Morning Wire - Texas Immigration Law Hold Up & Google’s Alleged Election Interference | 3.20.24

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

An appeals court’s late night decision blocks a Texas law allowing for the arrest of Illegal immigrants from taking effect, Google faces allegations of election interference, and the cost of home ownership continues to skyrocket. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Balance of Nature: "Get 35% off Your Order of Fruits & Veggies + $10 Off Every Additional Set. Use promo code WIRE at checkout: https://www.balanceofnature.com/" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Late last night, a lower court put on hold a Texas law allowing for the arrest of illegal immigrants, just hours after the Supreme Court let it take effect. What does the late night ruling mean for the legal fight between Texas and the Biden administration? I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Wednesday, March 20th, and this is Morning Wire. A new report from a media watchdog finds that tech giant Google has engaged in election interference for at least 16 years. And the cost of home ownership has skyrocketed over the past four years. What do American households need to earn now to buy a home?

Home affordability is the big issue for almost every homeowner and every potential home buyer. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. Hey guys, producer Brandon here. Balance Nature is our go-to way to get whole-food ingredients every day. They use an advanced cold vacuum process that encapsulates fruits and vegetables into whole-food supplements without sacrificing their natural antioxidants. The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extract, synthetics, pesticides, or added

sugar. The only thing at Balance of Nature fruit and veggie capsules are fruits and veggies. Go to Balance of Nature.com and use promo code Wire for 35% off your first fruits and veggie set plus $10 off each additional set. That's Balance of Nature.com promo code wire. The Supreme Court gave Texas the green light to use local law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants. But late last night, a federal appeals court put the law.

law back on hold. Here to talk about the court battle and its impact is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce. So Tim, this was initially a big victory for Texas, but now the law in question is back on hold. First, just briefly remind listeners about the law and what happened in court. So SB4 basically allowed Texas to enforce immigration laws independently by arresting people who enter the state illegally rather than relying on federal agents. This is controversial because immigration is technically the domain of the federal government, but the state is arguing they have no choice. The law has been caught up in the court since its inception, but yesterday the Supreme Court allowed it to take effect by declining a request from the Biden administration to block it.

It kicked the case back down to the Fifth Circuit, which is due to hear arguments in the case later today. Late last night, a panel of judges on the Fifth Circuit put a block on SB4 back in place ahead of today's arguments. Okay, so the Supreme Court said the law could be enforced, And that resulted in a lot of celebration by Texas yesterday. But then late last night, the lower court said, no, it can't take effect until a formal judgment is made. Correct. So what specifically does this law do? It makes immigrating illegally into Texas from Mexico a state crime, a misdemeanor punishable with at least six months in jail.

Repeat offenders could be charged with up to a second-degree felony and face up to 20 years in prison. After a migrant has served a sentence, a judge would order him taken to a port of entry and deported. back to Mexico. Migrants who refuse deportation or return illegally again would risk re-arrest and likely face more serious charges. A migrant family would be turned over to Border Patrol to keep from separating parents and children. I should note that Mexico says it will not cooperate with Texas on this and take back migrants deported by the state. So why is the Biden administration so against this law? The Justice Department says that immigration is a federal issue and only a federal issue. So states are legally barred from crafting immigration laws or even enforcing the federal immigration laws that are

already on the books. And it has Supreme Court precedent to back it up. Back in 2012, the court ruled in a similar case, Arizona v. United States, and shot down an Arizona law on the grounds that the Constitution preclude states from policing immigration. Now, the court looks a lot different than it did back then, all but two of the justices currently on the court either dissented from the Arizona decision or weren't on the bench that struck down the Arizona law. That said, Tuesday's 6-3 decision does not necessarily mean that the Supreme Court would overturn the Arizona precedent if it hears the Texas case. After all, Roberts voted against Arizona at the time, but allow the Texas law to go into effect in the procedural vote on Tuesday. So looking ahead, what could this mean for the future

of border enforcement? Well, it's very likely this case ends back up at the Supreme Court. If it does, and if Texas wins, it could overhaul the way we look at immigration. immigration policy. States, especially border states, would have much more power to police their own borders. Essentially, what Abbott has done in Eagle Pass, surging law enforcement and national guard troops into the area to block illegal immigration, he would have the legal grounds to do that all along Texas's over 1,200-mile border with Mexico. But if the Supreme Court strikes it down, we will be back to the status quo. And I think a lot of other border states are going to be watching this closely as well. Tim, thanks for reporting. Good to be on.

has been engaging in election interference for at least 16 years. That's according to a new report from the Media Research Center, a media watchdog group that has been studying how Google's search algorithms are used for censorship. Daily Wire reporter, Megan Basham, is here now to break down the allegations. So, Megan, if these claims are true, we're talking about four presidential cycles and another four midterms, correct? Yeah, that is correct. And that's a lot of elections, Georgia. So the report just released by MRC's Free Speech America arm says that Google interfered in U.S. elections 41 times since 2008. And when you look at Google's donations to political parties in just the 2018 midterm elections, for example, you can see just how aligned the company is with one side of the political aisle.

96% of its employees' political donations went to Democrats. So according to the MRC, the company, and I'm quoting, utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates while targeting their opponents for censorship. One example, in 2012, it allowed users to engage in a practice called a Google bomb to target Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. Now, it's a little complicated, but basically a Google bomb is a way to smear a candidate. So Google users manipulate the algorithms by associating his name with undesirable search terms on various web pages. So when you would search Santorum's name, disparaging and sometimes even obscene results would come up. When this practice impacted the White House's web page for Obama,

Google fixed it, but the platform refused to resolve the issue when Santorum's team complained. And then in some other instances, Google's interference backed one Democrat over another, leaning towards the more progressive candidate. Though interestingly, not in the case of Bernie Sanders versus Clinton, which I'll get to in just a second, but in 2008, Google suspended the accounts of some pro-Hillary Clinton blogs who were critical of Barack Obama. And several of those blogs were listed at just say no deal.com. Now, I'm guessing this was also in play when it came to the Clinton Trump election. Yeah, very much so.

