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Nov. 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:14:25
The Wonderfully Self-Flattering World Of Barack Obama | Ep. 1137
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Barack Obama releases a 768 page memoir, and that is just part one.
Democrats continue to lose their minds over Trump's refusal to concede the race, and politicians call for total COVID lockdowns as the virus spreads across the country.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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Bambi.com slash Shapiro to schedule that free HR Okay, so the election still has not been conceded by President Trump, nor probably will it be, until all of the states have certified their election results.
And to be completely real about this, President Trump is behind by tens of thousands of votes in the states that he needs most.
Arizona, he's down by 12,000 to 13,000 votes.
In Georgia, he's down by 14,000 votes.
In Pennsylvania, he is down by 45,000 to 50,000 votes.
In Michigan, he's down 150,000 votes.
These are margins that it's going to be very difficult in court for him to prove Or voter fraud or voter irregularities.
Does this mean that our voting system is absolutely clean and pure as the driven snow?
100% not.
The fact is that the mail-in balloting system has real problems with it.
When you have hundreds of thousands, millions of ballots going out to people's old addresses, that does create the potential for people to take those ballots, fill them out, and send them in.
Which is why Tucker Carlson on his show last night, for example, literally read off the voting records of dead people.
Right?
This does happen.
If you send ballots to addresses and you don't cleanse the voter rolls, which is something Democrats have forcibly opposed, right?
Democrats have filed lawsuits to avoid cleaning the voter rolls of people who are dead.
Well, that does provide the potential for somebody to grab that particular ballot, fill it in, mail it back in.
This is particularly true when in states like California have ballot harvesting, where literally people just go around picking up ballots from other people.
You don't even mail it in in those circumstances.
You have designated people from each particular party going out And picking all of those ballots up.
You don't know what happens with them.
They could theoretically fill them out.
This does create the potential for voter fraud.
And you've seen Democrats in various states around the country trying to get rid of signature verification.
So they don't even want you to have to verify that the signature on the ballot matches the signature for when you register to vote in the first place.
All of this creates the serious potential for voter fraud and voter irregularity.
All of this creates the potential for people not to trust the system.
And all of those things should be adjudicated.
Not only should they be adjudicated, the laws should be changed.
And as we have seen in certain cases, the GOP has been successful.
So for example, the GOP right now is suing in Pennsylvania, going up to the Supreme Court in all likelihood, about this policy that was created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, overruling the legislature, deciding that because of COVID, ballots that arrived after the election could still be counted even without a postmark.
Right.
The changes of those process absolutely undermine electoral integrity.
They absolutely undermine faith in our electoral system.
And all of those questions ought to be answered.
And we ought to fight those things out.
We really should.
These are legislative issues.
These are judicial issues.
And these all should be fought out.
Now, that's not quite the same thing as arguing that the proof is that all of these elections were skewed away from Trump, that the outcome of this was the skewing of the election away from Trump.
That's something Trump is going to have to show in court.
So, for example, In Michigan, Michigan GOP lawmakers have called for a full audit of the election results over serious allegations of error and voter fraud.
The Republican senators in the Michigan legislature called on Jocelyn Benson to do so.
The letter, dated Friday, November 13th, was released on Thursday, signed by two Republican state senators, Tom Barrett and Lana Thies.
This is according to Tim Pierce over at DailyWire.com.
The senators requested that Benson delay certifying election results over a spate of errors and allegations of voter fraud that have cast doubts on Michigan's election process.
The senators wrote, Now it is true that none of that should be ignored.
in the integrity of the election process and its outcome.
It is our responsibility as elected public servants to assure the people of Michigan of the process's integrity through complete transparency and the faithful investigation of any allegations of wrongdoing, fraud, or abuse.
Unfortunately, a number of serious allegations have been made, which cannot and should not be ignored.
Now, it is true that none of that should be ignored.
That doesn't mean that the state is gonna suddenly flip its electors or that they're gonna hold a brand new election.
Some of the errors that have been made in terms of voter fraud or voter irregularity are in fact just that, human errors.
Some of them probably are voter fraud or voter irregularity.
But Leon Wolf over at The Blaze actually went through the affidavits that have been presented by the Trump campaign.
234 pages of affidavits regarding alleged voter irregularities in Michigan.
And Leon Wolf again of The Blaze, which is a right-wing site.
He went through all of it and what he found is that the testimony contained in the affidavits pertains to fewer than a thousand total ballots.
Although it should be noted that numerous affidavits complained they were not able to see what was happening because they were required to maintain six feet of social distance or because people were in their way.
The material in the affidavits alleging an atmosphere of intimidation and hostility toward GOP poll workers is voluminous.
Reading between the lines, some of the frustration experienced by poll workers and refusal tends to retain further complaints may have been come by honestly, but there is no way to actually tell.
Here's the bottom line.
If you lose a state by 150,000 votes, it's going to be very, very difficult to challenge the results of that particular election.
That does not mean that we should not have a legal process.
Okay, and so the legal process is going forward, and it is important here to distinguish fact from rumor.
So, for example, there's been a lot of talk about Dominion voting systems because there is one county in Michigan that we have talked about at length on the show already.
It was called Altrom County, in which 6,000 votes were accidentally shifted by manual error from the Trump campaign to the Biden campaign.
And then that was fixed because they actually have verification processes and all this stuff is double-checked.
That was switched.
The Dominion has also been used in Maricopa County.
Maricopa County is run in Arizona by the Secretary of State of Arizona, who's a Republican.
And Maricopa County didn't have any problems with the Dominion system.
So in other words, a problem with a software system that was human error in Michigan does not mean that everywhere that uses the Dominion system, you're gonna see 6,000 votes shift from one side to the other side.
In other words, you do have to prove the voter fraud.
This is the high legal bar, and I'm explaining the legal bar because I think people have to have a realistic appraisal of the situation right now.
The legal appraisal of the situation is pretty obvious, and lawyers right, left, and center will tell you this, right?
Just from a legal point of view, the Trump team has a very rough Road to hoe here.
