--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Several tech CEOs get grilled on Capitol Hill over their alleged failures to protect children on their social media platforms.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: I'm so tired of this. It's been 28 years, what, since the internet. We haven't passed any of these bills. And the reason they haven't passed is because of the power of your companies.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: We break down the contentious testimony from the Senate's child online safety hearing.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: It's Thursday, February 1st, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: A House committee approved two articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his failure to secure the border.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: He's making it virtually impossible. They say in their own words, and they told us down on the border at Eagle Pass, it's impossible to do the job that they were trained to do.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: And Harvard is hit with yet another plagiarism accusation, this time involving its chief diversity and inclusion officer.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Good footwear is about more than just fashion and G-Defy shoes are anything but ordinary.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: They aim to foster healthy body movements, alleviate pain and prevent further wear and tear.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: I tried my first pair of G-Defy shoes and I actually didn't want to take them off. They were so comfortable even when I was just doing chores around the house.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Try them for yourself. Use code WIRE for $30 off orders of $150 or more at gdefy.com.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: That's G-D-E-F-Y dot com with promo code WIRE for $30 off your order.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Experience the miracle that is GDefy, where comfort meets innovation.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: A dramatic hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday as tech CEOs faced questions about the effects of social media on children.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Families impacted by youth suicides and sexual exploitation cheered as Senate Judiciary Committee members grilled the chief executives of Meta, TikTok, X, Snap, and Discord.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Here with more is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: So, this may have been one of the most emotional Senate hearings I've seen. What did they address and what were some of the standout moments?
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Well, you know, this was a very wide-ranging hearing, and among the issues covered were child sexual exploitation, child pornography, also the question of material that promotes harmful, life-threatening behavior, things like children purchasing drugs like fentanyl on apps like Snapchat, anxiety and general mental health impact, especially on teen and preteen girls.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And it even returned to the issue that we've seen in previous tech hearings of data privacy and Chinese ownership of TikTok.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And I'll say that one of the most noteworthy factors may be the level of bipartisanship that we saw.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: So, Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Josh Hawley were especially aggressive in grilling these CEOs.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And Graham actually said that they have blood on their hands.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: But, you know, Democrat senators, Amy Klobuchar and Dick Durbin were also aggressive.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: I really can't think of another issue in recent memory where we saw both sides being so aligned.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And then the other significant factor was the fact that families who blame social media for their children's deaths by suicide and overdose were in fact present in the chamber.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And they openly cheered at some points.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: This gave rise to the most dramatic moment of the hearing when Senator Hawley asked Zuckerberg if he wanted to apologize to the families.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: You're on national television. Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your product? Show them the pictures.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Would you like to apologize for what you done to these good people? I'm sorry to be thinking of your fault. It's terrible. I'm not going to get through the things that your families have suffered.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Why, Mr. Zuckerberg, why should your company not be sued for this?
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: You hide behind a liability shield. You can't be held accountable. Shouldn't you be held accountable personally?
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Will you take personal responsibility?
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Senator, I think I've already answered this.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: So, it may have been difficult to hear Zuckerberg there as he was facing away from the microphones.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: But what he did was turn and address the parents sitting behind him.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And he said, I'm sorry for everything you have all been through.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: So, very dramatic moment in a hearing that had no shortage of emotional moments, as you said, Georgia.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And some have questioned how Zuckerberg's apology there could now be used in lawsuits against Meta.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Now, did he and or other CEOs push back at all against claims that they were actually responsible for that harm?
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: To some degree, they did.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: What they did was they highlighted proactive steps that they say they've taken to protect kids online.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: So, Zuckerberg said Meta has plans to hide content that isn't appropriate for minors.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And he said that his company is unrolling 30 new tools that will give parents more ability to protect kids when they are on these apps.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: But he also pushed back against the idea that the mental health crisis in teens and preteens is the fault of social media.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Now, we sometimes see these explosive hearings, but they don't always translate into any actual legislative outcomes.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Are there any concrete solutions being floated?
