Rep. Kevin McCarthy keeps falling short in his bid to become House Speaker, as the Republican holdouts offer no alternative and Democrats laugh. Ben Shapiro explains why the stakes are so low, and what it means for the future of the Republican Party. Plus, Jordan Peterson falls under the thumb of the Canadian political commissars, and a look at how the government manipulates the media. All that and much more on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new podcast, The Bench Bureau, wherever you get your shows, and don t forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever else you re listening. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! You can also become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron patron by clicking the patron support link below. Thanks to our sponsor, SeatGeek.co/TheBENBORING for sponsoring the show and supporting Ben Shapiro s new book, "The Best Seat in the House" out on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. Thanks also to our patron, . for supporting the show. The show is now available on Audible, iTunes, and VaynerSpeaker.co and Podchaser for sponsoring this episode. If you like the show, please consider leaving a rating and review the show on iTunes and leaving us a review! Thank you for supporting us! in the comments section below! and we'll be looking out for new episodes in the next few weeks. and next week, we'll send you a review of your thoughts and reviews on the next episode of "The Bench Bureau show! on Monday, November 18th! Thanks, Ben Shapiro Thanks Ben Shapiro is @ Ben Shapiro: The BenchBureau: The Best Seat at The Benchboro Show: @ bencrane: , & Jordan Peterson: #Ben Shapiro: @ #The Benchboro: ) Also: . . @ , @ & , and at ? Is there any chance of a new House Speaker candidate? or is a candidate in the future? ? . Or is there a chance of becoming Speaker of the House Speaker? , or ? & ? @ @ @ ? ?
00:00:00.000Representative Kevin McCarthy keeps falling short in his bid for House Speaker as the Republican holdouts offer no alternative and Democrats laugh.
00:00:07.000More Twitter files drop, demonstrating the indirect manipulation of that service by the government and Jordan Peterson falls under the thumb of the Canadian political commissars.
00:00:40.000The stakes for the speakership of the House are incredibly low at this point because all the leader of the House basically has to do is say no to most of Joe Biden's proposals.
00:00:48.000There are certain things that the Speaker of the House, no matter who it is, is not going to do.
00:00:51.000Those things include an interminable government shutdown with no end.
00:00:54.000I know that there are some people who think that if you get a conservative enough leader in the Speakership of the House, that person is just never going to sign a check ever again as Speaker of the House.
00:01:02.000That is not going to happen because that would be political suicide.
00:01:04.000This has been proven over the course of the last 10 years, repeatedly, overtly, over and over and over again.
00:01:12.000Then there's the question as to whether Kevin McCarthy is going to surrender more often than another alternative conservative leader.
00:01:17.000This would posit the presence of another alternative conservative leader.
00:01:21.000Now, if you could provide me a name, then maybe I'd consider it.
00:01:24.000Since you can't provide me a name, and since the only viable alternatives have already endorsed Kevin McCarthy, it makes it very difficult to see exactly what the strategy of the people who are holding out on McCarthy is.
00:01:33.000Now, if they were holding out to gain some sort of procedural Recompense.
00:01:38.000If they were holding out in order to get some sort of surrender from McCarthy on key issues that matter, that might make sense as well.
00:01:45.000Last night on his show, for example, Tucker Carlson suggested that Kevin McCarthy should promise to the holdouts that he's going to release all of the material from the January 6th commission.
00:01:53.000I mean, if that's what they wanted, that'd be totally great.
00:02:12.000I know this because I'm speaking to many congresspeople, like, pretty much every hour now.
00:02:16.000And what they are saying is that behind closed doors, the people who are making the demands of McCarthy aren't actually making any material demands.
00:02:24.000What they are enjoying is the spectacle of being at the center of the political conversation, sort of in the same way that the squad on the left side of the aisle enjoys being the spectacle at the center of the political conversation on the left.
00:02:35.000Well, the problem right now is that all the incentive structures in the Republican Party cut against a cohesive Republican Party because the Republican Party effectively has no power anymore.
00:02:43.000In a time when political parties had a lot of power over their members, the power to reward and to punish members for sticking with the party or for moving against the party, there are incentive structures in place to ensure a cohesive level Inside the party, this no longer exists.
00:02:57.000Very often, Congress people are independent enough to basically be running without party.
00:03:02.000And what that means is that it's going to be very difficult for any coalition to cobble itself together as a majority with this small majority, which is why it really mattered an awful lot in November when Republicans walked away with a very, very small, bare majority, as opposed to walking away with 235 plus seats.
00:03:17.000There's a lot of attempts by people like Ronna Romney McDaniel, the incompetent head of the RNC, to suggest that there was going to be some sort of Victory for Republicans, because after all, Nancy Pelosi wasn't going to be Speaker of the House.
