barry Weiss, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump.
There's a lot of employee advocacy happening, said one Twitter employee.
And again, there's this inside-outside game that gets played at a lot of corporations these days, where you have Left-leaning corporate executives who still feel bound by corporate dictates and by the dictates of the market, but they get pressure from the bottom, from their employees.
And they say, well, we have to please our employees.
The purple haired intern with seven earrings and nose ring and a face tattoo.
We have to, we have to make sure that that person is very pleased with us.
Here's the way a normal company works.
If my employees here at Daily Wire decided that they did not like the editorial direction of the company, and decided that they were going to be very angry and yell about it, well, they have two choices.
They can either come to work and do their work, or they can leave.
There's no third choice where they get to run the editorial direction of the company.
That's not how any of this works.
But apparently, at a lot of these big tech companies, they decided, and this is because, again, they sympathize with their own employees, that they use the whining of their employees as an excuse to do what they wanted to do in the first place, which is to ban Trump.
One staffer said, we have to do the right thing and ban this account.
Quote, it's pretty obvious he's going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules.
In the early afternoon of January 8th, Barry Weiss reveals, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump's ban.
We must examine Twitter's complicity in what President-elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.
Now again, if my employees decided that they were going to write a letter, like an open letter, and sign it, with their names, to the New York Times, criticizing the editorial policy of this company, the door is right there.
They can leave at any time they choose.
But that's not what Jack Dorsey on Twitter did.
The Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded Trump had not violated Twitter's policies.
Quote, I think we'd have a hard time saying this is incitement, wrote one staffer.
It's pretty clear he's saying the American patriots are the ones who voted for him, not the terrorists.
We can call them that, right?
From Wednesday.
Another staffer agreed.
Quote, don't see the incitement angle here.
A Twitter policy official named Anika Navarroli said, I'm not seeing clear or coded incitement in the Donald J. Trump tweet.
I'll respond in the elections channel and say our team has assessed and found no violations for the DJT one.
And then she did that.
She says, safety has assessed the tweet above and determined there is no violation of our policies at this time.
Later, Navarroli would testify to the House January 6th Committee, Then, Twitter's safety team decided that Trump's tweet is also not in violation.
His later tweet was not in violation.
They said it's a clear no-vio.
into what I saw occurring, people were going to die.
Then, Twitter's safety team decided that Trump's tweet is also not in violation.
His later tweet was not in violation.
They said it's a clear no-bio.
It's just to say he's not attending the inauguration.
Barry White says to understand Twitter's decision to ban Trump, we must consider how Twitter deals with other heads of state and political leaders, including in Iran, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
So for example, in June 2018, Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted, quote, Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated.
It is possible and it will happen.
Twitter did not delete the tweet and they didn't ban the Ayatollah.
In October 2020, the former Malaysian prime minister said it was a right for Muslims to kill millions of French people.
Twitter deleted his tweet for glorifying violence, but he remained on the platform.
Mohammed Buhari, the president of Nigeria, incited violence against pro-Biafra groups.
In October 2021, Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region.
Twitter deleted that tweet, but they didn't ban Buhari.
In October 2021, Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region.
Twitter allowed the tweet to remain up and didn't ban the Prime Minister.
In early February 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government threatened to arrest Twitter employees in India and to incarcerate them for up to seven years after they restored hundreds of accounts that had been critical of him and Twitter didn't ban Modi.
But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers said Trump had not incited violence, not even in a coded way.
Less than 90 minutes after Twitter employees had determined that Trump's tweets were not in violation of Twitter policy, Vijaya Gaddy, Twitter's head of legal policy and trust, asked whether it could, in fact, be coded incitement to further violence.
A few minutes later, Twitter employees on the scaled enforcement team suggested Trump's tweet may have violated Twitter's glorification of violence policy if you interpreted the phrase American patriots preferred the rioters.
And then things escalated from there.
Members of that same safety and trust team came to, quote, view him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence and deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler.
And on that basis and on the totality of his tweets, he should be deplatformed.
So Donald Trump tweeted out just to get this straight.
That the American Patriots would not be denied and that he wouldn't be going to the inauguration.
And this made him comparable to Hitler, according to Twitter employees.
And so he had to be banned on that basis.
Two hours after that, Twitter executives hosted a 30-minute all-staff meeting.
Jack Dorsey and Vijay Gady answered staff questions as to why Trump had not yet been banned.
But some employees got angrier.