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Well, I think the most likely legislative result would be seeing more support for the Kids Online Safety Act.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: That's a bipartisan bill that requires social media apps to take what they call reasonable measures to prevent bullying, sexual exploitation, exposure to harmful materials, things like videos promoting anorexia or cutting.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And the platforms would need to protect children's private information.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: They would need to offer monitoring tools to parents.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And they'd also need to offer more disclosure on targeted advertising and marketing.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: So, Evan Spiegel, who is the chief executive of Snap, and Linda Iaccarino, who leads X, both pledged to back that legislation.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And that's noteworthy because lobbying groups for the tech companies have very much been working against that bill and against state-level legislation that imposes similar age and time restrictions on social media use.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: But Zuckerberg's and the CEOs of TikTok and Discord did not join that pledge.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: TikTok's CEO said that they support the spirit of these bills, but they have concerns about implementation.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: And that is fairly telling, perhaps indicating that Meta, TikTok, and Discord at least plan to continue lobbying to block these kinds of bills.
--:-- Guest: Megan Basham: Well, I'd be interested to know how much revenue they anticipate losing if kids did limit their time on the apps.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: NetSuite turns 25 this year.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Everything you need, all in one place.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: 36,000 businesses have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at netsuite.com slash morningwire.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: That's netsuite.com slash morningwire.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: House Republicans have now taken a crucial step in their efforts to impeach embattled Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Here to discuss is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Hey, Cabot, so GOP lawmakers have long vowed to impeach Mayorkas and now they're one step closer.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: First, what happened yesterday?
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: So, the House Homeland Security Committee voted 18 to 15 along party lines to advance articles of impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: As we've documented here, the U.S. has experienced an unprecedented surge in illegal immigration, with 7.5 million people crossing the border under the Biden administration.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: For context, if all of those migrants formed their own state, it would be the 13th largest state in the country.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: The impeachment charges say Mayorkas has knowingly made false statements to Congress and obstructed congressional oversight of his department.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Here's House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking on Mayorkas from the House floor Wednesday.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: He's handicapping law enforcement. He's limiting their ability to catch narcotics like fentanyl.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: We will be moving forward swiftly on those articles. It's long overdue.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: But Secretary Mayorkas is only part of the problem.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Because earlier this month, I released a memo documenting 64, 64 specific actions that the Biden administration has taken to undermine our border security and to promote the mass release of illegals and dangerous persons into our country.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: All right, so the committee's now moved the impeachment effort forward.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: What comes next?
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Well, the articles will now head to the House floor where they'll likely be voted on at some point next week.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Now, given their slim majority, Republicans can only afford to lose two votes in the House.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: If it does pass, it'll head to the Senate where a formal trial would be held.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: At that point, it will come down to whether the GOP can prove Mayorkas is guilty of committing, quote, high crimes and misdemeanors.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: That is the key bar set for impeachment, and it's a difficult one to reach.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Not only do Democrats control the Senate, making the odds of conviction relatively slim, but there's little historical precedent to go on as well.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: A sitting cabinet member has only been impeached and convicted once, and it was all the way back in 1876.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: What is the Secretary Mayorkas saying in response to this impeachment effort?
