Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker Bid Keeps Falling Short | Ep. 1639
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Representative Kevin McCarthy keeps falling short in his bid for House Speaker as the Republican holdouts offer no alternative and Democrats laugh.
More Twitter files drop, demonstrating the indirect manipulation of that service by the government and Jordan Peterson falls under the thumb of the Canadian political commissars.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Bench Bureau Show.
All righty, well, we are now in the midst of day two of Kevin McCarthy's attempt to become House Speaker.
And here's the wonderful thing about politics.
If you watch it as a tragedy, it's really sad.
But if you watch it as a comedy, it's actually super duper funny.
And right now, what is happening?
It's funny mainly because the stakes are so low.
Let's be real about this.
The stakes for the speakership of the House are incredibly low at this point because all the leader of the House basically has to do is say no to most of Joe Biden's proposals.
There are certain things that the Speaker of the House, no matter who it is, is not going to do.
Those things include an interminable government shutdown with no end.
I know that there are some people who think that if you get a conservative enough leader in the Speakership of the House, that person is just never going to sign a check ever again as Speaker of the House.
That is not going to happen because that would be political suicide.
This has been proven over the course of the last 10 years, repeatedly, overtly, over and over and over again.
So that's not going to happen.
Then there's the question as to whether Kevin McCarthy is going to surrender more often than another alternative conservative leader.
This would posit the presence of another alternative conservative leader.
Now, if you could provide me a name, then maybe I'd consider it.
Since you can't provide me a name, and since the only viable alternatives have already endorsed Kevin McCarthy, it makes it very difficult to see exactly what the strategy of the people who are holding out on McCarthy is.
Now, if they were holding out to gain some sort of procedural Recompense.
If they were holding out in order to get some sort of surrender from McCarthy on key issues that matter, that might make sense as well.
Last night on his show, for example, Tucker Carlson suggested that Kevin McCarthy should promise to the holdouts that he's going to release all of the material from the January 6th commission.
Okay, fine.
I mean, if that's what they wanted, that'd be totally great.
Sure.
I'd love to see the thousands of hours of footage that are being hidden.
I would love to see all of the interview context.
Sure.
Why not?
Tucker suggested that, for example, Thomas Massey be given charge of some investigative powers.
Okay, sure, why not?
But that's not the actual demand.
Here is the problem.
No one knows what the demands are.
I know this because I'm speaking to many congresspeople, like, pretty much every hour now.
And what they are saying is that behind closed doors, the people who are making the demands of McCarthy aren't actually making any material demands.
They don't even know what they want.
What they are enjoying is the spectacle of being at the center of the political conversation, sort of in the same way that the squad on the left side of the aisle enjoys being the spectacle at the center of the political conversation on the left.
Well, the problem right now is that all the incentive structures in the Republican Party cut against a cohesive Republican Party because the Republican Party effectively has no power anymore.
In a time when political parties had a lot of power over their members, the power to reward and to punish members for sticking with the party or for moving against the party, there are incentive structures in place to ensure a cohesive level Inside the party, this no longer exists.
Very often, Congress people are independent enough to basically be running without party.
And what that means is that it's going to be very difficult for any coalition to cobble itself together as a majority with this small majority, which is why it really mattered an awful lot in November when Republicans walked away with a very, very small, bare majority, as opposed to walking away with 235 plus seats.
There's a lot of attempts by people like Ronna Romney McDaniel, the incompetent head of the RNC, to suggest that there was going to be some sort of Victory for Republicans, because after all, Nancy Pelosi wasn't going to be Speaker of the House.
Well, now it seems like there's like half a chance that Hakeem Jeffries could actually be Speaker of the House with a minority in the House.
Because here is how this process is currently working.
Right now, every single bit of House business is held up because the House Speaker has to be elected.
There's been a foregone conclusion for 100 years.
For 100 years, there has not been somebody who has been, who's not been elected Speaker of the House on the first ballot.
It's been 100 years.
So now I guess the idea is that Kevin McCarthy is such a bad man that he can't be the guy who's the Speaker of the House.
Instead, we're going to have like multiple ballots.
This is going to go on for days or weeks or months with no end in actual sight and no alternative, no viable alternative being put forward.
I don't understand the strategy.
In any case, the actual way that this process works, you have to get a majority of the members who are currently sitting.
What that means is that if you have enough members who abstain, theoretically, you get a majority of the remaining members.
You can have a bunch of members vote present, for example, and in doing so remove themselves from the consideration of House Speaker. So right now you need 218 votes out of 435 in order to become House Speaker. If, however, say 100 members decided that they were going to vote present, then you'd need out of 335. So the number would drop pretty dramatically.
That is one of the strategies that's being considered right now by some of the Republicans.
Apparently McCarthy wants some of the disdaining Republicans to sit out.
That is very unlikely.
It's very unlikely these 20 Republicans who are voting against McCarthy are going to sit out the election and then sort of passively allow him to become Speaker of the House because what the hell is the point of that?
Then there are a couple of other strategies, and these are very risky strategies.
So, strategy number one is that you could get the House to vote at the behest of the Republican leadership in favor of changing the rule to elect the Speaker of the House.
