Ben Shapiro explains why the Democratic Media Complex is trying to exert control over all social media, including the one place where you get the most information about you, the American public, and the world at large. He also points out that the real problem is not the fact that your data is being stolen from you, but rather that you are being manipulated by the media and other powerful interests in order to influence the way you get your news and information about the world around you. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets. He's also a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire and has been featured on CNN, NPR, CBS, and NPR, and many other outlets, and is one of the most influential people in the conservative media. You can find him on social media at and . Subscribe to his new show, on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you shop at Caff or use discount code CRIMES at checkout at checkout, and receive a discount of $10 or more when you enter the offer code: "CRIMES10 at checkout. The show is now offers free shipping on all major retail locations nationwide! to receive $99 or over $99.99 and free shipping throughout the entire year! The offer is good for two months. and includes free shipping nationwide. If you enter CRIMOutsiders get $10, they get 10% OFFsales and they get a free shipping, plus a free copy of the entire show, and two-week shipping offer, plus two-day shipping nationwide, they will get $99, plus they also get a complimentary copy of my review of my book, and I'll get a limited edition print edition of the book plus I'll also receive an ad on my review and two weeks of my new book, I'm giving you get an additional $10% off my review begins shipping starts starts, too get an ad that starts shipping free, and they'll get an extra $5th of the deal starts starts on my ad starts starts starts after they receive $49 or they get my cart gets my free shipping starts, they'll receive $10/month and I'm also get $25,000 in the deal gets an ad discount.
00:01:34.000The new Democrat media complex attack on Facebook is completely manufactured.
00:01:38.000There are serious questions to be asked about how Facebook nudges you in particular directions.
00:01:42.000We've talked about that extensively on the show.
00:01:44.000We've talked about how Facebook's news feed is incredibly biased, how they use certain metrics in order to try and promote legacy media content.
00:01:52.000and suppress alternative content, which is sort of a newfangled thing because back in 2015, 2016, they really didn't do that.
00:01:59.000And then there was blowback from the left and Facebook, because like all other major corporations, cowardice is a factor there.
00:02:05.000Facebook decided that they were going to back off and start making changes to their algorithms to please the Democrat media complex.
00:02:11.000Well, once you give an inch, they seek to take a mile.
00:02:13.000And right now, and it's perfectly obvious that what the Democrats want is to just control Facebook.
00:02:23.000They don't want to set any sort of neutral rules by which Facebook could be held accountable or to which Facebook could adjust.
00:02:30.000They don't want regulations that are clear and transparent.
00:02:33.000What the Democrats want at this point is an agency that sits over all social media and then adjudicates on a case-by-case basis whether social media have met the demands of Democrats.
00:03:23.000You would go to Facebook to get your news.
00:03:25.000And Facebook would tailor its algorithms to what you liked to see.
00:03:28.000So if you were conservative, you were more likely to see links that you were more likely to click on.
00:03:33.000And that made sense because it was supposed to be the town square and in the town square there were a bunch of newspapers available and you'd go to the kiosk that you actually liked.
00:03:40.000And Facebook made it convenient by lining up the kiosks you liked near where you were entering the town square.
00:03:45.000That's effectively how Facebook's newsfeed operated.
00:03:47.000Democrats saw, however, that Facebook had re-established a distributional monopoly.
00:03:52.000And now because everyone was getting their news via Facebook, this meant that they could turn off the spigot on people they didn't like.
00:03:58.000And Facebook decided that in order to please the Democrats, they were going to go ahead and start to do this around the edges and more and more openly.
00:04:06.000So it started off as sort of a fringe phenomenon and then it became part of their mainstream and how they manipulated the newsfeed.
00:04:11.000That's a real concern and it's something that I've talked about.
00:04:14.000But Democrats aren't satisfied with that.
00:04:15.000What Democrats would like is a standard set by the federal government that is no standard at all.
00:04:20.000What Democrats actually want is a radically non-equality based standard.
00:04:31.000They want to just be able to control, essentially what they would like, Democrats, is to appoint somebody like Kara Swisher as the head of a government agency that oversees Facebook and tells Facebook what to do.
00:05:11.000Now, there are certain things that could be done to prevent Facebook from discriminating on the basis of politics.
00:05:16.000We've talked about those things in the past.
00:05:18.000Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was intended to provide a broader spectrum of political viewpoints online.
00:05:26.000Originally, there were liability concerns with anybody who allowed third-party posters to put material up on the internet.
00:05:33.000So any comments section of a website, you could be held liable for whatever got put up in a comment section.
00:05:38.000Section 230 said you're not liable for third-party content that is posted on your site.
00:05:42.000And then there was a legal case in which one of these major websites was sort of cultivating the content that it put up, mainly to try and prevent pornography and spam.
00:05:51.000They were sued because the argument was now they're cultivating the content, so they're responsible for the content.
00:05:58.000And then the federal government stepped in and said, OK, that's not really right.
