Lululemon comes under fire for lack of diversity despite its "woke virtue signaling." Trump sues big tech, and Joe Biden hands Afghanistan over to the Taliban? I'm Ben Shapiro, and I'll get to all the news in just one moment. First, a reminder: another thousand of you, my wise listeners, have already made the switch from your overpriced wireless carrier to PureTalk over the past couple of months because you wanted to save money. So what are the rest of you waiting for? If you have cell phone coverage with one of the big providers, you are spending too much money. If you're with AT&T, or Verizon, or T-Mobile, your family could save over $800 a year just by switching to PeerTalk. You get the same great coverage because they use the exact same towers as the big carriers. You can even keep your phone and your number, but you will save a fortune in the process. By the way, PeerTalk is the top rated wireless company by Consumer Affairs with the absolute best customer service team based right here in America. Go check them out right now, and get started and get 50% off your very first month of coverage. When you do, you'll get unlimited talk, text, and 6GB of data for just 30 bucks a month. You're not being smart if you don't switch over to Pure Talk today, are you being smart, say Ben Shapiro? "Dial Pound 250?" - That's $50 off your first month? When you get that dial Pound 250, you get $250 off your FIRST MONTH of coverage? You'll get $100 back by dialing in 250, Say Ben Shapiro. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Ben Shapiro's Show is a show that s all about smart, and you'll be getting $100 off your First Month of coverage by Dial Pound 250. Ben Shapiro: Get $100, Say CHECK $50, $200, $75, say CHECK CHECK 250, CHECK OUT CHECKOUT $5, $50 CHECK THEM OUT $10 CHECK A FRIENDS GET $100 OFF $25, $25 CHECKING $50 OFF A MONTH OF VIP PRICING $10,00 AND A FRIEND GET A PRICE OF $50 OR $25 BOWLE AND A VIP PACKAGE AND A PATREON IS PROGRAM AND A FOGCAST OF $20 CHECKED?
00:00:22.000We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
00:00:24.000First, a reminder, another thousand of you, my extremely wise listeners, you've already made the switch from your overpriced wireless carrier to PureTalk over the past couple of months because you wanted to save money.
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00:00:50.000You can even keep your phone and your number, but you will save a fortune in the process.
00:00:53.000By the way, PeerTalk is the top rated wireless company by Consumer Affairs, with the absolute best customer service team based right here in America.
00:01:49.000You remember, it was an event that was featured in an Instagram post in which Lululemon recommended other accounts to follow, including the host of the workshop, a person named Rebi Kern.
00:01:58.000That yoga instructor is a US-based brand ambassador for the firm.
00:02:02.000Now, a lot of people at the time pointed out Lululemon sells like $100 pairs of yoga pants.
00:02:07.000By the way, quick side swipe of yoga pants, not actual clothing.
00:02:10.000In any case, Lululemon sells these very overpriced yoga pants to middle-income to upper-income women with dispensable capital.
00:02:21.000And that's not where the virtue signaling, the woke virtue signaling, ended, of course.
00:02:25.000You'll remember that Lululemon was a big pusher in the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:02:29.000They started putting out the black square and they started telling everybody at their company, they had to sort of mirror the woke corporate message.
00:02:35.000Well, now, now the woke come for thee.
00:02:37.000Ask not for whom the woke come, they come for thee, Lululemon and thy yoga pants.
00:02:43.000According to Business Insider, in spring 2020, days after the murder of George Floyd, a high level Lululemon manager told a team of designers and copywriters she wanted to put All Lives Matter at the top of Lululemon's website.
00:02:53.000Amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations across North America, Lululemon had been scrambling in its Vancouver, British Columbia headquarters to craft a response to the events suddenly dominating the news cycle.
00:03:03.000Over the course of the afternoon on June 1st, the company put together a task force to develop copy and graphics to present to Top Brass and quickly publish to its website.
00:03:11.000The team of about 10 employees had spent hours mocking up a version of the homepage featuring Black Lives Matter as the headline because, you'll remember, it is very important in the modern age that every major corporation mirror whatever is the woke priority of the day.
00:03:24.000I know, most of you, you really didn't care whether a yoga pants company was signaling about Black Lives Mattering, particularly a yoga pants company that largely caters to upper-class white ladies.
00:03:33.000But it was very important to Lululemon that they do this.
00:03:36.000It was very important that they signal to everyone how much that company that makes overpriced, extremely tight-fitting bottoms, how they signal about systemic American police racism, supposedly.
00:03:51.000They were interrupted by a manager, however, according to four former and current employees close to the matter.
00:03:56.000It is so amazing how the inside-outside game now works at these corporations.
00:04:00.000All you have to have There's a couple of employees who go and leak to the media, and then the media suggests that your company is racist or sexist or bigoted in some way, and then you're not allowed to fire those people because, of course, these are good-hearted whistleblowers.
00:04:13.000You're not allowed to look for the folks who are trying to destroy your company from the outside and run your company based on this inside-outside game.
00:04:19.000All you have to do is craft a media response from the inside, these leakers, and suddenly the entire corporate structure is going to be responding to 21-year-old interns.
00:04:31.000A bunch of people leaked to Business Insider.
