On this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Ben talks about how the left is trying to delegitimize conservative media outlets and take control of the internet through de-platforming, censorship, and other means. He also talks about why it s so important to protect your digital privacy and why you should be using a VPN to keep your data safe from prying eyes and hackers. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and is a regular contributor to CNN and other major news outlets. He is also a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire and has been featured on Fox News and other media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS, NPR and NPR. His new book, "America's Next Door" is out now and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Click here to buy a copy of the book for just $99.99! If you don't already own a Kindle Fire, you can get a free eReader device with a built-in eReader app, too! Kindle $9.99, or use the Kindle $99, iBook $49, or an Audible membership is also available for 99.99 for 49.99. There is no Audible 4999, and Audible is 4949 for 49494949, 49994949.99 is a limited edition edition edition of the Kindle Fire Fire HDX, $4999, $99 and 4999 499999, plus shipping starts at $99 a month.99 a year.00.00, shipping starts starting in September 2020. . The Kindle Fire and iBook is also sells for 4999.00 starting at $49.00 and includes an additional two months, shipping starting in July 2020. Free shipping starts in September 2019, shipping begins in October 2020, shipping will be available in July, shipping in September, shipping after July 2020, and shipping starts will be $99 after July 2019, free shipping starts next year, shipping two months after July, and two years, shipping thereafter, starting in October, will be free, shipping start, shipping on a year and shipping will begin, free, starting two years after that starts, two months will get a maximum of 4999 europalm and two months of shipping, shipping, and a maximum, free of course, will get you a carte-ship, and three months of free shipping, two years of shipping and shipping,
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00:01:34.000Okay, so we are watching as the left basically uses its newfound power in order to call for crackdowns on everybody And they're telling you that it's not important, you know, because everybody that they disagree with, they'll still have outlets.
00:02:27.000We're going to go form our own outlets and we're going to use the normal methods of distribution in order to achieve a market share.
00:02:35.000And then the same people who ousted them, who threw them outside of the house, they say, OK, well, now you guys are so bad that you really shouldn't have access to the market at all.
00:02:43.000You can see this happening in real time.
00:02:46.000And it's been happening for a while, but really it's coming to a head right now because every crisis is an opportunity for the left.
00:02:51.000I said the day that January 6th took place, the day that the violation of the Capitol took place, I said that that act of evil was going to have tremendous repercussions.
00:02:59.000It was going to be used by the hard left as an excuse to basically censor everybody they didn't like.
00:03:04.000And they weren't going to restrict that to people who actually engaged in criminal activity.
00:03:08.000They weren't even going to restrict that to arguments that may have fostered the criminal activity.
00:03:12.000Instead, they were going to use that to go after everybody they don't like.
00:03:15.000Because let's face it, folks in the media purvey things that are not true a lot.
00:03:22.000How many members of the CNN staff spent months claiming that Jacob Blake was an unarmed black man who'd been shot by white police officers for no reason?
00:03:32.000How many members of the CNN staff, how many of their big anchors claimed that Andrew Cuomo was the greatest governor in all the land for months at a time while Rhonda Sanderson in Florida was a scourge Virtually all of them.
00:03:45.000They propel whatever narrative they want to propel at any given time, and they will fib to do it, or they'll twist the facts to do it, or ignore countervailing facts in order to do that.
00:03:53.000But the thing is that if those countervailing facts are brought to light by anybody else, or if there's a narrative that they see from the other side that they don't like very much, then that other side must be silenced.
00:04:03.000Who is a sort of bellwether for the woke left infusing itself into mainstream media.
00:04:08.000Stelter didn't used to be quite as radical as he has become.
00:04:11.000I was on his show just a few years ago and he said, you know, you have your outlet, Daily Wire, why don't people like you, why don't conservatives try to go into mainstream media?
00:04:19.000And I literally said to him, anybody at CNN going to try and hire me?
00:04:36.000You've seen a shift in the language being used by folks when it comes to what sort of information should be given a platform and which sort of information should receive distribution.
00:04:46.000There are a couple of major subtle linguistic shifts that are happening right now as we speak, and we're going to elucidate them on today's show.
00:04:52.000One is the shift from misinformation Okay, so it was misinformation and disinformation.
00:04:57.000So disinformation campaigns really were a, the idea was those were a foreign weapon.
00:05:04.000So a disinformation campaign was the Soviets putting out false information that they hoped would be eaten up by the left in the United States and then propagated to a wider audience.
00:05:26.000Maybe some of it is true, but I just don't like the narrative.
00:05:29.000So the shift from disinformation, which is the idea that it is being propagated by a foreign power in order to push a particular agenda that is anti-American in scope.
00:05:36.000The shift from disinformation, deliberate attempts to falsify, to misinformation, meaning information that I disagree with, or information that I think is wrong.
00:05:47.000That shift is pretty subtle, but it's being used.
00:05:50.000at an extraordinarily rapid clip is being adopted by members of the mainstream media as an excuse to shut down competitors.
00:05:57.000And not only that, if you have ever uttered something that they say was not true, then the idea is that you must be shut down as a human being.
00:06:04.000So it doesn't matter that again, CNN has propagated absolute untruths and CNN propagated lies about Covington Catholic.
00:06:11.000CNN propagated lies about Black Lives Matter.
00:06:24.000But that is where Brian Stelter is going to go.
00:06:26.000So now, Brian Stelter says, you know what?
00:06:28.000We should reduce the reach of people that I disagree with, basically.
