As more information emerges about FBI intervention at Twitter, Elon Musk pledges to step down from leading the social media company.
Up to 5,000 illegal immigrants could begin flooding the border every single day as Title 42 comes to an end and the January 6th committee fiasco comes to its conclusion.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Bench Bureau Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers?
No?
Me neither.
Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
Well, Elon Musk bought Twitter not all that long ago, and he's been a very hands-on owner.
He's been formulating Twitter policy in real time, banning accounts, bringing back accounts, doing everything by Twitter poll.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk put out a poll Asking whether he should step down as the active head of Twitter.
This doesn't mean he'll give up ownership of Twitter, of course, but he put out a poll saying that he would pledge to abide by the results of the poll and asking whether people should allow him to remain the CEO of Twitter.
And then the poll results came in and nearly 60% of people on Twitter were polled said that Musk should not remain the CEO of Twitter.
Now, here's the thing.
I think Musk is smart enough to know what the result was going to be ahead of time.
I really doubt that he thought that 60% of people are going to say yes.
So what this really looks more like is a transition plan.
He's He wants to make it look like the people wanted him to step out of the way and then he'll appoint somebody else to run Twitter.
But this does speak to the way that Twitter is currently being run, which is very ad hoc.
Again, I don't have a problem with that because I would rather that there be someone at the top of the food chain to blame as opposed to the way Twitter was being run.
But this does throw the entire social media system into at least some chaos because nobody actually knows what's coming next.
I have no information suggesting that Elon Musk actually knows who would replace him as CEO of Twitter.
It's not like he has somebody waiting in the wings, and this is all a setup.
This is all see-to-the-pants kind of stuff, which makes it, on the one hand, fun, and on the other hand, slightly terrifying for those who actually are trying to figure out what standards Twitter is attempting to apply here.
According to the Wall Street Journal, The majority of Twitter users said Elon Musk should step down as chief of the company in a poll the billionaire pledged to follow, casting no uncertainty on the social media platform after more than seven weeks of turmoil since he took it over.
More than 17 million users had voted by the time the poll on the platform closed after 6 a.m.
Eastern Time, with 57.5 percent saying he should leave as the head of the company he bought in October for $44 billion.
Musk had said when he launched the Twitter poll on Sunday he would abide by the results.
It's not clear who would be taking over Twitter, Inc.
if Musk steps aside or what his role would remain, given that he still owns the company.
Most of the company's prior leadership was either fired or left after he took over.
And by the way, it's not going to be a great job.
For all those people who are clamoring and saying out there, I could do it.
Well, Musk is just going to fire you after two weeks because all that will mean is that he stands sort of behind whoever the Twitter CEO is.
Musk tweeted, quote, No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive.
There is no successor.
Now, one of the reasons why Musk is doing this is because his other companies like SpaceX and Tesla have been suffering on the stock market.
Shares in Tesla have fallen more than 57% this year, frustrating some retail investors who partly blame it Musk's focus on Twitter for the decline.
And this is not unusual.
Anytime the market perceives Musk as a volatile figure.
His stock drops and then it always comes back.
This happened with Tesla when Musk went on Joe Rogan's show and he smoked pot.
And for a moment there, it looked like the Tesla stock was going to be in rough shape.
And then, of course, Tesla pulled out of the tailspin and soon it was doing fine.
Tesla shares were jumping pre-market Monday amid the suggestion that Musk would stop running Twitter and return his attention back to the engineering company that he founded.
There have been questions since Musk first showed interest in buying Twitter how he would juggle running that company while also pursuing all of his other endeavors.
Bill Nelson, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's administrator, this month said he had asked SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell if Twitter would divert from the rocket company's mission.
She assured me it would not be a distraction.
Musk said last month that he had too much work on his plate.
Now again, it's been a pretty chaotic couple of months under Musk.
Much of what he has done has been excellent.
So for example, the breaking of new Twitter files, demonstrating what exactly Twitter was doing to shut down free speech before Musk took over.
Musk had said that he was essentially a free speech libertarian when he took over.
And then he's sort of activated, as I say, an ad hoc policy where he bans people and then he brings them back based on Twitter polls where the standards are not entirely clear.
And what's funny to me about that is that the entire media are caterwauling about this.
They're screaming to the heavens, screaming to God about why exactly the standards are so opaque and changeable.
It's like, welcome to the party, pal.
It's been like this for the last 10 years.
The only difference that this time you guys are sometimes getting clocked.
But the real thing that Musk has done here is, of course, revealed what was going on at Twitter during the Trump era.
We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
First, are you tired of overpaying for your wireless network?
You probably should be, considering you're paying too much money.
How do I know?
Because if you're with one of the big guys, then you are paying too much money.
Get talk, text, and blazing fast data for just $30 a month with Pure Talk.
Pure Talk gives you the same network, the same towers, and the same coverage as the other guys at half the price.
Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas.
Everybody.
Pure Talk's U.S.-based customer service team makes the switch incredibly easy, and you can feel good knowing you're supporting a veteran-owned business.