00:06:00.000We should be allowing people who cultivate content at least to get rid of pornography, for example, or spam.
00:06:05.000We shouldn't make them liable for the other content that's on their site.
00:06:09.000This is how sites like Facebook are able to remove pornography, remove violent material, remove spam.
00:06:14.000Without being subjected to the same legal regimen of liability that, for example, Daily Wire's editorial page is subjected to.
00:06:22.000And then Facebook started to move beyond that and actually censor content and nudge people in particular directions.
00:06:28.000The best way of correcting that would be to change Section 230 to remove the catch-all provision.
00:06:32.000To just say, okay, Facebook is allowed to remove pornography, obscenity, violent content, but they're not allowed to just remove things on the basis of politics alone.
00:06:39.000And if they do start doing that, Now they look more like the New York Times or the Daily Wire in terms of the liability they undergo.
00:06:45.000Okay, that's the right-wing point of view on Facebook.
00:06:47.000The left-wing point of view on Facebook is that Facebook is bad, not because it doesn't allow enough content, but because it allows too much content.
00:06:54.000The left-wing viewpoint on Facebook is that Facebook is such a dominant place for people to get their information that they can grab it and they can use it to their own advantage.
00:07:03.000And Democrats and the media have become experts in this inside-outside game they now play with corporations, where somebody inside a corporation, a staffer at a corporation, gains access to confidential material, and then goes and quote-unquote leaks it.
00:07:17.000Even though the information is not illegal.
00:07:19.000They take that information that is confidential, and then they put it out there in the public sphere with the help of the media that have an agenda.
00:07:25.000The media push it, Democrats hold hearings on it, and then all of them threaten all of these social media companies into doing what they want.
00:07:32.000They essentially make Facebook into an agent of the Democratic Party by threatening them with legislation or regulatory oversight if they don't do what the Democratic Party wants.
00:07:42.000This is incredibly dangerous stuff, whether we are talking about the free speech area or whether we're talking about business areas.
00:07:48.000If the Democratic Party is doing the same thing with regard to major corporations, which they are, you have a whistleblower at a major corporation.
00:07:53.000The whistleblower will report that a corporation is doing nothing illegal.
00:07:57.000That's something the Democrats don't like.
00:07:58.000The media then blow it up into a major issue.
00:08:00.000The Democrats then hold hearings and they say, we will regulate you and we will come after you and we'll find a way to punish your business unless, unless you do what we want.
00:08:08.000And so they turn private organizations, private businesses into agents of the Democratic Party by using the power of government to threaten.
00:08:16.000Even though if the government actually went forward and passed legislation along these lines, there's a good shot it would be unconstitutional.
00:08:22.000So we'll get to how this is expressing itself with regard to Facebook.
00:08:24.000And it's super dangerous because if you think that there ought to be a level playing field when it comes to your access to information, that this is the core liberty that the First Amendment was seeking to protect, Democrats doing this with social media is unbelievably dangerous.
00:08:37.000They're attempting to reestablish the media monopoly, media oligopoly, that they held for 50 years before the rise of the Internet.
00:08:44.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:08:45.000First, we've got a very different kind of sponsor for this episode.
00:08:58.000We are fans of the Jordan Harbinger Show here.
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00:09:16.000In one episode, Jordan talks to a hostage negotiator from the FBI who offers techniques on how to get people to like and trust you, which is both useful and pretty disturbing.
00:09:24.000Another episode tells the story of a pimp and mafia enforcer Who talks about mind manipulation techniques and how to defend against them.
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00:09:53.000The new push against Facebook, which remember this is like their third push against Facebook since 2016.
00:09:58.000Right after 2016, there's a push against Facebook on the Russian disinformation front.
00:10:02.000Ah, Facebook needs to crack down on foreign actors manipulating US elections.
00:10:07.000The reality, as I've said before, is that the amount of actual Russian manipulation during the 2016 election via Facebook was minimal, statistically speaking.
00:10:14.000Then there was the push in 2018-2019 that there was too much generalized misinformation being put out there and Facebook needed to crack down on it.
00:10:26.000In 2018-2019, the Democratic Party demanded that Facebook create some sort of answerability for quote-unquote misinformation, right?
00:10:34.000They shifted from disinformation in 2016 and 2017 to misinformation in 2018-2019.
00:10:40.000And that's when Facebook started to institute fact-checking regimes that were designed to downgrade conservative content and to upgrade legacy media content because the fact-checkers themselves very often were working for the legacy media.
00:10:52.000Hey, now we have reached the third stage.
00:10:53.000This is the third iteration of the attack on Facebook.
00:10:56.000And this iteration is, Facebook is just bad.
00:10:58.000Facebook is bad because of what they do.
00:11:00.000So, there's this Facebook quote-unquote whistleblower.
00:11:02.000I say quote-unquote whistleblower because she's not blowing the whistle on anything.
00:11:06.000She literally is revealing no new information that people did not know.
