After the New York Post runs a bombshell story about Hunter Biden brokering a meeting between a Ukrainian oligarch and Joe Biden, Facebook and Twitter crack down on the story. We examine our intrepid journalists who continuously cheer censorship, and Amy Coney Barrett moves one step closer to confirmation. Today s show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. My savvy fans secure their internet by joining them at ExpressVpn. Join them for secure your internet, join them at secureyourinternet.org. And that is the topic of today s show. I mean, this is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Hunter Biden, who is in fact a crackhead, is a drug addict. He has had many affairs with various women. He s a mess. But it s not Joe s fault that he allowed Hunter Biden to run across the world, picking up sacks of cash by trading on his last name. And that s what Hunter Biden has been doing for years: He s been picking up checks for $50,000 a month, despite the fact that he didn t know anything about natural gas or oil. The only reason he was on the board of Burisma, a natural gas and oil company in Ukraine, is because he was sitting on a board of that company, which was the company Hunter was working for. And this is the story of Hunter Biden s involvement with a company Hunter has been involved in for years. Here s the bombshell: Hunter Biden helped broker the meeting between Joe Biden and an oligarch named Vadim Poshkimky, who was a company executive at a Ukrainian energy firm. It s really an honor, and it s really a pleasure to have Hunter Biden's name on my show. I never knew anything about it, I never did anything, man, did I ever did anything like that, right? I m not even supposed to know that, I m sorry if I didn t do it, did you? - Ben Shapiro - THE PENNY CHECK OUT THE PODCAST - CLICK HERE - FREE MENTIONED IN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP AND INSTAGRAM AND TWITTER GROUP - GOOGLE CHAT WITH ME AND OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS AND LINKS IN OUR SOCIETY AND OTHER PEDIATORY LINKS - FOUNDED IN THE MAKING ME OUT TO THE MEDIA AND OTHER LINKS ON PODCY CHAT AND SOCIAL PEDCAST?
00:00:00.000After the New York Post runs a bombshell story about Hunter Biden brokering a meeting between a Ukrainian oligarch and Joe Biden, Facebook and Twitter crack down on the story.
00:00:09.000We examine our intrepid journalists who continuously cheer censorship, and Amy Coney Barrett moves one step closer to confirmation.
00:00:29.000By the way, one of the reasons you should secure your internet is that social media giants cannot control the information that you see and hear as easily.
00:01:25.000He picked up sacks of cash in Ukraine.
00:01:27.000And for a long time, conservatives have been focused in on Hunter Biden's activities with regard to Burisma.
00:01:33.000Now, the original narrative with regard to Burisma is Burisma is a natural gas and oil company In Ukraine, Hunter Biden was sitting on the board of that company and picking up checks for $50,000 a month, despite the fact that he didn't know anything about natural gas or oil, despite the fact that he himself was a personal mess.
00:01:50.000The only reason he was on that board is because he was related to Joe Biden.
00:01:53.000Joe Biden was then the vice president of the United States and largely in charge of Ukrainian policy.
00:01:58.000Well, Joe Biden then bragged on tape about getting one of the chief prosecutors over in Ukraine fired.
00:02:04.000He threatened to withhold $1 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine until they fired this guy.
00:02:08.000Joe Biden always claimed that it had nothing to do with Hunter.
00:02:10.000And this prosecutor claims that he was about to investigate Burisma.
00:02:13.000That was the company Hunter was working for.
00:02:18.000So there's a lot of controversy over whether Victor Shokin, who was that prosecutor, was actually going to prosecute Burisma.
00:02:24.000There was indeed a lot of focus on Viktor Shokin as a possible corrupt figure inside Ukraine.
00:02:29.000A lot of people in Europe wanted to see Viktor Shokin go as the chief prosecutor in Ukraine.
00:02:33.000Biden has always claimed that his firing of Viktor Shokin was on the up and up.
00:02:38.000Shokin has always claimed that it was corrupt.
00:02:40.000That controversy has been out there for quite a while.
00:02:42.000What is unchallenged is that Joe Biden's family members, ranging from his brother to his son, use his name in order to make money for themselves.
00:02:51.000And that does have an element of corruption to it.
00:02:55.000Now, the best that you can say about it is that Joe Biden turned a blind eye to it, right?
00:02:59.000And this is sort of what Joe has argued.
00:03:00.000Joe Biden has said, well, I didn't know about it.
00:03:11.000Yesterday, the New York Post reports that Hunter Biden actually brokered a meeting between a Ukrainian oligarch who was a Burisma chief member and Joe Biden directly.
00:03:22.000That's what one of these emails tended to suggest.
00:03:24.000So here's the story from the New York Post. Hunter Biden introduced his father, then Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company according to emails obtained by the Post. The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadim Posharsky, an advisor to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17th, 2015, about a
00:03:53.000year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to 50 grand a month.
00:03:58.000The email reads, Dear Hunter, Thank you for inviting me to D.C.
00:04:01.000and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spend some time together.
00:04:06.000An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Posharsky, reportedly Berezman's number three exec, asking Hunter for advice on how you could use your influence on the company's behalf.
00:04:17.000The blockbuster correspondence, as the New York Post reports, flies in the face of Joe Biden's claim that he has never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
00:04:23.000It's contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.
00:04:27.000The computer was dropped off, apparently, at a repair shop in Biden's home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store's owner.