00:06:32.000The people who are on the other side of the aisle.
00:06:33.000Because it's not as though they have a consistent standard of truth.
00:06:36.000It's not like, okay, here are the people who lie all the time, and then here are the people who tell the truth all the time.
00:06:40.000It is just that they believe that people who are of their opinion are pure as the driven snow, and people who are not of their opinion, if you can find any hook upon which to hang their banning, you just go for it.
00:06:51.000So here is Brian Stelter on Reliable Sources over the weekend.
00:06:54.000Big tech platforms say they are removing lies about vaccines and stamping out Stop the Steal BS and QAnon cult content.
00:07:02.000Now, do these private companies have too much power?
00:07:04.000Many people would say yes, of course they do.
00:07:07.000But reducing a liar's reach is not the same as censoring freedom of speech.
00:07:12.000Freedom of speech is different than freedom of reach.
00:07:15.000And algorithmic reach is part of the problem.
00:07:18.000Okay, so he then extended that over to Fox News.
00:07:20.000He basically suggested that Fox News itself should have its freedom of reach Withdrawn.
00:07:27.000And when he says that it is not a First Amendment violation to restrict people's reach, what he's really talking about here are places like Daily Wire or places like The Federalist or anything that is right of center on Facebook, right?
00:07:39.000When he says that, what he means, that freedom of reach is not the same as freedom of speech, he's basically saying that what we need is for unofficial social media censors to stop the distribution of information.
00:07:49.000And he's saying that's not the government.
00:08:09.000When they decide that they are going to censor particular points of view, and they are going to do so basically with the permission of the government, because the government has given them these carve-outs under Section 230, then they are violating their core tenet.
00:08:21.000Okay, the freedom of speech does not cease to apply as a principle in places where it's supposed to be the chief functioning principle.
00:08:29.000So, members of the left are playing this little game here.
00:08:31.000And again, I'm libertarian on a lot of this stuff.
00:08:33.000I think that private companies should have an awful lot of freedom to do what it is that they want.
00:08:38.000I also think that rival public companies should also be able to—private companies should also be able to do what they want.
00:08:42.000I think that Parler should exist and Twitter should exist.
00:08:44.000I don't think that people should be deplatforming them.
00:08:46.000When you have neutral service providers that are denying service to one side or the other based purely on politics, which is what this is, Then things are getting really, really ugly, really, really fast.
00:08:56.000And the only answer is going to be either a rewriting of Section 230 or a reinterpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which we'll get to in just a second.
00:09:06.000But it's the principle that's amazing here.
00:09:08.000There's supposed to be a free speech program saying, freedom of speech is really important, but what we would love is for private companies to restrict that freedom of speech.
00:09:15.000Private companies need to stop people from seeing information that I don't like.
00:09:19.000And so you've had members of the CNN crews suggest that, for example, Comcast should simply get rid of the ability to distribute Fox News.
00:09:27.000You've had anchors on CNN claim the same thing.
00:09:30.000I've never seen anything from Fox News along these lines about CNN or MSNBC, by the way.
00:09:34.000For all the talk about how Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, look at these, look at these opinion hosts with their strong viewpoints.
00:09:42.000Not one of them, so far as I'm aware, has ever called on Comcast to de-platform CNN or MSNBC.
00:09:47.000But CNN and MSNBC are calling for this sort of stuff and they're calling for it pretty regularly.
00:09:51.000Joe Scarborough called for it last week on MSNBC, so did Mika Brzezinski.
00:09:55.000You're seeing Stelter call for it now.
00:09:56.000When they say that freedom of reach is not the same as freedom of speech, that's sort of like the argument that freedom of religion should basically be restricted to inside your house.
00:10:04.000You should only be free to practice your religion inside your house.
00:10:06.000If you go outside your house and you're acting as you would in the business world and you're making decisions in your business based on your religious precepts, well, now that's not freedom of religion anymore because, after all, you're acting in the public.
00:10:17.000Okay, well, if you restrict somebody's freedom of reach to essentially zero, then of what value is their freedom of speech at that point?
00:10:26.000Then you've got a real problem on your hands.
00:10:28.000But again, the goal here is not an exchange of decent ideas or even an Overton window that is better policed.
00:10:35.000The idea is that people I disagree with should be silenced.
00:10:37.000So Oliver Darcy, a nice guy, but Oliver Darcy, he was on CNN and he says, you know, we have to stop comparing Fox and MSNBC.
00:10:44.000We have to stop comparing that because Fox should basically be deplatformed while MSNBC should not.
00:10:48.000Here's Oliver Darcy on CNN making claims about rival networks.
00:11:19.000I'm old enough to remember when, during the Michael Brown protests, An entire panel of people on CNN held up signs that said, hands up, don't shoot.
00:11:28.000And commentators like Sally Cohen were actually doing the hands up, don't shoot thing, which is a total fraudulent lie.
00:11:52.000Hey, over at the Washington Post, they're doing the same thing.
00:11:54.000So Margaret Sullivan is the media columnist over at the Washington Post.
00:11:57.000She has a piece today basically saying that everybody that she doesn't like should be silenced and that's not cancel culture.
00:12:03.000So the left likes to play this game where they like to cancel people and then claim the cancel culture does not exist, which always makes it kind of fun and karmic when they themselves are canceled, which almost inevitably happens within about six months of saying cancel culture doesn't exist.
00:12:16.000You'll see there's this hilarious pattern in which folks on the left say, cancel culture is not real.