Joel Roth, who again is one of the bad guys in this whole story, relayed to a colleague, quote, multiple tweets, that'd be Twitter employees, have quoted the banality of evil, suggesting the people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders.
So in other words, allowing Donald Trump to remain on the platform, that is like Nazis following orders.
Dorsey requested simpler language to explain why Trump would be suspended, and Roth wrote, God help us, this makes me think he wants to share it publicly.
Oh, you mean you should have to share publicly why you were banning the sitting president of the United States from Twitter?
And Yulroth is mad about this?
Interesting stuff.
One hour later, Twitter announced Trump's permanent suspension due to the risk of further incitement of violence.
Many at Twitter were ecstatic and congratulatory.
By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle medical misinformation as soon as possible, because this is the way that it works.
If you feed the alligator, the alligator continues to eat.
And so they immediately decided, who can we go after next?
Who can we ban next?
For the longest time, Twitter's stance was that we aren't the arbiter of truth toward another employee, which I respected, but never gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
And that's what this is all about.
It's about giving the left warm, fuzzy feelings.
Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal, who would later succeed Dorsey as CEO, told head of security Mudge Zacco, who of course later would leave and become a whistleblower, suggesting that the company had become not an engineering company for free speech, but instead had essentially become a left-wing outlet that ignored security concerns.
Agarwal said, quote, I think a few of us should brainstorm the ripple effects of Trump's ban, and Agarwal added, centralized content moderation, in my opinion, has reached a breaking point now.
Again, internationally, there are a lot of people who are very critical of the banning of Trump.
Ultimately, says Barry Weiss, the concerns about Twitter's efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden's laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren't about the past choices of executives in a social media company.
They're about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy, which, of course, is exactly the point.
So Elon Musk parceling out this information obviously is part of a broader attempt by Elon Musk to broaden the Overton window and allow there to be more speech on vital topics.
As part of that effort, by the way, Elon Musk just disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.
The Trust and Safety Council was this Orwellian body that essentially decided who could stay and who could not stay on the basis of vague, undefined standards like trust and safety.
What constituted trust and safety?
Well, apparently it was if Yoel Roth didn't like you or Vijaya Gady was uncomfortable with you.
So Elon Musk put out a letter to the Trust and Safety Council members and quote, As Twitter moves into a new phase, we are re-evaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this. Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before. We will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal. We will also continue to explore opportunities to provide focused and timely input into our work, whether through bilateral or small group meetings.
Your regional points of contact will remain the best people to contact to escalate concerns.
Please let us know if you need reconnecting.
And so they have now disbanded the Trust and Safety Council, which of course is the right move.
Musk is moving fast and breaking things.
He has fired 80% of Twitter's employee base, which dramatically lowers their cost.
The traffic and engagement on Twitter is way up.
It should be because it's a much more interesting place now because you're not getting the curated views of Yoel Roth on Twitter.
Instead, you're actually being able to openly express your views on matters of public concern.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter's new head of trust and safety said the platform is emphasizing moving swiftly to address problematic content, even if it means figuring out some specifics later.
Ella Irwin, who joined Twitter in June, said for now, I think we're biasing toward moving quickly and figuring out the details in some of these areas afterward.
Now, some people are accusing Musk of being arbitrary about this, but the whole point is that Twitter was arbitrary before.
The difference is that Musk is actually taking credit for the decision.
So if Musk decides that he's going to ban Ye from Twitter, for example, a decision with which I disagree, despite the fact that Ye is a raging anti-Semite and also a mentally ill person.
If Elon Musk is going to do that, then Elon Musk is actually taking the hit for that, which is the way that it's supposed to work.
The head of the company always is where the buck stops, so Musk is at least doing that.
When Jack Dorsey was running the place, he was off vacationing in malaria-ridden caves.
And meanwhile, his middle management, Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gaddy, were deciding who would get banned and then pretending it was the algorithm that was doing all of this.
So again, the new management at Twitter is changing the way that big tech sees itself.
And that's going to make for a major change in Silicon Valley.
So much of Silicon Valley is now run by the diversity, equity, and inclusion hires.
In the same way that the administrative diversity hires over at the major universities have completely skewed how our university system works.
It used to be about knowledge.
It used to be about reason.
It used to be about education.
And now it's mostly about avoiding HR problems by feeding the diversity, equity, inclusion beast, which is why the administrative costs at universities have risen dramatically.
And while the number of teachers actually has not risen all that dramatically at major American universities, the same thing has happened in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley used to be about engineering solutions, which is why they made their money.
