Joe Biden makes excuses for protesters following a Democratic senator into a bathroom, and Facebook goes down for six hours while the media prepares a full frontal assault on the company in order to suppress conservative information, of course. Today s show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Stand up for your digital rights. Take action at expressvpn.org/standupforyourdigitalrights and help us all protect our digital rights in the 21st century. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor to CNN and other major news outlets. He is also the author of several books, including "The Dark Side Of: How To Fix America's Broken Political System," and "The New Deal: A Guide to Fixing the Broken American Political System." His new book, "New Deal," is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcasting friends! Support the show: bit.ly/support-the-cryptid Subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher Subscribe on Podchaser Learn more about your ad choices? Rate and review our podcast on iTunes Leave us a rating and review on a review in the podcast on a future episode of the podcast episode? Subscribe and review it on iTunes? Thank you for listening to our podcast episode or share it on your social media status and we'll hear about your thoughts on it on the podcasting platform on social media links? I'll be listening to it on Instapay or other posts on it's hashtags on it goes to it's posts on Instagay or I'll get it on it should go it's & other places I'm watching it goes it's a good thing I'm a link on it might be a good place etc... Thanks and I'll hear it's good there's a little more of it can be it's awed and I'm not better, I'll go it can do it I won't be more of that veeeeeeeeeeeeedeedeee that's a rock that it's really good that it really goes it really good it's that it can go it really it's not that it s really that good, etc etc. etc.
00:00:00.000Joe Biden makes excuses for protesters following a Democratic senator into a bathroom, and Facebook goes down for six hours while the media prepare a full frontal assault on the company.
00:00:09.000In order to suppress conservative information, of course.
00:00:24.000Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
00:00:26.000First, here is your reminder you're paying way too much money for your cell phone coverage.
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00:00:56.000The average family is saving over $800 a year.
00:01:30.000Alrighty, so as I have suggested, the Democrats eventually will get to some sort of agreement on spending here.
00:01:34.000I think it is very unlikely they come to no agreement with regard to spending, but that agreement is going to look a lot more like what Joe Manchin wants than like what the squad want.
00:01:43.000It's going to end up being about $2 trillion.
00:01:45.000This is something that President Biden is now saying.
00:01:47.000According to Politico, Biden summoned progressives to a virtual meeting to deliver a simple message per a senior White House official.
00:01:54.000He told them the end point would be about $2 trillion.
00:01:56.000He wanted their input on what that should look like.
00:01:59.000And so he's saying, I'm going to go with Sinema and Manchin because I really have no choice, but I'm going to let you guys write large sloths of the bill.
00:02:04.000It was part of a week-long project by Biden Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to gradually let it sink in with liberals.
00:02:11.000The reconciliation bill really will be dramatically scaled back.
00:02:14.000Now, remember, we're still talking about spending over $3 trillion between this $2 trillion spending bill, which undoubtedly will be closer to $3 trillion when you kick in all of the perks and you get rid of all of the games, the gaming of the accounting systems.
00:02:28.000When you add that together with the $1.2 trillion that's going to be spent on this infrastructure boondoggle package, you're talking about spending, again, $3 trillion.
00:02:36.000That's after Joe Biden earlier this year spent $2 trillion on the so-called American Jobs Plan.
00:02:40.000So that is a lot, a lot, a lot of money.
00:02:43.000But it's being treated as though it's sort of a moderate concession to go to $2 trillion.
00:02:48.000I'm old enough to remember when it was a big deal that the federal government every year was spending $4 trillion.
00:02:58.000Well, the real issue inside the Democratic Party, of course, is that there is a boiling battle between the far left and the so-called moderate caucus.
00:03:07.000And it is causing all sorts of chaos inside the Democratic Party because Joe Biden, all of his sympathies are with the radicals, but the practicalities are with the moderates.
00:03:16.000And if Joe Biden actually wanted to get a lot of things done, he should have come out earlier and just endorsed the moderate position and then put a lot of pressures on the progressives.
00:03:22.000Instead, he put a lot of pressure on the moderates.
00:03:25.000And now he's being forced to go back to the progressives and basically beg them for their help.
00:03:30.000The Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to proclaim that they're getting things done, and it's only the Republicans who are obstructing things.
00:03:35.000Jamie Harrison, the head of the DNC, was on with MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle, and he says that the new slogan for the Democrats is that Democrats deliver and Republicans obstruct.
00:03:43.000Yeah, that's not going to work, guys, especially because the stuff you're delivering is stuff that pretty much nobody is demanding.
00:03:49.000Here is the head of the DNC, Jamie Harrison.
00:04:02.000Democrats are the ones who do set these deadlines, though.
00:04:04.000They're trying to protect the tax cut for Jeff Bezos when we're just trying to get the mom-and-pop shops on Main Street to make sure that they sell.
00:04:18.000Okay, and that in the end is going to be the problem for the Democrats, because they either own passing a giant boondoggle package that involves massive tax increases that are going to hamper the economic recovery, or they don't pass it and they look like obstructionists.
