What does it mean to be an authoritarian? What does it look like, and why does it matter? Ben Shapiro explains what it means to be a "right wing" authoritarian and why it's the greatest threat to American democracy. He also explains why the "authoritarian right" is actually the biggest threat to democracy and why the Democratic Party is worse than any other party in American politics. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN, your data is your business, and Protect it at ExpressVPN. Protect it! Ben Shapiro: Protecting Your Data is Your Business by Protecting It at Express VPN, where you can get 50% off your first month with discount code "PRUDENTIAL" when you sign up for your first-month trial of ExpressVPN! You'll get access to all the features you need to protect your data, including features, features, and features that make your data more secure, secure, and affordable, and you'll save more time and save more money on your VPN bill. Protect Your Data Is Your Business is your Business. Subscribe to Protect It! by becoming a Member of the ExpressVPN Club where you get 10% off the first month, and get 20% off for the rest of the year, plus an additional 3 months when you upgrade your membership discount when you become a patron! If you're not a member, you'll get 5% off of Express VPN? and a FREE 3-a-month for the entire year when you join ExpressVPN membership starts in January 1st! Want to become a member? Learn more about ExpressVPN? Connect with ExpressVPN and get $5, $10, $25, $20, $50, and $50 gets you get 5,000 gets you an ad-free membership, and they get $50 off, and a year gets you 5,99 gets you 4,000, and I'll get you an entire year of VIP access to the VIP membership starting in January 2020, and gets you 3 months, plus I'm also get $4,99 a year, they'll get $24, I'll have access to VIP access, and she'll get a discount on my ad-only, I'm not even get $39,99 get $19, $49,99 and I'm getting a course that gets you a course starting, and can I get a VIP membership and a VIP discount? I'll be able to access all of that?
00:01:55.000And there was something authoritarian to people attempting to stop the democratic processes from taking place and going forward and working.
00:02:02.000You don't have to deny the presence of an authoritarian right to also recognize that the centers of power in American life, the centers of institutional power in American life, do not lie with the authoritarian right.
00:02:14.000Now, it is worthwhile at this point to define our terms.
00:02:18.000So, The very term authoritarianism is very often used kind of vaguely.
00:02:23.000What exactly does it mean to be authoritarian?
00:02:26.000People use it simultaneously to mean fascist and totalitarian.
00:02:30.000Authoritarian has a little bit more of a specific definition, typically.
00:02:34.000when you are talking about the characteristics of authoritarianism.
00:02:38.000So, let's talk about that for a second.
00:02:41.000So, there have been a bunch of studies on what authoritarianism actually looks like.
00:02:45.000What does it mean to be authoritarian?
00:02:47.000So, there's a guy named Theodore Adorno, and he very early in 1950 wrote a book.
00:02:52.000He was a Frankfurt School member, he was a Marxist theorist, and he wrote a book about authoritarianism.
00:02:56.000And his basic suggestion is that authoritarianism was a naturally right-wing phenomenon.
00:03:00.000See, as a Marxist, of course he thought that anybody who disagreed with him was sort of an authoritarian.
00:03:04.000His idea is that America was ripe for the plucking.
00:03:06.000America was about to fall into authoritarianism because America wasn't left-wing enough.
00:03:10.000Okay, so he wrote this very famous book called The Authoritarian Personality, in which essentially he suggested that anti-Semitism and authoritarianism were outgrowths of a particular mindset that also sprang from capitalism.
00:03:21.000Now, this was untrue, but it did lead to a lot of study as to what an authoritarian personality would look like.
00:03:27.000And there was a Harvard social scientist named Robert Altmeier.
00:03:31.000He created a right-wing authoritarianism scale.
00:03:34.000He was attempting to detect three particular character traits.
00:03:37.000These were character traits of the authoritarians.
00:03:39.000Character trait number one of an authoritarian was authoritarian submission.
00:03:43.000Willingness to submit to established and legitimate authorities.
00:03:46.000You're willing to just go along with whatever the boss says.
00:04:01.000And for a long time, social scientists, who tend to be very left-wing, thought there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism.
00:04:07.000Left-wing authoritarianism just did not exist.
00:04:09.000Because left-wingers were progressive and wonderful and anti-violence and pacifistic.
00:04:14.000Okay, well, it is very clear at this point there is left-wing authoritarianism.
00:04:16.000And in fact, social scientists have found that left-wing authoritarianism is quite common.
00:04:23.000When University of Montana social psychologist Lucian Conway created a scale to mirror Altmeier's scale, what he found is that the highest score for authoritarianism was for liberals.
00:04:34.000Liberals had the highest score for authoritarianism.
00:04:37.000And he described authoritarianism this way.
00:04:39.000Here's what they said, these particular social scientists from University of Montana, about what left-wing authoritarianism looked like.