And then it turned into a place where a bunch of people fresh from the universities were to come in and basically structure how all of society was going to run.
They decided that if the chief good of these companies was not being a public square, then the chief good would be quote unquote doing good, which is always incredibly, incredibly dangerous.
Well, this has made Musk unpopular in some circles of the left, because again, there's a radical left perspective, and this does separate sort of mainstream liberals from the radical left.
It's a distinction that I always make on the show.
People will say, oh, you're being too broad in how you paint the left.
Well, I've always made the distinction between the left and liberals.
Liberals are people who disagree with me about taxes, abortion and same-sex marriage, but who also agree that there ought to be open discussion of these things.
And then there is the left, and the left believes there should not be open discussion of these things, and that the very institutions of the republic are the problem.
The left believes that things like free speech are inherently biased toward power structures in the United States that have the ability to speak.
And therefore, we have to shut down free speech, or at least we have to rejigger free speech so as to benefit the people at the bottom.
Well, a lot of those people showed up to a Dave Chappelle comedy event in San Francisco.
It was supposed to be non-film, but apparently somebody sneaked a cell phone in.
So Dave Chappelle introduced Elon Musk to a mixture of boos and cheers.
Chappelle was really funny.
He was like, the people booing are probably former Twitter employees.
Correct.
Here's what that sounded like.
Thank you.
you're gonna make some noise for the richest man in the world.
Yeah!
Cheers and boogles, I guess.
It sounds like some of them people you fire in the audience.
It sounds like a lot of people have been fired by Elon Musk in the audience.
And that's probably true.
Again, there is a widespread perspective in places like San Francisco that broadening the boundaries of free speech is inherently dangerous and inherently problematic.
Meanwhile, the White House is denying that they have ever asserted pressure on social media to censor content, which is insane.
Obviously they have.
Mark Zuckerberg has publicly admitted that they have.
Mark Zuckerberg said that the FBI basically approached him in the run up to the 2020 election and suggested that disinformation was a major concern.
It was on that basis that the Hunter Biden story was censored.
Now, John Kirby, propagandist on behalf of the Biden administration, that's literally his job.
He says that the Biden administration, federal agencies, they really don't work with social media to censor, which is obviously untrue.
You said this, we aren't in the business of telling private companies how to execute their initiatives.
But it appears from these revelations from inside of Twitter, there were regular meetings between executives there, the FBI, DHS, the DNI.
So, you know, flagging tweets, expressing their concerns, it seems trying to drive certain conversations.
So, should or shouldn't the federal government, federal agencies, in your words, be directing private companies on how to execute their initiatives?
We aren't directing private social media companies on how to manage their content.
These are decisions that they have to make.
Okay, but what they are doing is providing broad layers of guidance to make sure that these people make the quote-unquote right decisions, which is really bordering if not violative of the First Amendment itself.
There's more on this in just one second.
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Meanwhile, all of this is bleeding over into the public health sphere.
So as that, that Barry Weiss thread demonstrates.
There are people at Twitter who obviously wanted to use the model of banning Trump for no actual violation to ban people for no actual violations when it came to spreading information about COVID or COVID vaccines.
So, for example, Twitter had suspended the account of Dr. Robert Malone, who is an mRNA vaccine researcher and has been very critical of many of the claims that were made about the COVID vaccine.
Twitter on Monday unsuspended his account.
Twitter had never specified which of Malone's tweets had actually violated any of their policies.
In one of his last tweets before he was banned, Malone shared a link to a video from a Canadian COVID care alliance titled, The Pfizer Inoculations for COVID-19, More Harm Than Good.
A description of that video said, Pfizer's six-month data shows that Pfizer's COVID-19 inoculations cause more illness than they prevent, plus an overview of the Pfizer trial flaws in both design and execution.
Twitter slapped a misleading label on Malone's tweet and restricted likes, retweets, and replies to the post, and then they suspended him.
It was right about the same time that Robert Malone became a very famous voice because he was on Joe Rogan's podcast and was highly critical of the COVID vaccines and then YouTube censored the podcast.
So now Malone has been reinstated.
Again, it turns out that you can't stop the conversation.
All you can do is generate more heat on the issues that you're attempting to ban.
Shutting down free speech rarely achieves its actual goal.
Well, Elon Musk has now started a firefight with Anthony Fauci and the White House because Elon Musk put out a tweet Suggesting that Fauci had essentially perjured himself by denying that his agency had funded gain-of-function research.