The way that would happen is instead of being elected by a majority, you could now be elected by a plurality.
And now, here is the risk for Republicans.
If you could be elected by a plurality, this means that the person who actually won the plurality of the last speakership vote, Hakeem Jeffries, could become Speaker.
Because Democrats are unified in support of Hakeem Jeffries.
There are 212 votes for Hakeem Jeffries.
That's all the Democrats voting in unified fashion for Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the House.
We'll get to more of the news in just one second.
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Yesterday, Kevin McCarthy on the first ballot fell short by 20 of his own party votes.
That means out of 222, he got 202.
So that means Hakeem Jeffries actually beat Kevin McCarthy in the plurality vote.
So if Kevin McCarthy were to basically say, we're changing the rules now by plurality vote, we elect the Speaker of the House.
If you'd have to count on 11 Republicans peeling off that 20 and voting in favor of the Republican in order to stop Hakeem Jeffries from becoming Speaker of the House.
Now, the problem is some of these Republicans have already said they don't mind if Hakeem Jeffries becomes Speaker of the House because then they'll just yell at him.
And they'll just try to hold up party business because a majority will still be able to vote down whatever Hakeem Jeffries wants.
Hakeem Jeffries will be in charge of the committees.
But I thought that half the purpose of the Republicans taking over the House of Representatives when they have a minority position in the government, meaning that they don't actually control the Senate or the presidency.
I thought that half the purpose was how you staff the committees, the investigative committees, the judiciary committee, and all the way.
So you're willing to surrender all that to Hakeem Jeffries because you're pissed at Kevin McCarthy?
I don't actually see the strategy here.
What is your strategy?
Again, you don't have to love Kevin McCarthy in order to ask a very simple question.
What is it you are trying to achieve?
What is your goal here?
I don't feel like this is an irrelevant question.
And I understand there are people online who are yelling and screaming.
Well, my goal is that I don't like Kevin McCarthy and we need more conservatism and we need we need better.
OK, we do need more conservatism.
We do need better leadership.
Who is it?
What's your strategy?
See, I can agree with you on many of your goals.
And also, I can ask you, what is your strategy?
What are you trying to do?
What do you seek to accomplish?
There are no other candidates who are in the running other than Andy Biggs, who in an internal party poll won 35 votes against Kevin McCarthy's 180 or something.
What are you talking about?
If there's no strategy, then whatever your goals are really matter very little.
It turns out that strategic thinking is the heart of politics.
And if you have no strategic thinking, then basically what you're saying is you want to run shouting into a wall over and over again.
And the more you run into the wall, the more virtuous you are considered.
And I just don't understand it.
What concessions are you seeking from McCarthy?
He's already attempted to give a bunch of concessions.
You could probably pry some more concessions out of him, maybe.
But that doesn't even seem like the strategy right now.
It just seems the strategy right now is to be very angry about things.
And I understand that politics is largely performative now.
I understand that the reason that many people go into Congress is because they wish to become famous and because they wish to have a platform for their ideas.
And again, I don't even argue with that.
You want to go into Congress in order to have a platform for your ideas.
You're not there to do the kind of nitty gritty work of the congressperson.
The institution used to shape the people inside it.
Now people inside the institution use it as a platform.
This is the point that Yuval Levin has made, the philosopher from American Enterprise Institute.
With all of that said, what are you achieving here?
I just failed to understand what exactly it is that you are achieving.
So, according to the Wall Street Journal, Kevin McCarthy fell short of winning the House Speaker's gavel in three rounds of voting on Tuesday, leaving the chamber without a leader as a determined block of conservative holdouts refused to relent over longstanding complaints about the direction of the party.
Now, here's the problem.
What direction of the party?
The party has no direction.
So what exactly are you, what is the specific complaint?
There's some people who have said, for example, that they want Steve Scalise to be put in place.
Steve Scalise is marginally more conservative than Kevin McCarthy.
I like Steve Scalise.
That's fine.
Except Steve Scalise ain't running.
He don't want the job.
By the way, you have to be kind of a nut to want to be Speaker of the House.
Let me give you a brief history of the last Republican Speakers of the House.
The last Republican Speaker of the House, starting in 1994, When Republicans took over the Congress or Newt Gingrich, he took over in 1994.
And then Newt Gingrich, after the 1998 election, he was essentially on his way out after that election because 1998 didn't go the way he wanted.
And then he was caught in extramarital affair and all of this.
And so Newt Gingrich had to step down.
The person who's supposed to succeed him, Bob Livingston, Actually ended up not because he was engaged in an affair of his own.
And so he ended up stepping outside of Congress.
The person who picked up was Denny Hastert.
Denny Hastert was the House Speaker from 2000 until 2006 when the Republicans lost the Congress.
He is now in jail for having molested a teenage boy.
Great history here.
Then John Boehner took over in 2010 when the Republicans won 60 seats.
You'll recall that John Boehner was largely hated by the right wing because there was a feeling that he had given in too easily to Barack Obama.
He didn't go along with the attempts to shut down the government more strongly.
And he had a bad habit of crying in public and looking weak in front of Barack Obama.