I mean, it's going to be very difficult for them to climb this particular hill and prove the tens of thousands of votes in a wide variety of states because now it's not just Pennsylvania.
It's Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia were done wrongly.
Now, again, does that mean that there is not going to be some proof of voter fraud?
There is going to be proof of voter fraud in the media because they're garbage at this.
They've decided that voter fraud simply doesn't exist.
They've said that voter fraud and voter irregularity are figments of your imagination.
So five seconds ago, they were telling you that voter fraud and voter irregularity were going to be used by the Trump campaign and voter suppression in order to prevent Joe Biden from being elected.
Then Joe Biden, they think, was elected.
And the first thing they do is, boom, cleanest election in history.
Nonetheless, a Pennsylvania judge ruled on Thursday that voters who took advantage of an extended deadline to provide missing proof of ID will not have their ballots counted because the government official who gave the extension lacked the legal authority to do so.
This is Ryan Savedra writing for Daily Wire.
According to Bloomberg Law, Commonwealth Court Judge Mary Hanna-Levitt ruled Thursday that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Buchfer lacked the authority to extend the original November deadline by three days.
Originally, there was a deadline that by November 9th, if you had a ballot that was not properly marked, they would have an ID check.
And then, Buchfer just decided randomly to extend that by three days.
The ruling means the battleground state that's already been declared for Joe Biden can't count ballots from voters who submitted missing ID.
Between November 10th and November 12th, ballots with cured ID issues received before that are not, in fact, being challenged.
Still, the number of ballots that we're talking about here is not in the tens of thousands of ballots.
It is probably in the hundreds of ballots.
If it's in the thousands, it's in the very, very low thousands of ballots.
So that is where things stand, legally speaking.
Now, will the process play out?
It will play out, right?
As I've been saying all along, the media are in a rush to declare this thing, mainly because they know that Trump isn't going to concede this until all of the states have actually verified their counts and until the electors are selected.
That's typical Trump.
Trump is not going to do that, nor is Trump forced to do that.
There's nothing in the Constitution, there's nothing in our legal process that says that if NBC or ABC or Fox News projects that an election has been won by a person, that you then have to concede.
That is a sort of nicety that has been typically observed, but it is not, in fact, something that is legally obligated, nor does it have much of an impact on the transition process, as no less than Joe Biden himself has stated.
Nonetheless, the media have ramped this thing up because the idea here is that if Trump doesn't concede, it's just more evidence that Republicans are authoritarians and they're terrible and a coup is underway.
We'll get to the media's hysteria over all of this in just a second, because again, that media hysteria is not about anything real.
It's about the media attempting to defend their own actions over the past four years.
They've been in a state of constant hysterical insanity for four years.
And then if it turns out that Donald Trump Did lose the election.
If it turns out that he is deemed to have lost the election, and Donald Trump leaves office, and we have a peaceful transition of power, it turns out all of their weird cosplay fantasies about how Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, they weren't true, and the media just blew out their own credibility for no reason other than pure political partisanship, which is of course exactly what they've done.
So they have to maintain that fiction going forward.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
With all of that said, it's been amusing to watch as members of the Democratic Party declare that the election is over and that if you have questions about the election, you're a very bad person.
No less a personage than Stacey Abrams went on TV last night and declared that Joe Biden's lead in Georgia was insurmountable.
She's on The View saying this.
Now, I will note that Joe Biden's lead in Georgia currently is under 15,000 votes.
Stacey Abrams lost her gubernatorial race against Brian Kemp by 50,000 votes, like four times that number.
She lost by a lot more votes than Joe Biden is currently winning Georgia, according to the current counts.
She says Biden's lead is intermountable.
She also maintains she is governor of Georgia.
Are you getting the feeling these folks are not particularly consistent when it comes to their claims of voter suppression or voter fraud, and that actually all they really care about is the results?
Here is Governor Stacey Abrams of Georgia.
We don't know how long it's going to take, but we are absolutely certain that this lead is insurmountable.
It is absolute.
And Joe Biden won Georgia.
The reality is they have the right to follow the law and the law permits this type of behavior.
And during my election in 2018, we fought through the courts to make sure every vote got counted.
Sadly, they just want to do a recount of what we already accomplished, and I wish them well.
But we know that Joe Biden is going to be not only the president of the United States, but the first president in 30 years from the Democratic Party to carry Georgia.
Wow, so it's an insurmountable lead, guys.
There's no way that any recount, there's no way that any voter fraud or voter irregularity could overturn that count.
Says Governor Stacey Abrams of Georgia.
I'm getting very, very tired of hearing from people who are fully willing.
I mean, literally the DNC called her the governor of Georgia in the middle of the DNC.
And now they're talking about undermining of democracy.
There's this extraordinarily self-flattering view that Democrats have of the world that is actually dangerous to the country.
Really dangerous, because it basically suggests all the angels are on their side and all the devils are on the other side.
Okay, that'll become clear when we talk about Barack Obama's pathetic, self-serving, 768-page first volume of his memoir.
My God, the Pentateuch, okay, the five books of Moses in Hebrew, are not that long.
God didn't have that much to say, but Barack Obama has plenty to say.
That was his Old Testament, can't wait for his New Testament, that'll be volume two.
By the way, dude's written, what would that make, his fourth memoir?
His fourth memoir?
There's no human being important enough, they require four memoirs.
Not a single human requires four memoirs.
We'll get to Barack Obama in just a second.
But Chuck Schumer, right?
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, a guy who five minutes ago was talking about getting rid of the filibuster and members of his caucus were talking about adding states willy-nilly to the Senate and packing the Supreme Court.
He says that we are at risk of a coup in the United States because Donald Trump won't just say the election is over.
Which again, there's no obligation for him to say the election.
Let's be real about this.
Donald Trump can go kicking and screaming.
And as long as he does not actually engage in law breaking, he has not violated anything legally, right?
There is no threat to the constitution of Donald Trump.
Again, Donald Trump can be whoever Donald Trump wants to be.
He can leave office saying the entire thing was a fraud and a sham and all.
It's not gonna matter one iota.
If the Electoral College votes the way the Electoral College is probably going to vote, Given the current vote counts and the certifications of state votes as they currently stand, then we will all move on because that is how the country works.
