The President's Daily Brief - October 31st, 2022. Elon Musk Officially Buys Twitter Promising to Create a "Beacon of Free Speech"

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

It’s October 31st. You’re listening to the President’s Daily Brief. Your morning intel starts now. ------ Businessman Elon Musk took over Twitter on Friday, promising to make the social media company a beacon for free speech. Well now he’s got his first test: rumors about something that happened at the home of Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We’ll talk about why these developments are such big deal — even if you don’t use Twitter. As always, I’m keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put these two on your radar. First, an outbreak of COVID at an Apple factory in China has workers cutting through fences to escape being locked down. Second, and speaking of COVID, there’s a new Senate report out on how COVID started in China. They have evidence it probably came from that Lab in Wuhan. And as always, we’ve got a listener question. Today it’s about those kids in the Congo mining for Dirty Green Energy, and whether kids should work at all. ------ Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief. Email: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's October 31st. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA Officer Brian Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. First up, businessman Elon Musk took over Twitter on Friday, promising to make that social media company a beacon for free speech. Well, now he has his first big test, rumors about something that happened at the home of Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We'll talk about why these developments are such a big deal. even if you don't use Twitter. As always, I'm keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put these two on your radar.

First, an outbreak of COVID at an Apple factory in China has workers cutting through fences to escape being locked down. Second, and speaking of COVID, there's a new Senate report out on how COVID started in China. They have evidence that it probably came from that lab in Wuhan. And as always, we've got a listener question. Today it's about those kids in the Congo mining for dirty green energy and whether kids should work at all. But first, let's get started with today's main brief.

On Friday, businessman Elon Musk finalized his purchase of the social media company Twitter. Now, he started that process last spring when he said that, quote, Twitter obviously has a strong left-wing bias, end quote. He was echoing the conservative complaints that Twitter often banned or minimized. conservative voices and points of view. Musk then promised that he would buy the company and turn it into what he said was a, quote, digital town square where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, end quote. Well, after officially buying the company last week, he promptly kicked off a firestorm by sharing an article actually yesterday about an attack that occurred in the home of Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So the background here is that her husband was allegedly assaulted by a

stranger with a hammer, although the article that he shared suggested that Mr. Pelosi was attacked by someone with a more intimate connection. Democrat observers have blasted Musk for sharing this article, calling it misinformation, while others are saying that he's proving his point. You can share basically anything when it comes to free speech, even stuff that is ugly or ultimately untrue. So we are going to talk about this whole debate, starting with whether Elon Musk is fundamentally right that Twitter has a political bias. And if so, why that matters, even if folks like you don't use Twitter, because as it turns out, Twitter influences the news that you consume. It defines truth in America, even if you don't realize it. So with that, let's get started. And to do so,

let's go back to the year 2018, when the CEO of Twitter at the time, a man named Jack Dorsey. He said in an interview that Twitter, like most tech companies in Silicon Valley, have a lot more left-leaning employees than right-leaning. In fact, he said that his conservative employees, quote, don't feel safe to express their opinions within the company, end quote. And he's right. According to Open Secrets, a research group that tracks political donations, 98.99% of political giving from Twitter employees to federal candidates, 98.99% was given to the Democratic Party. but it's not just Twitter the company that's got this bias, it's many of the people who use it too.

In a set of studies from 2019 and 2020 from the Pew Research Center, data show that Twitter users are more liberal than the general public and less inclined to find common ground with Republicans. In fact, more so than even other Democrats who don't use Twitter. Now, you might be thinking this brief about Twitter isn't really interesting to me because I don't use Twitter. Ah, but there are some very important people who do use Twitter even if you don't.

And those people shape what you watch on your nightly news or you read in your daily newspaper. So here's what we know. Twitter is used by a lot of people every day, more than 200 million worldwide. In America, that means about 13% of us get our news from Twitter. Now, compare that 13% to all the newspapers in America combined. That number is about 7%.