00:11:09.000Like, is it information that teenage girls using Instagram may not make them mentally healthier?
00:11:14.000So by self-polling data, many teenage girls say that Instagram, like 42% say Instagram makes their life better and only 15-20% say it makes their life worse.
00:11:22.000But like, let's face it, pretty much every fashion show ever has made teenage girls' lives worse.
00:11:31.000Coordinating online and viewing pictures of beautiful people and feeling envy and a certain level of bodily discomfort by looking at other pictures.
00:11:43.000And this is true for Facebook, it's true for Twitter.
00:11:45.000Anytime teenage girls are comparing themselves to some sort of ideal, this is not good for mental health.
00:11:49.000Frankly, online very often it's not good for mental health, period.
00:12:07.000When I say she's a Democratic activist, what I mean is that it's pretty damned clear she's a Democratic activist.
00:12:12.000According to the Daily Wire, she has a record of donations to far-left Democrats and a history of raising issues about purported bias while at previous employers.
00:12:19.000She's working with Democratic operatives to roll out her complaint.
00:12:22.000She has the same lawyers as the anonymous Ukraine whistleblower, whose allegations led to Donald Trump's impeachment, but who reportedly turned out to be then-Vice President Joe Biden's top advisor in the country.
00:12:32.000So, she is a long-time radical leftist.
00:12:36.000On January 13, 2020, for example, she gave money to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
00:12:40.000She's made more than 20 federal campaign contributions since 2016, all of which have gone to Democrats, according to the FEC.
00:12:47.000She was invited to testify by the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, chaired by radical leftist Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
00:12:58.000The lawyers that she has are from a group called Whistleblower Aid.
00:13:02.000The group was founded by Mark Zaid, who previously represented the national security official who alleged Donald Trump inappropriately pressed the Ukraine president on a phone call to investigate whether Joe Biden pressed the country to drop an investigation into Burisma.
00:13:17.000Hogan's case is pretty obviously being pushed by a raft of people who have been involved with the Democratic Party.
00:13:25.000The public relations firm of former Obama aide Bill Burton, a company called Bryce and Gillette, is providing Hogan with strategic communications device, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
00:13:35.000Jen Psaki, by the way, worked for Bryce and Gillette as a senior advisor until September 2020.
00:13:39.000But the Center for Humane Technology is one of her clients, according to ethics filings obtained by the Daily Wire.
00:13:44.000So this lady is really, really well-entrenched with the Democratic bureaucracy.
00:13:52.000The whistleblower doesn't blow the whistle on anything.
00:13:53.000They just say a bunch of stuff Democrats like.
00:13:55.000Democrats bring the Facebook whistleblower forward.
00:13:57.000They have her say a bunch of stuff we already knew, but in tones of high dudgeon.
00:14:01.000And then the Democrats threaten Facebook with vague regulation.
00:14:05.000And what they really want is to set up a governmental quote-unquote oversight body that is designed not to promote any sort of neutral standard that the government could be held to or that could subject the government to lawsuit, for example.
00:14:19.000Instead, they just want to have like a specialist who sits over a business.
00:14:22.000They want to have a shadow CEO at the governmental level.
00:14:37.000And really what I want is a government agency that sits on top of them.
00:14:40.000And Mark Zuckerberg has to have a boss appointed by the Democratic Party.
00:14:43.000I'm actually against the breaking up of Facebook because even looking inside of just Facebook itself, not even Facebook and Instagram, you see the problems of engagement based ranking repeat themselves.
00:14:54.000So the problems here are about the design of algorithms, of AI, and the idea that AI is not intelligent.
00:15:00.000I also believe there needs to be a dedicated oversight body, because right now the only people in the world who are trained to analyze these experiments, to understand what's happening inside of Facebook, are people who, you know, grew up inside of Facebook or Pinterest or another social media company.
00:15:16.000And there needs to be a regulatory home where someone like me could do a tour of duty after working at a place like this.
00:15:23.000And have a place to work on things like regulation, to bring that information out to the oversight boards that have the right to do oversight.
00:15:32.000What a self-sacrificial whistleblower!
00:15:34.000She's literally saying, leave Facebook intact, leave it huge, leave it dominant, let it retain market share, and put me in charge of it.
00:16:01.000She literally says I could leave Facebook and then I could move over to the regulatory side and then I could tell Mark Zuckerberg what to do.
00:16:08.000Understand this is what Democrats want.
00:16:10.000This is not about being anti-Facebook.
00:16:12.000It's about being very pro-Facebook so long as Democrats can run it.
00:16:16.000They don't like the idea of Facebook being independently run even though Facebook does a lot of the things Democrats want.
00:16:36.000That the federal government should essentially control businesses top-down in a very detailed manner.
00:16:43.000And that if these businesses work hand-in-glove with the government, then we leave them alone.
00:16:46.000Everybody else who doesn't work with the government, those people are screwed.
00:16:48.000But if you work with the government, we'll leave you alone, we'll let you retain your market share, but we will essentially control every aspect of how you run your business.