00:04:30.000So, it's a real problem for the Democratic Party.
00:04:33.000Now, what you'll hear from the media, the drumbeat for the next couple of weeks as the Democrats start to put together this $2 trillion package, is that every element is super popular on its own.
00:04:52.000You'll talk about the fact that the national debt is going up.
00:04:54.000And then they start to get a little bit less sanguine about each one of these individual programs.
00:04:58.000So what you're going to hear is propaganda from the media about how what we really need is universal child care.
00:05:02.000And what we really need is a full-fledged increase in the earned income tax credit, which really is not an earned income tax credit.
00:05:09.000It is really a disincentive for marriage.
00:05:11.000That's according to Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, both of whom are in favor of the earned income tax credit as a general rule.
00:05:17.000You're going to hear about all the wonders and glories of these programs, and the media are going to minimize all the costs of the programs by saying all the rich people are going to bear it, when in reality, everyone is going to bear it because the economy is completely interlaced.
00:05:28.000When your boss gets taxed, that gets passed down to you, just as when your company is profitable, it tends to raise wages.
00:05:35.000But the Democrats don't believe that, and so they're going to run full forward on this thing.
00:05:41.000The real campaign the Democrats are going to try and carry forward, however, and I don't think it's going to work because, again, they do have total power.
00:05:47.000And one of the worst things that has happened for the Democrats is that the Democrats actually won those Senate seats in Georgia because now people expect them to do stuff.
00:05:54.000But then the stuff that they are expected to do, people don't like very much.
00:05:57.000Joe Biden is trying to say that the Republicans are really bad for not raising the debt limit.
00:06:01.000And he's saying that this is just half of it is Democrats deliver, the other half is Republicans obstruct.
00:07:00.000The problem for the Democrats is that they don't want to use the extra reconciliation process.
00:07:04.000They only get to do it two or three times a year.
00:07:05.000They don't want to use the reconciliation process on the increase in the debt ceiling.
00:07:09.000You know who knows this, by the way, is Joe Biden.
00:07:11.000Back in 2004, for example, Joe Biden actually said he would not vote to raise the debt limit.
00:07:16.000This is from the Congressional Record.
00:07:18.000November 17, 2004, quote, I was not able to participate in today's debate and vote on the extension of the national debt limit. Had I been here to vote, I would have cast a symbolic vote against an extension of the debt limit. Today's fiscal mess, the transformation of historic surpluses into record deficits is not an accident. It is the inevitable outcome of policies that consistently ignored evidence and experience. Many of us in Congress argued we could not afford to do everything and we needed a fiscal policy that matched our revenues with our expenditures.
00:07:43.000We're here today because that advice was ignored, those hard choices were ducked, and the bill for our decision will be sent to our children and grandchildren in the form of additional debt we will authorize today.
00:07:52.000My symbolic vote against raising the debt limit would have been a protest of the policies that brought us to this point and a demand that we change course.
00:08:02.000But now if Republicans say the exact same thing to Joe Biden, this means that they are ready to watch a meteor hit planet Earth.
00:08:08.000But again, all of this is really just a distraction from the fact that there's this large international warfare going on inside the Democratic Party.
00:08:15.000Joe Biden, for his part, is trying to pretend that the timeline doesn't matter.
00:08:18.000Yesterday, he was he was gruff with people saying it doesn't matter when we pass it.
00:08:21.000It could be in six days, six hours, six months or six years.
00:08:55.000And what's interesting is to watch as the Democrats really do try to game the system.
00:08:58.000When I talk about gaming the accounting system, one of the things Democrats will typically do when it comes to a giant bill like this is they will use provisions In order to lower the estimated amount of debt that aren't real.
00:09:08.000So for example, they will say that a program kicks in in five years and then they'll only estimate the cost out to 10 years when the program continues beyond the 10-year limit.
00:09:16.000Or they'll say that a program begins in 2022 and sunsets in 2027, knowing full well that once a program has been established, Congress will likely vote to extend the program.
00:09:28.000This is why James Clyburn, for example, from South Carolina, is why he's been saying that we need to stop talking about tenure numbers at all.
00:09:34.000Instead, we should probably just, you know, we should probably just put these systems in place for a small period of time, and then we should pretend as though they're not going to have outlandish costs down the road.
00:09:44.000We need to stop talking about these 10-year numbers.
00:09:48.000That's what got people so out of whack.
00:09:51.000They don't realize that when you use that 3.5 number, you're talking about 10 years.
00:09:57.000People think in terms of budgeting, 1, 2, 3, sometimes 5 years, unless it's your house mortgage, you don't think in terms beyond that.
00:10:09.000Well, you don't have to think about terms beyond that because that would actually require us to, you know, use some forethought.
00:10:13.000Bottom line in all of this, Joe Biden decided he was going to side with the progressives.
00:10:17.000The only thing that has stood in the way of Joe Biden getting his progressive dreams done is Manchin and Sinema.
00:10:23.000No less a personage than Alexander Ocasio-Cortez has claimed Joe Biden as one of their own.