In fact, later he admitted that there had been quote-unquote modest gain-of-function research funding from the NIAID to a Chinese lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That is where many people suspect that COVID-19 originated.
What he originally testified, in a very Clintonian way, he was suggesting that gain-of-function research really is only a very narrowly defined term.
That gain-of-function research is, within a species, you make a disease more virulent.
And that if you take a disease and you make it now applicable to a new species, that is not gain-of-function research.
So he says the United States only funded the first, but they didn't fund the second.
Like making a virus that jumps from bats to humans.
He says, that's not actually gain-of-function research.
That's the kind of stuff that we funded.
We didn't actually make the research within bats more virulent.
Well, that's not really a question, dude.
I mean, a lot of people had a lot of questions about how gain-of-function was being funded.
He described it as, quote, taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and or pathogenic for humans.
He says that categorically was not done.
But again, making any of these pathogens more virulent in any way is what people tend to think of as gain-of-function research, or literally gaining function.
Fauci traced the NIH's interest in bat coronaviruses to the SARS outbreak from nearly two decades ago.
This is in his testimony a little bit earlier this year.
He said, we had a big scare with SARS back in 2002-2003 where that particular virus unquestionably went from a bat to an intermediate host to start an epidemic and a pandemic that resulted in 8,000 cases and 800 deaths.
It would have been a dereliction of our duty if we didn't study this.
The only way you can study these things is you have to go where the action is.
He says, you don't want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species.
NIH did fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Okay, so because of Fauci's comments about gain-of-function research, Elon Musk had tweeted that he thinks that Fauci essentially perjured himself and also believes that it was American money funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology that allowed for the Wuhan Institute of Virology to essentially create COVID-19.
Now, Fauci still says that it was not gain-of-function research and it was not even the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was the source of the COVID-19 infection.
He does admit the possibility, but he says that it wasn't me.
It certainly wasn't me.
Elon Musk, however, had tweeted out that his pronouns were quote unquote, prosecute Fauci.
And this drove the White House to new states of apoplexy.
World's worst press secretary, Kareem Jean-Pierre, slammed Musk's tweet as quote, disgusting and incredibly dangerous.
What's your response, first of all, to specifically to the attacks on Dr. Fauci?
And second, how is your view of Twitter as a sort of public forum and a forum for yourself and for the president and many other officials here? How are those views evolving?
So look, we've been very clear about this.
These attacks, these personal attacks that we have been seeing are dangerous on Dr. Fauci and other public health professionals as well.
They are disgusting and they are divorced from reality.
It's disgusting and dangerous when you attack somebody by name and it's terrible if you malign them.
Also, any Republican who didn't vote for Joe Biden's team in the last election is a member of the evil contingent and an enemy of the Republic.
So just a few things happening at the White House level.
Again, setting up people as though they are infallible and that criticism of them must be banned.
is really dangerous stuff because actually what it leads to is the feeling that those people kind of deserve to be criticized.
The fact is that Fauci does deserve a lot of criticism for how he handled this pandemic.
Everybody knows that.
We have yet to find out the full story on what exactly was funded at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Fauci has not been honest about a wide variety of subjects throughout his tenure during COVID-19.
And yet the White House is very exercised about all of this.
The White House thinks that it's just terrible, and they use the key word here, which is dangerous.
When they use that key word, when they say dangerous, this is a way of shutting down speech.
Because when you say that speech is dangerous, what you mean is that speech actually ought to be curbed in some way.
And so it's not a surprise that you see major publications like the Washington Post, they're now attempting secondary boycotts of Twitter.
You have actual columnists at the Washington Post suggesting that advertisers should pull their money from Twitter because Elon Musk is so personally dangerous.
It's the same game that they play with shows like this one.
It's the same game that they play with all the social media outlets.
What they do is they try to find an advertiser who has nothing to do with anything Elon Musk is actually saying on Twitter, but who advertises on Twitter.
And then they say, you can't advertise on Twitter because if you do, you're putting money in Elon Musk's pocket.
And if you do that, then you are complicit.
That's the way all of this works.
The politicization of the advertising space, the attempt to cudgel corporations into doing the will of the left by browbeating them into not supporting neutral spaces, spaces where people agree with them and disagree with them, is really amazing.
And the White House forwarding that narrative is quite dangerous, actually.
You want to talk about dangerous?
It is dangerous when the White House is bordering on violation of First Amendment principles by essentially pressuring people not to associate with other people based on the things that they say in the private sphere.