00:16:56.000This sort of corporatist mentality is obviously on display here.
00:17:01.000And it's why Democrats are pushing this.
00:17:05.000Now, the way that Democrats have to justify taking control of Facebook is to claim that Facebook is quote-unquote promoting violence.
00:17:11.000I remember there was an attempt to do this with Parler as well, which is why Amazon Web Services knocked Parler offline in the immediate aftermath of January 6th.
00:17:18.000So, this Facebook whistleblower, Hogan, she says that Facebook is going to lead to genocide.
00:17:25.000My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning.
00:17:32.000What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it.
00:17:43.000Congress can change the rules that Facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing.
00:17:49.000We now know the truth about Facebook's destructive impact.
00:17:54.000Okay, this is just, I'm sorry, it's top-down censorious bullcrap.
00:17:59.000It turns out that genocide and human polarization and people treating each other terribly has been a feature of human life since as long as human beings have been on planet Earth.
00:18:07.000It is not Facebook, which is simply a place where people gather and talk with each other, that is causing polarization, or that is causing genocide.
00:18:16.000And her suggestion is, well, if we just controlled the distribution of information top down via the government, which has never been bad, right?
00:18:23.000I mean, the government has never been used to polarize people.
00:18:26.000The government would never ever seize control of the means of distribution of information and start promoting propaganda on behalf of one political party that affected how people vote and how people think.
00:18:37.000I mean, sure, they did it like in the last election, like the whole last month of the election when they just sort of downgraded all conservative traffic via social media, under pressure from Democrats, and also got rid of openly true stories like the Hunter Biden laptop story a month before the election.
00:18:54.000This is very reminiscent of the basic democratic argument that is often brought up that rights themselves are dangerous because rights can be abused.
00:19:01.000Therefore, the government should get rid of the rights.
00:19:04.000You see this with regard to, for example, hate speech laws that Democrats are constantly pushing.
00:19:09.000The notion that hate speech must be policed, right?
00:19:12.000Because some people could say bad things, therefore, the First Amendment ought to be curbed.
00:19:16.000It's a very popular view on college campuses, and now it's being extended into the corporate sphere.
00:19:22.000Now, as I say, it's not as though this lady is saying anything new.
00:19:28.000According to Reason.com, And thanks to Hogan and the Wall Street Journal reporting, we know that Facebook attempted to survey teen users on how platforms were impacting their mental health.
00:19:37.000Unsurprisingly, the findings were not entirely encouraging.
00:19:39.000One in five respondents said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves.
00:19:43.000Teens already struggling with mental illness said the platform was giving them a harder time.
00:19:47.000But something like 40% said Instagram made them feel better about themselves.
00:19:52.000Ostensibly, says Reason, the problem with Instagram is that it promotes social competition, the race for likes and comments among users posting artificial filtered images of themselves, which may exacerbate body image issues.
00:20:01.000Of course, there's nothing new about this because glossy magazines have been doing this for literal decades.
00:20:07.000The achievement here, as Reason says, is one of self-branding because Hogan did not tell us anything new about all of this.
00:20:43.000For his part, Mark Zuckerberg has responded.
00:20:46.000He put up a Facebook post and he said that he found the criticisms non-compelling.
00:20:53.000He said, quote, First, the SEV that took down all of our services yesterday was the worst outage that we've had in years.
00:20:59.000He talked about the service outage that happened with regard to Facebook.
00:21:02.000He says, second, now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in.
00:21:06.000I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it doesn't reflect the company we know.
00:21:10.000We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being, and mental health.
00:21:12.000It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives.
00:21:16.000At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that's being painted.
00:21:20.000Many of the claims don't make sense, says Zuckerberg.
00:21:22.000If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
00:21:28.000If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space?
00:21:33.000Even ones that are larger than we are?
00:21:35.000If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting?
00:21:40.000And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, why are we still seeing polarization increase in the U.S.
00:21:46.000while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy a use of social media Around the world.
00:21:52.000We'll get to more of Mark Zuckerberg's response to the accusations of the quote-unquote fake whistleblower from Facebook in just one second.
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00:24:00.000Advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content.
00:24:04.000I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed.
00:24:08.000The moral business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction.
00:24:12.000But of everything published, says Zuckerberg, I'm particularly focused on the questions raised about our work with kids.
00:24:16.000I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the kinds of experiences I want my kids and others to have online, and it's very important to me everything we build is safe and good for kids.
00:24:23.000The reality is young people use technology.
00:24:25.000Think about how many school-age kids have phones.
00:24:27.000Now listen, I actually believe that kids very often should not be given phones by their parents.
00:24:31.000I don't plan on giving my kids any sort of phone with internet access until they basically hit 17, 18 years old.
00:24:38.000Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe, says Zuckerberg.
00:24:43.000We're deeply committed to doing industry-leading work in this area.
