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Dec. 16, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:09
Trump Releases A MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT | Ep. 1632
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President Trump releases a self-described major announcement.
Elon Musk banned several journalists on Twitter after accusing them of doxing him.
And another massive migrant surge hits our southern border as the Biden administration says everything is under control.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, we live in very serious times in which the President of the United States, Joe Biden, is attempting to push world-breaking change on the social, fiscal, and foreign policy front.
We face battles in pretty much every arena of our lives politically, attempting to define the most basic terms in human life, ranging from the terms man and woman to the terms family.
We're attempting to avoid a recession.
There are a lot of very serious things happening in the world right now.
This is why it matters that President Trump, who is the only Republican declared candidate so far, it's important to note that, he jumped into the water as soon as humanly possible after election 2022, which did not go the way that I think Donald Trump would have liked.
Many of his hand-chosen candidates in the Senate did not win.
Well, Donald Trump, two days ago, announced that he had a major announcement that he was going to reveal on Thursday.
And for a lot of people who are watching his campaign, they're thinking, okay, what's that major announcement going to look like?
After all, This man is the former president of the United States.
This is a guy who presumably is going to have some policy recommendations that he wishes to trot out.
He's going to have some important things to say, no matter whether you are pro him or against him.
The fact is that when the former president of the United States and a newly declared president for his third consecutive election says that he has a major announcement, people are going to take that pretty seriously.
And a lot of people were taking that pretty seriously, because again, if you are assuming that we live in serious times, and if you are assuming that Donald Trump is a serious candidate for president of the United States, and that he is running a serious campaign, what you would expect is some sort of major policy drop, for example.
Or maybe he's going to announce who is running for vice president with him.
Or maybe he was going to announce something else politically oriented that made a difference in American public life.
Instead, the major announcement almost completely craters his presidential campaign before it even gets off the ground.
Even many of his very, very strong allies, people ranging from Steve Bannon to say the Hodge twins were criticizing what Donald Trump did yesterday and for good reason.
So what was Donald Trump's major announcement?
Well, he put out on truth social, the major announcement, all capital letters, major announcement.
Quote, my official Donald Trump digital trading card collection is here.
These limited edition cards feature amazing art of my life and career.
Collect all of your favorite Trump digital trading cards very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting.
Go to collecttrumpcards.com and get your cards now.
Only $99 each would make a great Christmas gift.
Don't wait.
They will be gone, I believe, very quickly.
And the picture, for those who are not actually watching the show, and this is one of the reasons you should watch the show so you can see the visuals, is a picture of Donald Trump standing in a wrestling ring, wearing what appears to be a skin-tight superhero outfit with the American flag as his cape, a giant T on his chest, a rippling six-pack, a wrestling belt championship, and 45 boots, because he was the 45th president of the United States, with electricity popping around him.
It's a meme.
In other words, he's selling you memes for $99.
And this was the major announcement.
Super.
So major.
Unbelievably major.
Collect all the Trump cards.
Put together.
Search for Pikachu.
Find Pikachu.
Kill Pikachu.
In any case, the former president of the United States also put out a video.
And again, the reason this matters is because any presidential candidate who did this, it would be bad.
The former president of the United States, a man who is the presumptive frontrunner jumping into the race doing this, is cringeworthy.
It just is.
And again, if you, if you think that politics ought to be a somewhat serious business, that our politicians ought to provide a threat to the people we believe stand in the way of our freedoms, then when you say you have a major announcement and what you actually drop is what appears to be an NFT money grab, especially in, I mean, it's like on every available front, it's just, it's the dumbest politics I think maybe I've ever seen.
It's, it's really, it's painful.
It's painful.
And this is coming from somebody who voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
And like this, it is just bad.
So Trump drops this video.
And when I first saw it, I thought it was a deep fake.
To be honest with you, I thought that I thought there is no way that Donald Trump would acquiesce to the people around him pushing him to do something this stupid.
Because again, NFTs, first of all, nobody understands what an NFT is.
An unfungible token, which is what an NFT is, what it basically is, is a digital trading card.
Essentially, you buy a GIF and you have the exclusive right to a copy of that GIF.
Not the only copy, a copy of the GIF.
Which means nothing since I can literally just copy and paste one onto my desktop right now without having to spend $99.
But here is Donald Trump announcing his major, major announcement.
Again, I'm not the one characterizing it as a major announcement.
If this has just been one of the many things that he put out, okay.
