The Anchormen Show with Matt Gaetz

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Hot Takes. I'm Congressman Matt Gaetz. Let's talk about the news. We'll talk

00:00:21.080 about the competing town hall forums with Joe Biden and Donald Trump participating on ABC

00:00:27.860 and NBC, respectively, in just a moment. But the biggest news story in America is that Joe Biden

00:00:35.700 and Hunter Biden lied about their relationships with corrupt business leaders in Ukraine and

00:00:42.420 other parts of the world, that there are now evidence, emails, texts that fully prove these

00:00:49.580 corrupt relationships and these corrupt meetings and the lack of truthfulness from the Bidens.

00:00:55.600 And when that information was discovered and reported by the New York Post, it was censored

00:01:01.920 by social media, Twitter and Facebook in particular, catching a lot of heat over this blatant election

00:01:09.640 interference. Late last night, the legal lead of Twitter, Vijay Gad, put out the following tweet.

00:01:17.160 Over the last 24 hours, we've received significant feedback from critical to supportive about how

00:01:22.720 we enforced our hacked materials policy yesterday. After reflecting on this feedback, we have decided

00:01:29.540 to make changes to the policy and how to enforce it. Why the changes? We want to address the concerns

00:01:35.060 that there could be many unintended consequences to journalists, whistleblowers, and others in ways

00:01:40.640 that are contrary to Twitter's purpose of serving the public conversation. We put the hacked materials

00:01:46.420 policy in place back in 2018 to discourage and mitigate harms associated with hacks and unauthorized

00:01:53.540 exposure of private information. We tried to find the right balance between people's privacy and the

00:01:58.900 right of free expression, but we can do better. We've recently added new product capabilities, such as labels,

00:02:06.020 to provide people with additional context. We are no longer limited to tweet removal as an enforcement action.

00:02:12.420 We believe that labeling tweets and empowering people to assess content for themselves better serves the

00:02:18.520 public interest and public conversation. The hacked materials policy is being updated to reflect these

00:02:25.320 new enforcement capabilities. So what is changing? One, we will no longer remove hacked content unless it is

00:02:33.500 directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them. Two, we will label tweets to provide

00:02:40.320 context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter. All other Twitter rules will still apply

00:02:46.640 to posting or linking. So this is quite the statement. And I think the hottest take was from

00:02:55.040 at G. Ronald Smith, Smitty Smat, who replied, that's an awful lot of explaining just to say you'll be more

00:03:03.700 selective with your censoring and that you'll flag things you don't like. Here's my hot take.

00:03:09.420 Who's Twitter to flag information and provide their filter or their lens? Do they not trust their

00:03:16.840 users as creative, imaginative, and critical thinkers to be able to ascertain whether or not the sourcing

00:03:23.720 of information is relevant to its credibility or viability? It's really a slippery slope when you've

00:03:29.380 got the tech oligarchs deciding that they're going to be judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the

00:03:35.460 posting and sharing of content. So I'm glad that Twitter got a lot of pushback based on their just

00:03:42.780 very, I think, unfair administration of their hacked materials policy. And now we see they're going to

00:03:49.680 continue the labeling. They're going to continue to try to own the frame so that they can own the way

00:03:56.220 that our country acts and behaves and operates. And frankly, we need more in Congress willing to stand

00:04:03.040 up to big tech and to stop taking their special interest PAC donations. And I want to congratulate

00:04:09.540 and thank my fellow Florida man, fellow Congressman Greg Stubbe for joining in my call for Republicans

00:04:18.280 to stop taking federal PAC donations from these big tech companies. They get away with so much because

00:04:26.260 they buy off Congress. We ought to reject their funds. We ought to make it clear that they don't own

00:04:32.040 us. And we ought to make it clear to our constituents that they don't own us. Another member of the

00:04:36.540 Judiciary Committee, a member of the Florida delegation, Greg Stubbe, put out word to his

00:04:40.700 campaign staff to stop taking those donations from those sources. Let's hope others join suit.

