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Oct. 12, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:02:40
Democrats Declare Anything They Don’t Like Court-Packing | Ep. 1113
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Democrats pledge to stymie the Amy Coney Barrett nomination as judicial hearings open.
Joe Biden and the media team up to redefine the term court packing.
And Keith Olbermann is back and crazier than ever.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in a moment.
Today is the day that the Amy Coney Barrett hearings begin.
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Alrighty, so to understand what's going on in American politics today, you have to understand that all institutions can be broken.
The left believes that all institutions can be broken.
Why?
Well, because Trump has already fundamentally broken the country.
And therefore, every rule can be violated.
Every term can be redefined.
The entire country is now suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome in one form or another.
Which is why the return of Keith Olbermann is worthy of note.
So Keith Olbermann, you'll remember, used to have a show on ESPN, then he was on ESPN2, then he was on ESPN6, then he was on MSNBC, who's on Current TV, who's at GQ Magazine.
He's held a variety of jobs.
He's a rather peripatetic figure.
So Keith Olbermann was back to lecture you, America.
On why Donald Trump is the most evil, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person in the entire history of the world.
And not only that, anyone remotely associated with Donald Trump should go to jail.
For the far left, it's kind of a mild exaggeration of the left-wing position, but not much.
And this is why they don't care about court packing.
It's why they don't care about wrecking the Senate.
Because the country is at stake and everyone who disagrees with me should go to jail.
Here is Keith Olbermann being very serious and looking at you because he went to Cornell Ag School.
Keith Olbermann, go!
The task is twofold.
The terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box.
And then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees, and the William Bars, and the Sean Hannity's, and the Mike Pence's, and the Rudy Giuliani's and the Kyle Rittenhouse's and the Amy Coney Barrett's must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus.
We must take all of these people out and we must jail them and then possibly guillotine them.
From Kyle Rittenhouse to Amy Coney Barrett, they must be prosecuted I don't know why Amy Coney Barrett, but she's bad.
Even though I'm slightly aroused.
Keith Olbermann. But it's this attitude, it's this bizarre attitude that lies behind so much of our modern politics, which is we're at absolute crisis point because Donald Trump... Okay, here is the reality.
Donald Trump is not a threat to our institutions.
You pretending that Trump is such a threat to our institutions that you get to destroy the institutions?
That's an actual threat to our institutions.
Which brings us to the issue of the Supreme Court.
Over the weekend, apparently, you know, the craziness continued.
And that's not a great shock.
It's always difficult to have these Jewish holidays that last two days because you're afraid of logging back on and finding out what you missed.
It turns out that while I was gone, the entire media and Democratic Party simply decided to redefine terms in basic English so they no longer have to deal with the ramifications of those terms.
Specifically, they decided to redefine the term court packing.
So before, court packing meant that you were just going to add a bunch of seats to the Supreme Court in order to put a bunch of people who agreed with you politically on the court and therefore change the nature of the court.
It has meant this for some four generations in the United States.
In fact, the last time the number of people on the court changed was the 1860s, and it has been solid ever since.
In fact, it was so controversial in the 1930s that even a Democratic Congress, with FDR as president, refused to court pack.
But now the Democrats in the media have decided that they are going to completely redefine the term court packing so as to never have to answer a question about whether they plan to actually turn the judiciary into an open super legislature.
And when you talk about judicial nominations, when you talk about the role of the judiciary, you have to understand there is a fundamental difference in vision for how the judiciary is supposed to operate.
So on the conservative side of the aisle, The idea of the judiciary agrees with Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78 that essentially the judiciary is supposed to be the least dangerous branch.
That is the phrase that he used, the least dangerous branch, because it had neither the force to carry out its own judgments nor the purse to actually fund itself.
It was subject to the whims of the legislature as well as to the efficacy of the executive branch.
The judiciary could basically make decisions, but they didn't have any way to actually cram down those decisions.
And in fact, Alexander Hamilton said that should the judiciary become an agent of In other words, if the judiciary were to start basically cramming its opinions down on the American public, rather than just looking at the text of a statute and then trying to hue as closely as possible to the proper meaning of the text of the statute, they would be a legislature and there would be no reason to have unelected people in that position.
It would be an oligarchy.
Now, in a democratic republic like the United States, you want a bunch of different checks and balances.
There's no question that the judiciary is supposed to be anti-democratic.
What I mean by anti-democratic, it is a check on popular passions.
It was meant to be a check on popular passions.
But that's been true for judges since biblical days.
If you go back to the Bible and you talk about the sort of characteristics that people are looking for in judges, they're looking for honesty, they're looking for non-favoritism.
The Bible specifically says that judges are supposed to be able to neither favor the poor nor the rich.
So it's not outcome-driven jurisprudence.
The essence of justice is that justice is the same for everybody.
It is not driven by individual circumstance.
It is not driven by sympathy.
It is not driven by empathy.
Justice is supposed to be the interpretation of the law in accordance with justice.
That is what it is supposed to be.
That is what conservatives have always believed.
Judges are there in order to look at a statute that was passed by the legislature and then determine whether that statute is in the proper reading of the statute, in the most accurate reading of the statute, in coincidence with the Constitution looking at the most proper and accurate reading of the Constitution.
That is the job of the judiciary.
The left does not believe this.
The left in the United States believes that judiciary should essentially be an agent of change, and that is why the left has always celebrated the judiciary as an agent of change.
Now, what they've neglected is that the judiciary, actively speaking, is not really an agent of change.
Typically, it's something both the left and the right tend to overblow, I think.
They tend to think of the judiciary as a sort of As a sort of movement forward in American law, typically the judiciary greenlights stuff that the legislature is already doing, and then they refuse to stand in the way, or maybe they push something a little bit faster.
So to take a few obvious examples of sort of transformations in the law, in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court declared that segregation was unconstitutional, It still took an additional decade for desegregation to actually practically start happening in the South.
And that was only after the legislature acted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 65.
In other words, as Gerald Rosenberg says in his book, The Hollow Hope, the idea that the Supreme Court has the capacity to really change things radically in the United States is not quite right.
What the Supreme Court does have the capacity to do is to green light bad legislative activity.
So that is what happened in the Obamacare case, to take an example.
Yeah, so there are certain cases where people think that the Supreme Court has really affected social change, and there are cases where it has.
Roe v. Wade is the most obvious case, where the Supreme Court decided to read a trend and then try to jump to the end of the trend.
