The Ben Shapiro Show - Elon Exposes Twitter, And It’s Ugly As Hell | Ep. 1628

00:00:00.000 More Twitter files emerge and they show an organization run by political hacks with peculiarly disturbing perspectives.

00:00:06.000 Anthony Fauci writes his own valedictory and a Washington Post columnist tells religious people to bake the cake.

00:00:11.000 You bigots.

00:00:12.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:19.000 Protect your data online with the VPN I trust.

00:00:21.000 Visit expressvpn.com slash ben.

00:00:23.000 Well, Elon Musk's quest to unmask what happened at Twitter before he took over continues apace and it is fascinating.

00:00:31.000 Over the weekend, he revealed two more tranches of Twitter files.

00:00:34.000 One via Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist.

00:00:37.000 The other via Michael Schellenberger, the former Democrat who has been disillusioned with a lot of the sort of extremist global warming talk.

00:00:43.000 The thread from Matt Taibbi really sets the stage for the thread from Schellenberger.

00:00:48.000 And I have to say the rollout of this stuff, just from a PR angle, is very, very smart.

00:00:51.000 They're rolling it out on Twitter, which is where most of the coverage is going to be.

00:00:54.000 Not only are they doing it that way, they're also doing it serially, which means that people are really keeping an eye as more headlines emerge about how Twitter was run.

00:01:02.000 So, the first thread from Matt Taibbi is about the removal of Donald Trump, circa October 2020 to January 6.

00:01:10.000 The idea is that the preconditions for removing Trump were set from October 2020 to January 6, and what they show is ad hoc decision-making at the highest level of Twitter.

00:01:18.000 Outside of Jack Dorsey.

00:01:19.000 Jack Dorsey was off doing what he does, like hanging out with malaria-ridden mosquitoes in a Malaysian cave or something.

00:01:25.000 And the rest of the Twitter infrastructure was basically playing while Dorsey was gone.

00:01:30.000 They were deciding who should stay, who should go.

00:01:32.000 They were using their own political predilections to decide what sort of material was worthy of being seen.

00:01:37.000 When they set all these preconditions, in spite of the fact that they knew that there was no actual hardcore policy that was being defined By Twitter.

00:01:45.000 They knew that there was no actual standard that was being set by Twitter.

00:01:48.000 Instead, they just basically decided, here's the thing I don't like.

00:01:50.000 How do I cram this square peg into the round hole of Twitter policy?

00:01:54.000 So here is what Matt Taibbi says.

00:01:55.000 Again, this is covering the period October 2020 to January 6th, just before Donald Trump was banned from Twitter.

00:02:00.000 And all this is really important, not just because of what Twitter was during the election of 2020, although that's important, obviously.

00:02:06.000 But because this is how big tech is run.

00:02:08.000 And for so many of us who get our information via the outlets that big tech provides, you have to understand that there is a thumb on the scale in nearly all of these cases.

00:02:18.000 This is not just a Twitter problem.

00:02:19.000 This is a Facebook problem.

00:02:20.000 This is a YouTube problem.

00:02:22.000 This is something that we've been experiencing as a company daily where really since we began is the vagaries of how these big tech platforms work.

00:02:27.000 You'll be running a company and suddenly you'll see a 40% drop in traffic in like a week.

00:02:31.000 Because Facebook has quote-unquote changed its algorithm.

00:02:34.000 And the question you have to ask yourself is, are they changing the algorithm broadly and is it affecting everyone?

00:02:38.000 Or are they just targeting me?

00:02:39.000 And because they're not transparent about how these platforms are run, there is really no way to tell until you just, through trial and error, try to rebuild your business.

00:02:47.000 Well, meanwhile, over at the New York Times, it doesn't seem like they're experiencing anything remotely like the same problems in terms of having to navigate these wilds.

00:02:54.000 Instead, it seems like they're doing a pretty good job of having the inside track on exactly how this information is being distributed.

00:03:00.000 Big tech companies work in tandem with legacy media and the Democratic Party, as well as, it turns out, sometimes members of the FBI, in order to quash particular stories, in order to reduce the amount of information that is spread that they don't like you to see.

00:03:13.000 So here's what Matt Taibbi writes.

00:03:14.000 This came out December 9th, so it would have been Friday night.

00:03:17.000 Quote, the world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th.

00:03:24.000 We'll show you what hasn't been released.

00:03:25.000 The erosion of standards within the company in the months before January 6th.

00:03:29.000 Decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies and more against the backdrop of ongoing documented interaction with federal agencies.

00:03:35.000 So, there are several of these threads that went out.

00:03:39.000 There was the Taibbi thread and then there was the Schellenberger thread.

00:03:43.000 And then, A Barry Weiss thread is set to emerge in short order.

00:03:47.000 Taibbi says, He says, as they finished banning Trump, Twitter executives started processing new power.

00:04:02.000 They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses, perhaps even Joe Biden.

00:04:06.000 The new administration said one executive will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.

00:04:10.000 Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the quote-unquote context surrounding.

00:04:15.000 Actions by Trump and his supporters over the course of the election, and frankly, the last four plus years.

00:04:19.000 In the end, they looked at a broad picture, but that approach can cut both ways.

00:04:21.000 In other words, there was no actual standard that was being applied.

00:04:24.000 They just didn't like what Trump had done over the past four years.

00:04:26.000 And they didn't like the result on January 6th.

00:04:29.000 And therefore, they decided that even though Trump had not actually violated a policy, Trump had to be banned.

00:04:34.000 Tayibi says the bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump's ban took place in those three January days, January 6th to January 8th.

00:04:39.000 However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.

00:04:43.000 Before January 6th, Twitter was a unique mix of automated rules-based enforcement and more subjective moderation by senior executives.

00:04:49.000 As the election approached, senior executives, perhaps under pressure from federal agencies with whom they met more as time progressed, increasingly struggled with rules.

00:04:56.000 They began speaking of VIOs as pretexts to do what they'd likely have done anyway.

00:05:01.000 After January 6th, internal slacks showed Twitter executives getting a kick out of the intensified relations with federal agencies.

00:05:06.000 Trust and safety head Yoel Roth, who's emerging in all of this as a real villain, lamented a lack of generic enough calendar descriptions to conceal his very interesting meeting partners.

00:05:15.000 Again, this is all in the internal slack channels.

00:05:17.000 that have now been revealed by Elon Musk via Matt Taibbi.

00:05:20.000 So for example, Yul Roth wrote after January 6th that he's a big believer in calendar transparency but he's taking so many meetings with high-level government officials that now he doesn't have calendar transparency that is that is opaque enough and so he's just taking stuff off the calendar. He says that he's He's meaning about Trump, pretty obviously.