When you go to puretalk.com, enter code SHAPIRO, you save an additional 50% off your very first month of coverage.
There's no reason to pay Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile over $80 a month for wireless services when you can get the same service on the same network At Pure Talk for half the price.
Head on over to puretalk.com, enter code SHAPIRO to save 50% off your very first month of coverage.
That's puretalk.com, promo code SHAPIRO for 50% off your very first month of coverage.
Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless.
I made the switch.
It's super simple.
And again, you're using not unlimited data right now, but you're paying for unlimited data right now, so why not just get the same network as one of the big guys?
Not pay for the unlimited data and save a bunch of money.
Head on over to puretalk.com, enter code SHAPIRO, save 50% off your very first month of coverage.
Also, It's the holiday season and now is the time to get that special someone.
The best classic jewelry.
I'm talking about pearls from the Pearl Source.
The Pearl Source is still offering guaranteed Christmas delivery on all your orders.
Get the highest quality pearl jewelry up to 70% off retail prices by cutting out the middleman.
The Pearl Source eliminates crazy jewelry store markups and sells directly to you, the consumer.
Plus, the Pearl Source offers fast and free two-day shipping with guaranteed Christmas delivery on every order.
Your order comes pre-packaged in a beautiful jewelry box, ready to be given.
If you're not sure she'll love the gift, the Pearl Source comes with a no-hassle 60-day money-back guarantee with free return shipping, so it is risk-free.
I've given pearls to my wife.
I gave a pearl necklace to my mom.
I gave pearl earrings to my daughters.
They just make beautiful stuff over at The Pearl Source.
I know the family that runs the place.
Wonderful American family.
They're just terrific for a limited time.
My listeners can take 20% off their entire order.
Don't wait until it's too late to do your holiday shopping.
Go to ThePearlSource.com slash Ben.
Enter promo code Ben at checkout for 20% off your entire order.
That's ThePearlSource.com slash Ben.
Enter promo code Ben at checkout.
If you want fine pearl jewelry at the best prices online, go straight to the source, The Pearl Source.
And so over the weekend also, Matt Taibbi, who was a guest on this program last week, Former Rolling Stone journalist, he revealed how much contact was had between the higher-ups at Twitter and the FBI, and this should scare everybody.
When the FBI is contacting social media companies and telling them what to put up and what to take down and all the rest of it, predicated not on typical sort of law enforcement procedures, not based on warrants, not based on investigations, but based on simply the FBI's sense that they don't want something up, that's pretty scary stuff.
Late on Friday afternoon, the Twitter files are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.
Twitter's content with the FBI, contact with the FBI, was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth.
Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chen wishing Roth a happy new year along with a reminder to attend our quarterly call next week.
Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.
But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low follower accounts.
The FBI's social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents, and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.
Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
Matt Taibbi reports it's no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes.
But the Twitter files show something new.
Agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points pre-flagged for moderation.
What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government.
Some are aggregated from public hotlines.
There's an unanswered question.
Do agencies like the FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves or are they farming it out?
One former intelligence officer said, you have to prove to me that inside the effing government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search.
Tayibi says there was a master canine quality to the FBI's relationship to Twitter.
There's a November 2022 email, for example, in which the FBI San Francisco notified Twitter it wanted action on four specific accounts.
Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts.
Just to show that the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was more obvious that the person who kids a lot was actually kidding.
Pretty much all of the right-wing accounts ended up being suspended by Twitter at the behest of the FBI.
Now this, of course, is pretty scary stuff.
You don't really want the FBI coordinating with the social media companies to determine what should be taken down, what should be left up.
Many of the accounts that the FBI was targeting were satirical in nature.
Many of them were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, thanks Twitter letter.
When told of the FBI flagging, One of the people suspended said, my thoughts initially were, seems like Primey Faishey won a First Amendment violation.
Holy cow!
Me, an account with the reach of Namiba 3, what else are they looking at?
I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter.
That's crazy, said one of the users.
But that's exactly what was happening.
And this is one of the reasons why it was important for Musk to take over, because Musk is revealing all of the bad activity of the government in cahoots with Twitter.
Now, at the same time, as I say, the Musk's running of Twitter has been extraordinarily ad hoc.
I've used that phrase a bunch of times.
He's just doing it sort of seat of the pants.
So, for example, he suspended Taylor Lorenz.
Taylor Lorenz is just a garbage pseudo-reporter over at the Washington Post.
She spends all day just irritating people on social media and then tracking down her enemies on social media, and in the case of TikTok, actually doxing people on social media.
Well, she was actually briefly suspended from Twitter over the weekend.
She acted as though she had been shipped to the gulags under Stalin or something.
She was back on social media talking about her tremendously difficult period of Twitter expulsion in pretty short order.
But she came back online, by the way, and then she was sharing memes and all this, but she was suspended because of doxing of libs of TikTok.
Now, that's not a good standard.
I think Taylor Lorenz is garbage, and I think there are many times where she does things that ought to get her suspended or expelled from Twitter, including doxing people like libs of TikTok.