It actually turns out that the alphabet company is pretty good with numbers. So according to data scientist and research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, who testified for Congress, by the way, the impact of Google's search algorithm was to shift at least 2.6 million votes to Clinton in 2016, though, of course, she still lost to Trump, but according to this, it would have been by a wider margin without that Google effect. So essentially what they're alleging is that Google manipulated search results to convince voters to pull the lever for Clinton. For example, everyone has used Google's search bar before, and you know that if you start to type in some text, it will start to auto-fill suggestions. Well, during the 2016 election, it would exclude potentially

harmful auto fill results for Hillary Clinton and would instead suggest things like Hillary Clinton crime reform or Hillary Clinton, India. On the flip side, it would not filter results for Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. So Google has repeatedly claimed that these allegations are false, but I want you to listen closely to this

Project Veritas undercover recording from 2019 of Jen Jani, who was then the head of responsible innovation for Google. Now, in case you couldn't make out the Irish accent, which she said was, and I'm quoting, we're also training our algorithms if 2016 happened again, would the outcome be different? So suggesting they had already begun refining their results to alter election outcomes. She would go on to say this. Elizabeth Warren is saying that we should break the food. I love her, but she's very misguided.

Like, that will not make it better. It will make it worse because now all these smaller companies who don't have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing. the next situation. It's like a small computer. So again, a top Google executive there saying Congress should not interfere with Google's almost total dominance of the search engine industry because only Google can prevent someone like Donald Trump from being elected. So what's Google saying about all this? Well, they haven't responded to these latest allegations yet, but some pretty well-known names in the tech world are backing MRC's findings. Elon Musk, for instance, posted on his platform

X, quoting, Google interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season. This is to be expected when their censorship, aka trust in safety, teams have far left political views. And of course, Google's new AI tool came under fire recently for producing extremely biased results. And it's also worth noting that a few weeks ago, another media analysis company, all sides, studied Google's news aggregator, and it found that 63% of the news Google recommended came from left-leaning outlets, and only 6% came from right-leaning outlets, and only 16% from outlets rated center. Well, you know what's interesting.

One of the first wake-up moments that got me really interested in politics was around 2015 or 16, and I noticed how positive the suggested searches were for Clinton versus those for Trump. Yep. Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime. Homeownership is becoming more out of reach following years of high-priced homes, high-mortgage rates and high insurance costs. A recent report from Zillow found that Americans now need to make

much more to afford a home than they did even four years ago. Here to discuss the report is Daily Wire Senior Editor, Ash Short. So, Ash, people aren't crazy for thinking it's much harder to buy a house these days. No, I mean, just four years ago in 2020, an American family earning $59,000 a year could comfortably afford a monthly mortgage while spending no more than 30% of their income on housing, a typical measurement in calculating affordability. Back then, $59,000 was less than the median U.S. income of $66,000. But now, according to Zillow, Americans need to make at least $106,000 a year to comfortably afford the mortgage on a typical home. That's 20 grand more than the average household earns each year and far more than the median income. And I'm assuming there are places in the country where it's more

difficult to purchase homes than others, correct? Of course. We typically think of metro areas as being more expensive, but that's not always the case. While San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City, and Boston all require incomes of more than $200,000 a year to afford a home. Pittsburgh, Memphis, Cleveland, New Orleans, and Birmingham are all affordable to households making between $58,000 and $74,000 a year, depending on the city. Those incomes are all less than the average household earns each year. But home price isn't even the only issue. Insurance rates are also increasing quite a bit. What can you tell us about that? Right. So home insurance costs have risen so much in the past few years that 7.4% of home buyers have skipped buying it altogether, according to a study from the Consumer Federation of America.

and major cities like Miami and Houston have higher percentages of people foregoing insurance. Now, national brokerage firm guaranteed rate insurance found that the average cost of home insurance jumped from under 1,300 in 2021 to over $1,200 in 2023, a nearly $500 a year increase. Now, why are insurance rates climbing so high? A major cause is that inflation has caused home repair prices to increase, but there's also the issue of home density and disaster. prone areas. Many insurers are having to pay out more due to more people being affected by major disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. There's also the issue of fewer people buying insurance, which drives the cost up for the remaining pool of payers. Now, if the situation

is declared a disaster by FEMA, then sometimes uninsured homeowners can get assistance from the government. But if not, homeowners would have to go into debt or live in an unsafe home if something happens. Now, we're also seeing the costs go up for people who already own homes, leading to things like foreclosures. What's causing that? Well, insurance rates are of course up for everyone, but increasing mortgage rates also affect long-time owners depending on the terms of their loan. If your loan is set at one rate for the first few years, and then it's set to adjust later, you could be hit with a really high payment several years into owning a home. Foreclosures rose by 8% last year, meaning many people couldn't afford to keep their home. And the states who saw the biggest increase in foreclosures

may surprise you. South Carolina saw a 51% increase in foreclosures, while Missouri saw a 50% increase, and Pennsylvania saw foreclosures rise by 46%. But city-to-city, Chicago saw the greatest number of homes being repossessed by banks, followed by Philadelphia, New York City, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. So a difficult time to be a homeowner or a homebuyer. Ash, thanks for reporting. You're welcome. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know.