You see this in Obergefell also with regard to gay marriage, where the Supreme Court read the tea leaves and said, okay, well, more and more states are greenlighting gay marriage, so let's just go the whole hog and let's just put gay marriage right there in the Constitution.
That'd create a whole host of problems.
You see the same thing in abortion via Roe v. Wade.
The Supreme Court taking a leading moral role is the goal of the left, but it always has to be a left-wing moral rule.
The goal of the right is to treat the judiciary as though it has a separate job from the legislature, a separate job from the executive, and its job is to simply interpret the law.
It is not the job of the judiciary to create its own law or to rule in accordance with its own perception of morality.
That is not what a court is designed to do.
A court is designed in order to interpret the law as closely as possible.
But the left doesn't believe this.
And so the left believes that if the court is actually, if it becomes an instrument of interpreting law, and interpreting law requires the striking down of particular statutes the left doesn't like, or the court doesn't actively promote left-wing values, then the court has been perverted.
And this is why they oppose Amy Coney Barrett.
As we're about to see, Amy Coney Barrett, her hearings begin today.
And Amy Coney Barrett's opening statement is very much about how her job is not to impose her own morality on the world.
Instead, her job is to ensure that the law is interpreted properly.
And the left really does not like this.
If you look at the differences in how Sonia Sotomayor talks about the law, she talks about the law as sort of open-ended and broad and malleable when you see Stephen Breyer.
Justice Breyer talk about the malleable living constitution that you have to move along with the evolving standards of decency, the evolving standards of morality and interpret based on essentially your own moral compass.
That is a fundamental rebuke to Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton would look at that sort of talk about the judiciary and he would say, okay, then the judiciary doesn't deserve to be a separate branch.
We already have two bodies of the legislature.
We don't need a third, particularly a third branch that is not elected and that serves for life.
But the left would love all of that.
And we're gonna get to this in just one moment, because all of this is the underlying framework, the underlying philosophical framework for the debate happening today, not only over Amy Coney Barrett, but also the debate that is happening over so-called court packing.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so the hearings open today, and those hearings are basically a waste of time.
They're a waste of time because the Democrats are just going to posture about how Amy Coney Barrett is terrible, and how Amy Coney Barrett is a throwback to atheocracy, and how Amy Coney Barrett is somehow a handmaid.
It doesn't matter that she's an independent, powerful woman who's going to be sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States.
We're going to get all of the posturing from the various senators.
There are 22 different senators who make opening statements today.
10 of those senators are Democrats.
It includes Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris fans are eager for her to get very aggressive.
I don't think that she's going to.
I think Kamala Harris is probably going to take a backseat on this one.
The reason she's going to take a backseat is because she looked terrible grilling Justice Kavanaugh.
It turns out she's not good at her job.
She truly is not.
Again, proof positive she's not good at her job.
She dropped out of the Democratic primaries despite having at one point held the lead.
She dropped out before there was a single primary that was held.
Harris is going to attend Amy Coney Barrett's hearing remotely because she says the measures against COVID-19 are not safe for her.
Apparently, a spokesman for her said, due to Judiciary Committee Republicans' refusal to take common-sense steps to protect members, aides, Capitol Complex workers, and members of the media, Senator Harris plans to participate in this week's hearings remotely from her Senate office in the Hart Building.
Her confirmation hearings begin Monday.
Senators Mike Lee and Tom Tillis both tested positive for coronavirus.
Senator Lindsey Graham and Harris have been talking about implementing testing measures for members and staff ahead of the hearings, but Graham has not imposed additional testing requirements.
A lot of other members are expected to attend, including complete moron Maisie Hirono from Hawaii, who is indeed the stupidest person in the United States Senate.
I mean, she is truly a moron.
And Senator Chris Croons from Delaware.
He said that he's going to attend physically, and Hirono will as well.
Tillis has recovered.
He's expected to attend in person on Tuesday.
Lee is still undecided.
Will Harris get aggressive?
There are people who are urging her to.
Christian Farias, writing for the New York Times, says Kamala Harris should grill Amy Coney Barrett.
They say millions of Americans have already cast votes ahead of the election.
Democracy demands one of the candidates on the ballot be the Democrats' lead questioner at the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett that begins on Monday.
Kamala Harris isn't just a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Republicans control, and is rushing madly to ram through President Trump's chosen replacement for the Supreme Court seat formerly held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
She's also one of the sharpest questioners on the committee, setting herself apart in nearly four years she's been in the Senate.
She has cross-examined everyone from Jeff Sessions to Brett Kavanaugh to Bill Barr.
Yeah, her cross-examination of Brett Kavanaugh was this weird thing where she suggested that he was in cahoots with Donald Trump's law firm over at Kasowitz without any actual evidence of what she was talking about or even any indicator of what she was talking about.
But Democrats are rooting for Harris to get very aggressive.
According to this columnist for the New York Times, this is about democracy.
As Senator Harris herself observed during Wednesday's vice presidential debate, Republicans' brute force effort to confirm Judge Barrett as people head to the polls is an affront to voters.
We're literally in an election, she said.
Over 4 million people have voted.
People have been in the process of voting now.
Okay, so what?
I mean, seriously, so what?
That's a case against early voting.
That is not a case against actually having hearings to fill a vacant judicial seat.
But really, what they are going to object to, because they don't actually have any dirt on Amy Coney Barrett, and it's going to be a lot harder to accuse Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven, of being a gang rapist.
A lot harder to do that than it was for Brett Kavanaugh, who is, of course, a white male, and therefore guilty of a myriad of crimes he did not commit.
They're going to go after Amy Coney Barrett on the basis, presumably, that she is Catholic and too religious, or that she might be anti-Roe v. Wade.
John Podhoretz on the Commentary podcast made a great point the other day.
He was saying, we do live in a weirdly ironic world in which Amy Coney Barrett is expected to opine on every single issue that could possibly come before her.
But Joe Biden is allowed to hide in the basement and not explain any of his own viewpoints.
One of those people is running for an elected office.
And one of those people is being selected to be a judge.
But the media have got everything exactly backwards, of course.
So in her opening statement, Judge Coney Barrett is expected to praise her mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, as well as honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a brief series of remarks.
She issued a four-page statement and she talks about her judicial qualifications and she talks about her sort of judicial philosophy as well.
Here's what she says.
Courts have a vital responsibility to enforce the rule of law, which is critical to a free society.
But courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life.
The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the people.
She says, Justice Scalia taught me more than just law.