00:04:33.000they said the manager, a director who they added had not been previously involved in the project, demanded that the group use new approved copy. Near the beginning of the proposed text, the phrase All Lives Matter appeared in capital letters. We are not writing Black Lives Matter, that's not where we're at, the director told the group, according to two employees present in the room. After significant debate, the employees, several of whom are black, indigenous, and people of color, agreed to create two designs to present to leadership. One, One with All Lives Matter, another with Black Lives Matter.
00:04:58.000While Black Lives Matter was ultimately selected, an employee who was involved in the homepage project said they felt triggered and traumatized and described it as one of the most disgusting moments in their time at Lululemon.
00:05:10.000My God, the yoga pants company, a person, their final policy mirrored the policy priorities of these people of color who are low-level staffers inside the company.
00:05:20.000Finally, the company agreed with the low-level staffers who are people of color.
00:05:46.000They had to write the words, all lives matter in a mock-up that they didn't use.
00:05:50.000Oh, oh, the heart flutters at the level of threat faced by these employees at a yoga pants company.
00:05:58.000Lululemon then ended up putting out an Instagram post that said, words have power, actions have more power.
00:06:05.000Many corporations stumbled in their internal and external communication after the murder of George Floyd, but even before Spring 2020, All Lives Matter had been widely recognized as a phrase that downplayed the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:06:15.000The director was given the chance to apologize to a group of about 200 copywriters, designers, and photographers on a conference call.
00:06:21.000Ah, the obligatory internal Maoist struggle session.
00:06:24.000We have to make sure that this director knew he had sinned and he will atone.
00:06:31.000Many of these copywriters, designers, and photographers were unaware of the events for which the director was apologizing, which, of course, is part and parcel of all of this.
00:06:38.000It's not directed just at the director, of course.
00:06:40.000It is directed at all of the low-level employees who will shut up or face the same treatment.
00:06:44.000The director left Lululemon shortly after the apology.
00:06:47.000So he made the apology, and then he left.
00:06:49.000So you didn't get the benefit of the apology then.
00:06:51.000From the outside, Lululemon exudes an aspirational lifestyle with its high-tech active wear and brightly curated 500 plus retail stores designed to reflect the company's core values of personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, honesty, courage, connection, fun, and inclusion, according to its website.
00:07:06.000Lululemon has $4.4 billion in sales every year.
00:07:11.000It has only accelerated its growth turn under CEO Calvin McDonald thanks to his strategic investments in growing categories like menswear, e-commerce, and connected fitness, including the acquisition of Mirror in June 2020.
00:07:21.000But according to 12 current and former Lululemon corporate employees who spoke with Insider, the company's image stands in stark contrast to their experiences behind the scenes at the company's corporate offices.
00:07:32.000My god, I can't wait to tell you about the sorts of oppression happening at the yoga pants company.
00:07:38.000We'll get to more of this in just one second, because it is indicative of how companies are now being run, and it is indicative of the authoritarian moment that we are currently experiencing, and that is stretching out across the corporate landscape, and in some cases, being facilitated by government.
00:09:16.000Again, the way that this works is you get a couple of your fellow employees to go and talk to Business Insider, and then you pressure a company that does $4.4 billion in sales every year.
00:09:25.000To mirror your corporate woke priorities.
00:09:28.000Some corporate employees said they felt that the rapid growth of the company had hindered its ability to implement changes, particularly in areas like diversity and inclusion that have long plagued Lululemon.
00:09:37.000The employees who spoke with Insider did so on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their current and future employment opportunities.
00:09:42.000By the way, you should fear jeopardizing your current and future business opportunities when you talk out of school about a company that is paying you.
00:09:49.000Just a general rule, when the company is not violating the law, when you just don't like the priorities of the company, if you talk out of school about that, they have every right to fire you.
00:09:58.000There's nothing in employment law that suggests that when you bitch and moan about their diversity policies, this means they must listen to you.
00:10:05.000It is an absurdity of the highest order that these corporate heads don't just run their companies how they should normally run their companies.
00:10:14.000You know what would happen if one of my producers started talking out of school about the company, all the problems we have, we have lots of procedures.
00:10:21.000We have an HR department for any problems inside the company.
00:10:24.000You start going outside the company and talking to members of the media about how terrible the company you work for is, the boss has every right and nay, an obligation to fire your ass and put you on the unemployment line.
00:10:34.000In any case, Business Insider, the suggestion is that Lululemon is deeply racist because they acquiesced to the left wing.
00:10:42.000They were woke enough for the left wing for a brief period of time.
00:10:48.000According to Business Insider, according to one of the copywriters present in the room, several employees reported the director who demanded the All Lives Matter homepage design.
00:10:56.000So they reported him after the director's tearful apology.
00:10:59.000A copywriter who had left the company the year prior said she was notified of the incident by her former colleagues and felt compelled to send an email urging members of management to fire the director.
00:11:06.000Okay, so you have somebody, a copywriter, who no longer even worked at the company.
00:11:10.000Emailing the heads of the company to urge the firing of a person she had no relations with and was not even involved in the procedures with.
00:11:21.000Copywriter who no longer works at the company trying to get somebody to lose their job for the great sin of proposing an All Lives Matter post as opposed to a Black Lives Matter post?
00:11:29.000You're a jerk and an authoritarian to boot.
00:11:31.000The email was sent on June 8, 2020 with the subject line, Racism, Privilege, and Inaction at Lululemon.
00:11:38.000It is my ask of you, on behalf of many others who have complained and who do not feel able to speak on this issue publicly, out of fear for their employment, that you remove this person from your company immediately, she wrote in the email, which has been reviewed by Insider.