00:24:46.000A good example of this work is Messenger Kids, which is widely recognized as better and safer than the alternatives.
00:24:52.000We've also worked on bringing this kind of age-appropriate experience with parental controls for Instagram as well.
00:24:57.000But given questions about whether that would be better for kids, we've paused that project.
00:25:00.000Like many of you, I found it difficult to read the mischaracterization of the research into how Instagram affects young people.
00:25:06.000As we wrote in our newsroom post explaining this, the research actually demonstrated many teens we heard from feel using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced.
00:25:16.000In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Wall Street Journal, including areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness, and eating issues, more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.
00:25:33.000He says that we should really let the government get involved.
00:25:35.000It's similar to balancing other social issues.
00:25:38.000I don't believe private companies should make all the decisions on their own.
00:25:40.000That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now.
00:25:43.000I've testified in Congress multiple times.
00:25:45.000I've asked them to update the regulations.
00:25:46.000I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important.
00:25:50.000We're committed to doing the best work we can, but at some level, the right body to assess trade-offs between social equities is our democratically elected Congress.
00:25:57.000And what I think Zuckerberg does not understand here is that the goal of the Democrats is never to actually regulate.
00:26:12.000The goal is to take the biggest companies in America.
00:26:14.000Whether you're talking about just the pure corporate sector or whether you're talking about social media.
00:26:17.000And to have Democrats control every aspect of how work works.
00:26:21.000This is the reason why wokeness has infused corporations.
00:26:23.000These corporations know that if they please Democrats, Democrats will pat them on the head and call them good little boys and girls and then give them cookies.
00:26:30.000And when it comes to Facebook, it's not enough for Facebook to try and serve its governmental masters in the Democratic Party.
00:26:37.000The Democrats understand that Facebook, being a place where billions of eyeballs are gathered, is a heavy threat to their dominance via legacy media.
00:26:46.000That is the reason we are doing all of this.
00:26:48.000If there were no Facebook news feed, the Democrats would not care about Facebook.
00:27:27.000People sharing silly memes with their friends or ideas with their friends.
00:27:32.000The reason the Democrats are focused in on the news feed is because that's what they care about.
00:27:36.000And you can see this in how the media are ecstatic over all of this.
00:27:40.000Robin Given, the senior critic at large for the Washington Post, has a piece today in the Washington Post titled, The Whistleblower Came to Advocate for Humans Over Algorithms.
00:27:50.000This digital monster that has taught the culture how to overreact and fly off the handle needs to be tamed, regulated, open it up, slow it down, make it more human.
00:27:59.000A hard intervention is like taking a piece of content off Facebook, taking a user off Facebook.
00:28:03.000Soft interventions are about making a slightly different choice.
00:28:05.000To make the platform less viral, less twitchy, said Francis Hogan, the former Facebook employee who testified as a whistleblower.
00:28:13.000Hogan came to offer testimony about the way in which Facebook's profit strategy makes young people's lives worse.
00:28:18.000Okay, first of all, I just want to point something out.
00:28:20.000Whenever people on the left talk about the evils of profit strategy, understand that human beings are driven by ambition.
00:28:26.000They're driven by what is in their self-interest.
00:28:28.000And whenever people on the left say profit is bad, profit of course being simply the marginal increase of value The risk that you took and that paid off with regard to giving a profit or with regard to giving a product or service to somebody else.
00:28:42.000When they say profit is bad, the alternative is the government setting the rules.
00:28:45.000What are the incentive structures there?
00:28:47.000The incentive structures there are not about pleasing anybody else.
00:28:50.000It's about pleasing core constituencies and not pleasing consumers, right?
00:28:55.000If you seek to get rid of profit, what is going to be the actual driving factor in human behavior?
00:29:01.000The actual driving factor in human behavior is going to be soft societal approval or levels of power and control that you can utilize over other human beings without having to answer to a feedback loop like the market.
00:29:11.000The reason that profit motive is good is because it is a feedback loop where you learn what people want and what they don't.
00:29:18.000The reason that the government is very bad at this stuff is because feedback loops do not exist for the government, particularly in the regulatory sphere.
00:29:24.000At least you can make the argument that if a legislator does something bad, people can get rid of the legislator.
00:29:29.000This is not true in the regulatory sphere.
00:29:30.000So when you hear people ripping on profit motive at Facebook, understand that the alternative is to have governmental actors who are not answerable to you, controlling major areas of your life for their own power and glorification.
00:30:11.000She wants Democrats to control your speech.
00:30:15.000The goal here is to prevent people from actually coordinating with one another and talking with one another.
00:30:19.000This is why Anderson Cooper was gushing on CNN.
00:30:21.000The overwhelming media love for this whistleblower should be telling you something.
00:30:27.000Maybe it should be telling you something about self-interest.
00:30:31.000Facebook likes to say it was built to bring people together.
00:30:34.000It literally uses those words in promotional material.
00:30:37.000Well, today it did bring people together.