00:10:27.000Here is AOC talking about how they have now essentially borged Joe Biden and he is now a member of the Sanders crew.
00:10:34.000I think that President Biden has been a good faith partner to the entire Democratic Party.
00:10:42.000He is in fact a moderate and we disagree on certain issues, but he reaches out and he actually tries to understand our perspective and that is why I am fighting for his agenda with the Build Back Better Act.
00:11:01.000So, it's fun to watch Joe Biden, who's now been completely hijacked by the radical left, to the extent that he is now giving the go-ahead to the most radical members of the radical left.
00:11:11.000Now remember, we've been told that Joe Biden is a moderate, and the Democratic Party is a party of moderates.
00:11:15.000We were told that the only people who are into norm-breaking are the people on the right.
00:11:19.000Donald Trump was a guy who's going to violate norms, who's all about norm violation, shattering the norms.
00:11:24.000And there are some people who celebrated that.
00:11:29.000The dirty little secret of American politics is that when you grant all power to the executive branch, pretty quickly norms begin to be shattered.
00:11:35.000And when the American people are willing to run roughshod over norms to get to utopia, those norms end up being trampled.
00:11:42.000Joe Biden was Captain Norms when he was in the Senate, right?
00:11:44.000He was the guy who was working across the aisle, and he was the one who was upholding the filibuster and all this.
00:11:50.000Now he's talking about shattering the filibuster.
00:11:51.000Now he is talking about how the Democrats need to ram through every deal without any bipartisan support.
00:11:57.000Hey, this reared its ugliest head yesterday when protesters followed Kyrsten Sinema, who's the senator from Arizona, who, again, is sort of the Democratic John McCain in all of this.
00:12:07.000Protesters followed Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom.
00:12:10.000Here's a little bit of a view of what that looked like.
00:12:12.000We need a Build Back Better plan right now.
00:12:17.000We knocked on doors for you to get you elected, and just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don't support what you promised us.
00:12:32.000We need $7 million in citizenship for $7 million.
00:12:35.000We need the Build Back Better plan right now.
00:12:41.000I'm just going to point out here that it is my personal belief that everyone ought to be able to poop in peace.
00:13:33.000First, let's talk about a simple fact.
00:13:36.000One way to get yourself in serious financial trouble is to take out a credit card and then just keep spending on it without paying back the initial amount.
00:13:42.000You do that and you can find yourself really behind the eight ball.
00:13:44.000What you need to do is consolidate that credit card debt.
00:13:46.000You can do that with a credit card consolidation loan from Lightstream.
00:13:50.000Rates start at 4.98% APR with auto pay and excellent credit.
00:13:53.000Plus, the rate is fixed so it will never go up over the life of the loan.
00:13:56.000You can get a loan from $5,000 to $100,000.
00:14:59.000Well, Joe Biden was asked about people following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom.
00:15:02.000And here were his rather tepid remarks.
00:15:06.000Senator Sinema last time was chased into a restroom.
00:15:09.000Do you think that those tactics are crossing a line?
00:15:13.000I don't think they're appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody.
00:15:15.000From the only people it doesn't happen to are people who have secret service standing around them. So it's part of the process. It's part of the process.
00:15:35.000And is the response from the President of the United States the same way?
00:15:39.000It's amazing what sort of norm violation is considered totally okay or unworthy of further comment by the Democratic establishment and what sort of norm violation is deeply worthy of comment by the establishment.
00:15:50.000If Tucker Carlson does a segment about military uniforms for pregnant pilots, that is worthy of the worst sort of ire from the federal government.
00:15:58.000But if a sitting United States senator is followed into the bathroom by protesters, then that is worthy of a shrug, a little bit of a, you know, it happens, whatever.
00:16:09.000Again, it is incredible the sort of treatment to which the Democrats believe that people ought to be subjected so long as they are on the wrong side of a political issue.
00:16:21.000But this goes all the way back to the Trump administration.
00:16:23.000This goes back to the notion that if you have the wrong sorts of views, then you ought to be browbeaten.
00:16:27.000If you have the wrong sorts of views, then you ought to be run out of restaurants like Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
00:16:32.000If you have the wrong sort of views, you ought to be intimidated in life.
00:16:34.000Like this, Kristen Sinema will be fine.
00:16:36.000She's a sitting United States Senator.
00:16:38.000But the problem is that this sort of attitude bleeds down to pretty much everything.
00:16:41.000If you have the wrong views in American life, you can be bullied out of your job, you can be ostracized from your social community, you can be treated like garbage, and a lot of people will just kind of shrug and go, well, you know, you deserved it.
00:16:55.000And unfortunately, you saw a lot of blue checks on Twitter yesterday who are basically talking up that sort of position.
00:17:02.000And most famously, Jezebel, which is of course a radical left site, they put up a piece titled, The Senator is holding all of us back and some of her most vulnerable constituents are rightfully sick of it.
00:17:17.000This is by a columnist named Ashley Reeves, quote, the effectiveness of certain kinds of protests will always be up for debate.
