The Ben Shapiro Show


Chappelle’s “F*** You” Moment | Ep. 1362


Summary

Dave Chappelle tells the cancelters to get lost, the media unifies to take down Facebook for platforming conservatives, and the educational experts admit they re coming for your kids. This is the Ben Shapiro Show, and it's sponsored by ExpressVPN. For peace of mind wherever you go online, go online and use the promo code: "ELISSA" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to the Electric Future Fund, a non-profit organization that helps fund clean energy projects around the world. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and also HIT the RATE button so that you get notified when another episode like this is available. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podulters! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's the worst thing a comedian has ever said? 4:30 - Who is the most successful comedian on the planet? 5:00 What would you like to see him do next? 6:40 - Is he funny? 7:20 - Who's the most powerful comedian on Earth? 8:30 9:00 Is he a good person? 11:00 What are you going to do with his money? 12:50 - Who s going to pay him the most? 13:00 Does he deserve to be paid that much? 14:40 15:00 Can he be a better than that? 16:10 17:30 Is he not funny? 17:00 Do you have a chance to be a good guy? 17, is he really that good enough? 18:20 17) 19:40 Does he have it better than I m not a good enough than I think he s a good thing ? 21:40 Is he better than me better than you should be more than that than I bet he s not that I think I should be better than he s good than I do that than that I m going to be that he s gonna come to a place that I have to be so much more than I'm not getting a ticket to a bar in a place I should go to a movie or a place he s supposed to be in a movie that he thinks I'm watching that I don t think I'm going to like?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Dave Chappelle tells the cancelers to get lost, the media unify to take down Facebook for platforming conservatives, and the educational experts admit they're coming for your kids.
00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:09.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:16.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:00:18.000 For peace of mind, whenever you go online, visit ExpressVPN.com.
00:00:22.000 Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment first.
00:00:25.000 Reminder, this is your very last opportunity to get your hands on a free signed copy of my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, when you check out Birch Gold.
00:00:35.000 What are the reasons you should check out Birch Gold?
00:00:36.000 I mean, aside from getting a signed copy of that book?
00:00:39.000 Well, the number one reason is that inflation continues to spiral out of control, as we'll discuss in just a little bit.
00:00:44.000 Inflation is expected well into next year at this point, and now Democrats are looking to push forward trillions in more spending.
00:00:49.000 They're hiding even how much spending they are doing.
00:00:52.000 If you're freaked out about the impact this additional spending is going to have on already high inflation, now is an excellent time to protect your savings by reaching out to Birch Gold to diversify part of your IRA or 401k into a precious metals IRA.
00:01:04.000 Text Ben to 474747.
00:01:04.000 Go ahead and do it today.
00:01:07.000 Get a free information kit on protecting your savings with gold.
00:01:10.000 I buy my gold from Birch Gold.
00:01:11.000 They have an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless five-star reviews, thousands of happy customers.
00:01:15.000 This month, again, when you place an order with Birch Gold, you get that signed copy of my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, which is just a little sweetener for something you should probably be considering anyway.
00:01:25.000 Text Ben to 474747.
00:01:28.000 Claim your free, no-obligation information kit on holding gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account.
00:01:32.000 Plus, Sending this text is the only way to be eligible for that signed copy of the book.
00:01:35.000 Again, text BEN to 474747 and protect your savings today.
00:01:40.000 Alrighty, so we have now had in this country more controversy over Dave Chappelle making jokes about transness than we had over Joe Biden completely surrendering an entire country to the Taliban, which shows you where our priorities are as a nation.
00:01:54.000 But Dave Chappelle, for his part, is doing something quite important.
00:01:57.000 He's standing up and he's just saying no.
00:01:59.000 And that's really, really important.
00:02:01.000 It's important because most of the people who are targeted by the woke cancel culture crowd are not Dave Chappelle.
00:02:06.000 They're not one of the most powerful comedians on the planet who's worth a bajillion dollars.
00:02:10.000 Most people are people who are targeted inside their organizations, people who are outed for some comment on Facebook, people who have been ostracized from their social circles.
00:02:18.000 And when they see Dave Chappelle saying no, They too are empowered to say no because that's the thing about the cancelers.
00:02:23.000 You don't have to be cancelled if you don't want to be cancelled.
00:02:26.000 Now, that doesn't mean that you won't be fired.
00:02:28.000 It doesn't mean that you won't feel repercussions.
00:02:30.000 It does mean there's a whole side of the aisle out here waiting to embrace you if you decide that you don't care whether you are cancelled or not by people who despise you anyway.
00:02:39.000 So, Dave Chappelle did another comedy bit yesterday.
00:02:43.000 And in this comedy bit, he explicitly talked about meeting with the trans community, right?
00:02:47.000 This is something that many of the people who were protesting him demanded a meeting, a meeting.
00:02:51.000 They needed a meeting.
00:02:52.000 Now, I'm not sure what they think would get done at the meeting, other than they would get to lecture Chappelle and they think what, Chappelle was going to just sit there and apologize for his jokes, which comedians typically are not in the vein of doing.
00:03:03.000 Well, Chappelle did another comedy set last night, and he addressed exactly this complaint in demand.
00:03:09.000 To the transgender community, I'm more than willing to give you an audience.
00:03:15.000 But you will not summon me.
00:03:17.000 I am not bending to anybody's demands.
00:03:21.000 And if you want to meet with me, I'd be more than willing to, but I have some conditions.
00:03:27.000 First of all, you cannot come if you have not watched my special from beginning to end.
00:03:33.000 You must come to a place of my choosing, and a time of my choosing, And thirdly, you must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.
00:03:52.000 I'm sorry that he's funny, guys.
00:03:52.000 I'm sorry.
00:03:54.000 I'm sorry that he's funny and that he's going to continue to be very successful because he is funny.
00:03:58.000 Now, even Chappelle, who is, again, the most successful comedian on planet Earth.
00:04:02.000 Netflix pays him just oodles of cash in order to get him to do his specials with them.
00:04:09.000 Even Chappelle is now saying that he is at risk of being deplatformed.
00:04:12.000 He says he produced a documentary and many of the major Distributors will no longer touch his work other than his comedy specials.
00:04:20.000 They're happy to make money off his comedy specials, but they're not going to look at his ancillary work because he's just too offensive.
00:04:25.000 Here he was discussing this.
00:04:27.000 This film that I made was invited to every film festival in the United States, and some of those invitations I accepted.
00:04:33.000 And when this controversy came out about the close-up, they began disinviting me from these film festivals.
00:04:45.000 And now, Today, not a film company, not a movie studio, not a film festival, nobody will touch this film.