00:04:34.000Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who's admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.
00:04:46.000The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.
00:04:56.000The shop owner couldn't positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said that the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter's late brother and former Delaware Attorney General.
00:05:05.000Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to the Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop's owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.
00:05:14.000Before turning over the gear, according to the shop owner, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, Barbara Costello.
00:05:22.000Steve Bannon, the former advisor to President Trump, told the Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September.
00:05:27.000Giuliani provided the Post with a copy of it on Sunday.
00:05:30.000If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting money.
00:05:32.000Hunter Biden for the introduction to his dad, the then vice president admittedly pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk into getting rid of prosecutor general Victor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip to Kiev.
00:05:48.000Biden infamously bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations, I looked at them and said, I'm leaving in six hours.
00:05:53.000If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting money.
00:05:58.000And so it is not necessary to actually believe that Joe Biden got Shokin fired to protect his son in order to recognize that Joe Biden taking meetings with people that his son is picking up bags of cash from who have influence in areas over which Joe Biden had influence.
00:06:15.000It may not be illegal, but it is certainly corrupt.
00:06:18.000Pete Rose didn't have to bet on his own team in order for it to be a bad thing that he was betting on baseball.
00:06:24.000The Clinton Foundation did not actually have to manifest in Hillary Clinton doing things for the various countries who were sending cash to the Clinton Foundation.
00:06:32.000The fact that they had access to her was the corruption.
00:06:36.000Shoken has said that at the time of his firing in March 2016, he'd made specific plans to investigate Burisma that included interrogations and other crime investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.
00:06:49.000wanted Shoken removed over corruption concerns, which were shared by the European Union.
00:06:54.000So as early as 2014, the emails show that this top person at Burisma was urging Hunter Biden to use political leverage to help the company.
00:07:09.000I mean, it's certainly a story that Joe Biden apparently.
00:07:12.000Met with or was planning to meet with this Burisma executive on behalf of Hunter Biden.
00:07:18.000So that Hunter could continue to traffic with daddy's name.
00:07:21.000So the Biden campaign released a statement via Andrew Bates, their spokesman.
00:07:26.000They said investigations led by the press during impeachment and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as not legitimate and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath. The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of the story.
00:07:45.000They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani, whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported, claimed to have such materials.
00:07:54.000Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time in no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.
00:08:00.000Okay, so that is a very carefully worded statement.
00:08:03.000The reason it's a very carefully worded statement is it says that it's not on the calendar.
00:08:06.000Okay, well, lots of meetings happen between people that are in fact not on the calendar.
00:08:11.000Furthermore, I do enjoy it when Democrats start complaining and whining about Russian disinformation, when they literally trafficked in Russian disinformation for three long years, culminating in an impeachment attempt against Donald Trump.
00:08:24.000Okay, the fact is that the Mueller report was largely predicated on the Steele dossier, which was a piece of Russian disinformation that was not only bought into, it was overtly trafficked by the Hillary Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS to the Intel community.
00:08:38.000So don't lecture us about Russian disinformation when the fact is the Democrats were perfectly willing to accept Russian disinformation and then jabber on about how Trump was on tape asking people to pee on him and such.
00:08:53.000So it's a very carefully worded denial from Joe Biden.
00:08:56.000And then as it turns out, the denial doesn't actually mean anything.
00:08:58.000Because a little bit later in the day, Politico reported, quote, So now they're admitting, oh yeah, by the way, the meeting could have happened.
00:09:04.000former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pazarskii, which wouldn't appear on Biden's official schedule.
00:09:09.000They said any encounter would have been cursory.
00:09:11.000Pazarskii did not respond to a request for comment.
00:09:14.000So now they're admitting, oh yeah, by the way, the meeting could have happened.
00:09:17.000At no point anywhere in here, at no point, is there a denial that the emails are real, that the emails are legit?
00:09:25.000That they were written by Hunter Biden or by Pujarskii.
00:09:28.000At no point does the Biden campaign actually deny a material fact of the report other than continuing to deny that Biden got this prosecutor, Victor Shokin, fired in order to protect Hunter and Burisma.
00:09:39.000That is the only part of the story that they've denied.
00:09:41.000They've not denied any of the surrounding circumstances.
00:09:43.000They've not denied that a meeting took place.
00:09:46.000They've not denied that the emails about the meeting are real.
00:10:12.000I've been a big defender of freedom of the internet.
00:10:15.000I've been a big defender against using legislation to crack down on social media companies.
00:10:20.000It makes it very difficult for conservatives to defend a laissez-faire view of Facebook and Twitter and various other social media companies when they act as overt organs of the Democratic Party and involve themselves in censorship of mainstream media outlets like the New York Post because they don't like the story.
00:10:36.000It makes it almost impossible I don't think legislation is the proper answer to this question.
00:10:42.000I don't think the government overseeing Facebook and Twitter and controlling what they can do is the answer, but I sure as hell don't trust the people who are in charge over there if this is the kind of activity in which they're going to engage.
00:10:54.000So the Hunter Biden story, that's bad, but it's just the predicate to the actual story here, which is the attempt to stop you, the American people, from being able to access information that you want.
00:11:04.000In an overt attempt to stop you from seeing bad information about Joe Biden in the three weeks running up to the election.