00:05:42.000 And then he says, definitely not meeting with the FBI, I swear.

00:05:44.000 Which, of course, is him being sarcastic.

00:05:46.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:07:53.000 These initial reports are based on searches for docs linked to prominent executives whose names are already public.

00:07:57.000 They include Yoel Roth, former trust and policy chief at Vijayagadi, who you'll remember went on Joe Rogan and said shadow banning was not occurring, and recently plank walked a deputy general counsel and former top FBI lawyer Jim Baker.

00:08:07.000 One particular Slack channel offers a unique window into an evolving thinking of top officials in late 2020 and early 2021, says Tayibi.

00:08:11.000 On October 8, 2020, executives opened a channel Through January 6th, this particular channel was the home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved high-profile accounts they called very important tweeters, BITs.

00:08:26.000 They released some tension between safety operations, which is a larger department whose staffers were using rules in order to ban, for example, porn or scams or threats, and a smaller, More powerful cadre of senior policy executives like Roth and Gaddy.

00:08:39.000 The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of Moderation issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes, and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the president.

00:08:49.000 During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.

00:08:55.000 Over at the start of reviewing the Twitter files, we'll be finding more about these interactions every day.

00:08:59.000 Policy Director Nick Pickles was asked if they should say Twitter detects misinformation through ML, human review, and partnerships with outside experts.

00:09:06.000 The employee asks, I know that's been a slippery process.

00:09:08.000 Not sure if you want our public explanation to hang on that.

00:09:11.000 Pickle says, can we say partnerships?

00:09:13.000 After a pause, he says, not sure we'd describe the FBI or Department of Homeland Security as experts.

00:09:17.000 They're partnering with all these places to crack down on quote-unquote election misinformation.

00:09:22.000 Apparently, one post about the Hunter Biden laptop story showed that Yoel Roth not only met with the FBI and the DHS, but also with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

00:09:32.000 Roth's report to the FBI and DHS and DNI is almost farcical in its self-flagellating tone, quote, Some of Roth's later slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings.

00:09:49.000 Again, there's all sorts of material here showing that Yoel Roth was essentially working with the FBI to determine what should be banned and what should not be banned, which looks a lot like violation of First Amendment issues, at the very least.

00:10:02.000 Examining the entire enforcement slack, says Matt Taibbi, we didn't see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally.

00:10:09.000 We looked.

00:10:10.000 We were told they do.

00:10:10.000 They may exist.

00:10:11.000 However, they were absent here.

00:10:12.000 In other words, it was just coming from the Democrats, and it was coming from members of the FBI.

00:10:16.000 Okay, so that was part one that was sort of released over the weekend.

00:10:19.000 Part two that was released over the weekend was the Michael Schellenberger portion.

00:10:23.000 This is Twitter files total part four, because there was originally a Taibbi thread, then a Barry Weiss thread, then another Taibbi thread, and now a Michael Schellenberger thread.

00:10:30.000 And this one gets really juicy.

00:10:32.000 So, now we get to the actual removal of Donald Trump on January 7th.

00:10:36.000 Shellenberger says, as the pressure builds, Twitter executives build the case for a permanent ban.

00:10:40.000 On January 7th, senior Twitter executives created justifications to ban Trump, sought a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders.

00:10:49.000 You know, what we would call sort of ex post facto laws, right?

00:10:53.000 Bills of attainder, where you just decide, this guy needs to go, let's create a rule that allows us to go after this individual human being.

00:11:01.000 And says Michael Schellenberger, the senior Twitter executives express no concern for free speech or democracy implications of a ban.

00:11:08.000 So here's what he says.

00:11:09.000 He says, For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump.

00:11:12.000 Blocking a world leader from Twitter, it wrote in 2018, would hide important information and hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.

00:11:19.000 But after the events of January 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey grew.

00:11:24.000 Former First Lady Michelle Obama, tech journalist Kara Swisher, the ADL, high-tech VC Chris Sacca, and many others publicly called on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.

00:11:32.000 Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia the week of January 4th to 8th, 2021.

00:11:36.000 He phoned into meetings, but also delegated much of the handling of the situation to Joel Roth, Twitter's global head of trust and safety, and Vijay Gowdy, the head of legal policy and trust.

00:11:43.000 So again, these are kind of the two leading villains in the Twitter saga.

00:11:47.000 Jack Dorsey was an absentee landlord.

00:11:48.000 He basically created the company, and then he decided he didn't like running the company, and he would run off on vacation, and he would leave Joel Roth, who was a partisan hack, in charge, and Vijay Gowdy, another partisan hack, in charge.

00:11:59.000 As context, it's important to understand Twitter's staff and senior executives were overwhelmingly progressive.

00:12:05.000 In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, 99% of Twitter's staff's political donations went to Democrats.

00:12:12.000 In 2017, Yoel Roth tweeted there were actual Nazis in the White House.

00:12:15.000 In April 2022, Roth told a colleague his goal is to quote, drive change in the world, which is why he decided not to become an academic.

00:12:21.000 On January 7th, Jack Dorsey emailed his employees saying Twitter needed to remain consistent in its policies, including the right of users to return to Twitter after a temporary suspension.

00:12:30.000 After, Roth reassured an employee that, quote, people who care about this aren't happy with where we are.

00:12:34.000 Around 11.30pm Pacific Time, Roth DM'd his colleagues with news that he is excited to share, quote, guess what, he says, Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.

00:12:44.000 The new approach would create a system where five violation strikes would result in permanent suspension.

00:12:49.000 Progress exclaimed a member of Roth's trust and safety team.

00:12:52.000 The exchange between Roth and his colleagues makes clear they'd been pushing Dorsey for greater restrictions on the speech Twitter allows around election.

00:12:58.000 The colleague wanted to know if the decision meant that Trump could finally be banned.

00:13:01.000 Roth said it didn't, since Trump continues to just have his one strike.

00:13:04.000 Again, this is on January 7th.

00:13:05.000 He was banned on January 8th.

00:13:07.000 Roth's colleague's query about incitement to violence heavily foreshadowed what would happen the following day.

00:13:12.000 On January 8th, Twitter announced a permanent ban on Trump due to a, quote, risk of further incitement of violence.

00:13:16.000 On January 8th, Twitter said its ban is specifically based on how Trump's tweets are being received and interpreted.

00:13:22.000 But in 2019, Twitter said it did not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of content or its intent.