00:04:56.000 Thank God for Ted Sarandos and Netflix.
00:04:59.000 He's the only one that didn't cancel me yet.
00:05:03.000 Okay, so he's thanking God for Netflix.
00:05:05.000 We'll see how long Netflix lasts or whether they choose to undergo this controversy again.
00:05:09.000 Here's the thing, Dave Chappelle.
00:05:11.000 I'm sure that you and I disagree on nearly everything.
00:05:14.000 I'm sure that you have attacked people who work with Daily Wire.
00:05:17.000 I mean, I know you have.
00:05:17.000 You've done it publicly with, for example, Candace Owens.
00:05:20.000 I don't care.
00:05:20.000 I'd be happy to work with Dave Chappelle.
00:05:22.000 I'm sure Candace Owens would be happy to have Dave Chappelle working over here, too.
00:05:25.000 We don't care, because we are much more open-minded than the left is when it comes to jokes that target us.
00:05:29.000 Again, in Dave Chappelle's special, he tells two separate anti-Semitic jokes.
00:05:33.000 No one seems to care, including me, because the fact is that while I don't like the jokes and I don't really think they're funny, I am not the arbiter of what great humor is.
00:05:43.000 I'm not the sole arbiter, nor do I feel that people ought to be silenced on the basis of me not liking a particular joke.
00:05:49.000 So, if he's looking for distributors who are never going to cancel him, he will find himself on the right side of the aisle sooner or later, whether he likes it or not, because the left is just going to continue cordoning off all the areas where Dave Chappelle is allowed to work.
00:06:01.000 There is a great irony, by the way, in the fact that the vast majority of people who are very angry at Dave Chappelle are upper-class white liberals.
00:06:07.000 You have a black man who's become incredibly successful by telling jokes.
00:06:11.000 Coming from a background that was not wealthy.
00:06:13.000 And you have a bunch of upper-class white woke liberals who are very, very upset at Dave Chappelle because he noticed that a man is a woman.
00:06:19.000 That a man is a woman is a nonsensical statement.
00:06:21.000 Because he noticed that men are men and women are women and human beings are sexually dimorphous.
00:06:26.000 Because he noticed that, the white woke liberals are very mad.
00:06:29.000 Any other situation where you had a bunch of upper-class white folks attacking a black person, it would be totally unheard of.
00:06:34.000 It would be really wrong, right?
00:06:36.000 Just another element of the intersectional hierarchy of privilege rearing its ugly head.
00:06:41.000 But when it's Dave Chappelle telling jokes about a community that is supposedly at the top of the intersectional hierarchy of victimology, then Dave Chappelle must be brought to heel.
00:06:50.000 So good for him for saying no on all of that.
00:06:54.000 As he pointed out, he said, I've been, it's been said in the press, I was invited to speak to the transgender employees of Netflix and I refused.
00:06:59.000 That's not true.
00:07:00.000 If they'd invited me, I would have accepted it.
00:07:02.000 Although I'm confused about what we would be speaking about.
00:07:04.000 I said what I said and boy, I heard what you said.
00:07:06.000 My God, how could I not?
00:07:07.000 You said you want a safe working environment at Netflix.
00:07:10.000 It seems like I'm the only one that can't go to the office anymore.
00:07:14.000 And then he continued, he said, this really isn't about the LGBT community.
00:07:17.000 He says this has nothing to do with them.
00:07:19.000 It's about corporate interests and what I can say and what I cannot say.
00:07:22.000 For the record, I need you to know that everyone I know from that community has been loving and supporting, so I don't know what all this nonsense is about.
00:07:29.000 I'm sure that is right, by the way.
00:07:30.000 I'm sure the vast majority of LGBTQ people who watch the Chappelle special are like, eh.
00:07:36.000 Or they laughed.
00:07:37.000 Or they don't care.
00:07:38.000 But the activist class are the class that run our media and run the corporate boardrooms.
00:07:43.000 So Chappelle happens to be right about that.
00:07:44.000 So it's very important what Chappelle is doing right now.
00:07:46.000 Now, is it enough to actually create a groundswell of ignoring these folks?
00:07:53.000 I doubt it.
00:07:54.000 I mean, he praises Ted Sarandos over at Netflix.
00:07:56.000 Sarandos already offered a quasi-apology for airing Chappelle's Special.
00:07:59.000 He said, well, yeah, we should have aired Chappelle's Special, but I should have told the offended employees that I understood their feelings.
00:08:05.000 That is always the prelude to the alligator taking off an arm.
00:08:09.000 Netflix already fed them a finger.
00:08:11.000 Now it's just a matter of how far they allow the alligator to go.
00:08:14.000 Whereas Chappelle is cutting it off at the beginning.
00:08:16.000 So good for him.
00:08:17.000 Because we need more of this in our society.
00:08:18.000 More J.K.
00:08:19.000 Rowlings.
00:08:20.000 More Dave Chappelle's again.
00:08:21.000 I disagree, I'm sure, with J.K.
00:08:22.000 Rowling and Dave Chappelle on nearly everything.
00:08:24.000 But, as I've said before, the future of this country, and indeed of civilization and freedom, rests not with people on the right who have already made our call that we are in favor of individual freedom, nor does it lie with the radical left, which has made their call that they don't care about individual freedom so long as they are pursuing quote-unquote, redistributive justice.
00:08:41.000 It lies in the middle, with people who may have sympathy for the agenda items of the radical left, but who believe that individual rights take precedence, and that a force to choose between individual rights and preservation of their durability And the agenda items of the left, they will choose individual rights and the preservation of their durability, even if it takes longer to get to their policy preference.
00:09:02.000 All right, meanwhile, speaking of folks who are trying to shut down the pipelines of information, you've seen this coordinated assault on Facebook from the media, and it is truly coordinated.
00:09:10.000 We've seen something like 17 newspapers all releasing different parts of these so-called Facebook papers.
00:09:15.000 Now, from where I sit, this is basically a nothing burger.
00:09:18.000 Facebook is a giant corporation.
00:09:19.000 It does business in hundreds of countries around the world.
00:09:24.000 It has billions of constituents.
00:09:27.000 And it turns out that Facebook's main thrust when it comes to news or when it comes to people talking with each other is to not get in the way.
00:09:33.000 This has been Zuckerberg's position since literally Facebook started.
00:09:36.000 The difference is that the media used to believe that and now they no longer believe that.
00:09:39.000 Now the media are fully ensconced in the notion that Facebook should shut down the information the media don't like.
00:09:46.000 As I've been discussing for a while here now, there was an elite coterie in the media that felt that it could monopolistically dominate the dissemination of information.