00:17:22.000So naturally, a group of activists pursuing Senator Kyrsten Sinema around Arizona State University campus over the weekend and controversially somehow briefly following Sinema into a public restroom to note that their family members were deported is bound to prompt some pearl clutching.
00:17:35.000On Sunday, social justice organization Living United for Change in Arizona uploaded a video of activists asking Sinema to defend her opposition to President Biden's Build Back Better Act.
00:17:44.000Democrats at large support the bill, but Manchin and Sinema do not.
00:17:48.000It's no wonder her constituents, who don't understand what the F she's doing any better than the rest of us, are piping mad.
00:17:53.000Mad enough to pester her after she finished teaching a class at ASU.
00:17:59.000Lucha's video shows a group of activists waiting outside Sinema's classroom.
00:18:02.000When she emerges, they ask if they could talk to her briefly about the importance of Build Back Better.
00:18:10.000We knocked on doors for you to get elected, said an activist named Blanca, and just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don't support what you promised us.
00:18:29.000How could, you know, how could people be upset that this would happen?
00:18:34.000So Jen Psaki yesterday, she tried to walk this back because even some of the members of the Biden administration are like, this is a little much.
00:18:40.000So here's Jen Psaki trying to walk this back a little bit.
00:18:43.000What happened this weekend was that her classroom, her students, and the safe and intellectually stimulating environment she's worked to create during the years of teaching at ASU was breached.
00:18:55.000That's inappropriate and unacceptable. And I think the context of what happened here is important, despite the fact that, of course, we stand for, the president stands for, the fundamental right of people to protest, to object, to criticize, as they often do outside of the gates of the White House.
00:19:11.000Okay, so the question for the Democratic Party is going to be whether they actually Because remember, we can pretend that this is sort of an isolated incident, but main large parts of the Democratic Party last year were fine with people burning down entire cities.
00:19:26.000We spent an entire year pretending that riots weren't happening in America's major cities so that the media and Democrats could pretend that the protests over George Floyd's death had not, in fact, morphed into riots.
00:19:36.000Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, the current President of the United States, Vice President, I make the mistake, the same mistake Joe Biden makes, Vice President Kamala Harris is tweeting out bail funds for people who are burning things down in places like Minnesota.
00:19:49.000So when we talk about norm violation and rule breaking and where we go from here, we have to understand that if the norm, in many cases, the norm violation is happening inside the House and it has now hijacked many of the people who used to be considered moderates, including Joe Biden.
00:20:02.000And that is very scary for the future of the country.
00:20:05.000It matters an awful lot more than how much money we spend in the next month or so.
00:20:11.000But I'll tell you what matters even more is the fact that we have now reached the point in American politics where huge swaths of the American people are just like, you can do whatever you want to do so long as it helps you achieve the purpose you want to achieve.
00:20:22.000That is a recipe for the country falling apart.
00:20:26.000Meanwhile, Yesterday's big story is that Facebook had gone dark.
00:20:31.000So Facebook went dark for about six hours yesterday and the Facebook stock dropped.
00:20:39.000Facebook and Instagram were down for some amount of hours yesterday.
00:20:44.000And this prompted a lot of talk about Facebook and its evil.
00:20:48.000This was also prompted by a Facebook whistleblower named Frances Haugen, who was on 60 Minutes.
00:20:52.000This is all in preparation for a democratic full frontal assault on Facebook.
00:20:56.000This Facebook whistleblower was talking about how Instagram in particular had done internal research and they found that, shock of shocks, teenage girls were not doing well after using Instagram.
00:21:06.000Now, this has been true of pretty much everything in media for as long as I've been alive.
00:21:11.000It turns out the research shows that girls looking at glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan, not particularly good for self-image, that any sort of chat room for girls, any sort of interconnection for teenage girls that is outside of sort of the interpersonal, really is not great for mental health.
00:21:26.000But Frances Haugen over at Facebook is now a whistleblower and she's a whistleblower because there is an attempt right now by Democrats to basically take Facebook down a peg.
00:21:36.000The story of Facebook is kind of fascinating in the sense that it used to be celebrated by the left.
00:21:41.000Now it has become Persona non grata, enemy number one for the left.
00:21:48.000We'll explain that in just one moment.
00:21:50.000First, let us talk about a simple fact.
00:21:52.000And that is that right now, it's a very difficult time to hire.
00:21:54.000If you're an employer, you would have thought, well, look at all these people who are unemployed.
00:21:58.000I mean, that's a huge pool of people to choose from.
00:21:59.000But right now, actually, there are more job openings than people who are actually seeking the jobs.
00:22:35.000In fact, according to ZipRecruiter's internal data, jobs where employers use ZipRecruiter's invite to apply get on average two and a half times more candidates, which helps make for a faster hiring process.
00:22:44.000See for yourself, just go to this exclusive web address, ZipRecruiter.com slash D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E to try ZipRecruiter for free.
00:23:09.000So, to understand exactly what they're doing with Facebook, you have to understand why Facebook is a danger to the democratic media complex.
00:23:14.000So, before 2016, Facebook was a darling of the left.