All that according to the Pew Research Center once again from a 2021 survey. So as shocking as that might be, there's actually something that's a lot more important. And in fact, it's the real key here. Journalists and reporters rely heavily on Twitter to do their jobs. They scan the platform for stories and sources that they later sort of reshape and reshare with you on their mainstream outlets like the nightly TV news or daily newspaper. So let me just give you one example from last April. The executive editor of the New York Times, one of the most important newspapers in the country, he asked his staff to cut back on Twitter usage because, quote,

we can rely too much on Twitter as a reporting tool. And quote, he went on to add that while Twitter can be helpful to find stories or sources, his journalist should not rely on it exclusively or even predominantly as many were doing. In other words, folks, Twitter influences the influencers, the journalists, your broadcasters. Twitter helps curate the stories that shapes what you eventually learn as truth, even though data show that both Twitter employees and the platform itself have an overwhelming bias towards Democrats and left-leaning positions. But even still, with all of that, we still have one more piece of the puzzle to understand.

We have to ask if the bias has asked if the bias has ever been. actually harmed anybody to include conservatives? Or is this just a case of, you know, people like Elon Musk whining about politics? Well, the answer is that yes, we can prove that Twitter has harmed people. It has harmed our country. And here's how. During the 2020 elections, Twitter blocked a bombshell report about the son of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, of course. to refresh our memories on that story, Hunter left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware and then forgot that he did. He's a man with a very long and very painful history of drug addiction. Well, that laptop was subsequently evaluated by media outlets to include the New York Post,

and they broke a story on what they found, namely that Hunter Biden took a mountain of cash on behalf of the Biden family to include his father, and that cash came from foreign businesses and foreign governments to include the Chinese government. Well, in response, Twitter blocked that story from its platform, saying that it was Russian disinformation, that the laptop wasn't real. Well, that gave Twitter's users, those journalists at the other media outlets that I mentioned. Well, it gave them the justification to proclaim that they wouldn't cover the story either because it was fake news. Twitter said it was. But it turns out that they were wrong. All of them are wrong. The laptop, in fact, belonged to Hunter Biden and the allegation.

of foreign dealings in the Biden family to include Joe Biden were almost certainly true. Now, here's why that's a big deal. 16% of Joe Biden supporters would not have voted for him had they learned of that Hunter Biden laptop scandal before the 2020 election. That's according to a poll from the Media Research Center. In other words, folks, what the logic and what the data show is that had corporate media outlets like Twitter not censored the laptop story? Well, it is very possible that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, would now be in the White House.

So from that moment, we move two years forward to today. We have another political story breaking just days before the midterm elections once again. And here is that story. The husband of Nancy Pelosi, who of course is the Democrat Speaker of the House, he was allegedly attacked late last week by a local assailant that somehow got into the home. Now, there's a lot of rumor floating around about the details of this attack, who the man is, his relationship with Mr. Pelosi, and how he got into the home in the first place with so much security.

So I'm not going to speculate on all that, but Elon Musk, he did. He tweeted out a story with some pretty salacious allegations about the relationship between Mr. Pelosi and his attacker. Now, as you can imagine, people either loved or hated what Mr. Musk did, calling it either misinformation or an expression of, speech. Mr. Musk has since deleted that tweet with the allegations, but the point remains, did he have a right to free speech to say something that he wanted, even if it was wrong or offensive? And to what extent should platforms like Twitter protect our constitutional rights to

free speech? Or rather, should they instead police that free speech? And what happens when those police officers, as it were, the liberal workers at Twitter, what happens when they have such a profound personal and political bias that in the case of the 2020 election, their policing of that Hunter Biden laptop story will probably change the outcome of the election for the president of the United States. And that takes us this morning from facts and data to analysis and opinion. I want to focus on the council that I would offer you all as you wrestle with this story. Folks, if you were alive in 1978, you might remember when the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, took a very controversial stand for free speech.