00:30:39.000For the first time in a long time, Democratic and Republican members of a Senate Commerce Subcommittee were together, united in their praise of whistleblower Frances Haugen.
00:30:47.000Now, as you know, she's the former Facebook product manager who leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal documents indicating that Facebook knows the harm that they and Instagram can do But chooses to put clicks, eyeballs, and ad sales ahead of fixing the problem.
00:31:04.000Okay, but there's no way to fix the problem.
00:31:06.000This is the point that Zuckerberg has made.
00:31:45.000What they care about is preventing the dissemination of information that the media oppose.
00:31:50.000And by the way, the reason that the media, this is a problem of the media's own creation.
00:31:54.000If they wanted to reestablish faith with the American public, they could stop being dishonest jackasses, but they're not going to stop doing that.
00:31:59.000So instead, they're going to try and seize control of, again, how you get your news.
00:32:03.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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00:32:12.000This corporation was into scientific research and they thought about what could they do rather than what should they do.
00:32:18.000And so they decided they were going to create, let's say, like a giant park.
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00:33:39.000Okay, so as I say, the media are fully invested in the bull crap Facebook whistleblower who's not blowing the whistle on anything because they want to leverage their power For control on behalf of Democrats.
00:33:51.000That's why you have Alison Camerata who's berating the Facebook employees saying, you allowed the big lie to proliferate.
00:34:16.000Does Facebook take any responsibility for what happened on January 6th since it allowed the big election lie propagated by Donald Trump to proliferate on the site?
00:34:28.000The responsibility for January 6th, I can't be more clear about this than to say the responsibility for January 6th lies with those who broke the law and those in politics and elsewhere who incited them.
00:34:41.000Okay, the Facebook spokesperson is exactly right.
00:34:47.000But has anyone ever asked CNN, does CNN bear responsibility for the riots that happened last summer when they were allowing the big lie that police across the country are systemically racist to not only proliferate, but fill their news waves for day after day after day, for year after year actually?
00:35:02.000Does CNN bear responsibility for that?
00:36:31.000It is all just a BS cover for the actual seizure of power.
00:36:35.000David Cicilline, the representative from Louisiana, he's openly saying that Facebook needs to turn over its algorithms to the federal government now.
00:36:44.000If Facebook comes up with a proprietary algorithm that enhances their business capabilities, they don't seem to think they have to share that.
00:36:56.000Well, I mean, there's a number of ways you can require algorithmic audits to be sure they're doing what they claim they do.
00:37:02.000You can require greater transparency for algorithms.
00:37:05.000You can, you know, permit agent and agency responsible looking at their practices, either its impact on competition, or on fairness to consumers are two obvious places.
00:37:15.000Okay, under what rubric would you seize their algorithms?
00:37:24.000I know of very few other situations in American life where you are simply supposed to turn over your confidential business information to the federal government so they can oversee you.
00:37:34.000Not because you're like flying an airplane around and you need to demonstrate that the airplane is going to fly to the FAA, but because you're just a business operating.
00:37:43.000The point here is that you cannot demand that corporations turn over all confidential business information under the open acknowledgement that you are attempting to violate the First Amendment.
00:38:55.000I really think that you cannot afford to send your kid or yourself to a university That isn't going to at least mirror some eternal values at this point, considering what universities have become factories of leftist thought.
00:40:01.000They would love to maintain their former levels of control because as the media space fragments and as people start to view podcasts like this one, or start to listen to shows like this one, or start to access the Daily Wire, that means less control over how you get your news and less money for them.
00:40:16.000And they actually want their narrative to win.
00:40:18.000And that narrative is so often at odds with reality that the only way their narrative can win is to shut down the dissemination of the opposing narrative.
00:40:25.000So, for example, you've been hearing that Joe Biden is still in control of things.
00:40:50.000Central Time yesterday, and the man is slurring his words and walking into things.
00:40:55.000When you build a charging station, it's like back in the day when my grandpa worked for the Maryland Granola Company back in the 1920s in that area.
00:41:04.000They went from state to state convincing people that they allowed them to put 20,000 gallons of gasoline under the ground.
00:42:34.000According to Politico, Democrats who were hoping that the monthly $300 per-child checks the federal government started sending to families over the summer would be a winner in the midterms, they won't like the findings of the latest Morning Consult poll.
00:42:44.000Fewer than half of respondents, 47%, gave Congressional Democrats any credit for providing the extra cash.
00:42:52.000While half of registered voters support the expanded payments versus 38% in opposition, only 35% want to make them permanent, which is what Democrats are trying at the moment.
00:43:00.000Democrats just want to cram down the idea that they will give you free money and that you will love it.
00:43:04.000You will love the free money that they are cramming down upon you.
00:43:08.000And in order to justify spending all of this money, of course, they're going to claim that the Republicans are obstructionists because Republicans won't voluntarily raise the debt ceiling.
00:43:26.000That is what Republicans are trying to do.
