March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
10:12
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| Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny nose. | |
| And if you ever saw it, you would even think it gross. | |
| Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Dennis Prager Show. | |
| You know, I'm used to some Billy Joel playing at the start when I guest host. | |
| I don't know what this Christmas music is about, Sean, but we've got to get back to Billy. | |
| Just kidding. | |
| I'll make an exception for today. | |
| It is December 12th, 2022, 121222. My name is Julie Hartman. | |
| I co-host the Dennis and Julie podcast with the one, the only Dennis Prager, who is in New York City today, hence why I'm sitting in his chair. | |
| And I also just launched my brand new show, Timeless, with Julie Hartman, which is on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. | |
| So you can watch Dennis and Julie on Mondays, and then you can get Timeless the next three days of the week. | |
| So I encourage you all to check that out if you haven't already. | |
| 51 years ago, in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers. | |
| And this past weekend, Elon Musk released rounds three and four of the Twitter files. | |
| And they prove what we have known all along, that under the previous ownership of Twitter, there was a robust apparatus to suppress and censor. | |
| So some of you may know through Dennis' reporting on this that Musk has enlisted journalist Matt Taibbi to help release these files and explain their contents. | |
| And I think Taibbi has done a pretty good job of this. | |
| If you go on his Twitter page, he... | |
| Posts screenshots and he explains each story one by one. | |
| He has a few errors in his explanations of this past weekend. | |
| For instance, he called Mike Huckabee the former governor of Arizona, when in fact he's the former governor of Arkansas. | |
| And of course, many people will point to this to claim that the entirety of Taibbi's work is illegitimate. | |
| But putting aside those understandable small errors that one would probably make if they were pouring through hours and hours of Twitter. | |
| We know for certain now that Twitter executives had weekly meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. | |
| And Twitter employees, we see from their internal deliberations, wanted to refer to these meetings publicly as partnerships. | |
| Instead of disclosing that they were in fact meeting with federal agencies. | |
| Another thing that we have found out this past weekend is that Twitter had a separate Slack channel devoted entirely to assessing whether or not to censor Trump tweets. | |
| And for a while, Twitter was waiting for the right moment to completely kick Trump off of Twitter. | |
| They were talking over their Slack channel, and they were trying to find a violation so that they could reverse their public interest policy, which allowed Trump to stay on Twitter for the sake of public information, because he was then the President of the United States. | |
| And above all else, we can see from these files that Twitter approached evaluating the content of conservative or Trump tweets far differently than how they evaluated the content of left-wing tweets. | |
| So let's look at some examples of how they handled the right-wing ones. | |
| President Trump, a week before the election, back in 2020, tweeted, and I quote, Big problems and discrepancies with mail-in ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd. | |
| Now, this tweet, of course, was 100% true. | |
| Wisconsin, for instance, Wisconsin law says that absentee voting is a privilege and that only must be done in extenuating circumstances. | |
| And nevertheless... | |
| Wisconsin allowed many people to vote with mail-in balloting, and they just overlooked that law, so that's a big discrepancy. | |
| Wisconsin law also says that in order to vote by mail, you have to show an ID unless you are indefinitely confined. | |
| Now, if you're indefinitely confined, that means that you're disabled or otherwise sick and unable to show an ID. And there was evidence, even back in October of 2020, that the clerks of the state's two biggest Democratic counties, that's Milwaukee and Dane counties, falsely told voters to claim that they were indefinitely confined even when they were not. | |
| So this means that 195,000 of the million Wisconsin voters who voted by mail did not have to show an ID. Again, that's a big discrepancy that we knew at the time. | |
| Another example is Pennsylvania. | |
| Pennsylvania law code says that ballots that go against election rules, i.e. | |
| ballots that have faulty signatures or faulty dates, must not be counted. | |
| In Philadelphia. | |
| Which is a Democratic county of Pennsylvania. | |
| Sorry, I think I was referring, by the way, to Pennsylvania as Philadelphia. | |
| I get the two confused. | |
| But in Philadelphia, a Democratic county, 3,000 ballots with faulty dates and signatures were counted. | |
| But in Westmoreland County, which is a Republican county in Pennsylvania that more strictly follows the rules, election officials did not count improperly signed or dated ballots. | |
| So that's another discrepancy that we knew about. | |
| But Twitter decided to suppress this tweet by Trump, even though, again, there were mountains of evidence that Trump's claim was right. | |
| And you can see in their internal deliberations that there was no apparent reason for them to suppress it. | |
| They didn't highlight an accuracy problem, but they said that they chose to flag it, quote, So these Twitter employees are essentially admitting, given that it's Donald Trump and that we hate Donald Trump, we are going to censor this tweet even if it's accurate. | |
| Another thing that these Twitter files highlighted this past weekend is that actor James Woods highlighted that Trump tweet for being flagged. | |
| He said, wait a minute, this thing that he just posted is totally accurate. | |
| There are huge discrepancies in the way that votes are being counted. | |
| Why is Twigger flagging this? | |
| Suppression. | |
| And so the Twitter files have revealed that Twitter employees on their Slack pages took offense to James Woods saying this, and they wrote that they would try to, quote, hit him hard on a future violation. | |
| In other words, they were going to punish him, retaliate against him for his support of Trump, and try to relentlessly monitor his Twitter account so that they could get him on a small thing. | |
| A final example that we see here is that Georgia Republican Congresswoman Judy Heiss tweeted, Say no to big tech censorship. | |
| Mailed ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person voting. | |
| Now, of course, we know this to be true. | |
| A 2005 bipartisan commission headed by Democrat Jimmy Carter found that mail-in voting is the biggest potential source of fraud in the country. | |
| So this is not exactly a new idea. | |
| And nevertheless, Twitter flagged it. | |
| Because they thought it was misinformation. | |
| So those are some examples of what Twitter did with right-wing tweets. | |
| Now let's look at what they did with left-wing tweets. | |
| Some comedian named Elijah Daniel tweeted a photo of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation and said, this is disgusting and terrifying. | |
| Republicans are going to try to steal the election. | |
| If you haven't voted yet, don't mail it. | |
| Drop it off or vote early. | |
| So this tweet is essentially expressing concern, like the Republican tweets that I mentioned to you did, but Twitter did not flag this tweet. | |
| The internal deliberations reveal that they said that they would not flag it for misinformation or they would not flag it for being incorrect because, according to their logic, quote, it still encourages people to vote and just expresses concerns that mail-in ballots might not make it in time. | |
| Another example is that former Attorney General Eric Holder said in a tweet that the Postal Service was, quote, deliberately crippled by the Trump administration. | |
| He didn't say in the tweet by the Trump administration, but it was implied when he said that the Postal Service was deliberately crippled. | |
| This is referring to the fact that the Trump administration started to roll back the use of some mailboxes because, as we know, people don't use mail a lot anymore. | |
| People tend to send text messages or emails. | |
| This is not exactly a new thing. | |
| Under the Obama administration, they removed 14,000 mailboxes around the country that had gone out of use. | |
| But still, Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted that the Postal Service was being deliberately crippled because Trump was removing some of these mailboxes. | |
| And Twitter initially flagged this, to their credit, But then the internal deliberations revealed that executives pushed back, saying that it was accurate, so they unflagged it. | |
| Finally, we see that the hashtag stealourvotes, which referenced the theory that a combination of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation on the Supreme Court to protect Trump and Trump himself would try to steal the election, that hashtag was not suppressed. | |
| It was used hundreds of thousands of times, again, even though it was arguably peddling misinformation, and Twitter just decided to yawn at it. |
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