00:12:20.000And then five months later, somebody unearthed an old tweet that was bad, and suddenly they're canceled by the same left that they were cheering on a moment ago.
00:12:26.000Because the mob loves you until the mob doesn't love you anymore.
00:12:29.000So Margaret Sullivan has this piece over at the Washington Post.
00:12:32.000And her idea is the same as Stelter's, which is, we should just withdraw the means of distribution from people I don't like.
00:12:38.000And that's going to have no consequences whatsoever for the American body politic other than good.
00:12:45.000According to Washington examiners, Eddie Scarry, nothing less than a social justice mob, descended on Politico after it gave a guest editing slot to right-wing flamethrower Ben Shapiro.
00:13:05.000They don't listen to five seconds of Rush Limbaugh.
00:13:07.000They've never even heard anything Rush Limbaugh's ever said.
00:13:09.000By the way, that was actually the first conversation I ever had with Elizabeth Warren, long before she was a senator.
00:13:13.000She was a professor at Harvard Law School, and I met her at the top of the W Hotel when I was being recruited for Harvard Law, and she and I kind of...
00:13:21.000Met and she said, oh yeah, you're the one who wrote that book, because I'd written a book already about bias on college campuses.
00:13:27.000And she started talking about Rush Limbaugh and I said, have you ever listened to Rush Limbaugh?
00:13:35.000I'm a right-wing flamethrower because Margaret Sullivan, who I'm sure has never listened to anything I've ever said, calls me a right-wing flamethrower.
00:13:40.000And the goal of calling me a right-wing flamethrower, of course, is the idea that I should be deplatformed.
00:13:43.000So she says, scary mocked those, including many of Politico's employees, who thought Shapiro never should have been in charge of the site's popular playbook newsletter, even for a day.
00:13:52.000Such objections are an effort to silence conservative voices, Scaria claims in another piece.
00:13:56.000liberal journalists quote, believe one side of the political spectrum to be legitimate, and the other should be given as few opportunities to have their opinions heard as possible.
00:14:04.000In other words, it's all part of a cancel culture, the catchphrase for how the masses supposedly gang up to silence provocative voices.
00:14:09.000I happen to think that the Politico staffers were right to oppose their news organization, granting it's imprimatur to someone with Shapiro's history of performative bigotry.
00:15:04.000Literally, I have a piece on the website of Daily Wire, something no journalist I'm aware of or opinion journalist I'm aware of has ever done.
00:15:09.000I've posted every single bad thing I think I have ever said and then either explained it Or apologized for it, like, in writing.
00:15:30.000It was a statement on this show in which I was talking about Beto O'Rourke's view that he would be able to essentially get rid of religion in public life.
00:15:39.000Beto O'Rourke said that he wanted to remove all non-profit statuses from any church or synagogue.
00:15:44.000That did not go along with his woke social justice nonsense.
00:15:47.000And I made an argument that Beto O'Rourke was going to go after religious schools, remove their non-profit status, go after churches, remove their non-profit status, and then the left's next move would be to declare that if you did not educate your child in the ways they wanted to educate your child, they would come to your front door.
00:15:59.000And I said, anybody who tries to take my kid away from me on the basis of teaching my kid values that I don't want to talk to my kids, I will meet them at the door at the gun.
00:16:06.000Okay, I don't disagree with that sentiment.
00:16:24.000They grab control of the institutions, then they bar you from the institutions, then when you build alternative institutions, they air raid them.
00:16:32.000That is the pattern that we are seeing over and over in American society.
00:16:36.000And then, if you complain about it, then you're whining.
00:16:38.000Then you are part of a victimhood culture.
00:16:41.000Hilariously enough, there was a piece over at Axios about this by Jim Vandahay the other day, where he cited me, he cited Tucker Carlson, about the new right-wing talking point, that the right is under assault from the institutional centers of American culture.
00:16:53.000The right wing had centralized around this talking point.
00:16:56.000And I emailed, I emailed the folks at Axios, I was like, Jim VandeHei, the guy who wrote this piece, three weeks ago, three weeks ago, you wrote a piece in which you said, blue America is a sentence in every institutional area of America, and it was going to mean a rethinking of thought and speech in the United States.
00:17:11.000And then you wonder why we're a little paranoid.
00:17:13.000Just because we're paranoid does not mean you're not out to get us.
00:17:54.000You go over to the local auto parts shop and then you wait in line, you get to the front of the line, they have to order the part anyway, they charge you too much for it.
00:18:01.000Instead, why not just use the same thing you use for everything else right now?
00:18:50.000Write Shapiro in that How Did You Hear About Us box so they know that we sent you.
00:18:54.000Okay, so Margaret Sullivan continues along these lines.
00:18:57.000She says that it does not cancel culture if we cancel you.
00:19:00.000She says, night after night, Fox News offers primetime viewers its leftist gestalt on speech show.
00:19:06.000Josh Hawley, who needed only a few days to find a new publisher for his book, subsequently blasted the muzzling of America in an opinion piece in the widely read New York Post.
00:19:13.000Have any of these people been silenced?
00:19:15.000And then, Margaret Sullivan, hilariously enough, quotes Parker Malloy of Media Matters, Yes, there's an objective, an objective, non-partisan, non-silencing site.
00:19:25.000Media Matters exists only to silence voices it does not like.
00:19:29.000All Media Matters does, every day, each day, they hire people to just watch shows like this one, clip them out of context, and then attack our advertisers and our subscribers.