Because that is government action.
And this has been a problem throughout.
Well, meanwhile, the White House continues its own social media trolling and trolling generally.
So the White House has decided that this is nothing new.
When the Obergefell case happened, the White House was lit up.
This under Barack Obama during the Obergefell case, which was 2015.
Barack Obama lit up the White House with a rainbow flag because the idea that same-sex marriage is what is most American about America.
It is not just a controversial social issue.
It is not about the fundamental undermining and redefining of a major institution, maybe the major societal institution.
America is really about the gay pride flag.
You never, by the way, would have seen an equivalent If, for example, after the case of Jack Phillips and the Masterpiece Cake Shop case in Colorado, you never would have seen the White House lit up with a giant cross.
Religious freedom is what America is all about.
But in the aftermath of Obergefell, the White House was lit up in the rainbow colors.
Well, they're going to do that routine again.
The White House is now planning a major celebration.
It is not respect for marriage to redefine the fundamental institution as male-male or female-female.
The entire basis for the institution is male-female, of course.
But the White House is holding a major celebration, and this, of course, is an act of trolling.
This is an attempt to get people upset on the right side of the aisle so that they can point at all those people and say, look at those bigots.
Why can't they just celebrate along with us?
Look how terrible they are for not celebrating.
Why won't they bake the cake?
Why won't those terrible, terrible people bake the cake?
And you can tell how hard they are trolling by the people that they are inviting.
So Corinne Jean-Pierre yesterday, she said that, who is a gay woman, she says that the White House is going to have a massive celebration for the Respect for Marriage Act.
And it's going to be pride, progress flags everywhere because this is what is most American about America.
This is what the founders fought for, gang.
The legislation also enjoys support from a majority of Americans across party lines and faiths.
Tomorrow, the President will be joined by a bipartisan group of lawmakers as well as advocates and plaintiffs in marriage equality cases across the country to sign this critical legislation into law.
There will be musical guests and performances to celebrate this historic bill.
Musical guests and performances.
Now, I don't remember that for the Inflation Reduction Act, obviously, but this is a major issue because redefining marriage actually is a major thing.
Now, we were told that it wasn't a major thing.
We were told that it's just what had to happen because it was already the law, and why not confirm what the law is?
What are you making a big deal about?
Now, like, what's the biggest deal in the world?
We're going to have musical guests at the White House.
We're going to have full performances.
They're also inviting some of the world's most important people.
So, for example, they are inviting a drag artist, Marty, To be a non-binary drag artist invited to the White House is something I never imagined would happen.
And by the way, this is not because this person is literally of any other importance apparently.
It is because of this person's identity as a quote-unquote non-binary drag artist.
That this person is being invited to the White House.
Thank you, President and Dr. Biden, for inviting me to this historic bill signing.
Grateful doesn't begin to express the emotions I feel.
This is trolling.
It's high-level trolling.
It is the White House declaring that the policy of the United States that we all should celebrate as a unifying American moment is that sex, biological sex, does not matter.
In fact, biological sex is of no consequence when it comes to marriage and may not exist at all because, after all, non-binary is a category now.
And drag is the most American thing about America.
I keep saying the word trolling because that's what this is.
It's an attempt to draw attention.
It's an attempt to polarize.
It's not an attempt to unify, obviously.
That's why the White House is pushing this so unbelievably hard.
It turns out that transgressivism, which is a philosophy I've talked about before, the idea that human beings, what we are essentially, we can be boiled down to our sexual identity, our sexual desires.
That is the core of us.
And that authenticity may never be challenged.
We can act in any way we want, and it's society's duty to actually make us feel good about that.
It's society's duty to clap and cheer.
That basic notion has some consequences.
And it can only be crammed down top down.
Because the truth is that the natural state of society is that people form families.
This is the natural biological state of society.
People form family units.
Those family units provide the predicate for all of human society.
Edmund Burke talks about the little platoons that are the families, right?
Father, mother, children, grandparents.
And these little platoons form the basis of both community and civil society.
Community and civil society form the basis of the polity.
And that's how you get durable societies created from small units.
Essentially, what has now happened because of the philosophy of transgressivism is that all those institutions are seen as violative of basic human freedoms.
The family is violative of basic human freedoms.
Marriage is violative of basic human freedoms because it makes separate demands on men and women.
It suggests that you owe duties outside of yourself to children, to the rest of your family, and to society at large.