00:04:46.000Left-wing authoritarianism, if right-wing authoritarianism was about submission, and aggression approved by the bosses, and conventionalism, a belief that your traditional morality is the only approved social convention, and that you get to shut down everything else.
00:04:58.000Then left-wing authoritarianism is sort of the mirror image.
00:05:00.000Left-wing authoritarianism believes in revolutionary aggression, that the system has to be torn down.
00:05:05.000The hierarchy of power has to be destroyed.
00:05:08.000Top-down censorship, they simultaneously believe in.
00:05:11.000In order to achieve utopia, you have to shut everybody else up.
00:05:17.000Which these social scientists described as, quote, In other words, they're gonna cram down a particular moral worldview that says that you are evil because you disagree.
00:05:23.000of conservatives as inherently immoral.
00:05:26.000An intolerant desire for coercively imposing left-wing beliefs and values on others and a need for social and ideological homogeneity in one's environment.
00:05:33.000In other words, they're gonna cram down a particular moral worldview that says that you are evil because you disagree.
00:05:38.000So those are the three characteristics of left-wing authoritarianism.
00:05:41.000Revolutionary aggression and approval for it, which you saw over the summer when virtually the entire left-wing winked and nodded at the most damaging rights in American history.
00:05:48.000Top-down censorship directed at group authority.
00:05:52.000Right, group authority as a means of regulating right-wing beliefs and behaviors.
00:05:56.000We have to have the bosses shut everybody else up.
00:05:58.000Right, this is the diversity training you see inside your corporations, or as we will see, Democrats in Congress trying to shut down free speech.
00:06:04.000And anti-conventionalism, a belief that everybody who disagrees with you is inherently a moral lesser person, a morally lesser person, a bad person.
00:06:13.000These characteristics of left-wing authoritarianism are extraordinarily common.
00:06:17.000Not only are they common, they are dominant in our institutional culture.
00:06:27.000So when people say, you know, right-wing authoritarianism is dominant, again, you don't have to deny the presence of right-wing authoritarianism to recognize that the institutional power in our country is dominated by authoritarian leftists who seek top-down censorship, who believe that their progressive worldview is the only worldview that matters, and who believe in a revolutionary aggression designed at tearing down the quote-unquote hierarchies of power.
00:06:48.000That describes to a T what so many members of the Democratic Party are doing today.
00:06:53.000The reason I bring this up is because two members of Congress have now issued a series of letters to a variety of platforms and common carriers designed to shut down dissent.
00:07:06.000One member of Congress is named Anna Eshoo, the other is named Jerry McNerney.
00:07:09.000They issued this letter, and this is just full authoritarian stuff.
00:07:13.000We have a First Amendment for a reason.
00:07:17.000Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
00:07:20.000So what have our members of Congress decided to do?
00:07:22.000Instead of making a law, they're going to essentially create agents in the private sphere to do their bidding.
00:07:29.000They know they can't pass a law that abridges freedom of speech or it'll get struck down by the Supreme Court.
00:07:32.000Instead, what they do is they say, we will punish you if you do not do the censorship we wish you to do in the private sphere.
00:07:39.000This is the new model, not top-down censorship just from government, but top-down censorship with government actors using as a cudgel their power in order to beat corporations into submission and force those corporations to adopt the precepts of the authoritarian left and to censor from the top.
00:07:57.000We'll get to what I mean by this in just one second, because we really are living in an authoritarian time.
00:08:01.000This is an authoritarian moment that we are watching unfold before us right now, and it is deep, and it is threatening, and it has been creeping in American life.
00:08:09.000And unfortunately, the authoritarianism of the left was fostered in general and in very strong ways by the reaction to things like January 6th.
00:08:17.000It was an opportunity for the authoritarian left to get the upper hand in American discourse.
00:08:26.000If you say something they don't like, it could be dangerous.
00:08:28.000And so now is a great time to shut down free speech, to shut down individual rights, and to use all powers that they have at their disposal in order to do so.
00:08:38.000Again, the fact that this is happening in the United States should scare the living hell out of everybody who believes in individual rights, right, left, or center.
00:08:45.000I'm not saying everybody on the left is a member of the authoritarian left.
00:08:48.000I'm saying there is an authoritarian left, and it is becoming the dominant mode in the Democratic Party.
00:09:13.000It's much easier than walking into the store and people demanding quick answers and then ordering the part online.
00:09:17.000Instead, just go to rockauto.com and get the part yourself.
00:09:20.000Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear the way that airlines do.
00:09:26.000Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
00:09:28.000Let's say hypothetically, you happen to need, like, I don't know, a Delphi FG-1456 fuel pump assembly for a 2005 to 2010 Honda Odyssey.
00:09:34.000I don't know why that just popped into my head, but it did.
00:09:37.000It costs like $354 at a big chain store.
00:09:40.000That's the kind of thing you could get at Rock Auto for $217.