However, Taylor Lorenz, you can't retroactively decide to suspend people.
You can't decide two years later, because Taylor Lorenz did something to libs of TikTok, that now she ought to be suspended, because otherwise there's no standard at all.
I will say it was pretty funny.
Taylor Lorenz found out she'd been suspended.
She obviously was pretty happy about it.
And then she ended up dropping off of her own Instagram feed.
She had an Instagram feed in which she was announcing, or her TikTok feed, in which she was announcing this.
And all of the comments on the TikTok feed were about how much people hated Taylor Lorenz.
So she ended up running away.
Here's what it sounded like.
Oh my God.
This is just a bunch of Elon fans.
All right.
Oh, Air and Space Museum, hi!
Guys, I did have only three tweets because my tweets auto-delete and they have since 2014.
Anyway, I do have to go, but I love you guys and it was so fun to get to chat with you!
So, see you later, Taylor.
We'll catch you later.
Okay, Taylor Lorenz ended up being reinstated.
Here's the bottom line.
Bottom line is this.
Whoever is going to come in, foremost, because now he's pledged that he's going to step aside and he's going to put in some sort of new CEO.
Here is the standard that ought to be applied.
The standard that ought to be applied is a pure First Amendment free speech standard.
That's what ought to happen.
And then, all other standards ought to be made transparent.
If you're going to downgrade tweets that are First Amendment protected, but you don't want getting wide dissemination, You should have a transparent process whereby people can quickly see why the thing is being downgraded.
I will say that that Musk has been radically transparent, even though he is doing things, seat of the pants.
He's being very transparent about why he is doing things and how he is doing things.
And the answer is he's doing because he feels like it.
Whoever comes in next should continue that policy of radical transparency, but should take a very strict First Amendment standard with regard to Twitter in the United States.
One of the big problems for international companies like Twitter is that the free speech standards in the United States are not the free speech standards that apply in, say, France or Britain.
Where actual quote-unquote hate speech can be prosecuted.
They don't have the same First Amendment standards over in Europe.
So the best that Twitter probably can do, realistically speaking, is promulgate standards that are allowed by various governments in various parts of the West.
That's the best that they are going to do.
Whoever comes in next, however, you can imagine that Musk is not going to give up complete control of Twitter.
He is just going to give up day-to-day control, which will allow him to go back to his companies.
This is not a big victory against Elon Musk, the way the media are portraying it.
He still owns the place.
And despite all of the best attempts of the media to try to cudgel Twitter back into what it was before, that is not going to happen.
Meanwhile, we have a crisis that has now been unleashed on our southern border.
It's going to get a lot worse, according to the Washington Post.
Both Republicans and Democrats are warning there could soon be an unmanageable influx of migrants at the southern border of the United States with the expected end this week of Title 42, a Trump-era immigration policy that allowed border agents to expel migrants for public health reasons during the COVID pandemic.
On ABC's This Week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott warned if the courts did not intervene to keep Title 42 in place, it would be total chaos.
At the southern border, a federal appellate court on Friday ruled the Biden administration could end Title 42 on Wednesday unless the Supreme Court intervenes.
Republican officials have signaled in court records they would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
How bad is this?
It's so bad, the El Paso mayor, Oscar Leaser, actually declared a state of emergency in El Paso ahead of Title 42's expiration, citing an increased number of asylum seekers sleeping in the streets.
Here is the mayor of El Paso again as a Democrat, declaring state of emergency.
So is this all ginned up by the Republican-leaning press, or is there a real crisis at the border?
As we see the increase in asylum seekers into our community and we see the temperatures dropping and we know that Title 42 looks like it's going to be called back on Wednesday.
We felt there was proper time today to call a state of emergency.
I said from the beginning that I would call it when I felt that either our Asylum seekers or our community was not safe.
And I really believe that today our asylum seekers are not safe.
So he's being about the asylum seekers that they're coming in and they're not safe.
Well, I mean, the reality is that the country is not safe when you have literally millions of people who are crossing the border and not vetting any of them.
Yes, you feel bad for people who legitimately are seeking asylum and then are tossed into a completely unworkable system.
But the vast majority of people who are crossing our border are not technical asylum seekers.
The people who are crossing our border largely are economic migrants, people who are coming from countries that have worse economies than the United States.
I don't blame them, but the people who are coming across the border are not people who would fit under a normal definition of people who ought to be receiving asylum in the United States for human rights reasons.
How bad are things about to get?
Lieser said he had spoken to federal officials who said they believed El Paso could see four to six thousand new migrants on Wednesday alone.
4,000 to 6,000 new migrants on Wednesday alone.
That is an insane number of people.
That is when Title 42 expires.
That is a jump from the more than 2,000 migrants the El Paso sector of U.S.
Customs and Border Protection is currently getting every single day, which again, by the way, is an enormous number of migrants.
And that is just the El Paso sector.
That is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are crossing the southern border before Title 42 is repealed.
Once Title 42 goes away, you're going to see a vast wash of people coming into the United States.
