The Ben Shapiro Show - December 19, 2022


Is Elon Done Running Twitter? | Ep. 1633


Episode Stats

Length

43 minutes

Words per Minute

219.19022

Word Count

9,564

Sentence Count

590

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

9


Summary

As more information emerges about FBI intervention at Twitter, Elon Musk pledges to step down from leading the social media company. Up to 5,000 illegal immigrants could be flooding the border every single day as the January 6th committee fiasco comes to its conclusion, according to a new report from the Department of Homeland Security. Meanwhile, Tesla's stock drops more than 57% on the heels of Musk's comments on marijuana use, and the market reacts to the news. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers? Me neither, no? Get ExpressVPN right now at ExpressVpn.com/TheBenjaminShapiroShow and use the promo code: "ExpressVPN" to get 10% off your first month with discount code: BONUS to help get you an ad-free version of The Ben Shapiro Show wherever you get your epsiode. Ben Shapiro is a writer and editor at The Daily Beast. His work can be found at Ben Shapiro's website. He can be reached at benjamin.shapiro@crt.co.nz and Ben Shapiro on social media at . He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and The Financial Times, and has been featured on Forbes, and is a frequent contributor on the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Magazine. and the New Yorker. . He is the host of the Financial Times. , and is the founder of The Information, and he is a host of The Financial Tipsy, and many other publications. He is also a regular on the Money Line podcast, and other media outlets, including the Financial Tipster, and a regular at The Athletic, and Business Insider, among other things. He has a blog, including a podcast, including The Athletic and The Hollywood Reporter, and his wife, and a lot more. His profile includes a blog post on his book, which you can find you can read on his profile on the internet, which is out there on the Internet, which will be published online. If you're looking for a good time, listen to Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro s on The Bench Bureau Show on The Hill? on his podcast Ben Shapiro will be in the next episode of The Weekly Standard, on the podcast, and much more! Thank you for listening to The Benchmark Show?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 As more information emerges about FBI intervention at Twitter, Elon Musk pledges to step down from leading the social media company.
00:00:06.000 Up to 5,000 illegal immigrants could begin flooding the border every single day as Title 42 comes to an end and the January 6th committee fiasco comes to its conclusion.
00:00:14.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:15.000 This is the Bench Bureau Show.
00:00:16.000 Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:00:24.000 Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers?
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00:00:30.000 Well, Elon Musk bought Twitter not all that long ago, and he's been a very hands-on owner.
00:00:35.000 He's been formulating Twitter policy in real time, banning accounts, bringing back accounts, doing everything by Twitter poll.
00:00:41.000 Over the weekend, Elon Musk put out a poll Asking whether he should step down as the active head of Twitter.
00:00:46.000 This doesn't mean he'll give up ownership of Twitter, of course, but he put out a poll saying that he would pledge to abide by the results of the poll and asking whether people should allow him to remain the CEO of Twitter.
00:00:59.000 And then the poll results came in and nearly 60% of people on Twitter were polled said that Musk should not remain the CEO of Twitter.
00:01:07.000 Now, here's the thing.
00:01:08.000 I think Musk is smart enough to know what the result was going to be ahead of time.
00:01:11.000 I really doubt that he thought that 60% of people are going to say yes.
00:01:14.000 So what this really looks more like is a transition plan.
00:01:17.000 He's He wants to make it look like the people wanted him to step out of the way and then he'll appoint somebody else to run Twitter.
00:01:22.000 But this does speak to the way that Twitter is currently being run, which is very ad hoc.
00:01:26.000 Again, I don't have a problem with that because I would rather that there be someone at the top of the food chain to blame as opposed to the way Twitter was being run.
00:01:33.000 But this does throw the entire social media system into at least some chaos because nobody actually knows what's coming next.
00:01:40.000 I have no information suggesting that Elon Musk actually knows who would replace him as CEO of Twitter.
00:01:43.000 It's not like he has somebody waiting in the wings, and this is all a setup.
00:01:46.000 This is all see-to-the-pants kind of stuff, which makes it, on the one hand, fun, and on the other hand, slightly terrifying for those who actually are trying to figure out what standards Twitter is attempting to apply here.
00:01:56.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, The majority of Twitter users said Elon Musk should step down as chief of the company in a poll the billionaire pledged to follow, casting no uncertainty on the social media platform after more than seven weeks of turmoil since he took it over.
00:02:07.000 More than 17 million users had voted by the time the poll on the platform closed after 6 a.m.
00:02:11.000 Eastern Time, with 57.5 percent saying he should leave as the head of the company he bought in October for $44 billion.
00:02:17.000 Musk had said when he launched the Twitter poll on Sunday he would abide by the results.
00:02:21.000 It's not clear who would be taking over Twitter, Inc.
00:02:23.000 if Musk steps aside or what his role would remain, given that he still owns the company.
00:02:26.000 Most of the company's prior leadership was either fired or left after he took over.
00:02:29.000 And by the way, it's not going to be a great job.
00:02:31.000 For all those people who are clamoring and saying out there, I could do it.
00:02:34.000 Well, Musk is just going to fire you after two weeks because all that will mean is that he stands sort of behind whoever the Twitter CEO is.
00:02:42.000 Musk tweeted, quote, No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive.
00:02:45.000 There is no successor.
00:02:47.000 Now, one of the reasons why Musk is doing this is because his other companies like SpaceX and Tesla have been suffering on the stock market.
00:02:53.000 Shares in Tesla have fallen more than 57% this year, frustrating some retail investors who partly blame it Musk's focus on Twitter for the decline.
00:03:01.000 And this is not unusual.
00:03:02.000 Anytime the market perceives Musk as a volatile figure.
00:03:05.000 His stock drops and then it always comes back.
00:03:06.000 This happened with Tesla when Musk went on Joe Rogan's show and he smoked pot.