00:04:50.980 Last night, President Trump and Vice President Joe Biden held competing town halls. And I think by

00:04:56.640 comparison, the president did quite well. If you were to read the transcript of the Biden town hall,

00:05:03.460 it would look less like an exchange of questions and answers for an hour, and more like someone

00:05:09.280 threw scissors at a dictionary for an hour. Just words and sentence fragments everywhere. I don't know

00:05:16.740 that Joe Biden could be the commander in chief so much as he's commander of the sentence fragment.

00:05:22.060 Many Americans are being told by public health officials that Thanksgiving might not be an

00:05:27.700 appropriate family gathering. But if what you miss most about Thanksgiving are the wandering stories

00:05:34.100 and never ending answers from like grandpa, Joe Biden gave you plenty of it. You could just eat some

00:05:40.800 turkey at home alone and replay the Biden town hall meeting. Listen to just like the meandering thought

00:05:47.160 process that the former vice president put on display.

00:05:49.600 The next question is, am I worthy of your vote? Can I earn your vote? And the answer is there's two things I think

00:05:55.800 that I care and I've demonstrated I care about my whole career. One is in addition to dealing with a criminal

00:06:02.420 justice system to make it fair and make it more decent, we have to be able to put black Americans in a position to be

00:06:08.280 able to gain wealth, generate wealth. And so you look at what that entails and it entails everything from early

00:06:16.020 education. That's why I'm supporting making sure that we in title one schools, as you know, schools with the least tax

00:06:22.220 base to be able to support their schools. I increased the funding for them from 15 to 45 billion dollars. That allows every

00:06:31.840 teacher in that school to make up to 60,000 bucks. And the problem now is they're leaving the schools. They're not there. We're short about a

00:06:38.180 million and a half teachers, a million and a quarter teachers. Number two, every three and four and five year old

00:06:44.220 will go to school, school, not daycare school. And what all the great universities, including the one you've gone to,

00:06:50.900 go to or went to, in fact, talks about in the last eight years, what's happened. What happens when you let them go to

00:06:57.400 school, they make up rapidly that whatever, whatever, whatever shortcoming they had, it is evident that Joe

00:07:07.320 Biden is not up to the job of the presidency, just by virtue of watching this town hall, his lack of

00:07:13.880 cognitive engagement, his lack of command over the English language and the thoughts he's trying to convert

00:07:20.820 into words. It was quite the experience. It was also pretty boring. I talked to a number of people who wanted

00:07:26.320 to switch back and forth between the Biden town hall and the Trump town hall to get a flavor of both.

00:07:31.460 And what almost every single one of them said to me, even Democrats, was that the Biden town hall was

00:07:36.640 just insufferably boring. And you compare that to President Trump's exchanges with Savannah Guthrie and

00:07:43.100 the folks who attended in Miami. And the president was in command. He was high energy. He was focused and

00:07:50.000 engaged. One thing that was disappointing about President Trump's town hall is that in the first 20 minutes,

00:07:55.380 Savannah Guthrie seemed to focus on a lot of issues that just aren't kitchen table issues

00:08:00.860 to Americans. She focused on QAnon and what were the protocols of the party planning committee and

00:08:08.180 white supremacy. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of discussion about schools or education policy,

00:08:14.680 the environment, water quality, air quality, things that really do impact the duration of our lives,

00:08:20.580 the quality of our lives. In responding to questions, though, I do think the president

00:08:25.760 showed good empathy. And in a word, he was just downright charming. The president is so

00:08:32.220 interpersonally charming when folks spend time with him. He lights up, particularly when women are around.

00:08:38.800 A lot of men do. And in this forum, there was just a very high presence of female activity from

00:08:46.120 Savannah Guthrie being the moderator. You had the mother and daughter that were there. And Trump kind

00:08:51.820 of charmingly joked to the mother that they would work together to get the daughter's vote. And go

00:08:57.200 ahead and play that clip of the president and the mother and the daughter and a discussion about

00:09:02.180 health care and coronavirus frontline workers.

00:09:04.420 You're going to like this next couple of voters. It's a mom and a daughter.