00:03:28.000Well, now it seems like there's like half a chance that Hakeem Jeffries could actually be Speaker of the House with a minority in the House.
00:03:34.000Because here is how this process is currently working.
00:03:36.000Right now, every single bit of House business is held up because the House Speaker has to be elected.
00:03:40.000There's been a foregone conclusion for 100 years.
00:03:42.000For 100 years, there has not been somebody who has been, who's not been elected Speaker of the House on the first ballot.
00:03:51.000So now I guess the idea is that Kevin McCarthy is such a bad man that he can't be the guy who's the Speaker of the House.
00:03:56.000Instead, we're going to have like multiple ballots.
00:03:57.000This is going to go on for days or weeks or months with no end in actual sight and no alternative, no viable alternative being put forward.
00:04:06.000In any case, the actual way that this process works, you have to get a majority of the members who are currently sitting.
00:04:10.000What that means is that if you have enough members who abstain, theoretically, you get a majority of the remaining members.
00:04:16.000You can have a bunch of members vote present, for example, and in doing so remove themselves from the consideration of House Speaker. So right now you need 218 votes out of 435 in order to become House Speaker. If, however, say 100 members decided that they were going to vote present, then you'd need out of 335. So the number would drop pretty dramatically.
00:04:34.000That is one of the strategies that's being considered right now by some of the Republicans.
00:04:41.000Apparently McCarthy wants some of the disdaining Republicans to sit out.
00:04:46.000It's very unlikely these 20 Republicans who are voting against McCarthy are going to sit out the election and then sort of passively allow him to become Speaker of the House because what the hell is the point of that?
00:04:56.000Then there are a couple of other strategies, and these are very risky strategies.
00:04:59.000So, strategy number one is that you could get the House to vote at the behest of the Republican leadership in favor of changing the rule to elect the Speaker of the House.
00:05:07.000The way that would happen is instead of being elected by a majority, you could now be elected by a plurality.
00:05:12.000And now, here is the risk for Republicans.
00:05:14.000If you could be elected by a plurality, this means that the person who actually won the plurality of the last speakership vote, Hakeem Jeffries, could become Speaker.
00:05:21.000Because Democrats are unified in support of Hakeem Jeffries.
00:05:24.000There are 212 votes for Hakeem Jeffries.
00:05:27.000That's all the Democrats voting in unified fashion for Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the House.
00:05:31.000We'll get to more of the news in just one second.
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00:07:35.000Yesterday, Kevin McCarthy on the first ballot fell short by 20 of his own party votes.
00:07:44.000So that means Hakeem Jeffries actually beat Kevin McCarthy in the plurality vote.
00:07:47.000So if Kevin McCarthy were to basically say, we're changing the rules now by plurality vote, we elect the Speaker of the House.
00:07:53.000If you'd have to count on 11 Republicans peeling off that 20 and voting in favor of the Republican in order to stop Hakeem Jeffries from becoming Speaker of the House.
00:08:00.000Now, the problem is some of these Republicans have already said they don't mind if Hakeem Jeffries becomes Speaker of the House because then they'll just yell at him.
00:08:06.000And they'll just try to hold up party business because a majority will still be able to vote down whatever Hakeem Jeffries wants.
00:08:11.000Hakeem Jeffries will be in charge of the committees.
00:08:12.000But I thought that half the purpose of the Republicans taking over the House of Representatives when they have a minority position in the government, meaning that they don't actually control the Senate or the presidency.
00:08:22.000I thought that half the purpose was how you staff the committees, the investigative committees, the judiciary committee, and all the way.
00:08:27.000So you're willing to surrender all that to Hakeem Jeffries because you're pissed at Kevin McCarthy?
00:08:30.000I don't actually see the strategy here.
00:09:03.000There are no other candidates who are in the running other than Andy Biggs, who in an internal party poll won 35 votes against Kevin McCarthy's 180 or something.
00:09:34.000What concessions are you seeking from McCarthy?
00:09:35.000He's already attempted to give a bunch of concessions.
00:09:37.000You could probably pry some more concessions out of him, maybe.
00:09:41.000But that doesn't even seem like the strategy right now.
00:09:43.000It just seems the strategy right now is to be very angry about things.
00:09:46.000And I understand that politics is largely performative now.
00:09:49.000I understand that the reason that many people go into Congress is because they wish to become famous and because they wish to have a platform for their ideas.
00:09:56.000And again, I don't even argue with that.
00:09:57.000You want to go into Congress in order to have a platform for your ideas.
00:09:59.000You're not there to do the kind of nitty gritty work of the congressperson.
00:10:02.000The institution used to shape the people inside it.
00:10:05.000Now people inside the institution use it as a platform.
00:10:07.000This is the point that Yuval Levin has made, the philosopher from American Enterprise Institute.