When you're a presidential candidate and the former president of the United States, and you say that you have a major announcement, all capital letters, and your major announcement is, spend $99 on my worthless gift for a chance to possibly win a Zoom call with me, That's not great, Bob.
Here was Donald Trump yesterday.
Hello, everyone.
This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make.
I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now.
They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards.
These cards feature some of the really incredible artwork pertaining to my life and my career.
It's been very exciting.
Each card comes with an automatic chance to win amazing prizes, like dinner with me.
I don't know if that's an amazing prize, but it's what we have.
This is my first official Trump trading card NFT collection, and you get a chance to meet me.
Go to collecttrumpcards.com right now and remember, Christmas is coming and this makes a great Christmas gift.
That's it.
First of all, I don't think it makes an amazing Christmas gift.
If someone gave this to me for Hanukkah... Actually, I'll be honest, I think it'd be great.
If someone gave this to me for Hanukkah, I'm willing to take it.
But, um... What?
Just what?
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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So first of all, opening with, I'm a greater president than Washington.
Come for the, I'm, I'm a better president than Washington or Lincoln and stay and stay for the memes of Donald Trump dressed as an astronaut, I guess is, is the idea here.
I'm here to announce a major announcement.
They call it Magic the Gathering.
I have finally completed my set and you can buy a Magic the Gathering set as well.
With a picture of me.
Leviathan.
Power 9.
This is not what a presidential candidate should be doing.
And everybody was making fun of this yesterday.
Because, again, it is intensely mockable.
Especially the commercial, which sounds as though it came on Fox News at 1 a.m.
selling a walk-in bathtub.
That is what it feels like.
So, here's the question.
If Republicans are being ripped up and down, as they should be, for not being serious enough about stopping the left, is this what you want?
Is this what you want?
It's one of the most counterproductive things I've ever seen a candidate do because of that.
If you wish, if you are a fan of Donald Trump and you wish him to be president, do you actually look at this and think this is good strategy?
Or does it look to you like he's trying to sell you a Trump steak or Trump water?
Is it the worst of the Donald Trump branding?
Again, I'm pointing this out not because I want Donald Trump to lose.
I do not think he's the best candidate in a primary.
It is specifically because of this kind of stuff.
I do not think that he is the best candidate in a primary or in the general election.
Joe Biden obviously took the opportunity to jump on Donald Trump with both feet.
And again, it's hard not to jump on Donald Trump with both feet when he gives you that open-end opportunity.
Biden obviously tweeted out, I had some major announcements the last couple of weeks, too.
Inflation is easing.
I signed the Respect for Marriage Act.
We brought Brittany Greiner home.
Gas prices are lower than a year ago.
10,000 new high-paying jobs in Arizona now.
All of these things are at least quasi-lies in terms of whether they are good.
But that doesn't matter.
Joe Biden is basically saying my major announcements are about things that I do as President of the United States, and Donald Trump's major announcement Is about NFT trading cards with bad memes from four years ago with lasers coming out of his eyes.
This is the part that I think is really telling.
If you are this unfocused, if you are this scattered, you cannot defeat the Democrat.
You can't.
I'm sorry, it's not going to work.
And what it feels like, honestly, is it feels like Donald Trump is running a very lackluster campaign because I'm not sure he actually wants to run.
I'm not sure what else to make of that.
Because yesterday he actually put out a somewhat major announcement.
Here's the thing.
Donald Trump literally put out an announcement yesterday about what he called his free speech policy, which actually had some rather interesting things in it.
Trump put out a free speech policy in which he essentially announced that he wanted to ban the government from using its power to cram down on social media companies' bans on information.
Now this would have been, okay, a major announcement, right?
Like a policy announcement is what you would expect from a candidate, from the former president.
There was Donald Trump announcing that yesterday, but which one do you think gets more attention?
Him doing that, or literally, which he did not say was a major announcement, or the thing that he himself said was a major, the most major announcement, which was, in fact, a picture of him in spandex.
from his life and career.
And this is the thing that should have been the major announcement, but it wasn't, even according to Donald Trump. I'm not the one who characterized it that way. He is the one who characterized it that way. Here's Donald Trump.
They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health. The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed and it must happen immediately.
And here is my plan.
First, within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens.
I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis- or disinformation.
Okay, so again, like all of this is interesting and worthy of discussion and debate.
And that last provision there where he says that he's going to stop the federal government from labeling anything mis- or disinformation, you see exactly why he's doing that.