00:09:07.880 Mom, Barbara, voted for you in 2016. She's leaning to vote for you again. Now,

00:09:13.000 her daughter was too young to vote last time. She's going to vote for her first time in a

00:09:16.280 presidential campaign. And she is leaning Biden. So imagine the dinner table at their house,

00:09:20.860 okay? So, Barbara, why don't you go first and ask your question?

00:09:24.460 Bienvenido a Miami.

00:09:25.740 Thank you.

00:09:26.300 Mr. Trump, as a frontline ER doctor working through the coronavirus pandemic,

00:09:30.260 I know firsthand and I've seen that many hospitals throughout the United States

00:09:34.480 are suffering financial hardships. These economic effects are trickling down to the

00:09:41.600 frontline workers. We are being across the country. Frontline workers are being fired.

00:09:46.820 They're being furloughed. Our salaries are being cut. And this is also happening in other economic

00:09:50.860 sectors as well, including the travel industry and hospitality. My question to you is, how are you

00:09:56.860 going to get the United States back on track, both in terms of the economy and the pandemic?

00:10:02.020 So it's happening. We just set a record, 11.4 million jobs. We are going to have a phenomenal

00:10:08.160 third quarter, which will be announced on November 1st, just prior to the big November 3rd day,

00:10:13.700 where I think you're going to see a red wave. But we're going to have a tremendous announcement,

00:10:17.600 I believe. I mean, we're going to find out. But GDP is going through the roof. Jobs, real estate,

00:10:23.600 houses. So many things are happening. He even had some flirting going on during the president's

00:10:29.580 town hall. Not a whole lot of that during the Biden town hall. But one lady sure liked the

00:10:34.320 president's smile. Good evening, Mr. President. Thank you very much. I have to say you have a

00:10:38.320 great smile. Thank you. So you're so handsome when you smile. I thought some of the president's

00:10:47.360 best answers were on the economy and the intersection of the economy and coronavirus,

00:10:53.620 saying that the cure cannot be worse than the virus, that we cannot allow America to be

00:10:59.700 fundamentally changed for the worse as a consequence of lockdowns. Take a listen.

00:11:04.840 The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. We did the right thing. We were expected to lose

00:11:11.580 2,200,000 people and maybe more than that. We're at 210,000 people. One person is too much. It should

00:11:18.460 have never happened because of China. It happened because of China. And you have to get that and

00:11:23.540 understand that. But it shouldn't have happened. Undeniably, these forums did not fundamentally shape

00:11:29.460 the nature or the contours of this race. I do think that the upcoming presidential debate will be a

00:11:35.600 very important one. I know undecided voters who I think want to vote for Trump, but they want to see

00:11:42.700 an elite debate performance. Let's hope they get it. Let's hope the president brings it in the coming

00:11:48.660 days. I've got fresh polling on Judge Amy Coney Barrett. This coming from One America News, 48% of the

00:11:59.840 country now supports the confirmation and seating of Amy Coney Barrett on the United States Supreme

00:12:05.960 Court. That's up two points from just a week ago. It's up nine points from a week before that. So

00:12:13.160 Amy Coney Barrett does not just prevail here as a consequence of Republicans holding a majority.

00:12:18.940 She quite clearly won the hearings. She won the rollout. She's had an opportunity to display

00:12:25.900 grace and intellect and charisma and empathy throughout these hearings. And you didn't

00:12:31.940 really see Democrats going toe to toe with her on the law, instead attempting to evoke issue sets

00:12:37.800 rather than jurisprudential temperament. That was one of the critiques that Republicans offered of the

00:12:44.040 way that Democrats handled the hearings. But in quite an interesting move, Senator Dianne Feinstein,

00:12:49.580 the Democrat lead on the committee, praises Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman.

00:12:55.260 Take a listen.

00:12:56.300 I just want to thank you. This has been one of the best set of hearings that I've participated in.

00:13:02.540 And I want to thank you for your fairness and the opportunity of going back and forth.