00:09:44.000RockAuto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
00:09:48.000Head on over to RockAuto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
00:09:51.000Best of all, prices at RockAuto.com are always reliably low, and the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
00:09:57.000So, head on over to RockAuto.com right now.
00:09:58.000They've got amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car will ever need.
00:10:09.000Okay, so, these two members of Congress have now issued a series of letters Two common carriers telling them they want them to essentially boot Fox News off the air, and OANN, and Newsmax.
00:10:19.000And this is the same sort of top-down censorship that you are seeing called for by our establishment media against social media.
00:10:26.000Let's force social media not to disseminate information we don't like.
00:10:31.000And there are a variety of games they play in order to shut down stuff they don't like.
00:10:34.000You'll notice one of the things that they have done, and this is a pretty clever sleight of hand.
00:10:40.000A lot of this debate really started after the 2016 election.
00:11:05.000In fact, we didn't lose that election.
00:11:06.000The only reason we lost that election is because of Russian disinformation.
00:11:09.000Now, disinformation, you know, foreign intervention, using false information in order to pervert the political process, is in fact not something that That the government has to just leave alone.
00:11:22.000is something the government can step into.
00:11:24.000It does have First Amendment consequences, but there's some precedent for the government stepping in and stopping foreign actual interference with disinformation.
00:11:31.000But you'll notice that there's a verbal sleight of hand that went on where the media and Democratic members of Congress and Democrats in power, they decided to shift from Russian disinformation to misinformation.
00:11:43.000Now, there's a difference between disinformation and misinformation.
00:11:46.000Disinformation is active promotion of false material by a foreign government.
00:11:51.000That's what disinformation typically is, right?
00:11:53.000You do disinformation on the Soviets or the Soviets do disinformation on you.
00:11:57.000Misinformation is information that you perceive to be mistaken.
00:12:01.000There's no obvious intent for somebody to lie.
00:12:04.000It's just something you perceive to be mistaken.
00:12:06.000And so what the left does is they declare everything they don't like misinformation.
00:12:09.000If there's a narrative they don't like, that's misinformation.
00:12:12.000So they've now shifted over from fringe sort of issues when it comes to speech Foreign disinformation, the Russian government promulgating falsehoods in the middle of an election, to core political speech, which they then term misinformation.
00:12:26.000And then, they set up a whole body of fact-checkers, whose sole design, apparently, is to label anything they don't like, not only misinformation, but mostly false.
00:12:36.000And this is what you see at PolitiFact.
00:12:38.000PolitiFact will label Barack Obama's statement that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor half-true for several years, and then only later will they be like, oh yeah, that was the lie of the year.
00:12:46.000It becomes misinformation when it is convenient for them.
00:12:49.000And then they use those fake fact-checkers, those pseudo-fact-checkers, as an excuse to shut down outlets they don't like on social media and to suppress their reach.
00:12:57.000Or they go to YouTube and they say, you know what?
00:13:00.000We know that there are a lot of people out there who like conservative material, but we are afraid that that conservative material will lead to incitement.
00:13:09.000That those people are doing anything that incites violence.
00:13:11.000It's not that Jordan Peterson does anything that incites violence.
00:13:13.000It's that you might watch a Jordan Peterson video, and then maybe you'll get dragged into a rabbit hole of right-wing extremism.
00:13:21.000Okay, so they're consistently broadening out exceptions under American law that do exist to free speech, and then they're letting the exception eat the rule, right?
00:13:31.000So they will say incitement is illegal.
00:13:34.000Then they will say, that stuff that you're saying, you know, like normal political stuff, that's incitement.
00:13:39.000Or they will say, yeah, we understand that your narrative is opinion and it's protected, but it's really misinformation.
00:13:47.000And misinformation is really kind of like disinformation, and disinformation is something that the government can fight.
00:13:52.000So really your speech is like Russian disinformation.
00:13:56.000This is the way that the left goes about their top-down censorship.
00:14:00.000And it is tied into an ideology that suggests revolutionary aggression against the system because the system of individual rights is inherently discriminatory according to the woke left.
00:14:09.000The woke left says that individual rights are biased because the people who are in a position to best exercise their individual rights are the powerful in our society.
00:14:18.000And those people must be brought to heel.
00:14:20.000So individual rights take a backseat to what the collective requires.
00:14:24.000Individual rights take a backseat to equity.
00:14:27.000This is the language that you hear from the left.
00:14:29.000Again, these are the elements of authoritarianism.
00:14:49.000And the authoritarianism on the left in the United States is very, very dominant at this point in American life, and it's becoming more dominant every day.
00:14:58.000So here's this letter from these two members of Congress, again, directed at taking down political opponents.
00:15:03.000Here's a letter to John Stanley, Stanky rather.
00:15:10.000Dear Mr. Stanky, and again, this comes from two sitting members of Congress, our country's public discourse is plagued by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies.
00:15:35.000Well, I mean, the left lied throughout the summer that America's police are systemically racist.