He was devoted to his family, resolute in his beliefs, fearless of criticism.
As I embarked on my own legal career, I resolved to maintain that same perspective.
She, of course, clerked for Scalia.
There's a tendency in our profession to treat the practice of law as all-consuming while losing sight of everything else.
That makes for a shallow and unfulfilling life.
She's also going to talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Apparently she says, when I was 21 years old and just beginning my career, RBG sat in the seat.
She told the committee, what has become of me could only happen in America.
I've been nominated to fill Justice Ginsburg's seat, but no one will ever take her place.
I will be forever grateful for the path she marked and the life that she led.
It is the statements on judicial philosophy that interest me most, obviously.
And when she talks about the fact that it is not the job of judges to do right, it is the job of justices to interpret the law, this is exactly correct.
It is also in direct opposition to what the left believes, which is that, again, the court is designed to do the work that leftists couldn't get done in the legislature.
So they couldn't pass national legislation on same-sex marriage or abortion, and so they have the Supreme Court do their dirty work for them.
They couldn't pass the Affordable Care Act as a tax, so they called it a fee, and then they waited for Justice John Roberts to rewrite the statute into a tax so that it would be legal.
That is what the left wants the court to be.
The fundamental disconnect when it comes to the court that has happened here is that, again, the left would love for the court to be a super leftist legislature.
The right would like for the court to be a court.
And the left really objects when the court is used as a court because they see it as an obstacle to their utopian goals, whereas they would like for it to be just another weapon in their arsenal.
So, yeah, Amy Coney Barrett is obviously going to cut against a lot of the priorities that Democrats hold.
And she is exactly right when she says that the court is not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong.
That has been a controversial line.
I don't know how that's remotely controversial.
It is not the job of a court to do that.
It is the job of a court to interpret the law.
If the political branches want to solve a thing, they should solve the thing.
When I was in law school, I actually had a little acronym that I would text people when people started talking about judicial activism in class, which was L-I-T-T-L, leave it to the legislature.
Leave it to the legislature, should generally be the hallmark of a justice who recognizes that the law is badly written and needs to be struck down, or that a law is badly written and doesn't need to be struck down, but the legislature has to fix the law.
Judicial humility goes a long way.
A little bit of judicial humility goes a long way.
And that means faithfully interpreting the law.
Again, what's amazing about so much of this when it comes to judicial interpretation is that nobody would ever read the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1907 the way that they purport to read the Constitution of the United States.
And yet, more and more, the left expects justices to do this.
And you see even textualist justices doing this.
You saw Justice Gorsuch do exactly this with the Civil Rights Act of 64, suddenly and randomly reading transgenderism into Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
That's a bizarre absurdity.
It is a fundamental breach of what it means to be a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
But that's what the left would like.
And if they don't get their way, then they simply want to pack the Supreme Court and turn it into an overtly political branch.
And this is really what Trump has done.
And really, Obama and then Trump.
All that has happened is that the veneer has been stripped from American democracy.
That's all that has happened here.
As I've said before, Trump is not the killer.
Trump is the coroner.
Trump came upon the body of American politics.
He pointed out, he said, this body may still be warm, but it is effectively dead.
And the Democrats are confirming that each and every day.
It used to be that they would pretend that the judiciary It was some sort of apolitical branch.
Now they openly acknowledge that it's a political branch and that they would like to cram it full of Democrats.
They used to suggest that the Senate was a deliberative body.
Now they recognize it's not a deliberative body.
It is just another way for them to cram through their agenda.
The media used to pretend that they were objective.
Now they don't even pretend.
Now they're just like, okay, well, we're going to pretend we'll say we're objective, but it's pretty damned obvious that we are not objective in any way.
All the veneers have come off and it's really ugly.
A lot of people celebrate this.
A lot of people think that it's good.
I'm not so sure that it's good.
Because at least when there was the veneer, we could agree that the values the veneer stood for were good.
Yes, people were lying about what they actually wanted to do with the court, but they at least attempted to move in line with American expectations of what the court was.
With the veneer stripped away, it becomes obvious just how much we disagree with one another.
I'm going to get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so there was a veneer that really... If you want to know where the American people are, all you have to do is look at which directions politicians tend to lie.
Don't pay attention to their actual positions, because nobody pays attention to actual political positions.
If they did, I think Republicans would win far more often.
Nobody looks at political platforms.
Nobody even really looks at what politicians do.
Mostly, people look at what politicians promise.
And what politicians promise tends to be where they think the American people are.
So, even Sonia Sotomayor, who's a wildly activist left judge, even she, when she was trying to get herself on the court, she suggested that it was the job of judges to interpret law, not make law.
Now, of course, she's on the court, and she knows that it's the job of justices from a left-wing point of view to make law, to just do it willy-nilly.
But even when Sonia Sotomayor was being appointed, she paid lip service to the idea that judges are not legislators.
When it comes to the media, the media understand that most Americans would love to believe that their news are objective, and so media keep paying lip service, or did until very recently, to the idea of objectivity in news.
Now they've completely abandoned it.
And you're starting to see Democrats abandon it on the court.
When they talk about court packing, what they really mean is that the judiciary is no longer supposed to be an objective branch of government, an apolitical branch of government.
We're just going to strip the veneer away.
So we can't even agree on what the judiciary is supposed to do.
We can't agree on what our media are supposed to do.
We can't agree on what our government is supposed to do.
There used to be this truism in American politics that we all sort of want the same thing.
We just have different ways of going about it.
It's pretty obvious as time goes on, we do not in any way want the same thing.
That the utopian vision of the left is very, very different from the conservative vision for the country, and that the institutional obstacles the Constitution provides are a real problem for many members of the left, which is why, of course, they're now talking About court packing.
Now, in order to push for court packing, in order to push for adding justices, the left understands that it's unpopular.
They understand that most Americans are not in favor of fundamentally reshaping our institutions.
So they just lie.
You've seen them do this about the court routinely, by the way.
Not only individual justices who claim that they are just there to interpret the law and not to make it and then immediately turn around and make the law.
And not just justices who suggest that judicial activism, the term judicial activism, which typically means reading the law in alignment with your moral ideals instead of just reading what the text of the Constitution says.
That's what judicial activism used to mean.
They shifted the definition of judicial activism.
They rewrote the term in order to mean any time a judge strikes down a left-wing statute.
If a judge strikes down a right-wing statute, that's not judicial activism.
That's standing up for the Constitution.
If a judge strikes down a left-wing statute, that is now active, right?
