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--:-- Host (John Bickley): This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for 40% off. Terms apply.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Brazilian authorities are cracking down and promising to punish a group of protesters who stormed government buildings on Sunday. What's driving the months-long unrest? And why are so many Brazilians afraid of the return of a socialist president? I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Tuesday, January 10th, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Millions of Americans postponed buying a new car in 2022. Do not buy a car in 2023, or at least not yet. What caused auto sales to collapse and are better car prices on the horizon? And how much influence have foreign disinformation campaigns actually had on our elections? Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Boland Branch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com, promo code WIRE.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): On Sunday, thousands of protesters stormed the Brazilian Capitol, Supreme Court, and congressional buildings as part of a longstanding protest against newly elected President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The protesters, who were supporters of Jair Bolsonaro in the October election, alleged that the fully digital election was not trustworthy. Western media have drawn broad comparisons of the event in Brazil to the events on January 6th.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Joining us to discuss is Mateo Haider, Latin America research assistant at the Heritage Foundation. Mateo, thanks for coming on.
--:-- Mateo Haider: Yeah, so as we've seen, Georgia, for months there have been in Brazil electoral fraud, particularly with regard to Brazil's digital voting system, which is fully digitalized and fully centralized. Basically, what we saw from the Bolsonaro camp for over a year now was a push for a manual count to complement that digital voting count. And it was basically it was a campaign point that the leftist Lula camp used against Bolsonaro.
--:-- Mateo Haider: And what we're seeing now is a fragment of that camp of supporters. It's not everybody, and in fact, it's not Bolsonaro himself, a camp of supporters that have basically continued to raise those concerns with regards to the nature of Lula's election. And unfortunately that meant that those protests turned violent when there was a security breach of the major branches of government and the buildings that house them particularly the Supreme Court the presidential palace and areas close to the Congress as well.
--:-- Mateo Haider: Now, this has been going on for several months, or at least since the election in October. Can you give us some background on why so many people protested this election?
--:-- Mateo Haider: Lula campaigned on basically a return of many of his welfare policies, speaking specifically to lower-income Brazilians. The motto was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Lula is an ex-convict. He was responsible for the largest corruption scandals in Brazilian history, and he used those funds to help fund the authoritarian left in countries across Latin America. He's seen as a close ally of the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela. And so there is a lot of anxiety in terms of what a return of the leftist workers party with full control now of the Supreme Court, of basically all the controlling mechanisms for checks and balances of the state, basically in the hands of Lula allies.
--:-- Mateo Haider: And so you're seeing that anxiety sectors of the Bolsonaro camp, again, a lot of middle class families that are concerned about their wallets and their economic future. We're actually seeing a divide there, Georgia, between the military, right, and sectors of the military and the police, for example, and the Lula camp, right? And so Lula is in a struggle right now to purge large parts of the military to shift in his favor. He purged over 6,000 officials just this week alone. They're calling it the de-Bolsonarization of the military.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): All right. Well, Mateo, thank you so much for coming on. That was Mateo Hader, Latin America Research Assistant at the Heritage Foundation.
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--:-- Host (John Bickley): Coming up, the car industry sees its worst sales in years. The American Heart Association recommends four to five servings each of fruits and vegetables every single day. Now that's no small task, especially given your busy schedule. Balance of nature, fruit and veggie capsules are a convenient way to consume essential nutritional ingredients on the daily. Go to balanceofnature.com and use promo code WIRE for $25 off your first order as a preferred customer, plus a free fiber and spice supplement. That's balanceofnature.com, promo code WIRE.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): According to a new report, 2022 marked the worst year for auto sales in more than a decade, following a year when car prices skyrocketed and demand was at an all-time high. Here with the details on what's causing the slowdown and what it means for those in the market for a new or used car is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So Cabot, can I finally buy a new car at a more affordable price? Probably not. Okay. So tell us about this decline in sales.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, according to new research from the Wards Intelligence Firm, U.S. auto sales dropped 8% last year, falling to a total of 13.7 million vehicles. Now, for context, in the five years before COVID, sales had topped 17 million every single year. That number is also $2 million short of what was projected just 12 months ago. So we're looking at quite the anomaly.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: The company's hardest hit were Nissan, whose sales fell 25%, and then Honda, who saw a 33% drop. That is their largest annual decline in history. The one car company that did have a pretty good year was General Motors They been the top U seller for decades but fell behind Toyota for the first time after being especially hard hit by those supply chain backups In 2022, though, they actually reported an increase in sales and retook the lead over Toyota.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, this drop is quite a turnaround from 2021 when the industry was really booming. What caused this reversal? You're absolutely right. At the start of the year, the car market was red hot, and manufacturers were really scrambling to ramp up production to try and meet the overwhelming demand. But because of chip shortages and supply chain backups, they just were not able to get enough cars for everyone who wanted them. And now they've finally gotten around many of those problems and increased production, but they missed the wave of high demand.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: That's because two things have happened in the last year. Inflation went up and interest rates went through the roof. So inflation and higher rates, once again, wreaking havoc. Stop me if you've heard that before. They're really impacting everything.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: We'll start with those rising rates. Over the last decade, new car buyers could find 0% finance and 72-month loans, but those days are long gone. The average APR on a new car last quarter was 6.5%. And the average monthly payment on a new vehicle loan is currently $717. This time last year, it was $659. And get this, 15% of new car buyers last quarter committed to monthly payments of $1,000 or more. 15%, that's almost three times the rate we saw in 2020.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And that's similar to what we're seeing in the housing market, where rising rates are really giving buyers a tough time and cooling off the market, right?