00:03:10.000 And for a moment there, it looked like the Tesla stock was going to be in rough shape.
00:03:13.000 And then, of course, Tesla pulled out of the tailspin and soon it was doing fine.
00:03:18.000 Tesla shares were jumping pre-market Monday amid the suggestion that Musk would stop running Twitter and return his attention back to the engineering company that he founded.
00:03:24.000 There have been questions since Musk first showed interest in buying Twitter how he would juggle running that company while also pursuing all of his other endeavors.
00:03:31.000 Bill Nelson, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's administrator, this month said he had asked SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell if Twitter would divert from the rocket company's mission.
00:03:39.000 She assured me it would not be a distraction.
00:03:40.000 Musk said last month that he had too much work on his plate.
00:03:44.000 Now again, it's been a pretty chaotic couple of months under Musk.
00:03:48.000 Much of what he has done has been excellent.
00:03:50.000 So for example, the breaking of new Twitter files, demonstrating what exactly Twitter was doing to shut down free speech before Musk took over.
00:03:57.000 Musk had said that he was essentially a free speech libertarian when he took over.
00:04:00.000 And then he's sort of activated, as I say, an ad hoc policy where he bans people and then he brings them back based on Twitter polls where the standards are not entirely clear.
00:04:08.000 And what's funny to me about that is that the entire media are caterwauling about this.
00:04:11.000 They're screaming to the heavens, screaming to God about why exactly the standards are so opaque and changeable.
00:04:16.000 It's like, welcome to the party, pal.
00:04:18.000 It's been like this for the last 10 years.
00:04:20.000 The only difference that this time you guys are sometimes getting clocked.
00:04:23.000 But the real thing that Musk has done here is, of course, revealed what was going on at Twitter during the Trump era.
00:04:28.000 We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
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00:06:35.000 And so over the weekend also, Matt Taibbi, who was a guest on this program last week, Former Rolling Stone journalist, he revealed how much contact was had between the higher-ups at Twitter and the FBI, and this should scare everybody.
00:06:49.000 When the FBI is contacting social media companies and telling them what to put up and what to take down and all the rest of it, predicated not on typical sort of law enforcement procedures, not based on warrants, not based on investigations, but based on simply the FBI's sense that they don't want something up, that's pretty scary stuff.
00:07:06.000 Late on Friday afternoon, the Twitter files are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.
00:07:12.000 Twitter's content with the FBI, contact with the FBI, was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
00:07:17.000 Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth.
00:07:25.000 Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chen wishing Roth a happy new year along with a reminder to attend our quarterly call next week.
00:07:31.000 Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.
00:07:35.000 But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low follower accounts.
00:07:43.000 The FBI's social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents, and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.
00:07:53.000 Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
00:08:02.000 Matt Taibbi reports it's no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes.
00:08:07.000 But the Twitter files show something new.
00:08:08.000 Agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points pre-flagged for moderation.
00:08:15.000 What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government.
00:08:17.000 Some are aggregated from public hotlines.
00:08:20.000 There's an unanswered question.
00:08:21.000 Do agencies like the FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves or are they farming it out?
00:08:26.000 One former intelligence officer said, you have to prove to me that inside the effing government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search.
00:08:34.000 Tayibi says there was a master canine quality to the FBI's relationship to Twitter.
00:08:38.000 There's a November 2022 email, for example, in which the FBI San Francisco notified Twitter it wanted action on four specific accounts.
00:08:46.000 Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts.
00:08:51.000 Just to show that the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was more obvious that the person who kids a lot was actually kidding.
00:09:02.000 Pretty much all of the right-wing accounts ended up being suspended by Twitter at the behest of the FBI.
00:09:07.000 Now this, of course, is pretty scary stuff.
00:09:10.000 You don't really want the FBI coordinating with the social media companies to determine what should be taken down, what should be left up.
00:09:17.000 Many of the accounts that the FBI was targeting were satirical in nature.
00:09:21.000 Many of them were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, thanks Twitter letter.
00:09:27.000 When told of the FBI flagging, One of the people suspended said, my thoughts initially were, seems like Primey Faishey won a First Amendment violation.
00:09:34.000 Holy cow!
00:09:35.000 Me, an account with the reach of Namiba 3, what else are they looking at?
00:09:38.000 I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter.
00:09:40.000 That's crazy, said one of the users.
00:09:42.000 But that's exactly what was happening.
00:09:44.000 And this is one of the reasons why it was important for Musk to take over, because Musk is revealing all of the bad activity of the government in cahoots with Twitter.
00:09:53.000 Now, at the same time, as I say, the Musk's running of Twitter has been extraordinarily ad hoc.
00:09:59.000 I've used that phrase a bunch of times.
00:10:00.000 He's just doing it sort of seat of the pants.
00:10:02.000 So, for example, he suspended Taylor Lorenz.
00:10:05.000 Taylor Lorenz is just a garbage pseudo-reporter over at the Washington Post.
00:10:08.000 She spends all day just irritating people on social media and then tracking down her enemies on social media, and in the case of TikTok, actually doxing people on social media.
00:10:16.000 Well, she was actually briefly suspended from Twitter over the weekend.
00:10:19.000 She acted as though she had been shipped to the gulags under Stalin or something.
00:10:24.000 She was back on social media talking about her tremendously difficult period of Twitter expulsion in pretty short order.
00:10:33.000 But she came back online, by the way, and then she was sharing memes and all this, but she was suspended because of doxing of libs of TikTok.
00:10:41.000 Now, that's not a good standard.
00:10:43.000 I think Taylor Lorenz is garbage, and I think there are many times where she does things that ought to get her suspended or expelled from Twitter, including doxing people like libs of TikTok.
00:10:50.000 However, Taylor Lorenz, you can't retroactively decide to suspend people.