And this cannot be allowed to happen.
Now, the only way that you can obliterate the intermediate institutions of life The most basic, intermediate institutions like family, but also civil society and community is by cramming that down from the top.
Transgressivism can only happen if you have a cultural elite that grabs the levers of power and then shoves down these messages on the rest of society.
And if they say it often enough, then people start to buy it.
And this is why it's so important to the left to redefine terms.
It's why it's so important for the left to grab cultural high ground and then use that cultural high ground in order to intimidate people into silence.
It's why it's important for the White House to have events like this if you are on the left.
Because the idea is that if you push message forward over and over and over again, that you're a bigot if you disagree with them, then people will basically give up all of the institutional protections that they have for traditional morality in favor of an unfettered sense of authenticity that the left really pushes incredibly hard.
You can see how they're doing this not just at the White House, but also this sort of trollery exists in the halls of culture.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Right now, okay, so when we talk about the media trolling and the social media trolling and the cultural trolling, again, understand transgressivism, the idea that all intermediate institutions in life must be obliterated in the name of individual authenticity.
But that philosophy requires a cultural cram down.
It requires cultural elites to cram down their view of society upon you.
And so it matters when you have cultural arbiters like the dictionary, like the Cambridge Dictionary, redefining the word woman.
I'm not kidding you.
They have now redefined the word woman.
Now you thought that a woman is, you know, a woman.
A member of the human species who is female, who is biologically female.
That's what you thought a woman was.
Wrong!
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, quote, a woman is, this is the definition, an adult who lives and identifies as female, though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.
Example, she was the first trans woman elected to a national office.
Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.
Now, if you ask them, what does female mean?
Then they would say, female is any person who identifies as a woman.
And so it would be completely circular.
A woman is a person who identifies as female.
A female is a person who identifies as a woman.
Now, if you ask them to define either female or woman without reference to the word female or woman, and to give like an actual objective metric, then they have no idea.
They can't say anything.
They can't say that it's a biological sexual category.
They can't say any of that.
And I can't say any of that because, of course, that would violate their scruples.
When the dictionary begins to overtly redefine terms, it's truly Orwellian.
I mean, this is news speak.
When Orwell talked in 1984 about how communist societies would redefine terms, literally just make up new terms, or take old terms, rob them of their content, and then reuse them.
He was talking about how you pervert the minds of millions of people.
And that's exactly what you see.
When dictionaries start redefining terms in completely nonsensical ways that are an infinite regress of nonsense, That is an attempt by cultural arbiters to cram down a particular set of morals.
And then it gets celebrated at the White House and all of this is good.
And you are supposed to ignore all of this or be considered a bigot.
You're supposed to pretend that all of this is good and fine.
After all, what business is it of yours if we redefine the word woman?
How does it change your life?
This is the question that's always asked.
How does it change?
The answer is societal standards change everybody's life.
If they did not, the left would not be so intent on changing them.
It's very simple.
The left says things like, how does same-sex marriage affect your life?
And the answer is, Bob and Bill down the street do not affect my life.
What does affect my life, because it affects my society, is how society redefines and incentivizes marriage.
That obviously has a major impact.
I mean, you can literally say this about any public policy issue.
Pick a public policy issue.
The vast majority of them do not directly affect your life, but they indirectly affect your life because when you reset the standards for a society, that has an impact on every citizen.
This is a case that could have been made by slaveholders in 1850.
They could have said, well, sure, I'm down here in the South holding a slave.
How does that affect your life in Massachusetts?
And the answer was, it didn't.
But when society tolerates slavery, that is a grave evil that redefines how everyone lives.
This is true for every public policy issue.
And the left's little game is to treat everybody as an atomized individual and then say, what we do in terms of public policy, it doesn't really affect you because you're an atomized individual anyway.
But it does affect you.
If you obliterate civil society, if you obliterate community, if you obliterate family, and you do all of that in the name of authentic sexual identity.
If you obliterate language, obliterate reason, obliterate biology in the name of these things, of course that has an impact on how we all live.
Because it has an impact on how we converse with one another.
It has an impact on our supposed sense of shared morality.
It's a real problem.
And so gaslighting goes on.
You're supposed to pretend that you don't notice it.
And if you do notice it, then you're a bigot.
So for example, you end up with headlines like this one.
This is from the DailyMail.com.
Are you ready for this?
This is an amazing headline.
Shocking moment!
Female-to-male transgender ice hockey player is tackled to the ground and concussed by a much larger male-to-female rival at controversial NHL-backed tournament.