00:23:17.000Facebook had been used to great success by Barack Obama in 2012 to mobilize all the people who were going to vote for him and to organize on the ground.
00:23:43.000Because they had convinced themselves after 2012 that they had a durable, never-to-lose coalition.
00:23:49.000They had a coalition that would never be defeated electorally again.
00:23:52.000It was a coalition of the dispossessed.
00:23:53.000There was African Americans for Barack Obama, and gays for Barack Obama, and Hispanics for Barack Obama, and college-educated white liberals for Barack Obama.
00:24:00.000And this coalition, when you put them all together, would never lose again.
00:24:21.000They did a full principal Skinner from The Simpsons.
00:24:24.000And they decided Facebook was the problem.
00:24:26.000It had been Facebook, because if Facebook had not allowed all of this dissemination of speech, then presumably Hillary Clinton would have won.
00:24:32.000And the way that they tried to cover for the fact that they don't like freedom of speech is by saying it was Russian interference on Facebook.
00:24:38.000Now, anybody who actually looked at the stats on Russian interference on Facebook understands that the amount of actual dissemination of Russian material was extremely low.
00:24:46.000In the number of people actually affected by Russian disinformation, the Senate did a full report and they were putting up posts that were supposedly the election shifters that had like a thousand shares.
00:24:56.000I had more shares for my Facebook page in a month than the entire quote-unquote Russian operation had in over a year.
00:25:01.000Did I shift the entire election in favor of Donald Trump?
00:25:06.000But the media had to go with this narrative because, of course, somebody had to pay.
00:25:09.000And it turns out that this narrative also allowed the Democratic media establishment to try and re-establish the monopoly on informational dissemination that they have been seeking since the rise of alternative media.
00:25:21.000Back in the 60s, 70s, there were only a few daily papers that were national, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal.
00:25:28.000There were only a couple of channels that were national, ABC, CBS, NBC.
00:25:35.000And then with the rise of the internet, there came this ability to actually critique and find alternative viewpoints on stories and sometimes find alternative stories that were just not covered by the media.
00:25:44.000And this started to eat into the media's market share.
00:25:51.000One was they could double down on their base.
00:25:52.000This is why the New York Times is now indistinguishable from Salon.com.
00:25:58.000and, right, because they did both, they could attempt to crack down on the methods of dissemination of information and reestablish a media monopoly.
00:26:06.000And the way they would do that is by cuddling Facebook into suppressing traffic from their competitors.
00:26:11.000The idea was if we can reestablish the dominance of legacy media, then things will go back to normal.
00:26:17.000It'll help us, the media, in our quest for oligarchic control of informational dissemination and market share.
00:26:24.000And it'll help Democrats because, of course, all of the major outlets, the legacy media outlets in American life, those outlets all slant to the left and coordinate pretty openly with the Democratic Party.
00:26:33.000Okay, so the latest assault on Facebook is part of this.
00:26:36.000Understand nobody in the media truly cares about Instagram and its effect on teenage girls.
00:26:42.000It's been the right largely that has been very critical of kids using the internet in these ways for years and years and years and years.
00:26:48.000I'm not letting my kids use the internet until they're essentially 18.
00:26:50.000I have no intention of letting my kids traffic around on Instagram.
00:26:56.000With that said, the Democrats were kind of happy with all this stuff, right?
00:26:59.000Social media is where you go for approval when you're gender transitioning.
00:27:03.000Social media is where you go when you come out of the closet.
00:27:05.000Social media is where you go when you're looking for support for a fringe left-wing position.
00:27:09.000Social media is where you go when you're coordinating the revolution.
00:27:12.000Social media is how you escape the bonds of your confinement at your home and find a more sympathetic audience.
00:27:19.000These are the things that many members of the left have been saying for years and years and years.
00:27:22.000Now they're very upset, however, with these exact same services on a very selective level.
00:27:26.000So understand that the attack on Instagram really is not about Instagram.
00:27:30.000The left is not looking to crack down on Instagram in any serious way.
00:27:32.000What they're looking to do is force Zuckerberg and force Facebook and force all of these outlets into compliance with what they believe should be the informational dissemination rules.
00:27:43.000So the latest element of this attack is the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
00:27:47.000She was on 60 Minutes talking about how Facebook had information that Instagram was damaging to teenage girls and they continued to operate their business.
00:27:56.000Frances Haugen plans to testify before Congress this week.
00:28:01.000She believes the federal government should impose regulations.
00:28:05.000Facebook has demonstrated they cannot act independently.
00:28:09.000Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety.
00:28:13.000It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety.
00:28:17.000I'm hoping that this will have had a big enough impact on the world that they get the fortitude and the motivation to actually go put those regulations into place.
00:28:27.000Okay, so understand, the whistleblower didn't whistleblow on anything.
00:28:30.000She didn't actually give you any information you didn't already have.
00:28:33.000Was there anybody in America who is unaware that Instagram is damaging to teenage girls?
00:28:48.000Teenagers generally coordinating with each other, like teenagers are not fully developed brain-wise and they tend to make really dumb decisions.