00:09:55.000 And for most of the 20th century, they were right.
00:09:56.000 You had three news networks, ABC, NBC, CBS.
00:10:00.000 The third one of those only cropped up much later in terms of its serious TV presence.
00:10:05.000 You had radio networks, which were also dominated by just a couple of corporations.
00:10:09.000 You had a couple of nationally distributed newspapers.
00:10:12.000 And then you had your local newspaper.
00:10:14.000 That was it.
00:10:15.000 There were no other means of dissemination of information.
00:10:17.000 And so for a long time, that oligopoly of information prevented the American people from seeing the truth behind their institutions, which is that most people who run most institutions are idiots.
00:10:27.000 Because most people you know are idiots.
00:10:29.000 And the beauty of a free market is that the idiotic parts of what you do during your day are kind of shuffled out, right?
00:10:37.000 Basically, there's the wheat to your day and there's the chaff to your day, right?
00:10:40.000 The wheat being the productive part of your day and the chaff being the unproductive part.
00:10:43.000 This is true for all decision-making.
00:10:44.000 What the markets do is they focus in on the wheat and they maximize the wheat.
00:10:48.000 I can't trade my chaff for your wheat.
00:10:50.000 The useless stuff that I do, the bad decisions I make, that is of no value to you.
00:10:53.000 So I can't trade my chaff for the productive stuff that you do.
00:10:56.000 I can only trade the productive stuff that I do for the productive stuff that you do.
00:10:59.000 What markets do is incentivize good decision-making.
00:11:03.000 Hey, our institutions.
00:11:04.000 So what that means is that a free market allows for a lot of idiocy, right?
00:11:08.000 We can all individually be idiots, but our collective knowledge about our own situations is much higher than any one centralized source of information.
00:11:16.000 And all the people around you might be dolds, but you can still work with each other because you understand what that guy over there, that idiot, he has one productive thing he does all day and it's fix cars.
00:11:23.000 You know to bring your car to him when you want your car fixed, but you're not going to take life advice from that guy.
00:11:27.000 Okay, so you can survive in a free market system understanding that most people are kind of dumb.
00:11:32.000 What you cannot do is centralize all power in institutions with the same dumb people at the heads controlling all aspects of your life.
00:11:40.000 Doing all the things that make them dumb are now part and parcel of what you have to accept from them.
00:11:45.000 Okay?
00:11:46.000 This is the lie from the beginning of the progressive era.
00:11:46.000 And this was the great lie.
00:11:49.000 Is that if you give power to the so-called experts, many of whom happen to be idiots, Then they will fix all of your problems.
00:11:55.000 And the media were fully in line with this because they, too, then got to be the great expositors.
00:11:59.000 They got to be the most powerful, informational, mind-shaping people on planet Earth.
00:12:04.000 Problem is, they, too, are idiots.
00:12:06.000 So, when the 20th century came to a close and the Internet started to rise and suddenly the oligopoly was broken and suddenly you could actually see behind the curtain Instead of Americans reacting by saying, okay, well, maybe we should take power away from the institutions.
00:12:21.000 The institutions reacted and they made Americans face each other.
00:12:24.000 And they said, okay, well, we're not the problem.
00:12:26.000 You're the problem.
00:12:28.000 And so you, you uninformed rubes, the big problem is that you've got too much access to the information.
00:12:34.000 You've seen behind the curtain and you must never see behind the curtain again.
00:12:38.000 We must foreclose your ability to access information.
00:12:41.000 The original thought of a lot of these elitists in our society Was that the rise of the internet would facilitate all sorts of conversations that would ensconce them in power.
00:12:51.000 That would re-enshrine their power.
00:12:53.000 And then it turns out that when people saw Behind the Curtain, their first reaction was, whoa!
00:12:58.000 Has it always been like this?
00:12:59.000 Has it always been this dirty and this ugly?
00:13:00.000 And the answer is yes, it's always been this dirty.
00:13:02.000 It's always been this ugly.
00:13:03.000 The difference was these people didn't have that much power over your life.
00:13:06.000 Then over the course of an entire century, they took tremendous control over your life.
00:13:09.000 But they were still the same idiots.
00:13:10.000 And now we see they're idiots.
00:13:12.000 But those idiots have to maintain their power somehow.
00:13:14.000 The way they've chosen to maintain their power is to now shut off the spigot of information.
00:13:19.000 To re-institute their oligopoly, their control over what you can see and what you can hear.
00:13:25.000 Because here's the problem, when it comes to assessing your own rights, when it comes to assessing your own place in the world and who should control you, you're not an idiot.
00:13:32.000 You're actually pretty good at this part.
00:13:34.000 But they don't like that because you might come to a conclusion different than the conclusion they have for you.
00:13:38.000 This is why they've been so angry that people are able to go online and get information and make their own risk assessments with regard to COVID, for example.
00:13:44.000 It's why they're so mad that people have been able to go online and actually view stories about Hunter Biden and corruption inside the Biden family.
00:13:51.000 It's why the people who are the oligopoly, they understand that every time the institutions that they have built up crack, they are that much closer to crumbling.
00:13:59.000 And so they're going to shore them up with the cement of censorship.
00:14:02.000 That's what these Facebook papers are about.
00:14:04.000 They're not about making Facebook better.
00:14:05.000 They're about making Facebook more closed.
00:14:08.000 Because they care about the internet becoming more closed.
00:14:09.000 Because they want their control.
00:14:11.000 We'll get to this in just one second.
00:14:13.000 First, let's talk about another podcast you should give a listen to.
00:14:15.000 That is the Jordan Harbinger Show.
00:14:17.000 It's a podcast you should try out.
00:14:19.000 I know every day somebody tells you that you should listen to another podcast.
00:14:21.000 You're like, I don't have time for another one.
00:14:22.000 This one you should make time for.
00:14:23.000 Jordan's Show, which Apple named one of its best of 2018.
00:14:27.000 is aimed at making you a better informed more critical thinker so you can get a sense of how the world actually works and come to your own conclusions about what's happening even inside your own brain.
00:14:35.000 Each episode is a conversation with a different fascinating guest and when I say there's something for everyone here I mean it.
00:14:40.000 It's always eclectic and fascinating.
00:14:42.000 Jordan talks for example to a hostage negotiator from the FBI in one episode who offers techniques on how to get people to like and trust you.
00:14:49.000 Another episode tells the story of a pimp and mafia enforcer who talks about mind manipulation techniques, right?
00:14:53.000 I mean, it's weird and interesting and offbeat, and you'll always learn something.
00:14:57.000 I recommend our listeners check out Jordan's conversations with Colonel Oliver North or Kobe Bryant.