00:13:26.000 Again, that is a very, very loose standard.

00:13:29.000 Literally any tweet can be taken by some crazy person as impetus to do something bad.

00:13:33.000 This is one of the things about public speech.

00:13:34.000 There are lots of people who are listening to public speech and many of them do crazy things.

00:13:38.000 So of course you can't hold people accountable for what somebody takes into their brain and then spits back out in the form of garbled nonsense.

00:13:47.000 Schellenberger says the only serious concern we found expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization who was tucked away in a lower-level Slack channel known as the Site Integrity Auto.

00:14:00.000 This person wrote, It might be an unpopular opinion, but one-off, ad hoc decisions like this that don't appear rooted in policy are a slippery slope.

00:14:06.000 This now appears to be a fiat by an online CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep search, gatekeep speech for the entire world.

00:14:13.000 Twitter employees use the term one-off frequently in their Slack discussions.

00:14:16.000 Its frequent use reveals significant employee discretion over when and whether to apply warnings on tweets and strikes on users.

00:14:23.000 Again, it's pretty obvious that Twitter has been doing this for years, that they control visibility or they issue suspensions based on sort of an ad hoc decision-making process where progressive Democrats with blue hair decide whether you get to speak or not, or whether you get to see somebody else's speech.

00:14:36.000 Twitter's employees recognize the difference, says Schellenberger, between their own politics and Twitter's terms of service.

00:14:41.000 But they also engage in complex interpretations of content in order to stamp out prohibited tweets as a series of exchanges over the hashtag StopTheSteal hashtag reveals.

00:14:50.000 So if something started to trend, right, a hashtag they didn't like, they'd just quash the hashtag.

00:14:54.000 Or they'd start hiding tweets to prevent the algorithm from elevating that particular hashtag.

00:14:59.000 You can see this all the time, by the way.

00:15:00.000 The manipulation of the Twitter trending items.

00:15:05.000 Roth immediately DM'd a colleague to add that they add Stop the Steal and Kraken to a blacklist of terms to be de-amplified.

00:15:12.000 Roth's colleague subjected that blacklisting Stop the Steal risks de-amplifying counter-speech that validates the election.

00:15:17.000 Indeed, notes Roth's colleague, a quick search of Stop the Steal tweets is counter-speech, like it is against the Stop the Speech movement, but it didn't matter.

00:15:25.000 They ended up trying to block it anyway.

00:15:27.000 Their solution was, quote, de-amplify accounts with Stop the Steal in the name or profile since, quote, those are not affiliated with counter-speech.

00:15:33.000 It turns out that even blacklisting Kraken was not particularly straightforward because it turns out that it's not just a QAnon kind of word that was used during the Stop the Steal time.

00:15:43.000 It also happens to be the name of a cryptocurrency exchange, and so it was allow listed.

00:15:47.000 So that means that on one hand, they were saying you have to allow that term because it's a cryptocurrency exchange.

00:15:51.000 On the other hand, they were saying you have to block the term because the same term is used by QAnon people.

00:15:56.000 Employees struggled with whether to punish users who shared screenshots of Trump's deleted January 6th tweets.

00:16:02.000 What if a user disliked Trump and objected to Twitter's censorship?

00:16:05.000 The tweet still got deleted.

00:16:07.000 But since the intention is not to deny the election result, there was no strike applied.

00:16:10.000 Again, it's all ad hockery.

00:16:13.000 So Schellenberger says what happens next is essential to understanding how Twitter justified banning Trump.

00:16:17.000 A sales executive wrote, are we dropping the public interest policy now?

00:16:21.000 And Roth says, quote, in this specific case, we're changing our public policy interest approach for his account.

00:16:27.000 The ad exec is referring to Twitter's policy of public interest exceptions, which allow the content of elected officials, even if they are a violator of Twitter rules, quotes, if it directly contributes to understanding or discussing a matter of public concern.

00:16:39.000 Roth then pushed for a permanent suspension of Matt Gaetz, even though it doesn't quite fit anywhere.

00:16:43.000 That was kind of a test case for the rationale for banning Trump.

00:16:45.000 Around 2.30, Comms Executive DMed Roth to say they didn't want to make a big deal of the QAnon ban to the media because they feared, if we push this, it looks as though we're trying to offer up something in place of the Trump ban.

00:16:55.000 So they're gonna ban QAnon, but they're gonna do it quietly because they know that people like Kara Swisher are gonna say it's not enough, you actually have to ban Trump.

00:17:03.000 And so, again, this is all top-level manipulation.

00:17:07.000 And once Twitter did this, then this meant that pretty much all of Big Tech was going to do this.

00:17:12.000 There's wild inconsistency here.

00:17:13.000 And once Twitter did this, then this meant that pretty much all of big tech was going to do this.

00:17:20.000 It's really amazing.

00:17:22.000 Now, Facebook ended up banning Trump and then Twitter was sort of left out on the branch since they banned Trump too.

00:17:27.000 They made up a policy to do this.

00:17:29.000 What does all this show?

00:17:29.000 What it shows is that, again, you had a group of people in control of speech and they were pretending not to be in control of speech over and over and over.

00:17:36.000 So Jack Dorsey, for example, actually testified in front of Congress that Twitter does not consider political viewpoints in determining what information can and cannot be disseminated.

00:17:45.000 This is not true.

00:17:46.000 Here was Jack Dorsey saying this a few years back.

00:17:49.000 If it's okay with all of you, I'd like to read you something I personally wrote as I thought about these issues.

00:17:55.000 I'm also going to tweet it out right now.

00:17:59.000 I want to start by making something very clear.

00:18:02.000 We don't consider political viewpoints, perspectives, or party affiliation in any of our policies or enforcement decisions.

00:18:13.000 Oh, really?

00:18:14.000 You don't?

00:18:15.000 Weird, cuz, um, you do.

00:18:16.000 Isn't that strange?

00:18:19.000 Pretty much amazing stuff there from Jack Dorsey.

00:18:21.000 He kept doubling down on this, by the way.

00:18:23.000 He said publicly that Twitter does not shadowban conservatives.

00:18:26.000 Now, again, they were playing a semantic game here.

00:18:28.000 They say that shadowbanning means that you tweet out and no one actually sees your tweet except for you.

00:18:33.000 But that's not what shadowbanning means.

00:18:34.000 Everybody understood that what shadowbanning was is a reduction in the reach of your tweets so that people couldn't actually see what you were tweeting as much as they normally would have.

00:18:41.000 What Twitter would call deamplification.

00:18:43.000 Here's Jack Dorsey denying that they did this.