00:28:55.000And when they're networked with each other, the decisions get dumber and dumber.
00:28:58.000And this has been true for a very long time.
00:28:59.000But why are the media playing this up?
00:29:01.000So Facebook responded to this report from 60 Minutes.
00:29:03.000They said, every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place.
00:29:10.000We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content.
00:29:15.000To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.
00:29:18.000They said, we've invested heavily in people and technology to keep our platform safe and have made fighting misinformation and providing authoritative information a priority.
00:29:26.000If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.
00:29:32.000We have a strong track record of using our research to inform changes to our app.
00:29:37.000They say hosting hateful or harmful content is bad for our community, bad for advertisers, and ultimately bad for our business.
00:29:43.000Our incentive is to provide a safe, meaningful experience for billions of people who use Facebook.
00:29:50.000And they say that the goal of meaningful social interactions, there's a metric called meaningful social interactions, which is what they use to boost traffic on particular posts.
00:29:57.000They say the goal of the meaningful social interactions ranking change is in the name.
00:30:00.000Improve people's experience by prioritizing posts that inspire interactions, particularly conversations between friends and family, which research shows is better for people's well-being, and deprioritizing public content.
00:30:11.000Research shows polarization has been growing in the United States for decades.
00:30:15.000So, again, what Facebook is saying here, because most of what this report has been focused on in the media is Instagram, but the other part of the whistleblower talk is how Facebook is prioritizing quote-unquote hate speech, and how they're incentivizing hate speech.
00:30:28.000Okay, understand why the media is covering that?
00:30:30.000They're saying that because when they say hate speech, what they mean is shows they don't like, and people talking they don't like.
00:30:34.000They mean the New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
00:30:41.000That is very clearly what they're attempting to do.
00:30:44.000It is no coincidence that the Facebook whistleblower is a longtime Democratic donor.
00:30:48.000According to the National Pulse, she donated 36 times to Democrats, including to AOC.
00:30:56.000That is not a shock in any way, shape, or form.
00:31:00.000It is also not a shock that the top Democratic operative Bill Burton is advising the Facebook whistleblower.
00:31:06.000According to the Washington Free Beacon, she's getting strategic communications guidance from a top Democratic operative.
00:31:13.000Burton is now deeply integrated with an emerging infrastructure on the left comprised of individuals and organizations, including the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, seeking to press Facebook to more aggressively police political content.
00:31:24.000In Hogan's public testimony, industry and political insiders see a sophisticated communications campaign intended to put Facebook on defense from a steady trickle of leaked internal documents that fueled a Wall Street Journal investigative series dubbed the Facebook Files to the blockbuster 60 Minutes interview to congressional testimony scheduled to begin on Tuesday.
00:31:42.000Hogan's 60 Minutes interview kicked off a media feeding frenzy with the story mentioned at least 200 times on cable news since the segment aired.
00:31:50.000Burton's involvement helping to manage Hogan's public debut suggests her argument is part of a broader Democratic initiative.
00:32:20.000There are people on the right who say, well, you know, we on the left and the right, we can agree that Facebook needs to be regulated.
00:32:25.000What you don't understand if you say that is that the way that the right wants to regulate Facebook is by forcing Facebook to allow more content.
00:32:31.000The way that the left wishes to regulate Facebook is by forcing Facebook to allow less content.
00:32:35.000That is a fundamental debate that is not going to be bridged here.
00:32:38.000Here's Jen Psaki essentially calling for censorship.
00:32:41.000In our view, this is just the latest in a series of revelations about social media platforms that make clear that self-regulation is not working.
00:32:50.000That's long been the president's view and been the view of this administration.
00:32:53.000They validate the significant concern that the president and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed about how social media giants operate and the power they've amassed.
00:33:05.000Okay, understand that what this really is, is government control.
00:33:08.000Okay, they are looking for government control.
00:33:10.000Margaret Sullivan, the columnist for the Washington Post, she says, what we really should be pushing for here is, get ready for it, a new federal agency focused on the digital economy.
00:33:18.000Hey, more federal government, that'll be the solution.
00:33:20.000Remember that part where it said, Congress shall not abridge freedom of speech?
00:33:25.000We need a new federal agency that is given the power to effectively just slap any company that disseminates information That Democrats don't like, I guess is presumably the way this would work.
00:33:36.000The idea comes from none other than a former FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, who maintains that neither his agency nor the Federal Trade Commission are nimble or tech-savvy enough to protect consumers in a volatile and evolving industry.
00:33:47.000You need an agency that doesn't say, here are the rigid rules, when the rules become obsolete almost immediately, said Wheeler.
00:33:53.000So, if we really want to think about the public interest in the fast-paced digital world, it will be necessary to revise the, quote, cumbersome, top-down rulemaking process that has been in place since the industrial era, Wheeler wrote in a Harvard-Schornstein Center paper.
00:34:07.000Digital platforms like Facebook and Google have become pseudo-governments that make the rules, said Wheeler.
00:34:11.000So instead, what they need are a bunch of people in government who don't actually have to say what the rules are.