00:10:55.000 You can't decide two years later, because Taylor Lorenz did something to libs of TikTok, that now she ought to be suspended, because otherwise there's no standard at all.
00:11:04.000 I will say it was pretty funny.
00:11:05.000 Taylor Lorenz found out she'd been suspended.
00:11:06.000 She obviously was pretty happy about it.
00:11:08.000 And then she ended up dropping off of her own Instagram feed.
00:11:10.000 She had an Instagram feed in which she was announcing, or her TikTok feed, in which she was announcing this.
00:11:14.000 And all of the comments on the TikTok feed were about how much people hated Taylor Lorenz.
00:11:19.000 So she ended up running away.
00:11:20.000 Here's what it sounded like.
00:11:21.000 Oh my God.
00:11:25.000 This is just a bunch of Elon fans.
00:11:30.000 All right.
00:11:32.000 Oh, Air and Space Museum, hi!
00:11:35.000 Guys, I did have only three tweets because my tweets auto-delete and they have since 2014.
00:11:43.000 Anyway, I do have to go, but I love you guys and it was so fun to get to chat with you!
00:11:51.000 So, see you later, Taylor.
00:11:53.000 We'll catch you later.
00:11:54.000 Okay, Taylor Lorenz ended up being reinstated.
00:11:56.000 Here's the bottom line.
00:11:57.000 Bottom line is this.
00:11:58.000 Whoever is going to come in, foremost, because now he's pledged that he's going to step aside and he's going to put in some sort of new CEO.
00:12:03.000 Here is the standard that ought to be applied.
00:12:05.000 The standard that ought to be applied is a pure First Amendment free speech standard.
00:12:09.000 That's what ought to happen.
00:12:11.000 And then, all other standards ought to be made transparent.
00:12:13.000 If you're going to downgrade tweets that are First Amendment protected, but you don't want getting wide dissemination, You should have a transparent process whereby people can quickly see why the thing is being downgraded.
00:12:23.000 I will say that that Musk has been radically transparent, even though he is doing things, seat of the pants.
00:12:27.000 He's being very transparent about why he is doing things and how he is doing things.
00:12:30.000 And the answer is he's doing because he feels like it.
00:12:32.000 Whoever comes in next should continue that policy of radical transparency, but should take a very strict First Amendment standard with regard to Twitter in the United States.
00:12:39.000 One of the big problems for international companies like Twitter is that the free speech standards in the United States are not the free speech standards that apply in, say, France or Britain.
00:12:47.000 Where actual quote-unquote hate speech can be prosecuted.
00:12:49.000 They don't have the same First Amendment standards over in Europe.
00:12:52.000 So the best that Twitter probably can do, realistically speaking, is promulgate standards that are allowed by various governments in various parts of the West.
00:13:00.000 That's the best that they are going to do.
00:13:02.000 Whoever comes in next, however, you can imagine that Musk is not going to give up complete control of Twitter.
00:13:07.000 He is just going to give up day-to-day control, which will allow him to go back to his companies.
00:13:10.000 This is not a big victory against Elon Musk, the way the media are portraying it.
00:13:13.000 He still owns the place.
00:13:15.000 And despite all of the best attempts of the media to try to cudgel Twitter back into what it was before, that is not going to happen.
00:13:20.000 Meanwhile, we have a crisis that has now been unleashed on our southern border.
00:13:24.000 It's going to get a lot worse, according to the Washington Post.
00:13:27.000 Both Republicans and Democrats are warning there could soon be an unmanageable influx of migrants at the southern border of the United States with the expected end this week of Title 42, a Trump-era immigration policy that allowed border agents to expel migrants for public health reasons during the COVID pandemic.
00:13:40.000 On ABC's This Week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott warned if the courts did not intervene to keep Title 42 in place, it would be total chaos.
00:13:46.000 At the southern border, a federal appellate court on Friday ruled the Biden administration could end Title 42 on Wednesday unless the Supreme Court intervenes.
00:13:53.000 Republican officials have signaled in court records they would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
00:13:57.000 How bad is this?
00:13:58.000 It's so bad, the El Paso mayor, Oscar Leaser, actually declared a state of emergency in El Paso ahead of Title 42's expiration, citing an increased number of asylum seekers sleeping in the streets.
00:14:08.000 Here is the mayor of El Paso again as a Democrat, declaring state of emergency.
00:14:10.000 So is this all ginned up by the Republican-leaning press, or is there a real crisis at the border?
00:14:16.000 As we see the increase in asylum seekers into our community and we see the temperatures dropping and we know that Title 42 looks like it's going to be called back on Wednesday.
00:14:30.000 We felt there was proper time today to call a state of emergency.
00:14:35.000 I said from the beginning that I would call it when I felt that either our Asylum seekers or our community was not safe.
00:14:43.000 And I really believe that today our asylum seekers are not safe.
00:14:49.000 So he's being about the asylum seekers that they're coming in and they're not safe.
00:14:52.000 Well, I mean, the reality is that the country is not safe when you have literally millions of people who are crossing the border and not vetting any of them.
00:15:00.000 Yes, you feel bad for people who legitimately are seeking asylum and then are tossed into a completely unworkable system.
00:15:06.000 But the vast majority of people who are crossing our border are not technical asylum seekers.
00:15:10.000 The people who are crossing our border largely are economic migrants, people who are coming from countries that have worse economies than the United States.
00:15:16.000 I don't blame them, but the people who are coming across the border are not people who would fit under a normal definition of people who ought to be receiving asylum in the United States for human rights reasons.
00:15:25.000 How bad are things about to get?
00:15:26.000 Lieser said he had spoken to federal officials who said they believed El Paso could see four to six thousand new migrants on Wednesday alone.
00:15:33.000 4,000 to 6,000 new migrants on Wednesday alone.
00:15:35.000 That is an insane number of people.
00:15:38.000 That is when Title 42 expires.