Because again, the federal government basically labeled everything up to and including The Hunter Biden laptop story missed or disinformation and ended up cuddling or encouraging or winking and nodding at social media taking that stuff down.
The counter argument on that score would be, well, the federal government sometimes has to say that things are false or whether things are true, but the problem is we don't trust them.
Again, all of that is interesting and controversial and worthy of note, but that's not what he called the major announcement.
What he called the major announcement was, here I am, and I'm saying to you, you must buy this poster drawn by me, of me, signed by me, for me, for you.
That is not, that's not serious stuff.
Now, here is another aspect of this.
The left, they hate Trump.
And we have, obviously, a reactionary country in which if the left hates a thing, the right immediately says that the thing is good.
But the left hates Ron DeSantis just as much as they hate Trump.
And they hate Ron DeSantis for a different reason than they hate Trump.
They hate Trump because, yes, obviously he politically opposes much of their agenda.
Also, they hate Trump because they see Trump as sort of a class traitor.
Trump was a guy who should have been in their corner.
Until about 2014, he was very socially liberal, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump was a person who had won Emmy awards.
He had performed at the Emmys singing about Green Acres.
I'm not kidding.
And that tape is available.
This was a person who was very, very, I mean, he was at Bill and Hillary Clinton wedding or at the wedding of Chelsea Clinton.
This is a person who is widely known and understood in left-wing circles, and then he turned on them and so they hate him for cultural reasons.
The reason that the left hates Ron DeSantis is specifically and solely because he is an effective advocate of right-wing policies.
That is the reason they hate DeSantis.
Otherwise, they never would have noticed DeSantis.
The reason they hate DeSantis is precisely why many Republicans want to see DeSantis elected.
Because he's an effective advocate of conservative policies that have broad-spectrum appeal, which is how you turn a 0.4% victory in 2018 into a 20% victory in 2022.
And you can see their hatred is just, it's virulent for Ron DeSantis in the same way it was for Trump.
So if the great draw for you with regard to Trump was that Donald Trump is the person the left hates most, I'm not sure that's actually true.
I'm not sure that's actually true.
They may hate him most on sort of a gut level.
They find him gross and he annoys them and vulgar and all that.
But the reason they actually hate DeSantis is because they're afraid DeSantis is good at his job.
That is the reason they hate him.
I'm just gonna give you one example.
Stephen Colbert, who is no longer a comedian, Stephen Colbert is just the second worst White House press secretary after Corine Jean-Pierre.
Colbert, last night, on his show, talked about DeSantis versus Trump.
And listen to the way he describes this, because these are two very, very different politicians.
Ron DeSantis is a very disciplined politician who, for example, does not release videos of himself calling himself better than Lincoln and Washington, and then trying to sell you a $99 worthless digital token.
Ron DeSantis is a very effective governor of a major state in the United States.
And here's Stephen Colbert likening the two, because this is how the left thinks of DeSantis.
So again, if the chief draw for you for Trump is the left hates him, they hate DeSantis too, and DeSantis is wildly, wildly effective.
New Wall Street Journal poll says that in a hypothetical GOP primary matchup, DeSantis beats the former president 52% to 38%.
Yay?
Also maybe boo?
It's hard to know who to root for here.
It's like a poll between gonorrhea and a slightly more racist gonorrhea.
This is apologies to gonorrhea.
By the way, this also goes to show you that their hatred for Trump applies to literally all Republicans.
It applies to everyone.
So it's between gonorrhea and... So Ron DeSantis is gonorrhea, I assume, in this particular iteration.
And Trump would be the slightly more racist gonorrhea.
And the crowd in New York is cheering wildly.
Ah, these geniuses.
They're... Don't worry.
Don't worry.
They don't hate you.
They just hate Trump, except for they hate you, and DeSantis, and everybody else.
So, when it comes time for Republicans to pick, when we move forward as the Republican Party or as conservatives, and when we look at who's the most effective best candidate, the question is going to be, who offers the most opportunities for the left to attack them while being ineffective in terms of policy?
And right now that video that Trump put out, I think it's the same.
Again, I think it's one of the single most damaging things I've ever seen a candidate do.
Maybe the single most damaging thing I've seen a candidate do because it directly underscores the problem with Trump in the first place, which is the pervasive sense of unseriousness that has surrounded him since 2020, since he left office in early 2021 and lost the election in late 2020.
There's a sense that he no longer cares about the priorities of his own party.
He cares about his own priorities.
And when you release a major announcement, I don't think I'm making too much of this.