And people will be pissed.
And people will have doubts about the voter process.
And people will call for rectification of many of the areas of voter unfairness that we have seen across the country.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
But Chuck Schumer, of all people, saying that Republicans are poisoning the well of democracy says, Chuck Schumer, come on.
Instead of working to pull the country back together so that we can fight our common enemy, COVID-19, Republicans in Congress are spreading conspiracy theories, denying reality, and poisoning the well of our democracy.
The Republicans should stop their shenanigans about an election that President Trump has already lost and focus their attention on the immediate issue at hand, providing relief Okay, by the way, I do love Chuck Schumer suggesting that Donald Trump is so distracted that he won't pass any sort of relief bill.
You know who held up the relief bill?
We all know who held up the relief bill.
Nancy Pelosi in the House.
And it probably cost her House colleagues double digits in the House.
But Chuck Schumer, again, this is all just nonsense.
It's all nonsense and it is self-flattering.
Politically driven nonsense.
I think my favorite comment of the last 24 hours over all of this coup talk came from Seth Meyers.
Seth Meyers was like, Donald Trump, that guy's a threat to democracy.
Also, let's get rid of the Electoral College.
He's a threat to the system.
Let's destroy the system.
Let's get rid... You know what I don't like?
I don't like federalism anymore, and I don't like the Electoral College anymore.
Let's get rid of all of those things in order to restore democracy.
Let's get rid of all the institutions.
Also, Donald Trump is a big threat to your institutions.
Here's idiot Seth Meyers.
It's not a good situation when you have one political party committed to democracy no matter the outcome and the other opposed to democracy at all costs.
Even if this ridiculous coup attempt fails, it doesn't bode well for the future, which is why we need bold, systemic reforms to empower everyone to vote and honor what the majority of voters actually want, like abolishing the Electoral College and fixing the Voting Rights Act, among other things.
These should be no-brainers.
If we had a healthy, functioning political system, both parties would react to these ideas by saying, Okay, he's such a moron.
I'm sorry.
Seth Meyers is a moron.
Moron.
Okay, when Seth Meyers says there that one party is committed to democracy and the other party is not committed to democracy.
Therefore, the party committed to democracy should reinstate the Voting Rights Act, which was put in place in the 1960s.
It required preclearance from the federal government with regard to Drawing of districts.
And was designed to be phased out over time when it became clear that these districts were not drawn for racial reasons.
And the Supreme Court recently ruled the Voting Rights Act was no longer relevant 50 years after it had been written.
He wants that restored so the federal government gets to rule the states on how the districts are drawn.
And then he also wants to get rid of the Electoral College.
But don't worry, he's the guy committed to democracy.
He's totally committed to democracy.
Weird how the word democracy tends to shift and change depending on exactly what Democrats want from it.
But let's be real about this.
All this really comes down to is, as usual, orange man bad, Don Lemon letting the cat out of the bag and being triumphalist.
Joe Biden's super popular and Donald Trump is super unpopular.
And this wasn't a close election.
Here is Don Lemon, objective journalist, getting his journalism everywhere.
Joe Biden has widened his lead over Trump in the popular vote by more than 5 million ballots in the popular vote.
He's way more popular than Trump has ever been or will ever be.
Biden has tallied up more than 77 million votes.
That's more than any presidential candidate in American history.
Can you imagine?
How the man who is obsessed with ratings and numbers, how that feels?
That's all it's about.
For the Democrats and for the media, but I repeat myself, it's all about the schadenfreude of suggesting that Donald Trump is getting what he deserves because he's unpopular.
By the way, by this measure, you know who's more popular than any Democrat who's ever lived, basically?
It's Joe Biden.
He's won more raw votes, right?
He's more popular than Barack Obama by leaps and bounds.
Now, do you actually think that Don Lemon believes that?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Okay, in just one second, we're going to get to the continuing self-flattering narrative Democrats are painting.
So according to Democrats, Democrats love democracy.
Also, Democrats are the only people who care about COVID.
We'll get to that ridiculous narrative in just one second as COVID spreads across the country.
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Okay, so as part of the Democrats' self-flattering narrative here, there are a couple things.
One, they love democracy.
Republicans hate democracy.
Also, Republicans love COVID, right?
This is their other narrative, is that Republicans love COVID.
So here is the reality, as some of us have been saying for quite a while.
It turns out that nobody has a good solution to COVID.
There are no good solutions to COVID.
This is why I have been suggesting the only thing that you can really do is expend resources trying to protect the most vulnerable among your population.
There's a study recently published, I believe in the Wall Street Journal, that suggested that the number of people above the, who are on Medicare in the United States, essentially everybody over the age of 65, who have died of COVID with no preexisting conditions, right?
Above the age of 65 is 2,500.
That means that what you actually have to do is protect not even the old, but truly you have to protect people with preexisting conditions.
Okay, now the thing is in the United States, That's a lot of people.
Because there are a lot of people who have diabetes, a lot of people who have asthma, a lot of people who have heart conditions.
Hypertension could theoretically be a contributing factor to a bad reaction to COVID.
But given widespread community spread, not just here in the United States, but all over Europe, the fact is that the only thing that you can do is shield the most vulnerable.
And what that does mean is that if you have vulnerable people in your family, you should wear a mask around them and socially distance.
Right?
That's just the smart thing to do.
I have two grandmothers, both of whom are over the age of 90.
Thank God they're still alive and doing decently.
And if I visited them, I would definitely not visit them without a face mask or without being several feet back, right? I mean, at least six feet back.
And that is the smart thing to do.
And that's the only thing you can do. Now, there's this weird idea out there that if you just lock everything down, this is going to solve everything. But of course, locking everything down is not going to solve everything. All you're going to end up doing is prolonging the agony in the sense that you lock it down and then eventually you have to reopen. So yes, a vaccine is on the way, but the vaccine is not going to be widely available, we are told, until March or April.
Is anybody realistically suggesting that we all be confined to our homes from November until March?
Is anybody really suggesting that at this point?
Even the WHO doesn't suggest that that is a good idea.