00:15:01.000 I don't always agree with Jordan, but you don't have to to learn something.
00:15:04.000 We here at The Daily Wire enjoy the show.
00:15:05.000 We know you will, too.
00:15:06.000 Check out jordanharbinger.com slash start for some episode recommendations or search for The Jordan Harbinger Show.
00:15:12.000 That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:15:19.000 Okay, so the big breaking news from Facebook is via the Wall Street Journal, quote, Facebook internal chat boards show politics often at center of decision making.
00:15:31.000 In June 2020, when America was rocked by protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, a Facebook employee posted a message on the company's racial justice chat board, Get Breitbart out of NewsTab.
00:15:44.000 NewsTab is a feature that aggregates and promotes articles from various publishers chosen by Facebook.
00:15:48.000 The employee's message included screenshots of headlines on Breitbart's website, such as Minneapolis Mayhem, Riots and Masks, Massive Looting, Buildings in Flames, Bonfires, and BLM Protesters Pummel Police Cars on 101.
00:16:02.000 The employees said they were emblematic of a concerted effort at Breitbart and similarly hyper-partisan sources, none of which belong in NewsTab, to paint black Americans and black-led movements in a very negative way.
00:16:11.000 According to written conversations on Facebook's Office Communication System, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, many other employees chimed in to agree.
00:16:19.000 In the same chat, a company researcher said any steps aimed at removing Breitbart, a right-wing publisher popular with supporters of former President Trump, could face roadblocks internally because of the potential political blowback.
00:16:29.000 At best, it would be a very difficult policy decision, the researcher said.
00:16:33.000 Facebook chose to keep Breitbart on NewsTab.
00:16:35.000 A spokeswoman for the tech giant said the company makes a judgment based on the specific content published on Facebook, not the entire Breitbart site, and that the Facebook material met its requirements, including the need to abide by its rules against misinformation and hate speech.
00:16:48.000 Many Republicans from Mr. Trumpdown say Facebook discriminates against conservatives.
00:16:51.000 The documents reviewed by the journal didn't render a verdict on whether bias influences its decisions overall.
00:16:56.000 They do show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank-and-file.
00:17:07.000 The documents viewed by the journal, which don't capture all the employee messaging, didn't mention equivalent debates over left-wing publications.
00:17:12.000 Okay, so, is this a leak that paints a bad light on Facebook?
00:17:17.000 What this leak actually shows is that the Facebook higher-ups were demanding that employees show where Breitbart was wrong in their headlines because none of those headlines were false.
00:17:25.000 Cities were burning last summer.
00:17:27.000 People were pummeling police cars on the 101 last summer.
00:17:30.000 There was video that was attached to all of these articles.
00:17:34.000 But some Facebook employees were mad.
00:17:36.000 They were mad because Facebook was allowing too much speech.
00:17:39.000 Because as our left-wing oligarchs suggest, too much speech allows for the rubes to actually view things they shouldn't be viewing.
00:17:47.000 And we have to restrict what the rubes can see and what the rubes can hear.
00:17:51.000 And if we close their eyes and we close their ears, then they will speak the words we want them to speak, namely the nostrums of the Democratic Party.
00:17:58.000 Now, Facebook, for its part, didn't remove Breitbart News from that News tab.
00:18:02.000 What they have done, and we've talked about this on the show before, is they've taken soft measures to reduce the reach of right-wing content on their site.
00:18:10.000 We know this because we can see our own internal metrics.
00:18:12.000 Right Bart, their traffic got taken down 20%.
00:18:15.000 That is because of interior agitation at Facebook, promoted from the outside by the media.
00:18:19.000 Because guess what?
00:18:20.000 The New York Times loves when Facebook shuts down right-wing speech.
00:18:24.000 Right-wing speech competes with them.
00:18:25.000 See, the media has been faced with a real problem.
00:18:28.000 As one of the institutions that has been proved to not be competent at their jobs, which was to just provide you the facts, as an institution that has lost trust with the American people, they have two choices.
00:18:36.000 One is they could look in a damn mirror and recognize that the rise of right-wing publishers is a direct result of the lack of institutional trust in them.
00:18:44.000 That would require them to change their business model.
00:18:46.000 It might require them to hire somebody who, for example, voted for President Trump in the last election cycle.
00:18:51.000 I'm not certain that there's one member of the editorial page board over at the New York Times, for example, who voted for Trump.
00:18:57.000 I'm not aware there are any.
00:19:00.000 That might require them, if they wanted to take seriously the needs of the readers, It might require them to get outside their box.
00:19:06.000 Or, alternatively, they could just look to Facebook and notice that they aggregated all the eyeballs and then just try to strangle all the information that wasn't coming from the New York Times and re-establish their monopoly.
00:19:18.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook employees, as seen in a large quantity of internal message board conversations, have agitated consistently for the company to act against far-right sites.
00:19:28.000 In many cases, they've framed their arguments around Facebook's enforcement of its own rules, alleging that Facebook is giving the right-wing publishers a pass to avoid PR blowback.
00:19:36.000 As one employee put it in an internal communication, we're scared of political backlash if we enforce our policies without exemptions.
00:19:42.000 Except that that's not policy enforcement.
00:19:43.000 You have to point out where Breitbart was lying in order to get them banned.
00:19:47.000 It's never about policy enforcement.
00:19:48.000 It's specifically about the fact that these employees don't like Breitbart or don't like Daily Wire.
00:19:55.000 That's what this has always been about.
00:19:57.000 Hey, CNN reported for, like, weeks that Joe Rogan was taking horse dewormer.
00:20:04.000 He was not.
00:20:05.000 They maintain that he was taking horse dewormer.
00:20:07.000 He was not.
00:20:09.000 Has CNN been dinged by Facebook on any of that?
00:20:11.000 Of course not.
00:20:13.000 The Facebook employees aren't in control of the company, and this is what they're angry about.
00:20:16.000 So they went outside the company to try and gain control of the company.
00:20:20.000 That's what this so-called whistleblower, who really is just A ridiculous left-wing activist attempting to grab control of the reins of power herself.
00:20:28.000 That's what she is doing.
00:20:29.000 It's the reason why Democrats are upholding it.
00:20:31.000 Why do you think that these specific documents were leaked?
00:20:34.000 Not to places like Daily Wire or Daily Caller or Breitbart.
00:20:36.000 Why do you think they were leaked to all of the legacy media outlets?
00:20:39.000 Because the legacy media outlets are in on it.
00:20:41.000 The legacy media outlets love it.
00:20:42.000 Anything that reestablishes their stranglehold on information is good for them.