00:10:11.000With all of that said, what are you achieving here?
00:10:15.000I just failed to understand what exactly it is that you are achieving.
00:10:19.000So, according to the Wall Street Journal, Kevin McCarthy fell short of winning the House Speaker's gavel in three rounds of voting on Tuesday, leaving the chamber without a leader as a determined block of conservative holdouts refused to relent over longstanding complaints about the direction of the party.
00:10:49.000By the way, you have to be kind of a nut to want to be Speaker of the House.
00:10:52.000Let me give you a brief history of the last Republican Speakers of the House.
00:10:56.000The last Republican Speaker of the House, starting in 1994, When Republicans took over the Congress or Newt Gingrich, he took over in 1994.
00:11:06.000And then Newt Gingrich, after the 1998 election, he was essentially on his way out after that election because 1998 didn't go the way he wanted.
00:11:14.000And then he was caught in extramarital affair and all of this.
00:11:16.000And so Newt Gingrich had to step down.
00:11:18.000The person who's supposed to succeed him, Bob Livingston, Actually ended up not because he was engaged in an affair of his own.
00:11:24.000And so he ended up stepping outside of Congress.
00:11:26.000The person who picked up was Denny Hastert.
00:11:28.000Denny Hastert was the House Speaker from 2000 until 2006 when the Republicans lost the Congress.
00:11:34.000He is now in jail for having molested a teenage boy.
00:11:38.000Then John Boehner took over in 2010 when the Republicans won 60 seats.
00:11:43.000You'll recall that John Boehner was largely hated by the right wing because there was a feeling that he had given in too easily to Barack Obama.
00:11:50.000He didn't go along with the attempts to shut down the government more strongly.
00:11:54.000And he had a bad habit of crying in public and looking weak in front of Barack Obama.
00:11:58.000He didn't look like sort of a stalwart leader.
00:12:00.000So they decided to defenestrate John Boehner.
00:12:02.000And John Boehner stepped down in 2016 for no actual reason, right?
00:12:16.000Paul Ryan had to be forced into the position of House Speaker.
00:12:18.000He didn't want that position because who the hell wants the head of this fractious caucus?
00:12:22.000Very, very difficult to run anything inside the House of Representatives right now.
00:12:27.000The Republican Party is like herding cats.
00:12:28.000The Democrats are rank and file, right in line.
00:12:31.000As much as we like to talk about the squad and the internal battles between Nancy Pelosi and the squad, when it came down to the vote, the squad knew where its bread was buttered.
00:12:37.000Because Nancy Pelosi still held the purse strings.
00:12:39.000She was the one who was raising all the money.
00:12:41.000She still had the entire party apparatus behind her.
00:12:43.000Because the Republican Party has fractured six ways from Sunday, they essentially have no leverage over their own members.
00:12:47.000Okay, so Paul Ryan takes over in 2015.
00:12:52.000This was not the intent of the conservatives inside the party, by the way.
00:12:54.000Many of the conservatives inside the party, they were OK with Ryan on fiscal issues, but they're like, why are you making restructuring of Social Security your number one issue as opposed to a wide variety of other issues?
00:13:04.000So Paul Ryan was not popular with sort of the rank and file conservative members, but he was the only person who they could actually get to take the job.
00:13:10.000And they give him all sorts of sort of perks in order to take the job.
00:13:13.000A lot of control over the way that the agenda was run.
00:13:17.000In 2018, the Republicans lose the Congress, Nancy Pelosi takes back over, and now we have this battle over Kevin McCarthy, which means the Republican Party has had effectively two somewhat effective speakers of the House over the course of the last 20 years.
00:13:30.000Newt Gingrich for maybe a term and a half, and then Denny Hastert was a fairly effective House leader from the time that he took over until the time that he lost power in 2006 and was putting aside all of his personal evils.
00:14:43.000We owe it to them, the American people, the good people of this great country, to step forward, to come together, get a Speaker elected, so we can address these three things.
00:14:53.000I hope you'll vote for Kevin McCarthy, and that's why I'm proud to nominate him for Speaker of the House.
00:14:59.000Okay, so and then people like Elise Stefanik, who many were saying, maybe she'll run again.
00:15:36.000And so what they've been asking of the Speaker of the House is to basically guarantee, for example, that it's going to require a two thirds majority in the House to approve any earmark.
00:15:43.000That means no legislation ever gets passed again in the House of Representatives.
00:15:46.000As much as I would love For the pure, unbridled, conservative policy to be the only policy that gets done in Congress?
00:15:52.000That is not the way that Congress works.
00:15:55.000That is cruising for an electoral bruising.
00:16:51.000When he says that he wants some sort of solution to stop the spending, well, I mean, I'm all ears.