00:12:01.000The former employee told Insider she didn't receive a response, but said the director left Lululemon shortly after her email was sent.
00:12:08.000Stacia Jones, a vice president and head of inclusion, diversity, equity, and action at Lululemon, which is a filler of a job, says as a matter of company policy, we do not comment on individual employee situations.
00:12:18.000If anyone at Lululemon has a negative experience, we have several ways for employees to share their concerns and feedback.
00:12:25.000But there was another incident involving racial insensitivity just weeks prior at the height of the global coronavirus outbreak in April 2020 when art director Trevor Fleming posted a link to a t-shirt on his personal Instagram account.
00:12:38.000The t-shirt had the title of bat fried rice with a picture of a Chinese takeout box of bat wings on the front and the words no thank you on the back and right sleeve.
00:12:45.000As in like don't eat the bats because it started the global coronavirus pandemic according to early reports before it turned out it was actually probably just a Chinese governmental lab leak.
00:12:54.000In an email to Insider, Fleming said sharing the t-shirt, which was designed by an acquaintance of his, was a momentary lapse of judgment and an incident he had, quote, spent the past year regretting.
00:13:02.000I fully understand the insensitivity associated with the design he made and deeply regret the pain I caused.
00:13:08.000The scandal followed an even earlier incident.
00:13:11.000It used to be that companies in the United States actively discriminated against members of racial minorities.
00:13:16.000Now, a director posts a mildly insensitive Instagram and suddenly all hell breaks loose.
00:13:22.000That scandal, a scandal of epic proportions, followed an earlier incident in Lululemon's history when founder and then-CEO Chip Wilson wrote in a since-deleted post that the company's name was chosen as a marketing ploy to attract Japanese customers.
00:13:35.000A Japanese marketing firm would not try to create a North American-sounding brand with the letter L because the sound does not exist in Japanese phonetics, Wilson wrote on the company's blog.
00:13:42.000By including an L in the name, it was thought the Japanese consumer would find the name innately North American and authentic.
00:13:48.000It's funny to watch them try and say it, he added.
00:13:52.000A dumb comment does not mean the entire company is, of course, deeply racist.
00:13:55.000But everything has to be taken as though it is a massive issue.
00:13:59.000And of course, We'll have the obligatory struggle sessions.
00:14:02.000There'll be donations to various interest groups.
00:14:05.000Ibram Kendi will get a million-dollar donation from Lululemon, probably, in order to ensure that they are anti-racist enough.
00:14:11.000They'll participate in the system of woke indulgences.
00:14:15.000And none of us will buy them anything, except for a notion that the next time any employee has a problem, they immediately run back to Business Insider.
00:14:22.000And this is the entire goal now with regard to corporate America.
00:14:25.000You too can pressure your bosses into doing the bidding of the left.
00:14:28.000All you have to do is find some member of the journactivist media to cover it and you are good to go.
00:14:33.000Because this is what journalism has become.
00:14:35.000The story here isn't about a bunch of woke employees who can't keep their mouths shut and violate their confidentiality agreements.
00:14:42.000The story is truly about a media that is designed and created in order to be an activist wing of the Democratic Party.
00:14:47.000There is no difference at this point between business insider Or Daily Beast and Media Matters.
00:14:52.000They are all part of the same ecosystem.
00:14:54.000Their entire design is to pressure institutions that they believe they can pressure into doing the bidding of the left.
00:15:00.000That is what all of these stories are about.
00:15:01.000They're about can you get an institution to do what you want?
00:15:05.000It's not about covering something that is innately newsworthy.
00:15:07.000What the hell is newsworthy about a thing that happened in 2020 that is not even mildly worthy of news coverage that a director said all lives matter in 2020?
00:15:17.000By the way, this was the featured story at Twitter yesterday.
00:15:19.000And this is not just me bringing up a story that is random on the internet.
00:15:23.000This was the featured story all day on Twitter.com.
00:15:27.000And they actually put it in their news feed on the right side of the page.
00:15:31.000Because again, all of the journalistic entities that you know and love are activist entities.
00:15:35.000Now some of us in the conservative side of the aisle will say we're conservative.
00:15:38.000We cover the news from a particular angle.
00:15:40.000But the thing is that the media ecosystem that proclaims that it is in fact a sort of objective news ecosystem is not.
00:15:48.000It is designed in the same way as Media Matters.
00:15:50.000They run stories specifically in order to pressure these corporations.
00:15:53.000They run stories specifically in order to Begin boycott.
00:15:58.000Why do you think it is that every time a controversial comment is made, you get somebody from the Huffington Post calling up advertisers of Tucker Carlson's program and saying, do you know you advertised with Tucker Carlson?
00:16:07.000That question is not designed to elicit a response.
00:16:10.000That question is designed to elicit inaction.
00:16:12.000Namely, the advertiser getting scared and canceling Tucker Carlson.
00:16:17.000That is, this insider story is designed in order to get Lululemon to do whatever the left wants it to do, because this is not innately newsworthy stuff.
00:16:25.000It's not the president of Haiti being assassinated in his home.
00:16:28.000It is not the United States pull out from Afghanistan.
00:16:31.000It is a couple of woke employees from Lululemon who are frustrated with their day jobs and bored in their New York apartments.
00:16:39.000But this is how the game works right now.