It's activism.
You see the left do this routinely.
Redefining terms.
And it's really perverse.
Well now, their new move is to redefine the term court packing.
So for several months now, we have been talking about the fact that during the Democratic primaries, many of the candidates talked about packing the court, even before RBG died.
Then RBG died, and it became a rote talking point for many Democrats that they would look at packing the court if they gained control of the Senate.
Now this isn't really as much of a threat to Biden as it is to various Senate candidates.
The truth is Biden's refusal to denounce court packing is not going to hurt Biden very much because the vote for Biden is really not about Biden.
It's really about Trump.
But it could hurt the Democrats down ballot.
It could hurt the Democrats in the Senate, because those races are very, very closely fought.
There's the significant possibility right now, and I think I'd probably put my money on this, that Joe Biden is leading in the presidential race, but in the Senate, Republicans hold the Senate because the Democrats have gotten so radical on this issue.
So instead, they've decided to completely redefine the term court packing, and the media are going along with this completely.
Donald Trump, over the weekend, he correctly pointed out that the radical left Democrats are pushing Joe Biden to pack the Supreme Court.
So President Trump tweeted, FDR's own party told him you cannot pack the United States Supreme Court.
It would permanently destroy the court.
But now the radical left Democrats are pushing Biden to do this.
He has zero chance against them.
And Biden so far has not really stood up to the radical left.
This is why, and this does undercut Biden's chief message.
It may not matter, but it does undercut his chief message.
Remember, Joe Biden is, I am a stolid moderate.
I'm a person who's going to stand up against the predations of the radical left.
I'm a return to normalcy.
Then why in the world is Joe Biden so hesitant to condemn court packing, which is a fundamental change to the nature of the republic?
The minute that you have a court that is openly political, people just stop paying attention to the court.
The minute that you have a Senate that has been packed, filled with Democrats from new states, and then pushing forward a packed court, and then pushing forward any legislation to the far left, the American people and various states are just going to say, I'm not paying attention to that.
You've now rigged the system, like truly rigged the system.
And Joe Biden is not standing up to that, which is an amazing thing for a guy who's campaigning as captain return to normalcy, back to moderation, back to the future, right?
That's a weird take.
It's a weird take from Joe Biden.
So over the weekend, here was Joe Biden trying to redefine the term court packing.
So this has been his consistent message.
Last week, Joe Biden said that he would tell you about court packing after the election.
He just simply refused to answer a question on whether he would go along with packing the court.
Here was Biden last week in Arizona.
They'll know my opinion in court packing when the election is over.
Now look, I know it's a great question, and I don't blame you for asking it, but you know the moment I answer that question, the headline in every one of your papers will be about that.
Other than, other than, focusing on what's happening now.
Okay, that was him just last week.
Okay, then over the weekend, Biden was asked about all of this.
Okay, and this is clip five.
He's specifically asked whether voters deserve to hear an answer on court packing.
And Biden's like, nope, they don't deserve to hear an answer.
This man has nothing but scorn for the American voter and scorn for American journalists.
He does not care about answering the questions, Joe Biden.
He's a lifelong politician.
He's never had to answer hard questions.
When he has had to answer hard questions, it's gone poorly for him.
So his entire campaign is now going to be, I don't exist.
I'm not going to answer questions because if I answer questions, you might write about me and I want you to write about Donald Trump.
And he's openly saying this to the media.
And so the media, like the good little lapdogs they are, are simply reflecting it back at him.
It's incredible.
It's incredible.
Watch.
Here he is openly saying voters do not deserve an answer on whether he's going to wreck the third branch of government.
Sir, I've got to ask you about packing the courts, and I know that you said yesterday you aren't going to answer the question until after the election, but this is the number one thing that I've been asked about from viewers in the past couple of days.
Well, you've been asked by the viewers who are probably Republicans who don't want me continuing to talk about what they're doing to the court right now.
Well, sir, don't the voters deserve to know?
No, they don't.
I'm not going to play his game.
He'd love me to talk about, and I've already said something on PAC, he'd love that to be the discussion instead of what he's doing now.
OK, that is the most absurd answer in the world.
No, voters don't deserve to know where I stand on wrecking the third branch of government because I want you to talk about Donald Trump.
He's literally just giving instructions to the media.
Don't cover this question.
Instead, I want you to cover Trump.
So I'm not going to give you an answer.
Okay, and then Joe Biden lays out the narrative that has become immediately the rote narrative for the entire Democratic Party and many members of the media.
And it's unbelievable how everything switched on a dime.
Okay, he decides that he's going to lay out a narrative whereby the term court packing itself no longer means that you pack the court with extra seats from people of your political persuasion.
Instead, court packing now means legally filling the seats that are empty with people who are duly nominated and confirmed.
I'm not kidding.
This is his actual case.
Now, the predicate for this case was set last week by Kamala Harris.
So, in debate with Mike Pence, she was struggling for answers.
He kept saying, are you packing the court?
Are you going to pack the court?
Are you going to pack the court?
And she finally said, you want to talk about court packing?
Let's talk about court packing.
And then she randomly started talking about how there were no black judges appointed by Donald Trump, as though they love Clarence Thomas over on the left wing.
But this is a fundamental redefinition of the term, right?
Because when people are asking about court packing, they don't mean, are you filling existing empty seats?
They mean, are you adding seats to courts to willy-nilly overturn the majorities that currently exist on those courts?
Not a seat came open, and now you fill that seat with somebody.
Instead, court packing typically means you add seats to the court.
This is not a change in definition.
It has been like this for four generations.
During the debate.
Remember, I laughed openly at this when I reviewed the debate the other night.
Kamala Harris tried to redefine the term court packing in the middle of the debate.
You'll see Biden picked it up, then the entire Democratic Party picked it up, and then the media picked it up, which is normally the way this works.
Do you know that of the 50 people who President Trump appointed to the Court of Appeals for lifetime appointments, not one is black?
This is what they've been doing.
You want to talk about packing a court?
Let's have that discussion.
Okay, that is not what packing a court means.
Packing a court means that you add seats to the court.
That is what it has always meant.
So now there's this weird redefinition going on, because they don't want to answer the question, in which we equate filling seats with people who are constitutionalists and originalists, duly, because the seat is empty and you get to nominate and confirm judges.
We're going to equate that with adding five, six, seven seats on the Supreme Court, which is crazy.
OK, so Joe Biden tried this line also.
