On Monday, I was wondering what exactly the October surprise from the Democrats and the media would be; one week out from an election and they haven’t had much. Is attacking comedian Tony Hinchcliffe and supposed jokes about Puerto Ricans all they had? Is that really all they had in their bag?
And then I received a text.
It came from a reporter at the New York Times, and read as follows:
Good day, Mr. Shapiro. I hope you’re well. I’m Nico Grant, a reporter at The New York Times. I wanted to give you an opportunity to comment for an upcoming article that takes a look at how political commentators have discussed the upcoming election on YouTube.
We rely on an analysis conducted by researchers at Media Matters for America. Could you kindly provide us with a comment or decline to comment by the end of day tomorrow, Tuesday, October 29? Thank you so much for your time.
Here are points we plan to include. Media Matters identified 286 YouTube videos between May and August that contained election misinformation, including narratives that have been debunked or not supported with credible evidence. Researchers identified videos posted by you in those four months that contain election misinformation. We feature a clip of you saying, “ … Your party rigged many of the voting rules in advance of the election in order to ensure an extraordinary number of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting …”
I also have a few questions: 1. Are you a member of the YouTube partner program? 2. If so, how frequently does YouTube demonetize your videos? 3. Has YouTube sent you messages, emails or notices in the last year that your content contains misinformation? Thanks for your time.
This is not just a text. This is the October surprise.
Here’s what the New York Times was planning, as they were pretty obviously and clearly working with Media Matters for America, which is a far-Left radical organization, started by David Brock in an overt attempt to destroy all conservative media. Media Matters was launched to astroturf boycotts on conservative media and anyone who would advertise with conservative media.
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Media Matters became incredibly famous by essentially launching secondary boycotts on people like Rush Limbaugh. They’ve tried it with us at Daily Wire as well. They’ve tried it with our hosts. This is what they do.
The New York Times is overtly, clearly admitting to using Media Matters research in order to pressure YouTube to demonetize people on the Right and destroy them, because when you are demonetized, that also limits your reach.
They want to destroy the dissemination of information from people on the Right one week prior to an election.
That’s what’s going on here. It turns out the October surprise from our media, along with Media Matters — again, both Media Matters and the New York Times are Democratic apparatchiks — is an overt attempt to silence dissent one week before an election.
That is what this is about. That is what the text is about. That’s the entire game. They run an article on the front page in the New York Times saying that YouTube is subsidizing election misinformation which, in turn, pressures YouTube (owned by Google, the number one donor to the Democratic Party) to censor any and all hosts, any and all information that disagrees with the Left.
The important point is: They didn’t just reach out to me. As we now know, they reached out to pretty much everybody on the Right, other hosts from The Daily Wire, people like Tucker Carlson — everyone on the Right.
Why?
Because their goal is to shut the spigot off so you can’t get any information on places like YouTube. Thirty-seven percent of Americans get their news from YouTube, according to Pew Research.
Theoretically, that number is even higher because some people engage with news on YouTube without even knowing it. Political ads run on YouTube. It is possible to watch a non-political video and be pushed to a political video, watch for five minutes, and only then tune out.
Shutting off the spigot on news information one week in advance of an election: That is the New York Times’ trick.
Obviously, none of this is about election misinformation and about shutting down “bad information,” as everyone knows.
How do I know? Because they reached out to me about “election misinformation.” To me, of all people. If you listen to the show, you know I have been perfectly consistent since November of 2020 in that I believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election. I thought Donald Trump had every right to legally challenge that election, but I did not see the actual evidence that the allegations he was making about fraud in the election and the election itself were sufficient to overcome the state certification of the ballots.
So of all the people to come to about election misinformation, coming to me is absolute proof that this trick has nothing to do with election misinformation. Instead, it is about silencing anybody on the Right. That is the goal. It is always the goal for the Left. It’s always the goal for the New York Times.
Consider the craziness of this. The New York Times is supposed to be the tip of the spear in terms of freedom of the press and free speech; that same media outlet is overtly and clearly attempting to pressure the biggest video platform on planet Earth to shut off other press outlets.
That’s crazy. They say it’s a challenge to the press if Trump calls them “fake news.” Imagine if we at the Daily Wire called for the New York Times to be completely demonetized and shut down on social media because of misinformation. Would that not be a challenge to free speech principles?
It’s unbelievable.
What’s hilarious is the quote they sent me about “election misinformation,” where apparently I said, “Your party rigged many of the voting rules in advance of the election in order to ensure an extraordinary number of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting…”
Really?
FiveThirtyEight wrote in 2023, “One of the most striking aspects of the 2020 election was the unprecedented use of mail-in voting. Nearly half (43 percent) of all voters cast a ballot by mail in 2020, a record share, according to the latest Survey of the Performance of American Elections, a post-election poll of tens of thousands of registered voters run by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III. Much of this was driven by COVID-19 — states changed voting rules and requirements to make it easier to vote by mail, and voters hoping to avoid crowded polling places in the middle of a pandemic took advantage.”
Wait, that sounds like rigging the voting rules in order to increase mail-in balloting.
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Maybe they ought to fact-check CBS News about ballot harvesting. In 2020, CBS News reported, “The Nevada Assembly passed legislation that would allow the state to mail a ballot to every registered voter, and the bill allows for third parties to collect ballots. Fierson argues that the threat to Postal Service funding and the warning of mail delays ‘makes ballot assistance even more important.’ But critics argue it opens the door to abuse and interference. The Nevada law does not limit how many ballots a person can collect. The Trump reelection campaign filed a lawsuit against the measure in Nevada and in other states.”
Again, that sounds like rigging the rules so as to increase ballot harvesting.
In 2020, the late-breaking media interference came in the form of shutting down the Hunter Biden laptop story. The New York Post had the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the social media “bros” were pressured into taking down that story by both the press and by members of the federal intelligence agencies. They shut it down. They throttled it. They prevented dissemination of the story on places like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter).
Now, they are doing something even more overt. They are overtly attempting to shut down all conservative dissemination of information on the biggest video platform in existence one week in advance of an election.
If that’s not an attempt to rig an election, I don’t know what is.
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