00:19:48.000As Parker Malloy puts it, despite getting a spot on the front page of the fourth largest newspaper in the U.S., coverage across the entire Fox News lineup, a new book deal, an audience of more than half a million followers on Twitter, and a lengthy list of credits on IMDb, Howley would like you to believe he is a man without a voice.
00:20:02.000Okay, so the goal here, but here's the thing.
00:20:03.000You guys want to take away all of those things.
00:20:07.000It's not as though you're saying, yeah, you know, Josh Hawley, he, you know, if he loses his Simon & Schuster book contract, I'm glad that there are other publishers out there willing to pick up Josh Hawley's book contract.
00:20:23.000Quoting the person from Media Matters to the effect that Josh Hawley is not being silenced.
00:20:28.000All Media Matters does all day long is attempt to silence people they don't like.
00:20:33.000Okay, so here's what Margaret Sullivan concludes.
00:20:35.000I talked to the leading First Amendment lawyer and scholar, Jamil Jaffer, about all this last week.
00:20:39.000Jaffer thinks a lot of these complaints are misguided.
00:20:41.000They spring, he said, from a misunderstanding of what the First Amendment is all about.
00:20:44.000The point of the First Amendment is to take these kinds of debates out of the hands of government and put them in the hands of private citizens, says Jaffer, a Columbia University law professor and director of the Knight First Amendment Institute.
00:20:53.000It's not subverting the First Amendment to criticize a politician or a cable news host or a right-wing provocateur.
00:20:58.000That's the whole point of a First Amendment.
00:21:00.000Nor is it a subversion of free speech values for news organizations to make editing decisions or for social media platforms to make and enforce rules.
00:23:09.000We still have the ability for you to subscribe.
00:23:10.000This is why I've been encouraging everybody.
00:23:11.000If you're on the conservative side of the aisle, you need to go and pay direct for the stuff you like, because the left is going to try and take it away on all the other mechanisms of distribution.
00:23:19.000But put us aside, because we in the media, it's our job to find a way to get our information to you.
00:23:24.000And in a free country, which the United States, thank God, still is, at least in most ways, we are going to find a way to get you that information with your help.
00:23:31.000But what this really is about is not about me or about Tucker or about any of the people who are in the media sphere.
00:23:37.000What this really is about is about you.
00:23:39.000It's about you working your day job at a normal corporation.
00:23:42.000It is you working your day job at a school.
00:23:45.000It's about you working your day job Not being a politically volatile person, just posting on Facebook every once in a while, living in fear that your corporation is going to crack down on you for saying the wrong thing at work.
00:23:57.000That somebody at work is going to find out that you voted for Trump or went to a Trump rally.
00:24:01.000That somebody at work is going to find out that you listen to this show, so you make sure that you listen to it during your off hours.
00:24:07.000This is about you worrying that your friends and neighbors are going to treat you as a leper, a social leper.
00:24:14.000You happen to have different points of view.
00:24:16.000See, in order for the First Amendment protections to abide, in order for the legal protections of government not to get involved in your free speech to continue, you need an attitude that is pro-free speech.
00:24:27.000You see how Margaret Sullivan conflates the First Amendment legally with free speech as a value?
00:24:32.000Free speech as a value is a commitment by the common person, by corporations, by your boss, to the idea that there can be some dissent in the workplace, to the idea that there can be open conversation, that they're not gonna fire you for something that has nothing to do with your ability to do your job.
00:24:47.000It means that you, among your friends, you're not going to attempt to cancel people in your social circle just because you have disagreements about tax rates.
00:24:56.000Or because they voted for somebody that you don't like, right?
00:24:59.000It takes commitment by everybody to this certain level of diversity of values, right?
00:25:05.000There have to be certain baseline because that diversity of value stands atop a broader universal value, right?
00:25:11.000About which there can be no diversity.
00:25:12.000And that is a value that free speech matters, that in a free society, we should be able to treat each other decently and still disagree about things.
00:25:51.000It showed that a plurality of every group politically in the United States, outside of woke progressives, believes they have to self-censor.
00:26:37.000wrote a letter to cry and cancel culture and the left went after them.
00:26:41.000All of those people are being lumped in now with people on the right and all those people are being lumped in with the worst offenders of people who violate sort of norms of decency.
00:26:50.000Because the goal here is to shut the Overton window so small that no one fits in it except for the wokest of everybody on a social level.
00:26:58.000So if you have the right political values, by the way, then you have a free pass to do whatever you want.
00:27:02.000And if you don't have the right political values, then you have a free pass to do nothing.
00:27:05.000And we will dig up everything you wrote back in 2002, and we will use it to ruin you.
00:27:12.000So, right now, in politics, there are two stories.
00:27:16.000One is going to receive significant media attention.
00:27:18.000One is not going to receive significant media attention, at least not in the long haul.
00:27:22.000Again, the one that's not gonna receive significant attention in the long haul, it's a story right now, so it's gotten a little bit of mainstream media attention, to be fair.
00:27:27.000It's not gonna receive any over the course of the next two weeks.
00:27:31.000The co-founder of the Lincoln Project, right?
00:27:32.000The Lincoln Project is a bunch of supposedly ex-Republicans who went Democrat, wasted tens of millions of bucks targeting particular Republicans across the country, and then claimed victory after the last election cycle.
00:27:43.000And it's sort of the most, not only never Trump and anti-Trump, but anti-Republican.
00:27:47.000They were going after people like Susan Collins in Maine.