In fact, the wash of people into the United States is going to be so broad that New York City is now fretting that there is the possibility that a thousand migrants a day could be entering New York City.
Remember that time when it was absolutely terrible that Greg Abbott was sending some of the migrants who had entered Texas, some of the illegal immigrants who had entered Texas over to New York, and he was sending like a few dozen people?
Get ready for a thousand people arriving in New York City maybe every day, according to Mayor Eric Adams, over in New York City.
Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom visited an immigration center along the border and said it was a federal government issue that similar immigration sites were already at capacity.
Senator Alex Padilla of California defended the removal of Title 42, saying it was not intended to be an immigration policy, but public health policy.
He said, we're in a different place when it comes to COVID today than we were two or three years ago.
It's past time for Title 42 to be gone.
But again, there is no replacement policy for the Democratic Party and for the Joe Biden administration.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said last week that the Biden administration was prepared to lift Title 42 in quote-unquote, a safe and humane way, but they do not actually have the means to do so.
And everybody knows it, including the Democrats.
Now, everybody knows what's happening here.
What's happening here is that the Biden administration has decided that they have effectively an open border policy.
They've dramatically understaffed the border.
They've rejected Donald Trump's remain in Mexico policy, which was stay in Mexico while you apply for asylum in the United States.
They've decided that they are not going to vastly bulk up the number of Border Patrol agents who are available.
They've decided that they are not even going to vastly bulk up the number of courts that are available to process the people who are arriving on the border.
The Biden administration has very little interest in actually stopping what's going on at the border.
They have an interest in stopping people from covering it.
And this is why you have Bill Malugan, who actually has drone footage of thousands of migrants crossing the Rio Grande.
Then all of a sudden, the Biden administration gets very angry.
They don't like being covered on this stuff.
But they have no problem with the actual fundamental policy.
And to the migrants who are crossing the border, they understand what's going on.
They're coming because Joe Biden is president.
It's that simple.
One migrant interviewed by CNN says that border agents are telling him to wait until Title 42 ends to cross the border.
Well, again, the reason Border Patrol is saying that is because that is Biden administration policy.
Biden administration policy is Title 42 means I have to turn you away.
When Title 42, which is COVID policy, saying that you might have COVID so we can just turn you away for public health reasons.
When that goes away, then you can come back and can apply normally, which means a flood of people to the border.
Here's a migrant interviewed by CNN.
The reporter explains.
Gustavo, what are you seeing there?
Not only are these people getting in, we have all these people pondering when to pass.
Most of them I've been talking to, they are from Venezuela.
They are telling me that some of them already tried to go in.
Some of them are saying that once they get there, the agent tells them that this is not the right time.
A lot of people told me to at least wait, not to waste my time giving up because they were going to take me to another border.
The right thing to do would be after the 21st, I would have a chance to answer because Title 42 would go away. Everybody knows what's going on here. Even the former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, under Barack Obama, he says migrants know that they can simply game the asylum walls. They can show up, they can be processed, they can show up for one court appearance, they can disappear into the interior waiting for somebody to amnesty them, which is probably what will happen.
These people are going to be here for years because the asylum claims, the immigration claims take years to go through because the system is so overwhelmed.
How does this get fixed?
Well, Anderson, first of all, the courts have gotten way too involved in what traditionally has been an area where the courts defer to the political branches of government to the point where our policy is Muddled and confusing.
One week it's, no you have to end Title 42.
Another week it's, no you have to keep it.
Clearly, the state of our asylum system and our laws is one of the reasons that migrants come here.
Oh, really?
I mean, if only you had been the Department of Homeland Security head under Barack Obama and you'd actually changed the state of the laws and made it clear that people should not come here unless they have a legit asylum claim.
If only you had done something about that.
Oh, well.
Well, Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, quite correctly says our border is wide open, which of course is true.
Here's the senator from Arkansas.
Terry Mayorkas, do you continue to maintain that the border is secure?
Yes, and we are working day in and day out to enhance its security, Congressman.
First of all, what's your reaction when you hear Mayorkas denying the words that... And we have more tape, but it's only an hour show.
Yeah, Harris, those are the words of a delusional ideologue.
Of course our border is wide open.
Since Joe Biden took office, more than 5 million illegal aliens have entered our country.
I mean, that's an insane statistic.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, the situation in Ukraine, it's getting worse and worse.
The winter is now setting in.
Russia continues to send extraordinary amounts of ordnance into Ukraine.
It means a lot of people are suffering over there.
My friends at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews have been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years, but they've never seen hunger and suffering like they currently are.
This is why I'm asking for your help.
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.
Just 45 bucks can ensure warmth, food, and clean water to Jewish kids and the elderly in need.
Right now, through a match challenge campaign, your donation to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews will double in impact.
Join us in our goal to help distribute 2,000 food boxes to Jewish families in war-torn Ukraine and across the former Soviet Union.
Head online to benforthefellowship.org or text SHAPIRO to 41444.
It's the season of giving right now.
Make one of your giving priorities the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
Go online to benforthefellowship.org or text SHAPIRO to 41444 to get started.