00:16:59.000You can move through regular order, and then if the Democrats in the Senate don't move forward with regular order and Joe Biden vetoes the legislation and there's no defense spending and the government shuts down again, who do you think gets blamed?
00:17:53.000And then Chip Roy suggested that members of the caucus were threatened.
00:17:57.000They were threatened by Kevin McCarthy and the House leadership that if they didn't vote for McCarthy, they'd be stripped of their committee assignments.
00:18:02.000Well, I mean, I'm not super shocked by that, considering that that's basically the only leverage that the party has over its members to cudgel them into line.
00:18:12.000And this morning, a group of folks threatened some of us, and they lost votes on that.
00:18:18.000We're not going to back down until we get in a room and we decide how we're going to be able to stand up and fight for the American people, no matter who the speaker is.
00:18:25.000Congressman, you just used the word threatened there in the House GOP conference meeting this morning.
00:18:33.000Well, it's been public information out there that Mike Rogers threatened to say he's going to kick those of us off of any committees who dared to challenge the coronation of the Speaker.
00:18:42.000And the reality is, that was a threat, and it was not received well by a lot of people in the room.
00:18:48.000Well, again, I'm not surprised that there was that threat that was leveraged.
00:18:51.000I mean, this is what other threats do you have?
00:18:53.000Not to fund campaigns, not to put you on committees like that's pretty much it.
00:18:56.000That's the only leverage that the party has over its members.
00:18:58.000And the answer apparently is that the party has no leverage over its members, which is why the caucus is extremely fractious.
00:19:03.000Matt Getz is speaking sort of the same language as Chip Roy, suggesting that Kevin McCarthy is a quote unquote swamp creature.
00:19:09.000I really need a definition of swamp creature.
00:19:12.000I do, because it just seems like it's a broad catch-all term that means people I don't like.
00:19:16.000Again, I think pretty much everybody in D.C.
00:20:23.000Okay, well, one of the reasons that the Speaker of the House sometimes refuses to bring up legislation that sounds great to me and sounds great to Matt Gaetz is because it doesn't have the votes.
00:20:31.000You don't bring up policies that don't have the votes if you're the Speaker of the House.
00:20:38.000One of the things you generally don't want to do is bring up, by your own party, in the majority, legislation that is not going to get the votes.
00:20:45.000You don't have the votes for term limits.
00:21:05.000It would be foolish for Republicans to bring up a piece of legislation that is overtly not going to pass and is going to be humiliating to the Republican leadership when it turns out that half the Republicans don't vote for it.
00:21:16.000Is there any political point other than to humiliate your own party?
00:21:19.000So Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one of the other representatives who's voting against McCarthy, he said McCarthy hasn't done enough to stem government spending.
00:21:25.000He said, quote, we're going bankrupt if we're not already.
00:21:27.000When we asked what plan he has, he just doesn't have one.
00:21:49.000What are you going to bargain against yourself?
00:21:52.000There's no clear, there's no actual clear strategy out here.
00:21:58.000And here's the thing, many of the people who are voting against Kevin McCarthy are saying they're doing so in the name of the MAGA agenda.
00:22:03.000You know who's repeatedly endorsed Kevin McCarthy, like over and over and over again?
00:22:07.000Donald Trump has endorsed Kevin McCarthy over and over again.
00:22:09.000Including this morning, quote, some really good conversations took place last night.
00:22:12.000It's now time for all of our great Republican House members to vote for Kevin, close the deal, take the victory and watch crazy Nancy Pelosi fly back home to a very broken California.
00:22:30.000So we'll see if Kevin, by the way, if Trump doesn't actually have any leverage over these members.
00:22:34.000Then his position in the party really has waned.
00:22:37.000If these 20 members can't follow Trump on this one, then it's very unclear exactly who his support base is in 2024.
00:22:44.000We'll get to more of the news in just one second.
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00:24:59.000In fact, we know so little about the strategy that it appears that some of Kevin McCarthy's allies are warning conservatives that they might look across the aisle to find a compromise speaker to gain Democratic votes in order to force these Republicans to vote for McCarthy, right?
00:25:12.000This is the strategy I was talking about earlier, is that you might have Kevin McCarthy's allies bring up a vote to change the Speaker of the House rules to plurality.
00:25:20.000Which would create the actual threat that Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader on the minority side of the aisle, becomes Speaker of the House, is how you sort of pry away 11 of those Republican votes to vote in favor of Kevin McCarthy.
00:25:50.000It's so bad that apparently, according to Semaphore, which is one of these new news outlets, AOC, the irrepressibly idiotic AOC, She told Semaphore that Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar of Arizona approached her separately to ask if Democrats were considering leaving to clear the way for McCarthy, meaning would enough Democrats leave the chamber so that Republicans would then be able to vote McCarthy in with less than 218 votes.
