Back on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro appeared before Congress to comment on the blatant censorship of conservatives and conservative media outlets pushed by the government, and Congressman Eric Swalwell tried to derail the hearing by attacking him, leading to Shapiro roasting Swalwell in quite entertaining fashion.
The main subject about which Shapiro was speaking to the House Judiciary Committee was the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). He accused it of being involved in a conspiracy to target and silence conservative media outlets such as his Daily Wire, with it pushing social media companies and the other tech companies involved to somehow suppress right-leaning content.
Rep. Swalwell was quite annoyed by the testimony and tried to distract from it by pushing Shapiro to comment on not only Project 2025, but also his religious and political beliefs. The main purpose of his irrelevant questioning appeared to be distracting the committee from what GARM had been up to, and painting the right as being composed mainly of extremists.
Swalwell kicked it off with a near-incoherent question, saying, “Mr. Shapiro, thank you for joining us today. I think it is important that you’re here as one of the leading conservative voices in the country. And the country in the last couple of weeks has talked about, googled Project 2025 … and you’re not going to get any censorship from me, so I just wanted to know from your perspective, I think it would help us understand, on just like a scale of 0-100 percent, how much do you support Project 2025?”
Shapiro fired back by mocking Swalwell’s incantation of the scary-sounding project, saying, “I think like President Trump, I haven’t looked all that deeply at Project 2025. But it seems that Democrats on this committee [think that] — sort of like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell — if they say Project 2025 enough, their presidential candidate becomes alive again.”
Swalwell later tried to discredit Shapiro and paint him as an extremist by displaying a poster of a quote from Shapiro in 2018 in which the conservative podcaster called homosexual activity “a sin.” Shapiro wasn’t flummoxed by it, instead firing back, “Yes, I’m a religious Jew. You found me out. I agree with me. Yes, that’s true.”
And, at still another point during the contentious back and forth, Swalwell pressed Shapiro to answer his questions about a wide variety of conservative policy positions, ignoring the GARM issue. Responding with a mixture of confusion and derision, Shapiro told the Congressman, “I’m not sure why I’m testifying on immigration policy at this point.” Watch him here:
"*" indicates required fields
Commenting on what GARM does during the hearing, Shapiro noted how it used made up “safety” standards to silence conservatives. He said, “GARM purportedly sets ‘brand safety’ standards – objective standards by which advertisers and platforms can supposedly determine just what sort of content ought to be deemed ‘safe’ for advertising.”
Continuing, he noted the vast scope of the advertising censorship, saying, “In reality, GARM acts as a cartel. Its members account for 90 percent of ad spending in the United States — almost $1 trillion. In other words, if you’re not getting ad dollars from GARM members, it’s nearly impossible to run an ad-based business.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video