Right now, again, they're in the middle of a math challenge, so your donation is going to go further.
Go online to benforthefellowship.org or text SHAPIRO to 41444.
Also, If your sleep quality is not as good as you want it to be.
And you can't think of why, right?
You already got your great mattress.
You've got the temperature, right?
But something is just not right.
You know what it is?
It's your sheets.
I'm just telling you right now.
Because nobody ever thinks of their sheets until you get a really nice set of sheets like the sheets from Bull & Branch.
The holidays are the most exciting time of the year.
You need the proper sleep to enjoy them properly.
Head on over to Bull & Branch.
They're better than any other sheets I've tried.
In fact, we took all of our other sheets in the house and we actually just threw them out.
Bull & Branch sheets are made from the finest 100% organic cotton threads on planet Earth.
Their signature hemmed sheets were made with threads so luxurious three U.S. presidents have slept in them.
Bowling Branch sheets actually soften with every wash cycle.
They come in nine neutral colors in all mattress sizes. Their signature sheets come wrapped in a beautiful holiday gift box.
Bowling Branch will give you a 30-night risk-free trial with free shipping and returns on all orders. You're not going to want to return them, seriously, you're not.
Give the gift of a better night's sleep this holiday season with Bowling Branch for a limited You get 20% off your first set of sheets, plus free shipping when you use promo code Shapiro at bullandbranch.com.
And two, they activate the media to pretend that you noticing is the problem.
So, over the weekend, the White House said that ending Title 42 does not mean that the border is wide open.
The border is still shut.
Everything is secure.
Everything is good.
Here's Fox News reporting.
Now the White House reacting last night to this ruling in a statement saying quote to be clear the lifting of the title 42 public health order does not mean the borders open anyone who suggests otherwise is doing the work of smugglers spreading misinformation to make a quick buck off of vulnerable migrants despite the White House pointing the finger at Republicans some Democrats are directly contradicting the White House warning of what they say will be a tidal wave of illegal migrants expected to come to the U.S.
on top of the more than two million in the past year.
The gall of these people.
So 5 million people have entered the country legally since Joe Biden took office.
And if you notice it, it's you that's the problem.
So it's us saying the border is open under Joe Biden that's causing people to come up and try to cross the border.
It's not the border actually being open, it's that they are misinformed all those people.
That's the real problem.
So Martha Raddatz, doing the work of the legacy media, which is essentially just the Praetorian Guard for the Democratic Party.
Martha Raddatz over at ABC News, she was talking to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Abbott was saying, Joe Biden is leaving the border open.
She's like, well, Joe Biden says he's not leaving the border open.
You're saying he's leaving the border open.
So it's your fault.
If you wouldn't, if you weren't out there saying that Joe Biden was leaving the border open, no one would know.
It would be a big secret.
And then the border wouldn't be open.
This is amazing.
I mean, this is just gaslighting at the highest level.
So you do a bad thing.
And then we notice you doing the bad thing.
And then the media say the bad thing is happening because you noticed.
Not because the person originally is doing a bad thing, but because you noticed.
And because you noticed and you said something, other people are taking from that that the bad thing is happening, which they wouldn't have known in the first place unless you said it.
By this token, by the way, you should disband the entire media because the media actually cover bad things happening.
Then they are obviously promulgating the bad thing that's happening.
Anytime the media promulgate a story in which somebody does something bad and then people react to that story, then it's the media's fault.
So probably should just disband the media by Martha Raddatz's logic.
Here's ABC News's Martha Raddatz doing the work of the Biden administration.
I don't think I've ever heard President Biden say, we have an open board, come on over.
But people I have heard say it are you, are former President Trump, are Ron DeSantis.
That message reverberates.
In Mexico and beyond.
So they do get the message that it is an open border and smugglers use all those kinds of statements.
It was known from the time that Joe Biden got elected that Joe Biden supported open borders.
It is known by the cartels, they have sophisticated information, whether or not the Biden administration is going to enforce the immigration laws or not.
That's obviously true.
It's not that Greg Abbott said it, so people down in El Salvador are like, okay, time to cross the border.
It's that everyone knows the border is open, and that's why people are rushing up to the border.
Okay, none of that solves the underlying problem.
Let's say that every Republican tomorrow stopped saying that the border was open.
Do you think people would stop coming?
Or do you think maybe it's the bad policy that is facilitating all this?
And this obviously raises the question as to why the Biden administration keeps pushing bad policy.
Why don't they close the border?
Why did they stop the building of Trump's border wall?
Why are they getting rid of Title 42 without anything to make up for its absence?
Why did they try to end the Remain in Mexico policy?
Why are they doing all these things?
And the answer is pretty obvious.
I mean, Chuck Schumer actually said it out loud not all that long ago.
Chuck Schumer said, there aren't enough people in the United States to do a bunch of the low-level work, and so we have to ship in low-education, illegal immigrants into the country.
That was Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, who said that.
Not me.
Not promulgators of the so-called Great Replacement Theory.
Chuck Schumer.