Here is Joe Biden saying the only court packing that is happening is happening with conservatives, which, of course, makes no sense because conservatives are not packing the Supreme Court.
The only court packing going on right now.
It's going on with Republicans taking the court now.
It's not constitutional what they're doing.
We should be focused on what's happening right now.
And the fact is that the only packing going on is this.
It's being packed now by the Republicans after the vote has already begun.
What the hell is he talking about?
Filling a seat that is empty when you have a majority in the Senate?
Is that court packing?
That's literally the constitutional process.
It is not adding seats to the Supreme Court.
Okay, but this immediately gets laundered by the Democrats into the media.
So you see Dick Durbin over the weekend, the idiot senator from Illinois who once compared American soldiers to Pol Pot.
Here was Dick Durbin over the weekend on Meet the Press explaining that if you fill vacancies, this is now packing the court.
Now, they think you're a moron.
I mean, they do.
They think the American voters are morons.
Joe Biden openly says it.
Voters don't deserve to know my answer on court packing.
Also, court packing no longer means court packing.
It means duly appointing people to open positions.
Here's Dick Durbin trying to treat the American people as idiots.
American people have watched the Republicans pack in the court over the last three and a half years, and they brag about it.
They've taken every vacancy and filled it.
Did you know that they've sent us, and we have approved only with their votes I might add, ten people who have been judged unanimously unqualified by the American Bar Association?
Do you know how many judicial nominees came from Obama who were judged unanimously unqualified?
None.
So we are dealing with people on the court, packed into the court, with little or no qualification, who are going to be there for a long time.
So this is incredible.
So the entire activist left picks this up.
The memo goes out, the entire activist left picks this out.
Sam Berger, who is the vice president of Center for American Progress, he immediately tweets out, conservative court packing in one chart.
And all the chart is, is how many judges were appointed by Donald Trump.
Which is 30, right?
That is the number of appellate judges confirmed by the United States Senate between 2015 and 2018 is 30.
2015 and 2018 is 30.
And then he tweets out, conservatives stealth court packing plan.
Step one, steal seats by blocking confirmation of judges until White House and Senate are under conservative control.
Step two, change the rules to appoint the most partisan conservative judges at breakneck speed.
So number one, I just, I'm really enjoying the redefinition of a judge who rules according to the law as a partisan conservative.
Now, if you just do your job as a judge or a partisan conservative.
You are, in fact, a wondrous human being if you look into your heart for empathy, the way Barack Obama described Sonia Sotomayor.
But if you're a judge and you look at a law and you say, you know what, this law doesn't allow this thing, even if I would like it, even if it's a nice thing to do, then you are a conservative partisan.
That is the way they've redefined what it means to be a judge.
They've redefined the term judicial activism.
And now they're redefining the term court packing.
So there is Sam Berger for the Center of American Progress.
Then you get Dan Rather.
Who for some reason is still a famous person.
Which is pretty incredible after he completely blew up his career in 2004 by putting out a fake notice of George W. Bush going AWOL.
He's now regained a certain amount of credibility for some odd reason.
He tweeted out, That's not court packing!
They didn't have the votes to confirm Merrick Garland.
End of story.
playbook for decades asking for Merrick Garland. That's not court packing. They didn't have the votes to confirm Merrick Garland. End of story. They do have the votes to confirm the judges that Trump is appointing. In what way is that court packing?
That is a redefinition.
So Dan Rather tries to launder that term.
Then you get Ruth Marcus over at the Washington Post.
Republicans have no standing to complain about court packing.
Which is the 2020 election isn't about whether to expand the size of the Supreme Court.
It isn't about whether Democratic nominee Joe Biden states his position on court packing.
The election is about one thing, a referendum on the dangerous presidency of Donald Trump.
No wonder Republicans are so desperate to change the subject.
The future of the court, now that Republicans are poised to cement a sixth justice conservative majority, is a hugely important topic.
Republicans stole one seat when they refused to let President Obama fill a vacancy created nine months before the 2016 election.
Now they are poised to steal another.
It's not stealing a seat to not confirm a justice who is appointed by your political opposition, nor is it stealing a seat to confirm a justice appointed by a member of a party of which you are also a member.
Okay, what you are watching is an incredible case of gaslighting.
It's just an unbelievable case of gaslighting.
The media are now in plain view, and Democrats are in plain view, taking the term court-packing and saying, court-packing no longer means court-packing.
We're not entitled to fill.
This is slow motion court packing in plain sight.
Okay, what you are watching is an incredible case of gaslighting.
It's just an unbelievable case of gaslighting.
The media are now in plain view and Democrats are in plain view taking the term court packing and saying, court packing no longer means court packing.
It now means anything Republicans do and we don't like is court packing.
As we will see, they're also gonna say anything that Republicans do and we don't like is unconstitutional, which is super fun, considering that the left scorns and despises the institutions of the constitution of the United States.
They think that the Senate is unrepresentative and therefore bad.
They think that the judiciary ought to be a super legislature.
They believe that the presidency of the United States should be unbounded.
There should be no delegated powers.
In fact, one of the reasons why I vote Republican is because, while I have many problems with the way that the Republicans have gone along with the expansion of the executive branch, at least they don't fundamentally despise the institutions of the Constitution the way the Democrats apparently do.
The AP picked this up.
The Associated Press picked this up.
So according to the Associated Press, they're talking about Steve Bullock, who is the current governor of Montana.
He's now running for Senate against Steve Daines.
We can all hope and pray that Steve Daines wins that race.
Here's the Associated Press describing court packing.
You ready?
So it started off, remember, from Biden and Harris, redefining court packing.
Then it went to kind of the lower level senators, redefining court packing.
Then it went out to the activist base.
It went out to people like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who put out a tweet thread saying, any Democrat who uses the term court packing to describe expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court should be smacked upside the head. This is not only idiotic politics. More importantly, it is wrong, incorrect, not what anyone is proposing.
For the last decade, Republicans have used an escalating mix of aggressive and corrupt means to stack the federal judiciary in order to entrench power they believe they will no longer be able to win in majority elections.
If Democrats control the Congress and the White House, they must take steps to undo this harm and corruption, and the most viable logical path is to add additional seats to the Supreme Court.
He calls this remedial.
So he says, stop calling it court packing.
It's just remedial.
And the Associated Press picks it up and goes with it.
Here's the Associated Press talking about Montana Governor Steve Bullock.
So Bullock, over the weekend, Okay, at least we'll consider packing it.
I mean, why not?
