Morning Wire XX
[0] Brazilian authorities are cracking down and promising to punish a group of protesters who stormed government buildings on Sunday.
[1] What's driving the months -long -long unrest, and why are so many Brazilians afraid of the return of a socialist president?
[2] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley.
[3] It's Tuesday, January 10th, and this is Morning Wire.
[4] Millions of Americans postponed buying a new car in 2022.
[5] Do not buy a car in 2023, or at least not yet.
[6] What caused auto sales to collapse and are better car prices on the horizon?
[7] And how much influence have foreign disinformation campaigns actually had on our elections?
[8] Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.
[9] Stay tuned.
[10] We have the news you need to know.
[11] Hey, everyone.
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[19] On Sunday, thousands of protesters stormed the Brazilian Capitol, Supreme Court, and congressional buildings as part of a long -standing protest against newly elected president Luis Anasio Lula de Silva.
[20] The protesters who were supporters of Jaira Bolsonaro in the October election alleged that the fully digital election was not trustworthy.
[21] Western media have drawn broad comparisons of the event in Brazil to the events on January 6th.
[22] Joining us to discuss is Matteo Hayder, Latin America research assistant at the Heritage Foundation.
[23] Matteo, thanks for coming on.
[24] Now, we've heard about some 1 ,200 protesters who were detained on Sunday after they stormed some of Brazil's capital buildings.
[25] Why were they protesting?
[26] And what's going on more broadly in Brazil?
[27] Yes, 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.
[28] 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.
[29] And it was basically it was a campaign point that the leftist Lula camp used against Bolsonaro.
[30] And what we're seeing now is a fragment of that camp of supporters.
[31] It's not everybody.
[32] 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.
[33] 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.
[34] Now, this has been going on for several months, or at least since the election in October.
[35] Can you give us some background on why so many people protested this election?
[36] Lula campaigned on basically a return of many of his welfare policies, speaking specifically to lower -income Brazilians.
[37] The motto was breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
[38] Lula is an ex -convict.
[39] He was responsible for the largest corruption scandals in Brazilian.
[40] history.
[41] And he used those funds to help fund the authoritarian left in countries across Latin America.
[42] He's seen as a close ally of the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela.
[43] 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.
[44] 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.
[45] We're actually seeing a divide there, Georgia, between the military, right, and sectors of the military and the police, for example, in the Lula camp, right?
[46] And so Lula is in a struggle right now to purge large parts of the military to shift in his favor.
[47] He purged over 6 ,000 officials just this week alone.
[48] They're calling it the debolsonorization of the military.
[49] Also, they've threatened to National Guard in the style of what Mexico's leftist president has done, of what Venezuela has done.
[50] They've flirted with that idea in the past.
[51] And so you're seeing actually that struggle over control of the military manifests itself during the protests.
[52] All right, well, Mateo, thank you so much for coming on.
[53] That was Mateo Hater, Latin America Research Assistant at the Heritage Foundation.
[54] Coming up, the car industry sees its worst sales in years.
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[61] 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.
[62] 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 DailyWire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips.
[63] So Cabot, can I finally buy a new car at a more?
[64] affordable price.
[65] Probably not.
[66] Okay.
[67] So tell us about this decline in sales.
[68] Well, according to new research from the Ward's intelligence firm, U .S. auto sales dropped 8 % last year, falling to a total of 13 .7 million vehicles.
[69] Now, for context, in the five years before COVID, sales had topped 17 million every single year.
[70] That number is also two million short of what was projected just 12 months ago.
[71] So we're looking at quite the anomaly.
[72] Yeah.
[73] The company's hardest hit were Nissan, whose sales fell 25%, and then Honda, who saw a 33 % drop.
[74] That is their largest annual decline in history.
[75] The one car company that did have a pretty good year was General Motors.
[76] They'd been the top U .S. seller for decades, but fell behind Toyota for the first time after being especially hard hit by those supply chain backups.
[77] In 2022, though, they actually reported an increase in sales and retook the lead over Toyota.
[78] Now, this drop is quite a turnaround from 2021 when the industry was really booming.
[79] what caused this reversal?
[80] You're absolutely right.
[81] 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.
[82] And now they've finally gotten around many of those problems and increased production, but they missed the wave of high demand.
[83] That's because two things have happened in the last year.
[84] Inflation went up, and interest rates went through the roof.