00:15:38.000They don't seem to care about that lie very much.
00:15:41.000These phenomena undergird the radicalization of seditious individuals Who committed active insurrection on January 6th, and it contributes to a growing distrust of public health measures necessary to crush the pandemic.
00:15:53.000Right, so the idea here is that we would have crushed the pandemic if it were not for misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies.
00:15:59.000Weird, because every single Democratic member of Congress, so far as I'm aware, backed mass protests in the middle of a pandemic because they said that racial issues were a public health problem.
00:16:08.000In any case, these members of Congress say we are concerned about the role AT&T plays in disseminating misinformation, misinformation, again, it's that slight of hand, misinformation, to millions of its U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV subscribers.
00:16:21.000And we write to you today to request additional information about what actions AT&T is taking to address these issues.
00:16:26.000Now notice, Congress does not have the power to regulate AT&T into shutting down free speech.
00:16:31.000That'd be a violation of the First Amendment.
00:16:33.000So instead, they will send nasty, threatening letters to places like Comcast and AT&T, and they will basically say, You know, nice company you got there.
00:16:40.000It'd be a real shame if something happened to it.
00:16:43.000Real shame if something happened to AT&T over there.
00:16:46.000You know, we have been looking into these other sort of antitrust issues, and I can tell you that if you weren't doing this fostering of misinformation, well then, maybe we would stop looking into that.
00:16:56.000I'm not threatening you or anything, of course.
00:16:59.000I mean, this is the way the game is played now.
00:17:03.000Nearly half of Americans get their news primarily from TV, say these two members of Congress.
00:17:07.000However, not all TV news sources are the same.
00:17:10.000Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm.
00:17:16.000Now we get the incitement argument, right?
00:17:19.000Is if there's information that you don't like, or if there are even things that are not true that are said that you don't like.
00:17:25.000That those aren't necessarily incitement.
00:17:27.000Lots of things are said in American public discourse every day.
00:17:30.000And we have laws against things like slander and libel.
00:17:33.000So you can sue people based on some of those things.
00:17:36.000We have incitement statutes that are on the books.
00:17:38.000Those incitement statutes require actual incitement, not just people saying things that are false.
00:17:43.000You will also note that these Democrats have no problem with the radical level of things that are not true being said on places like CNN and MSNBC.
00:17:51.000For full-on a year, we heard that Andrew Cuomo was the greatest governor on planet Earth.
00:17:55.000CNN reported that the kids from Covington Catholic were vicious racists.
00:17:59.000Covington, the mainstream establishment media, pushed the idea that Brett Kavanaugh was a rapist.
00:18:06.000None of those things ended up being true.
00:18:09.000It's only one type of quote-unquote misinformation you'll note that they're very upset about.
00:18:13.000Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues, in our public discourse.
00:18:25.000And so, again, the idea is that if you allow things I don't like, then the public discourse is polluted.
00:18:31.000Okay, well, it may very well be polluted.
00:18:35.000I'll acknowledge that there's information in the public discourse that I think pollutes the public discourse.
00:18:38.000For example, if a member of the SNL cast puts out the overt lie that the state of Israel has been not handing out vaccines to its Arab citizens, that seems like something that pollutes the public discourse.
00:18:48.000Do I have any right to call for SNL to be canceled on that basis?
00:18:52.000Should I call for, if I were a member of Congress, would I have the ability, constitutionally speaking, to regulate that?
00:18:58.000There's a lot of stuff in the public discourse that is chaff, and then there is some that is wheat, and it is your job to distinguish between the two.
00:19:04.000But the authoritarian left believes it is their job to distinguish for you and then use their power to cram down in censorious fashion exactly what they like.
00:19:12.000So, say these Congress people, experts have noted that the right-wing media ecosystem is quote-unquote, much more susceptible to disinformation, lies, and half-truths.
00:19:21.000Well, I mean, if they say so, wow, I mean, amazing how they came to that conclusion.
00:19:26.000It's just the right-wing media ecosystem that's susceptible to disinformation, lies, and half-truths.
00:19:31.000Doesn't matter that for four long years, a vast bulk of Democrats believed that the 2016 election was stolen.
00:19:37.000Right-wing media outlets like Newsmax, One American News Network, and Fox News all aired misinformation about the November 2020 elections.
00:19:43.000For example, both Newsmax and OANN ran quote incendiary reports of false information following the elections and continue to support an angry and dangerous subculture that will continue to operate semi-openly.
00:19:54.000As a violent mob was breaching the doors of the Capitol, Newsmax's coverage called the scene a sort of romantic idea.
00:19:59.000Fox News, meanwhile, has spent years spewing misinformation about American politics.
00:20:04.000Fox News is exactly the same as Newsmax is exactly the same as OANN.
00:20:08.000And I do love that, that apparently Newsmax calling the scene a quote-unquote sort of romantic idea, which is not a good thing to say.