00:11:12.000These social media companies who purport to be platforms rather than publishers are now in the business of censoring content they do not like.
00:11:19.000Not on the basis of any neutral application of rules, but on the basis of absolutely non-neutral application of rules.
00:11:47.000You can stream your shows on your TV or any other smart device.
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00:12:07.000Yes, it does include Fox News for my listeners who love Fox News.
00:12:10.000Right now, FuboTV is offering my listeners the seven-day free trial.
00:12:14.000and 15% off your first month by going to fubotv.com slash ben. There are no contracts, you can cancel anytime. Go to fubotv.com slash ben for 15% off your first month and a free trial.
00:12:26.000Again, that's fubotv.com slash ben, f-u-b-o-t-v.com slash ben. I've been using FuboTV, it's fantastic. And again, it's going to cost you way less than cable. So just cut that cord and get involved over at fubotv.com slash ben to get 15% off your first month. Okay, so the Senate committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee is now announcing an investigation of According to the Censorsquare, U.S.
00:12:49.000Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the committee will now be investigating newly released emails published by the New York Post that purport to reveal that Hunter Biden introduced his dad, Joe Biden, while he was VP of the United States, to an executive at Ukrainian gas firm Burisma.
00:13:03.000The emails contradict claims Joe has repeatedly made to the media.
00:13:08.000Johnson told Fox News the committee was in contact with the source of the emails, quote, although we consider those communications to be confidential because the individual in this instance spoke with the media about his contact with the committee, we can confirm receipt of his email complaint, have been in contact with the whistleblower and are in the process of validating the information he provided.
00:13:25.000About two weeks ago, the Senate Committee announced the findings of a year-long investigation into Hunter Biden after Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa raised concerns about alleged corruption linking Hunter Biden to millions of dollars in transactions taking place between Burisma Holding, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, and Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing's communist government.
00:13:42.000Joe Biden has repeatedly said he knew nothing about any of this.
00:13:48.000He did not know anything about any of this.
00:13:49.000And then as it turns out, well, not so much.
00:13:53.000Okay, so the underlying issue is again an issue of corruption.
00:13:58.000The appearance of corruption is certainly there when the Vice President of the United States with power over Ukraine policy is meeting with Ukrainian oligarchs in charge of natural oil and gas companies at the behest of his son who is picking up bags of cash in Ukraine from that company.
00:14:12.000Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana, he pointed this out last night on Fox News.
00:14:17.000President Obama put Vice President Biden in charge of America's foreign affairs with two countries, Ukraine and China.
00:14:27.000And in both cases, his son, Mr. Hunter Biden, walked away with millions of dollars of contracts.
00:14:37.000I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but I'm telling you this.
00:14:42.000This is the message it sent to the rest of the world.
00:14:46.000The foreign policy of the United States of America can be bought like a sack of potatoes.
00:14:54.000Okay, that is the impression that is put out there in the same way that the Clinton Foundation, which was receiving bags and bags and bags of cash from foreign sources during the years when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and then all the funding magically dried up the minute she was no longer Secretary of State.
00:15:09.000Gives that same appearance of generalized corruption.
00:15:11.000Okay, but that's not the real story here.
00:15:13.000The real story here is the social media reaction to this.
00:15:15.000I have never seen anything remotely like this.
00:15:18.000I've been highly critical of Twitter in particular for censoring material, for booting people, for using fake fact checks in order to target particular stories and particular tweets, particularly from Trump.
00:15:29.000I've been extremely critical of Facebook and their use of outside fact checkers.
00:15:33.000I did an entire episode on this just a couple of weeks ago, when Facebook used outside fact checkers to take down two separate ads that were both true.
00:15:41.000One claiming that Joe Biden was going to raise your taxes, and the other claiming that the Equality Act would make it impossible for there to be separate male and female sports, if taken literally.
00:15:51.000OK, the Facebook took both of those down based on garbage fact checks from a garbage leftist fact checking site called PolitiFact.
00:15:57.000So Facebook has been attempting to remove itself from the business of determining what material should be up or down.
00:16:02.000Instead, they outsourced it to a bunch of outside fact checkers who all Virtually all of whom happen to be left-wing fact-checkers who have no interest in actually checking facts.
00:16:11.000Instead, what they do is they will take a statement that is perfectly true from a conservative, and they will fact-check the implications, quote-unquote implications, things that nobody said, and then they will declare that a perfectly true statement is false.
00:16:23.000And then Facebook will censor the material based on the outside fact checkers.
00:16:27.000Facebook has also set up a group, it's supposed to be a panel, like an appeals board on this sort of stuff, but that appeals board has not gone into place yet, so we have no idea how that appeals board will rule on particular cases.
00:16:38.000So Facebook has been deliberately attempting to take itself out of the business of being directly responsible for censorship by trying to outsource it to various fact-checking groups.
00:16:46.000Yesterday, the mask came completely off, completely off for Facebook, and Twitter never had a mask.
00:16:52.000And so Twitter basically just decided, okay, well, you know what?
00:16:55.000We don't like this story about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
00:16:58.000It doesn't matter that we have yet to find an element of the story that is overtly not true.
00:17:03.000The only thing that matters is that this story cannot go out.
00:17:30.000You couldn't tweet from the New York Post Twitter account because of this story.
