Morning Wire XX
[0] Voters go to the polls in Wyoming and Alaska today in what some are calling a referendum on former President Trump.
[1] Will Liz Cheney's prominent role in the January 6th committee put an end to her congressional career?
[2] I have fought for Wyoming and I will fight for you in Washington, D .C. And I will be taking that fight to D .C. just as soon as I defeat Liz Cheney.
[3] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor -in -chief John Bickley.
[4] It's Tuesday, August 6th.
[5] And this is Morning Wire.
[6] There are 83 days until the midterms, and Twitter has rolled out new content guidelines aimed at curbing election misinformation.
[7] How will the new rules affect discussion in the Digital Town Square?
[8] And the one -year anniversary of the U .S. withdrawal from Afghanistan seized the Taliban -controlled country in turmoil.
[9] How many American allies still remain in the country?
[10] And how is the U .S. maintaining intelligence on the ground to combat terrorism?
[11] Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.
[12] Stay tuned.
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[22] Two anti -Trump Republican lawmakers are facing primaries in their respective states today.
[23] Voters will decide the political futures of Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
[24] Here to preview the races is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce.
[25] So Tim, both of these lawmakers are notable Trump critics, but Liz Cheney is arguably more prominent because of her role as vice chair of the House January 6th committee, how is her race looking?
[26] Hey, Georgia.
[27] So Cheney spent a lot of political capital on joining House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's special committee investigating January 6th.
[28] Of course, that doesn't seem to matter much to Cheney, who has basically said she joined the committee on principle and would do it again even if it cost her seat, which it very likely will.
[29] For context, her home state of Wyoming voted 70 % for Donald Trump in 2020.
[30] A recent University of Wyoming poll showed Cheney's Republican rival attorney Harriet Higman with a commanding lead.
[31] The survey found that 57 % of likely Republican primary voters support Higman nearly 30 points above Cheney's 28%.
[32] So the January 6th committee is what Cheney is most known for, but what's interesting is she actually voted with Trump pretty consistently when he was in office.
[33] How is she squaring that circle with voters?
[34] Right.
[35] She voted with Trump 90 % of the time, but since he left office, she's made January 6th, the center of her campaign.
[36] Even her father, former VP Dick Cheney, cut an ad calling Trump one of the greatest threats the United States has ever faced.
[37] Here's a bit from that ad.
[38] He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.
[39] He's a coward.
[40] So I want to move on to Alaska.
[41] Lisa Murkowski is a centrist Republican in the Senate, and she's also a vocal critic of Donald Trump.
[42] Alaska is less conservative than Wyoming, but they still went for Trump by about 10 points in 2020.
[43] How is Murkowski expected to perform in her primary?
[44] Better than Cheney's for several reasons.
[45] First, as you mentioned, Alaska leans more left than Wyoming.
[46] Second, Murkowski isn't the face of anti -Trump sentiment.
[47] Her approval rating among Alaska's Republicans has actually been trending up since Biden took office.
[48] A recent morning console poll put her favorability slightly underwater at 46 % disapproved versus 41 % approve.
[49] According to the same poll, though, her net approval, which includes Democrats and independence, is actually positive 46 to 39.
[50] Finally, and this is the main factor, Alaska restructured its elections two years ago and basically scrapped primary elections.
[51] If it hadn't, Murkowski's prospects would look much dimmer.
[52] With the new system, Alaska is moving to rank choice voting.
[53] The primary will be a free -for -all where voters list their candidates in order from favorite to least favorite, and the top four move on to the general election.
[54] It doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or Republican, your choices can be for either party.
[55] So someone like Murkowski may not get many first -place votes, but she may receive a ton of second, third, and third, fourth place votes, especially due to her name recognition.
[56] So for that reason, it's expected to disproportionately help her.
[57] Also in Alaska, Sarah Palin, a former governor and vice presidential candidate, is leading in a special election for Alaska's lone congressional seat that opened up when Congressman Don Young passed away earlier this year.
[58] He was the longest serving member of the House at the time.
[59] If she wins, she could be shaking up D .C. in about a month.
[60] All right.
[61] Well, Tim, these are a lot of races to keep an eye on, but thanks for coming on.
[62] Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wires, Tim Pierce.
[63] Coming up, Twitter rolls out its new election misinformation program.
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[69] Twitter has announced new content moderation policies for the upcoming midterm elections.
[70] It says the rules are intended to crack down on, quote, harmful misleading information about elections and civic events.
[71] Here to give us the details on these new policies and how they may impact midterm races is Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham.
[72] So, Megan, we all know that big tech has faced a lot of scrutiny regarding content moderation in the past few years, with some people saying it verges on censorship.
[73] But what specifically does Twitter's new policy entail?
[74] Hey, Georgia.
[75] Well, you know, you have to say that some of these new actions should be pretty non -controversial.
[76] What they're going to do is primarily build on the rules that the company first put in place in 2018.
[77] They're going to be doing things like labeling or removing misleading posts about where, when to vote, or who can vote.
[78] And then they're also going to be creating notification.
[79] so that users will know when the polls are open in specific states.
[80] They're also going to ramp up their verification process so that they can weed out imposter accounts posing as real candidates.
[81] Pretty standard stuff there.
[82] However, the company also says it's going to label or remove posts intended to undermine public confidence in an election.
[83] And it's also going to boost posts from quote unquote credible news sources.
[84] So that's the part that's setting off alarm bells.
[85] The policy doesn't explain how moderators are going to decide what's credible and what undermines public confidence.
[86] And when you look at their history and consider that they banned former President Trump and suppressed a legitimate news story from the New York Post about Hunter Biden's laptop, that announcement has some conservatives concerned.