Even Anthony Fauci suggests that that is not a good idea.
And Anthony Fauci is about as hawkish on lockdowns as anybody in the American federal government right now.
Fauci appeared on Good Morning America yesterday, and he said, there's no appetite for locking down.
We shouldn't be pushing full-scale lockdowns at this point.
There is no appetite for locking down on the American public, but I believe that we can do it without a lockdown.
I really do.
I mean, sometimes when people talk about the measures that I'm suggesting we double down on, they equivocate that and say that, well, that that makes that not a lockdown.
It isn't necessarily lockdown.
You could still get businesses going.
You could still have economic forward thinking.
while you're doing that, you don't necessarily have to shut everything down.
So that actually is accurate, right? Okay. And Republicans basically across the country are saying the same thing. They're saying, okay, because they're saying mostly what I'm saying, right? Be cautious. Don't go out into crowded areas. If you are going to be in crowded areas, then make sure that you wear a mask and you try to socially distance as much as possible. Like we're all on the same page here. It is not as though there's this vast split in terms of where the American mind is.
Doesn't matter.
Democrats have declared that if you are a Republican, you literally want people to die.
So Nancy Pelosi yesterday, she said that Republicans and the GOP should be carrying deaths on their conscience.
This is the lady who's eaten ice cream in front of her Sub-Zero fridge while declaring that she was not going to be passing a COVID relief bill.
She was holding up a COVID relief bill at the time.
She's still holding up a COVID relief bill.
By the way, if you're in favor of more lockdowns, you know what you need?
To pass a COVID relief bill!
Because there are a bunch of people who aren't going to be able to go to work.
How do you think they're going to be able to pay your bills?
I mean, it's wild.
Nancy Pelosi, the woman who was saying, come on down to Chinatown and party with us in late February, is now declaring that it's Republicans' fault that this thing has spread across the country.
Even as she held up the relief bill for her own nefarious political purposes, which completely backfired on her own caucus.
This is the master politician.
Here she was yesterday declaring, again, herself on the side of the angels and her enemies on the side of Satan.
If the Republicans want to be cold-hearted and say they don't care, or as the President's son said, 125,000 I think at that time, that's no big number kind of thing.
No.
Every single one of those deaths is important to us.
We carry those people in our hearts.
And they should be carrying them on their conscience for what they did not do.
Since we passed the bill, the HEROES Act, over 100,000 more people have died.
That could have been prevented.
Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, under Trump, said yesterday that during Thanksgiving we have to make sacrifices to keep people alive.
Fauci is still in the Trump administration.
Probably Trump's fulminations about Fauci.
Dude is still in the federal government.
Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, under Trump, said yesterday that during Thanksgiving, we have to make sacrifices to keep people alive.
That might mean fewer parties, more social distancing, more mask wearing.
Like there is no vast gap here between Republicans and Democrats.
The only vast gap is that Democrats have taken the political incentive structure and completely perverted it.
So they are now in favor of vast lockdowns, including of places that are not risk centers like schools.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so as I say, there is no partisan conflict over the fact that when it comes to COVID, people should exercise a certain level of caution.
This is not particularly controversial.
Here's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, who is a member of the Trump administration, saying that we need to be cautious about this.
Reduce the number of people at your gathering.
If you can open the windows, let more ventilation in.
We've got very practical things.
Even if you have a ceiling fan, set it so it pulls the air up instead of down.
Use single-use servings for individuals.
Wear your face coverings because I want to make sure, even if we make sacrifices this Thanksgiving and Christmas, those sacrifices are for a reason.
So that everybody you want to be with will be here for next Thanksgiving and next Christmas.
Okay, so again, not a huge gap, except that Democrats have artificially created a gap about COVID, where if you just say, you know what, the economy should remain open, you should be careful, you should try to shield your fellows who are particularly vulnerable, then this means you're evil, right?
You're on the side of Satan.
Even as Nancy Pelosi holds up the COVID relief efforts, you're on the side of Satan.
And so Democrats have decided that because of the incentive structure, it's time for full lockdowns.
Full lockdowns are back on the table.
Except, by the way, if you are celebrating some sort of woke cause.
If you're celebrating a woke cause, then lockdowns don't matter anymore.
As we all know, COVID is the wokest virus that ever was.
It does not affect anybody who attends a Black Lives Matter rally, but it'll hit everybody at a Trump White House event.
It has never affected a non-Trump voter.
It turns out that this virus is sort of a holy virus in the view of the left.
It only hurts people who do the wrong things.
It's like Santa Claus.
It keeps a list, it checks it twice, and then it comes after you if you were naughty and not nice.
Anyway, here is Biden's spokeswoman yesterday ducking whether he would actually attempt a national lockdown, which is like, good luck.
First of all, you don't have the power under the Constitution of the United States, thank God, to impose a national level lockdown, particularly in January.
We don't even know where this thing is going to be in January.
But I think that you should pretty much commit that you are not going to use an executive order to try and lock down the entire American economy.
I mean, if you want to talk about the essence of tyranny, that would be it.
The President of the United States declaring, you know what?
National lockdown time.
Here is Biden's spokeswoman literally refusing to answer the question.
Is that something that President-elect Biden is considering, a four to six week lockdown?
Well, I think he laid out very clearly across the course of the campaign the things that he wants to do to get the virus under control, including encouraging national mask mandates.
But what does that mean?
No plans for a lockdown, but that could change?
I mean, Michael Osterholm's on the task force.
There are steps that we can take now, again, encouraging people to wear a mask.
Again, they're just going to say mask, mask, mask, but they'll hold in abeyance the possibility of a total lockdown of the American economy.
And mayors all over the country who are Democrats are now calling for a total lockdown, except when they're not.
So Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot issued another lockdown advisory.
She demanded that you cancel your Thanksgiving plans.
Starting on Monday, according to the Chicago Tribune, she'll impose a 10-person ceiling on gatherings such as weddings, funerals, and other events.
She also tweeted out, a stay-at-home advisory for Chicago will go into effect on Monday, November 16th at 6 a.m.
By the way, I do love these delays.