00:20:16.000That that apparently is the sort of offense that should get Newsmax taken off AT&T.
00:20:22.000However, CNN, which overtly promoted riots in the middle of the summer, I mean, Chris Cuomo went on television and he said, where does it say in the Constitution that protest is supposed to be peaceful?
00:20:32.000And somehow that didn't promote, right?
00:20:34.000It's only one side of the aisle, you'll note.
00:20:36.000These same networks say these Congress people have also been key vectors of spreading misinformation related to the pandemic.
00:20:42.000A media watchdog found over 250 cases of COVID-19 misinformation on Fox News in just one five-day period.
00:20:47.000Economists demonstrated Fox News had a demonstrable impact on noncompliance with public health guidelines.
00:20:53.000The evidence that Fox News was directly responsible for people not wearing masks, for example, is exorbitantly weak.
00:20:59.000They couldn't even link the people who are not wearing the mask to people who are watching, for example, Sean Hannity.
00:21:04.000One online platform suspended and demonetized OANN's channel online because it was spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
00:21:10.000Newsmax has amplified allegations that members of the Chinese Communist Party helped develop the COVID-19 vaccine.
00:21:15.000Really, that's the big one that you came up with, Newsmax?
00:21:18.000Is it Newsmax said that maybe the CCP has something to do with the development of the virus?
00:21:23.000In reality, there is a fairly good amount of information that this thing, while not created by the CCP, was in fact leaked from a Wuhan lab.
00:21:31.000There's more information to that suggestion than there is to the idea that it came from the wet markets, as we were originally told, and some idiot ate a bat.
00:21:38.000Oh wow, you quoted last week tonight with John Oliver.
00:21:40.000If John Oliver says it, it must be true.
00:21:41.000television show aired a segment about OANN last April that included a dire warning.
00:21:45.000The kind of misinformation OANN is spewing right now could end up getting people killed. Oh wow, you quoted last week tonight with John Oliver. Amazing.
00:21:54.000If John Oliver says it, it must be true because John Oliver is a super reliable source. We'll continue with the censorship that the Democrats are now pushing.
00:22:03.000And it can come with a happy face, but the happy face does not make it any sort of... It does not mean that these people are in favor of liberty.
00:23:32.000Alrighty, so now we get to the crux of the matter from these Democratic Congress people.
00:23:35.000So they've spent most of this letter so far yelling about how they don't like Fox News and OANN and Newsmax and how they're spewing misinformation.
00:23:41.000Now, I've talked about some of the things I think that OANN and Newsmax in particular were pushing about the election that were not true, that I saw no evidence for.
00:23:49.000And in fact, OANN has been forced to back off some of its allegations with regards to Dominion, same thing with Newsmax.
00:23:54.000Okay, all of that is true because there are slander and libel laws in the United States.
00:23:58.000Both of them, I believe, are currently being sued by Dominion.
00:24:12.000That's top-down censorship in full authoritarian leftist mode.
00:24:15.000So here's what these Congress people say.
00:24:16.000Remember, this is a letter to the head of AT&T.
00:24:19.000Yet, to our knowledge, the cable, satellite, and over-the-top companies that disseminate these media outlets to American viewers have done nothing in response to the misinformation aired by these outlets.
00:24:27.000AT&T currently carries Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV.
00:24:32.000As a company that serves 17 million Americans, AT&T plays a major role in the spread of dangerous misinformation that enabled the insurrection of January 6th and hinders our public health response to the current pandemic.
00:24:43.000In other words, if you don't mirror what we believe, we believe that you should shut them down.
00:24:48.000Again, Congress cannot pass a law restricting freedom of speech, but members of Congress can pressure companies like AT&T into restricting freedom of speech.
00:24:58.000They're essentially turning these companies into their agents in order to shut down free speech, which is authoritarian stuff.
00:25:09.000Why do you think that Coca-Cola is doing diversity training?
00:25:12.000They're doing so for fear of liability.
00:25:13.000They're doing so because they're afraid they're going to be sued and that you're going to get some lefty judge who decides that discrimination has taken place because they didn't insulate themselves by buying a $20,000 Rob and D'Angelo bullcrap course.
00:25:25.000The reason Coca-Cola is doing this is that the Democrats leave them alone.
00:25:29.000The reason that all of these corporations are caving to the woke mob is because the woke mob has the levers of power in a wide variety of institutions right now.
00:25:38.000Not just at the top of corporations, where there are a lot of people who head corporations who are sympathetic to the woke mob, but they have the whip hand when it comes to the media.
00:25:45.000They have the whip hand when it comes to the social media companies.
00:25:47.000And most of all, they have the whip hand when it comes to members of Congress who are willing to shut down free speech.
00:25:53.000Not formally through passage of a law, but through simple outside pressure.