00:16:41.000And it has predictable impacts in terms of politics.
00:16:43.000Because it turns out that typically, when corporations are involved in politics, it's because, for example, they want to get people elected who are friendlier to their business positions.
00:16:51.000But now the polarity has been reversed.
00:16:53.000Politicians, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, are able to activate members of the media to now make the corporations do what the politicians want them to do.
00:17:00.000It used to be the notion that corporations supported politicians because they wanted to get politicians elected who would be beneficial to their agenda.
00:17:08.000Now it is actually precisely the opposite.
00:17:09.000It is politicians who are cuddling businesses into doing what they want them to do in the social sphere.
00:17:15.000And they're doing so with the help of a not compliant, a complicit media, an activist media that is deeply involved in every aspect of this.
00:17:24.000We'll get to more of this in just one second, because this is becoming very clear with regard to, for example, Toyota.
00:17:28.000First, let us talk about how you hire and fire.
00:17:31.000So, if you're a business owner who's hiring, you probably face a lot of challenges when it comes to finding the right person for your role.
00:17:36.000That's why hiring can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
00:17:38.000Sure, you could post your job to some job board, and all you can do is hope the right person comes along.
00:17:43.000That's why you should try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
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00:18:06.000It's no wonder over 2.3 million businesses have come to ZipRecruiter for their hiring needs.
00:18:11.000So, for example, here at Daily Wire, if you need a great producer like Elliot, you know, somebody who will make sure that things Run on time, but also give you terrible recommendations about Marvel movies that you must, must, must watch.
00:18:22.000Well, then you need ZipRecruiter as well.
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00:18:38.000ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
00:18:41.000All right, so it's not just Lululemon, of course.
00:18:43.000This entire sort of debacle is designed in order to push corporations to do what the left wants them to do. The latest element of this, of course, is Toyota has now announced it will stop any donation to any Republican member of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. Now, presumably, Toyota is not going to do this. For example, Jamie Raskin from Maryland, who you'll remember last time around in 2016, voted against certifying the election.
00:19:07.000But according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the company's PAC has given $56,000 to 38 members of Congress who objected to the certification of the election on January 6th.
00:19:17.000And it is a very short step from this particular thing.
00:19:20.000Listen, I don't think that anyone should have voted against the certification of the election.
00:19:23.000I don't think there is a legal basis to do so.
00:19:25.000I've been very, very clear about this.
00:19:27.000With that said, I don't think that corporations should be forced to boycott politicians who agree with their particular business agenda because those politicians also supported a thing with which the company was not involved.
00:19:43.000So, for example, I do not think that companies should be forced to stop giving money if they are into giving money to Democrats based on their economic agenda for some reason.
00:19:53.000I don't think that there should be a lot of social pressure to force those companies to stop giving money to Democrats based on the fact that Democrats support, broadly speaking, crackdowns on religious freedom.
00:20:05.000It's a company that's not involved with any of that sort of stuff.
00:20:08.000I don't really think those two things are related.
00:20:10.000But we have now come to the point where anything that becomes a leftist talking point is an excuse to push corporations to not give to Republicans overall.
00:20:19.000And if it weren't January 6th, it would be something else.
00:20:21.000It would be anybody who supported Donald Trump cannot be supported by any sort of corporation.
00:20:26.000Because if they do, then they are supporting all of the evils and excesses of Donald Trump.
00:20:30.000In a statement issued on Thursday, Japan-based automaker said it had, quote, decided to stop contributing to those members of Congress who contested the certification.
00:20:37.000Toyota is committed to supporting and promoting actions that further our democracy, said Toyota.
00:20:41.000This is the same thing that Stacey Abrams finally accomplished in Georgia when he saw corporations divesting from the state of Georgia because Georgia passed a law shoring up voter ID, for example.
00:20:51.000And then she realized, oh, this was a bad idea and tried to back off of that.
00:20:55.000Toyota says our company has long-standing relationships with members of Congress across the political spectrum, especially those representing our U.S.
00:21:01.000Our bipartisan PAC equally supports Democrats and Republicans running for Congress.
00:21:04.000In fact, in 2021, the vast majority of contributions went to Democrats and Republicans who supported the certification of the 2020 election.
00:21:12.000We understand that the PAC decision to support select members of Congress who contested the results troubled some stakeholders.
00:21:19.000We are actively listening to our stakeholders, and at this time we have decided to stop contributing to these members of Congress who contested the certification of certain states in the 2020 election.
00:21:27.000The reason I pause on the word stakeholders is because this is deeply indicative of a perverse view of how business is supposed to work.
00:21:33.000There are two views of how business is supposed to work.
00:21:36.000One is what is called shareholder capitalism.
00:21:38.000Pushed by people like Milton Friedman.
00:21:40.000And the basic idea here is that a company's main duty is to its shareholders.
00:21:43.000You buy stock in a company, and now the company has a duty to you.
00:21:45.000The company has a duty to create a program that will allow for long-term earnings.
00:21:50.000The company has a duty to ensure that your stock price over time does not go down, that they make good business decisions.
00:21:56.000That's what shareholder capitalism is all about.
00:21:58.000That the people who actually own a share of the company are the people to whom the company's board is responsible.
00:22:04.000Stakeholder capitalism is a very different thing.
00:22:06.000Stakeholder capitalism is a term that's been coined by quote-unquote intellectual elites to suggest a system in which corporations are answerable not just to their own shareholders, but to the public at large, which really means to government actors.