00:17:34.000Kayleigh McEnany, the White House Press Secretary, had her Twitter account suspended for tweeting out information from the New York Post story.
00:17:58.000Both Facebook and Twitter cracked down on it and made it impossible to distribute the story.
00:18:03.000That's an unbelievable breach of whatever Twitter and Facebook were supposed to be.
00:18:08.000If again, the idea is that these are platforms and that their job is to provide an open forum for people to disseminate information, particularly if the information is not overtly false.
00:18:16.000I mean, again, this is prior to any fact check.
00:18:27.000It appears that Facebook and Twitter were so concerned with the ramifications of a bad story going out about Hunter and Joe Biden based on leaked emails, That they shut down the entire story.
00:18:39.000The only reason for that is because the leftists at Facebook and the leftists at Twitter and the leftists in the journalistic establishment have decided that it is time to shut down the dissemination of information they do not like.
00:18:50.000Okay, this is a threat to the Republic.
00:18:52.000I don't think Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are a threat to the Republic.
00:18:54.000I do think that social media becoming a tool of one side to the extent that they are now openly censoring what material can be disseminated.
00:19:05.000You want to talk to me about Trump being a threat to the press?
00:19:07.000Trump isn't one iota the threat to the press that social media are when they decide that you cannot publish a story that reflects negatively on Joe Biden.
00:19:19.000People should be leaving these services in droves if these are the standards that are going to be put forth by these social media companies.
00:19:26.000Again, I've been very hesitant to talk about Big Tech as sort of a monolithic leftist entity.
00:19:30.000Well, yesterday they acted as a monolithic leftist entity without any attempt to pretend that they were enforcing anything remotely resembling a neutral rule.
00:19:42.000We'll get to more of this in one second.
00:19:44.000I'm enraged by this, and you should be enraged by this too.
00:19:47.000Honestly, left, right, or center, you should be enraged by the idea that these social media companies will literally stop the dissemination of a story because they don't like the story.
00:19:56.000Because they don't like the story, therefore you cannot disseminate the story.
00:20:00.000And they particularly don't like the story because they are afraid that if Joe Biden were to see that story disseminated on Facebook, that maybe Joe Biden and his Democratic friends might regulate Facebook.
00:20:11.000This is exactly the accusation that the left has been making about Trump and companies like Facebook.
00:20:16.000Because Trump has had conversations with Mark Zuckerberg.
00:20:20.000That Zuckerberg was somehow biasing the algorithm at Facebook to benefit Trump.
00:20:24.000This is all part of the leftist bullcrap narrative that they pushed in 2016 after Hillary Clinton, a horrible candidate, lost to maybe the most unpopular candidate of all time, Donald Trump.
00:20:33.000They pushed a narrative that it was because Facebook, taken over by Russian bots, had somehow changed the outcome of the election.
00:20:39.000And then they decided to pressure Facebook into changing its policies.
00:20:43.000So basically, these social media companies are so afraid of Democrats that they will voluntarily do what Democrats want so Democrats don't come after them.
00:20:50.000This is a blackmail routine by Democrats against social media.
00:20:53.000It's an inside-outside job because so many members of the media love Facebook-censoring material.
00:20:59.000And is Facebook an inside job and Twitter of an inside job when top Democrats at these places decide that it is time to shut down material?
00:21:07.000There's a baseline agreement between Democrats, the social media bros, and the journalists, all of whom are lying to you about their true agenda.
00:21:15.000None of them apparently care about freedom of the press, particularly the journalists.
00:21:18.000It's astonishing how little journalists care about freedom of the press.
00:21:21.000I mean, they really don't care about it.
00:21:23.000They would love to see, many of them, free speech cracked down upon by social media in the name of their actual principles, which are of the left.
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00:21:49.000The average person who switches to Pure Talk is using less than 4 gigs of data a month, but the big carriers are charging you for unlimited data.
00:21:55.000Which is like paying for an entire row on an airplane, but only needing one seat.
00:21:59.000Well, that's how Pure Talk saves the average person over $400 a year on their wireless service.
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00:22:06.000What happens if you go over on data usage?
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00:22:29.000There is no reason at all for you to be spending too much on your cell phone, Bill, unless you're addicted to spending too much money or something.
00:22:46.000Okay, they said that in line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links of, or images to, the material in question on Twitter, is what a Twitter spokesperson told National Review.
00:23:01.000Twitter's Hacked Materials Policy states it does not permit the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets.
00:23:17.000The platform said the policy applied in this case due to concerns about the lack of authoritative reporting in regards to the origins of the material.
00:23:24.000The New York Post reports that there is a laptop, Hunter Biden, who is a who is a dope addict.
00:23:29.000OK, Hunter Biden, who is a drug addict and a and a derelict, left his computer at this computer repair store, according to the New York Post.
00:23:52.000But according to Twitter, they suspect that this is actually Russian disinformation, that it was hacked material by the Russians handed over.
00:24:51.000A month and a half ago, there was a story from the Atlantic claiming that Donald Trump routinely went around to military cemeteries and said bad things about dead soldiers.
00:24:58.000It turns out that every element of that story fell apart.
00:25:00.000There were people on the record denying the story.
00:25:02.000Every source in that story was unnamed.
00:25:05.000Every element of that story, so far as I'm aware, has now been debunked by people who are on site.