00:15:39.000 That is a jump from the more than 2,000 migrants the El Paso sector of U.S.
00:15:43.000 Customs and Border Protection is currently getting every single day, which again, by the way, is an enormous number of migrants.
00:15:49.000 And that is just the El Paso sector.
00:15:51.000 That is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are crossing the southern border before Title 42 is repealed.
00:15:58.000 Once Title 42 goes away, you're going to see a vast wash of people coming into the United States.
00:16:03.000 In fact, the wash of people into the United States is going to be so broad that New York City is now fretting that there is the possibility that a thousand migrants a day could be entering New York City.
00:16:10.000 Remember that time when it was absolutely terrible that Greg Abbott was sending some of the migrants who had entered Texas, some of the illegal immigrants who had entered Texas over to New York, and he was sending like a few dozen people?
00:16:19.000 Get ready for a thousand people arriving in New York City maybe every day, according to Mayor Eric Adams, over in New York City.
00:16:26.000 Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom visited an immigration center along the border and said it was a federal government issue that similar immigration sites were already at capacity.
00:16:35.000 Senator Alex Padilla of California defended the removal of Title 42, saying it was not intended to be an immigration policy, but public health policy.
00:16:41.000 He said, we're in a different place when it comes to COVID today than we were two or three years ago.
00:16:45.000 It's past time for Title 42 to be gone.
00:16:48.000 But again, there is no replacement policy for the Democratic Party and for the Joe Biden administration.
00:16:54.000 White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said last week that the Biden administration was prepared to lift Title 42 in quote-unquote, a safe and humane way, but they do not actually have the means to do so.
00:17:04.000 And everybody knows it, including the Democrats.
00:17:07.000 Now, everybody knows what's happening here.
00:17:09.000 What's happening here is that the Biden administration has decided that they have effectively an open border policy.
00:17:14.000 They've dramatically understaffed the border.
00:17:16.000 They've rejected Donald Trump's remain in Mexico policy, which was stay in Mexico while you apply for asylum in the United States.
00:17:23.000 They've decided that they are not going to vastly bulk up the number of Border Patrol agents who are available.
00:17:29.000 They've decided that they are not even going to vastly bulk up the number of courts that are available to process the people who are arriving on the border.
00:17:36.000 The Biden administration has very little interest in actually stopping what's going on at the border.
00:17:40.000 They have an interest in stopping people from covering it.
00:17:43.000 And this is why you have Bill Malugan, who actually has drone footage of thousands of migrants crossing the Rio Grande.
00:17:48.000 Then all of a sudden, the Biden administration gets very angry.
00:17:49.000 They don't like being covered on this stuff.
00:17:52.000 But they have no problem with the actual fundamental policy.
00:17:56.000 And to the migrants who are crossing the border, they understand what's going on.
00:17:58.000 They're coming because Joe Biden is president.
00:18:00.000 It's that simple.
00:18:02.000 One migrant interviewed by CNN says that border agents are telling him to wait until Title 42 ends to cross the border.
00:18:09.000 Well, again, the reason Border Patrol is saying that is because that is Biden administration policy.
00:18:13.000 Biden administration policy is Title 42 means I have to turn you away.
00:18:16.000 When Title 42, which is COVID policy, saying that you might have COVID so we can just turn you away for public health reasons.
00:18:21.000 When that goes away, then you can come back and can apply normally, which means a flood of people to the border.
00:18:25.000 Here's a migrant interviewed by CNN.
00:18:27.000 The reporter explains.
00:18:29.000 Gustavo, what are you seeing there?
00:18:32.000 Not only are these people getting in, we have all these people pondering when to pass.
00:18:38.000 Most of them I've been talking to, they are from Venezuela.
00:18:42.000 They are telling me that some of them already tried to go in.
00:18:45.000 Some of them are saying that once they get there, the agent tells them that this is not the right time.
00:18:52.000 A lot of people told me to at least wait, not to waste my time giving up because they were going to take me to another border.
00:19:01.000 The right thing to do would be after the 21st, I would have a chance to answer because Title 42 would go away. Everybody knows what's going on here. Even the former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, under Barack Obama, he says migrants know that they can simply game the asylum walls. They can show up, they can be processed, they can show up for one court appearance, they can disappear into the interior waiting for somebody to amnesty them, which is probably what will happen.
00:19:21.000 These people are going to be here for years because the asylum claims, the immigration claims take years to go through because the system is so overwhelmed.
00:19:32.000 How does this get fixed?
00:19:36.000 Well, Anderson, first of all, the courts have gotten way too involved in what traditionally has been an area where the courts defer to the political branches of government to the point where our policy is Muddled and confusing.
00:19:50.000 One week it's, no you have to end Title 42.
00:19:53.000 Another week it's, no you have to keep it.
00:19:55.000 Clearly, the state of our asylum system and our laws is one of the reasons that migrants come here.
00:20:05.000 Oh, really?
00:20:06.000 I mean, if only you had been the Department of Homeland Security head under Barack Obama and you'd actually changed the state of the laws and made it clear that people should not come here unless they have a legit asylum claim.
00:20:14.000 If only you had done something about that.
00:20:17.000 Oh, well.
00:20:18.000 Well, Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, quite correctly says our border is wide open, which of course is true.
00:20:23.000 Here's the senator from Arkansas.
00:20:25.000 Terry Mayorkas, do you continue to maintain that the border is secure?
00:20:31.000 Yes, and we are working day in and day out to enhance its security, Congressman.
00:20:36.000 First of all, what's your reaction when you hear Mayorkas denying the words that... And we have more tape, but it's only an hour show.
00:20:45.000 Yeah, Harris, those are the words of a delusional ideologue.
00:20:49.000 Of course our border is wide open.
00:20:51.000 Since Joe Biden took office, more than 5 million illegal aliens have entered our country.