[87] Now, is there any sign that Twitter plans to shift the approach to assuage some of those concerns?
[88] You know, Twitter has never officially addressed its decision to censor that post story.
[89] or to also lock the newspaper out of its account, though former CEO Jack Dorsey did later call those actions unacceptable.
[90] So I talked to Carl Zabo, who is vice president and general counsel for net choice, a tech trade organization.
[91] He thinks that Elon Musk's very public battles with the company has taught it some lessons about changes it needs to make to serve users across the political spectrum.
[92] I will say when the White House had put out its statement saying that inflation was at zero percent, we had zero inflation.
[93] Twitter actually had flagged that and was pointing people to other newspapers and sites showing what the real facts are on that data.
[94] So I don't know how they're going to ultimately play it as we go forward, but I will tell you from that one anecdote that I saw, it's clear that they're trying to be politically agnostic.
[95] Now, that said, I should add that not every conservative agrees with Zabo on this.
[96] constitutional attorney, Harmeet Dylan, who, full disclosure, has represented the Daily Wire before.
[97] Well, she published an op -ed at Fox News this week, warning that Twitter will likely use these policies to benefit Democrats.
[98] Just a couple of weeks ago, the platform suspended the parents' rights group, Moms for Liberty, for saying of a California transgender bill that gender dysphoria is a mental health disorder being normalized by predators.
[99] So clearly you look at that, and that is political speech about a specific piece of proposed legislation, Twitter says it violated their content policies.
[100] Now, does Zabo have any ideas about how they could address this kind of thing in a more fair way?
[101] Well, his organization advocates for free markets, so he's really pointing to competition from new platforms like Getter and Rumble.
[102] But he thinks that the worst thing that could happen would be for the government to get involved in moderating Twitter's content moderators, so to speak.
[103] he really wants the markets to be left to work this out on their own.
[104] And certainly the press has a role in spreading this information as well, so we're going to keep covering the issue.
[105] Megan, thanks for reporting.
[106] Yeah, anytime.
[107] That's Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham.
[108] It's been one year since the U .S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, yet many American allies remain in the Taliban -controlled country.
[109] Here to discuss is journalist Lynn O'Donnell, former Afghanistan Bureau Chief for AFP.
[110] So, Lynn, let's start with.
[111] the question many people are asking, are there still many American allies in Afghanistan trying to get out a year later?
[112] Yes, there are very many people who are American citizens and passport holders of other countries that are still trying to leave the country.
[113] I've heard up to 160 ,000.
[114] So that's mostly Afghans with American citizenship who are still in Afghanistan.
[115] many of them will be very impatient to get out.
[116] They are considered enemies of the state and it is probably because of the Taliban policies towards them and the Taliban's overall administrative incompetence that they are still there.
[117] A lot of people who are trying to get passports have been trying to do so for a long time.
[118] The price of passports is going through the roof and then once people have the passports, they have to get visas and there's no diplomatic representation of most countries of the world in Afghanistan anymore.
[119] So it is very difficult.
[120] Now what kinds of roles would these allies have played as it relates to the U .S. operation there?
[121] Yes, they'd be Afghans who worked with the military in very many capacities, but a lot of people who worked alongside American soldiers and Marines and contractors as interpreters, very many of them, other people who worked at the embassy and with the reconstruction effort of the Americans alongside them.
[122] So, yeah, there's an awful lot of people.
[123] 160 ,000 sounds like a lot, but it's certainly not outside the bounds of imagination.
[124] And there would possibly be tens and tens of thousands of people who worked with governments and military of the Allies as well.
[125] You've got to remember that there were nearly 50 countries represented in the US -led alliance.
[126] So there were a lot of people working for them, and it was 20 years.
[127] Now, in terms of intelligence on the ground for the efforts to get people out of there and counteract potential terrorist threats, is the West now reliant completely on the Taliban's cooperation to get anything done?
[128] Well, I would have thought that, and especially when we saw the killing of the leader of al -Qaeda, Amun al -Zawahiri, in a villa in central Kabul, on the 31st of July, the immediate thought that I had was that they couldn't have done that without having people on the ground cooperating with American intelligence.
[129] But I've been told by very senior people who are working in the US administration on Afghanistan specifically that that's not the case.
[130] And others as well in the security sphere who have said to me that the Americans really showed the quality and viciousness, if you like, of their intelligence because they went for him, they found him, and they killed him alone, that they're not cooperating with the Taliban.
[131] Looking ahead in terms of the geopolitical situation, how are the Allies going to approach Afghanistan in the coming months?
[132] Well, the United States leads the Allies when it comes to a lot of geopolitical policy issues, but most specifically on Afghanistan.
[133] I've even heard from Pakistani officials that there isn't going to be any recognition diplomatically of the Taliban without America doing so first.
[134] The Americans and the Taliban have been negotiating for very many months on the release of $3 .5 billion that are half or just less than half of Afghanistan's foreign reserves.
[135] Now that money has been frozen by law by the United States and the United States.
[136] nations because it's illegal to do financial transactions with terrorists.
[137] And it's been on that point, independent oversight of the money that's been the sticking point in the negotiations.
[138] And this same senior official in the Biden administration told me that that money is not going to be released anytime soon.
[139] Well, Lynne, thank you so much for talking with us again.
[140] Thanks a lot.
[141] That was journalist Lynn O'Donnell.
[142] Another story we're tracking this week.
[143] The effort to recall L .A. District Attorney George Gascon has failed.
[144] The group behind the petition submitted 715 ,000 signatures, but more than 28 % were ruled invalid.
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