00:26:17.000She said some of the Republicans who are holding out were wondering if that was true.
00:26:22.000So the question is, were they asking because they want the Democrats to leave so that McCarthy can be elected and then they can say it's not our fault?
00:26:32.000Whatever the goal is, it is pretty obvious what is being achieved, and that is that Democrats are jubilant over this.
00:26:38.000General rule of thumb in basic party politics.
00:26:40.000If the other side is jubilant over your activity, what you're doing is probably not super smart.
00:26:45.000Yesterday, Representative Pete Aguilar of California, he tore into the Republicans, mocked Kevin McCarthy, mocked the Republicans for not being able to get it done.
00:26:52.000This is the attitude of both the media and Democrats today.
00:26:54.000So again, if you are somebody who doesn't like the agenda of the left, perhaps you should stop giving them reasons to celebrate.
00:27:00.000We are unified behind a speaker who is an unapologetic advocate for protecting and expanding our freedoms.
00:27:58.000This does not have widespread consequences.
00:28:00.000What it does do is it again underscores one of the reasons Republicans did very poorly in the last election cycle.
00:28:05.000And one of the reasons Republicans did very poorly in the last election cycle is a general perception that Republicans are incompetent and foolish.
00:28:12.000It's not because people like Democrats.
00:28:18.000People are not in love with Mark Kelly.
00:28:20.000What happened is that Republicans ran a bunch of candidates who are not particularly good.
00:28:24.000And there is a generalized feeling among the populace that the Republicans are not capable of making their own breakfast.
00:28:30.000And when you keep demonstrating over and over again that you're not capable of making your own breakfast, people say, OK, well, I don't like those other guys, but at least they're capable of making their own breakfast.
00:28:41.000CNN's Anderson Cooper, of course, he was chortling over all of this and using this as an opportunity to jump both feet on Kevin McCarthy's throat.
00:28:49.000And it's already significant leverage that they've given away to these far-right individuals, and yet they're still not coming over to vote for him, which does suggest that the next Speaker of the House will be Steve Scalise.
00:29:01.000Yeah, I mean, their goal seems to be wanting to simply humiliate Kevin McCarthy and run him out of town.
00:29:22.000Again, the sort of incentive structure here, which is that 20 Republicans are going to control the other 200 Republicans, seems pretty skewed.
00:29:29.000And again, there's no one else out there who's willing to do it.
00:29:31.000If Jim Jordan were to step up today and say, I'll be Speaker of the House, my guess is you'd see a bunch of Republicans say, listen, if this ends it, fine, we'll make Jim Jordan Speaker of the House.
00:29:57.000We put forth to the American public a commitment to America.
00:30:01.000There's times we're going to have to argue with our own members if they're looking for only positions for themselves, not for the country.
00:30:10.000Again, this is, it's just interminable.
00:30:12.000And it's so, it's such small stakes and it's such foolishness and there's really no upside.
00:30:17.000So of course, we're going to do this for another several days, probably.
00:30:19.000I mean, Republicans, great at everything except for, you know, their actual jobs.
00:30:25.000And meanwhile, Over in the Senate, you can see Mitch McConnell chortling over all of this.
00:30:30.000And for all those who are very upset with Mitch McConnell for signing on to, for example, the Democrat spending bill that went through at the very end of last year, that $1.7 trillion giant omnibus crap sandwich that Mitch McConnell voted in favor of and many Republicans voted in favor of in the Senate with a Democratic House.
00:30:46.000The reason that Mitch McConnell said he was doing that, he said, I got my priorities.
00:30:49.000The real reason he did that is because he felt like the Republican Congress was unable to actually pass a budget.
00:30:54.000He felt like they were unable to actually do anything, that the leadership was so weak and that the party levers were so failing that there was no way they were going to be able to get together to even put together a piece of legislation that he would then support and then they could send to Joe Biden to get a signature on.
00:31:09.000Well, I mean, the Republicans in the House are doing a pretty good job of making McConnell look not like a sellout.
00:31:15.000Which, by the way, it is a sellout move to pass a piece of legislation with the opposite party because you trust your own party in Congress so little.
00:31:22.000But meanwhile, I mean, your own party in Congress is not looking especially good at their jobs today.
00:31:27.000I mean, it was Mitch McConnell in November who's pledging that if Republicans took the House, there'd be no more blowout spending.
00:31:31.000And then he signed a $1.7 trillion blowout spending bill specifically because he didn't trust that Republicans in the House would be able to get their heads out of their out of their colons long enough to actually pass something.
00:31:42.000If the House becomes Republican, there's no more one party running over us like they did through reconciliation.
00:31:50.000No more $1.9 trillion spending spree, plus another $750 in August that sent inflation through the roof.