00:22:44.000Instead, they are focused in on pleasing particular political actors who are the loudest.
00:22:48.000Stakeholder capitalism, again, is just a way of saying that your corporate overlords ought to be responding not to market incentives, but to non-market incentives.
00:22:56.000They are not responding to the demands of the market.
00:22:59.000They are responding instead to the loudest political actors out there, which is a form of corporatism in which corporations act hand-in-glove with the government and with the Democrat media complex in order to cram down institutional power.
00:23:11.000My new book, The Authoritarian Moment, is all about this.
00:23:13.000It's about how the institutions of power have been hijacked and weaponized by the left.
00:23:16.000Stakeholder capitalism is a very big aspect of this.
00:23:19.000And this is why you are seeing the media cover Lululemon, because you're a stakeholder in Lululemon, you see.
00:24:02.000Instead, you need to refinance your credit card balances and lower your interest rate and save yourself some money.
00:24:07.000You don't have to be a financial expert to do it.
00:24:08.000Right now, you can get a credit card consolidation loan from my friends at Lightstream with a rate as low as 5.93% APR with auto pay and excellent credit.
00:24:16.000It's lower than average credit card interest rates of over 19% APR.
00:24:20.000That means you could be saving thousands of bucks in interest and you get a loan from $5,000 to $100,000 with no fees.
00:25:25.000And so they're very much subject to media pressure and to being cudgeled into place, beaten into place, clubbed into place by members of the government.
00:25:34.000Also, these are the main mechanisms by which people consume information.
00:25:37.000So this creates a very bizarre situation where social media are both the people who control what you see and are in turn controlled by government incentive programs and by outside media coverage, which can shape how political actors work.
00:25:51.000There's this iron triangle that I've talked about before between social media, media, and the Democrats.
00:25:55.000The Democrats don't like that social media has been historically free and open and has allowed people to post a lot of material that they don't like.
00:26:03.000And so they go to the media, and they say that these social media companies are responsible for every bad thing in the world.
00:26:07.000If there's a violent attack, it must be social media.
00:26:09.000If there is a story they don't like that's getting out, a Hunter Biden story, for example, that's social media, and it needs to be stopped.
00:26:15.000The media then cover these social media companies as though they are evil.
00:26:19.000The more open they are, the more evil they are, according to the media.
00:26:22.000Who could have foreseen that the press, being, of course, a political actor and not an actor that is in favor of free speech in the United States, the press has become the chief They're the chief rooting interest in favor of shutting down free dissemination of information.
00:27:55.000And the Democrats had to come up with some excuse for why it wasn't their fault.
00:27:58.000Why it wasn't their fault that Hillary Clinton, the heir apparent, and the person who'd been pushed for the presidency since essentially 1992 by the Democratic Party and the media, why she had lost to this real estate Reality TV star who was wild and bombastic and said anything that came into his head.
00:28:32.000Facebook had allowed for Russian collusion to happen.
00:28:35.000Now, as it turned out, statistically speaking, the amount of Russian propaganda put out on Facebook was extraordinarily minimal.
00:28:39.000If you actually look at the stats, not big stats, as somebody who's in the Facebook stats like every single day, I can tell you, The amount of Russian messaging during the 2016 election and the impact thereof via Facebook was minimal on a percentage basis.
00:28:53.000Like the total number of impressions created by the Russians for like a period of two years was equivalent to about the number of impressions I create for my personal Facebook page in the course of maybe a couple of weeks.
00:29:05.000Okay, so no, it was not a big deal, but that was not the point.
00:29:08.000The point was we have to get social media now to shift, right?
00:29:11.000Social media has to move from being in favor of broad, open dissemination of information.
00:29:16.000Social media now has to move into being the content police.
00:29:20.000And so you saw Mark Zuckerberg giving speeches in 2018, as late as 2017, 2018, talking about how he wanted to cut in favor of free speech.
00:29:28.000He wanted to cut in favor of open dissemination of information.
00:29:31.000And then you would see them testify before Congress and saying we're responsible for the information on our platform, which of course is not true.
00:29:36.000The minute you say you're responsible for the information on a social media platform, now you should be liable for the information on your platform.
00:29:42.000We here at Daily Wire, we have legal liability for the stuff we print.
00:29:45.000Our comments section is governed by section 230, which means it is a platform.
00:29:49.000We are not liable for the stuff that appears in the content section.
00:30:08.000We're not responsible under Section 230 or morally speaking, but Facebook has started to treat itself more like the editorial side than they have treated itself like a platform.
00:30:17.000And that's because Democrats decided you must treat yourself like you're an editorial site.
00:30:21.000And only then when you treat yourself like an editorial site will we give you immunity.
00:30:24.000So they've created this bizarre reverse situation in which it used to be.
00:30:28.000Legal immunity had been provided for platforms in order to facilitate open information.
00:30:33.000And then the Democrats decided that these open platforms should become closed, edited platforms in order to retain their immunity, which of course destroys the entire purpose of the immunity in the first place.
00:30:45.000The whole purpose of the immunity is to incentivize open conversation.
00:30:49.000It is not to shut down open conversation.
00:30:51.000Okay, so all of this has culminated in a lawsuit that President Trump is now filing against, it's a class action lawsuit that he is filing against Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and he's doing this on the basis that they have banned him but he's suggesting that their censorship procedures affect a broad swath of people.