00:25:09.000Okay, there is yet to be a single main source in that story.
00:25:12.000Not one link from the Atlantic was removed on that basis.
00:25:16.000You know how many stories we've seen like that?
00:25:18.000How many links went out there about how the Russians were paying Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers and Trump was ignoring it?
00:25:23.000And then it turned out that that story kind of fell apart.
00:25:58.000We want to provide much needed clarity around the actions we've taken with respect to two New York Post articles that were first tweeted this morning.
00:26:04.000The images contained in the articles include personal and private information, like email addresses and phone numbers, which violate our rules.
00:26:20.000As noted this morning, we also currently view materials included in the articles as violation of our hacked materials policies.
00:26:26.000Commentary on or discussion about hacked materials, such as articles that cover them, but do not include or link to the materials themselves, aren't a violation of this policy.
00:26:34.000Our policy only covers links to or images of hacked materials themselves.
00:26:37.000Again, there is no evidence at this point that this is hacked material.
00:26:41.000Hunter Biden is an idiot, so he left a laptop at a computer repair store.
00:26:45.000Beyond that, Okay, so then it gets even worse.
00:26:52.000Twitter says, The policy, established in 2018, prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization.
00:26:59.000We don't want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials.
00:27:05.000Okay, here's where we are off the rails now.
00:27:07.000Okay, hacking is a very specific charge, which is that somebody illegally violated the law, they hacked into your computer, they took materials, Twitter doesn't want that distributed.
00:27:16.000Forget about the fact they have not evenly applied this policy, obviously.
00:27:19.000They literally say that their policy prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization.
00:28:02.000Okay, I can name a half dozen stories off the top of my head in which Twitter allowed distribution and not only allowed the distribution, pushed the distribution.
00:28:55.000Okay, so how does Jack, Jack Dorsey, dumbass head of Twitter, guy who donated $10 million to Ibram Kendi so that he could feel not racist while getting bit by mosquitoes in Malaysia or something, how does Jack Dorsey respond to this?
00:29:07.000Quote, And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we're blocking is unacceptable.
00:29:16.000The problem is not your communication strategy.
00:29:18.000The problem is that you blocked the material without any actual rationale as to why you would block this material as opposed to any other leaked material.
00:29:27.000Virtually every major story is an unauthorized leak of information.
00:29:31.000Every bombshell story is an unauthorized leak.
00:29:33.000How many authorized leaks have there been from the federal government in the recent past?
00:29:37.000Every story involving Andrew McCabe leaking to the Wall Street Journal, which, as it turns out, got his pension canceled, I believe.
00:29:45.000Those stories were not taken down by Twitter.
00:29:47.000Every unauthorized leak from the Mueller probe, were any of those taken down by Twitter?
00:30:37.000First, let us talk about the fact that you don't have time to go down to the post office right now.
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00:31:55.000Facebook censored this and downgraded it.
00:31:58.000Before a fact check, before a fact check, they didn't wait for their vaunted outside fact checkers to fact check the story.
00:32:05.000They preemptively prevented you from disseminating the story.
00:32:10.000Andy Stone, who is a former Democratic operative, he now works in a high level over at Facebook, he tweeted this out yesterday, very early yesterday morning, quote, while I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners.
00:32:29.000In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
00:32:38.000Okay, so go back to that first tweet for a second, because we've got to break this down.
00:32:47.000So their new standard is, if Andy Stone doesn't like it at Facebook, they will preemptively ban the distribution of the information, waiting for a fact checker to do their dirty work and call the thing false.
00:33:38.000Because Andy Stone and the Democrats are suspicious of a story that makes Joe Biden look bad.
00:33:42.000He refers to the Facebook policy there, right?
00:33:44.000He says, well, you know, this is in line with our normal Facebook policy, which is that we will reduce distribution of a story pending a fact check.
00:33:51.000Quote, we're working to take faster action to prevent misinformation from going viral, especially given that quality reporting and fact checking takes time.
00:33:59.000In many countries, including in the US, if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third party fact checker.
00:34:07.000What were the signals that this piece of content is false?
00:35:26.000Our journalistic betters are a threat to the press.
00:35:29.000It's jackasses and morons like Kara Swisher at the New York Times, or Kevin Roos at the New York Times, or Charlie Warzel at the New York Times, who spend each and every day trying to not-so-subtly urge social media to crack down on dissemination of any information that they personally do not like.
00:35:46.000There is a reason that Ben Rhodes, a man who overtly acknowledges that he created a journalistic echo chamber to promote falsehoods about his Iran deal, He tweeted out, I have a question.
00:35:58.000What says that this is disinformation?
00:36:00.000unchecked demonstrates why you should not be able to spread this information unchecked. They know they have no political viability without the capacity to spread lies. I have a question. What says that this is disinformation? What?
00:36:11.000There's no information here. What Ben Rhodes means is information I don't like is disinformation and it should not spread unchecked and therefore I want all of this shut down. And it was not just Ben Rhodes.
00:37:06.000They continue to promote the lie anyway.
00:37:08.000The media keeps saying over and over and over that engagement on the right is really high.
00:37:13.000And it's true, engagement on the right is really high.
00:37:16.000So for example, in August, News Whip announced that the Daily Wire, my outlet, had for the second month in a row taken the top spot for total engagements, amassing 104.9 million engagements over the course of the month.