00:13:07.560 It leaves one with a lot of hopes, a lot of questions, and even some ideas, perhaps some good

00:13:14.700 bipartisan legislation we can put together to make this great country even better. So thank you so much

00:13:21.500 for your leadership. Following this praise, Senator Feinstein and Chairman Graham have a mask-free hug

00:13:27.660 to close out the Senate Judiciary hearings on future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

00:13:34.920 And the political left in America appears to be turning on Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat lead in

00:13:42.460 the Judiciary Committee, suggesting that perhaps she needs to lose that position. Demands Justice is a group

00:13:49.100 funded by George Soros, their executive director, Brian Fallon, putting out a statement that she needs

00:13:55.420 to go, that she needs to be removed. And if she is unwilling to step down, that her fellow Democratic

00:14:00.940 senators must remove her. Trouble on the left, indeed.

00:14:05.260 This could be the biggest news on big tech that we've had during the entire Trump presidency.

00:14:15.740 Finally, Chairman Ajit Pai of the FCC putting out a statement that the FCC, the Federal Communications

00:14:22.700 Commission, will engage in rulemaking so that there is clarity to Section 230 that does not allow the

00:14:30.300 discrimination, the bias, the shaping of the truth that so many of these digital platforms are attempting

00:14:37.020 to engage in. I have long said, Congress will not regulate big tech because Congress is bought off

00:14:44.380 by big tech. But the FCC ought to be free of some of those political pressures. They ought to be able to

00:14:51.580 delve into the conduct and practices that these companies have utilized to try to conform the world to their

00:15:01.260 political viewpoint, rather than hosting a non-biased digital platform. And they get benefits in the law by

00:15:09.260 virtue of being a non-biased platform. But there's never the transparency, the checking to ensure that they in fact

00:15:15.740 live up to the law. That's why this rulemaking is so important. Here's my hot take for Chairman Pai.

00:15:22.740 Force transparency. Force these companies to allow regulators to observe how the algorithm interacts with

00:15:30.380 content. Two, collect evidence on the human beings who are the content moderators. We've seen from Project Veritas that

00:15:39.220 people have the ability to go in and alter search, suppress content, elevate content, make things trend or not

00:15:46.620 trend based on their politics, not based on how the people of this country are interacting with news or facts or

00:15:54.540 even lies that they encounter, but ought to have the resources and ability to sort through and vet. Third, we need to

00:16:03.780 really investigate the third party groups that create the protocols that allow these tech companies to

00:16:10.840 censor, remove, block, lock out, flag. A lot of these groups are like straight up left wing entities that have no

00:16:20.400 desire for fairness and yet they're deemed like the umpires of the internet. That's not fair. So this is a major

00:16:28.300 development. This is a welcome to development. I praise Chairman Pai for stepping up to the plate. I hope

00:16:34.480 the rest of the FCC will follow suit and I hope we aren't too late. I hope that this rulemaking process

00:16:40.160 forces real transparency, real change in conduct and if it just did those things, looked at the algorithm,

00:16:46.760 looked at the people altering the content and looked at the outside groups and then required big tech to be

00:16:53.300 honest about those negative influences. I think big tech could do a pretty good job of self-policing

00:16:58.620 the negativity out, but they have no such incentive in the absence of FCC action. That's why I'm glad

00:17:06.280 they're getting on the job.

00:17:11.260 No trick or treating for you. That's the message from the city of Beverly Hills, California to their

00:17:18.800 constituents. They've passed a city ordinance making it illegal to pass candy to another. Whether that

00:17:26.020 occurs through a door or through the trunk of a car, apparently there's something called trunk or

00:17:31.000 treating that they wanted to ban too. Interestingly, they also banned the spraying of shaving cream on

00:17:37.320 another person, something that apparently also happens during Halloween, though they have created an

00:17:42.440 exemption for licensed barbers. So don't worry, licensed barbers. You will not be accidentally

00:17:48.380 swept up by the Halloween police because someone confuses you for someone who has chosen the

00:17:54.880 trick. Violations could be met with fines or other penalties. Let's hope that the Beverly Hills city

00:18:02.880 jails are not full of people in costumes hoping to get their trick or their treat.