00:20:59.000 I mean, that's an insane statistic.
00:21:00.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:21:02.000 First, the situation in Ukraine, it's getting worse and worse.
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00:23:09.000 So, how does the White House respond?
00:23:11.000 The White House responds in two ways.
00:23:12.000 One, they pretend everything is hunky-dory.
00:23:15.000 And two, they activate the media to pretend that you noticing is the problem.
00:23:19.000 So, over the weekend, the White House said that ending Title 42 does not mean that the border is wide open.
00:23:24.000 The border is still shut.
00:23:25.000 Everything is secure.
00:23:25.000 Everything is good.
00:23:26.000 Here's Fox News reporting.
00:23:28.000 Now the White House reacting last night to this ruling in a statement saying quote to be clear the lifting of the title 42 public health order does not mean the borders open anyone who suggests otherwise is doing the work of smugglers spreading misinformation to make a quick buck off of vulnerable migrants despite the White House pointing the finger at Republicans some Democrats are directly contradicting the White House warning of what they say will be a tidal wave of illegal migrants expected to come to the U.S.
00:23:56.000 on top of the more than two million in the past year.
00:23:59.000 The gall of these people.
00:24:01.000 So 5 million people have entered the country legally since Joe Biden took office.
00:24:05.000 And if you notice it, it's you that's the problem.
00:24:08.000 So it's us saying the border is open under Joe Biden that's causing people to come up and try to cross the border.
00:24:13.000 It's not the border actually being open, it's that they are misinformed all those people.
00:24:17.000 That's the real problem.
00:24:18.000 So Martha Raddatz, doing the work of the legacy media, which is essentially just the Praetorian Guard for the Democratic Party.
00:24:24.000 Martha Raddatz over at ABC News, she was talking to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Abbott was saying, Joe Biden is leaving the border open.
00:24:29.000 She's like, well, Joe Biden says he's not leaving the border open.
00:24:31.000 You're saying he's leaving the border open.
00:24:33.000 So it's your fault.
00:24:34.000 If you wouldn't, if you weren't out there saying that Joe Biden was leaving the border open, no one would know.
00:24:37.000 It would be a big secret.
00:24:38.000 And then the border wouldn't be open.
00:24:41.000 This is amazing.
00:24:42.000 I mean, this is just gaslighting at the highest level.
00:24:45.000 So you do a bad thing.
00:24:47.000 And then we notice you doing the bad thing.
00:24:49.000 And then the media say the bad thing is happening because you noticed.
00:24:53.000 Not because the person originally is doing a bad thing, but because you noticed.
00:24:56.000 And because you noticed and you said something, other people are taking from that that the bad thing is happening, which they wouldn't have known in the first place unless you said it.
00:25:04.000 By this token, by the way, you should disband the entire media because the media actually cover bad things happening.
00:25:08.000 Then they are obviously promulgating the bad thing that's happening.
00:25:11.000 Anytime the media promulgate a story in which somebody does something bad and then people react to that story, then it's the media's fault.
00:25:18.000 So probably should just disband the media by Martha Raddatz's logic.
00:25:20.000 Here's ABC News's Martha Raddatz doing the work of the Biden administration.
00:25:26.000 I don't think I've ever heard President Biden say, we have an open board, come on over.
00:25:32.000 But people I have heard say it are you, are former President Trump, are Ron DeSantis.
00:25:39.000 That message reverberates.
00:25:44.000 In Mexico and beyond.
00:25:46.000 So they do get the message that it is an open border and smugglers use all those kinds of statements.
00:25:53.000 It was known from the time that Joe Biden got elected that Joe Biden supported open borders.
00:25:59.000 It is known by the cartels, they have sophisticated information, whether or not the Biden administration is going to enforce the immigration laws or not.
00:26:08.000 That's obviously true.
00:26:09.000 It's not that Greg Abbott said it, so people down in El Salvador are like, okay, time to cross the border.
00:26:15.000 It's that everyone knows the border is open, and that's why people are rushing up to the border.
00:26:18.000 Okay, none of that solves the underlying problem.
00:26:20.000 Let's say that every Republican tomorrow stopped saying that the border was open.
00:26:23.000 Do you think people would stop coming?
00:26:24.000 Or do you think maybe it's the bad policy that is facilitating all this?
00:26:27.000 And this obviously raises the question as to why the Biden administration keeps pushing bad policy.
00:26:32.000 Why don't they close the border?
00:26:33.000 Why did they stop the building of Trump's border wall?
00:26:37.000 Why are they getting rid of Title 42 without anything to make up for its absence?
00:26:40.000 Why did they try to end the Remain in Mexico policy?
00:26:43.000 Why are they doing all these things?
00:26:45.000 And the answer is pretty obvious.
00:26:46.000 I mean, Chuck Schumer actually said it out loud not all that long ago.
00:26:50.000 Chuck Schumer said, there aren't enough people in the United States to do a bunch of the low-level work, and so we have to ship in low-education, illegal immigrants into the country.
00:26:58.000 That was Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, who said that.
00:27:01.000 Not me.
00:27:02.000 Not promulgators of the so-called Great Replacement Theory.
00:27:04.000 Chuck Schumer.
00:27:05.000 So we're not having enough kids in this country, and so we have to ship in immigrants.
00:27:08.000 And if they have to come illegally, they have to come illegally.
00:27:11.000 This is a purposeful policy by this administration.
00:27:13.000 That's the only reason you have five million people who have crossed the border since the beginning of this administration.
00:27:18.000 That's an amazing statistic.
00:27:20.000 And the media had an interest in looking the other way, effectively speaking, because they all agree with the administration.
00:27:25.000 And so this is one of those issues that sort of flares up.
00:27:27.000 It's like a bad case of gonorrhea.
00:27:29.000 Every so often, it just flares up into the American public mind.
00:27:31.000 And then it goes away when the media stopped covering it.