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Exactly. Definitely some similarities there.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And then there's inflation, which is really the root cause of those higher rates to begin with. First, there's the fact that people simply have less money to spend now than they did a year ago. So a lot of buyers have been priced out of the auto market altogether. Inflation is also impacting those who recently bought a car even before the rates went up. As living costs go up, those auto payments can be harder to make.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: To that point, the latest data shows that in November alone, there was an 8% jump in the number of deep subprime borrowers who are more than 60 days past due on their car payments. That's kind of an ominous sign and signals the potential for hundreds of thousands of repossessions as the year goes on and people fall behind. So keep an eye on those numbers.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Now you're our silver lining guy. So any cause for optimism?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Thank you, John. There is a bit. There's a hope that raw materials will start to become more affordable as supply chains continue to unsnarl and also that interest rates will drop as the economy begins to cool further. And the other big factor is computer chips. We've talked extensively about that chip shortage. Well, there was actually a slight increase in chip supply before the end of the year, which should make the sticker cost on new cars a bit cheaper if that trend continues. That's good news and I'm sure welcome news to a lot of people.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Cabot, thanks for reporting. Anytime.
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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): That's Daily Wire's senior editor, Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): A new study on foreign disinformation suggests that fears surrounding it are overblown. In particular, it found that Russia's attempt to spread false information on social media during the 2016 presidential election had little impact on voters. Here to tell us more about this study is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the study comes out of NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics, but it was actually conducted by an international team that also included some researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College in Dublin, and Technical University of Munich. Now, as to parameters, it wasn't focused on general misinformation, and that's just inadvertently incorrect posts that you put online. Instead, it specifically looked at disinformation, and that's when someone intentionally posts false information with the hope of spreading it.
--:-- Megan Basham: And so it focused on accounts from Russia that were known to generate disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. And what it found was that while these kind of posts did find an audience particularly with right users they actually didn't change voters attitudes or behavior Now, that's not to say that these posts weren't reaching an audience. They were, but only to the degree that they were already confirming the users' prior views.
--:-- Megan Basham: So, for example, the study found that very committed Republicans who were already planning to vote for Donald Trump were likely to share the posts that cast Hillary Clinton in a negative light. And part of the reason for that may be that people shared reports from legitimate news outlets and political figures far more often. In fact, the study found that Americans saw 25 times more national news posts than they did posts from these Russian accounts.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the information voters were seeing from legitimate media outlets was far more influential and really drowned out that Russian disinformation. And so the takeaway, I guess, is that voters are really good at screening out foreign conspiracy theories.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, were the researchers surprised by this or was this what they expected? It sounds like they were a little bit surprised. So one of the study's authors told The Washington Post this about the foreign disinformation concern. My personal sense coming out of this is that it got way overhyped.
--:-- Megan Basham: Even as we speak, political leaders who do want to see more content moderation are pointing to foreign actors that are trying to spread false information as the reason. And of course, as those Twitter records have shown, that was also part of the justification that the FBI, the DOJ, the White House, and a lot of other federal departments used when they were asking Twitter to take down certain posts or ban particular users.
--:-- Megan Basham: And it was also a key argument that the Biden administration made for why it needed to launch that disinformation board. So to now discover that the issue did not sway American voters in the election where it was thought to be most prevalent, I would say is pretty noteworthy.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, it's interesting to note that before Elon Musk, those tech executives seemed to concede that disinformation was a serious problem that they really needed to act on. Yeah, that's true. Though it is easy to forget, but early on in Twitter's history, previous CEO Jack Dorsey also argued that letting the open market, and by that he meant all the people on the platforms, sift through information and judge for themselves what was credible, would take care of the problem of disinformation.
--:-- Megan Basham: And actually, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took that position in 2017 as well. In fact, Zuckerberg directly asked Congress in a hearing on the issue to provide evidence of the claim that disinformation was swaying voters. Now, later, he changed his tune, and there has been a lot of discussion about whether that was because of government pressure or the threat of more congressional hearings.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Well, that is the idea behind the free public square. Megan, thanks for reporting.
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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Another story we're tracking this week. Attorney General Merrick Garland has opened an investigation to review classified materials from Joe Biden's time as vice president that were discovered at a Biden think tank. CBS News reports that around 10 documents were found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement by Biden's attorneys. CNN reports that the documents include top-secret files designated as, quote, sensitive compartmented information. The documents were discovered November 2nd before the midterm elections.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.
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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): And don't forget to check out our sponsors. Boll & Branch: Boll & Branch Get 15% off your first set of Boll & Branch sheets and free shipping when you use promo code WIRE at https://www.bollandbranch.com/WIRE.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): And Balance of Nature: "Get $25 OFF Your Preferred Order Use Promo Code ‘WIRE’ at BalanceOfNature.com"
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