00:37:26.000Two other explicitly conservative sites, The Blaze and Breitbart, made it into the top 10.
00:37:34.000If you add up all of the engagements of the three conservative sites, you find that they collectively racked up 187.8 million engagements over the course of the month.
00:37:42.000That is just under a third of the 587.8 million total engagements among the top 10.
00:37:48.000If you expand the list to the top 25 news publishers for August, you'll find just three more self-styled conservative sites, Western Journal, CNS News, and Conservative Opinion.
00:37:56.000The total engagements represented by that group of six, 257.4 million engagements.
00:38:02.000That gives explicitly conservative sites just 27% of total engagements in the top 25.
00:38:07.000If you include Fox News, Daily Mail, and the New York Post, you'll find right-leaning sites account for less than half of engagements produced by Facebook's top 25 sites.
00:38:17.000And if you look at the data from previous months, you will see that it completely falls apart.
00:38:22.000That in previous months, our reach has not been quite as great as that.
00:38:26.000And it's not just which sites get the most engagement, it's which sites have the most reach.
00:38:30.000In other words, which sites' posts are seen by the most users.
00:38:33.000There too, left-leaning and mainstream media outlets outperformed conservative sites, a point highlighted by Facebook's head of news feed, John Hageman, in July.
00:38:41.000In response to the New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roos' steady stream of Facebook-themed tweets trying to suggest that conservatives should be shut down on social media, Hageman suggested that Roos and others are missing the proper metric.
00:38:53.000According to Hegeman, a more accurate metric for understanding what news people see on Facebook is reach, or the number of people who saw a link in their news feed.
00:39:01.000Hegeman shared a list of links that had the widest reach on Facebook, compared with the posts with the highest engagement on the same day.
00:39:07.000On July 5th, for example, the posts with the highest engagement came from Franklin Graham, me, Breitbart, For America, and CNN.
00:39:13.000By contrast, the links with the widest reach that day came from the LA Times, MSNBC, Ranker, BuzzFeed, and ABC News.
00:39:20.000So they're just lying about the idea that conservatives have this outsized advantage on Facebook.
00:39:36.000There is no one on the right who believes that social media should shut down NBC, The New York Times, ABC News, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, or any other leftist outlet.
00:39:45.000There's no one on the right who said that the New York Times should not have the right to post that Trump tax return stuff on Facebook.
00:40:34.000And what they would like to do is reduce distribution for everybody else via the social media networks, where everybody gathers, and make it so that you are back to only having access to stories that the left-wing approves of, and only outlets that the mainstream media like.
00:40:49.000They're trying to re-establish a monopoly via Facebook, via Twitter, via the social media sites.
00:40:54.000The predictable effect of this should be that people should be rushing away from those sites en masse to sites that are actually going to allow you to see the things that you want to see.
00:41:07.000As Sourabh Amari, the editor of the New York Post op-ed page writes, this is what totalitarianism looks like in our century.
00:41:15.000Not men in darkened cells driving screws under fingernails, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging expose on their preferred presidential candidate.
00:41:24.000He says, you know, the standards that they're using, they've never been applied to any of these other stories.
00:41:29.000Remember when four CNN reporters claimed in June 2017 James Comey was about to dispute in congressional testimony Trump's claim the FBI director had reassured the president he wasn't under investigation?
00:41:41.000Remember when The Guardian concocted a story about Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and Julian Assange meeting at Ecuador's embassy in London?
00:41:52.000Remember when The Atlantic published a several thousand word story suggesting that Jeff Sessions had lied when he said he didn't meet the Russian ambassador as a Team Trump surrogate, but as a routine member?
00:42:09.000Okay, it's perfectly obvious what happened here.
00:42:11.000And the disgusting and stomach-churning part of this is that it is not only approved by Democrats, which you would expect, but by the social media companies themselves and the Democrats within, and it is approved by the journalistic institutions who supposedly stand squarely in favor of free speech and the First Amendment.
00:42:29.000We'll get to more of this in just one second, because this is the scandal of the campaign.
00:42:32.000Whatever else was happening in the campaign, the thing that's going to affect you beyond the campaign is this.
00:42:37.000Okay, because we all engage with these social media sites.
00:42:41.000We're gonna get some more of this in just one second.
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00:44:01.000Okay, we'll get to more of the media cheering on the crackdown on free dissemination of information.
00:44:08.000And by the way, it's not just Twitter and Facebook, it is now Amazon as well.
00:44:11.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:44:13.000First, if you have not already heard, DailyWire's Old Glory DailyWire Baseball Bat.
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00:45:10.000You're listening to the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:45:14.000♪♪ There's a reason Republicans are fighting mad.
00:45:21.000Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who's been calling for regulation of Facebook and Twitter and social media in general, he is now demanding answers as to why Facebook and Twitter limited the ability to read that New York Post piece.
00:45:31.000And he has now asked the Federal Election Commission to express his concern regarding what he described as unprecedented suppression from Big Tech.
00:45:38.000Tech said the post reporting has understandably attracted substantial public discussions.
00:45:42.000Countless Americans have sought to discuss and debate that article, but two social media platforms have engaged in unprecedented suppression of public discussion of that article.
00:45:50.000The conduct does not merely censor the core political speech of ordinary Americans, though it definitely does that.