He didn't look like sort of a stalwart leader.
So they decided to defenestrate John Boehner.
And John Boehner stepped down in 2016 for no actual reason, right?
He stepped down.
Just because his party didn't like him.
It was October 29, 2015.
He was like, fine, you want me to go?
I'm out.
Until he decided to get out.
Paul Ryan had to be forced into the position of House Speaker.
He didn't want that position because who the hell wants the head of this fractious caucus?
Very, very difficult to run anything inside the House of Representatives right now.
The Republican Party is like herding cats.
The Democrats are rank and file, right in line.
As much as we like to talk about the squad and the internal battles between Nancy Pelosi and the squad, when it came down to the vote, the squad knew where its bread was buttered.
Because Nancy Pelosi still held the purse strings.
She was the one who was raising all the money.
She still had the entire party apparatus behind her.
Because the Republican Party has fractured six ways from Sunday, they essentially have no leverage over their own members.
Okay, so Paul Ryan takes over in 2015.
This was not the intent of the conservatives inside the party, by the way.
Many of the conservatives inside the party, they were OK with Ryan on fiscal issues, but they're like, why are you making restructuring of Social Security your number one issue as opposed to a wide variety of other issues?
So Paul Ryan was not popular with sort of the rank and file conservative members, but he was the only person who they could actually get to take the job.
And they give him all sorts of sort of perks in order to take the job.
A lot of control over the way that the agenda was run.
In 2018, the Republicans lose the Congress, Nancy Pelosi takes back over, and now we have this battle over Kevin McCarthy, which means the Republican Party has had effectively two somewhat effective speakers of the House over the course of the last 20 years.
Newt Gingrich for maybe a term and a half, and then Denny Hastert was a fairly effective House leader from the time that he took over until the time that he lost power in 2006 and was putting aside all of his personal evils.
And so, who wants this job?
You can't get anyone to take the job.
Steve Scalise doesn't want the job.
He doesn't.
You know who else doesn't want the job?
Jim Jordan.
So, I really like Jim Jordan.
Jim Jordan, representative from Ohio.
Dude does not want the job.
He wants to be head of the Judiciary Committee.
Because that's a much better job, being the head of the Judiciary Committee.
Your job is to sit there, and it is to give advice and consent on matters of judicial policy.
It is to investigate.
You have tremendous investigative power as head of the Judiciary Committee.
And all the rest, Jim Jordan endorsed Kevin McCarthy yesterday.
Steve Scalise endorsed Kevin McCarthy.
Here was Jim Jordan yesterday.
He's sort of the great hope of a lot of conservatives to come in and restructure.
I like again, really, I know Jim Jordan, super nice guy, really like him, strong conservative, not up for the job.
Here's Jim Jordan yesterday endorsing Kevin McCarthy.
We should all remember, we should all remember, only about 12,000 people have ever had the opportunity to do what we're doing today.
Sit in this body, serve in this Congress.
It is a privilege.
It is an opportunity.
We owe it to them, the American people, the good people of this great country, to step forward, to come together, get a Speaker elected, so we can address these three things.
I hope you'll vote for Kevin McCarthy, and that's why I'm proud to nominate him for Speaker of the House.
Okay, so and then people like Elise Stefanik, who many were saying, maybe she'll run again.
She's not running either.
She's not running.
Jim Jordan is not running.
Steve Scalise is not running.
So who is the alternative?
You guys keep saying there's an alternative.
Who?
Bueller?
Who?
So Chip Roy, again, I really like Chip.
I think a good congressperson from Texas.
I think he's a very strong conservative.
I understand his frustrations at the way that the Republican Party is run.
I will tell you one thing.
No Speaker of the House is going to guarantee a preemptive government shutdown.
No Speaker of the House is going to do that.
Many people in the Republican rank and file would like to see that sort of thing.
That is a bad strategy.
And so what they've been asking of the Speaker of the House is to basically guarantee, for example, that it's going to require a two thirds majority in the House to approve any earmark.
That means no legislation ever gets passed again in the House of Representatives.
As much as I would love For the pure, unbridled, conservative policy to be the only policy that gets done in Congress?
That is not the way that Congress works.
That is cruising for an electoral bruising.
Republicans have tried this before.
It does not work.
My job, as a commentator, is to explain sort of pure Republican, conservative thought.
More conservative than Republican.
It is the job of legislators to bargain.
It is the job of legislators to legislate.
It is the job of legislators to get the most that they can without losing their seats.
That is their job.
Running directly into walls is not the job.
Anyway, Chip Roy got up yesterday and he endorsed Jim Jordan.
But as we've already seen, Jim Jordan endorsed Kevin McCarthy.
So what does it matter if you endorse Jim Jordan?
I want the tools or I want the leadership to stop the swamp from running over the average American every single day.
I'm going to sit here until we figure out how to stop spending money we don't have.
And to do that, I'm going to do what I did my very first act as a member of Congress or as a congressman-elect.
Okay, so here's the thing.
When he says that he wants some sort of solution to stop the spending, well, I mean, I'm all ears.
I'm all ears.