00:31:09.000There's some problems with the lawsuit, there are also some interesting things about the lawsuit and I think that you're, on the one side you're hearing people say this is the greatest lawsuit since sliced bread, which it is not.
00:31:17.000On the other side, you're hearing people say, this is absolute crap and there's no basis for it whatsoever.
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00:32:36.000Okay, so President Trump has now filed a lawsuit against YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, all of whom have banned him, which is frankly an unbelievable thing.
00:32:44.000It is incredible that the sitting president of the United States was banned from the three largest social media services in the United States.
00:32:51.000President Trump said in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, one of the gravest threats to our democracy today is a powerful group of big tech corporations that have teamed up with the government to censor the free speech of the American people.
00:33:01.000This is not only wrong, it is unconstitutional.
00:33:03.000To restore free speech for myself and for every American, I am suing big tech to stop it.
00:33:07.000Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers, and television networks were in prior generations.
00:33:13.000The internet is the new public square.
00:33:14.000In recent years, however, big tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information, and people on social media, banning users, deplatforming organizations, aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.
00:33:28.000No longer are big tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence.
00:33:31.000They're manipulating and controlling the political debate itself.
00:33:34.000Consider content that was censored in the past year.
00:33:36.000Big tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true.
00:33:44.000In the middle of a pandemic, big tech censored physicians from discussing potential treatments like hydroxychloroquine, which studies have now shown does work to relieve symptoms of COVID-19.
00:33:52.000In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post, America's oldest newspaper, for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden's family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute.
00:34:01.000Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social media accounts of the sitting president.
00:34:06.000And if they can do it to me, they can do it to you.
00:34:10.000Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher, was banned from Facebook for sharing an article questioning whether mandatory masks for young children are healthy.
00:34:16.000Later, when her brother went missing, she was unable to use Facebook to get the word out.
00:34:19.000Colorado physician Kelly Victory was deplatformed by YouTube after she made a video for her church explaining how to hold services safely.
00:34:26.000Kayan Michael of Florida and her husband Bobby lost their 21-year-old son in a fatal collision caused by a twice-deported illegal alien.
00:34:32.000Facebook censored them after they posted on border security and immigration enforcement.
00:34:36.000It says this flagrant attack on free speech is doing terrible damage to our country.
00:34:41.000That is why in conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I filed class action lawsuits to force Big Tech to stop censoring the American people.
00:34:47.000Our lawsuits argue that Big Tech companies are being used to impose illegal and unconstitutional government censorship.
00:34:53.000In 1996, writes Trump, Congress sought to promote the growth of the Internet by extending liability protections to Internet platforms, recognizing that they were exactly that, platforms, not publishers.
00:35:02.000Unlike publishers, companies like Facebook and Twitter can't be held legally liable for the content posted to their sites.
00:35:06.000Without this immunity, social media companies could not exist.
00:35:09.000Democrats in Congress are exploiting this leverage to coerce platforms into censoring their political opponents.
00:35:15.000In recent years, we have all watched Congress haul Big Tech CEOs before the committees and demand that they censor, quote, false stories and disinformation, labels determined by an army of partisan fact-checkers loyal to the Democratic Party.
00:35:25.000Further, Big Tech and government agencies are actively coordinating to remove content from the platforms according to the guidance of agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
00:35:34.000This coercion and coordination is unconstitutional.
00:35:36.000Okay, so here is where Trump is right and here is where Trump is wrong.
00:35:41.000So he is not wrong when he says that there are certain activities that can be undertaken by private companies that are coincident with government action and that have been deemed by the courts in the past to be government action.
00:35:53.000There's an article just back in January by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld.
00:35:57.000Rubenfeld is a former professor over at Yale.
00:36:00.000In which they specifically talk about the fact that private companies can, in fact, be deemed state actors if proper government leverage is applied.
00:36:09.000So for example, it is axiomatic the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison that the government quote may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish. You see that's what Congress did by enacting section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.
00:36:31.000The justices have long held that the provision of such immunity can turn private action into state action.
00:36:37.000In Railway Employees Department v. Hanson, for example, they found state action in private union employer closed shop agreements, which force all employees to join the union because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law.
00:36:49.000In other words, if Congress gives some sort of immunization to liability, and then in order to maintain the immunity, Congress cudgels companies to do a thing, that can be deemed state action.
00:36:58.000In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association, the court again found state action in private party conduct, drug tests for company employees, because federal regulations immunized railroads from liability if they conducted those tests.
00:37:09.000In both cases, with Section 230, the federal government didn't mandate anything.
00:37:13.000It merely preempted state law protecting certain private parties from lawsuits if they engaged in conduct Congress was promoting.
00:37:18.000Okay, so this is the part where Trump is not wrong, for example.
00:37:23.000So, If these social media companies were granted immunity from liability by Section 230, because Section 230 was designed to basically promote open speech on the internet and, yes, to allow social media companies to curate content.
00:37:37.000Now, the idea behind Section 230 is that you shouldn't be punished as a publisher if, for example, you started curating your comment section to get rid of things like pornography, if you curated your comment section to get rid of obscenity or violence or other maybe First Amendment-protected activities, but you just want to clean the comment section.
00:37:54.000Okay, and Section 230 does in fact protect, for example, even a sort of partisan cleansing of platforms, right?