00:27:50.000And so it turns out that the Lincoln Project, which is basically a bunch of grifters who suggested that they were going to say nasty things about Republicans and raise lots of money to do it.
00:27:57.000It turns out that the co-founder, John Weaver, has now been condemned by the Lincoln Project in the wake of allegations that the longtime GOP strategist made unsolicited sexual overtures to several young men, including one who was 14 years old at the time he received sexual messages from Weaver.
00:28:12.000The group, finally, after, I mean, there are reports about this for months, by the way.
00:28:16.000Finally, the group put out a statement on Sunday when it became clear they couldn't keep running away from the story, saying, John Weaver led a secret life that was built on a foundation of deception at every level.
00:28:24.000He's a predator, a liar, and an abuser.
00:28:25.000We extend our deepest sympathies to those who are targeted by his deplorable and predatory behavior.
00:28:30.000The Lincoln Project rose to prominence last year as they campaigned against Trump and others who supported him.
00:28:37.000He had previously worked on the presidential campaigns for John McCain and John Kasich.
00:28:40.000The New York Times published a report Sunday morning based on interviews with 21 men who alleged Weaver sent them unwanted provocative messages or solicited them for sex, often in exchange for the promise of professional help.
00:28:51.000The New York Times story followed reports about Weaver's behavior from earlier this month, including one by the American conservatives Ryan Gerdersky on January 11th, and by Axios on January 15th.
00:29:02.000His original response, Weaver's, was that he was a gay man, which is the get-out-of-jail-free card of sexual abuse, at least for a couple of weeks, right?
00:29:08.000Is that if you're a straight guy, supposedly, who engages in predatory behavior, claiming you're gay is somehow supposed to give you cover.
00:29:52.000Okay, do you think that the right is going to- if they were a right-wing group, do you really think that that would be let go within the next few days?
00:30:06.000Meanwhile, every Republican in America will be asked about the crazy person Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:30:13.000Every single Republican for the next couple of years will be asked every time Marjorie Taylor Greene says a crazy thing to denounce Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:30:20.000Because that's the way this game works.
00:30:21.000Is that if there is somebody on the right who's crazy, and you need somebody crazy you can focus in on so that you can slander the entire Republican Party and every conservative with that person, you just keep focusing in on that person.
00:30:31.000John Weaver will not be in the news two days from now.
00:30:34.000Marjorie Taylor Greene will be in the news for the next couple of years at minimum, no matter how many times people say that she's a crazy person.
00:30:39.000Because by the way, she's a crazy person.
00:31:48.000Get the life insurance you and your family require.
00:31:51.000Alrighty, we're gonna be getting into more of the contrast between The material used to slander the left and the material used to slander the right, not quite the same.
00:33:05.000I've been hearing from folks on the left, why don't you guys on the right, why don't you just get rid of your worst folks?
00:33:10.000And I say, well, you know, when Steve King said his white supremacy defense comment, right, when he said that thing, Some of us went full out for his opponent in a primary.
00:33:51.000Okay, Marjorie Taylor Greene does not have a fan base outside of her immediate constituency in Georgia.
00:33:56.000Okay, I'm wondering who exactly is the giant fan base for Marjorie Taylor Greene, and yet Marjorie Taylor Greene is being treated as though she is sort of the heroine of the Republican Party these days.
00:34:07.000I don't know where, I mean, I do know where this is coming from.
00:34:09.000It's coming from a motivated media line of thought that says Republicans are their worst members and Democrats don't have bad members.
00:34:59.000Now, of course, we see, which is to be expected, the support of Donald Trump, who incited violence, who promoted the attempted coup on January 6th, and five people died.
00:35:11.000And so she, based on who she is, her behavior, what she has said, She's a danger and should not serve in any legislative body.
00:35:20.000So I agree she never should have been elected to Congress.
00:35:23.000By the way, the comments that she's referring to is that Marjorie Taylor Greene believes a bunch of crazy crap because she's kind of crazy.
00:35:29.000Here's the stuff that she has said, according to the Sacramento Bee.
00:35:32.000She suggested in a Facebook post that the wildfires in California She says there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires and pictures and videos.
00:35:46.000And apparently these lasers are controlled by the Jews.
00:35:52.000The Post claims involvement from investor Richard Blum, husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the banking firm Rothschild Inc.
00:35:58.000So apparently, she says, if they are beaming the sun's energy back to Earth, I'm sure they would never miss a transmitter receiving station, right?
00:36:05.000I mean, mistakes are never made when anything new is invented.
00:36:33.000She's a nutty person who was elected to Congress because it was a small primary.
00:36:37.000She's the only person who received any sort of funding or media attention.
00:36:40.000And next time around, she should not be elected, right?
00:36:43.000And if she says this sort of stuff while she's in Congress, then Congress has every ability to eject her from Congress, certainly to censure her.
00:36:50.000With all of that said, the attempt to paint Marjorie Taylor Greene as the face of the Republican Party is pretty obvious by the media.
00:36:54.000That is why there is all this oppo-focus on Marjorie Taylor Greene right now.
00:36:58.000See, they can't do it for Trump anymore, right?
00:37:09.000Instead, they're going to pick Marjorie Taylor Greene and attempt to claim the entire Republican Party is, in fact, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and suggest over and over that Republicans are more worried about the normies within the party than they are about the Marjorie Taylor Greene's within the party.
00:37:22.000So that's what Chris Wallace was doing over the weekend on Fox News.
00:37:25.000The Fox News, by the way, that Brian Stelter would like to ban.