00:43:27.000They're saying, listen, we understand you're trying to pay off the current credit card bill.
00:43:30.000Also, we are not going to extend you a further line of credit unless you decide that you're going to restructure how you approach the economy as a whole.
00:44:04.000Well, you know, the big problem here is that Trump was a big spender.
00:44:06.000As I recall, all of the spending done last year was a bipartisan affair, including Democrats.
00:44:10.000All of the spending done this year was a completely partisan affair with not a single Republican vote, so far as I'm aware.
00:44:15.000Here is Joe Biden here ripping on Trump.
00:44:18.000The reason we have to raise the debt limit is in part because of the reckless tax and spending policies under the previous Trump administration.
00:44:27.000In four years, they incurred nearly $8 trillion.
00:44:33.000In four years, $8 trillion in additional debt and bills we have to now pay off.
00:44:41.000That's more than a quarter of the entire debt incurred now outstanding after more than 200 years.
00:44:57.000Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, They're threatening to reuse the power, their power, to prevent us from doing our job, saving the economy from a catastrophic event.
00:45:10.000I think quite frankly, it's hypocritical, dangerous, and disgraceful.
00:45:14.000Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds.
00:45:19.000Excuse me, especially as we're clawing our way out of this pandemic.
00:45:25.000And then he finishes up by saying, if you don't want to save the country, get the hell out of the way, because there's nothing that says bipartisanship quite like that.
00:45:32.000Meteor is headed to crash into our economy.
00:45:36.000Democrats are willing to do all the work stopping it.
00:45:40.000Republicans just have to let us do our job.
00:45:59.000Joe Biden doesn't want to do that because that would involve a quote-unquote voterama.
00:46:01.000Okay, voterama is where the Democrats have to vote on a bunch of separate issues, and they all have to be on the record voting for those separate issues.
00:46:07.000Biden doesn't want them on the record, so he's angry at Republicans.
00:46:42.000Okay, but instead, they are now considering, just to avoid the culpability of having to vote on a bunch of single issues at the Senate level, and then hold those Senators to account, to avoid all of that, the Democrats are now apparently contemplating the stupidity of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin, according to Axios.
00:47:01.000A trillion dollar platinum coin could be minted within hours of the Treasury Secretary's decision to do so, says Philip Deal, former director of the U.S.
00:47:14.000Well, then you guys better get on it, shouldn't you?
00:47:16.000In case of emergency, a trillion dollar coin could be deployed to bridge any gap between the money running out and the debt ceiling being raised.
00:47:23.000Mint already produces a one-ounce platinum eagle and has no shortage of platinum blanks already in stock.
00:47:29.000So first of all, I'm just looking forward to the Netflix film about the ragtag group of diverse criminals who steal the one trillion dollar Fed coin that has now been created in order to pay off our ballooning national debt.
00:47:42.000Apparently, a coin could be struck in minutes at the West Point Mint, and then it would be physically deposited at the New York Fed.
00:47:49.000You have bought yourself the equivalent of a trillion dollar increase in the debt limit without any impact on inflation.
00:47:53.000Well, I mean, there is some impact on inflation, considering that when you start minting coins in order to pay off the debt, which is what you're talking about right here, The idea being that we'll backfill all of this later and then take the $1 trillion coin out of circulation. When you start doing that, you are leading the way to what if we just print more money? What if we actually just physically print more money?
00:48:12.000That's clearly why people have been hesitant to do this in the past. But according to the Democrats, the real idea here should be to get rid of the debt limit entirely. Entirely. Here's James Clyburn making that case.
00:48:24.000We have some arcade rules that we need to just get rid of.
00:48:28.000This debt limit business is arcade and needs to be thrown to the trash pile.
00:48:36.000OK, it needs to be thrown in the trash pile.
00:48:38.000We want to have to remember the way that it used to be is that Congress actually had to appropriate specific funds.
00:48:43.000Congress had to tell the federal government exactly what debt instruments they had to use.
00:48:47.000This was the case from about 1787 all the way through about 1910.
00:48:52.000And then during World War One, there were these sort of blanket Abilities for the federal government to take out debt.
00:48:58.000And then in the 1970s, there was an attempt to effectively get rid of the debt ceiling by saying anytime Congress appropriated funding that would give the federal treasury the ability to take out debt.
00:49:08.000And then that was walked back in the 1990s.
00:49:11.000That's what the Democrats would like back.
00:49:12.000They would like the idea to be that we never have to think about the debt ever, ever, ever.
00:49:15.000It just automatically increases the ability of the federal government to borrow.
00:49:19.000And then they wonder why people are worried about inflation.
00:49:22.000Janet Yellen, again, it is incredible, and it says something about how our financial system works, that people move directly from the so-called independent Federal Reserve directly over to heading the Treasury Department for Joe Biden without any gap, and they promote exactly the same policy.
00:49:37.000We're going to pretend that's not political in any way?