00:34:17.000They can just go around and do exactly what they want.
00:34:23.000It's kind of an incredible thing that they're calling for.
00:34:24.000I mean, they're calling for pretty much top-down tyranny.
00:34:27.000You know, the rule of law requires that you have easily interpretable, neutrally applicable rules.
00:34:33.000What's being called for by Margaret Sullivan is a government agency that has no rules, but has nearly unlimited power over this area of American life.
00:34:42.000Now listen, Facebook has made its own bed here in some ways.
00:34:45.000Because for years, Facebook stood up to the left and then Facebook started to collapse to the left.
00:34:50.000I mean, back in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg said at Georgetown University, quote, people no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard.
00:35:00.000I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people's hands.
00:35:10.000This is when Zuckerberg was a big free speech advocate.
00:35:13.000And then the left put so much pressure on that Facebook started to suppress information.
00:35:18.000Apparently in the belief that if they were nice to the left, the left would leave them alone.
00:35:23.000Once the left's got its foot in the door, now the left is going to go the rest of the way.
00:35:25.000And they are going to go after Facebook.
00:35:28.000And, you know, we on the right, again, a lot of people on the right are very skeptical of Facebook.
00:35:31.000I think that skepticism is in many ways justified, as I'll discuss in a moment.
00:35:35.000But understand that if Facebook gets shut down, or if Facebook gets restricted by the federal government, the outlets that are going to suffer are not the New York Times, or CNN, or MSNBC.
00:35:45.000The outlets that are going to suffer are all of the competitive brands.
00:35:48.000Because those competitive brands have been using Facebook as a distribution platform in new media.
00:35:54.000All these other platforms we're talking about have been around for 30 years.
00:36:07.000You don't have to love Zuckerberg to believe that.
00:36:09.000You don't have to love Facebook to believe that.
00:36:11.000You can be very critical of Facebook's willingness to concede to exactly the people seeking to shut off the spigot, which we'll discuss in a moment.
00:36:18.000But you gotta understand what exactly they're trying to do because it is perfectly obvious at this point.
00:36:21.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:36:23.000First, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you probably heard me talk about my Helix mattress.
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00:36:34.000They just launched a new company called Allform.
00:36:36.000They're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped directly to your door.
00:36:40.000So, what makes an all-form sofa really cool?
00:36:41.000Well, for starters, it's the easiest way you can customize a sofa using premium materials and at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores.
00:36:48.000You can pick your fabric, and it's spill, stain, scratch resistant, the sofa color, the color of the legs, sofa size, shape.
00:36:53.000Make sure it is perfect for you and your home.
00:36:55.000They've got armchairs and loveseats all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, so there's something for everybody.
00:36:59.000And you can always start small and buy more seats later on if you want your all-form sofa to grow and change with you when you move.
00:37:05.000For my family, I picked out the three-seat sofa with chaise and the sand color with espresso legs.
00:38:01.000If you like what you hear, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:38:06.000And if you're a big fan of the show, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:38:14.000And if you like what you hear, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:38:16.000And if you like what you hear, you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative So, a few weeks ago, Facebook put out a notice as to how they distribute content, their content distribution guidelines.
00:38:25.000So, here at the DailyWare, over the last year, right, just before the election, it became very clear that Facebook had changed its standards and was now suppressing content.
00:38:34.000We could see how Facebook had started to suppress our traffic, essentially.
00:38:37.000And now they are admitting exactly how they do this.
00:38:41.000And the way that they do this is by setting standards that explicitly benefit the legacy media.
00:38:44.000And so there's a certain irony to the legacy media now using that as a foot in the doorway to just ram through all the way and destroy Facebook wholesale.
00:38:53.000As always, cowardice is met not with some sort of conciliatory approval by those who are seeking a concession.
00:39:01.000Cowardice is met with abject humiliation.
00:39:03.000If you are a coward, they will come and they will destroy your business.
00:39:06.000If you are a coward and you give one inch to the left, the left will come in and they will break you.
00:39:11.000They will destroy what you have built.
00:39:14.000So Facebook gave much more than an inch.
00:39:16.000Remember, Facebook's original pitch was, we are here to allow as many people as possible to engage with as many sources as humanly possible, because you live in a world of choice, and this will allow people to actually get access to information and social networks they otherwise would not have been a part of.
00:39:47.000They decided they were going to call out mainstream information and they were going to suppress mainstream information so long as that information came from a non-approved political point of view.
00:39:55.000And now they're making that perfectly clear, right?
00:39:56.000So here are their standards that they admitted to having for the past year.
00:40:00.000And this kind of stuff does affect elections, gang.
00:40:03.000They said that they were going to suppress content from domains with limited original content.
00:40:08.000They said they were going to crack down on content that, quote, contains a large amount of content from other publishers that has been copied or only slightly modified, usually for the purposes of increasing web page volume and driving traffic.
00:40:19.000Now, that is explicitly directed at places that don't have massive journalistic budgets.
00:40:24.000Because the reality is that most sites rely on a certain amount of aggregation.