Here is Democrat Steve Bullock, who at least is honest enough to admit what he is planning to do here.
He says, OK, at least we'll consider packing it.
I mean, why not?
This is clip seven.
They have been trying to politicize the court every step of the way, and we have to figure out ways to make it less political.
So I'm open to that, and that's anything from a Judicial Standards Commission, or we'll look at any other thing that might be suggested, including adding justices.
Okay, so there was Steve Bullock openly acknowledging that he would consider packing the court.
Okay, and here is how the AP covered this.
Bullock said that if Coney Barrett was confirmed, he would be open to measures to depoliticize the court, including adding judges to the bench, a practice critics have dubbed packing the courts.
Oh, it's only critics who call it packing the courts, you see.
Yes, we've been doing this for a hundred years, talking about this.
But only critics call this packing the court.
Otherwise, it's not packing the court.
It's depoliticizing the court, you understand.
So if Republicans appoint judges who faithfully interpret the law rather than creating it from whole cloth, that is politicizing the court.
So when you add seats to the court, you are depoliticizing the court.
That is your objective, Associated Press.
Very, very objective stuff there from your Associated Press.
So it was amazing to come back off of Jewish holiday and see how the term court packing has now been completely turned on its head and redefined so that court packing is now depoliticization rather than politicization of the court.
Truly incredible, incredible stuff.
By the way, it didn't stop there.
Joe Biden claimed that packing the court was just, he essentially said, I'm not gonna answer the question.
And then he said, it is unconstitutional to push through a judge in these times because we're in the middle of an election.
He said it's unconstitutional.
So Jake Tapper asked his spokesperson, you know, you guys keep saying that it's unconstitutional to do this.
Do you know what the constitution is?
And of course she has no answer.
You know, people say sometimes I'm soft on Jake.
That's because Jake will on many occasions ask actual difficult questions of Democrats.
Here was Tapper going after Biden's spokesperson.
He said it's not constitutional what they're doing.
How is it not constitutional what they're doing?
The vast majority of people say that they want the person who wins the election on November 3rd to nominate the justice to take this seat.
That's a poll.
That's not the Constitution.
So poll after poll shows that most Americans vehemently disagree with this.
They believe that the vote should happen on November 3rd.
That's not what the word constitutional means.
Constitutional doesn't mean I like it or I don't like it.
It means it's according to the U.S.
Constitution.
There's nothing unconstitutional about what the U.S.
Senate is doing.
OK, so that is, of course, correct.
But according to Biden, now we're going to launder the word unconstitutional.
If you don't like it, it's not only not.
If you like it, it's not court packing.
If you don't like it, it's court packing.
If you don't like it, it is unconstitutional.
If you like it, it's constitutional, which again, this is all part of a piece.
It's all part of a piece.
Every single element of American politics is simply a tool to get done what the left wants to get done.
They have no respect for the institutions of the United States.
They don't care about the institutions of the United States.
In fact, as it turns out, it's not just the institutions of the United States they don't care about.
They're willing to twist and turn science in order to achieve their desired result, and then blame Trump in the process.
We'll get to that in one second when we get to COVID.
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Okay, in just a second, We're gonna get to how the media and the left are now twisting science in order to achieve their priors.
It's pretty impressive, it really is.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, in case you missed it, we had another great episode of the Sunday special yesterday with DailyWire God King, Jeremy Boring.
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Okay, so it's not just that the left and the media are undermining American institutions like the Supreme Court of the United States and then gaslighting you, deceiving you about the nature You know what the term means.
And then they just lie to you about what the term means.
So court packing is no longer court packing.
Unconstitutional is no longer unconstitutional.
Basically, if they like it, it's all the good things.
And if they don't like it, it's all the bad things.
Well, now they're doing the same thing with science.
So they're blaming Trump for ruining science.
Now, let's just be real about this.
People's faith in science surrounding COVID has been Wavering since the beginning of this pandemic, namely because scientists, I think, claimed to know more than they did.
I don't think that they spoke with the proper amount of humility.
I think many of our scientific leaders proclaimed that they knew exactly what they were talking about when they absolutely did not.
They claimed that they were sure of their policies when, in fact, there was a lot of uncertainty.
I'm very much in favor of being clear about the level of uncertainty with which you pursue certain conclusions.
So I said at the beginning, maybe lockdowns are justified because we don't know enough about this particular disease.
Maybe masks are not justified, because Fauci's saying we don't need masks, and then they switched on masks, and then it turns out that the lockdowns probably were not justified.
It turns out that lockdowns have the effect of lowering infection rates for a temporary time, and then as soon as you release, then the infections start to move through society.
But current lockdowns are probably not justified.
It turns out there's been lots of conflicting science about a lot of different topics.
But the media speak with one voice as though the science on COVID is completely clear in every respect.
Which is just not true.
And so that means that we have been misled on several different occasions by a variety of supposedly scientific outlets.
Remember, The Lancet published an entire study suggesting that hydroxychloroquine was going to kill you of a heart attack, and it turns out that the study was essentially falsified.
That doesn't mean that hydroxychloroquine was a cure-all the way that President Trump was talking about it.
Probably it was not.
But at the same time, it was not just Trump who was botching that particular story.
It turns out that the botchery of COVID has been uniform across all levels of government and across all levels of our institution.
The media, however, have decided the only person who is botching the rollout on COVID is Trump.
They keep saying, we follow the science, we follow the science.
Except, as it turns out, you guys don't very often follow the science.
You follow the science when it leads to conclusions you like, and you don't follow the science when it leads to conclusions you don't.
And you're critical of Trump no matter what he says.
So if Trump had come out and said hydroxychloroquine is bad for you, they immediately would have said, well, the studies show hydroxychloroquine is not bad for you.
Everything is driven by Trump.
It is not actually driven by the science.
Again, one of the great lies, following the science, Sometimes the science is conflicted.
Sometimes the science is unclear.
It turns out that what science is really good at is examining the past.
Very often it is not great at predicting the future, and that's particularly true with a new pandemic.
There are no experts in a new pandemic.
And yet we are treated to this bizarre sort of rhetoric where when Trump says something and it's wrong, then that is uniquely bad.
But when scientists say stuff and it turns out to be wrong, then they are not held to account for it at all.
That is not a justification for Trump speaking beyond science.
It is a recommendation that we be pretty humble in how we approach all of the science from every available level, and that scientists should do the same.
So the Washington Post, for example, has a piece today about how Trump has undermined confidence in government science.