00:18:46.000 The president called you out for shadow banning.

00:18:49.000 What is the truth around that idea?

00:18:51.000 If someone puts out a tweet, hiding that tweet from everyone without that person who tweeted it knowing about it.

00:19:00.000 But the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints?

00:19:08.000 And we are not.

00:19:09.000 Period.

00:19:10.000 We do not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology.

00:19:16.000 We look at behavior.

00:19:19.000 Okay, that is an amazing, amazing thing, because it's not true.

00:19:22.000 It's just not true.

00:19:23.000 And they knew it wasn't true.

00:19:24.000 Now, Dorsey, again, had a hands-off approach, so he wasn't the one who was personally implementing this stuff.

00:19:29.000 He didn't have to personally implement this stuff.

00:19:29.000 But it doesn't matter.

00:19:31.000 He knew how his company was run.

00:19:33.000 And one of the things that Elon Musk found in the closet after taking over Twitter, he literally went into a closet at Twitter, and what he found was a giant stack of black t-shirts that said, hashtag, stay woke.

00:19:43.000 And when your entire employee base is left-wing, and when they are given extraordinary amounts of discretion in order to determine what can and cannot be seen, what you end up with is what Twitter had.

00:19:53.000 And so then it becomes a matter of real public concern who staffs companies like Twitter.

00:19:59.000 And Twitter basically looked like a government bureaucracy, is the truth.

00:20:02.000 Because all the incentive structures for the Twitter middle-level executives were not to maximize share price on behalf of the company and create a successful site.

00:20:10.000 The entire basis of Twitter's management was please the people who matter.

00:20:15.000 Who are the people who matter?

00:20:16.000 The people at the FBI, the people in the Democratic Party, the people in the press, right?

00:20:19.000 Those are all the people who spend all their days on Twitter.

00:20:21.000 The truth is that Twitter makes a lot of money off of the fact that there are a few giant accounts that are followed by a lot of people.

00:20:26.000 And those accounts tend to be high-profile journalistic accounts that are blue in nature.

00:20:32.000 I mean, not like dirty, blue as in Democrat.

00:20:35.000 And so it is a place for journalists to gather.

00:20:37.000 And the Biden administration, by the way, knows this.

00:20:39.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second. 0.96

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00:22:47.000 There was a report just today that the Biden administration sees Twitter essentially as an echo chamber for its political dispensations.

00:22:53.000 That it goes on Twitter and uses it as a propaganda outlet and creates these echo chambers with people like Kara Swisher, and that that is essentially what it is for.

00:23:01.000 And so, middle management decided that they were going to cater to these people.

00:23:05.000 They weren't catering to the consumer base.

00:23:06.000 The consumer base didn't matter at all, particularly the right-wing consumer base, because where else were they going to go, guys?

00:23:11.000 And as it turns out, in the aftermath of January 6th, there was no place else where they could go, because when people on the right said, okay, well, if we can't be on Twitter, we'll go to Parler, Amazon Web Services shut down Parler.

00:23:20.000 So they essentially created a quasi-monopoly in favor of Twitter.

00:23:24.000 And so what that means is that middle management's incentive structure at Twitter was not to please the users.

00:23:29.000 It was not to increase revenue.

00:23:31.000 It was to make sure that it was a safe place for everybody.

00:23:34.000 And this is what happens when you swim in the warm baths of wokeness.

00:23:38.000 The advertisers are afraid of the woke attacking them.

00:23:40.000 Twitter's middle management is responsive to both the woke and the advertisers.

00:23:43.000 The Democratic Party is ginning both the woke and the middle management of Twitter up.

00:23:48.000 And what you get is ad hoc policymaking by people who are very politically active.

00:23:53.000 Because Twitter theoretically should be an engineering company.

00:23:56.000 You have to have an organizational culture determined what exactly your company is going to be.

00:24:01.000 This is a point that James Q. Wilson makes in his book, Bureaucracy.

00:24:04.000 He's talking about both private bureaucracies, as in like major companies, as well as public bureaucracies.

00:24:08.000 In his book, Bureaucracy, he talks about the idea of organizational culture.

00:24:11.000 Organizational culture can be defined in a number of ways.

00:24:14.000 So one of the ways it can be defined, you could theoretically have a political organizing culture.

00:24:18.000 So for example, we here at The Daily Wire, we're a political company.

00:24:21.000 We were founded by me, right?

00:24:23.000 My business partner, Jeremy Boring, very political.

00:24:23.000 I'm very political.

00:24:25.000 We're very ideological.

00:24:27.000 And that means that everything that we do, is geared toward two purposes.

00:24:31.000 One, yes, serving our customer base, but there are limits to that.

00:24:34.000 And if forced to choose between our quote-unquote customer base and following the dictates of our conscience, when it comes to politics, we're very obvious that we're going to follow the dictates of our conscience.

00:24:43.000 We are political conservatives with a religious bent, obviously, and that means that our company is shaped around those preferences.

00:24:49.000 And our employees know that, right?

00:24:50.000 Everybody who works here knows this walking through the door.

00:24:54.000 When Twitter came around, The basic idea of Twitter is that it was a value-neutral space, which means it was not predominantly a political space, it was an engineering space.

00:25:02.000 The organizational culture was not to quote-unquote do good, it was that by providing a platform, that was the good.

00:25:08.000 So theoretically, a bunch of engineers could just sit there, they could tweak the algorithms without much political preference, and what you'd end up with is something that looked like a town square.

00:25:15.000 And this is how Twitter was originally pitched.

00:25:16.000 Over time, because the incentive structure changed, because the leaders of Twitter, this also happened to Facebook, the middle management level at Twitter was highly political because they were located in San Francisco and because they don't like free speech all that much, the organizational culture changed and now they were serving a different set of priorities.

00:25:34.000 It was not create the best engineering solutions to the problem of how do you create a digital town square.

00:25:39.000 Now it was, how do we ensure that certain messages are increased and certain messages are decreased?

00:25:45.000 And the engineering, by the way, went completely by the wayside.

00:25:48.000 It was political, not engineering.

00:25:51.000 And this is shown by the fact that there's an entire other arena of Twitter failure here that has been public for a couple of months, and no one has touched it.

00:25:59.000 No one cares about it, but really is about the security failures of the Twitter infrastructure.

00:26:04.000 If it was an engineering company, these are the things it would have had to solve first and foremost.

00:26:07.000 But they were too distracted with, do we ban Donald Trump?

00:26:10.000 Do we downgrade Republicans?

00:26:11.000 Do we ban Charlie Kerr?