00:38:03.000If you go through and you get rid of all the anti-Trump commentary in the comments section of a particular website, this does not relieve Section 230 liability.
00:38:13.000You can still do that, but this changes once the government starts applying pressure.
00:38:18.000Once the government starts applying pressure and saying, we are going to remove your immunity, that immunity is going to go away.
00:38:25.000Unless you censor the kinds of content we want you to censor, now that looks a lot more like state action.
00:38:31.000And so the Trump argument in the lawsuit is a little too broad for my liking.
00:38:35.000He says that Communications Decency Act Section 230 is fully unconstitutional in that particular lawsuit.
00:38:41.000He says that that basically created a section of immunity from liability that is not constitutional in the first place, which is questionable at best.
00:38:55.000Liability is not written into the Constitution.
00:38:58.000There's nothing in the Constitution that says you are definitely liable if you don't print X or Y, of course, because free speech still applies to private corporations.
00:39:06.000However, once the government starts forcing corporations with threat of legislation into censoring what they want them to censor, now that looks like compelled state action.
00:39:15.000Now that looks like these companies have basically become mercantilist Free speech outlets for the Democratic Party.
00:39:22.000And that's why it is so troubling when you see people like Dianne Feinstein threatening Facebook, if you don't stop this, we will.
00:39:29.000But once you say that, then what is Facebook exactly going to do in order to maintain their own business?
00:39:34.000They're going to have to do what Dianne Feinstein wants them to do.
00:39:37.000And this means that you have to start treating these people like state actors, or maybe you do, right?
00:39:42.000That legal theory is not nearly as wild as the media are making it out to be.
00:39:47.000The media are like, well, it's a private company, they can do exactly what they want, which is weird because the media have yet to, the same media that will tell you that Lululemon cannot do what it wants because there are three woke employees who are pissed off at a guy who left the company a year ago, those same people will tell you Facebook can do exactly what it wants in censoring content as long as that content that they are censoring is the right content to censor.
00:40:06.000Well, there is actually a fairly large difference between even Lululemon doing what it wants and Facebook doing what the government tells it to do in order to maintain its immunity from liability.
00:40:16.000And that is the case that Trump is making.
00:40:19.000Clarence Thomas has sort of hinted at this in the past.
00:40:21.000So it's not quite as wild a lawsuit as people are suggesting.
00:40:24.000Now, do I think that the lawsuit is actually going to go all the way?
00:40:27.000Trump says that he's going to sit for a deposition.
00:40:29.000I can't imagine he will, because if he has to sit for a deposition, no lawyer in the world is going to allow Donald Trump to sit for a deposition.
00:40:35.000He is the worst legal client on planet Earth.
00:40:37.000There's a reason he's gone through every lawyer in America, to the point where he ended up like Sidney Powell, right?
00:40:41.000He went through every lawyer because the first rule of being a lawyer is tell your client to shut up.
00:41:32.000Rockauto.com is a lot easier than going to the auto parts store.
00:41:34.000You wait in line for like an hour, you get to the front.
00:41:37.000Finally, the guy behind the counter, he finally asks you a bunch of questions, you type something into the computer, it's like, oh yeah, we don't have that part in stock, we're gonna order it, come back in three weeks.
00:41:44.000You're like, my car doesn't even work right now, what are you talking about?
00:41:46.000Like, oh yeah, and also we're gonna upcharge you by 25%.
00:41:48.000Or, you can go to rockauto.com, you get the product delivered directly to your house, and then you can just do it yourself, right?
00:42:33.000The Daily Wire is hiring a web marketing specialist to do, well, a bunch of technical stuff that I don't understand and that I'll pay you to do.
00:42:39.000But seriously, if you know how to optimize a website experience, if you've done A-B testing before, if you're a data-loving nerd, that I am, then this is the job for you.
00:42:46.000So, head over to dailywire.com slash careersapply right now, as you know.
00:42:50.000We are the fastest growing conservative media company in the country.
00:43:09.000Also, from pronouns to microaggressions, language has been turned into a tool used by the political left to silence dissenters and ostracize them from friends and family.
00:43:17.000That's why Michael Knowles took it upon himself to write a book about it.
00:43:19.000The book is called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
00:43:22.000If you have not picked up a copy, now would be a good time to do so.
00:43:25.000The book will take you through the origins of political correctness, why it is essential we stand up and fight its insidious spread into every public institution in America.
00:43:32.000Because if we don't, the consequences are waiting for us and our kids in the very, very near future.
00:44:10.000If you don't feel like making a trip, it's available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle edition.
00:44:14.000You are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:44:18.000♪♪ Meanwhile, Joe Biden is just losing Afghanistan.
00:44:26.000He's just decided to surrender in Afghanistan.
00:44:27.000And what's unbelievable about this, truly, is that Afghanistan was in a state of stasis.
00:44:33.000It wasn't a war that was won in any realistic sense.
00:44:35.000The Taliban was still around, obviously, but the country had not been ceded to the Taliban.
00:44:39.000The Taliban did not have control of the entire territory.
00:44:43.000It could not really provide safe havens for wide varieties of terrorist groups.
00:44:46.000It was still being fought to a standstill at the very least by the Afghan government.
00:44:52.000And we are pulling out at a time when we are spending approximately $50 billion a year in Afghanistan. That's how much money that we've been spending in Afghanistan as of like 2019.