Trump fans will say that I am, but he's the one who made it into a major announcement.
So people should keep that in mind as time moves forward toward the 2024 presidential election.
Meanwhile, controversy has broken out on Twitter after Elon Musk banned a series of journalists.
He banned them because he said that they were essentially doxing him.
Now, doxing is the practice online whereby you give somebody's real-time location that they were trying to keep private.
So, doxing is not like I'm walking around at Disneyland and somebody notices that I'm there and they text their friends.
That's not really doxing.
Doxing is, I try to keep my home address private and you uncover my home address and then you send people to my door.
That's doxing.
Doxing is where you uncover the license information on my car and then you tweet real-time updates on where my car is.
That sort of stuff is doxing.
So, Musk is now accusing a bunch of journalists and pseudo-journalists of doxing.
And this started when he decided that he was going to ban an account called Elon Jets.
Now, he had said he was not going to ban an account called Elon Jet.
He had suggested that because he's so free speech, he had said, I'll keep Elon Jet online.
I mean, it's something that he actually had tweeted out earlier this year.
He changed his mind, apparently, after there was an incident in Los Angeles in which a person followed his son, he has a very young son, and he had a person apparently followed that car and then jumped on the roof of the car, according to Elon Musk.
And so this apparently changed his opinion.
It was back in November, like early November of 2022, that he tweeted, my commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.
Well, he obviously changed his mind and he decided to put in place a doxing policy that says you're not allowed to put out anybody's information on location.
Now the definition of doxing is going to come into play here.
What exactly is doxing?
So, for example, We track, in real time, a lot of people via the jets.
I mean, you can track presidential campaigns.
This sort of stuff happens all the time.
When a politician travels to Iowa, for example, you will see reports on Twitter that the politician has gone to Iowa, presumably to campaign for the presidency, and we do that by looking at the tail number on the plane.
Or we track Russian oligarchs.
Or we track politicians.
Like when Pete Buttigieg is taking private flights all across the country, you can track those private flights using the tail number on the jet.
This sort of stuff is fairly common online.
It is publicly available information.
The question is to when that shades over into doxing.
Meaning like the unsafe targeting of a person's location.
A location that somebody is trying to keep private.
That's kind of a shaded issue.
Musk says I've tried to keep that information private and people are now uncovering that information they're using it to target my family.
I'm very sympathetic to those claims considering that I as a human have 24-7 security on myself and on my house.
So I totally sympathize with Musk's claim.
However, the extent to which this is doxing is in question.
In any case, he ended up banning a bunch of quote-unquote journalism accounts.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So according to CNN, the accounts belonging to CNN's Donny O'Sullivan, The New York Times' Ryan Mack, The Washington Post's Drew Harwell, and other journalists who have covered Musk aggressively in recent weeks were all abruptly permanently suspended.
The account of progressive independent journalist Aaron Ruppar was also banned.
Now, the truth is Ruppar should have been suspended for disinformation years ago.
And if we aren't actually taking seriously the Twitter terms of service, which suggests that you're not allowed to mislead people, then Aaron Ruppar is one of the worst actors on Twitter.
Banning all of these other journalists on the basis that they were revealing his location, that is sort of dicey.
Musk claimed that journalists had violated his news-doxing policy by sharing his live location, amounting to what he describes as, quote, assassination coordinates.
CNN's Daniel Sullivan did not share the billionaire's live location.
Instead, he had shared, apparently, a link to a tweet talking about whether or not Elon Musk, in the aforementioned incident with his son, had actually filed an LAPD police report.
Shortly before his suspension, O'Sullivan reported on Twitter that the social media company had suspended the account of an emerging competitive social media service, Nastodon, which had allowed the continued posting of Elon Jett.
That was the account that posts the updated location of Musk's private jet.
Other reporters suspended Thursday had recently written about the account.
CNN says doxing refers to the practice of sharing someone's home address or other personal information online.
The banned account had instead used publicly available flight data, which remain online and accessible, to track Musk's jet.
But this also depends on whether Musk had taken serious measures to essentially obscure the ownership of his jet, for example.
Like let's say he bought his jet in a trust, specifically because he wished his jet data to remain private.
And while people speculating about that, is that quite doxing or is it not quite?
It's kind of in a gray area.
The bans raise a bunch of questions about exactly what Musk's standards are.
Musk, this is very funny, so yesterday there was a giant phone call with a bunch of pseudo-journalists and journalists with Musk, in which Musk called in and tried to explain why he was banning people.