00:27:34.000 Just suffice it to say, Joe Biden has still never been to the border because Joe Biden does not care about border policy.
00:27:38.000 He's too busy with his big spending policy.
00:27:41.000 And here's the reality.
00:27:42.000 A giant welfare state is reliant on new blood coming in and providing the labor fodder for that welfare state.
00:27:48.000 Now, the problem is when you bring in a lot of people who then become dependent on welfare, you actually exacerbate the problem.
00:27:53.000 Another problem is when you bring a lot of people in with no intention of assimilating them to American rights and duties, then you've actually changed the nature of the country.
00:28:00.000 But Joe Biden doesn't care about any of that.
00:28:02.000 For Democrats, it's all short-term gain and long-term pain.
00:28:06.000 But in the end, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the end, in the long run, we're all dead.
00:28:10.000 So who cares?
00:28:11.000 Speaking of people who are nearly dead, who are going to continue running for president, Joe Biden is still planning on running for president.
00:28:18.000 Both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer over the weekend said that Joe Biden should run again.
00:28:20.000 Why not?
00:28:21.000 I mean, Nancy Pelosi is well into her 200th year.
00:28:24.000 So why exactly shouldn't Joe Biden run again?
00:28:26.000 He's a spring chicken by the standards of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
00:28:30.000 Do you think President Biden should step aside for a younger generation?
00:28:37.000 I think President Biden has done an excellent job as President of the United States.
00:28:42.000 I hope that he does seek re-election.
00:28:45.000 He's a person with a great vision for our country.
00:28:50.000 He's been doing an amazing job, says Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer at the Old Age Home.
00:28:56.000 By the way, it is amazing that the Biden team is now apparently prepping a strategy for his likely 2024 re-election campaign, according to the Washington Post.
00:28:56.000 Amazing job.
00:29:04.000 It would dramatically expand efforts to organize content sharing between supporters and their friends on digital platforms, including TikTok and WhatsApp, where political advertising is not allowed, according to people involved in that effort.
00:29:13.000 So here's the rule when it comes to the use of technology in order to facilitate campaigns.
00:29:17.000 When Democrats do it, it's amazing and wondrous, and the platforms are great.
00:29:20.000 When Republicans do it, it's evil.
00:29:22.000 This is what we saw in 2012, when Barack Obama successfully used Facebook in order to mobilize an extraordinarily large voting base.
00:29:29.000 And then in 2016, when Cambridge Analytica was using data from Facebook in order to target voters, then Facebook became evil.
00:29:36.000 So I'm sure we're about to see the same thing with TikTok and WhatsApp.
00:29:39.000 According to the Washington Post, the plans, which build upon lessons from the 2020 campaign, are one part of an expensive research effort funded by the DNC to prepare for Biden's expected campaign launch next year.
00:29:48.000 Top advisors have been testing ways to reactivate volunteers and donors.
00:29:51.000 They completed a review this summer of the shifts in how voters consume political information over the past two years.
00:29:56.000 The review found phone-based apps and streaming television have grabbed an increasing share of attention from voters, which offer fewer opportunities for direct advertising.
00:30:03.000 Local television news continues to be popular.
00:30:05.000 So does search engines.
00:30:07.000 But much of the focus of party strategists has been on groups of voters who are increasingly spending time consuming information in private digital environments, mostly through their phones or on public platforms where paid political advertising is not actually available, including chat threads.
00:30:18.000 Democratic strategists have concluded that in many cases, volunteers can have more impact by creating or distributing content to their digital communities than by spending their time in a more traditional canvassing operation.
00:30:27.000 So basically, they're not going to activate all of your friend list in order to bother you on WhatsApp about voting for Joe Biden.
00:30:33.000 This is their plan.
00:30:35.000 And it may work.
00:30:37.000 And it will be considered a brilliant digital plan up until the moment that Republicans adopt the same plan, at which point these apps will be to blame.
00:30:42.000 And we'll have to have government regulation of WhatsApp to prevent just this sort of stuff.
00:30:46.000 Jen O'Malley Dillon, senior Biden advisor, said, quote, And hard.
00:30:53.000 As a result, the Biden team has been reviewing ongoing experiments run by the National Party and looking at Democratic Senate campaigns involving once obscure organizing strategies, which became more common in the 2022 midterms.
00:31:02.000 The options include paying social media influencers to promote and share supportive content.
00:31:06.000 That's not corrupt at all.
00:31:08.000 So you're now going to get, you know, the local makeup artist on TikTok to start advertising for Joe Biden, encouraging volunteers or paid organizers to directly push messages to targeted voters in their phone contacts.
00:31:19.000 There are also technologies the party has been reviewing that make it easier for volunteers to share campaign content to their networks.
00:31:25.000 Again, it's brilliant when Democrats do it.
00:31:27.000 It's very bad when Republicans do it.
00:31:28.000 So watch for that emerging narrative.
00:31:30.000 Now, there's only one problem for Joe Biden in all of this, and that is that he's still a bad president.
00:31:34.000 I mean, I know that we keep pretending that Joe Biden is an amazing president because he dodged the bullet in 2022.
00:31:40.000 But the reality is that if you look at Joe Biden's job approval rating, that dude is still way underwater.
00:31:46.000 According to the latest Harvard-Harris poll, he's still down at 42% approval rating.
00:31:51.000 According to Reuters, he's down at 39% approval rating.
00:31:55.000 The only one that even has him in spitting distance of 50% is YouGov, which still has him at 45%.
00:32:01.000 His overall RealClearPolitics polling average, Joe Biden's job approval, is 43%.
00:32:05.000 These are not good numbers.
00:32:07.000 These are terrible numbers for Joe Biden.
00:32:10.000 And yet, the Democratic Party seems to believe that this guy is a big winner.
00:32:15.000 Again, the mask of the 2022 election could come back to really harm Democrats here.