You can move through regular order, and then if the Democrats in the Senate don't move forward with regular order and Joe Biden vetoes the legislation and there's no defense spending and the government shuts down again, who do you think gets blamed?
I understand that Congress holds the purse strings.
The question is really for the American public.
And there's not even a question about Republican Congress people.
They're trying to square a circle.
The American public lie when they say they want to cut the spending.
This is a big problem.
It is a generalized problem with Western welfare states.
Everybody says they want to cut the spending.
This is true by every poll ever taken.
They all say, we'd like to cut the spending.
And then you say, on what?
And they go, it's a real problem.
And that's not a problem that's going to be solved by simply shouting that you'd like to lower the spending.
So you have Chip Roy who voted against Kevin McCarthy.
Again, I'm not doubting the motives of the people who are voting against Kevin McCarthy.
I think their motives are probably quite good.
Again, I like Chip Roy.
The question that I have is, what is your plan?
What is your plan?
It's politics.
What's your plan?
And then Chip Roy suggested that members of the caucus were threatened.
They were threatened by Kevin McCarthy and the House leadership that if they didn't vote for McCarthy, they'd be stripped of their committee assignments.
Well, I mean, I'm not super shocked by that, considering that that's basically the only leverage that the party has over its members to cudgel them into line.
This is what political parties do.
And this morning, a group of folks threatened some of us, and they lost votes on that.
We're not going to back down until we get in a room and we decide how we're going to be able to stand up and fight for the American people, no matter who the speaker is.
Congressman, you just used the word threatened there in the House GOP conference meeting this morning.
Can you tell us what happened?
Well, it's been public information out there that Mike Rogers threatened to say he's going to kick those of us off of any committees who dared to challenge the coronation of the Speaker.
And the reality is, that was a threat, and it was not received well by a lot of people in the room.
Well, again, I'm not surprised that there was that threat that was leveraged.
I mean, this is what other threats do you have?
Not to fund campaigns, not to put you on committees like that's pretty much it.
That's the only leverage that the party has over its members.
And the answer apparently is that the party has no leverage over its members, which is why the caucus is extremely fractious.
Matt Getz is speaking sort of the same language as Chip Roy, suggesting that Kevin McCarthy is a quote unquote swamp creature.
I really need a definition of swamp creature.
I do, because it just seems like it's a broad catch-all term that means people I don't like.
Again, I think pretty much everybody in D.C.
is a member of the Swamp.
If by member of the Swamp, you mean has voted for bad legislation.
Because that's all Congress does, is votes for bad legislation.
I would also like to see the size of the federal government shrink dramatically.
But unless you have a good plan to get from A to B, shouting about the Swamp is not an actual solution.
Donald Trump shouted about the Swamp consistently in 2015-2016.
Then he became President of the United States with the Republican Congress and blew out the spending.
Those of us who will not be voting for Kevin McCarthy today take no joy in this discomfort that this moment has brought.
But if you want to drain the swamp, you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise.
I'm a Florida man and I know of what I speak.
We offered Kevin McCarthy terms last evening that he rejected.
We sought a vote in the first quarter of the 118th Congress on term limits.
He refused.
We wanted a budget from the Republican Study Committee that balances on the floor in the first quarter.
He refused.
We wanted the border plan that the Texas delegation put together on the floor.
He refused.
Okay, well, one of the reasons that the Speaker of the House sometimes refuses to bring up legislation that sounds great to me and sounds great to Matt Gaetz is because it doesn't have the votes.
You don't bring up policies that don't have the votes if you're the Speaker of the House.
It's just a general rule.
You have a bare, slim majority.
One of the things you generally don't want to do is bring up, by your own party, in the majority, legislation that is not going to get the votes.
You don't have the votes for term limits.
So why do you bring that up?
It's just a matter of pure politics.
Again, this all sounds dirty and scurrilous, but that's the job of these people.
I can tell you that I'm very much in favor of a balanced budget.
I'm in favor of a balanced budget constitutional amendment, for that matter.
I'll tell you what's not going to pass.
A balanced budget constitutional amendment.
It would be foolish for Republicans to bring up a piece of legislation that is overtly not going to pass and is going to be humiliating to the Republican leadership when it turns out that half the Republicans don't vote for it.
What is the point of that?
Is there any political point other than to humiliate your own party?
So Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one of the other representatives who's voting against McCarthy, he said McCarthy hasn't done enough to stem government spending.
He said, quote, we're going bankrupt if we're not already.
When we asked what plan he has, he just doesn't have one.
OK, so I agree we are going bankrupt.
Also, what is your plan?
Like if you want some normally when you come to the bargaining table, let's say it's a salary negotiation.
You have to have in mind what salary you want.
If you come into a salary negotiation and somebody offers you $100,000 and you're like, no, I say, what's your counter?
You just say no.
What are you going to bargain against yourself?
There's no clear, there's no actual clear strategy out here.
And here's the thing, many of the people who are voting against Kevin McCarthy are saying they're doing so in the name of the MAGA agenda.
You know who's repeatedly endorsed Kevin McCarthy, like over and over and over again?
Donald Trump has endorsed Kevin McCarthy over and over again.
Including this morning, quote, some really good conversations took place last night.