They decided that they wanted to defend a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie. Now, that suburb, folks, is where many Holocaust survivors lived at the time. According to the ACLU, the notoriety of that case caused some ACLU members to resign. but for others, that case has come to represent the ACLU's unwavering commitment to the principle of free speech. In other words, folks, you have to defend all speech because when we let the government or companies decide what truth is to police it, well, that's when we lose it. And I think that that's what we're seeing these past few years. These social media platforms infused with the

bias of their employees and executives, well, they are deciding truth. And they're either ban, or canceling those folks, especially conservatives, who dare say the opposite. And meanwhile, the U.S. government is trying its hand at this too. You may recall the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board that the Biden administration proposed last April. Now, it was slated to allegedly help protect America's national security. The idea was that the government would help identify and label disinformation, misinformation, misinformation, and mal-information.

But the Biden administration shut it. down in August after the prospective leader of that board, a woman named Nina Jankowitz, turned out to be a partisan activist for Democrats. So the bottom line, folks, is that at least from my optic and what I would counsel you on this morning, is that it appears the data, the facts, the logic, all suggests that America is slowly drifting away from constitutional rights and towards censorship by either the government or media companies. And I think what Elon Musk is claiming that he wants to do is push us back towards the Constitution. Now, whether Elon Musk executes that properly on Twitter, well, that remains to be seen. But his goal of creating a public square where we can

say or challenge virtually anything, especially journalists and doctors and politicians who tell us that we can't challenge certain things, well, that goal of an open public square is a good one. even if we have to put up with the bad, just like the ACLU did in 1978. Coming up, ladies and gentlemen, a closer look at what's on my radar. Two quick briefs for you, both on China. We'll be right back. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new Elixir Collection, featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique Orchid Accord, paired with vanilla,

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Welcome back to the PDB as always. I'm watching a few other stories this morning. Put these two on your radar. First, in China, workers at Apple's largest iPhone plant are quite literally running away from the company's campus because of a COVID outbreak. They've been locked down for about 10 days now because their campus of 200,000 workers has 167 COVID cases, and they can't handle being cooped up anymore. And by running away from the campus, I mean thousands of workers, it seems, are in some cases cutting the fencing that keeps them in.

There's a video actually of people dragging their luggage through the streets, even wheatfields trying to avoid government authorities and to escape back to the rural areas where most of them are from. Reuters news service is reporting that because of this growing crisis and people fleeing the factory, well, Apple's supply of iPhones will probably be down upwards of 30 plus percent in the coming weeks, which will, of course, affect Christmas sales. So you might want to keep that in mind if such a thing is on your Christmas list. Meanwhile, this is all happening because China maintains what's called a zero COVID policy. So to refresh our memories on this one, it means that the government there can and does, lockdown entire cities if Beijing's health authorities detect even a single case of COVID.

Well, China's President Xi is sticking with that policy, in part because he can't admit that it's failed, but also because he views it as a propaganda boost. He says that only 5,200 Chinese people have lost their lives to COVID as compared to America's $1 million. That means that China and its Communist Party are a much better place and system than America and its democracy. Again, President Xi has said this repeatedly. The cost of his policy, though, is really big, and it's very important for us. China is the world's factory in many ways, and those factories are getting really tired of dealing with the lockdowns and worker revolts, like this latest one at Apple's factories. So some other examples, the toy company, Hasbro, they move their factories to Vietnam and China.

The car company, Volvo, they're moving their operations back to Eastern Europe and a move that's called. called reshoring. Now regardless, what we know is that the frustration by these companies operating inside China creates an opening for America to bring home some of these industries and factories that we've lost to China over the decades. So more to come on that in future PDB podcasts, but it's really important, and I think we ought to be laser focused on it in the coming months. I certainly will be, and I will bring you those briefs as soon as possible. Second this morning, let's stay in China for this one, to a city in fact that we have all heard of, unfortunately, the city of Wuhan, where the COVID pandemic started. Last Friday, Senate Republicans released a much anticipated report on the origins of the coronavirus.