00:37:27.000Here's Chris Wallace saying that there is more focus on Lynne Cheney in the Republican Party than there is on Marjorie Taylor Greene, which I'm not sure how that is the case, considering that every single Republican member I have heard of has condemned Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments.
00:37:43.000You know, you've got a situation right now where there is more visible outrage inside the GOP over Liz Cheney, a member of leadership voting to impeach the president, over rather than some of these wild conspiracy theories being espoused by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:38:03.000How serious is this for the GOP and what can they do about it?
00:38:11.000Liz Cheney, with regard to impeachment, is obviously doing something that's kind of more important within the Republican Party than this fringe nut from Georgia who believes in Jewish Space Laser.
00:38:20.000By the way, I can't tell you more about the Jewish Space Laser.
00:38:23.000First rule of Jewish Space Laser is you never talk about Jewish Space Laser.
00:38:28.000Second rule of Jewish Space Laser is that we never roll on Shabbos.
00:38:32.000Those are the two rules of Jewish Space Laser.
00:38:34.000But aside from that, But the reason that Republicans are maybe focused on the controversy surrounding Liz Cheney is because impeachment is kind of a big thing, and Liz Cheney is the number three Republican in the House, whereas this lady is a first-term backbencher from Georgia who probably won't win re-election in her district.
00:38:48.000So maybe that is more of an issue in the immediate term for the Republican Party.
00:38:52.000But the goal here, of course, is that every Republican is going to be smeared with With Marjorie Taylor Greene in the same way that every Republican a few years back was smeared with Todd Akin.
00:39:03.000You're going to hear MTG, Marjorie Taylor Greene, repeated over and over and over again.
00:39:07.000And by the way, because the left does this, this is what they do.
00:39:09.000Because the left is going to spend an inordinate amount of time, the mainstream media, on this person, that is going to drive people into the arms of this person.
00:39:16.000Because then people will be like, why is this person being unfairly attacked?
00:39:19.000Why are they constantly talking about her?
00:39:21.000Okay, she's gonna end up with a larger following, which of course is exactly what a lot of people want.
00:39:25.000A lot of people, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, I would assume, love that media attention.
00:39:29.000Because the media focusing on that means a lot of people in reactionary fashion will then go and defend Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:40:35.000And when you do the same thing with Marjorie Taylor Greene while you wrap your large-scale democratic embrace around Ilhan Omar and pretend that she's a leading figure in your movement?
00:40:43.000I'm gonna say that you guys don't have a leg to stand on when you talk about anti-Semitism in your own party.
00:40:46.000Especially given the fact that your entire critical race theory nonsense is rooted in anti-Semitic perceptions about how Jews are not actually a victimized people.
00:40:53.000Jews are actually just successful white people.
00:40:56.000Now Asians are turning into white people thanks to critical race theory.
00:41:00.000So yeah, I don't buy any of your phony insanity about this rando, weirdo, crazy person.
00:41:10.000I think that it's a little bit convenient that you've decided to elevate Marjorie Taylor Greene to the leadership of the Republican Party based on zero evidence that she's a member of the leadership of the Republican Party.
00:41:29.000To be mildly self-centered here for a second.
00:41:31.000When Politico, when people say I shouldn't have written for Politico because I'm a right-wing firebrand.
00:41:35.000Okay, let me just point out, I'm maybe the only person on the right who said from the get-go that Trump didn't have evidence that he'd won the election.
00:41:43.000Okay, so, but that's, there's nobody moderate enough for these folks.
00:41:52.000Everybody is in the same boat, including the person who's not even political, who just wants to go to work and be left alone and go home and then believe what they want about politics.
00:42:01.000They're not going to be allowed to do any of that.
00:42:04.000Okay, meanwhile, I will say that the kind of nuttiness within the Republican Party needs to be stopped and it needs to be condemned.
00:42:13.000I think overall it has been, but I think that it needs more, always more.
00:42:19.000But I'm a conservative, so I would like to see it in the Republican Party as well.
00:42:23.000So Doug Ducey, the excellent governor of Arizona, he was censured by the state Republican Party for no reason at all because Kelly Ward is the head of the state Republican Party, which is very foolish.
00:42:35.000The state party chairman instead has been condemning Ducey.
00:42:39.000The state Republican Party has been on Twitter, you know, signaling loyalty to the idea that Trump won the election over and over or that there was fraud in the state of Arizona, which I don't believe was even alleged by the Trump campaign.
00:42:49.000And then they tried to censure Ducey for not going along with attempts to overturn the election results.
00:42:56.000So here is Ducey chiding the state Republican Party.
00:42:58.000By the way, note to Arizona Republicans, if you want to make that state blue, please continue doing what you're doing.
00:43:04.000If you would like the state to remain red, You need to stop going along with the people who are the fringiest of the fringe.
00:43:11.000Passion does not mean strategic acumen.
00:43:13.000Ducey happens to be an excellent Republican governor of a purple state.
00:43:40.000I believe I was in good company in that cartoon.
00:43:43.000And I also want to say I worked incredibly hard to deliver the state for Donald Trump and Red up through election day.
00:43:53.000Okay, so, meanwhile, things are getting radical over on the Biden side of the aisle, and we're never going to talk about that.
00:43:58.000Everything that Biden does is going to be treated as completely mainstream and decent in every possible way.
00:44:03.000So let's talk about that for a second.
00:44:05.000Every single day, the Democrats are rolling out more evidence that they are more and more radical, and the media are going to treat this as moderation.