00:32:19.000 They might think that he's doing an amazing job because they didn't get shellacked in 2022 because the Republicans raided the local homeless shelter for candidates.
00:32:26.000 But as it turns out, Joe Biden is an extraordinarily weak candidate, which presumably is just another reason why the January 6th committee is going ahead with a bunch of criminal referrals for Donald Trump.
00:32:35.000 The goal is sort of a win-win for them.
00:32:39.000 They get to either criminally refer Donald Trump and then he's prosecuted, in which case they get to ask every single Republican about Donald Trump's prosecution in January 6th and make election of 2024 about 2020.
00:32:49.000 Or they fail and they somehow allow Donald Trump to regain coherence and they sort of jog Trump to new heights in the polling, which very often happens.
00:33:00.000 When Democrats attack Trump, Republicans naturally tend to move into Trump's corner.
00:33:04.000 That's what happened after the Mar-a-Lago raids.
00:33:06.000 Right after the Mar-a-Lago raids, A lot of Republicans moved.
00:33:09.000 If you look at Joe Biden's job, he was being unfairly targeted, which seems to have been true based on the fact that he was not actively attempting to disseminate serious classified information or any classified information to foreign powers.
00:33:22.000 So Democrats could be looking at a win-win with the January 6th committee result, which is why it was always rigged in the first place.
00:33:27.000 We'll get to that in just a moment.
00:33:28.000 Well, folks, the holiday season is officially upon us.
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00:34:21.000 Okay, so if Joe Biden is an extraordinarily weak candidate, then he has to rely on Republicans sucking at this in order to win again in 2024.
00:34:29.000 And this is presumably where the January 6th committee came in.
00:34:31.000 It's why so many Republicans were very upset with people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for doing cover for the January 6th committee.
00:34:37.000 Because they weren't there to ask holistic questions about what Congress could do to prevent further events like January 6th.
00:34:42.000 Instead, the whole thing was about how do we provide fodder for Democrats so they can turn the entirety of Campaign 2022 and 2024 into a referendum on whether January 6th was bad or not.
00:34:53.000 Well, now we are reaching the end of the January 6th Committee.
00:34:56.000 According to Politico, the House January 6th Select Committee meets at 1 p.m.
00:34:59.000 today to vote on its final report and possible criminal referrals against Donald Trump.
00:35:04.000 Apparently, Kyle Cheney says that the House January 6th Committee is convening this afternoon to wrap up business.
00:35:11.000 They are going to fill in the record.
00:35:13.000 Their decision, it says Kyle Cheney, to recommend criminal charges for Donald Trump will suck up a lot of oxygen.
00:35:17.000 The more significant development will be the sheer volume of new details and information the panel supplies to back up the eye-popping contentions in their report.
00:35:23.000 For instance, I want to know what evidence of witness tampering the committee has, which they've teased during some of the public hearings.
00:35:28.000 Now, here's the reality.
00:35:29.000 They've been teasing all along in the same way that Adam Schiff kept teasing and teasing and teasing that there was going to be a Russian collusion bombshell that never actually dropped.
00:35:35.000 They've been teasing all along.
00:35:37.000 There was going to be some bombshell showing that Trump knew it was illegal to seek Alternative slates of electors knew he had lost and therefore was attempting to subvert the Constitution and finding an alternative slate of electors.
00:35:47.000 I have serious doubt as to whether they're gonna be able to prove that actual case.
00:35:52.000 In reality, it's very likely that the January 6th committee was always going to do this.
00:35:57.000 Whether the DOJ acts on it is fairly irrelevant at this point.
00:36:00.000 They'll get the headline.
00:36:01.000 The DOJ, of course, already has a special counsel working on the January 6th case as well as the Mar-a-Lago case.
00:36:08.000 The DOJ has already brought in some of the highest level figures in Trump's orbit, according to Kyle Cheney over at Politico, reaching the upper echelons of his administration.
00:36:15.000 That's usually a sign of a mature investigation that could be nearing a charging decision.
00:36:19.000 And also there's a Fulton County grand jury, which has similarly fought in one battle to obtain testimony from many of Trump's top aides.
00:36:25.000 Again, what is the goal here?
00:36:26.000 The goal here, presumably, is to hang January 6th around Republicans' neck from here until the end of time.
00:36:33.000 It worked in 2022, of course.
00:36:33.000 And they have to do this.
00:36:35.000 And many of the people that Donald Trump sided with, many of the people who are most strong about their claims that the 2020 election was overtly stolen and that Trump actually won, went down in flaming defeat in their various senatorial races.
00:36:45.000 There's a major factor in Republicans not taking back the Senate this year, the first election in an extraordinarily long time in which not a single incumbent on the Democratic Party side of the aisle lost in the Senate.
00:36:56.000 An amazing accomplishment.
00:36:58.000 Apparently, according to Politico, the White House is closely watching whether the committee refers House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and Representative Jim Jordan for ethics sanctions after defying the panel subpoenas.
00:37:07.000 You can bet that Biden allies will frequently cite their obstinance in the media and potentially in the courts as the GOP sends subpoenas down Pennsylvania Avenue starting on January 3rd.
00:37:15.000 A person familiar with the White House's thinking summarized the message sent by the likely new Speaker and Judiciary Committee Chair.
00:37:20.000 Subpoenas for thee, but not for me.
00:37:21.000 So they're going to attempt to essentially suggest that they don't have to abide by any subpoenas because Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan didn't decide to show up in front of the Congressional Committee to be grilled by their fellow legislators.
00:37:35.000 Adam Schiff, who is a misinformation font par excellence.
00:37:39.000 It's what he does.
00:37:40.000 He's just a continuous spout of misinformation.
00:37:43.000 And also a person who actually has put up a pup tent outside the CNN green room.
00:37:49.000 He was on the national TVs over the weekend explaining that there is evidence that Trump committed criminal offenses.