Now, they tried to settle the question of where it originated from in a Wuhan wet market or inside a nearby Chinese government laboratory. In other words, did it come from nature, an animal in that wet market, or, Or did a Chinese scientist release it accidentally or otherwise? The authors of this report came away with this conclusion. The virus probably came from that Chinese laboratory. Not the market, the laboratory. The quote from the report is this. It appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely than not

the result of a research-related incident, end quote. For what it's worth, more and more scientific, are now beginning to agree with this finding. It's not just Senate Republicans. As the Washington Post said last year, quote, some of the reluctance to embrace the lab theory more fully may have been driven by the suspicion that Donald Trump had promoted it all to shift the blame to China from his administration's chaotic response to the pandemic. And quote, one final piece here. If Republicans take control of the House or Senate in the coming weeks, they have the power to hold hearings on this issue to compel people like Tony Fauci of the NIH or the CIA director,

William Burns, all to provide testimony to help answer this question of who's responsible for the COVID pandemic. You may want to keep that in mind as you vote in the next couple of weeks and ask your elected representatives to make it a priority if that's what you feel. And with that, one more thing before I let you go, a follow-up question about those kids in the Congo who mine cobalt for our dirty green revolution. We'll be right back. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment

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Ebbglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebbglis. Before starting Ebbglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebbglis.com or call 1800 LilyRX or 1800 545-97579. Welcome back to the PDB ladies and gentlemen. One more thing before I let you go. Tony in Long Island wrote in about a recent edition of our series, The Dirty Green Revolution, which of course is America's pivot to solar, wind, electric vehicles,

and the batteries, the power at all. Now those batteries, as you'll recall, are made in China with materials like cobalt, which is almost exclusively mined in the African country of the Congo. And the miners there for about a third of the production are kids, as young as six. Now, Tony and Long Island had some questions about that and whether I think that kids should be able to work at all. So here's what she said. When you mentioned the mining of cobalt by children,

a question came to my mind about the definition of children. Now, we might say under the age of 18 here in the USA, say, but would you count 16-year-old children? So my husband used to have a paper route at the age of 16 or so, maybe even younger, so it seems like kids should be able to work. But for the Congo kids, are these six-year-old slaves? Or is the whole family trying to survive by everyone working? In other words, is poverty the real issue here? Well, Tony, lots of great questions. So let's tackle the last couple. The answer is that, yes, you will actually see both individual children and entire families do this mining because it's a way for them to earn money. But again, this cobalt can be dangerous

to the touch and certainly to inhale the dust. So regardless, we have an obligation to stop it. At least that's my view. Meanwhile, you asked about whether kids in general should work, and if so, at what age? Well, I'll tell you, like a lot of folks probably listening this morning, I started working pretty early on. In elementary school, I was selling candy bars and magazines door to door. In junior high, I sold hot chocolate and sodas at college football games. And, of course, I grew up on a ranch. And like most of the folks in my family, I was expected to pitch in whenever my dad or granddad asked.

So, yes, kids can and should work. But the challenge is, when should that be and what kind of work? And you're right, Tony, the concept of childhood has changed over time. we often say 18, but for instance, in the Jewish tradition, you become a man at age 13. So here's what I would offer. There are cases where young people have to work because of poverty when instead they should be in school. And that's awful.

I would hope that as a people, we can evolve to the point where that's not true anymore or as true as often as it is now. And at that point, work becomes a tool for character development. It promotes responsibility and tenacity and maturity. It prepares young men and women for the day when mom and dad aren't there anymore, either in spirit or in person, like it did for me, and I suspect your husband with his paper route. But to be very clear, that's not what's happening in the Congo. Those kids are working in the mines so that Americans can drive electric vehicles or power our solar farms.

That's not work, Tony. That's exploitation. And it's gross. And you know what? I think that we can do better and we should. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we conclude your morning brief. As always, we close out the show reminding each other of why we are here, talking about our country and our world. It's the creed of every good spy and every smart American. It's from John, chapter 8, verse 32. And you shall know the truth. And the truth shall make you free. Good day. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.

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