00:45:00.000That represents approximately 1.3% of a $4 trillion budget.
00:45:05.000And now that we're talking about spending, you know, one bajillion dollars, well, it represents a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. The number of American soldiers who were being killed in combat every year was in the the single digits. This was not an endless war. In other words, it's not.
00:45:18.000It doesn't count as a war when single-digit number of your soldiers are being killed in it every single year.
00:45:42.000I mean, tens of thousands of people will undoubtedly be made into refugees.
00:45:45.000You'll see thousands of people murdered.
00:45:46.000You'll see anyone who worked with the American government killed outright.
00:45:49.000You'll see women forced back into effectively chattel slavery, which is what they were living like in Afghanistan before the United States got there.
00:45:56.000And this notion that long-term occupation of countries has no positive effect is just silly.
00:46:03.000And the United States still has bases in South Korea.
00:46:06.000After the Korean War, we should note that after the Korean War, it was not as though the U.S.' 's presence was widely appreciated in South Korea.
00:46:14.000It was not as though South Korea immediately transformed into a successful market democracy.
00:46:22.000There was a full military dictatorship In South Korea for a fairly significant period of time and an extraordinary amount of corruption in South Korea before the so-called Sixth Republic was founded.
00:46:37.000There's a reason it was called the Sixth Republic because it took a lot of go around in order to get to anything remotely resembling an actual republic in South Korea.
00:46:44.000There's still high levels of corruption in South Korea.
00:47:42.000And it's not only weird, it is stupid.
00:47:43.000Because again, it will be treated by all of America's worst enemies as a big win for the Taliban, as though they drove the United States out.
00:47:51.000What they really did is they just waited for the United States to get bored, and then we unilaterally pulled out when there was really no effective reason to.
00:47:58.000Joe Biden, like an idiot, says the United States has achieved its objectives, which of course is not true.
00:48:03.000Yesterday, speaking after the withdrawal of nearly all U.S.
00:48:05.000combat forces, and as the Taliban surge across the country, Biden spoke directly to critics of his order to bring an end to American participation in a conflict born from the terrorist attacks of September 11th.
00:48:15.000He said, let me ask those who want us to stay.
00:48:30.000You can say thousands of Americans died in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war when we were responding to, you know, the murder of 3,000 Americans in New York and Washington, D.C.
00:48:38.000But when we're losing, like, single-digit soldiers per year in Afghanistan, in an active combat situation, um, that is, like, he has to exaggerate for a fact.
00:48:47.000It's the only way that he can justify what he is doing.
00:48:49.000Because a lot of people have been pointing out quite correctly that Joe Biden's policy here is indistinguishable on every available level.
00:48:56.000I mean, truly indistinguishable from pulling out from Saigon in 1975 and handing the entire country over to the Viet Cong, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing, many of them literally getting in boats to get out of Vietnam and the fall of Cambodia and the murder of two million people by Pol Pot in Cambodia.
00:49:12.000He's going to have This sort of withdrawal leaves blood on American hands in the same way that there was blood on American hands when we made promises to the Kurds in 1991, and then just let Saddam Hussein go in and slaughter them.
00:49:22.000There's blood on American hands when you make promises to people, and those people rely on those promises.
00:49:26.000And then, to prevent not even a high-cost scenario, to prevent a very, very low-cost scenario, relatively speaking, with regard to American foreign policy, you withdraw all troops.
00:49:36.000Joe Biden's position here makes no sense at all.
00:49:39.000Well, yesterday, Joe Biden, he got slightly tongue-tied announcing the Afghanistan withdrawal because, again, Joe Biden is in a running gun battle with the teleprompter.
00:49:48.000Here was President Biden getting a little confused about the Afghanistan withdrawal yesterday.
00:49:54.000We're going to continue to work for the release of detained Americans, including Mark, excuse me, Ferex.
00:50:04.000I want to pronounce the name correctly.
00:50:24.000I mean, the fact is that the United States' troop presence in Germany prevented not only the Russians from taking over Western Europe, but also ended up forestalling the possibility of Germany turning back into something horrific.
00:53:32.000The United States has actually allowed for elections to take place in Afghanistan.
00:53:36.000That is much more a reflection of quote-unquote what the people want than, you know, an armed terrorist group running over the country and then stuffing women in burqas and taking them out of school.
00:53:52.000When he says that they get to choose the government that they want, and, you know, if we walk away and the Taliban take over, probably that's the government that they want.
00:55:24.000I mean, and if he does, he's an idiot.
00:55:26.000If he thinks that the Afghan government is going to suddenly hold up in the face of the Taliban right now, then there would be no controversy.
00:55:32.000And this is, again, this is disconnected from reality.
00:55:35.000All he wants is a cheap political win.
00:55:38.000It's not really even going to be a win.
00:55:39.000Because let me just tell you, five minutes after we leave and the headlines come out about how the Taliban are rounding up women who are going to school and slaughtering them in the streets, those headlines ain't going to look good for Joe Biden.
00:55:50.000In fact, Jen Psaki's basically acknowledging as much, right?
00:55:53.000She says, we're not going to have a mission accomplished.
00:56:02.000In terms of plans for the end for our men and women coming back, I don't have anything to preview, but we don't, we're not going to have a mission accomplished moment in this regard.
00:56:11.000It's a 20 year war that has not been won militarily.
00:56:17.000Um, so she's admitting that they haven't won anything.