00:32:18.000If the Kevin McCarthy-led Republican Congress were to propose some sort of big, giant, omnibus spending package not backed by a vast majority of the Republican Party, McCarthy would feel the sting.
00:32:32.000He agreed to a change of the rules that would have allowed him to actually be brought into question as Speaker of the House upon the advice and consent of essentially five people.
00:32:44.000And if five members of the Republican coalition decided to challenge his speakerhood, then he would hear a speaker's challenge, right?
00:32:51.000He weakened his own durability as Speaker of the House.
00:32:54.000So if he were to bring to the floor some really, really bad piece of legislation that had the support of, say, 50 Republicans, but all the Democrats, which is presumably what many of these Republicans who don't like McCarthy are afraid of.
00:33:05.000He would be ousted from his own party leadership position.
00:33:06.000This is what happened to John Boehner in 2015.
00:33:09.000And they're trying to weaken the ability of these speakers to preserve their own power.
00:33:14.000The lack of strategy here is just absolutely astonishing.
00:33:17.000Okay, meanwhile, the Twitter files continue to be released.
00:33:20.000Elon Musk took over Twitter and he has been releasing more and more information about the inner workings of Twitter.
00:33:27.000First, the economy seems as though it is on a razor's edge once again.
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00:35:06.000Okay, meanwhile, Elon Musk over at Twitter has been releasing in tranches huge swaths of information about how Twitter was run before he took over.
00:35:13.000He's released another tranche of Twitter files to Matt Taibbi.
00:35:16.000The left-wing journalist who is now being considered right-wing simply because he actually is reporting on what Twitter used to do.
00:35:22.000It turns out that basically Twitter's internal censorship was being done by people who are being manipulated from the outside by the government and the media.
00:35:30.000This is something that happens in woke corporations all the time.
00:35:33.000Woke corporations are constantly being manipulated by groups of people in the government and in the media.
00:35:40.000What happens is that somebody in government will suggest, for example, that a corporation should not be engaging in business in Georgia because of the Georgia voting law.
00:35:47.000And then media will pick up on this and they will call up members of the corporation and they'll say, why are you engaging in business?
00:35:52.000And then they'll run a front page story, Coca-Cola engaging in business in Atlanta, Georgia.
00:35:56.000And then Coca-Cola goes, oh my God, we're on the front page of the newspaper.
00:36:00.000And then they'll immediately talk about how terrible the Georgia voting law is.
00:36:03.000This is the way this stupid game works.
00:36:04.000And it works for all the woke corporations.
00:36:06.000What particularly is bad when it comes to Twitter, because there you're not just talking about a corporation speaking out of turn.
00:36:10.000You're not just talking about Disney sounding off about the bill that prevents the indoctrination of children on sexual orientation until the age of eight.
00:36:17.000You're not talking about just a corporation sounding, you're talking about a corporation whose chief job it was to determine who got to speak and who did not.
00:36:24.000So this gets into very dangerous territory.
00:36:26.000So here's what Matt Taibbi has released.
00:36:27.000He says, quote, by 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts.
00:36:35.000In February 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center, a fledgling analytic intelligence arm of the State Department, went to the media with a report called Russian disinformation apparatus taking advantage of coronavirus concerns.
00:36:47.000The GEC, again, it's a government agency, flagged accounts as Russian personas and proxies based on criteria like, quote, described the coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon, blaming research conducted at the Wuhan Institute and attributing of the appearance of the virus to the CIA.
00:36:59.000Well, there's a problem with that, which is that the first two, At least the one that says that research conducted at the Wuhan Institute was responsible for lab leak.
00:37:09.000That actually may, in fact, be the truth.
00:37:11.000State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular US-based Zero Hedge, claiming the episode, quote, led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.
00:37:20.000The GEC still led directly to news stories like the AFP's headline, Russia-linked disinformation campaign led to coronavirus alarm, U.S.
00:37:28.000says, and a Politico story about how Russian-Chinese-Iranian disinformation narratives echo one another.
00:37:33.000So basically, they started laundering through the media this message that Twitter was allowing Russian disinformation to shape the COVID narrative.
00:37:46.000When Clemson's media forensics hub complained Twitter hadn't made a Russia attribution in some time, trust and safety chief at Yoel Roth said it was revelatory of their motives.
00:37:54.000Roth said, we're happy to work directly with you on this instead of NBC.
00:37:57.000He tried to convince outside researchers like the Clemson lab to check with them before pushing stories about foreign interference to the media.
00:38:02.000In other words, he had a bunch of people in the government suggesting that there were Russian bots that were running stories on Twitter.
00:38:07.000And Twitter actually kind of knew whether they're Russian bots or not.
00:38:13.000Twitter was trying to reduce the number of agencies with access to Yoel Roth.