So the headline, by the way, on Twitter was a little bit shorter than that.
The actual headline on Twitter was, moment trans woman hockey player concusses trans male rival.
Now you read that, you're like, I don't even know what you're talking about.
What the hell are you even talking about right now?
Now I'm going to read that headline in English.
Ready?
Moment Male Hockey Player Concusses Female Hockey Rival.
That's the actual headline.
A male body checked a woman into the boards and she got a concussion.
Now in a normal society, you'd be like, what in the world is a male doing on the hockey ice with a female and checking her into the boards?
What in the world is happening?
What sort of decent society allows a male to essentially bludgeon a woman so long as they are pretending that he is a she and she is a he?
That's a societal question, is it not?
But we're all supposed to pretend that this is good.
In fact, this event was sponsored by the NHL.
According to the Daily Mail, a female-to-male transgender hockey player was left concussed after being knocked to the floor by a much larger male-to-female trans opponent during a controversial NHL-backed tournament.
Danny Mackey was knocked down and left concussed following what appeared to be an accidental rough hit at the Team Trans Ice Hockey Draft in Middleton, Wisconsin late last month.
The incident has only just been reported by Quillette magazine, whose journalist Jonathan Kaye suggested the two-day tournament had been subjected to a woke cover-up.
Mackie was subsequently accused of self-censoring what had happened on Instagram by describing the incident as an odd fall despite himself sharing the video, which clearly shows he was tackled.
Well, he is a she.
She was tackled.
By a dude.
Pretending that a woman who takes male hormones is now a male and that a male who takes estrogen is now a female is absurd on its face.
But this is the sort of stuff that we're all supposed to pretend along with and the NHL celebrates and then we're all supposed to ignore when stuff like this happens.
And this also happens in other contexts.
So, for example, we were told to essentially ignore the alleged rape of a ninth grade girl at a school in Loudoun County.
We were told that the father, being very angry about this at a school board meeting, was demonstration that parents were effectively domestic terrorists.
You'll recall.
That in Loudoun County, there was a father who was treated as though he was a violent threat because he came to a school board meeting and protested the fact that the Loudoun County School Board was pushing a trans bathroom policy while simultaneously covering up the alleged rape of his ninth grade daughter.
And he got pretty upset because that seems kind of upsetting, right?
And then the school board association, National School Board Association, wrote a letter to the FBI and the DOJ asking for prosecution and investigation of members of the general parental community who are angry at school boards.
Well, now, as it turns out, the actual criminal activity was not by the father.
The actual criminal activity was by the transgender girl who was a boy who was apparently serially raping girls.
Allegedly.
And the superintendent and spokesperson for this particular school board.
Now it's not only covered in the New York Times, not covered in the Washington Post, it is covered by the Daily Wire.
It is only because Luke Rosiak, our excellent reporter in Loudoun County, actually did the research on this and figured out what happened with this angry father instead of treating him as a pariah.
And the cultural gaslighting at the top level is, the dad's the bad guy, the superintendent of the school district is good, because the superintendent of the school district buys into the woke nonsense that boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and a boy who pretends to be a girl is actually a girl and should go into the girl's restroom, even if he is then engaging in the alleged anal rape of a girl in the bathroom.
So here is the latest in that story, and this wouldn't have happened without the investigation of Luke Rozsiak.
Two top officials of a Northern Virginia public school district were indicted Monday for their roles in the handling of a bathroom rape by a skirt-wearing boy after the Daily Wire revealed the apparent cover-up last year of court documents Unsealed Monday showed.
Former Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler, who was fired last week, was indicted on three misdemeanor counts of false publication, conflict of interest prohibited conduct, and penalizing an employee for court appearance.
Spokesman Wade Byard was indicted on a felony charge of perjury, according to court records.
A week ago, a special grand jury released a 91-page report that confirmed the findings Of the Daily Wire's October 2021 expose, determining that Ziegler told a bald-faced lie when he dismissed concerns about a proposed transgender policy by denying that there had ever been any bathroom sex assaults, despite knowing that he'd attacked on a 9th grade girl just a month earlier.
The grand jury said that Ziegler's administration also concealed from the public and even the school board.
The same boy went on to sexually assault another girl in a classroom with school board members learning about it from a report in the Daily Wire.
The grand jury pleadings painted a devastating picture and showed that, quote, throughout this ordeal, LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interests of LCPS.