And here's what that sounded like.
And there is not going to be any distinction in the future between journalists, so-called And regular people.
Everyone's gonna be treated the same.
You're not special because you're a journalist.
You're just... You're a Twitter... You're just... You're a citizen.
Um... So... Uh... No special treatment.
Um... You dox... You dox, you get suspended.
End of story.
Um... So... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And...
That is obviously simply trying to evade the meaning.
That is no different than actually showing real-time information.
So when you're saying posting a link to it, I mean, some of the people like Drew and Ryan Mack from the New York Times who were banned, they were reporting on it in the course of sort of pretty normal journalistic endeavors.
You consider that like a tricky attempt at ban evasion?
You show the link to the real-time information, ban evasion, obviously.
So, Musk actually did tweet out later, my plane is actually not trackable without using non-public data.
So there are a few things here that are worthy of note.
One is, we actually have to clarify the standard of what is considered doxing and what is not considered doxing.
If you're just publishing publicly available flight data without actually delving into a person's private information, then that is not covered by sort of doxing criteria, typically speaking.
If, however, you dig up somebody's home address and tweet that out in an attempt to get people to go to their house and harass them, a la Brett Kavanaugh, obviously that would qualify as doxing.
So this is sort of a gray area.
The area where Musk is completely right is that Musk refuses, as you hear right there, to give into the distinction that has been drawn between the quote-unquote journalistic crowd and everybody else.
There's a group of self-appointed journalismers And they are journalismers, because they say that they are journalismers.
And because they are journalismers, the standards of everyday life do not apply to them.
So you, as a human, on Twitter, for a very long time, were not allowed to post the home address of a person that you didn't like, because that was considered doxxing.
If, however, a journalist did it, then, like Taylor Lorenz doing this to libs of TikTok, then apparently that was totally fine.
That was absolutely fine.
If you posted Taylor Lorenz's address yourself as a regular citizen, this meant that you were doxing her and that was terrible.
If Taylor Lorenz showed up at the door of Libs of TikTok's parents to harass Libs of TikTok and then actually reveal video of that and the address and all of the rest, then that was not doxing because Taylor Lorenz is a journalism-er.
So Musk says, no, no, no.
We're not going to have that distinction anymore because that distinction is nonsense.
And he is correct about this.
When it says freedom of the press in the First Amendment, what it means is that Congress cannot crack down on dissemination of speech.
It does not mean that there's a special category of people called the press who have special privileges that you or I do not have.
And in fact, it would be very hard to determine who's a member of the press because people commit acts of journalism.
Whistleblowers very often are giving you more relevant information about the inside workings of a company than a journalist who's being given PR releases from the company.
So what constitutes being a member of the press versus not being a member of the press or being a journalist versus not being a journalist?
Very often it is self-appointed.
Aaron Ruppert is a journalist.
Like, the dogs on paw patrols are horses.
Like, that's not, like, Aaron Rupar is not a journalist.
Aaron Rupar is a person who clips people out of context, calls himself a journalist.
Does he get special privileges on Twitter because of that?
The answer, of course, is no.
Now, it also, one of the other questions here is how widely Musk is applying the ban.
Meaning, it is one thing to suspend Elon Jett.
It is another thing to suspend a person who tweeted out that they called LAPD to find out whether, in fact, a police report was filed and the police report was not filed, right?
That just looks like normal media criticism.
Final point here, however, the journalists who are extraordinarily upset, and they're really mad, the people at CNN, the people at NBC, the people at all the media infrastructure, who are super upset that standards are now being applied to them, that were applied in opaque fashion to all of their enemies five minutes ago and they were cheering, I have no sympathy for them.
So two things can be true at once.
I may not agree with Elon Musk's standard, it depends on the details of that standard as they emerge, but all of the journalists who are spending their time Cheering on censorship or going after other media companies and trying to have their advertisers removed.
By calling up advertisers who have nothing to do with the company and trying to harass them into silence.
All the same people who say speech is violence and therefore it's fine to get kicked.
Like all the people at Politico, for example, who are whining and screaming and holding vast staff-wide meetings over me writing a playbook letter for Politico.
If those people get suspended, I have no sympathy for them.
One set of rules for everyone.
If you are the people who are claiming that censorship on the basis of opaque standards is totally fine because you like the people doing the censoring, then live by those standards.
You will get no sympathy from me.
So people like Aaron Ruppar, whose job in life, and the glory they get in life, is by trying to get other people kicked off social media, getting kicked off social media, you have no tears, there will be no tears for you.