00:25:57.000So, say these Congress people, it is for these reasons we ask you provide us with responses to the following questions about AT&T's policies toward content carried on U-verse Direct TV and AT&T.
00:26:06.000What moral or ethical principles do you apply in deciding which channels to carry or when to take adverse actions against a channel?
00:26:12.000They're deliberately, these are not questions directed at eliciting answers, of course.
00:26:16.000These are questions elicited at, directed at eliciting a response, namely the cancellation of all of these outlets that Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney don't like.
00:26:26.000Two, do you require through contracts or otherwise that the channels you carry abide by any content guidelines?
00:26:31.000If so, please provide a copy of the guidelines.
00:26:33.000How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3rd, 2020 elections?
00:26:41.000Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel.
00:26:44.000And you know, that is the predicate for them setting up some sort of liability argument, as though AT&T is liable for damage done at the Capitol building because there were morons who decided to commit criminal acts on the basis of speech that may or may not have been true, but certainly did not meet the standard of legal incitement.
00:27:01.000What steps did you take prior to, on, or following the November 3rd, 2020 elections to monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans?
00:27:13.000Please describe each step that you took.
00:27:16.000Have you taken any adverse actions against a channel, including Fox News, for using your platform?
00:27:21.000Have you ever taken actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate disinformation?
00:27:25.000Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN?
00:27:29.000These are members of Congress who are overtly attempting to shut down the dissemination of information because they don't like these channels.
00:27:36.000All of this led to Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr calling this effort a chilling transgression of free speech.
00:27:43.000He said, by writing letters to cable providers and other regulated entities that carry these news media outlets, the Democrats are sending a message that is as clear as it is troubling.
00:27:51.000These regulated entities will pay a price if the targeted newsrooms do not conform to Democrats' preferred political narratives.
00:27:56.000This is a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys.
00:28:01.000He says debate on matters of public interest should be robust, uninhibited, and wide open.
00:28:06.000Yet the concerted effort by Democrats to drive political dissent from the public square represents a marked departure from these First Amendment norms.
00:28:13.000A newsroom's decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them.
00:28:20.000He says to the House Democrats that use their official letterhead to launch this inquiry, I would say this.
00:28:24.000Your demand to know the quote-unquote moral principles that guide a private entity's decision about what news to carry cannot be reconciled with bedrock principles of free speech and journalistic freedom.
00:28:32.000I call on my FCC colleagues to join me in publicly denouncing this attempt to stifle political speech and independent news judgment.
00:28:39.000The Biden administration is happy with this sort of stuff.
00:28:41.000The Biden administration has never sounded off in favor of free speech principles.
00:28:46.000And this doesn't apply even internally to media outlets on the left.
00:28:50.000Media outlets on the left are happy to fire people who cross them.
00:28:54.000And whether you're talking about the New York Times deciding to get rid of Don McNeil for the grave sin of using the N-word in a conversation about why you shouldn't use the N-word, or today, the big story, is that Slate decided they were gonna get rid of a guy named Mike Peska.
00:29:06.000Okay, now Slate is a very left-wing outlet.
00:29:09.000Mike Peska committed a sin, a grave sin.
00:29:13.000He used the N-word in describing why you should not use the N-word.
00:29:17.000According to defector.com, Mike Peska, host of Slate's daily podcast, The Gist, has been suspended from the company indefinitely.
00:29:24.000Sources confirmed that Pesca's indefinite suspension is without pay, and that his access to the company's Slack and email channels had been revoked.
00:29:30.000The memo announcing Pesca's suspension, sent by Slate CEO Dan Check, refers obliquely to a conversation that took place in Slack last week.
00:29:37.000Defector has obtained images of the Slack conversation that Check's memo refers to, in which Pesca argues a point he has previously gotten to hot water for arguing, that in some contexts, white people should be allowed to say the N-word.
00:29:47.000Okay, again, this was in a discussion of the Don McNeil story from the New York Times.
00:29:52.000So, Pesca argued that McNeil's journalism made The Times more valuable to more Americans than having ousted him in 2019 would have.
00:29:56.000would have. He said, my points are his internal conduct was in a gray area. You guys don't think it was. He said, expressing the views, not the word, the views he did on that trip are not fireable, worthy of talking to, or what are you doing as a representative of the times, but nothing requiring much angst among management or staff or no.
00:30:13.000Should the Times discipline staffers who question the idea of white supremacy or who express retrograde ideas on mass incarceration?
00:30:19.000The question is, is an out loud utterance of that word in a work environment fireable, censurable, etc.?
00:30:24.000Even as a point of clarification to a question exactly about the use of that word.
00:30:29.000And this led to him essentially being fired.
00:30:34.000I don't think it's proper to use it in casual conversation, the n-word.
00:30:36.000I'm in no position to tell black New York Times workers they shouldn't be worried it's gonna pop out of a colleague's mouth at some point.