00:20:46.000 So this Facebook former employee went to a PR manager and they tranched out these really non-revelatory documents.
00:20:54.000 To a bunch of outlets that are sympathetic to the idea that Facebook needs to stop disseminating information that is not the legacy media outlets.
00:21:01.000 It's a power grab.
00:21:02.000 It's that simple.
00:21:03.000 It's not about principle.
00:21:04.000 It's simply about power as always.
00:21:07.000 All right, so according to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook employees focused special attention on Breitbart, the document's show, criticizing Facebook for showcasing the site's content in NewsTab and for helping it sell ads.
00:21:19.000 They also alleged Facebook gave special treatment to Breitbart and other conservative publishers, helping them skirt penalties for circulating misinformation or hate speech.
00:21:27.000 Right-wing sites are consistently among the best-performing publishers on the platform in terms of engagement, according to data from NewsWhip.
00:21:33.000 That is one reason Facebook is often criticized by people on the left, who say Facebook's algorithms reward far-right content.
00:21:39.000 Facebook says it enforces rules equally and doesn't consider politics in decision-making.
00:21:43.000 Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said, quote, we make changes to reduce problematic or low quality content to improve people's experiences on the platform, not because of a page's political point of view.
00:21:52.000 When it comes to changes that will impact public pages like publishers, of course, we analyze the effect of the proposed change before we make it.
00:21:58.000 Now, again, the the goal here with this entire tranche of stories from the media are to push Facebook to do more censorship.
00:22:10.000 This is why when you hear people on the right and they're like, yeah, Facebook does a bad job because they are censoring right-wing speech.
00:22:14.000 There's truth to that.
00:22:15.000 There really is.
00:22:15.000 I mean, again, I know the internal metrics.
00:22:18.000 There's truth to the notion that they have specifically targeted right-wing sites by changing policies.
00:22:23.000 Like for example, the people who are the most engaged, they have prevented those people from having their engaged posts reach a lot of people.
00:22:31.000 They've also changed the way that the stories are distributed by measuring how much of a site's traffic comes from Facebook.
00:22:37.000 If too much of a site's traffic comes from Facebook, they ding the site and they reduce its reach, which of course benefits legacy media outlets like the New York Times or CNN, which have existed for a much longer time and have been able to gain market share long before Facebook arrived.
00:22:51.000 And so it is simply true that Facebook has dinged right-wing traffic.
00:22:55.000 This is well known in the industry.
00:22:58.000 But when the right complains about that, and then they say, we can make common cause with Elizabeth Warren and the left.
00:23:01.000 No, you guys have diametrically opposed solutions.
00:23:04.000 The right says, Facebook needs to open up more and allow more speech and leave us alone.
00:23:08.000 And the left says, you must never leave the right alone.
00:23:11.000 You must shut down all of those sites.
00:23:12.000 And then they use all sorts of ridiculous, Jerry-rigged studies in which they penalize you for openly stating your bias.
00:23:20.000 So for example, if you go to Newswhip, Newswhip will say that my site, The Daily Wire, is ranked less, lower on trust than, for example, CNN or the New York Times.
00:23:28.000 Why do they say that?
00:23:29.000 We literally had a call with them.
00:23:31.000 And on this call with Newswhip, we explained we are overtly conservative.
00:23:35.000 And they said, right, but that means you're biased.
00:23:36.000 And we said, well, actually, it means we're honest and we're overtly conservative.
00:23:40.000 And they said, well, this means you're less trusted.
00:23:42.000 I said, hold up.
00:23:43.000 So if we're honest about our own bias, whereas the New York Times lies clearly and openly about its own bias, they're considered more trusted and they're considered more honest.
00:23:52.000 We label every one of our stories.
00:23:53.000 At the bottom of the story, it says that we are a conservative news site.
00:23:56.000 And this makes us less honest than the New York Times, which just lies about things routinely because of its left-wing bias?
00:24:03.000 So, Facebook tends to use studies from outside groups like Newswhip, or they tend to use the fact checks of politically motivated groups like PolitiFact in order to ding right-wing publishers.
00:24:11.000 This is the entire goal.
00:24:14.000 Breitbart was included in the News tab, which was launched in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:24:18.000 The product contains a main tier with curated news from publishers, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post.
00:24:23.000 Those get paid for their content.
00:24:25.000 All of the big guys are already getting paid directly by Facebook.
00:24:27.000 Daily Wire is not paid directly by Facebook.
00:24:29.000 Breitbart is not paid directly by Facebook.
00:24:32.000 Breitbart is part of a second tier of news designed to deliver news tailored to a user's interest.
00:24:36.000 It is not paid.
00:24:37.000 Facebook said it requires sites included on NewsTab to focus on quality news reporting and bars those that repeatedly share what it deems misinformation or violate its public list of community standards.
00:24:48.000 Asked about the inclusion of Breitbart, Mark Zuckerberg said at the time of the launch that the aim was for NewsTab to have a diversity of perspectives.
00:24:58.000 Again, this is the game.
00:24:58.000 The game is re-establish the monopoly.
00:24:59.000 Re-establish the monopoly.
00:25:00.000 understood factual progressive and conservative leaning news organizations both needed to be represented. Both needed to be represented but that could be done without including Breitbart. Again this is the game.
00:25:09.000 The game is re-establish the monopoly. Re-establish the monopoly. And again the way that they crack down most on the conservative publishers, the way they crack down most is they put in place tools that are specifically designed to only hit conservative publishers.
00:25:31.000 So they, for example, looked at their informed engagement and sparing sharing tools, and then they used those metrics and they jiggered those metrics to lower right-wing traffic.
00:25:41.000 And the idea is that they're a pro-right-wing site, according to these folks.
00:25:43.000 Again, it's all about the control.
00:25:45.000 It's all about the control.
00:25:46.000 And they're just saying ridiculous things.
00:25:47.000 I'm sorry.
00:25:49.000 Is it the town square's fault if people use the town square in a way that you don't like?
00:25:53.000 In essence, the argument against Facebook allowing distribution of information is the argument against the First Amendment.
00:25:59.000 So Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, in a dissent in a case in the early 20th century, that when we discover that there are people of many fighting faiths who have to argue with one another, and that that argument allows the truth to out, that view on the First Amendment has been completely rejected by the left.
00:26:16.000 The First Amendment, according to the left, is a problem.
00:26:18.000 And the reason it's a problem is it allows people to say things you don't like.
00:26:21.000 We need to lower the risk that people might believe things you don't like by lowering the ability to hear things via the First Amendment.
00:26:27.000 They believe this on a broad level and they believe it on a narrow applied level over at Facebook.