00:26:12.000 These are the things that they were spending their time on.

00:26:15.000 When it came to a conflict between engineering And trust and safety.

00:26:19.000 Trust and safety won pretty much every time.

00:26:21.000 It was a conflict between, for example, the whistleblower, the former Twitter security chief, Peter Mudge Zatko, and Yoel Roth.

00:26:29.000 Zatko was the security guy.

00:26:30.000 Roth was the political head of safety and policy.

00:26:37.000 And it was Roth who would win.

00:26:39.000 Now, in an engineering company, that guy would lose.

00:26:42.000 In an engineering company, it wouldn't be up to Roth what gets banned and what doesn't get banned.

00:26:45.000 It would be an engineering issue.

00:26:47.000 And this is what Musk is really going back to, because Musk is at root an engineer.

00:26:51.000 He's a person who likes to make things work.

00:26:52.000 This is why he's the head of Tesla.

00:26:53.000 This is why he's the head of SpaceX.

00:26:55.000 He's an engineer.

00:26:56.000 And so he's bringing an engineering approach to Twitter, which is why he came in and he wiped out 80% of the employee base.

00:27:01.000 And the place is running just fine.

00:27:02.000 In fact, it has higher engagement than ever because he saw Twitter as a real engineering problem that he could unlock by applying engineering solutions.

00:27:08.000 But the heads of Twitter did not see Twitter as an engineering place.

00:27:12.000 They did not see Twitter as a value neutral place for free speech.

00:27:15.000 They saw it as a weapon on behalf of their own political persuasions.

00:27:18.000 And so they ignored a lot of the serious questions about engineering at the company.

00:27:22.000 So as I say, there was a whistleblower complaint obtained by the Washington Post from the former Twitter security chief, Peter Mudge Zatko.

00:27:31.000 And the Washington Post printed this in August of 2022, and it went very little noticed, but there's some real revelations in there.

00:27:38.000 Like for example, Twitter did not monitor employee computers at all.

00:27:41.000 Employees were installing spyware on their work devices, which means that all of your material that you were putting in was now available to spyware.

00:27:49.000 A lot of this is summed up by a Twitter account He did a good job of going through some of the stuff in the Whistleblower account.

00:27:57.000 Twitter does not have a separate development, test, staging, and production environment.

00:28:00.000 At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to all the production systems.

00:28:04.000 In 2020, Twitter had security incidents serious enough they had to be reported to the federal government on an almost weekly basis.

00:28:10.000 Meanwhile, Parag Agrawal, who was the CEO of Twitter at the time, or the COO of Twitter at the time, was actually lying publicly about how secure Twitter was, according to the Whistleblower.

00:28:20.000 On January 6th, Mudge, the whistleblower, wanted to take action to prevent possible sabotage by a rogue employee.

00:28:26.000 And that's when he learned it was not possible for Twitter to actually secure its production environment.

00:28:31.000 In fact, he predicted that there could be a catastrophic failure in engineering, causing Twitter to lose all of its data.

00:28:38.000 He told the higher-ups, they ignored him, and then it almost came true.

00:28:42.000 It also happens to be that Twitter was making itself subject to foreign governments.

00:28:47.000 According to the Whistleblower, these are all engineering issues.

00:28:51.000 Agrawal, the CEO, is ignoring all of that because the stuff that he was most interested in was telling his board that he was quote-unquote doing good in the world.

00:28:58.000 And this goes back to the entire debate that we've had over Sam Bankman Freed, over at FTX, or that we had over BlackRock, this idea that corporate bosses should be interested in quote-unquote doing good for the world as opposed to serving their shareholders.

00:29:10.000 What that does is it leads political hacks to be in charge of extraordinary levels of market power.

00:29:16.000 And this leads to people like Yulroth being in charge.

00:29:18.000 So Yulroth is a disaster area, obviously.

00:29:20.000 Yulroth, the head of, um, the former head of trust and safety over at Twitter, who was fired by Elon Musk.

00:29:27.000 Well, it turns out that this is a person without peculiar views on the world.

00:29:32.000 So, for example, Yulroth tweeted out November 20th, 2010, He tweeted, quote, This was the person in charge of Twitter's safety policy?

00:29:52.000 Strange.

00:29:54.000 Yol Roth also happens to be the person who wrote a PhD thesis on gay hookup culture on Grindr for minors.

00:30:02.000 And here's one of the things that Yol Roth wrote, quote, Even with the service's extensive content management, Grindr, which, for those who don't know, is a place where gay men go to... to...

00:30:13.000 Schedule sexual encounters with one another, chiefly.

00:30:15.000 Even with these services' extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hookup-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers.

00:30:22.000 But the fact that people under 18 are on those services already indicates we can't readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture.

00:30:29.000 Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility, or worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr, including possibly their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

00:30:43.000 So he was recommending that Grindr make itself available to 16, 17-year-old kids so that they can hook up with each other, quote-unquote, safely.

00:30:53.000 This person was in charge of content management.

00:30:57.000 This is not wonderful, but this is what happens when, again, the culture of a company shifts from being about engineering problems to being about shutting down of free speech and promoting a particular political point of view.

00:31:12.000 So, you know, Twitter was a disaster.

00:31:16.000 Musk is fixing Twitter.

00:31:16.000 And this is freaking people out.

00:31:18.000 People on the left cannot handle this.

00:31:19.000 They can't handle this because, again, they do not want the free dissemination of information.

00:31:24.000 They're more freaked out about what Musk is doing now than they are about how Twitter was run for years on end.

00:31:32.000 And by the way, the way Twitter was run for years on end did lead to the suppression of actual useful and valuable information.

00:31:37.000 I'm not talking here just about the Hunter Biden story.

00:31:39.000 I'm talking chiefly about the fact that authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, I was a big proponent of the Great Barrington Declaration.

00:31:45.000 Essentially, it suggested the Great Barrington Declaration that vaccinations should be targeted mostly, they should be focused on getting people 65 and up to vaccinate, and then we should get everybody back to work.

00:31:55.000 And the younger and healthier you are, the more you should get back to work.

00:31:58.000 And this is the shield and protect strategy, is what the Great Barrington Declaration suggested.

00:32:02.000 And Anthony Fauci had declared himself in opposition to the Great Barrington Declaration.

00:32:06.000 He said they were a bunch of kooks.

00:32:07.000 Well, that Great Barrington Declaration, that group, was headed by a doctor named Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University.

00:32:13.000 Twitter actively suppressed the dissemination of information that he was putting out there about vaccine efficacy, about the risks of the disease, about vax transmission rates.