[85] So inflation and higher rates, once again, wreaking havoc.
[86] Stop me if you've heard that before.
[87] They're really impacting everything.
[88] We'll start with those rising rates.
[89] Over the last decade, new car buyers could find 0 % financing and 72 -month loans, but those days are long gone.
[90] The average APR on a new car last quarter was 6 .5%.
[91] And the average monthly payment on a new vehicle loan is currently $717.
[92] This time last year, it was $6 .59.
[93] And get this, 15 % of new car buyers last quarter committed to monthly payments of a thousand or more.
[94] 15%.
[95] That's almost three times the rate we saw in 2020.
[96] 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?
[97] Exactly.
[98] Definitely some similarities there.
[99] And then there's inflation, which is really the root cause of those higher rates to begin with.
[100] First, there's the fact that people simply have less money to spend now than they did a year ago.
[101] So a lot of buyers have been priced out of the auto market altogether.
[102] Inflation is also impacting those who recently bought a car even before the rates went up.
[103] As living costs go up, those auto payments can be harder to make.
[104] To that point, the latest data shows that in November alone, there was an 8 % jump in the number of deep subprime borrowers who were more than 60 days past due on their car payments.
[105] That's kind of an ominous sign and signals that the potential for hundreds of thousands of repossessions as the year goes on and people fall behind.
[106] So keep an eye on those numbers.
[107] Now you're our silver lining guy.
[108] So any cause for optimism?
[109] Thank you, John.
[110] There is a bit.
[111] 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.
[112] And the other big factor is computer chips.
[113] We've talked extensively about that chip shortage.
[114] 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.
[115] That's good news, and I'm sure welcome news to a lot of people.
[116] Kavitt, thanks for reporting.
[117] Anytime.
[118] That's Daily Wire's senior editor, Kavit Phillips.
[119] A new study on foreign disinformation suggests that fears surround, it are overblown.
[120] 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.
[121] Here to tell us more about this study is Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham.
[122] So, Megan, to start, who conducted this research and what specifically do they look at?
[123] 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.
[124] Now, as to parameters, it wasn't focused on general misinformation, and that's just inadvertently incorrect posts that you put online.
[125] Instead, it specifically looked at disinformation, and that's when someone intentionally posts false information with the hope of spreading it.
[126] And so it focused on accounts from Russia that were known to generate disinformation during the 2016 presidential election.
[127] And what it found was that while these kind of posts did find an audience, particularly with right -leaning users, they didn't actually change voters' attitudes or behavior.
[128] Now, that's not to say that these posts weren't reaching an audience.
[129] They were, but only to the degree that they were already confirming the user's prior views.
[130] 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.
[131] And part of the reason for that may be that people shared reports from legitimate news outlets and political figures far more often.
[132] In fact, the study found that Americans saw 25 times more national news posts than they did posts from these Russian accounts.
[133] So the information voters were seeing from legitimate media outlets was far more influential and really drowned out that Russian disinformation.
[134] And so the takeaway, I guess, is that.
[135] that voters are really good at screening out foreign conspiracy theories.
[136] Now, were the researchers surprised by this, or was this what they expected?
[137] It sounds like they were a little bit surprised.
[138] So one of the studies authors told the Washington Post this about the foreign disinformation concern.
[139] My personal sense coming out of this is that it got way overhyped.
[140] Even as we speak, political leaders who do want to see more content moderation are pointing to foreign actors that are trying to spread.
[141] false information as the reason.
[142] 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.
[143] And it was also a key argument that the Biden administration made for why it needed to launch that disinformation board.
[144] 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.
[145] 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.
[146] Yeah, that's true.
[147] 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.
[148] And actually, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took that position in 2017 as well.
[149] In fact, Zuckerberg directly asked Congress in a hearing on the issue to provide evidence of the claim that disinformation was swaying voters.
[150] 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.
[151] Well, that is the idea behind the free public square.
[152] Megan, thanks for reporting.
[153] That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham.
[154] Another story we're tracking this week.
[155] 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.
[156] CBS News reports that around 10 documents were found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement by Biden's attorneys.
[157] CNN reports that the documents include top secret files designated as, quote, sensitive compartmented information.
[158] The documents were discovered November 2nd before the midterm elections.
[159] That's all the time we've got this morning.
[160] Thanks for waking up with us.
[161] We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.