Is the virus delayed for the next three days or so?
If you can issue this advisory, shouldn't you do it right now?
It's that big an emergency?
This advisory calls on all Chicagoans to do the following, stay home unless for essential reasons, stop having guests over, including family members you do not live with, avoid non-essential travel, and cancel your Thanksgiving plans.
By the way, I will just note that the queen of science, who yesterday released an entire video about how much she values science, this was her like six days ago at a rally in the open with no mask on, shouting into a loudspeaker about Joe Biden.
That's a picture of her right there.
This is here she goes.
This is a great day for our country.
We get to take our democracy back.
Giant crowd in the streets, many not wearing masks.
For all those people who voted, you made this happen.
Because that was okay.
That was okay.
Six days ago, that was okay.
Now you can't have grandma and grandpa over for Thanksgiving dinner, even if you're being cautious and socially distancing.
So yeah, I definitely trust these people and don't think this is political at all.
How about Bill de Blasio?
Bill de Blasio is doing the same thing.
So Bill de Blasio was asked about Andrew Cuomo's restrictions on CNN last night.
He said, I think that Andrew Cuomo's new restrictions that basically say that we're going to shut down bars and restaurants after 10 p.m.
because COVID apparently does not apply before 10 p.m.
Also saying that you can't have 10 people in your backyard.
But you can't have eight people in your house, which makes no sense at all.
Here's Bill de Blasio saying these standards make perfect sense to him.
He and I have talked about this a lot.
I think he's in the right place.
I think it will help for sure.
And the additional work that's being done in Staten Island in particular, I think is going to help a lot.
Look, the goal here is to turn this around.
We're still at one of the lowest levels of positivity in the country.
We can drive it down again.
Okay, and I'm just going to note that, like, again, six days ago, here was Bill de Blasio in the streets celebrating with people.
It's liberation.
It's just joyous.
People have felt this weight and a sense of we're divided, and we shouldn't be that way.
And now there's a feeling that anything's possible, that we can heal again, that we can move forward.
And look, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did something amazing.
This is turning out to be a huge victory all over the country.
We can stop it there.
Somebody should have told Bill de Blasio that there were a bunch of Orthodox Jews having like a prayer session behind him.
Maybe we would have done something else.
The giant ass crowd directly behind him celebrating in the middle of a pandemic.
That was apparently totally fine.
By the way, the rewritten history by which Donald Trump is responsible for everything COVID related, let me just take you back to like mid-February.
Ronald Klain is the incoming chief of staff for Joe Biden if Joe Biden is in fact legally made the president-elect of the United States.
Here's a Ronald Klain tweet from the middle of February.
He was responding to a tweet from Bill de Blasio, February 13th.
It was my honor to spend time with our Asian-American owned small businesses in Flushing today.
This vibrant community is standing strong, but they need your support.
Our Chinatowns are open for business.
Make some dinner plans, do some shopping, stand with our neighbors.
This is from all the captains of science who were saying that they would have changed everything had they been in charge in February.
Okay, Ronald Klain.
Okay, that is the new incoming Joe Biden chief of staff.
Here is what he tweeted.
He tweeted, So it's not that everybody does their best here and people make mistakes.
We are starting to see a fear epidemic.
Kudos to Mayor Bill de Blasio and others for standing against that.
So it's not that everybody does their best here and people make mistakes.
It's that the political priors decide everything.
They do.
If Donald Trump was talking about the dangers of the Wuhan virus in February, then it was xenophobic, and he should go down to Chinatown.
If Donald Trump started talking about how the issues with COVID were overblown, then it was lock everything down immediately.
The binary nature of politics is one of the stupidest things in the world.
One of the dumbest things ever.
By the way, again, CNN was spending the week talking about how these parties in the streets, this celebration, this block party that was happening all over the United States, it was good.
And then yesterday they had on a medical guest and they were like, you know what?
You should cancel Thanksgiving because gathering should not be the norm.
Less is more this Thanksgiving.
It is the COVID Thanksgiving.
We don't want to give the virus while we're giving thanks.
We want to protect Grandma and Grandpa, and we do that by keeping ourselves as separate as possible.
As much as we would like to get together, this year, separation should be the norm.
Please, everybody, be careful.
We don't want Thanksgiving to be a spreader event.
Honestly, I don't disagree with a lot of this because bottom line is that people are going to have to act in responsible fashion.
I'm just not going to hear it from a bunch of people who five seconds ago were saying it's totally fine to gather in the streets and swig from the same champagne bottle because you don't like Donald Trump.
It's just it's so irritating and so stupid and it undermines faith in science.
It undermines faith in the media.
The same people who shout science are at the same time shouting that racism is a scientific issue that requires you to be out in the streets.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to pay any attention to you guys.
I'm just not.
I'll pay attention to people who have been consistent.
That large-scale gatherings in the middle of a pandemic are bad all the way through.
Like those people I will listen to.
I will listen to people who have said that we should be cautious all along.
I'm not going to listen to people who are like, either willy-nilly, depending on your political point of view, you can do what you want, or you can't do what you want at all.
That undermines public trust.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
And we'll get to the battle that is now raging inside the Democratic Party between the Democrats and the Radicals, between the so-called mainstream and the Radicals.
And the Radicals are going to win.
The reason the Radicals are going to win is because they are the mainstream.
The fact is that the moderates inside the Democratic Party are now the minority in their own party.
And the reason is because of Barack Obama.
And he's making this very clear with his voluminous tome of memoirs.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so meanwhile, The Democrats are trying to cope with the fact that they lost a bunch of seats in the House, that they are in all likelihood not going to gain the Senate.
And this battle has broken out into the open between the Democratic radicals and the so-called moderates inside the Democratic Party.
Biden is supposed to be a representative of the moderate Democratic Party, a return to normalcy.
There's only one problem.
The heart and soul of the Democratic Party is not controlled by the moderates.
The heart and soul of the Democratic Party is controlled by the radicals.
Because Barack Obama was a radical posing as a moderate.
He took over the party and he shaped that party in his image.
Joe Biden, in order to be a return to normalcy, would have to be a return to the pre-Obama era, but he is not.