00:32:23.000 Right, transmission after vaccination.

00:32:25.000 So Bhattacharya yesterday, he quite properly came out, he said, listen, Twitter suppressed information and it harmed the public.

00:32:31.000 Here was Jay Bhattacharya.

00:32:33.000 Dr. Bhattacharya, your reaction tonight.

00:32:35.000 This is blockbuster after learning that you were secretly placed on this trends blacklist. 0.93

00:32:42.000 It's ridiculous and it really hurt public health.

00:32:45.000 If we'd had an open discussion, Laura, the schools would not have closed in the fall of 2020.

00:32:51.000 If we had an open discussion, the lockdowns would have been lifted much earlier because the data and evidence behind them was so bad.

00:32:58.000 Twitter, by suppressing scientific discussion, harms science, harms children, and harms the American public.

00:33:07.000 He's right about that.

00:33:09.000 How information is distributed makes an enormous difference in American public life.

00:33:13.000 And this is why an almost parallel ecosystem of informational dissemination has come about in the first place.

00:33:19.000 It used to be that at least when Twitter was an open platform, at least when Facebook was an open platform, In the very beginnings, we're talking like 2009, 2010, 2011, people were speaking to one another because they knew that there wasn't a hand in the other room that was turning up or down the dial, depending on what you were saying.

00:33:33.000 But as it became clear that that was the case, people started to act reactively.

00:33:37.000 And so the idea was, if it comes from this outlet, I just won't trust it ever.

00:33:39.000 And if it comes from this outlet, I will trust it.

00:33:42.000 And so you end up with people on the left who refuse to listen to Jay Bhattacharya.

00:33:46.000 That's exactly what ends up happening here.

00:33:48.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:35:40.000 Okay, so, as you mentioned, the Twitter destruction.

00:35:45.000 The destruction wrought by Twitter in terms of public discourse, which led to the suppression of actual useful information.

00:35:50.000 This is one of the things that really ticked off Elon Musk.

00:35:53.000 Over the weekend, Elon Musk tweeted out, my pronouns are prosecute, hash, prosecute slash Fauci, which is really funny.

00:36:02.000 And people got very, very angry at him because, number one, how dare you mock pronouns?

00:36:06.000 And number two, how dare you mock Fauci?

00:36:08.000 And somebody wrote back to him criticizing him over this, saying, Elon, please don't mock and promote hate toward already marginalized and at risk of violence members of the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign community.

00:36:18.000 They are real people with real feelings.

00:36:19.000 Furthermore, Dr. Fauci is a dedicated public servant whose sole motivation was saving lives.

00:36:24.000 And Elon Musk wrote back, I strongly disagree.

00:36:26.000 Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn't ask and implicitly ostracizing those who don't is neither good nor kind to anyone.

00:36:32.000 Slow clap for Elon Musk on that one.

00:36:35.000 As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people.

00:36:39.000 Not awesome, in my opinion.

00:36:41.000 But all of this stuff was suppressed by Twitter until Musk took over.

00:36:44.000 And finally, Musk got so ticked that he dropped $44 billion on Twitter in order to free up the mechanisms of distribution.

00:36:52.000 And this is why you see an utter disconnect because for a lot of people who live inside that Twitter bubble, Anthony Fauci is the greatest person who ever lived, and Jay Bhattacharya is a crazy person.

00:37:01.000 And you can create the narrative that somebody is crazy by just not magnifying them, by shutting them down.

00:37:06.000 You marginalize them.

00:37:07.000 Like, you literally marginalize them by putting them on the margins of services like Twitter, and the mere fact that they have been marginalized now allows you to call their opinion marginalized as well.

00:37:18.000 This is exactly what Twitter was doing.

00:37:21.000 And this is why so many of us are irritated and irked by the endless goodbye of Anthony Fauci.

00:37:25.000 He just will not leave.

00:37:26.000 And here's Dr. Anthony Fauci just saying things that are not backed by the data or the science.

00:37:34.000 Since we've been vaccinated, how dangerous is it to be near our grandchildren?

00:37:39.000 They have not been vaccinated beyond what's required in the schools.

00:37:42.000 Right.

00:37:43.000 Well, vaccination again is the answer.

00:37:46.000 So if you want to protect your grandchildren and vice versa, even though the grandchildren are not required to get vaccinated, if they are within the age which is now six months or older, I would encourage their family.

00:38:03.000 Based on what?

00:38:04.000 Based on what?

00:38:05.000 Again, the data on the vaccinations preventing transmission do not exist.

00:38:10.000 Okay, Omicron basically ran right through that.

00:38:12.000 But Anthony Fauci is still being treated as though he is a master of science bringing us the great flame like Prometheus here.

00:38:20.000 And it's just in there.

00:38:21.000 But you can craft this narrative when you shut down all opposition.

00:38:24.000 Anthony Fauci does have a goodbye column in the New York Times championing himself.

00:38:29.000 The goodbye column contains multiple pictures of Anthony Fauci.

00:38:33.000 Which is typical for this rather self-aggrandizing human being.

00:38:37.000 He wrote a piece in the New York Times that is titled, A Message to the Next Generation of Scientists.

00:38:41.000 And it's all about how wonderful he is and what an amazing job he did.

00:38:45.000 He concludes his self-written valedictory by saying this.

00:38:48.000 As I think of the 27-year-old who arrived on the NIH campus in 1968, I'm humbled by the enormous privilege and honor I had serving the American and global public.

00:38:56.000 I've experienced enormous joy and benefit from training and learning from the hundreds of brilliant and dedicated physician scientists and support staff members working in my laboratory, in the NIH clinics, and in the NIAID research divisions, and from domestic and international research collaborators.

00:39:09.000 Looking ahead, I am confident the next generation of young physicians, scientists, and public health practitioners will experience the same excitement and sense of fulfillment I have felt as they meet the immense need for their expertise to maintain, restore, and protect the health of people around the world and rise to continual unexpected challenges and all the rest.

00:39:26.000 The key citation in this particular Anthony Fauci self-backpatting is this.

00:39:33.000 He says the reason we failed on COVID-19 is because it was, quote-unquote, hindered by the profound political divisiveness in our society.

00:39:39.000 In a way that we have never seen before, decisions about public health measures such as wearing masks and being vaccinated with highly effective and safe vaccines have been influenced by disinformation and political ideology.

00:39:47.000 That's the key line.

00:39:48.000 Because that's Anthony Fauci clearly calling for Twitter and and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and all the rest to shut down information that Anthony Fauci does not like.

00:39:58.000 Meanwhile, distributing information that is not particularly true.