00:26:31.000 And so what you do is instead of blaming the people who purvey misinformation, for purveying misinformation and calling it out, instead you blame the fact that there is a First Amendment, or that there is a Facebook.
00:26:42.000 This is why you see the ridiculous specter of Francis Hogan, the so-called Facebook whistleblower, who again is just a left-wing activist who is revealing essentially nothing new.
00:26:50.000 Going in front of British lawmakers and saying that in 60 years there will be women walking around with brittle bones because of choices that Facebook made now.
00:26:57.000 Or maybe they'll be walking around with brittle bones because of choices they make now.
00:27:00.000 I'd notice that Facebook doesn't do anything except allow people to see information.
00:27:05.000 I'm extremely worried about the developmental impacts of Instagram on children.
00:27:10.000 Because of Facebook.
00:27:11.000 Not because of their parents.
00:27:11.000 Not because teenagers are making decisions that are bad all the time.
00:27:14.000 osteoporosis for the rest of your life, right?
00:27:16.000 There are going to be women who are walking on this earth in 60 years with brittle bones because of choices Facebook made now.
00:27:21.000 Because of Facebook, not because of their parents, not because teenagers are making decisions that are bad all the time because of Facebook.
00:27:30.000 By the way, she was honest about this like a few weeks ago.
00:27:33.000 She said that she wishes that there was an oversight body that she was the head of.
00:27:36.000 So basically, she doesn't like how Zuckerberg's running a place, so she wishes to run the place.
00:27:39.000 And you see that the, again, Facebook must be blamed for everything.
00:27:43.000 So Facebook was blamed in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump winning the 2016 election.
00:27:47.000 The media quickly shifted from Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate to it was the Russians and Facebook that won Donald Trump the election.
00:27:53.000 And so they're really, really bad.
00:27:55.000 And now they're trying to blame Facebook for January 6th.
00:27:59.000 To the beginning, they blamed Parler and then they knocked Parler offline.
00:28:02.000 Now they're blaming Facebook because, hey look, a convenient target.
00:28:06.000 So, for example, you have CNN reporting, quote, not stopping, not stopping, stop the seal.
00:28:12.000 Facebook papers paint damning picture of a company's role in insurrection.
00:28:17.000 Just days after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6th, Facebook's Chief Operational Officer Sheryl Sandberg downplayed her company's role in what had happened. We know this was organized online. We know that, she said in an interview with Reuters.
00:28:27.000 We took down QAnon. Proud Boys stopped the steal anything that was talking about possible violence last week. Our enforcement's never perfect. I'm sure there are still things on Facebook.
00:28:35.000 But internal Facebook documents reviewed by CNN suggest otherwise.
00:28:39.000 The documents, including an internal post-mortem and one document showing in real-time countermeasures Facebook employees were belatedly implementing, paint a picture of a company that was in fact fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize, and that only truly swung into action after the movement had turned violent.
00:28:59.000 Asked by CNN about Sandberg's quote, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the greater context.
00:29:03.000 She'd been noting the January 6th organization happened largely online, including but not limited to Facebook's platforms, the spokesperson said.
00:29:11.000 One of Hogan's central allegations about the company focuses on the attack on the Capitol.
00:29:16.000 In an SEC disclosure, she alleges, quote, Facebook misled investors and the public about its role in perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection.
00:29:27.000 Facebook denies the premise.
00:29:29.000 They say, quote, the responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6th lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.
00:29:36.000 We took steps to limit content that sought to delegitimize the election, including labeling candidates' posts with the latest vote count after Mr. Trump prematurely declared victory, pausing new political advertising, and removing the original Stop the Steal group in November.
00:29:49.000 But again, the idea is that if Facebook didn't stop every bad thing from happening, Facebook must be stopped itself.
00:29:53.000 And the person who should be in charge is Frances Hogan, who will stop all bad things from happening.
00:29:57.000 How?
00:29:57.000 By giving her and her friends total control.
00:30:00.000 This is not whistleblowing.
00:30:01.000 It is just a power grab, as always.
00:30:04.000 As always.
00:30:05.000 And the media are pushing it full scale.
00:30:07.000 I mean, it's pathetic.
00:30:08.000 The Washington Post has an entire piece titled, quote, you've decided to quit Facebook.
00:30:13.000 Here's how to migrate your online life elsewhere.
00:30:16.000 Okay, so again, they're just encouraging people to quit Facebook.
00:30:20.000 Listen, if you want to not be on Facebook, you're prerogative.
00:30:23.000 But let's not pretend that this is anything but a coordinated hit designed to destroy conservative publishers by forcing Facebook into compliance with left-wing demands.
00:30:33.000 For his part, Zuckerberg did an earnings call in which he said, what we're seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.
00:30:42.000 He said, the reality is these questions are not primarily about our business, but about balancing different social values.
00:30:46.000 This, of course, is correct.
00:30:47.000 He is right about this.
00:30:49.000 But you have to understand that the institutions will not let go of their power.
00:30:53.000 They won't.
00:30:54.000 Anything that disseminates power more broadly, anything that opens up is a threat to the New York Times.
00:30:59.000 It is a threat to CNN.
00:31:00.000 It is a threat to the Democratic Party.
00:31:03.000 That's a threat.
00:31:04.000 You are a threat.
00:31:05.000 You having information is a threat.
00:31:07.000 And so whenever you see a story about a shark Basically, blood in the water and the sharks coming for a company like Facebook.
00:31:15.000 Understand, it's not really directed at Facebook, it's directed at you.
00:31:19.000 It really is, because that's the angle.
00:31:21.000 That does not say Facebook has handled this perfectly.
00:31:23.000 Again, we've been dinged by Facebook, we've lost traffic for no reason on Facebook, and we're pretty pissed about it.
00:31:28.000 But the overarching attack here from the left is designed to prevent you from viewing shows like this one.
00:31:34.000 It's designed to get companies like YouTube to take down content that you like.
00:31:38.000 That's the goal.
00:31:39.000 In just one second.
00:31:40.000 Speaking of the attempt to maintain control over you and your life and your children, Remember that time the left said they weren't teaching critical race theory and that they were not teaching radicalism?
00:31:49.000 Now they're like, even if we are, you need to shut up about it.
00:31:52.000 First, if you haven't heard already, The Daily Wire has signed Alison Williams to lead a very special sports series exclusively for our members.
00:31:58.000 Alison was a seasoned sports reporter for ESPN.
00:32:00.000 She announced her resignation last week because they were trying to force her to get the COVID-19 vaccine despite the fact that she already had natural immunity and was looking to get pregnant.
00:32:09.000 Well, her decision to leave didn't go unnoticed by us.