It's now time for all of our great Republican House members to vote for Kevin, close the deal, take the victory and watch crazy Nancy Pelosi fly back home to a very broken California.
The only speaker in U.S.
history to have lost the House twice.
Republicans do not turn a great triumph into a giant and embarrassing defeat.
It's time to celebrate.
You deserve it.
Kevin McCarthy will do a good job and maybe even a great job.
Just watch.
So we'll see if Kevin, by the way, if Trump doesn't actually have any leverage over these members.
Then his position in the party really has waned.
If these 20 members can't follow Trump on this one, then it's very unclear exactly who his support base is in 2024.
We'll get to more of the news in just one second.
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So, how foolish is the strategy?
Okay, so right now, here's what we know about the strategy.
Nothing.
We don't know what the strategy is.
In fact, we know so little about the strategy that it appears that some of Kevin McCarthy's allies are warning conservatives that they might look across the aisle to find a compromise speaker to gain Democratic votes in order to force these Republicans to vote for McCarthy, right?
This is the strategy I was talking about earlier, is that you might have Kevin McCarthy's allies bring up a vote to change the Speaker of the House rules to plurality.
Which would create the actual threat that Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader on the minority side of the aisle, becomes Speaker of the House, is how you sort of pry away 11 of those Republican votes to vote in favor of Kevin McCarthy.
Now, Democrats could also do that.
They could vote for a plurality vote.
What that would do is presumably give the crew that doesn't like McCarthy an out.
Because at that point, they said, we don't like McCarthy, but we're not going to do what the Democrats want.
And they sort of reversed themselves.
So I find it hard to believe the Democrats would be strategically inept enough to call for a vote based on a plurality.
They're more than happy to watch Republicans twist in the wind.
How bad is this for Republicans?
It's so bad that apparently, according to Semaphore, which is one of these new news outlets, AOC, the irrepressibly idiotic AOC, She told Semaphore that Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar of Arizona approached her separately to ask if Democrats were considering leaving to clear the way for McCarthy, meaning would enough Democrats leave the chamber so that Republicans would then be able to vote McCarthy in with less than 218 votes.
She said some of the Republicans who are holding out were wondering if that was true.
I said, absolutely not.
So the question is, were they asking because they want the Democrats to leave so that McCarthy can be elected and then they can say it's not our fault?
Is that the goal here?
Whatever the goal is, it is pretty obvious what is being achieved, and that is that Democrats are jubilant over this.
General rule of thumb in basic party politics.
If the other side is jubilant over your activity, what you're doing is probably not super smart.
Yesterday, Representative Pete Aguilar of California, he tore into the Republicans, mocked Kevin McCarthy, mocked the Republicans for not being able to get it done.
This is the attitude of both the media and Democrats today.
So again, if you are somebody who doesn't like the agenda of the left, perhaps you should stop giving them reasons to celebrate.
We are unified behind a speaker who is an unapologetic advocate for protecting and expanding our freedoms.
He does not traffic in extremism.
He does not grovel to or make excuses for a twice impeached so-called former president.
He does not make excuses for a twice impeached so-called former president.
Madam Clerk, he does not bend a knee to anyone who would seek to undermine our democracy.
Of course Democrats are jubilant.
They're in the minority.
They lost control.
And the Republicans are busy fighting with each other.
Now, again, does any of this have real high stakes?
No.
Somebody will be elected Speaker of the House.
In the end, it will probably be a Republican.
It will probably be Kevin McCarthy.
And then we'll all go back to sleep.
This does not have widespread consequences.
What it does do is it again underscores one of the reasons Republicans did very poorly in the last election cycle.
And one of the reasons Republicans did very poorly in the last election cycle is a general perception that Republicans are incompetent and foolish.
It's not because people like Democrats.
People don't like Joe Biden.
People don't like John Fetterman.
People don't like Raphael Warnock.
People are not in love with Mark Kelly.
What happened is that Republicans ran a bunch of candidates who are not particularly good.
And there is a generalized feeling among the populace that the Republicans are not capable of making their own breakfast.
And when you keep demonstrating over and over again that you're not capable of making your own breakfast, people say, OK, well, I don't like those other guys, but at least they're capable of making their own breakfast.
At least they run like a machine.
CNN's Anderson Cooper, of course, he was chortling over all of this and using this as an opportunity to jump both feet on Kevin McCarthy's throat.
And it's already significant leverage that they've given away to these far-right individuals, and yet they're still not coming over to vote for him, which does suggest that the next Speaker of the House will be Steve Scalise.
Yeah, I mean, their goal seems to be wanting to simply humiliate Kevin McCarthy and run him out of town.
Mission accomplished.
Yeah, mission accomplished so far.
But it seems like McCarthy's willingness to be humiliated knows no bounds.
No, you're right.
I mean, what do you expect him to do, drop out?
McCarthy, for his part, says he's not going anywhere.
I mean, why would he?
Again, the sort of incentive structure here, which is that 20 Republicans are going to control the other 200 Republicans, seems pretty skewed.
And again, there's no one else out there who's willing to do it.