I think you probably shouldn't have been kicked off.
Also, your standards, buddy.
You know, F around and find out is sort of the idea here.
Your standards.
No sympathy.
And I know there are a lot of people who say that that is a violation of consistency.
No, it's not.
I can say those two things at once and they are perfectly consistent.
I don't think you should be banned.
And also, if you are banned, I don't feel bad for you because you seem to be like a person who likes banning.
So the Musk controversy continues apace along these lines.
And the reason that I point out the media inconsistency here is because many of the same people who are very upset with Elon Musk for suspending a bunch of journalists and pseudo-journalists on Twitter, like he's suspending Keith Olbermann, that's definitionally a pseudo-journalist.
Many of those same people were totally fine with pushing false information at the behest of the federal government and then calling for bans on that information from social media.
So, for example, Breitbart is now reporting that former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Cliff Sims said that he warned CNN reporter Natasha Bertrand that Hunter Biden's laptop was not Russian disinformation before she wrote the infamous and now discredited Politico story, which used dozens of former intel officials to push a false and misleading narrative about the origins of Hunter's laptop.
Bertram was reporting for Politico at the time.
She approached then-deputy D.N.I.
Sims on October 19, 2020 regarding an article she was writing about 50 former information officials claiming that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.
Breitbart News' Emma Jo Morris had a few days earlier broken the laptop from hell story, which Big Tech censored in the New York Post.
Sims told Bertram before the publication of the Politico story that the laptop from hell was not Russian disinformation, citing then-D.N.I.
John Ratcliffe.
Despite Sims' warning, Bertrand wrote the story anyway, gave the Democrats the headline they wanted, and this provided the impetus for social media banning all of this stuff.
So all of the journalismists who are very happy with the ban on the Hunter Biden laptop story are now very upset that Elon Musk is banning people based on tweeting out flight information or being next to people who are tweeting out flight information.
And I may agree with their standard, but I don't agree with them.
They're perfectly happy to have censorship standards applied through an opaque algorithm.
Well, Musk, at least, I'll say this for him, I mean, he's out there defending himself.
He's out there on Twitter explaining exactly what he is doing.
You can agree with it.
You can disagree with it.
But he is, in fact, explaining what he is doing.
And that is worthy of note because that is certainly a lot better than most of us got from Twitter for years when they were shadow banning material.
I'm sure.
We're going to talk to Matt Taibbi a little bit later on today, who is one of the reporters who was handed the Twitter files.
I want to ask him whether, in fact, I was shadow banned, because it is pretty obvious I was.
I've gained about a million followers on Twitter since the end of the Jack Dorsey tenure over at Twitter.
So.
Again, amazing to watch members of the media caterwaul and scream over standards being applied to them, they're happy to have applied to everybody else.
Alrighty, meanwhile, we are seeing a crisis on the border.
This is one of the reasons why when Trump releases stuff like major announcement, it's an NFT.
I become very, very irritated.
I think a lot of people do.
We have serious problems in this country.
Why is the leading president presidential candidate?
On the Republican side, the only candidate in the race.
Why is he not making that his chief?
This is the guy who was saying I'm going to build a wall.
Like, why would he?
Why wouldn't his major announcement be that, for example, he is now already coordinating with with governors in southern states in order to effectuate the building of a wall if he's reelected?
Like, why wouldn't he do that?
That would be a major announcement.
Instead, he's doing NFT garbage.
And that's a problem because we do, in fact, have a massive crisis at the Southern border, which everybody recognizes and the White House is simply lying about.
We'll get to that in a moment.
First, the situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate.
They're entering winter.
The Russian bombardment of infrastructure has not stopped.
This is one reason my friends at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews have been working in Ukraine Israel and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.
They've never seen hunger and suffering like they're seeing in Ukraine right now.
It's a reason why I'm asking you to help deliver food, heating fuel, and blankets to God's most vulnerable people.
In this season of giving, please consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
They're on the ground providing generators, building wells, providing medicine and food boxes in this very dire situation.
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There are a lot of vulnerable people over in Ukraine right now and you can help them out with your year-end giving.
Head on over to benforthefellowship.org or text SHAPIRO to 41444 to get started.
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Meanwhile, the border situation is completely out of control.
Everybody knows this at this point.
According to the Wall Street Journal, as federal immigration authorities continue to release migrants by the thousands, El Paso officials and local charities are near a breaking point in the sprawling border city.