00:32:12.000 Instead, we decided to pick her up and now she'll be making great content for us.
00:32:15.000 We uncancel the canceled here at Daily Wire.
00:32:18.000 Leftist elitists do not dictate our content.
00:32:20.000 You do.
00:32:21.000 You decide what you want to watch and which creators to support.
00:32:23.000 If you want premium entertainment and sports content without the woke, become a member at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
00:32:29.000 Use code do not comply at checkout for 25% off.
00:32:32.000 We're building a movement against the leftist Hollywood machine and Joe Biden's unconstitutional mandates, but we need your help.
00:32:38.000 So go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
00:32:40.000 Code do not comply for 25% off.
00:32:43.000 Help us.
00:32:43.000 We really need it.
00:32:44.000 Join the fight.
00:32:45.000 Also, there's no better way to wake up than with your daily dose of the facts, which is why The Daily Wire created Morning Wire, the daily morning show dedicated to bringing you all the news you need to know with no spin or hidden agenda.
00:32:55.000 It's the only daily podcast that values your time and the truth.
00:32:57.000 And while we are working overtime to make sure fact-based news still has a platform, we do need your help to keep it trending toward number one.
00:33:03.000 So subscribe, start listening now to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
00:33:10.000 You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:33:13.000 Alrighty, so as I say, there are people who want to control you.
00:33:22.000 They want to control your right to see information.
00:33:24.000 They would also love to control how you raise your kids.
00:33:28.000 There's a piece in the Washington Post.
00:33:31.000 It was retweeted by the American Federation of Teachers head, Randy Weingarten, who's one of the worst people in America.
00:33:35.000 I mean, her absolute scorn for the parents of America is truly astonishing.
00:33:42.000 She retweeted this piece.
00:33:43.000 The piece is titled, quote, Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids' school curriculum.
00:33:47.000 They don't.
00:33:49.000 Um, yeah, we do, actually.
00:33:52.000 It's written by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Jennifer Berkshire, a freelance journalist and co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.
00:34:04.000 And the idea is that only school boards, only government actors, only the wise will determine how your children are to be educated.
00:34:12.000 Now, what's kind of amazing about this is that the rise of the public education system in America, if you actually look back historically, was Not particularly a bad thing, but it also was kind of an anti-Catholic thing.
00:34:22.000 If you look at how public schools were supposed to operate, they were almost designed to operate as anti-Catholic indoctrination centers.
00:34:30.000 And people talked pretty openly about this at the time.
00:34:32.000 So from the very beginning, there's been open debate about how kids are to be taught in schools, and whether schools are simply supposed to convey reading, writing, and arithmetic, or whether they're supposed to impose values.
00:34:42.000 But parents have always had the ability to take their kids out of school, to homeschool their kids.
00:34:46.000 But the left would like this not to be the case.
00:34:49.000 I recently did a discussion slash debate with Anna Kasparian of the Young Turks and she openly said that she would love the Finnish model in which there are no private schools and homeschooling is forbidden.
00:34:58.000 In which basically you must send your kids to a government indoctrination center.
00:35:01.000 Well that's the underlying case here in the Washington Post.
00:35:06.000 In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of quote-unquote parents' rights.
00:35:12.000 In Indiana, Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita recently introduced a Parents' Bill of Rights, which asserts that education policy and curriculum should accurately reflect the values of Indiana families.
00:35:22.000 In Florida, the legislature passed an even more comprehensive bill assuring that the state and its public schools cannot infringe on the fundamental rights of parents.
00:35:31.000 Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere.
00:35:38.000 Yet what's actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed.
00:35:43.000 This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught.
00:35:48.000 A common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents.
00:35:56.000 In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, this effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself Is what children do.
00:36:06.000 Except that's not what you're talking about.
00:36:07.000 It's not about children learning to think for themselves.
00:36:09.000 It's about parents wanting their kids to have their values and to pass their values on to their kids.
00:36:14.000 It's literally my number one priority in life.
00:36:16.000 And about educators who have a different set of values.
00:36:18.000 This is not a value neutral proposition.
00:36:21.000 Which is the reason why I pick where my kids go to school.
00:36:24.000 And I specifically ask the principals where my kids go to school if my kids are being taught values that I agree with.
00:36:30.000 And I will not send my kids to a school where the values that I agree with are not taught.
00:36:34.000 When do the interests of parents and children diverge, according to these columnists?
00:36:38.000 Generally, it occurs when a parent's desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain.
00:36:49.000 To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently.
00:36:53.000 As the political scientist Rob Reich has argued, minimal autonomy requires, especially for its civic importance, that a child be able to examine his or her own political values and beliefs, and those of others, with a critical eye.
00:37:04.000 If we value that end, the structure of schooling cannot simply replicate in every particularity the values and beliefs of a child's home.
00:37:11.000 The law has long reflected this.
00:37:13.000 Consider homeschooling.
00:37:14.000 Although it is legal across the country, states still regulate its practice.
00:37:17.000 Such regulations aren't often enforced, but they are certainly on the books.
00:37:20.000 Homeschooling parents can be required to establish minimal academic qualifications, to submit examples of student work to school district administrators, or even to adopt a state-approved curriculum.
00:37:31.000 The sudden push for parental rights, then, isn't a response to substantive changes in education or the law.
00:37:35.000 It's a political tactic.
00:37:38.000 And then they say that it's a paranoid style of politics, quoting Richard Hofstadter, one of the most overrated historians of the 20th century, talking about how it's just paranoid to think that these people want to indoctrinate your kids.
00:37:47.000 They have no political values.
00:37:48.000 They just want you to have kids who challenge everything that you believe.
00:37:53.000 In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing Napalm to the fight.
00:37:59.000 That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor.
00:38:02.000 But as with any scorched earth campaign, the cost of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops.
00:38:07.000 Parents may end up with a new set of rights, only to discover they have lost something even more fundamental in the process.
00:38:13.000 Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake up from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
00:38:20.000 This was retweeted again by the American Federation of Teachers said that you shouldn't worry about the fact that they are teaching your kid radical crap in school.
00:38:27.000 And the school library is filled with pornography, which is actually the case in Loudoun County, for example.
00:38:33.000 No, what you should actually worry about is your own authoritarian fascism in wanting your kids to be inculcated with your values.
00:38:42.000 Hey, so the plan is to hijack your kids.
00:38:44.000 I mean, they're openly saying that the plan is to hijack your kids and that you really should have no say in the matter.
00:38:49.000 I mean, it makes sense on a sort of demographic level, right?
00:38:52.000 There's one group in the United States that is having lots of kids, namely religious parents.
00:38:55.000 There's another group that is having almost no kids, namely highly secularized parents.