If Jim Jordan were to step up today and say, I'll be Speaker of the House, my guess is you'd see a bunch of Republicans say, listen, if this ends it, fine, we'll make Jim Jordan Speaker of the House.
And I'd be fine with that.
I like Jim Jordan.
Jim Jordan doesn't want it.
Jim Jordan doesn't want any piece of it.
Here is Kevin McCarthy yesterday saying he's not going anywhere.
Are you going to stay in the race, Leader McCarthy?
Yes, I'm not going anywhere.
I came into this position and we had less than 200 members.
We are now sitting in the majority.
We put forth to the American public a commitment to America.
There's times we're going to have to argue with our own members if they're looking for only positions for themselves, not for the country.
Again, this is, it's just interminable.
And it's so, it's such small stakes and it's such foolishness and there's really no upside.
So of course, we're going to do this for another several days, probably.
I mean, Republicans, great at everything except for, you know, their actual jobs.
And meanwhile, Over in the Senate, you can see Mitch McConnell chortling over all of this.
And for all those who are very upset with Mitch McConnell for signing on to, for example, the Democrat spending bill that went through at the very end of last year, that $1.7 trillion giant omnibus crap sandwich that Mitch McConnell voted in favor of and many Republicans voted in favor of in the Senate with a Democratic House.
The reason that Mitch McConnell said he was doing that, he said, I got my priorities.
The real reason he did that is because he felt like the Republican Congress was unable to actually pass a budget.
He felt like they were unable to actually do anything, that the leadership was so weak and that the party levers were so failing that there was no way they were going to be able to get together to even put together a piece of legislation that he would then support and then they could send to Joe Biden to get a signature on.
Well, I mean, the Republicans in the House are doing a pretty good job of making McConnell look not like a sellout.
Which, by the way, it is a sellout move to pass a piece of legislation with the opposite party because you trust your own party in Congress so little.
But meanwhile, I mean, your own party in Congress is not looking especially good at their jobs today.
I mean, it was Mitch McConnell in November who's pledging that if Republicans took the House, there'd be no more blowout spending.
And then he signed a $1.7 trillion blowout spending bill specifically because he didn't trust that Republicans in the House would be able to get their heads out of their out of their colons long enough to actually pass something.
If the House becomes Republican, there's no more one party running over us like they did through reconciliation.
No more $1.9 trillion spending spree, plus another $750 in August that sent inflation through the roof.
That's over.
And, you know, it wasn't.
And the reason that it wasn't, again, is because the Republican Party is fractious and falling apart.
And this is just another excuse for the big spenders to spend.
This is the part that's really amazing.
You are achieving precisely the opposite of what you seek to achieve.
See, here's the thing.
If the Kevin McCarthy-led Republican Congress were to propose some sort of big, giant, omnibus spending package not backed by a vast majority of the Republican Party, McCarthy would feel the sting.
He could be challenged, by the way.
He agreed.
He agreed to a change of the rules that would have allowed him to actually be brought into question as Speaker of the House upon the advice and consent of essentially five people.
And if five members of the Republican coalition decided to challenge his speakerhood, then he would hear a speaker's challenge, right?
He actually agreed to that.
He weakened his own durability as Speaker of the House.
So if he were to bring to the floor some really, really bad piece of legislation that had the support of, say, 50 Republicans, but all the Democrats, which is presumably what many of these Republicans who don't like McCarthy are afraid of.
He would be ousted from his own party leadership position.
This is what happened to John Boehner in 2015.
And they're trying to weaken the ability of these speakers to preserve their own power.
The lack of strategy here is just absolutely astonishing.
Okay, meanwhile, the Twitter files continue to be released.
Elon Musk took over Twitter and he has been releasing more and more information about the inner workings of Twitter.
Some of this stuff is really scary.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
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Okay, meanwhile, Elon Musk over at Twitter has been releasing in tranches huge swaths of information about how Twitter was run before he took over.
He's released another tranche of Twitter files to Matt Taibbi.
The left-wing journalist who is now being considered right-wing simply because he actually is reporting on what Twitter used to do.
It turns out that basically Twitter's internal censorship was being done by people who are being manipulated from the outside by the government and the media.
This of course is no great shock.
This is something that happens in woke corporations all the time.
Woke corporations are constantly being manipulated by groups of people in the government and in the media.
What happens is that somebody in government will suggest, for example, that a corporation should not be engaging in business in Georgia because of the Georgia voting law.
And then media will pick up on this and they will call up members of the corporation and they'll say, why are you engaging in business?
And then they'll run a front page story, Coca-Cola engaging in business in Atlanta, Georgia.
And then Coca-Cola goes, oh my God, we're on the front page of the newspaper.
That's terrible.
That's bad publicity.
And then they'll immediately talk about how terrible the Georgia voting law is.
This is the way this stupid game works.
And it works for all the woke corporations.
What particularly is bad when it comes to Twitter, because there you're not just talking about a corporation speaking out of turn.
You're not just talking about Disney sounding off about the bill that prevents the indoctrination of children on sexual orientation until the age of eight.
You're not talking about just a corporation sounding, you're talking about a corporation whose chief job it was to determine who got to speak and who did not.
So this gets into very dangerous territory.