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Yeah, he sent a letter to the House calling the impeachment a sham based on, quote, baseless and false claims.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: He went on to tell Republican members that, quote, your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service mission to which I've devoted most of my career.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Democrats in the House released a statement of their own defending Mayorkas.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: To that point, here's Representative Benny Thompson, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: The Committee on Homeland Security has distinguished itself through serious legislative and oversight work under the leadership of both parties.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Republicans' partisan rush to consider House Resolution 863 today is a betrayal of that hard-earned record.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: And look, it is worth noting here, there have been voices on the right who are urging House Republicans to drop the effort.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Alan Dershowitz, for example, who represented former President Trump in his first impeachment trial, claimed the GOP was using, quote, double standards and called the charges vague.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: We heard a similar sentiment from legal expert Jonathan Turley, who, it's worth noting, has been called as a Republican witness in numerous congressional hearings.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: He said there's, quote, no evidence Marcos committed an impeachable offense and said Republicans have no cognizable basis for conviction.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: But for their part, House Republicans say that they have a duty to remove him given the chaos at the border.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Here's a closing argument we heard from Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, who really led the charge in the Homeland Security Committee.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: He has willfully and systematically refused to comply with the laws passed by Congress and breached the trust of Congress and the American people.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: The results have been catastrophic and have endangered the lives and livelihoods of all Americans.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: So now we wait and see if the House votes to impeach next week.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: And after that, how the Senate trial proceeds.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: All right, more to come.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Guest: Cabot Phillips: Anytime.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: In the wake of the scandal involving now Harvard President Claudine Gay, the university is facing more plagiarism allegations.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Harvard University's chief diversity officer appears to have plagiarized large portions of her academic work, too, according to a complaint filed with the school.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Daily Wire investigative reporter Maraida Lordi is here with the details.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Hi, Georgia. While these allegations appeared in a complaint filed Monday with Harvard, Sherry Ann Charleston, Harvard's first ever chief diversity and inclusion officer, allegedly plagiarized parts of every publication she wrote.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: That's at least 40 times total, according to this anonymous complaint filed with the university, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: The complaint says Charleston quoted or paraphrased nearly a dozen other academics without proper attribution in her 2009 dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Also, Charleston's only peer-reviewed journal article, written in 2014 with her husband, lifted parts from a 2012 study her husband published, presenting it as new research.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: We should note her husband, LaVar Charleston, is the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Charleston herself was previously Assistant Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Chief Affirmative Action Officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: So she presented her husband's study and then passed it off as new?
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Yes, at least parts of it, if the complaints allegations are true.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: In the 2014 article they authored, which was published in the Journal of Negro Education, even interviews with Black computer science students from the 2012 study showed up word for word.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: The 2014 article also listed the same methods, findings, and descriptions of survey subjects as the older study.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: That's according to the Beacon's analysis.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: This is a big problem because not only are you not supposed to recycle old research, especially data and conclusions, but the 2014 publication also added two new authors, Sherry Ann Charleston and Jorlando Jackson, who had nothing to do with the original study.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars, told The Beacon the 2014 paper, quote, appears to be entirely counterfeit and called it research fraud, pure and simple.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: So what's Harvard's response been?
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: A Harvard spokesperson told the school's newspaper that Harvard has processes for handling research misconduct allegations, but they, quote, do not comment on individual cases or on the existence of investigations related to research misconduct allegations.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: The spokesperson also praised the chief diversity officer and said she advanced the school's, quote, belief that everyone who comes to Harvard belongs at Harvard and whether a student, faculty, staff member or researcher should have the opportunity to succeed.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: A spokesperson for UW-Madison, where Charleston used to work, said the school has initiated an assessment in response to the allegations.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: It said it takes all allegations of research misconduct seriously.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: This comes shortly on the heels of allegations against Claudine Gay, the former university president.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: So it sounds like more bad press for Harvard.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: That's right. As we mentioned earlier, these allegations do echo those against Claudine Gay, who stepped down as Harvard's president earlier this month.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Gaye was accused last year of dozens of instances of plagiarism in her published works.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: However, Gaye still collects a $900,000 annual salary as a tenured faculty member at Harvard.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Here's an interesting tidbit, too.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: As chief diversity officer, Charleston served on the presidential search committee that ultimately named Claudine Gaye as president.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: So overall, more PR woes for Harvard as it figures out how to respond to this situation.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Absolutely.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Maureen, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Guest: Maraida Lordi: Thanks, Georgia.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with us.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know.