00:49:41.000Here is Janet Yellen saying that inflation is transitory, but also it's not going to go away soon, which is not the definition of transitory.
00:49:48.000Supply bottlenecks have developed that have caused inflation.
00:49:53.000I believe that they're transitory, but that doesn't mean they'll go away over the next several months.
00:50:02.000Oh, well, if it goes away, then... But it's also not... It's kind of transitory, but not... Also, she wants more control over how you do your finances.
00:50:10.000So the Democrats have been proposing an IRS rule that would require all banks to report all transactions over $600.
00:50:15.000So that the IRS can spy on everything you do.
00:51:14.000All of this is about more control top down, and this is why they have to maintain the supremacy of informational dissemination.
00:51:20.000If that goes away, they got a real problem on their hands.
00:51:22.000Okay, meanwhile, Democrats have begun to narrow their differences on Biden's social spending bill.
00:51:26.000As I predicted, this thing is not going to go down to flaming defeat.
00:51:28.000Eventually, it will end up in the $2 trillion area.
00:51:31.000According to the Washington Post, Democrats in a flurry of private talks are beginning to narrow their differences over the size of Biden's sweeping safety net bill.
00:51:38.000As liberals signal, they are open to sizable concessions on the scope of what could be the most far-reaching social legislation in years.
00:51:44.000I mean, guys, stop tubing all over the place.
00:51:49.000Most far-reaching social legislation in years.
00:51:52.000The discussions, which remain highly fluid, suggest that Democratic leaders are pushing to move beyond a series of angry intraparty standoffs and focus instead on whether they can coalesce around a scaled-down package.
00:52:02.000In a virtual meeting with a dozen liberal Democrats on Monday, Biden suggested a package in the range of $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion for the safety net bill, significantly lower than the original $3.5 trillion.
00:52:15.000Pramila Jayapal countered with a range of $2.5 trillion to $2.9 trillion, according to three of those people.
00:52:21.000Biden signaled another potential compromise when asked by reporters whether he would sign the bill if it included the Hyde Amendment, a provision banning the use of federal funds for abortion.
00:52:29.000That is a rider that is attached to pretty much every federal bill.
00:52:32.000And Biden said, yeah, yeah, I'll still sign that, which is fun since last year he said he opposed the Hyde Amendment.
00:52:38.000Biden is also attempting to tell people how important this bill is when we are in the middle of an inflationary spiral and we are paying people to stay out of work and there are 10 million open jobs in the country right now.
00:52:49.000And Democrats are a little bit damned if they do damned if they don't hear.
00:52:52.000If they don't do it, then they are incapable of getting anything done.
00:52:54.000And if they do do it, then they are going to end up with a bill that is going to provide just a field day for Republicans ripping on how Democrats spend your money.
00:53:04.000So there's only one way that you can get through that.
00:53:06.000The only way, there's no way out but through for the Democrats, and that is they just have to keep talking.
00:53:09.000They have to keep talking, they have to fill the airwaves, and they have to prevent anybody from speaking back against them.
00:53:14.000Okay, this is true in the area of fiscal responsibility.
00:53:17.000It's also true in the area of science.
00:53:20.000It is just a continuing incredible thing to me how the scientific establishment has been completely perverted by a desire for social justice nonsense.
00:53:32.000So yesterday, there was a meme that was going around.
00:54:28.000Um, no, men cannot get pregnant, but our scientific experts are now telling us so.
00:54:33.000The only way that you can promote garbage is, again, to hold an informational monopoly.
00:54:37.000That is the only way that you can do it.
00:54:39.000And that's how you end up with this insane situation with Sonic.
00:54:42.000So, there's this insane story that made the rounds yesterday.
00:54:46.000Again, this just demonstrates, it demonstrates at full scale how crazy our society has become.
00:54:52.000There is a recent viral video of a trans woman in a heated conversation with a Sonic employee, and it sparked a debate about gender identity and transphobia.
00:56:29.000I want all businesses to hire trans-led organizations to teach their employees how to respect all humans.
00:56:34.000So Sonic immediately looked into this and started thinking about whether they ought to fire this person for the great crime of pointing out that perhaps the employees were terming this person sir because the person's credit card had a male name on it.
00:56:56.000And Taurus says, what would you assume looking at me?
00:56:58.000And the Sonic employee answers, I assume you're a man.
00:57:02.000And that's when Taurus turned the camera to face himself, displaying pink lipstick, long hair, and cat eye frames, and said, thank you, whatever, and drove away.
00:57:10.000Okay, well, if you ask somebody whether they appear to be a man or a woman, and then they give you an honest answer, that is not transphobia if you are a man.
00:57:20.000But again, the only way that you can promote this sort of crap, and then you can do it to corporations, and then you can do it to the entire society, is by essentially monopolizing the conversation.
00:57:31.000I keep focusing on it because it's so important.
00:57:33.000The monopoly on the conversation is everything to the left.
00:57:35.000If they lose the monopoly on conversation, they lose the conversation.