00:44:13.000They're going to just pretend that nothing bad is going on.
00:44:16.000So Susan Rice, who's the domestic policy advisor, based on her vast experience lying to the American public about Benghazi, she is the domestic policy advisor to Joe Biden.
00:44:24.000And she was explaining to Jonathan Capehart, who again is a far left guy.
00:44:31.000She was explaining to Jonathan Capehart that when the Biden administration says things like racial justice and racial equity, Then that is not divisive.
00:45:08.000This is actually the opposite of dividing us.
00:45:11.000This is about bringing everybody in and being inclusive.
00:45:14.000It's a bit rich for the Republicans after the 44 years of the most divisive president ever, who use bigotry and hatred as a political strategy to accuse a new administration that is trying to include and lift up everybody.
00:45:31.000It's literally not attempting to include and lift up everybody if you are saying that certain groups should be privileged above other groups.
00:45:35.000That is the exact policy that is being proposed.
00:45:38.000By the way, even Politico is noting this today.
00:45:44.000So they have an entire piece in the fabled, untouchable, pristine Politico playbook.
00:45:53.000Okay, about the equity versus equality routine that the Biden administration is doing.
00:45:59.000They say this, they're all talking about equity, right?
00:46:02.000This is the early buzzword of the Biden administration, popping up in nearly every policy proposal, executive order, and speech by the president and his top official so far.
00:46:08.000They're all talking about equity, not to be confused with equality, the umbrella term that past administrations, including Barack Obama's, use to describe efforts to address racial and economic disparities.
00:47:11.000Today, I wrote about another example in a story for Politico, say the editors of Playbook.
00:47:15.000Black and brown people who are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus are also least likely to get vaccinated.
00:47:20.000There are lots of reasons why, but access to the internet to sign up for shots, and access to pharmacies and hospitals to receive the shots, is a big one.
00:47:26.000Simply giving all people access to vaccination isn't enough, Biden officials say.
00:47:30.000It will likely require deploying mobile units to certain black and brown neighborhoods, among other targeted actions, to get the job done.
00:47:36.000Okay, no, the actual critique of vaccine policy is not that in areas where there's literally no ability to get vaccine, we should make sure that people can get vaccine.
00:47:44.000The critique is that the CDC policy... The critique is that the CDC policy originally recommended that we vaccinate young African-American people before 65-year-old white people, which is nuts.
00:48:00.000Now, says Politico, conservatives have taken notice of Biden's embrace of equity and are criticizing it as affirmative action by a different name.
00:48:20.000Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked HUD Secretary-designate Marcia Fudge about the difference during her confirmation hearing on Thursday, seemingly trying to get her acknowledged that equity means treating people differently based on their race.
00:48:32.000Fudge's response, quote, you know, if you say to me that I'm going to give you five bucks and you're going to give my friend five bucks, my five bucks is not necessarily going to go this far because my friend already has a mother and father who are wealthy.
00:48:42.000Shortly after, Cotton sent out an email blast highlighting the exchange, signaling this could soon become ammunition in Washington's partisan warfare.
00:48:52.000These Republicans, they won't accept the idea that we should basically segregate people according to group and then treat them according to group identity rather than individually.
00:49:00.000By the way, even fudge is fudging there.
00:49:03.000The truth is, in the United States, we already have means-based social welfare programs.
00:49:09.000I do not receive any benefits from the federal government.
00:49:11.000People who are very impoverished in the United States receive benefits from the federal government.
00:49:16.000When they say equity, what they mean is that they're going to judge you based on your race.
00:49:20.000They're going to judge you based on your history of racial victimization, not personally, but as a group.
00:49:25.000So Colin Powell's kid should receive five bucks, and my kid should not receive five bucks, even though both are growing up pretty wealthy.
00:49:32.000Expect the debate, says Politico, to shape how some white Americans in the middle and on the right think about the Biden-Harris presidency.
00:49:37.000The left has recently embraced the shift to equity, and black and brown people have been there for decades.
00:49:41.000Will Biden try to sell it to the public?
00:49:44.000So far, at least, administration officials are saying equity a lot, proposing policies they think reflect it, and hoping that it clicks.
00:49:50.000Well, the reason that they are using the term equity, as opposed to something like affirmative action, or quote-unquote reparative justice, right, that's the other one they use, reparative justice, because it's a reparation, they don't want to use that language.
00:50:01.000They say equity, hoping that your brain will think equality, and then you'll just let it go.
00:50:06.000Just as they've shifted from disinformation to misinformation in the media so they can shut up people they don't like, now they're shifting from equality to equity in the hope that you don't know the difference between equality and equity because one has only one extra syllable, basically.
00:50:18.000And this has become the talking point for every element of the Democratic agenda.
00:50:22.000Over the weekend, National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, she said, the environment is a racial justice issue.
00:50:53.000And by the way, the goal here, the goal here, that racial justice and climate justice are the same thing, the goal here is that if you then say you oppose their program, what are they going to call you?
00:51:43.000John McWhorter is like a middle-of-the-road liberal.
00:51:47.000But now, Ibram Kendi is basically suggesting that John McWhorter needs to be run out of polite society because he opposes Ibram X. Kendi's anti-racist, fascistic nonsense.
00:51:59.000And by the way, it is absolutely fascistic nonsense.
00:52:04.000Ibram X. Kendi has specifically proposed, I am not kidding you, that there be a national department at the federal level in the executive branch, a national anti-racism department capable of striking down any state, local, or federal policy ending with disparate racial outcome.