Joel Achenbach and Lori McGinley, they say, in another era, what happened Wednesday might have been viewed as simply good news.
Two companies, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly, have independently developed therapeutic drugs called monoclonal antibodies that, in preliminary testing, appear to reduce symptoms for coronavirus patients.
They applied for emergency use authorization from the FDA.
The positive development immediately became entangled in election year politics, with President Trump repeatedly making false and exaggerated claims about the new therapeutics.
He called them a cure, which they're not.
He said he was about to approve them, a premature promise given the FDA's career scientists are charged with reviewing the applications.
This has been the 2020 pattern.
Politics has thoroughly contaminated the scientific process.
The result has been an epidemic of distrust, which further undermines the nation's already chaotic and ineffective response to coronavirus.
OK, well, again, it's all about Trump, right?
So this entire article is about Trump and how the White House has intruded and how it's really bad that Trump has intruded.
And I think a lot of that is true.
I think the White House should not have intruded here.
But you also have Kamala Harris saying she's not going to take a vaccine if Trump says you should take the vaccine, which, of course, is anti-science because Trump ain't the one who's developing the vaccine.
Also, it turns out that we've been getting conflicting information from the scientific community all the way along.
First, the WHO said that this thing was not airborne.
Then, the WHO said this thing was not human-to-human transmissible.
Then, the WHO said that masks were bad.
Then, the WHO said that masks were good.
Then, the WHO suggested that perhaps lockdowns were justified.
Now, Dr. David Nabarro, the WHO Special Envoy, is saying that we should never be using lockdowns because they are not, in fact, an effective tool at containing the pandemic.
Here was Dr. David Nabarro, over the weekend, explaining lockdowns are dumb.
We really do have to learn how to coexist with this virus in a way that doesn't require constant closing down of economies, but at the same time in a way that is not associated with high levels of suffering and death.
It's what we're calling the middle path.
And the middle path is about being able to hold the virus at bay whilst keeping economic and social life going.
So now the WHO is anti-lockdown.
So forgive everybody for being a little bit confused.
And let's not pretend that if Trump were not in office that people would be less confused.
They are not.
There's mass confusion reigning in Europe.
There's confusion ranging across the Middle East.
There's confusion nearly everywhere about exactly how to handle this thing, what it constitutes, how dangerous it is.
I mean, there's actual riots in the streets in Israel.
There have been riots in the streets in France.
There have been riots in the streets in the UK.
None of that has anything to do with Trump.
One of the things that has happened with regard to our scientific institutions is that they have politicized themselves.
Once again, I think that Trump exacerbates the problems here, but I don't think that Trump is the creator of the problem inside our scientific community.
One problem is that our politicians politicize science.
The other problem is that our scientists politicize science, and they get involved in making political judgments about science.
So perfect case in point.
So Anthony Fauci said early on in the pandemic in an interview, he said that the Trump administration was doing the most of any administration he could imagine, which was true.
Again, if you look at what the Trump administration has done, not what Trump has said, not the idiotic rhetoric, if you look at what the Trump administration has actually done, namely making sure that everybody could get the ventilators they need, mobilizing Navy ships to go off the coast of New York, ensuring that PPE were distributed, Developing Operation Warp Speed, we could get the fastest vaccine literally in human history because of Operation Warp Speed.
The government backing of the development of new therapeutics that have radically reduced the rate of death from COVID-19, down closer to flu rates than originally to the WHO's suggested rate.
The WHO, you remember, suggested that the death rate on this thing could be three to five percent.
It has turned out to be maybe one-tenth of that.
That is a pretty stunning response.
Fauci said fairly early on that the Trump administration was doing yeoman's work in mobilizing everything.
So Trump cut an ad in which he pointed out that Fauci had said this, especially because Fauci is now considered sort of the trusted scientist.
Although there's one member of the, I will say, one member of sort of private medical establishment who's a very prestigious doctor at a very prestigious university.
And when they said that, how did Fauci become sort of the epidemiologist, like the source for all information?
Normally in doctorland, people who work for the government are considered like second raters.
But in any case.
That's not a direct rip on Fauci.
That's him ripping Fauci.
I don't know enough to say what is considered the grand level of expertise.
In any case, Fauci himself said that the Trump administration had done a good job mobilizing the resources.
So Trump cut an ad this way, and then Fauci inserted himself right into the politics.
So again, it is not just politicians who have politicized the science.
It is scientists who have politicized the science.
Here is Trump cutting an ad.
There's nothing wrong with this ad.
The ad is fine.
President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America.
Together, we rose to meet the challenge.
Protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time, sparing no expense.
President Trump tackled the virus head-on, as leaders should.
I can't imagine that anybody could be doing more.
We'll get through this together.
We'll live carefully, but not afraid.
I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.
Okay, so Fauci then came out and said it was inaccurate.
Fauci said, they're taking my words out of context.
Why?
Because he wasn't talking about Trump personally.
He was talking about the federal employees.
Yes, but who's the head of the government?
I'm sorry, but that is not an inaccurate ad.
If you say that I can't imagine anybody doing more about the Obama administration, then Obama cuts an ad where it says, I can't imagine anybody doing more.
No one would be objecting, but because Trump is saying it, suddenly it's objectionable.
And again, the scientists have been pretty political throughout this entire process, I will say.
It is not just politicians.
Now, meanwhile, our cultural institutions are similarly under assault.
So we have our governmental institutions, then we have science, which has been politicized every which way by political actors ranging from Trump to Andrew Cuomo, who, by the way, said yesterday that he is looking at additional lockdowns in New York State after there were five deaths in New York from COVID.
Five.
That's a state of 20 million people.
This thing has become very political.
So we've already perverted our governmental institutions.
We've perverted our scientific institutions because our scientists are considered the font head of all knowledge.
And many of them are not exhibiting the sort of scientific caution that would be recommended in any normal scientific scenario.
And now we are going to pervert every aspect of our culture as well.
Like literally every aspect of our culture.
Our media are going to engage in this.
So here specifically, I gotta talk about two articles in the New York Times because this is really impressive stuff.
So, over the weekend, Bret Stephens had an excellent column in the New York Times.
I know, an excellent column in the New York Times, a sentence that is very rarely uttered.
He had a piece called the 1619 Chronicles, and he talks about the fact that the 1619 Project has now rewritten its own history to suggest that it wasn't saying that 1619 replaces 1776.
Well, that of course is a lie.
1619 was explicitly designed to overwrite 1776.