Large groups of migrants, including a large contingent of Nicaraguans who crossed the border on Sunday, have been streaming across the Rio Grande in recent days.
U.S.
Border Patrol facilities housed more than 5,000 people on Wednesday, and roughly 1,700 migrants were released, according to data from the city of El Paso.
My country is hard.
There's no work.
Our president is very bad," said Catherine Urbina, a 28-year-old from Nicaragua who is traveling with relatives and friends, said of why she came to the U.S.
right now, which is not actually an asylum claim.
Being from a country that is not great and where there's underemployment is not actually an asylum claim.
Urbina said she and relatives were part of the large group that crossed on Sunday and spent several hours standing on the U.S.
side of the river waiting to surrender to border patrol so they could ask for asylum.
It's unclear what triggered the latest wave of migrants, but authorities think the impending end of Title 42 may be a fact.
Remember, Title 42 was used.
It was the COVID excuse to get people away from the border.
It was like, well, we don't know if you have COVID or if you don't, so under Title 42, we can exclude you from the country and process you inside of Mexico.
A federal judge has ordered the Biden administration to stop expelling migrants under the law by December 21st.
U.S.
officials are considering a move to expand a program creating a legal process for Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum to also include Nicaraguans, Cubans, and Haitians amid the recent surge according to the Wall Street Journal.
Such a move would allow migrants from those countries to apply from abroad to fly to the United States and could slow attempts to cross the southern border.
But that's only going to work if people don't believe that if they arrive at the southern border we're just going to release them into the interior.
So if the idea is apply from Venezuela and we'll reject you while you're in Venezuela or Move up a couple thousand miles to the American southern border and then we'll just let you in.
People are just going to continue to stream in.
It's not about where you're processed.
It is about whether if you're processed at the border, you're going to be let in.
Well, if you're not processed at the border, you're not going to be let in.
That's what this is about.
Even Democrats are freaking out about all of this.
Democratic Representative Escobar says, I'm afraid that there will be a catastrophe.
And what you're going to end up with here because of under-resource is homeless migrants just wandering the streets of El Paso.
Nothing's going to happen unless an absolute catastrophe and then has to be responded to or the politics around this changes.
You are 100 percent right, Kate.
I am afraid that a catastrophe will happen that, you know, that there will be homeless migrants on the streets and freezing temperatures and people will die.
I'm worried about that.
I mean, that is.
That is from a Democrat.
And she should be worried about that.
The waves of migrants who are now swamping the southern border, that is happening because Joe Biden has made it clear that if you get into the country, you will be allowed to live here.
That is what has happened here.
This is why the rates of illegal migration have skyrocketed in the United States.
And that's not about processing power.
That's about the simple fact that when you say to people that if you get in, we will release you, you come back for one court date, and now you just get to live here and we'll probably amnesty you sometime in the near future.
Of course you're going to get waves of people who are attempting to get in.
I don't blame those people.
If I were living in Nicaragua, I'd also attempt to get into the United States.
The United States is an amazing place.
That does not mean that the United States has an obligation, moral or legal or otherwise, to bring people in just because economic situations around the world are worse.
Otherwise, the United States would have approximately 8 billion citizens, considering that the United States does have the world's strongest economy.
It's not a reason why a country has an obligation to bring people in.
Even if you are somebody who believes in an asylum and refugee status, typically that is because the government is specifically targeting you and your family.
It is not because the economy sucks where you live and you can't get a job.
And it's an absurdity.
This situation is growing worse and worse.
A Texas County border judge named Richard Cortez says the Biden administration is not helping us whatsoever.
Now, basically, we have a leak here at the border.
And instead of actually attempting to plug the leak and stop the hole, instead, the Biden administration is sending us buckets to catch the water.
But those buckets are insufficient.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that it has deployed additional agents and resources to the El Paso region.
I'm wondering if you think that is enough?
You mentioned the laws.
Specifically, laws and what?
You know, I'm smiling because what we have is that we have a leak.
We need a plumber to come and stop the leak.
And instead, what we're doing is we're sending us more buckets to hold the water.
That is not the solution.
He is correct that it is not the solution.
And again, this problem is getting worse and worse because it is not just illegal immigrants who are crossing the border.
It's also the fentanyl that many of them are carrying.
We have a massive fentanyl crisis in the United States.
It's taken over as the leading killer of people from drug overdose over, for example, straight heroin.
CBS Evening News with Nora O'Donnell interviewed the Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco about this.