He is not a return to the pre-Obama era.
The only reason that he is apparently the president-elect at this moment, according to media projections, is because he is supposedly following in the footsteps of Barack Obama, who was one of the great political prevaricators of modern American history, I mean, truly.
The battle between the moderates and the non-moderates in the Democratic Party has broken out really, really radically.
According to Politico, It was the biggest surprise on election night.
Democrats, instead of growing their House majority, actually lost seats.
Now the party is going through an internal reckoning on what went wrong.
The clearest picture of what happened will come when a full breakdown of how Donald Trump and Joe Biden fared in individual districts across the country is available.
But the most shocking results available thus far make it clear Trump did far better than polling indicated he would in many suburban battlegrounds.
And in others, Republican congressional candidates may have benefited from ticket splitters.
Overall, it looks like 2018 was a high watermark for Democrats, a wave that crested and fell.
Democrats' unexpected losses ranged from districts in Florida and Texas, where sliding Latino support provided costly blue-trending suburbs, where affluent voters split their tickets, and rural seats, in which Trump's GOP roared back last week.
In the end, Democrats could end up losing around 10 seats, depending on the final counts.
It'll probably be more than that.
It'll probably be like 13 or 14.
Here are the most surprising congressional races of 2020, and then they name a bunch of areas in which incumbent Democrats lost their districts, and lost pretty heavily.
The point of this, and pretty much everybody in the Democratic Party knows it, is that the moderate Democrats got blown out because they were tied to the radical Democrats.
One person who knows this is Senator Joe Manchin.
Joe Manchin has always sort of been on the bubble.
He keeps getting elected in West Virginia, which is an extremely red state at this point.
West Virginia, in terms of presidential elections, it votes like 65-35 in favor of the Republican candidate.
But Joe Manchin, because he's sort of an older-style moderate Democrat who very often votes with Republicans, he's been able to survive.
So he tweeted this out.
He tweeted out, Defund the police.
Defund my butt.
I'm a proud West Virginia Democrat.
We are the party of working men and women.
We want to protect Americans' jobs and healthcare.
We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.
All of which prompted the Honorable Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D, Crazy Towns, to tweet out a picture of herself glaring at Joe Manchin.
Because during the State of the Union Address, Joe Manchin had the temerity to, I believe, applaud for some tax cuts.
And AOC sat behind him and glared at him.
This is the... Slay, Queen.
Please, continue.
Continue along.
I want her to primary Chuck Schumer.
I really, really do.
Hey, glaring at Joe Manchin.
By the way, chances that Joe Manchin switches to the Republican Party over the course of the next couple of years, I would say at least 50-50.
Because otherwise, he's gonna lose his seat.
Because if he gets tied to that wing of his party, he's toast in West Virginia.
But here's the thing.
For all the Democrats declaring that they are not, in fact, the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, makes it very difficult to claim that when Nancy Pelosi is literally posing on covers with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad.
She's not appearing on magazine covers with Abigail Spanberger and Conor Lamb.
She's appearing with the hottest new things in the new media with all the Twitter, Instagram crowd.
The people who make for good clapback tweets, but have no actual ability to get anything done other than shouting socialism at the moon.
It's a real problem for the Democrats.
As Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, said, what this election shows more than anything is that there's a mandate against socialism, and Republicans are right about this.
Not one Republican incumbent lost.
Republicans won from Miami to New York to Minnesota to California.
The only seat the Democrats won was an open seat.
And then they claim to have won a redistricting in North Carolina where Republicans didn't even run.
I heard the Speaker call it a mandate.
It was a mandate against socialism.
It was a mandate against defunding the police.
It was a mandate against wasting a majority that the Democrats have done for the last Congress.
Okay, so the Democrats have been pushing back against this by saying, we're not socialism, we're not defunding the police, we're not that radical.
There is only one problem.
This is not the party of Bill Clinton.
If Bill Clinton ran on his 1992 platform today, he'd be in the Republican Party.
Real talk.
Okay, that is the reality.
This is Barack Obama's Democratic Party, and Barack Obama's Democratic Party is not, in fact, the party of Hillary Clinton.
Or Joe Biden, even.
Barack Obama's Democratic Party is the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
It is the party of Rashida Tlaib.
It is the party of Ilhan Omar, who's just better at hiding it.
What Barack Obama was great at doing was pretending that he was in the mold of old-school Democrats, when actually he's just an intersectional politician who is deeply ensconced in all of the lies of the socialist and race-baiting left.
And Barack Obama was excellent at lying about this.
And we'll get to his memoir in just a second because it really does spell all of this out.
If you read what we now know about his memoir, if you read it, what you'll see is that Barack Obama in ideology is much closer to people like Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo than he is to Joe Manchin.
We'll get to that in just one moment first.
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All right, we're going to get into Barack Obama and how this is Barack Obama's party, but it's not Barack Obama's moderate party.
It's Barack Obama's radical party.
His memoirs are making that absolutely clear.
We'll get to that in one second.
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All righty, so let's talk about the fact that this is Barack Obama's Democratic Party.
So the battle inside the Democratic Party right now between the so-called moderates, the Joe Manchins of the party, or even the Joe Bidens of the party, against the sort of Alexander Ocasio-Cortez squad, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders wing of the party, that battle is over.
And the reason that the battle is over is because there is no immune response to the argument that is being made by people like Ocasio-Cortez.
The people like Rashida Tlaib, the people like Elizabeth Warren, which is that the system itself is deeply corrupt.
The reason there's no immune response is because Barack Obama killed the immune response.
The great lie of Barack Obama's tenure is that he was a unifying president who believed in foundational American principles.
He absolutely did not.
The 2012 election, I think, broke the country because in 2008, Barack Obama was elected along the lines of, I am here to unify.
I'm here.
Red states, blue states, United States.
We've had a lot of racial conflict in this country in my own person.
I have felt that pain, but now I am a symbol of hope.
That was his whole 2008 campaign.
And then come 2012, everybody who opposed him was racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
If you didn't like him, it was because you had not uncovered the bigotry in your own heart.