00:18:09.220 I have a fascinating hot takes update for you. Some weeks ago, we told you of a person in a jetpack being

00:18:19.760 sighted near the Los Angeles airport, and you won't believe it, but it's happened again. The Los Angeles

00:18:26.680 Times Richard Winton has the staff report, Los Angeles International Airport officials are investigating reports

00:18:33.540 of someone wearing a jetpack in a flight path. The second such report in a little over a month.

00:18:40.560 Here, a China Airlines crew member noticed someone flying at about 6,500 feet, seven miles from the

00:18:46.800 airport. The FBI is investigating the sighting, and they apparently haven't solved the last one.

00:18:54.580 My favorite part about this story is that as the airline entity is communicating with the air traffic

00:19:01.140 control tower. One air traffic controller is quoted as saying, only in LA, only in LA indeed, we will

00:19:09.900 continue to follow all stories of humans on jetpacks. Wow.

00:19:17.900 Steve Scully of C-SPAN should have never been picked by the Commission on Presidential Debates to be a

00:19:24.380 moderator, as a former Biden intern, as someone who had shared Never Trump content online. His bias was

00:19:32.900 evident. It was open and obvious. But you see, the Commission on Presidential Debates and Establishment

00:19:39.040 Institution, equity, fairness, they're not really, it's not really important to them. They're about

00:19:44.300 maintaining power. But they sure have egg on their face today. Steve Scully releasing a statement that

00:19:50.160 he lied about his Twitter account being hacked. He thought he was sending a direct message to

00:19:56.200 now Trump hater Anthony Scaramucci about whether or not to respond to the president following the

00:20:02.360 president's criticisms, which were the same criticisms I echoed on this podcast. And instead of sending

00:20:08.260 that as a private direct message, he sort of had the Anthony Weiner dynamic just without the nudity,

00:20:14.200 where he posted publicly what he thought he had only sent privately, then the predictable claims

00:20:20.780 of hacking, then of course, the lack of any evidence of hacking, then the admission that there was no

00:20:26.180 hacking and that he had just lied to the people. And of course, if you're in media and you lie to

00:20:32.180 people, then there's really no reason for anyone to listen to you ever again. You wield no power, you can

00:20:39.340 take no positions that change laws or impact the oversight of programs. You're a commentator. And

00:20:46.160 when your commentary is not truthful, when it's a lie to be self-serving to cover up your own actions,

00:20:53.080 well, then it's, it typically renders someone unwatchable, unworthy of the contribution to the

00:21:01.060 discussion when they're unwilling to maintain the veracity that is required. And by the way, it just,

00:21:08.060 it just strikes me that this isn't the first television commentator to have this problem,

00:21:12.780 though the outcome was far different at MSNBC. Joy Reid had on some of her digital platforms,

00:21:20.120 some very awful, homophobic, transphobic, just really terrible things that she, that were posted

00:21:28.520 on her platforms. She claimed that there was a hack. She then had to sheepishly confess that there was

00:21:34.840 no evidence of a hack at all. She just didn't remember writing those things very different than

00:21:40.200 a hack. And then was rewarded with the Chris Matthews slot on MSNBC primetime. So I guess if

00:21:47.820 you lie about a hack and work at C-SPAN and you're Steve Scully, your career may be over. If you lie

00:21:55.580 about a hack and you're Joy Reid on MSNBC, you get a promotion. What an interesting double standard.

00:22:01.900 Thanks for listening to Hot Takes. I'm Congressman Matt Gaetz. Make sure you subscribe. Give us a

00:22:08.680 five-star rating. Leave us a comment to let us know what you think of the show.

00:22:13.320 Have a great weekend. Join us next Monday for more Hot Takes.

00:22:17.780 Have a great weekend.

Episode 110 - Huge News on Big Tech Accountability from the Trump Admin. Beverly Hills Bans Halloween. Jetpack Joyrides are BACK!

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