So we're not having enough kids in this country, and so we have to ship in immigrants.
And if they have to come illegally, they have to come illegally.
This is a purposeful policy by this administration.
That's the only reason you have five million people who have crossed the border since the beginning of this administration.
That's an amazing statistic.
And the media had an interest in looking the other way, effectively speaking, because they all agree with the administration.
And so this is one of those issues that sort of flares up.
It's like a bad case of gonorrhea.
Every so often, it just flares up into the American public mind.
And then it goes away when the media stopped covering it.
Just suffice it to say, Joe Biden has still never been to the border because Joe Biden does not care about border policy.
He's too busy with his big spending policy.
And here's the reality.
A giant welfare state is reliant on new blood coming in and providing the labor fodder for that welfare state.
Now, the problem is when you bring in a lot of people who then become dependent on welfare, you actually exacerbate the problem.
Another problem is when you bring a lot of people in with no intention of assimilating them to American rights and duties, then you've actually changed the nature of the country.
But Joe Biden doesn't care about any of that.
For Democrats, it's all short-term gain and long-term pain.
But in the end, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the end, in the long run, we're all dead.
So who cares?
Speaking of people who are nearly dead, who are going to continue running for president, Joe Biden is still planning on running for president.
Both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer over the weekend said that Joe Biden should run again.
Why not?
I mean, Nancy Pelosi is well into her 200th year.
So why exactly shouldn't Joe Biden run again?
He's a spring chicken by the standards of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
Do you think President Biden should step aside for a younger generation?
I think President Biden has done an excellent job as President of the United States.
I hope that he does seek re-election.
He's a person with a great vision for our country.
He's been doing an amazing job, says Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer at the Old Age Home.
Amazing job.
By the way, it is amazing that the Biden team is now apparently prepping a strategy for his likely 2024 re-election campaign, according to the Washington Post.
It would dramatically expand efforts to organize content sharing between supporters and their friends on digital platforms, including TikTok and WhatsApp, where political advertising is not allowed, according to people involved in that effort.
So here's the rule when it comes to the use of technology in order to facilitate campaigns.
When Democrats do it, it's amazing and wondrous, and the platforms are great.
When Republicans do it, it's evil.
This is what we saw in 2012, when Barack Obama successfully used Facebook in order to mobilize an extraordinarily large voting base.
And then in 2016, when Cambridge Analytica was using data from Facebook in order to target voters, then Facebook became evil.
So I'm sure we're about to see the same thing with TikTok and WhatsApp.
According to the Washington Post, the plans, which build upon lessons from the 2020 campaign, are one part of an expensive research effort funded by the DNC to prepare for Biden's expected campaign launch next year.
Top advisors have been testing ways to reactivate volunteers and donors.
They completed a review this summer of the shifts in how voters consume political information over the past two years.
The review found phone-based apps and streaming television have grabbed an increasing share of attention from voters, which offer fewer opportunities for direct advertising.
Local television news continues to be popular.
So does search engines.
But much of the focus of party strategists has been on groups of voters who are increasingly spending time consuming information in private digital environments, mostly through their phones or on public platforms where paid political advertising is not actually available, including chat threads.
Democratic strategists have concluded that in many cases, volunteers can have more impact by creating or distributing content to their digital communities than by spending their time in a more traditional canvassing operation.
So basically, they're not going to activate all of your friend list in order to bother you on WhatsApp about voting for Joe Biden.
This is their plan.
And it may work.
And it will be considered a brilliant digital plan up until the moment that Republicans adopt the same plan, at which point these apps will be to blame.
And we'll have to have government regulation of WhatsApp to prevent just this sort of stuff.
Jen O'Malley Dillon, senior Biden advisor, said, quote, And hard.
As a result, the Biden team has been reviewing ongoing experiments run by the National Party and looking at Democratic Senate campaigns involving once obscure organizing strategies, which became more common in the 2022 midterms.
The options include paying social media influencers to promote and share supportive content.
That's not corrupt at all.
So you're now going to get, you know, the local makeup artist on TikTok to start advertising for Joe Biden, encouraging volunteers or paid organizers to directly push messages to targeted voters in their phone contacts.
There are also technologies the party has been reviewing that make it easier for volunteers to share campaign content to their networks.
Again, it's brilliant when Democrats do it.
It's very bad when Republicans do it.
So watch for that emerging narrative.
Now, there's only one problem for Joe Biden in all of this, and that is that he's still a bad president.
I mean, I know that we keep pretending that Joe Biden is an amazing president because he dodged the bullet in 2022.
But the reality is that if you look at Joe Biden's job approval rating, that dude is still way underwater.
According to the latest Harvard-Harris poll, he's still down at 42% approval rating.
According to Reuters, he's down at 39% approval rating.
The only one that even has him in spitting distance of 50% is YouGov, which still has him at 45%.
His overall RealClearPolitics polling average, Joe Biden's job approval, is 43%.
These are not good numbers.
These are terrible numbers for Joe Biden.
And yet, the Democratic Party seems to believe that this guy is a big winner.