So here's what Matt Taibbi has released.
He says, quote, by 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts.
In February 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center, a fledgling analytic intelligence arm of the State Department, went to the media with a report called Russian disinformation apparatus taking advantage of coronavirus concerns.
The GEC, again, it's a government agency, flagged accounts as Russian personas and proxies based on criteria like, quote, described the coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon, blaming research conducted at the Wuhan Institute and attributing of the appearance of the virus to the CIA.
Well, there's a problem with that, which is that the first two, At least the one that says that research conducted at the Wuhan Institute was responsible for lab leak.
That actually may, in fact, be the truth.
State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular US-based Zero Hedge, claiming the episode, quote, led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.
The GEC still led directly to news stories like the AFP's headline, Russia-linked disinformation campaign led to coronavirus alarm, U.S.
says, and a Politico story about how Russian-Chinese-Iranian disinformation narratives echo one another.
So basically, they started laundering through the media this message that Twitter was allowing Russian disinformation to shape the COVID narrative.
So what did Twitter do?
Twitter basically caved.
When Clemson's media forensics hub complained Twitter hadn't made a Russia attribution in some time, trust and safety chief at Yoel Roth said it was revelatory of their motives.
Roth said, we're happy to work directly with you on this instead of NBC.
He tried to convince outside researchers like the Clemson lab to check with them before pushing stories about foreign interference to the media.
In other words, he had a bunch of people in the government suggesting that there were Russian bots that were running stories on Twitter.
And Twitter actually kind of knew whether they're Russian bots or not.
And it didn't matter.
The media ran with the story anyway.
Twitter was trying to reduce the number of agencies with access to Yoel Roth.
Policy Director Carlos Manche said if these folks are like Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them a direct contact with Yoel, they'll want to come back to him again and again.
Apparently, the GEC was using intel from other agencies to insert themselves into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others.
So, the government, again, was going to the media, they were pushing a story that Twitter was allowing disinformation, and then they were pressuring Twitter to change the status of accounts that were pressing this quote-unquote misinformation.
This is exactly what everybody sort of suspected was going on, is that the government was using its power in order to Launder censorship through outlets like Twitter.
According to Taibbi, Twitter was taking requests from every conceivable government body, beginning with the Senate Intel Committee, which seemed to need reassurance Twitter was taking FBI direction.
Execs rushed to tell Team SSCI they zapped five accounts on an FBI tip.
Requests arrived and were escalated from all over, from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, the FBI, DHS, and more.
They received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn't like to be banned.
So, for example, Democrat and House Intel Committee Chief Adam Schiff, the person who is responsible for much of the Russian actual disinformation about Russian collusion, he actually asked Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry.
Twitter declined to honor Schiff's request.
They said, we don't do this, but Sperry was later suspended.
Twitter honored almost everybody else's requests, even those from the government, including a decision to ban accounts like Rebel Protests and Bricks Media because the GEC identified them as GRU-controlled and linked to the Russian government, respectively.
So you wonder why the Hunter Biden stuff happened?
One of the reasons the Hunter Biden stuff happened is because Twitter was on edge, having been told by every government agency that everything that was happening was Russian disinformation, and they just kept banning accounts.
This is why when people say that Twitter was sort of, it's independent of the government.
This is not a First Amendment issue.
Twitter's a corporation.
They can do whatever they want.
And then I noticed that as soon as Elon Musk takes it over and takes it private, then literally that minute, everybody immediately shifts to, we have to publicly regulate Twitter.
I mean, this is just bad.
We can't have Elon Musk deciding.
No, what you actually had was the government deciding in cahoots with the chief leadership at Twitter who could be seen and who could not.
One of the things that Tucker suggested last night, that the new Congress, the Republican, McCarthy-led Congress do, is give Thomas Massie the ability to investigate collusion between the FBI and places like Twitter in terms of informational dissemination.
That happens to be correct.
And it becomes more necessary every single day.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of censorship, Jordan Peterson is now under fire.
By apparently members of the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
What exactly did Jordan do?
Obviously, Jordan Peterson, full disclosure, is a host at Daily Wire Plus.
Jordan blasted Canada's commissars and penned a scathing letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Tuesday after a leading association of his fellow psychologists threatened to go after his license to practice clinical psychology over social media criticisms of the nation's far-left government.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario ordered the best-selling author and Daily Wire Plus host to undergo social media communications retraining.
Ah, the re-education plan.
Or face a hearing on the potential suspension of his medical license.
Writing to Justin Trudeau, Peterson vowed not to participate.
I simply cannot resign myself to the fact that in my lifetime I am required to resort to a public letter to the leader of my country to point out that political criticism has now become such a crime in Canada that if professionals dare engage in such activity, government appointed commissars will threaten their livelihood and present them with the spectacle of denouncement and political disgrace.
There is simply and utterly no excuse whatsoever for such a state of affairs in a free country.
This of course is just the latest of several investigations launched by the College of psychology with prior complaints having been dismissed.
What exactly did Jordan do that was so terrible that now he is being investigated by this ridiculous organization, the College of Psychologists of Ontario?
What exactly did he do?