00:40:03.000 We can all make our decisions about the vaccine.

00:40:05.000 I never was in favor of Vax mandates because I felt that everybody should be able to make the decisions about vaccines for themselves.

00:40:10.000 But Fauci was promoting information that suggests that there should have been a mandate.

00:40:14.000 In fact, the Biden administration is still out there suggesting that military members, the youngest, healthiest cohort of Americans, should be fired from the military if they are on Vax.

00:40:22.000 This is still the perspective of the Biden administration.

00:40:24.000 This would only be part of the conversation at all by suppressing information that ran counter to what Anthony Fauci was preaching.

00:40:31.000 Here is Corinne Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, making the case that we should continue to fire unvaxxed military members. 1.00

00:40:38.000 Should the Senate expect to know what the position of the President is on the bill before they vote on it?

00:40:45.000 I mean, we've been very clear when I've been asked about the vaccine mandate.

00:40:49.000 We thought that that was a mistake, you know, and it wasn't just from the President.

00:40:54.000 It was also from the Senate, and Congress received a letter from Secretary Austin saying how important, he believed how important the vaccine mandate was.

00:41:07.000 They're promoting this information, which is in fact misinformation, because they know that they have been able to stranglehold the dissemination of information for a really long time.

00:41:16.000 Well, there is a danger to them in this.

00:41:17.000 There's a danger to them in this.

00:41:19.000 is that if you continue to promote bad ideas into an echo chamber, you think the only people out there who matter are the people in the echo chamber.

00:41:26.000 There are a lot of other people outside the echo chamber, and the blowback is going to be severe.

00:41:29.000 And this is true not just with regard to COVID.

00:41:32.000 It's also going to be true with regard to social issues.

00:41:34.000 So, for example, EJ Dionne has a piece over in the Washington Post today.

00:41:38.000 It's called, A Question to Conservative Christians on Gay Marriage.

00:41:41.000 Why draw the line here?

00:41:43.000 And basically what he says is, Religious conservatives should bake the cake. 0.62

00:41:47.000 It's very important that religious conservatives bake the cake.

00:41:51.000 He admits that for thousands of years marriage has meant man and woman, but he says religious people are bigots.

00:41:58.000 Now, this is a perspective that has developed inside a very specific precinct of American life.

00:42:04.000 The vast majority of religious people are not using religion as a cover for their bigotry.

00:42:09.000 They believe that same-sex marriage is wrong for both natural law and religious reasons.

00:42:14.000 But according to E.J.

00:42:15.000 Dionne, because this is the kind of stuff that he says to his friends, if you are a religious person and you oppose same-sex marriage, it is because you're a bigot. 0.84

00:42:22.000 He says, many traditionalist Christians view homosexual relationships as sinful.

00:42:25.000 I think they are wrong, but I acknowledge this is a long-held view.

00:42:28.000 Yet many of the same Christians also view adultery as a sin.

00:42:31.000 Jesus was tough on divorce.

00:42:32.000 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder, he says in Matthew's Gospel.

00:42:36.000 But unless I'm missing something, we do not see court cases from website designers or florists or bakers about refusing to do business with people in their second or third marriages.

00:42:43.000 Well, I mean, first of all, this has been a pretty solid debate among Christians for a very long time as far as how to view divorce.

00:42:49.000 Divorce is acceptable inside Judaism. 0.99

00:42:51.000 It's acceptable inside Protestantism.

00:42:53.000 Catholicism does not accept divorce.

00:42:55.000 But presumably, divorce is still a very live issue for Catholics.

00:43:00.000 You can see a world in which a Catholic baker says, I'm not going to bake a cake celebrating your divorce, and there'd be nothing wrong with that. 0.58

00:43:06.000 But, says E.J.

00:43:07.000 Dionne, we do not see the same ferocious response to adultery as we do to same-sex relationships. 0.58

00:43:11.000 Heck, conservative Christians in large numbers were happy to put aside their moral qualms and vote twice for a serial adulterer. 0.98

00:43:16.000 Why the selective forgiveness?

00:43:18.000 Why the call to boycott only this one perceived sin?

00:43:20.000 But it's not selective.

00:43:21.000 Because Donald Trump, also by the way, was in favor of same-sex marriage.

00:43:25.000 Last I checked.

00:43:27.000 So what he's really saying is that because he lives in this ivory tower where all the people agree with him, any religious person who disagrees with him is actually a bigot.

00:43:38.000 He says what we are seeing in the opposition to same-sex marriage is less about religious faith than cultural predispositions.

00:43:44.000 American attitudes toward homosexuality have certainly changed radically, but so have our attitudes toward racial and gender equality.

00:43:49.000 Are not these moves toward greater openness all expressions of the equal God-given dignity of every person?

00:43:53.000 So now he's preaching.

00:43:54.000 So he says before, I totally understand what exactly it is that you are... I totally understand that you have a religious tradition that says that this is wrong, but I don't believe you.

00:44:04.000 I don't believe you.

00:44:04.000 You are a bigot.

00:44:05.000 And really, you should accept my gospel, the gospel of E.J.

00:44:08.000 Dionne.

00:44:09.000 Because he's in the acceptable, Conversation.

00:44:13.000 He says stuff like this, which is just bigotry against religious people, and he doesn't even think twice about it.

00:44:18.000 He says, we hear from our conservative friends about the importance of family values, and I heartily agree.

00:44:21.000 Healthy families are good for society, for children, and for social justice.

00:44:25.000 But we straight people have done a heck of a job wrecking the family all by ourselves, and in any event, supporting same-sex marriage is to stand for, not against, stable, loving, lifetime relationships.

00:44:33.000 Um, not all stable relationships are blessed by God or produce children.

00:44:40.000 I mean, you presumably could have a stable, loving, lifetime relationship between four people.

00:44:45.000 I don't know that E.J.

00:44:46.000 Dionne is up for that.

00:44:47.000 He says, I hold religious freedom as a high value and see religion as, on balance, a positive social force.

00:44:52.000 I support well-crafted legal exemptions to protect the autonomy of religious institutions and the free exercise of religion.

00:44:57.000 But these cannot become a defense of discrimination in the marketplace or in our legal system.

00:45:02.000 So, he finally says, and this is where he gets to the punchline, I have a respectful suggestion for traditionalist Christians who run businesses that cater weddings.

00:45:08.000 Joyfully do the work same-sex couples hire you to do and witness your faith by giving them a copy of the New Testament.

00:45:14.000 It teaches us that God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.