And she says, Fentanyl is a national security crisis and when Title 42 ends... By the way, it is worth remembering here just how hypocritical the Biden administration is.
When they came into office, they said they needed to end Title 42 because it was bad.
Then they realized by ending Title 42, they'd get a wave of illegal migration.
And so they said, Title 42 has to continue applying.
Then they said it had to continue applying because of COVID.
But they've also declared that COVID is over.
So essentially, they don't want to own the consequences of their own bad policy, and the fentanyl keeps flowing right into the country.
Here's the Deputy Attorney General under Joe Biden.
There is a growing concern that there will now be a tsunami of fentanyl flowing through the southern border when Title 42 ends next week.
Is that something you're concerned about?
Well, I'm concerned about the increase in illegal migration.
I'm concerned with human smuggling.
I'm concerned with drug smuggling.
The DEA has taken an approach where they have established two counter-threat teams.
This is the kind of approach you take to organizations that pose a national security threat.
Okay, here's the thing.
The White House is not taking any of the sort of measures that would be necessary in order to stop any of this.
And you know who knows this?
All the Border Patrol agents.
So, according to the Washington Examiner, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary, visited El Paso, Texas this week.
Now, Kamala Harris has not gone down there, despite her lies about having gone to the border.
Joe Biden has not gone down to the border, and he's not too busy to do so.
He's busy wearing his sunglasses, aviator sunglasses, and hanging out with Men on the White House lawn who put out videos about how much they like erect penises.
I'm not kidding.
That happened two days ago.
In any case, this administration is not taking this problem seriously.
Secretary Mayorkas went down to the border.
And while he was there, he had a cold shoulder from the Border Patrol because obviously he's not actually effectuating policy that allows them to do their job.
There's been a big problem with ICE for as long as ICE has existed, is they basically have two conflicting missions, and those missions really should be separated by department.
One mission is to effectuate legal border crossing, and the other is to reject illegal border crossers.
Those are two very different missions.
And keeping them housed inside of one agency without any clear policy guidance means massive confusion and a feeling like you are going to be punished.
Let's put it this way.
You're not going to be punished if you allow too many people in.
You're going to be punished if you reject people who should have gotten in, according to the dictates of the Biden administration.
Mayorkas traveled to West Texas on Monday and Tuesday to meet with U.S.
Customs and Border Protection.
He focused his comments on smaller groups of management and rank-and-file agents and officers on suicide prevention.
And everybody's like, why are you talking about suicide prevention?
Why don't you talk about you sucking at your job?
A senior border patrol agent said, quote, when he stated he was here to bring light to suicide prevention and nothing about the migrant crisis, our staff couldn't believe it and made it known to him.
One federal law enforcement agent present at the discussion asked Mayorkas why he has continued to state that the border is secure when agents say this is an inaccurate assessment, given the hundreds of thousands of non-citizens they've observed on camera illegally entering and absconding.
The same agent said they asked him why he's saying that the border is secure and we have no agents in the field.
He had the nerve to respond.
He never said the border was secure.
I wish you could see into our agent's eyes.
They are lifeless, the same person said.
The secretary apparently shrugged off the question and pivoted.
Americas further fanned the flames by not visiting the land border, similar to Vice President Kamala Harris's flub during her first and only visit to El Paso 18 months ago.
So he stayed very, very far away from the border.
You don't want a picture of him anywhere near a border that he says is secure and which is totally insecure.
Meanwhile, Corine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, she says that Joe Biden has been doing the work since day one to secure the border.
Again, these are just abject lies.
They are not true.
From the White House perspective, though, should Americans be supportive or concerned with the end of Title 42, which obviously stops most migrants from being able to apply for asylum?
What Americans should know is that the President has done the work to deal with what we're seeing at the border since day one.
What Americans should know is that the President put forth an immigration reform policy to make sure that we're dealing with a broken system.
Again, Joe Biden has not done any of the work.
Everybody knows he's done none of the work.
This is why some seriousness on the Republican side would be ever so amazing.
How about some serious policymaking on the other side of the aisle as opposed to posturing and stupidity and NFTs and garbage?
We live in serious times.
This requires serious answers and serious people.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be joined by Matt Taibbi, former Rolling Stone journalist.
He is definitely on the left now.
He's being slandered as a person on the right.
Why?
Well, because Elon Musk gave him access to the Twitter files and he's actually been reporting on what Twitter was censoring.
And it's really, really bad.
I think he's going to break some news on the show.
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