00:30:41.000If you want my opinion, it's that there are some limited reasons why a non-African-American journalist or professor would use that word when conveying a quote in the name of clarity or factualness.
00:30:49.000But it's not a comfortable point to even pursue right now.
00:30:51.000If I had the opposite opinion, I know a hundred ways I could make the opinion I actually have seem horrible and racist, and you know what?
00:30:57.000So that's when the boss chimed in and said, maybe we should stop this conversation.
00:31:01.000And a slate staffer said this, quote, I feel outraged.
00:31:05.000I cannot believe I had to watch him enthusiastically provoke people on whether or not it is appropriate to use a racist slur.
00:31:11.000Other slate staffers that spoke to Defector expressed frustration and anger at Pesca's insistence on having that particular conversation, quote, I don't want to be in a workplace where people feel emboldened to have this argument.
00:31:20.000People's humanity is not an intellectual debate.
00:31:24.000Okay, Slate Editor-in-Chief Jared Holt then posted a message in Slack saying he didn't ever want to see a similar argument in Slack ever again.
00:31:31.000He said, while we are a workplace where people argue about things all the time, it's also a workplace where we must think very hard about the lived experience of colleagues whose experience is different than ours.
00:31:40.000Pesca's been suspended for a week, and then it has been suspended, upgraded to indefinite.
00:31:49.000And by the way, according to Holt, he said that if Pesca had actually used the N-word, he didn't even use the N-word, by the way, in this conversation, so revision.
00:32:19.000He said the N-word at work because he was quoting somebody.
00:32:23.000So then they've suspended him or fired him from Slate.
00:32:28.000Hey, this is the authoritarian left at work.
00:32:30.000And they have the upper hand in major corporations.
00:32:33.000On the left, not just on the left, in major corporations across the board.
00:32:37.000So for example, Ryan Anderson, an excellent thinker over at the Heritage Foundation who writes on trans issues, It's a really, really good book.
00:32:45.000It's called, When Harry Became Sally, Responding to the Transgender Movement.
00:32:48.000And it is a logical point-by-point debunking of many of the myths surrounding transgenderism and gender identity and the idea that gender is entirely malleable.
00:33:02.000So the best description of that would be a digital book burning.
00:33:05.000When you actually remove a book from Amazon, that is a digital book burning because the goal of a book burning is to remove that book from circulation.
00:33:12.000That comes on the heels of just a few months ago, the attempt by Amazon to remove Abigail Schreier's book from their shelves.
00:33:19.000So now they're doing it to Ryan Anderson's When Harry Became Sally.
00:33:23.000Encounter Books, which is the publisher, they said, if Amazon, which controls most of the book sales in America, has decided to delist a book with which some of its functionaries disagree, this is an unconscionable assault on free speech.
00:33:33.000It will have a chilling effect on the publishing industry and the free circulation of ideas.
00:33:37.000It must not be left to stand unchallenged.
00:34:06.000Facebook, I think, reluctantly does it.
00:34:07.000But the reality is that when you have Congress sitting on your neck and saying they're gonna break you up unless you do their bidding, well, you end up with... I mean, Dianne Feinstein literally said that.
00:34:15.000She literally said to the heads of social media, if you don't police this content, we are gonna have to do something about it ourselves.
00:34:21.000Okay, that is a violation of First Amendment principles, but the authoritarian left is in control.
00:34:25.000So, when people say that there is an authoritarian right and that is a grave threat to the country, there is a fringe authoritarian right.
00:34:32.000I'm not going to pretend that there aren't people on the right who believe in authoritarian principles and who don't like democracy very much or who think that democracy is so improperly functioning and we need to overthrow it or stuff like that.
00:34:42.000There are some people who believe that.
00:34:45.000The mainstream Democratic Party apparently believes that it is okay to use the positions of power they have in American corporations, in American institutions, at universities, in the media, and in government, in order to cram down an anti-First Amendment, anti-free speech, anti-liberty position.
00:35:08.000Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to be getting to Joe Biden, who apparently is a good president, according to the press, because he is very empathetic.
00:35:15.000That's all that matters, that he's empathetic.
00:35:17.000Doesn't matter that he's pushing policy that makes no sense.
00:35:19.000He's empathetic because that's all we care about these days.
00:35:21.000We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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00:36:43.000But, watch me suffer as I join Jeremy Boring, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clavin, and yes, the execrable and unthinkably awful Michael Knowles tomorrow night, 7 p.m.
00:36:52.000Eastern, as we roundtable about current events and big picture issues like, I don't know, probably cancel culture.
00:36:56.000So, join us at dailywire.com or on the Daily Wire YouTube to watch.
00:37:43.000Every week, I'll take a fact and logic position and put it up against a popular leftist argument, the kind you see your friends post and share all over the internet.
00:37:50.000Whether it's climate change or universal healthcare, I'm gonna help you completely dismantle those particular arguments.