00:37:53.000 Now, in reality, Congress does not have the power to charge, obviously.
00:37:58.000 And the DOJ is going to be determining whether they even think that he committed criminal offenses.
00:38:01.000 And then there'll have to be a jury trial if, in fact, they think there were criminal offenses occurred.
00:38:05.000 I'm not going to listen to Adam Schiff on this.
00:38:07.000 Talk about somebody who's blowing out his credibility.
00:38:10.000 Do you think the evidence is there that Donald Trump committed any of the crimes I just mentioned, and that the cases are prosecutable?
00:38:17.000 That you could get a conviction?
00:38:19.000 I think that the evidence is there that Donald Trump committed criminal offenses in connection with his efforts to overturn the election.
00:38:27.000 And viewing it as a former prosecutor, I think there's sufficient evidence to charge the President.
00:38:37.000 Uh, nobody believes you, Adam Schiff.
00:38:39.000 This is part of the problem.
00:38:39.000 When you blow out your credibility, you don't get it back quite that quickly.
00:38:42.000 You know, Adam Schiff let the cat out of the bag here.
00:38:44.000 He basically said, I hope that they charge him in the middle of all of this because I want it to still be politically relevant.
00:38:50.000 This has been the Democrats' chief goal from the beginning is to keep Donald Trump at the center of the public conversation because the more people are talking about Trump, the less they're talking about Joe Biden doing a crappy job and allowing, for example, 5 million illegal immigrants into the country.
00:39:00.000 Here's Adam Schiff saying the quiet part out loud here.
00:39:03.000 Do you think That Donald Trump is going to face some kind of criminal charges in the coming months, independent from your investigation?
00:39:14.000 The short answer is, I don't know.
00:39:15.000 I think that he should.
00:39:18.000 I think he should face the same remedy, force of law that anyone else would.
00:39:23.000 But I do worry that it may take until he is no longer politically relevant for justice to be served.
00:39:32.000 That's what he's worried about.
00:39:33.000 He wants it done while Trump is politically relevant.
00:39:36.000 He wants to smack Republicans with it.
00:39:38.000 Now, the reality, of course, is that the FBI, the DOJ, they're very often reluctant to get involved in issues that impact campaigns.
00:39:46.000 This was a story with Hillary Clinton in 2016, for example.
00:39:48.000 It's why there was major controversy over James Comey opening his mouth.
00:39:51.000 But Adam Schiff would like for this to happen while Trump is politically relevant.
00:39:55.000 This is their saving grace.
00:39:57.000 And Democrats cannot rely on their own good governance here in order to shift them into high gear for 2024.
00:40:01.000 They're going to have to rely on Republicans being bad at this.
00:40:05.000 Now, the good news for them is that they can always find some Republicans who are bad at this.
00:40:08.000 This is an insane story.
00:40:09.000 Apparently, there is a representative-elect named George Santos.
00:40:12.000 He's a Republican from New York.
00:40:15.000 And there's a report in the New York Times that basically says that, you know, we'll take it with a grain of salt.
00:40:20.000 It's the New York Times.
00:40:20.000 We'll see what Santos responds.
00:40:22.000 But it seems like this dude has falsified an extraordinary number of aspects of his actual biography.
00:40:27.000 Again, Congress is filled with all sorts of weirdos.
00:40:29.000 I know a lot of Congress people on both sides of the aisle.
00:40:32.000 Not the world's finest.
00:40:34.000 It's not the best people, but this particular story is pretty insane.
00:40:37.000 According to the New York Times, George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion he was the full embodiment of the American dream and was running to safeguard it for others.
00:40:48.000 His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey.
00:40:50.000 He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent.
00:40:55.000 By his account, the He catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a seasoned Wall Street financier and investor with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
00:41:06.000 But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the U.S.
00:41:09.000 and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the resume he sold to voters.
00:41:18.000 Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Santos's campaign biography, told the Times they had no record of his ever working there.
00:41:25.000 Officials at Baruch College, which Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
00:41:35.000 There is also little evidence his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization.
00:41:40.000 The IRS has no record of a registered charity with that name.
00:41:43.000 His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth.
00:41:46.000 He lends his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years, and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.
00:41:57.000 But the firm is something of a mystery.
00:41:59.000 On a campaign website, Santos once described Devolder as his family firm that manages $80 million in assets.
00:42:04.000 On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors.
00:42:13.000 But Santos' disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if there are clients.
00:42:19.000 And while Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed records of his properties.
00:42:25.000 At the same time, new revelations uncovered by the Times have the potential to create ethical and legal challenges once he takes office.
00:42:31.000 Santos responded to no request from the Times that he furnish either documents or a resume with dates that would substantiate any of the claims he made on the campaign trail.
00:42:40.000 Santos has said he was born in Queens to parents who immigrated from Brazil and was raised in the borough.
00:42:45.000 His father, he has said, is Catholic and has roots in Angola.
00:42:47.000 His mother was descended from migrants who fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine in World War II strife in Belgium.
00:42:51.000 Santos says he's a non-observant Jew but also has said he is a Catholic.
00:42:55.000 But apparently, in 2008, when he was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records.
00:43:02.000 Police and court records show Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes.
00:43:06.000 Here's the bottom line.
00:43:07.000 If it turns out that these aspects of his biography were falsified, it's going to be a real problem for not just him, but the Republican Party, considering that the Republican majority in the House is about five seats at this point.
00:43:21.000 I mean, Republicans cannot afford to lose people in the majority.
00:43:24.000 This is why it matters, the outcomes of elections, and it's also why parties should run better candidates.
00:43:29.000 Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
00:43:31.000 You're not going to want to miss it.
00:43:31.000 We'll be taking your calls.
00:43:33.000 Plus, Japan is beginning to arm up in anticipation of what could be a very volatile situation with China.