Again, the mask of the 2022 election could come back to really harm Democrats here.
They might think that he's doing an amazing job because they didn't get shellacked in 2022 because the Republicans raided the local homeless shelter for candidates.
But as it turns out, Joe Biden is an extraordinarily weak candidate, which presumably is just another reason why the January 6th committee is going ahead with a bunch of criminal referrals for Donald Trump.
The goal is sort of a win-win for them.
They get to either criminally refer Donald Trump and then he's prosecuted, in which case they get to ask every single Republican about Donald Trump's prosecution in January 6th and make election of 2024 about 2020.
Or they fail and they somehow allow Donald Trump to regain coherence and they sort of jog Trump to new heights in the polling, which very often happens.
When Democrats attack Trump, Republicans naturally tend to move into Trump's corner.
That's what happened after the Mar-a-Lago raids.
Right after the Mar-a-Lago raids, A lot of Republicans moved.
If you look at Joe Biden's job, he was being unfairly targeted, which seems to have been true based on the fact that he was not actively attempting to disseminate serious classified information or any classified information to foreign powers.
So Democrats could be looking at a win-win with the January 6th committee result, which is why it was always rigged in the first place.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
Well, folks, the holiday season is officially upon us.
Many of you are already DailyWirePlus members and get to enjoy the great content we've released this year, like What is a Woman, Terror on the Prairie, and The Greatest Lie Ever Sold.
If you've not been able to enjoy it because you're not a member, take advantage of our 30% off holiday sale.
This also applies to gift memberships, so don't miss this opportunity to get everybody on your list, an annual gift membership from DailyWirePlus with code HOLIDAY at checkout.
Since joining DailyWirePlus, Jordan Peterson and I have spent a lot of time together working on some projects I'm going to tell you about very, very soon.
They're awesome.
Earlier this fall, Jordan and our production team went to Washington, D.C.
to film a beautiful and engaging documentary on the Museum of the Bible called Logos and Literacy.
In it, Jordan meets with historians, theologians, and philosophers to discuss the history of the Bible and its influence on the world.
Now folks, this is all content that is only available to Dailyware Plus members, so sign up today.
Use code HOLIDAY at checkout to get 30% off your new annual Daily Wire Plus membership at dailywire.com slash ben.
That is dailywire.com slash ben today.
Okay, so if Joe Biden is an extraordinarily weak candidate, then he has to rely on Republicans sucking at this in order to win again in 2024.
And this is presumably where the January 6th committee came in.
It's why so many Republicans were very upset with people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for doing cover for the January 6th committee.
Because they weren't there to ask holistic questions about what Congress could do to prevent further events like January 6th.
Instead, the whole thing was about how do we provide fodder for Democrats so they can turn the entirety of Campaign 2022 and 2024 into a referendum on whether January 6th was bad or not.
Well, now we are reaching the end of the January 6th Committee.
According to Politico, the House January 6th Select Committee meets at 1 p.m.
today to vote on its final report and possible criminal referrals against Donald Trump.
Apparently, Kyle Cheney says that the House January 6th Committee is convening this afternoon to wrap up business.
They are going to fill in the record.
Their decision, it says Kyle Cheney, to recommend criminal charges for Donald Trump will suck up a lot of oxygen.
The more significant development will be the sheer volume of new details and information the panel supplies to back up the eye-popping contentions in their report.
For instance, I want to know what evidence of witness tampering the committee has, which they've teased during some of the public hearings.
Now, here's the reality.
They've been teasing all along in the same way that Adam Schiff kept teasing and teasing and teasing that there was going to be a Russian collusion bombshell that never actually dropped.
They've been teasing all along.
There was going to be some bombshell showing that Trump knew it was illegal to seek Alternative slates of electors knew he had lost and therefore was attempting to subvert the Constitution and finding an alternative slate of electors.
I have serious doubt as to whether they're gonna be able to prove that actual case.
In reality, it's very likely that the January 6th committee was always going to do this.
Whether the DOJ acts on it is fairly irrelevant at this point.
They'll get the headline.
The DOJ, of course, already has a special counsel working on the January 6th case as well as the Mar-a-Lago case.
The DOJ has already brought in some of the highest level figures in Trump's orbit, according to Kyle Cheney over at Politico, reaching the upper echelons of his administration.
That's usually a sign of a mature investigation that could be nearing a charging decision.
And also there's a Fulton County grand jury, which has similarly fought in one battle to obtain testimony from many of Trump's top aides.
Again, what is the goal here?
The goal here, presumably, is to hang January 6th around Republicans' neck from here until the end of time.
And they have to do this.
It worked in 2022, of course.
And many of the people that Donald Trump sided with, many of the people who are most strong about their claims that the 2020 election was overtly stolen and that Trump actually won, went down in flaming defeat in their various senatorial races.
There's a major factor in Republicans not taking back the Senate this year, the first election in an extraordinarily long time in which not a single incumbent on the Democratic Party side of the aisle lost in the Senate.
An amazing accomplishment.