Well, he retweeted Conservative Party leader Pierre Polivre.
I'm going to screw up his name, but so be it.
Blasted Trudeau's former senior aide, Gerald Butt.
And he blasted New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, tweeting opposition to a plan by Ottawa police to take custody of the children of trucker convoy protesters.
He also told Joe Rogan's podcast audience that accepting radical gender theory is a sign of civilization collapsing and also said that climate change models are unreliable.
So apparently this is enough for the college executive director to review the tweets and a transcript from Peterson's appearance on Joe Rogan and determine that this warranted an investigation.
The probe has now been expanded to include subsequent social media posts by Peterson, including a made Twitter post in which he said that Sports Illustrated putting plus-size swimsuit model Yumi Nu on the cover was not an example of beauty.
All Jordan wrote at that point, you remember this big controversy, he wrote, sorry, not beautiful and no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.
He also tweeted that the movie star Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot Page, is actually a woman.
This particular college, by the way, sounds like a private organization.
In Canada, that's not the way that it works.
The college is a government-regulated association that regulates and has the authority to sanction psychologists ostensibly to protect the health and safety of workers and the public.
Peterson charged that the Ontario Professional Organization has been hounding him since 2017.
He said, I was never investigated for anything for the 20 years I practiced prior to my emergence on the public scene.
But because the college is obligated to probe any written complaint filed against a member, Peterson says that he's been befetted with investigations, many of which were prompted by anonymous calls.
One accused him of being transphobic, sexist, and racist for pointing out an article from Crisis Magazine accusing the transgender movement of targeting autistic children.
Last year, Peterson was taken to task by the college after telling a scientist who said overpopulation was a threat to the planet that he was free to leave at any point.
The college opened an investigation and Jordan declined to cooperate.
He said at the time, take whatever steps you deem necessary.
I'm simply not going to spend the hours and days required to undergo the unbelievably stressful process necessary to respond to this formally because one of the millions of people who follow me on social media took offense to one thing I said at one point.
Now again, one of the reasons that they are targeting Jordan is to shut everybody else up.
Jordan has a big enough platform that it's very unlikely that he's going to end up being banned from the practice of psychology in Canada by the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
But the whole point is to shut everybody else up.
The people have less of a platform than Jordan.
And this is the point on Twitter as well.
It's to intimidate people into silence.
You ban a few accounts and then you get everybody else to shut up.
This is the goal of the censorship regime.
Free speech is the predicate to having an open conversation on any of these important issues.
And given the amount that the experts have used their authoritarian power to silence actual useful conversation, it is truly scary that you now have commissars in supposedly Western countries like Canada.
This is happening in the UK as well.
Cracking down on free speech.
You remember that case just a couple of weeks ago from before the new year, in which a woman in the UK was arrested for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic.
Literally just standing there.
And they asked if she was praying, and she said, maybe in my head, and they arrested her for that.
Western civilization cannot abide the authoritarians who now have decided that because they are the elite, they get to control not only how you act and what you do, but also what you see, what you watch, how you think.
This is truly scary stuff.
Whether it is being laundered through private companies like Twitter, or whether it's being done directly by governments like the government in Canada.
And good for Jordan for standing up to it.
I'm glad Jordan does this sort of stuff because frankly, if Jordan didn't do it, who else would be left to stand up against this sort of stuff?
Especially because so much that we have found out over the course of the last few years demonstrates that we were just not told things that we were we were being barred from having information that was really, really important.
So for example, Alysia Finley has a piece in the Wall Street Journal opinion page today.
This certainly would have been banned on social media for about two years.
Quote, public health experts are sounding the alarm about a new Omicron variant dubbed XBB that is rapidly spreading across the northeast US. Some studies suggest it is as different from the original COVID strain from Wuhan as the 2003 SARS virus.
Should Americans be worried?
It isn't clear that XBB is any more lethal than any other variant, but its mutations enable it to evade antibodies from prior infection of vaccines, as well as existing monoclonal antibody treatments.
Growing evidence also suggests repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus's rapid evolution.
Now, by the way, if you had mentioned this anywhere along the line here, that when it came to vaccines, that overuse of vaccines actually bottlenecks the process, Because it now means that all of these viruses attempt to evolve to escape the vaccine.
If you mention that, this was considered really, really bad.
That's just been common medical science for a very long time.
But if you mention that online, there was a good shot Twitter was going to bar you for years on end here.
Prior to Omicron's emergence in November 2021, there were only four variants of concern according to the Wall Street Journal, Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma.
Only Alpha and Delta caused surges of infections globally.
Omicron has begotten numerous descendants, many of which have popped up in different regions of the world, curiously bearing some of the same mutations.
Under selective evolutionary pressures, the virus appears to have developed mutations that enable it to transmit more easily and escape antibodies elicited by vaccines and prior infection.
All of this was perfectly foreseeable, that if you overuse the vaccines, this is what you end up with.
And that natural immunity might actually be a better strategy, but you were barred from saying it.
This is why it's important to stand up against the censor group that now lies at the heart of all of these governments, as well as their buddies and lackeys over in social media.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Ron DeSantis's new inaugural address.
Is it his presidential pitch?
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