When the Daily Wire asked Bayard last week about the Grand Jury's fact-finding report, he sent a statement attributed to School Board Chief Jeff Morse and Vice Chair Ian Sirotkin that said they were pleased that the Grand Jury had not indicted anyone.
The Daily Wire noted in response to Bayard that Attorney General Jason Mayares had pointedly said the Grand Jury was still running.
On Monday, Bayard did not return a request for comment on his own indictment.
The School Board fired Ziegler on Tuesday, a day after the Grand Jury report, but fired him without cause, apparently giving him a $350,000 golden parachute.
An indictment for the misdemeanor of false publication said, quote, on or about June 22nd, 2021, Ziegler did unlawfully, knowingly, and willfully state, deliver, or transmit by any means whatever to any publisher, a false and untrue statement, knowing the same to be false or untrue concerning any person or corporation with intent that the same shall be published.
June 22nd was the date of the school board meeting at which Ziegler cited Time Magazine to lecture parents, the quote, we've heard it several times tonight from our public speakers, but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.
So, again, amazing stuff here.
This stuff ends in criminal activity and indictment.
But you're supposed to ignore it until apparently it is uncovered by Luke Rosiak.
And even then, it doesn't deserve a follow-up report because that would run counter to the desires of the counter-cultural elite.
The transgressive elite who are now cramming down the morality on literally everyone.
We're supposed to pretend that none of this ever happens.
That everything is good to go.
Turns out that the control of the commanding heights of culture, handing that over to the transgressors has some pretty devastating side effects, including for individuals like ninth grade girls who get raped in bathrooms by boys who are pretending that they identify as girls, or some such nonsense.
And by the way, now would be an excellent time to note that Luke Rosiak, our investigative reporter over at Daily Wire, we can only have investigative reporters because people like you subscribe, people like you sign up over at dailywire.com.
You should become a Daily Wire Plus member so we can do reporting like this as well as you get all the rest of our great material.
But it is Luke who uncovered this, and it is Luke's action on this that has led to the indictment now of a public official who lied to the public about whether, in fact, it was safe for transgender bathrooms to be established.
And he did it on the basis of false data.
Now, I promise you, by the way, that on the other side of the media ledger, let's say that this story had happened in a Catholic school.
Let's say that what happened in a Catholic school is that a boy was allowed to go into a girl's bathroom and rape a girl.
And a parish priest had been in there and seen, apparently, part of this happen.
And then later, there had been a press conference in which they were asked about their bathroom policy.
And the priest had said, no, you know, we've never seen anything like this.
That'd be a church cover-up, right?
That's the way our culture works.
The way our culture works is traditional institutions that sin are demonstrations that the traditional institutions are evil.
Meanwhile, left-wing or secular institutions that create policies that facilitate evil.
When that sort of stuff happens, it's an exception.
It's an exception.
Or we just ignore it.
It doesn't happen at all.
We can't cover it at all.
This is part and parcel of the broader problem of how we cover institutions in a secular society.
When there's a massive cover-up in the Catholic Church about the abuse of children?
This is deserving of Oscar-winning movies like Spotlight.
This is deserving of mass cultural criticism, which it is.
But, has there yet been a major story in a major newspaper about the spate of sexual abuse in our public schools?
Because I promise you, there's an enormous amount of sexual abuse that happens at the nation's public schools.
There are literally 100 million kids in our public schools.
So I promise you there's an enormous amount of abuse in these public schools.
There's no reason to suggest that Catholicism is the reason for the sexual abuse.
There's also been no investigation into many of the favored organizations of the left that deal with children.
There's just a lot of pretending.
A lot of pretending that nothing bad could possibly happen because after all you hold the right perspective.
If the idea, this is true across the board, if the idea is that any institution is so vulnerable that critique of the institution results in its collapse and thus critique ought to be forbidden, you know that the powerful are attempting to censor.
Now the Catholic Church, which engaged in a cover-up, now does not engage in cover-ups of those behavior because the Catholic Church has been durable for a couple thousand years.
The Catholic Church will survive, it will thrive, it will continue to have a billion adherents.
When it comes to America's secular left, They are so scared bleepless of the consequences of their own philosophy, because that philosophy is deeply connected with sexual liberation and autonomy, that they can't allow stories like this to see the light of day.
Only Daily Wire reports on this.
Again, another reason for you to go get membership today over at Daily Wire.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Kyrsten Sinema declaring that she is an independent and Bernie Sanders declaring that he might back a Democrat against her in Arizona.