00:38:59.000 Highly secular people in the United States are having very, very few children at this point, and people who are religious are having lots of kids.
00:39:05.000 Which means that down the line, if parents actually teach their kids their values and those kids live with those values, you're going to get a more right-wing, more religious country.
00:39:13.000 Left doesn't like that very much.
00:39:14.000 So one of those solutions is take those kids and indoctrinate them in your ideas.
00:39:19.000 Put them in government indoctrination factories and churn out good little liberals.
00:39:23.000 And then tell parents they have no rights.
00:39:24.000 Because after all, you're just teaching them how to think.
00:39:27.000 You're just teaching them to be broad-minded and open-minded and to challenge parental authority.
00:39:31.000 But if your authority is challenged in any way, then it's really bad.
00:39:34.000 And by the way, we know this is the case whether it comes from parents or whether it comes from students.
00:39:38.000 You know how many letters I receive from public school students who say, I'm afraid to speak up in class because my teacher is going to punish me if I disagree with the teacher?
00:39:46.000 Don't give me that high school teachers are teaching children how to think in the main.
00:39:49.000 They're teaching their own opinions very often.
00:39:52.000 And where you send your kid is going to determine what opinions are taught.
00:39:55.000 It is that simple.
00:39:56.000 But again, the idea here is the institutions must be upheld.
00:39:59.000 And if that means curbing First Amendment rights, fine.
00:40:01.000 If it means curbing parental rights, absolutely.
00:40:04.000 The left is simply willing to do this.
00:40:06.000 And standing up is key at this point.
00:40:09.000 They also, of course, would like to curtail economic rights as well, which is why they are now pushing an unconstitutional wealth tax.
00:40:15.000 By the way, it is unconstitutional.
00:40:16.000 When you hear the Democrats are trying to tax unrealized gains at the federal level, there's nothing in the Constitution that allows for this.
00:40:23.000 The Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States does not allow for this sort of taxation, which is why you had to have a constitutional amendment.
00:40:31.000 That constitutional amendment to allow the income tax only allows the income tax.
00:40:35.000 It does not allow direct taxation of unrealized gains.
00:40:39.000 But Democrats are pushing this because, again, economic control, ideological control, control over your kid's education.
00:40:46.000 Did it ever occur to these people that maybe we don't want to be controlled?
00:40:49.000 Maybe the entire premise of American liberty is that we are not controlled and we get to make our own decisions?
00:40:55.000 And that when you maximize the control of morons over every aspect of your life, your life gets materially worse.
00:41:00.000 I've been talking a lot in recent days about risk and risk allocation, about the fact that human beings tend to want to minimize risk.
00:41:06.000 We don't like risk.
00:41:07.000 At the very least, we don't like loss.
00:41:09.000 Right?
00:41:10.000 And so what we are prone to is handing over authority to people who pledge that they are going to minimize our risk.
00:41:16.000 But here's the thing.
00:41:16.000 This is what the institutions are learning.
00:41:18.000 And we learn it anew every time there's a major unexpected recession, for example.
00:41:22.000 You can push off risk.
00:41:24.000 You can pretend that reality entails no risk.
00:41:26.000 You can empower experts to minimize risk.
00:41:28.000 But all they can do is build dams against risk.
00:41:31.000 The waters of risk do not go away.
00:41:34.000 The best way to deal with the endemic risk in life is to incentivize people to make good individual decisions in terms of how to mitigate risk.
00:41:41.000 And maybe local level decisions on how to deal with risks if they materialize.
00:41:45.000 But when you pledge that you can stop all risk from happening, when you pledge that if you give somebody complete informational control, they will make your life better, or you give people complete control over your kids, it will make your life better and your kid's life better.
00:41:57.000 All you're doing is building a dam that holds back the waters of risk.
00:42:00.000 And when that dam collapses, There is a tsunami.
00:42:03.000 Not a trickle of risk that is handleable, not a stream of risk that you can tranche off, or that you can redirect, or that you can use to power your economy.
00:42:11.000 Instead, you create a dammed-up flood of risk.
00:42:16.000 And when that dam bursts, the risk overwhelms the entire civilization.
00:42:20.000 And that is what is happening right now.
00:42:22.000 The institutions are cracking.
00:42:24.000 Those institutions were a dam meant to prevent you from exercising your freedom to assess risk.
00:42:28.000 And now, as that dam bursts, they're desperately trying to shore it up by more control.
00:42:33.000 It's not going to work.
00:42:35.000 They'd be better off lessening the power of the water behind the dam by allowing us to actually make individual assessments about things that matter to us, by allowing us to speak freely and access information freely, by allowing us to educate our kids as we see fit.
00:42:48.000 But they're not going to do that, because to do that would, in fact, undermine their entire project, which is the control.
00:42:55.000 Whether they believe it or not, Whether they believe that they are making your life better if you give them more control, or whether they just want the power is irrelevant.
00:43:01.000 The effect is that they are going to control every aspect of your life from soup to nuts if they have the chance.
00:43:07.000 And they're openly bragging about it.
00:43:08.000 I mean, the New York Times is talking about Joe Biden creating cradle-to-grave welfare programs.
00:43:12.000 The phrase cradle-to-grave used to be a pejorative in American politics.
00:43:16.000 It was something the Republicans said about Democrats, that they wanted cradle-to-grave care, demonstrating that they were enervating the American public.
00:43:23.000 Now it's used as a piece of braggadocio by the left.
00:43:26.000 The agenda is pretty much out there in the open, which means that we have the obligation to fight that agenda.
00:43:32.000 It's the reason why it is so necessary to look at what big cities like Chicago are doing right now in implementing universal basic income and say to yourself, what is this designed to do except to make people more dependent on government?
00:43:45.000 Except to continue to foster the lie that the more control you give these people, the safer they will keep you.
00:43:50.000 They're not going to keep you safe at all because eventually reality always intervenes.
00:43:53.000 And when it does, it gets really, really ugly.
00:43:55.000 All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
00:43:58.000 The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
00:44:00.000 Eastern.
00:44:00.000 Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
00:44:02.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:44:02.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:44:03.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld.
00:44:11.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
00:44:13.000 Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
00:44:15.000 Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
00:44:17.000 Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
00:44:19.000 Post-Producer Justin Barber.
00:44:21.000 The show is edited by Adam Sievitz.
00:44:23.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
00:44:25.000 Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
00:44:27.000 Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
00:44:29.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:44:31.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
00:44:34.000 On the Matt Wall Show, we talk about the things that matter.
00:44:36.000 Real issues that affect you, your family, our country, not just politics, but culture, faith, current events, all the fundamentals.