CLAY: I wanted to start with what has become readily apparent — the information arbitrage war that is going on every single day on Twitter — and there are a couple of breaking news stories. Woke up this morning to see that Elon Musk is potentially not going to buy Twitter. Although he says he remains committed to the purchase of the company, he is concerned about how many bots — in other words, not real accounts — there are on Twitter. And he has, therefore, put a pause on his potential purchase of Twitter.

Now, to be fair, he is saying that he still intends to purchase Twitter but the stock, as we are speaking right now, has dropped nearly 9%. It’s trading at $41 and change. The company was supposed to be sold for $54.20. So there’s a massive discount going on right now. Now, some of you out there are like, okay. What could be going on here? I think what may be at play here is Elon Musk lowering his potential purchase price for Twitter because he’s aware that with the massive stock market sell-off we have seen…

Trillions of dollars in value erased almost to the point where Joe Biden’s entire tenure, 17 months now, the stock market is not far from going negative over that 17-month period. And so, as a result, tech company stocks have collapsed. And I happen to think that Elon Musk may be thinking to himself, $54.20 a share is way too much to be paying when, if I weren’t buying this company, Twitter might be $25 a share. So he could walk away, allow the stock price to collapse, and then potentially come back and try to make a play for that.

But this is important, and it is such a win for sane people in an insane world if Elon Musk buys Twitter because right now the White House is still using Twitter to spread direct lies while accusing people like you and me, many of your coworkers who start to raise questions about the Biden administration of spreading disinformation. This was yesterday afternoon the White House tweeted out, “When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available.”

The first sentence is a lie. Joe Biden, and millions of others, received covid shots before January 20th. The second paragraph is classic disinformation. These are not “new” jobs, they are the jobs we shut down in March 2020. We still aren’t back to the March 2020 job numbers. https://t.co/X5SvA0d5gy

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 13, 2022

That first sentence is a direct lie. In fact, Joe Biden got his covid shot in December of 2020, a full month before he took the oath of office. So that sentence from the White House — which has been lecturing all of us about the perils of disinformation — is a lie. And then the next sentence: “In the last 15 months, the economy has created 8.3 million jobs and the unemployment rate stands at 3.6%, the fastest decline in unemployment to start a president’s term ever recorded.”

This is direct disinformation. This is a direct lack of truth as well. So what’s at stake here? What is at play? The White House is asking for the power to determine what is truth and false in social media, in modern media today, while using those same platforms to directly spread lies and misinformation themselves. Now, this is important because there’s gonna be a lot of discussion about this as we get closer to the midterms.

The Biden administration is going to claim that they have created all these millions of jobs and that they have created a strong economy. We know that’s not true because we’re all struggling every single day with nearly double-digit inflation. but when they claim that they have “created” — as they did in this tweet — 8.3 million new jobs and it’s “the fastest decline in unemployment to start a president’s term ever recorded,” what you need to understand is this:

We still have not regained all of the jobs that existed in March of 2020 when we had 15 days to slow the spread. We still have not regained! We’re still, I believe, over a million jobs behind. We had the greatest economy in the history of the United States in February of 2020. White, black, Asian, Hispanic, everybody’s overall wages were growing. We had hit an unbelievable 50-plus-year low in the unemployment rate and we were just starting to hit full-steam ahead thanks to all of the economic policies that Donald Trump and the Republican Party put in place to unlock the full growth of our economic potential.

And then what happened? Covid. Covid happened! We make the disastrous decision to shut down our economy and start to send trillions of dollars into the marketplace. That is only going to be exacerbated when Joe Biden becomes president in 2021 and immediately adds another $1.9 trillion in covid spending that was unnecessary, and immediately adds another over $1 trillion in the infrastructure bill, which you’ll remember Buck and I saying also further created the apparatus here for nearly double-digit inflation.

And recall that we also were absolutely poised for another $5 trillion-plus in spending as a part of the Build Back Better bill. If that had ended up happening, then we would be well into double-digit inflation — 15%, 20%, who knows where the inflation rate might be — if Joe Biden had gotten everything he wanted. So I start here talking with you about the information wars that are taking place every single day.

And you guys listening know what I’m talking about. Whether or not you feel comfortable being able to share your opinion on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, there are people who want to be able to investigate you, to pay attention to what you are saying in terms of whether they believe it’s true or false. And this idiot Ministry of Truth individual, Nina Jankowicz, who has been hired by the Biden administration to be their czar of misinformation, she now is saying — this is crazy — that she wants people to be able to edit your own tweets and change what is said in those tweets if they decide that it is misinformation!

Listen to this incredibly idiotic idea.

Only “trustworthy” people like Nina Jankowicz should be verified on Twitter and able to add context to other people’s tweets. pic.twitter.com/nsquSNJRyI

— Maze (@mazemoore) May 10, 2022

CLAY: This is madness. First of all, if you disagree with something that people tweet, you can dispute it. You can argue with it on Facebook. You can respond to a comment that you disagree with already and further contextualize what is being said. But what’s going on here is, we got a rigged system, and Elon Musk buying Twitter say big part of ending that rigged game because guess what hasn’t happened at all? It’s not uncommon when I share a covid detail, a covid fact that there’s a appended statement underneath it about whether or not they consider it to be true or false.

The Biden White House lied yesterday. This is a direct lie: “When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available.” Twitter has not done anything to label that tweet. There’s no “further context” provided for this claim that has been the most successful economic president ever. That’s what he’s claiming. Yet every single one of you out there that has seen shortages in baby formula, dealing with the highest gas prices in the United States history, dealing with the highest inflation in 40-plus years — every single one of you knows — this is a lie.

There is no response at all providing further context on these lies. And here, direct quote: “Biden receives the first dose of coronavirus vaccine publicly.” He got it on December 21st, 2020. At the time that he took office, the Trump administration was administering one million covid shots a day, over a million covid shots a day. And for the first several months of the Biden White House, they didn’t accelerate that rate very substantially at all.

They were implementing the existing policies and procedures that had already been put in place by the Trump White House. This is a lie. It’s important to call out lies, particularly when the people who are lying to you are claiming that they are the ones telling the truth. That is a straight-up 1984, George Orwell, Big Government, authoritarian move from the Biden White House. Nothing is being said at all. So that is the context on what’s going on right now with Twitter, the battle for truth and for fairness, content-neutral policies that should hopefully be put in place in the event that Elon Musk is able to complete this acquisition of Twitter.