00:52:19.000Okay, with not an elected body, just a bunch of experts who basically rule in order to achieve a completely equitable arrangement at the top of politics.
00:52:28.000Now, Kendi is going after John McWhorter, who is a black liberal.
00:52:31.000Okay, like this is how far this is going.
00:52:34.000So don't let them pretend that this is all about equality or it's about decency or it's about liberty.
00:52:44.000Instead, it is about ousting people you disagree with, even if you disagree with them, kind of mildly on policy.
00:52:52.000This prompted, by the way, John McWhorter over the weekend to tweet out, McWhorter has an excellent piece over at Substack all about this.
00:52:56.000alone in finding his ideas primitive. Go with it and walk on. Maybe even tell your friends you don't get the hype. You'll likely find that they never did either.
00:53:02.000McCorder has an excellent piece over at Substack all about this. He talked about, at Substack, the Kendi ideology and how it is infusing so many places all across the country. He says it's a great piece.
00:53:16.000He says, in my Atlantic article about anti-racism manifestos that threaten to destroy institutions of basic missions as educational, I mentioned that the Dalton School in New York was considering transformative anti-racism measures.
00:53:29.000However, I have it on good authority that, in fact, the damage was already done as of last semester.
00:53:32.000Here are some snapshots from Dalton Fall 2020 from concerned parents who, because of they went public with their names, they would be pilloried as bigots nationwide, are staying anonymous.
00:53:41.000Quote, Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, racist cop reenactments in science, de-centering whiteness in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class.
00:53:52.000By the way, not rare at the Dalton School.
00:53:55.000In California, I believe it was at Brentwood School, somebody sent an email to me that showed that parents are being separated by race for actual parent-teacher conferences.
00:54:05.000They're having like a white parents' night and a black parents' night.
00:54:11.000Honestly, the segregationists from 1955 are just clapping and gleeing their graves.
00:54:17.000Now the elect, my term for the hyper works, woke, says John McWhorter, who are hijacking constructive leftist ideals in this nation, will claim that this sort of thing is exactly what education needs to be, and that white or white parents who object are displaying fragility.
00:54:30.000However, we get that fragility notion from one of the worst books ever written, as I've argued.
00:54:34.000What Dalton is doing is tragic and grisly.
00:54:37.000By the way, I cannot resist noting that I hear on good authority that Professor Robin D'Angelo has claimed she is the Neil deGrasse Tyson to my astrologer.
00:54:44.000I will only say that quite a few presented within the three of us would find me more akin, if only superficially, to Tyson for certain reasons.
00:54:55.000He says, in the Atlantic piece I wrote of how anti-racist protests shut down Bryn Mawr last semester.
00:55:00.000The protests actually spread to allied schools Haverford and Swarthmore.
00:55:03.000I have it on good authority that at Swarthmore, the president simply folded arms and said no to the protesters, upon which they basically folded in their tails and went away.
00:55:11.000Because the president is a black woman, Valerie Smith.
00:55:16.000She knew she could respond to melodramatic performance art with the refusal it deserved because no one could call her racist.
00:55:22.000And this is the point that he's making, is that, again, the redefinition of racism, from has animus on the basis of race, to you don't agree with my agenda, that transformation is vile and dangerous.
00:55:37.000He says, I don't mean that being against racism is BS, I mean that a certain strain of quote-unquote anti-racism these days is BS.
00:55:44.000And that's right, for just saying this, Kendi wants basically McWhorter barred from the public conversation.
00:55:50.000And that's the exact ideology that is now being embraced by the Biden administration.
00:55:55.000This is the danger of the Biden administration.
00:55:58.000Not specifically the policies they enact, which will be bad.
00:56:01.000The stuff that's actually dangerous from the Biden administration is going to be the ideology they put forward.
00:56:04.000It was an ideology first put forward during the Obama years.
00:56:07.000It is being revivified much more deeply and in hyper-partisan fashion by the Biden administration.
00:56:15.000By the way, if you think these people have the best, if you think these people have the best interest of all Americans at heart, remember Biden, you know, during his inaugural, he said, I'm here for unity, and I'm here because, you know, I want, I'm going to stand for all Americans, unity in all Americans, and all this stuff.
00:56:31.000I don't think that his administration has all Americans in mind.
00:56:34.000Just the latest indicator, Kamala Harris, the most wondrous of all vice presidents, right?
00:56:45.000And the Biden administration's environmental plans are going to wreck a bunch of jobs in places like West Virginia because of their attempts to shut down carbon emissions.
00:56:53.000Okay, here is Kamala Harris, who obviously cares about everyone, so caring, so knowledgeable, completely botching West Virginia mining policy.
00:57:01.000You will hear her in this clip refer to abandoned mine lands as landmines because she is so knowledgeable and understanding and really takes all Americans' concerns seriously.
00:57:12.000Job creation around, for example, all of those skilled workers who are in the coal industry and transferring those skills to what we need to do in terms of dealing with reclaiming abandoned landmines.
00:57:28.000What we need to do around plugging leaks from oil and gas wells and transferring those important skills to the work that has yet to be done that needs to get done.
00:57:39.000Oh, we do need those West Virginians out there ensuring that we, what?
00:57:47.000Somehow failed to trigger the abandoned landmines.
00:57:50.000It's like the demilitarized zone in Korea.
00:58:39.000If you want to cut through the madness of our politics and culture and know what's really going on and what it really means, head on over to The Michael Knowles Show, where we can all bask in the simple joys of being right.