1776. Brett Stephens says, if there's one word admirers and critics alike can agree on when it comes to the New York Times award-winning 1619 project, it's ambition. Ambition to reframe America's conversation about race. Ambition to reframe our understanding of history. Ambition to move from news pages to classrooms. Ambition to move from scholarly debate to national consciousness. In some ways, this ambition succeeded. The 1619 project introduced a date previously obscure to most Americans that ought always to have been thought of as seminal and probably now will.
It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which black freedom was a victory gained by courageous black Americans and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.
But it also went further.
It went further.
Ambition can be double-edged.
Journalists are, says Brett Stephen, most often in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it.
We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence and directions unseen, not the capital T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded.
We're supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.
As fresh concerns make clear on these points, and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs, and a Pulitzer Prize, the 1619 Project has failed.
These concerns came to light last month when a long-standing critic of the project, Philip W. Magnus, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to 1619 as the country's true founding, or moment America began, had disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.
These were not minor points.
The deleted assertions went to the core of the project's most controversial goal, quote, to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation's birth year.
That doesn't mean the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history, but it does mean it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of black struggle against white supremacy, of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.
In a tweet, Cannon-Jones responded to Magnus and other critics by insisting the text of the project remained unchanged, while maintaining the case for making 1619 the country's true birth year was quote, always a metaphoric argument.
I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as our true founding had been merely metaphorical.
Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious it went without saying.
She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that using 1776 as our country's birth date is wrong, that it should not be taught to school children, and that the only one that should be taught was 1619.
Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that, she added.
Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by the New York Times Magazine's editor.
Quote, 1619.
It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country's history.
Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation's birth.
What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every 4th of July, is wrong, and that the country's true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?
Now they've cut that out.
Now they've cut that out.
This is what the new text says.
1619 is not a year most Americans know as a notable date in our country's history.
Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you 1776 is the year of our nation's birth.
What if, however, we were to tell you the moment the country's defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August 1619?
What they left out was that the fact that we were taught that 1776 is the founding date is wrong and that the country's true birth date is 1619.
And so Bret Stephens points this out, and he suggests that this is historically wrong.
This led to the New York Times Guild, which is the union of writers over the New York Times, to tweet out in bizarre fashion, quote, Okay, so a couple of things.
One, you are currently attacking a New York Times writer.
Two, they don't know how to use the word it.
article reeks. Okay, so a couple of things. One, you are currently attacking a New York Times writer. Two, they don't know how to use the word it.
It is not a possessive. Okay, but in any case, they then tweeted out, we deleted our previous tweet.
It was tweeted in error.
We apologize for the mistake.
What you will notice is that two days elapsed between them putting up that tweet and them taking down the tweet.
So in other words, it's very bad to point out that the 1619 Project is a ball of crap.
You can't point that out.
What you can do is rip on a writer at the New York Times who points this thing out.
The rewriting of our cultural institutions is occurring wholesale by motivated political actors who have no interest in journalism.
By journalists who refuse to dog Joe Biden on whether he's gonna court-pack.
By journalists who are happy to go along with the redefinition of court-packing.
And by journalists who refuse to ask simple questions like, why were you allowed to rewrite the chief mechanism and chief goal of the 1619 Project?
Okay, so that's one example of the New York Times rewriting reality in bizarre ways.
Another way in which the New York Times is rewriting reality in bizarre ways.
So this is an insane article from the New York Times today.
It's from their book review section.
They are reviewing a book by a woman named Jane Ward, put out by New York University.
It's called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.
This is where things get real weird.
Again, this is all the New York Times just promoting cultural propaganda from the Jacques Derrida deconstructionist left.
It's bizarre.
The tragedy of heterosexuality wastes absolutely no time getting to the point.
While many of its sentences made me laugh out loud, it is at heart a somber, urgent academic examinations of the many ways in which opposite-sex coupling can hurt the very individuals who cling to it most.
Okay, so now the New York Times Book Review is literally pushing a book that argues that heterosexuality is in and of itself bad.
It only perpetuates the species.
It only provides solid family structures for children.
But it's bad.
It's inherently bad.
Here is what the New York Times Review of Books says.
The New York Times Book Review.
Ward distinguishes straightness as a practice from straight culture, which is at the very heart of society's most disgraceful failures.
Straight culture is at the heart of society's most disgraceful failures, you see.
It is not, as one popular joke goes, that straight people are not okay.
It is that heteronormativity creates a powerful, privileged form of sexuality against which historically and currently all other forms are compared.
In examining the pressure to partner with the opposite gender, we find the extortions of capitalism, the misogyny of violence against women, the racist and xenophobic erasure of non-white families, and the homophobic hatreds that purvey so much of everyday life.
So, if you're straight, and if we see straight culture, like being straight, as something good, Because it propagates the species and creates families naturally through the general biological process.
This means that you are participating in, let me quote this, the extortions of capitalism.
I didn't realize that a man having sex with a woman was about the extortion of capitalism.
The consensual exchange there was about capitalism, per se.
It seems like lots of commie countries still have heterosexuals in them.
The misogyny of violence against women.
So now we are back to the old feminist chestnut that all penetrative sex is a form of rape or some such nonsense.
The racist and xenophobic erasure of non-white families.
Okay, that's confusing.
So it turns out that being straight has to do with saying that black families don't exist, which is weird.
And the homophobic hatreds that pervade so much of everyday life.
So in other words, if you say that heterosexuality is good, that means that you have to be nasty to gay and lesbians, which is weird, because it seems like the vast majority of straight people in the United States are very friendly toward gays and lesbians.
This is the New York Times.
Rewriting our cultural norms and institutions.
Our desires may feel beyond our control, but Ward stresses the importance of understanding sexuality as self-identified.
One of the foundational principles of lesbian feminism is that each person's sexual desire is their own responsibility, says Ward.
If not something they can choose, then at least something they can choose to examine and take ownership of.
As such, she argues a queer theory might be just the thing to rescue heterosexuality from its unearned hegemony in our shared cultural imagination.
Oh my god.
So this is the culture they want to create.
This is the culture of the left, in which heterosexuality is about capitalism and forcible violence against women, and in which 1776 is not the founding of the country.
And if you argue that it is the founding of the country, then you should be called out by the New York Times Guild.
These are our media members.
But don't you worry, they have your best interest at heart, America.
They care deeply about American values.
Deeply about American values.
In very real, And abiding ways.
OK, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow for much, much more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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