Apparently, according to Politico, the White House is closely watching whether the committee refers House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and Representative Jim Jordan for ethics sanctions after defying the panel subpoenas.
You can bet that Biden allies will frequently cite their obstinance in the media and potentially in the courts as the GOP sends subpoenas down Pennsylvania Avenue starting on January 3rd.
A person familiar with the White House's thinking summarized the message sent by the likely new Speaker and Judiciary Committee Chair.
Subpoenas for thee, but not for me.
So they're going to attempt to essentially suggest that they don't have to abide by any subpoenas because Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan didn't decide to show up in front of the Congressional Committee to be grilled by their fellow legislators.
Adam Schiff, who is a misinformation font par excellence.
It's what he does.
He's just a continuous spout of misinformation.
And also a person who actually has put up a pup tent outside the CNN green room.
He was on the national TVs over the weekend explaining that there is evidence that Trump committed criminal offenses.
Now, in reality, Congress does not have the power to charge, obviously.
And the DOJ is going to be determining whether they even think that he committed criminal offenses.
And then there'll have to be a jury trial if, in fact, they think there were criminal offenses occurred.
I'm not going to listen to Adam Schiff on this.
Talk about somebody who's blowing out his credibility.
Do you think the evidence is there that Donald Trump committed any of the crimes I just mentioned, and that the cases are prosecutable?
That you could get a conviction?
I think that the evidence is there that Donald Trump committed criminal offenses in connection with his efforts to overturn the election.
And viewing it as a former prosecutor, I think there's sufficient evidence to charge the President.
Uh, nobody believes you, Adam Schiff.
This is part of the problem.
When you blow out your credibility, you don't get it back quite that quickly.
You know, Adam Schiff let the cat out of the bag here.
He basically said, I hope that they charge him in the middle of all of this because I want it to still be politically relevant.
This has been the Democrats' chief goal from the beginning is to keep Donald Trump at the center of the public conversation because the more people are talking about Trump, the less they're talking about Joe Biden doing a crappy job and allowing, for example, 5 million illegal immigrants into the country.
Here's Adam Schiff saying the quiet part out loud here.
Do you think That Donald Trump is going to face some kind of criminal charges in the coming months, independent from your investigation?
The short answer is, I don't know.
I think that he should.
I think he should face the same remedy, force of law that anyone else would.
But I do worry that it may take until he is no longer politically relevant for justice to be served.
That's what he's worried about.
He wants it done while Trump is politically relevant.
He wants to smack Republicans with it.
Now, the reality, of course, is that the FBI, the DOJ, they're very often reluctant to get involved in issues that impact campaigns.
This was a story with Hillary Clinton in 2016, for example.
It's why there was major controversy over James Comey opening his mouth.
But Adam Schiff would like for this to happen while Trump is politically relevant.
This is their saving grace.
And Democrats cannot rely on their own good governance here in order to shift them into high gear for 2024.
They're going to have to rely on Republicans being bad at this.
Now, the good news for them is that they can always find some Republicans who are bad at this.
This is an insane story.
Apparently, there is a representative-elect named George Santos.
He's a Republican from New York.
And there's a report in the New York Times that basically says that, you know, we'll take it with a grain of salt.
It's the New York Times.
We'll see what Santos responds.
But it seems like this dude has falsified an extraordinary number of aspects of his actual biography.
Again, Congress is filled with all sorts of weirdos.
I know a lot of Congress people on both sides of the aisle.
Not the world's finest.
It's not the best people, but this particular story is pretty insane.
According to the New York Times, George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion he was the full embodiment of the American dream and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey.
He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent.
By his account, the He catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a seasoned Wall Street financier and investor with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the U.S.
and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the resume he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Santos's campaign biography, told the Times they had no record of his ever working there.
Officials at Baruch College, which Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
There is also little evidence his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization.
The IRS has no record of a registered charity with that name.
His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth.
He lends his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years, and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.
But the firm is something of a mystery.
On a campaign website, Santos once described Devolder as his family firm that manages $80 million in assets.
On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors.
But Santos' disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if there are clients.
And while Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed records of his properties.
At the same time, new revelations uncovered by the Times have the potential to create ethical and legal challenges once he takes office.
Santos responded to no request from the Times that he furnish either documents or a resume with dates that would substantiate any of the claims he made on the campaign trail.
Santos has said he was born in Queens to parents who immigrated from Brazil and was raised in the borough.
His father, he has said, is Catholic and has roots in Angola.
His mother was descended from migrants who fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine in World War II strife in Belgium.
Santos says he's a non-observant Jew but also has said he is a Catholic.
But apparently, in 2008, when he was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records.
Police and court records show Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes.
Here's the bottom line.
If it turns out that these aspects of his biography were falsified, it's going to be a real problem for not just him, but the Republican Party, considering that the Republican majority in the House is about five seats at this point.
I mean, Republicans cannot afford to lose people in the majority.
This is why it matters, the outcomes of elections, and it's also why parties should run better candidates.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be taking your calls.
Plus, Japan is beginning to arm up in anticipation of what could be a very volatile situation with China.