00:45:54.000Twitter and Facebook's conduct also appears to constitute a clear violation of federal campaign finance law.
00:46:00.000Federal law prohibits any corporation from making a contribution to a federal candidate for office.
00:46:04.000He's saying this is basically an in-kind contribution by the media.
00:46:07.000I mean, by that standard, frankly, that is the democratic-slash-mainstream media every single day.
00:46:13.000Donald Trump commented on this in a rally in Iowa last night, going hard after the social media companies as well he should.
00:47:20.000He wasn't trafficking on daddy's name.
00:47:21.000Meanwhile, by the way, it's not just Facebook and Twitter cracking down on dissemination of material that they don't like.
00:47:25.000Amazon has now canceled Shelby Steele.
00:47:28.000Shelby Steele, who is an incredible thinker, the author of just an incredibly insightful book about race relations in America called White Guilt, among other things.
00:48:07.000So Amazon will give you basically softcore pornography if you would like to buy it.
00:48:10.000But if you want to pay a couple of bucks to watch Shelby Steele's movie on Amazon, you cannot.
00:48:16.000Amazon informed the Steele's their film is, quote, not eligible for publishing because it doesn't meet Prime Video's content quality expectations.
00:48:27.000It's about the fact that Shelby Steele does not abide by the Black Lives Matter narrative that America is systemically racist and that all problems in the black community spring from the evils of the United States.
00:48:38.000I mean, that is, so that's an amazing story.
00:48:41.000Now, I want to discuss at a little bit of length, again, how the media have reacted to all of these giant crackdowns by these social media companies and by our major corporations.
00:48:52.000And the answer is that they are fine with it.
00:48:56.000I have yet to see a lot of mainstream media reporters or journalists or even opinion columnists saying that it is bad that the social media companies are cracking down on information they do not like.
00:49:08.000In fact, today, over at New York Times Magazine, there is a piece by Emily Bazelon suggesting that free speech is bad, that the First Amendment needs to stop This is literally the piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend.
00:49:25.000It's all about how free speech is a threat to our democracy.
00:49:29.000The basic idea here is that because free speech allows for the possibility of misinformation, free speech is bad.
00:49:36.000According to Emily Bazelon, she says, the conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions, the overwhelming amounts of information, the anger encoded in it, these all serve to create chaos and confusion and make people, even non-partisans, exhausted, skeptical, cynical about politics.
00:49:49.000The spewing of falsehoods isn't meant to win any battle of ideas.
00:49:52.000Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought by causing us to simply give up.
00:49:57.000A working paper from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard released early this month found that effective disinformation campaigns are often an elite-driven, mass-media-led process in which social media played only a secondary and supportive role.
00:50:10.000Trump's election put him in position to operate directly through Fox News and other conservative media outlets like Rush Limbaugh's talk radio show, which have come to function in effect as a party press, the Harvard researchers found.
00:50:21.000A false story about Democrats plotting a coup spread through a typical feedback loop.
00:50:25.000Links from Fox News hosts and other right-wing figures aligned with Trump, like Dan Bongino, often dominate the top links in Facebook's news feed for likes, comments, and shares in the United States.
00:50:35.000Though Fox News is far smaller than Facebook, the social media platform has helped Fox attain the highest weekly reach offline and online combined of any single news source in the United States, according to a 2020 report by Reuters Institute.
00:50:45.000Again, this is all tied into the New York Times' attempt to prevent social media from disseminating information they do not like.
00:50:52.000Better to force social media to shut off those spigots?
00:50:56.000Better to cut against the First Amendment directly?
00:51:00.000So points for honesty to Emily Bazelon in New York Times Magazine.
00:51:03.000She's not just ripping on social media and saying social media should crack down on free speech.
00:51:07.000She's saying we should all crack down on free speech.
00:51:09.000The government should rewrite its own doctrines on free speech, according to Emily Bazelon.
00:51:14.000Quote, it's an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that government should regulate it as little as possible.
00:51:20.000But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
00:51:29.000They think our formulations are simplistic and especially inadequate for our era.
00:51:33.000Censorship of external critics by the government remains a serious threat under authoritarian regimes, but in the United States and other democracies, there's a different kind of threat, which may be doing more damage to the discourse about politics, news, and science.
00:51:44.000It encompasses the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract.
00:51:51.000Do you understand the insane danger that Emily Bazelon is proposing as policy here?
00:51:56.000She is saying that because you get to speak freely, you might say something Emily Bazelon doesn't like, and therefore that Emily Bazelon categorizes as speech from an extremist that smears and distracts.
00:52:08.000She's saying there is a bigger threat from you speaking freely than there is from the government controlling speech.
00:52:15.000That is a patently absurd, absurd, disgusting perspective on your rights as an individual American citizen.
00:52:26.000It is a suggestion that you cannot be trusted with your own liberty, therefore the government will stop you from speaking freely, or should stop you from speaking freely, or should prevent the dissemination of information that Ben Rhodes and Emily Bazelon and your betters at the New York Times don't like.
00:52:40.000This concern spans the ideological spectrum.
00:52:42.000Along with disinformation campaigns, there's a separate problem of troll armies, a flood of commenters, often propelled by bots, that aim to discredit or to destroy the reputation of disfavored speakers and to discourage them from speaking again, says Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor at Harvard.