00:37:54.000So, if you're not already a Daily Wire member, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, use the code debunked, To get 25% off.
00:38:55.000Emotion doesn't happen to solve problems.
00:38:57.000Very often, emotion gets in the way of solving problems, and I don't judge presidents on how much empathy they have.
00:39:01.000I judge presidents on how well they do in doing the things they are supposed to do.
00:39:05.000I don't care whether my plumber has empathy, I don't care whether my lawyer has empathy, and I don't care whether the president has empathy.
00:39:10.000I've been clear about this since the get-go.
00:39:12.000In fact, there are good studies to show that sympathy is useful in politics because it allows you to think about a wide variety of people who are not you, but empathy is actually a problem.
00:39:20.000Empathy is where you put yourself in somebody else's shoes.
00:39:22.000Sympathy is where you sympathize with somebody else's positions.
00:39:25.000Empathy makes you elevate certain people above other people because you are empathizing with them, right?
00:39:29.000So empathy can actually be a problem in politics.
00:39:31.000There's a great book called Against Empathy by a psychologist all about this, about how in politics it's kind of a problem.
00:39:38.000In any case, Joe Biden does this event, and in the middle of the event, the goal of the event is not only to demonstrate empathy, but then to suggest that people who disagree with his agenda, that people who don't agree with the way he's approaching policy are non-empathetic.
00:39:56.000That is what politics usually is, is trying to create A level of moral superiority for yourself and make your opponents seem morally inferior.
00:40:04.000So Joe Biden does this event and he says, for example, it's time to end the politics and the misinformation.
00:40:09.000OK, as we've been talking about for weeks at this point, Joe Biden has been a chief purveyor of COVID misinformation since his accession to the office of president.
00:40:17.000He has put out the idea that there was no COVID plan.
00:41:27.000If people are saying that you should go out and you should congregate with other people and there's no risk of COVID if you without vaccination or anything, and that you should not wear a mask and not socially distance.
00:41:35.000Yeah, that's going to spread the virus.
00:41:37.000Okay, so if you say that, then that would be, and you say it's not gonna spread the virus, that's misinformation.
00:41:41.000But if we are talking generally, as Joe Biden says, that misinformation is the cause of the virus spreading, I noticed something, which is that Andrew Cuomo, your favorite governor, literally lied to the American people, to his own constituents, to the families of people who died.
00:41:55.000He lied to his fellow Democratic legislators, and your administration won't even say that.
00:41:59.000And then you have the temerity to get up at one of these events and say something like, we have to stop the misinformation in the politics?
00:43:33.000That is exactly how you should respond.
00:43:35.000When someone from the government says, I care about you, your first response should be, no, you really don't.
00:43:40.000You care about me in the same way that a plumber cares about me paying him to fix my toilet.
00:43:45.000Why should we pretend that our politicians are the most caring and wonderful of people when we all know that this is precisely the opposite?
00:43:51.000But again, you have to promulgate the notion that Joe Biden is full of empathy so that you don't catch on to the fact that he's actually foolish.
00:44:00.000You have a president who has shaped Joe Biden, whether you're a Democrat or Republican or an Independent out there watching, he's been shaped by the personal tragedy in his own life.
00:44:08.000He understands what it is like for a family to suffer, for a family to lose, and for a family to have to get up and recover.
00:44:53.000What an event that the White House put on for the American people and for the world to memorialize the half a million people who have been taken by this virus.
00:45:06.000And, you know, I don't want to do a lot of looking back, but at almost the same location where his predecessor came back from the hospital having the virus himself and ripped off his mask.
00:45:16.000What a difference just a few months makes in having somebody who, as my colleagues have said, you know, wants to emote and to empathize and to sympathize and to grieve with this country.
00:45:30.000Okay, I'm not looking for a psychologist.
00:45:37.000In fact, he's enthralled to a bunch of people whose policies are completely non-empathetic, because they don't actually care about Americans.
00:45:59.000How does this, in your view, affect mom-and-pop businesses who are just struggling to keep their doors open, keep workers on the payroll right now?
00:46:07.000Well, they shouldn't be doing it by paying people low wages.
00:46:55.000The Biden administration is mirroring all of the priorities of the American Federation of Teachers when it comes to reopening schools.
00:47:00.000Here, by the way, is what the American Federation of Teachers president, Randy Weingarten, had to say about whether kids are going to recover from missing an entire year of school, not being with their classmates, experiencing significant mental health disorders.
00:47:12.000Really, I know many people who have had kids who are suffering with this sort of stuff.
00:47:15.000Here is the very empathetic Randy Weingarten on this topic.
00:47:54.000Okay, so for all of the empathy and the emotivism, what it really comes down to when it comes down to policy is, which constituency can I please today?
00:47:59.000Recognize this is true for all of your politicians, Democrat, Republican, all of them.
00:48:04.000Anybody who looks for, you want sympathy?