00:45:19.000 Well, I mean, it turns out that if you're a Christian, you should take the gospel of Jesus and you should throw that one out. 0.99

00:45:26.000 E.J.

00:45:26.000 Dionne has his own, and that one trumps it.

00:45:28.000 You should bake the cake, you bigots.

00:45:30.000 Now, the reason that this is important, this kind of stuff, is because this echo chamber that has been created, and it's a strong, a super strong echo chamber, disconnects the left from millions, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of Americans.

00:45:44.000 And so they are shocked, always, when there is blowback against this sort of stuff.

00:45:49.000 They continue to push cultural transgressivism.

00:45:52.000 And then when people notice the transgressivism, they get very upset.

00:45:55.000 They get very, very angry.

00:45:58.000 It is amazing that it never occurs to them that maybe they are out of touch.

00:46:03.000 Right?

00:46:04.000 It never occurs to them.

00:46:04.000 Like, there's an entire article in the New York Times today titled, Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences.

00:46:10.000 So, they don't understand.

00:46:11.000 Why are these highbrow films not winning audiences?

00:46:14.000 Well, maybe it's because many of the films that you consider highbrow run directly against the values of the vast majority of Americans.

00:46:20.000 Maybe that would be the problem.

00:46:21.000 Maybe it's not just that people like to go to theater to watch things blow up.

00:46:24.000 Maybe it's also because films that do not slap them in the face politically are films they are more likely to see.

00:46:29.000 Maybe Top Gun Maverick did unbelievable business, not just because it's great to watch and great to look at and the special effects are really cool and all of that, but also because Top Gun Maverick is a very traditionalist story.

00:46:39.000 It is traditionally patriotic.

00:46:41.000 It is traditional about relationships.

00:46:43.000 Maybe it's because of that.

00:46:44.000 Maybe it's because I could take my wife to the theater and not have to worry about my values being mocked. 1.00

00:46:50.000 But the New York Times doesn't understand that.

00:46:51.000 There's an entire piece by Brooks Barnes, and he says, A year ago, Hollywood watched in despair as Oscar-oriented films like Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley flatlined at the box office.

00:47:00.000 The day seemed to have finally arrived when prestige films were no longer viable in theaters and streaming had forever altered cinema.

00:47:05.000 But studios held out hope, deciding that in November 2022, they would have a more accurate reading of the marketplace.

00:47:10.000 By then, the coronavirus would not be such a complicating factor.

00:47:13.000 This fall would be a last stand, as some put it, a chance to show that more than superheroes and sequels could succeed.

00:47:18.000 It has been carnage.

00:47:20.000 One after another, films for grown-ups have failed to find an audience big enough to justify their cost.

00:47:24.000 Armageddon Time cost $30 million to make and market.

00:47:27.000 It collected $1.9 million at the North American box office.

00:47:29.000 Now, why do you think that is?

00:47:31.000 Number one, the budget is completely out of whack.

00:47:32.000 I mean, there's no economics to this.

00:47:33.000 But also, Armageddon Time is an attack on the Reagan administration.

00:47:36.000 That's what it is, according to all the reviews.

00:47:38.000 Tar cost at least $35 million, including marketing.

00:47:40.000 Ticket sales total $5.3 million. 0.98

00:47:42.000 Well, maybe that's because it's about a sexually abusive lesbian. 1.00

00:47:46.000 Like, is that what you want to go see on a Friday night with your girlfriend? 0.99

00:47:50.000 Or with your boyfriend?

00:47:51.000 Like, is that what... Universal spent $55 million to make and market She Said, which took in $5.3 million.

00:47:58.000 Well, maybe that's because She Said is an ode to journalists uncovering the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which had, like, no controversy attached to it.

00:48:07.000 Everybody acknowledged it was good, and then it morphs quickly into every single human being who has ever had sexual relations with another human being may be a sexual abuser.

00:48:16.000 And the reason that these movies are failing is because these movies run directly counter to many of the values of the American people.

00:48:24.000 That would be at least one major reason.

00:48:27.000 So, you know, the disconnect has cultural effects, but it's not just the disconnect has cultural effects.

00:48:33.000 Obviously, the disconnect also has serious political effects.

00:48:37.000 And the serious political effects have yet to be felt.

00:48:39.000 Joe Biden escaped censure from the American public in 2022 because Republicans decided to raid the local homeless shelter for candidates.

00:48:45.000 But if that had not happened, Joe Biden would have gotten clocked.

00:48:48.000 So he's just going to continue doing what he's doing.

00:48:50.000 Democrats are going to continue doing what they're doing because they've created this bubble for themselves.

00:48:53.000 Elon Musk has pierced that bubble and this is why they're so angry.

00:48:56.000 Elon Musk did a comedy show with Dave Chappelle the other night where he came up on stage and Chappelle praised him and he got booed by the audience, Musk.

00:49:03.000 And Chappelle immediately said that you basically have a bunch of unemployed Twitter people up in the upper deck, the Wokies. 0.91

00:49:10.000 That's correct.

00:49:11.000 You know, Musk uncovering what's happening at Twitter, is vital stuff, not just for technology, but for us to come back together over some sort of at least shared space where we can discuss ideas openly.

00:49:25.000 And that has been largely lost.

00:49:26.000 And that's been lost because the left does not want to share ideas openly.

00:49:29.000 They don't want to have these conversations at all.

00:49:31.000 They must not be shared openly.

00:49:32.000 If you share ideas openly, it threatens them.

00:49:34.000 Well, the problem is if those ideas are not shared openly and rebutted or discussed, they end up metastasizing in the worst situations.

00:49:43.000 And in the not-worst situations, they end up being suppressed.

00:49:46.000 Good ideas end up being suppressed.

00:49:48.000 Jay Bhattacharya ideas.

00:49:49.000 Those end up being suppressed.

00:49:51.000 And then, when the American public take their revenge on the people who have suppressed the dissemination of information, when they take revenge on the people in control of the cultural levers, the left is going to be absolutely stunned and they're going to be absolutely shocked.

00:50:01.000 And it is coming.

00:50:02.000 It didn't come for them in 2022 because of external factors, including bad candidate selection and fear of Donald Trump by the Republican Party, but it is going to materialize.

00:50:10.000 It is going to happen.

00:50:11.000 And when it does, The left is gonna have no clue what hit it.

00:50:15.000 Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.

00:50:18.000 Make sure to come back at 4 p.m.

00:50:19.000 Eastern Time, catch more of The Ben Shapiro Show, guest hosted by Michael Noltz.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 12, 2022

Elon Exposes Twitter, And It’s Ugly As Hell | Ep. 1628

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