And in fact, his agenda was about a vision for the country that may have moved beyond the founders.
Okay, so now he has a memoir out.
And the memoir is making pretty damned clear where he comes from.
Okay, the memoir is not vague.
It is slightly coded.
When I say it's slightly coded, I mean that he pays sometimes lip service to what he says are American principles that are actually not foundational American founding principles.
Barack Obama is the pathway for the Democratic Party moving forward.
That's what they think.
This is what the Democratic Party thinks.
And this is why the future of the Democratic Party looks a lot more like the Squad and a lot less like Joe Manchin, which is why you have that particular tweet from AOC glaring at Joe Manchin.
That is the future of the Democratic Party.
It's radicals all the way down.
First of all, for anybody who believes that Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, let me introduce you to a man named Barack Obama.
Nobody has ever loved Barack Obama more than Barack Obama loves Barack Obama.
Jeffrey Toobin doesn't love Jeffrey Toobin as much as Barack Obama loves Barack Obama.
It is absurd how much Barack Obama loves himself and Barack Obama.
The man has written, at this point, this is his third memoir, and volume one is longer, as I have said, than the five books of Moses.
Not kidding.
In the original Hebrew, this is a 768-page memoir.
That's volume one.
Hey, he didn't accomplish anything when he was president.
He did Obamacare, and then he had a bunch of executive orders, and he undermined the fundamental unity of the country.
So I guess there are a few things that he did, but is that worthy of like 1,500 pages?
Maybe he'll just continue writing these memoirs forever.
I don't know that Winston Churchill wrote this many memoirs, and Winston Churchill was actually an important human.
I don't think that Barack Obama is a particularly important human in the vast panorama of American politics, except for destructive things that he has done to the body politic.
Okay, but that doesn't stop the media from just drooling over him.
The New York Times Book Review?
Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come.
It is not merely this book avoids being ponderous as might be expected, even forgiven of a hefty memoir, but that it is nearly always pleasurable to read sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid.
Jeffrey, too, has been writing that right there.
I mean, that is a lot of book review journalism going on right there.
OK, so what does Barack Obama actually say in his memoirs?
Well, we have an early excerpt from The Atlantic, another place that is basically a Barack Obama stenographer.
Jeffrey Goldberg famously was sort of the place that Barack Obama would go to vomit all of his bile at his enemies, and Jeffrey Goldberg would just sit there and write it and nod along.
In fact, Jeffrey Goldberg was so much of a tool of the Obama administration that Ben Rhodes, who's a fiction writer who helped craft the Iran deal, the garbage Iran deal, openly stated that he used Jeffrey Goldberg as a stenographer for his idiotic politics.
Anyway, The Atlantic, which fired Kevin Williamson for the sin of being pro-life, but obviously will print nearly anything.
Ibram Kendi writes over there.
They printed some of Barack Obama's memoir.
Here are the paragraphs that stick out the most.
Okay, so the theme of Barack Obama's presidency and his life is that he is disappointed in you.
You get this from Michelle Obama too.
He's disappointed in you and he's disappointed in American democracy because what he wants from you and from American democracy is a radical remaking.
He wants a radical reshifting.
He talks about the contest between Democrats and Republicans.
And of course, it goes to this deeper point that Democrats have fallen headfirst into, which is that if you do not believe in the Democrats' radical agenda on every score, it's because you're a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
This is Barack Obama, a twice elected president by wide margins both times, talking about how the American people are garbage.
He says, This contest is not new.
Right now, we are seeing a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be.
A crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted.
First of all, being lectured on basic facts by, Captain, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, is somewhat galling.
But Barack Obama says this contest is not new, of course.
In many ways, it has defined the American experience.
It's embedded in founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifths of a man.
It finds expression in our earliest court opinions, as when the Chief Justice of the United States bluntly explains to Native Americans that their tribes' rights to convey property aren't enforceable because the court of the conqueror has no capacity to recognize the just claims of the conquered.
It's a contest that's been fought on the fields of Gettysburg and Appomattox, but also in the halls of Congress.
On a bridge in Selma, Alabama, across the vineyards of California, and down the streets of New York, a contest fought by soldiers, but more often by union organizers, suffragists, home importers, student leaders, waves of immigrants, and LGBTQ activists armed with nothing more than picket signs, pamphlets, or a pair of marching shoes.
At the heart of this long-running battle is a simple question.
Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals?
Do we really believe that our notions of self-government and individual freedom, equality of opportunity and equality before the law apply to everybody?
Or are we instead committed in practice, if not in statute, preserving those things for a privileged few, right?
Again.
If you don't believe in all the radical policy prescriptions of Barack Obama, then you believe in reserving freedom and prosperity and equality of opportunity to a privileged few.
You're a bad person.
Not only are you a bad person, it turns out, you might be a racist and also the founding fathers might be a racist.
So he says, I'm all in favor of founding principles, even though I might not really believe that the founding principles are in fact the founding principle.
Here's where we get into the radical 1619 project territory of Barack Obama's thought.
He says, I recognize there are those who believe it's time to discard the myth, that an examination of America's past and an even cursory glance at today's headlines show that this nation's ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start. And I confess, there have been times during the course of writing my book, as I've reflected on my presidency and all that's happened since, when I've had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was
that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we've been promised. I've been a better angel than Lincoln.
I don't know.
He doesn't know.
You know, he doesn't know.
He doesn't know if these were actually... Maybe the myth is wrong.
Maybe America was founded in racist, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, exploitation.
And then he says, what I can say for certain is I'm not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America.
Oh, so again, you guys, you just keep disappointing Barack Obama.
But here's the thing.
In order to not disappoint Barack Obama, what you have to do is you just have to concede.
That's what you need to do.
You need to concede to all of his radical opinions.
And if you don't, it's because you want a worse America.
You're a bad person.
This is AOC kind of language.
This is not the language of unity.
This is not the language of discussion.
This is not the language of a common vision for the future.
This is the language of radicalism.
Barack Obama speaks it fluently.
He's able to cover it in a way that the radicals in the squad aren't, but he's every bit as radical as they are.