00:40:27.000In fact, even the mainstream media relies on a certain amount of aggregation.
00:40:32.000How many times have you seen a story from the New York Times laundered into the Washington Post as a rewrite of the New York Times story?
00:40:38.000But Facebook was only going to crack down on one type of site for this sort of activity.
00:40:43.000Then, Facebook said they were going to crack down on traffic rooted in fact-checked misinformation.
00:40:49.000So they downgraded, quote, content that has been debunked as false, altered, or partly false by non-partisan third-party fact-checking organizations who partner with Facebook and have been certified by the International Fact-Checking Organization.
00:41:01.000So as we've detailed expansively on this show and at Daily Wire, fact-checking organizations who have been approved by the so-called International Fact-Checking Network are almost entirely left-wing propaganda agencies dedicated to the upholding of left-wing lies and the suppression of right-wing truths.
00:41:19.000So, if you say things that are true, fact-checkers will very often suggest that you have said something that is false.
00:41:25.000This sort of stuff happens, like, all the time.
00:41:27.000They will say that you are missing context.
00:41:29.000They'll admit openly that what you're saying is true in the body of the piece, and then they will say, mixed.
00:41:35.000Meanwhile, if you're a leftist and you say something overtly false, like the cost of the Build Back Better agenda is zero, they will say that it's mostly true because it's covered by tax dollars.
00:41:47.000The fact-checking organizations are propaganda outlets.
00:41:49.000So basically, Facebook outsourced to a bunch of left-wing propaganda outlets the ability to suppress traffic from anybody who disagrees.
00:41:55.000Facebook also said they would cut down on quote-unquote inauthentic sharing.
00:41:58.000According to Facebook, link posts will be reduced when they are shared a high number of times, and the majority of that sharing comes from accounts that recently and repeatedly engaged in hyper-sharing content relative to the average person who uses our service.
00:42:09.000So in other words, if the most excited people tend to retweet Daily Wire articles or repost them on Facebook, then the content will be suppressed.
00:42:17.000You have to have the average Joe, who may not be all that politically aware or informed, tweeting out stuff or putting it up on Facebook in order for Facebook to allow the traffic to aggregate.
00:42:26.000Facebook cut down on traffic from links to domains and pages with a high quote-unquote click gap.
00:42:33.000According to Facebook, they restricted, quote, links to websites that receive a particularly disproportionate amount of their traffic directly from Facebook compared to the amount of traffic the websites receive from the rest of the internet.
00:42:44.000It is a perfect example of so-called regulatory capture by the legacy media.
00:42:48.000The legacy media has existed for literally over a century.
00:42:53.000They've built up this wellspring of people who are subscribers and who click on their stuff organically.
00:42:58.000For those of us who had to start our companies in the last 10 years, a large amount of our traffic comes from the place where the eyeballs are, Facebook.
00:43:05.000Facebook is now saying, if too high a percentage of your traffic comes from Facebook, we will crack down on your traffic.
00:43:10.000So we are explicitly cracking down on the places that are new media in favor of the places that are old media.
00:43:16.000It's like a billboard agency deciding to reject advertisements from a startup restaurant because too many customers on a percentage basis are coming into the restaurant based on the billboard rather than coming in based on quote-unquote organic traffic.
00:43:27.000That would obviously cut very much in favor of legacy organizations like a McDonald's or KFC and not in favor of the new startup restaurants that is simply trying to get people to come in by using billboards.
00:43:37.000Facebook says they're going to suppress articles that are coming from quote Non-transparent authorship.
00:43:42.000So if you use a staff byline or somebody uses a pseudonym online to avoid the evil political climate we've created where people are targeted in their homes, then they're going to crack down on that.
00:43:52.000And they cut down on posts from, quote unquote, broadly untrusted news publishers.
00:44:02.000Broadly untrusted, according to Facebook, means that you have to have people from all sides of the political aisle that say that they trust you.
00:44:08.000Who do you think that's going to benefit?
00:44:10.000That's not going to benefit the new media, who are overt about their biases.
00:44:13.000It's going to benefit the old media, who lie about them.
00:44:16.000Hey, and they said they were gonna suppress content that was borderline to the community standards, including content that does not violate COVID-19 or vaccine policies, but which shares misleading or sensationalized information about vaccines in a way that would be likely to discourage vaccinations, which means they really should be cracking down on Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, but instead they're cracking down on the right.
00:44:34.000The point that I'm making here is that Facebook has already spent years attempting to placate the left, and now the left is seeking to destroy Facebook all the way.
00:44:41.000They're seeking to destroy Facebook wholesale.
00:44:44.000If you can't spot what it is they are trying to do.
00:44:47.000You're gonna miss exactly why all of a sudden there's all this information that is coming out about Facebook.
00:44:51.000It has nothing to do with the goodwill of the media and the attempts to crack down on bad behavior by massive social media companies.
00:44:58.000It's about cracking down on your ability to access the information that you want by the Democrat media complex in coordination with some insiders and Facebook itself.
00:45:07.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.