00:52:55.000This tactic may be directed by those in power.
00:52:58.000Either way, it's often grimly effective at muting critical voices.
00:53:02.000And yet, as Tim Wu, a progressive law professor at Columbia, points out in the same book, the use of speech as a tool to suppress speech is, by its nature, something very challenging for the First Amendment to deal with.
00:53:12.000These scholars argue something that may seem unsettling to Americans, that perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way.
00:53:18.000At the very least, we should understand it isn't the only way.
00:53:20.000Other democracies in Europe and elsewhere have taken a different approach.
00:53:23.000Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic.
00:53:26.000In fact, they've created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what's true from what's not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be.
00:53:33.000Here in the United States, meanwhile, we are drowning in laws.
00:53:37.000So presumably, she would like the sort of hate speech regulation you see in Scotland, where if you're a religious person, you could be thrown in jail, depending on what you have to say about LGBT issues.
00:53:44.000Presumably, she would like the sort of hate speech regulations you see across Europe, where if you say something quote-unquote Islamophobic, you could theoretically be prosecuted.
00:53:54.000Okay, this is what the left in the United States would like.
00:53:58.000Now, the ACLU used to say that they would fight to the death for your right to say something with which they disagreed.
00:54:03.000Now, the ACLU and the entire leftist infrastructure say precisely the opposite.
00:54:07.000They want the government to crack down on speech they do not like.
00:54:09.000They're becoming clear and open about this.
00:54:13.000Emily Bazelon's piece here, it's just the tip of the spear.
00:54:16.000This has been going around in leftist circles for a while.
00:54:19.000There was a New York Times piece maybe a year ago, year and a half ago, by an Obama administration official arguing the exact same thing.
00:54:25.000We should pursue hate speech regulations in the United States that prevent the dissemination of information and perspectives that members of the left do not like.
00:54:33.000Emily Bazelon says facts and transparency are the intended pillars of the modern First Amendment.
00:54:38.000Since the nation's founding, the Constitution has guaranteed the government shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press.
00:54:43.000For more than a century, however, these limits on the state's power were worth little.
00:54:47.000From 1798 to 1801, more than two dozen people, including several newspaper editors, were prosecuted by the administration of John Adams under the Alien and Sedition Act.
00:54:55.000Prosecutors were also jailed for criticizing the government during World War I.
00:55:19.000So, again, this is what happens when you believe that you have a sheer majority and through the power of compulsion you can get people to shut up.
00:55:27.000This is the attitude of many in media.
00:55:29.000Do not make the mistake of thinking that just because there are people in media who purport to believe in free speech, that that is the dominant ideology inside the media.
00:55:52.000How could Maggie Haberman tweet out a link from a major American newspaper alleging a thing about Joe Biden?
00:55:55.000he alerted the feds to their existence. Okay, and everybody on the left went nuts. Journalists went nuts. How could Maggie Haberman tweet out a link from a major American newspaper alleging a thing about Joe Biden? How could that happen? Kimberly Johnson, who is some sort of left-wing author, She writes for Huffington Post, for example.
00:56:16.000She tweeted out, what is wrong with you?
00:56:17.000You know they're calling you Maggie Haberman, right?
00:57:09.000Giuliani has been everywhere on this, but this has been kicking around since late last year and unreleased until now.
00:57:15.000Okay, David Corn, meanwhile, suggested that this was disinformation.
00:57:23.000Again, members of the media, very angry at Maggie Haberman, because again, in the end, all that matters is that the information disseminated is something that members of the left don't like.
00:57:39.000NBC staffers are fighting mad because NBC scheduled a Trump town hall tonight.
00:57:44.000So there was supposed to be a debate tonight.
00:57:46.000The Commission on Presidential Debate, which apparently is just another organ of the left, and there's no other way for me to interpret their cancellation of a debate a week in advance because Trump had COVID.
00:58:34.000Over a dozen staffers from NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC have now expressed anger over this decision.
00:58:39.000That report comes just several hours after NBC announced the town hall and ABC indicated the network will not move its scheduled event with Biden.
00:59:06.000And you see this again across the left.
00:59:07.000So Wolf Blitzer, we played you yesterday, this amazing exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Nancy Pelosi, in which Pelosi absolutely loses whatever is left of her mind and starts yelling at Wolf Blitzer, suggesting, we feed poor people, you're mean, all because Wolf Blitzer asked her a very simple question, namely, why don't you just sign off on a $1.8 trillion relief package in the middle of COVID?
00:59:25.000Pelosi couldn't answer it for 14 minutes.
00:59:27.000So instead, she decided to berate Wolf Blitzer.
00:59:30.000Here's what that sounded like yesterday.
01:00:54.000Don't print any stories about Joe Biden.
01:00:56.000Social media should stop conservatives from being able to disseminate information or they should be downgraded as bad sites because partisan fact-checkers have downgraded them.
01:01:04.000We are in a war of information, of the ability to even disseminate the information.
01:01:11.000It has now gotten extremely, extremely hot.
01:01:13.000These social media platforms, they better get right with the First Amendment.
01:01:17.000They better get right with principles of free speech and dissemination of information, or both the government is gonna come after them from both sides, and other outlets are gonna come after them, and they absolutely should.
01:01:27.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
01:01:30.000Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
01:02:00.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
01:02:03.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
01:02:09.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.