00:38:17.000Policy Director Carlos Manche said if these folks are like Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them a direct contact with Yoel, they'll want to come back to him again and again.
00:38:27.000Apparently, the GEC was using intel from other agencies to insert themselves into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others.
00:38:37.000So, the government, again, was going to the media, they were pushing a story that Twitter was allowing disinformation, and then they were pressuring Twitter to change the status of accounts that were pressing this quote-unquote misinformation.
00:38:53.000This is exactly what everybody sort of suspected was going on, is that the government was using its power in order to Launder censorship through outlets like Twitter.
00:39:04.000According to Taibbi, Twitter was taking requests from every conceivable government body, beginning with the Senate Intel Committee, which seemed to need reassurance Twitter was taking FBI direction.
00:39:11.000Execs rushed to tell Team SSCI they zapped five accounts on an FBI tip.
00:39:17.000Requests arrived and were escalated from all over, from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, the FBI, DHS, and more.
00:39:23.000They received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn't like to be banned.
00:39:27.000So, for example, Democrat and House Intel Committee Chief Adam Schiff, the person who is responsible for much of the Russian actual disinformation about Russian collusion, he actually asked Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry.
00:39:40.000Twitter declined to honor Schiff's request.
00:39:42.000They said, we don't do this, but Sperry was later suspended.
00:39:46.000Twitter honored almost everybody else's requests, even those from the government, including a decision to ban accounts like Rebel Protests and Bricks Media because the GEC identified them as GRU-controlled and linked to the Russian government, respectively.
00:39:57.000So you wonder why the Hunter Biden stuff happened?
00:39:59.000One of the reasons the Hunter Biden stuff happened is because Twitter was on edge, having been told by every government agency that everything that was happening was Russian disinformation, and they just kept banning accounts.
00:40:09.000This is why when people say that Twitter was sort of, it's independent of the government.
00:40:15.000And then I noticed that as soon as Elon Musk takes it over and takes it private, then literally that minute, everybody immediately shifts to, we have to publicly regulate Twitter.
00:40:25.000No, what you actually had was the government deciding in cahoots with the chief leadership at Twitter who could be seen and who could not.
00:40:32.000One of the things that Tucker suggested last night, that the new Congress, the Republican, McCarthy-led Congress do, is give Thomas Massie the ability to investigate collusion between the FBI and places like Twitter in terms of informational dissemination.
00:40:59.000Obviously, Jordan Peterson, full disclosure, is a host at Daily Wire Plus.
00:41:05.000Jordan blasted Canada's commissars and penned a scathing letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Tuesday after a leading association of his fellow psychologists threatened to go after his license to practice clinical psychology over social media criticisms of the nation's far-left government.
00:41:17.000The College of Psychologists of Ontario ordered the best-selling author and Daily Wire Plus host to undergo social media communications retraining.
00:41:26.000Or face a hearing on the potential suspension of his medical license.
00:41:30.000Writing to Justin Trudeau, Peterson vowed not to participate.
00:41:33.000I simply cannot resign myself to the fact that in my lifetime I am required to resort to a public letter to the leader of my country to point out that political criticism has now become such a crime in Canada that if professionals dare engage in such activity, government appointed commissars will threaten their livelihood and present them with the spectacle of denouncement and political disgrace.
00:41:50.000There is simply and utterly no excuse whatsoever for such a state of affairs in a free country.
00:41:55.000This of course is just the latest of several investigations launched by the College of psychology with prior complaints having been dismissed.
00:42:03.000What exactly did Jordan do that was so terrible that now he is being investigated by this ridiculous organization, the College of Psychologists of Ontario?
00:42:12.000Well, he retweeted Conservative Party leader Pierre Polivre.
00:42:15.000I'm going to screw up his name, but so be it.
00:42:18.000Blasted Trudeau's former senior aide, Gerald Butt.
00:42:22.000And he blasted New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, tweeting opposition to a plan by Ottawa police to take custody of the children of trucker convoy protesters.
00:42:29.000He also told Joe Rogan's podcast audience that accepting radical gender theory is a sign of civilization collapsing and also said that climate change models are unreliable.
00:42:38.000So apparently this is enough for the college executive director to review the tweets and a transcript from Peterson's appearance on Joe Rogan and determine that this warranted an investigation.
00:42:49.000The probe has now been expanded to include subsequent social media posts by Peterson, including a made Twitter post in which he said that Sports Illustrated putting plus-size swimsuit model Yumi Nu on the cover was not an example of beauty.
00:43:01.000All Jordan wrote at that point, you remember this big controversy, he wrote, sorry, not beautiful and no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.
00:43:08.000He also tweeted that the movie star Ellen Page, who now goes by Elliot Page, is actually a woman.
00:43:16.000This particular college, by the way, sounds like a private organization.
00:43:18.000In Canada, that's not the way that it works.
00:43:19.000The college is a government-regulated association that regulates and has the authority to sanction psychologists ostensibly to protect the health and safety of workers and the public.
00:43:27.000Peterson charged that the Ontario Professional Organization has been hounding him since 2017.
00:43:30.000He said, I was never investigated for anything for the 20 years I practiced prior to my emergence on the public scene.
00:43:37.000But because the college is obligated to probe any written complaint filed against a member, Peterson says that he's been befetted with investigations, many of which were prompted by anonymous calls.
00:43:47.000One accused him of being transphobic, sexist, and racist for pointing out an article from Crisis Magazine accusing the transgender movement of targeting autistic children.
00:43:56.000Last year, Peterson was taken to task by the college after telling a scientist who said overpopulation was a threat to the planet that he was free to leave at any point.
00:44:03.000The college opened an investigation and Jordan declined to cooperate.
00:44:07.000He said at the time, take whatever steps you deem necessary.
00:44:09.000I'm simply not going to spend the hours and days required to undergo the unbelievably stressful process necessary to respond to this formally because one of the millions of people who follow me on social media took offense to one thing I said at one point.
00:44:20.000Now again, one of the reasons that they are targeting Jordan is to shut everybody else up.
00:44:23.000Jordan has a big enough platform that it's very unlikely that he's going to end up being banned from the practice of psychology in Canada by the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
00:44:31.000But the whole point is to shut everybody else up.
00:44:33.000The people have less of a platform than Jordan.
00:44:35.000And this is the point on Twitter as well.
00:44:37.000It's to intimidate people into silence.
00:44:38.000You ban a few accounts and then you get everybody else to shut up.
00:44:41.000This is the goal of the censorship regime.
00:44:44.000Free speech is the predicate to having an open conversation on any of these important issues.
00:44:48.000And given the amount that the experts have used their authoritarian power to silence actual useful conversation, it is truly scary that you now have commissars in supposedly Western countries like Canada.
00:45:03.000You remember that case just a couple of weeks ago from before the new year, in which a woman in the UK was arrested for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic.
00:45:12.000And they asked if she was praying, and she said, maybe in my head, and they arrested her for that.
00:45:18.000Western civilization cannot abide the authoritarians who now have decided that because they are the elite, they get to control not only how you act and what you do, but also what you see, what you watch, how you think.
00:45:30.000Whether it is being laundered through private companies like Twitter, or whether it's being done directly by governments like the government in Canada.
00:45:37.000And good for Jordan for standing up to it.
00:45:39.000I'm glad Jordan does this sort of stuff because frankly, if Jordan didn't do it, who else would be left to stand up against this sort of stuff?
00:45:45.000Especially because so much that we have found out over the course of the last few years demonstrates that we were just not told things that we were we were being barred from having information that was really, really important.
00:45:56.000So for example, Alysia Finley has a piece in the Wall Street Journal opinion page today.
00:46:00.000This certainly would have been banned on social media for about two years.
00:46:03.000Quote, public health experts are sounding the alarm about a new Omicron variant dubbed XBB that is rapidly spreading across the northeast US. Some studies suggest it is as different from the original COVID strain from Wuhan as the 2003 SARS virus.
00:46:17.000It isn't clear that XBB is any more lethal than any other variant, but its mutations enable it to evade antibodies from prior infection of vaccines, as well as existing monoclonal antibody treatments.
00:46:25.000Growing evidence also suggests repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus's rapid evolution.
00:46:33.000Now, by the way, if you had mentioned this anywhere along the line here, that when it came to vaccines, that overuse of vaccines actually bottlenecks the process, Because it now means that all of these viruses attempt to evolve to escape the vaccine.
00:46:49.000If you mention that, this was considered really, really bad.
00:46:52.000That's just been common medical science for a very long time.
00:46:54.000But if you mention that online, there was a good shot Twitter was going to bar you for years on end here.
00:46:58.000Prior to Omicron's emergence in November 2021, there were only four variants of concern according to the Wall Street Journal, Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma.
00:47:04.000Only Alpha and Delta caused surges of infections globally.
00:47:07.000Omicron has begotten numerous descendants, many of which have popped up in different regions of the world, curiously bearing some of the same mutations.
00:47:14.000Under selective evolutionary pressures, the virus appears to have developed mutations that enable it to transmit more easily and escape antibodies elicited by vaccines and prior infection.
00:47:23.000All of this was perfectly foreseeable, that if you overuse the vaccines, this is what you end up with.
00:47:27.000And that natural immunity might actually be a better strategy, but you were barred from saying it.
00:47:31.000This is why it's important to stand up against the censor group that now lies at the heart of all of these governments, as well as their buddies and lackeys over in social media.
00:47:44.000Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.