It just takes him a little bit longer to word his way around it.
This is what made him good at what he did.
It's also what makes him an admigog.
OK, so let's talk for a second about Barack Obama's role in polarizing the country.
So I know that there is this myth, this media-created myth, that Barack Obama brought the country together.
He was great.
His only scandal was the tansuit.
Wonderful, wonderful man.
Captain Unity over here.
And that Barack Obama is a unifying figure in American public life.
He is absolutely not.
Barack Obama was a radical in sheep's clothing.
He always was.
If you read Dreams for My Father, he makes this very clear.
He says, in Dreams for My Father, that the same things drive terrorism in Jakarta as drive crime in the heart of Chicago, right?
Not ideology, not philosophy, but poverty, right?
There's a Marxist vision of how the world works, that poverty drives crime and terrorism, and if you just correct the economic problems, then everything is fine.
He also has a very essentialist vision of race in the United States.
His belief of race in the United States is that we ought not treat people as individuals, but that we ought to treat people as members of groups, as intersectional groups.
That you're a victim if you are a member of a particular group.
And in fact, because Barack Obama is a member of a group, because Barack Obama is black, Barack Obama is a victim too, and he makes this clear in his memoir.
He's a victim.
A man who was elected by an overwhelming majority of the voting public of the United States in both 2008 and 2012 is apparently a victim of deep-seated American racism.
And any inability to effectuate his agenda is because, number one, the American people are too stupid, and number two, because the American people are too racist.
This is the great shift that has happened in our politics.
If you look back to 2000 or even to 2004, there are pretty significant differences between the party, particularly in terms of economic vision.
But there was no great argument about the foundations of the country.
There was no great argument that America was essentially and in its root racist.
You heard people calling each other racist for no apparent reason and because they thought that it was politically popular to do so.
But the truth is that that argument was largely ignored.
It was largely seen as overwrought.
See, if you go back to the 1960s, when a lot of these issues first sprang full-blown into the American public consciousness, now, obviously, they'd been simmering under the surface, and some for quite good reason had been simmering under the surface.
And that bubble bursting in the 60s had some very good effects, and it had some very bad effects.
Obviously, the good effects would be the Civil Rights Movement.
The bad effects would be the complete destruction of traditional notions of morality, for example.
Okay, but in the 1960s, a couple of things happened.
One, there was a failure of the liberal vision when it came to the role of government in American life.
So in the 1960s, there was a vision.
It was a vision of the anointed that suggested that government could cure all problems.
And so government on an economic level was going to take on new burdens.
It was going to cure all the problems.
It was going to overthrow the rapacious rule of capitalism.
And it was going to guarantee the fundamental freedoms promised by FDR.
Freedom from fear, freedom from want, and all the rest of this, right?
This is the LBJ's great society program.
Government was now going to care for all of us.
So that was movement number one.
There was simultaneously a second movement, and that was a movement to fight racism in American life.
Initially an excellent, excellent movement because it was in fact fighting racism in American life.
It culminated in the Civil Rights Act.
Right, and all that was good.
And then in the late 60s, the notion of racism itself began to transmute.
Shelby Steele talks about this.
The definition of racism began to move from people thinking of each other as inferior based on race or crafting policy in order to make another race worse off, and it shifted into something significantly more vague.
Something that didn't make a whole lot of sense, right?
That was, any inequality of outcome could be attributable to the system.
The system was responsible for all inequality, and therefore the system itself was inequitable, and the system had to be torn down.
This was a perspective first mouthed in the late 1960s by Stokely Carmichael, Who at the time was the head of... It was before he was the head of the Black Panthers actually.
So Stokely Carmichael suggested institutional racism.
The idea was that any institution that ended with inequality between groups was a racist institution.
This could include things like freedom of speech.
If freedom of speech ended with more inequality between black and white, then freedom of speech itself was a tool of the powerful against the oppressed, right?
This is what Barack Obama is talking about in that little section of his memoir quoted earlier in The Atlantic, where he says, there are people who believe that all the systems of the United States are basically a myth, a cover for oppression and power dynamics.
Barack Obama kind of believes that too.
So that was a Stokely Carmichael point talking about the institutions of the United States.
He had these two simultaneous movements, right?
One was, That government had the power to correct all the economic ills of the entire society and fix everything.
And the second was that all of the institutions of government were themselves infused and infected with racism and bigotry and power dynamics and exploitation.
Well, it turns out over the course of the subsequent 20 or 30 years, both of these narratives started to fall apart.
So first of all, the narrative that government was capable of taking care of you through all circumstances and fixing all problems and solving inequality, it completely fell apart by the 1970s when the American economy started to collapse in on itself like a dying star.
It ended with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 after a decade of essentially economic Complete economic stagnation between the late 1960s and 1980.
Pretty much complete economic stagnation.
It ends with the Reagan Revolution.
And that culminates in Bill Clinton, Democrat, claiming that the era of big government is essentially over.
So that was line number one from the left that falls apart.
Then there's line number two from the left that falls apart.
And that is that there is no way to overcome our racism in the United States.
That what we have to do is we have to shift our thinking on racism so as to achieve equality of outcome.
And this results in an actual widening of gaps in the United States.
It results in a slower growth of the black middle class.
It results in serious crime problems because as the government starts to incentivize people to commit crimes and not punish crimes, you get this vast wave of crime, particularly in heavily minority areas that are disproportionately poor.
And so by 1994, the Republicans and the Democrats are getting together and they are saying, OK, this is not working.
We're going to need to actually crack down on crime.
What if we just treated everybody as an individual?
What if we treated everybody as an economic individual in charge of their own life?
The era of big government is over.
And what if we treated everybody as an individual in terms of personal responsibility?
If you commit a crime, no matter what your race, you're going to go to jail.
And if you are cheating welfare, we're not going to give you welfare.
Welfare reform is now going to be a bipartisan thing in order to promote work.
We're going to treat you as an individual.
We're not going to treat you as a member of a group that is owed some sort of reparations by a perversion of the system.
So both of these twin narratives from the 60s have basically died by the early 1990s.
And after the fall of the Soviet Union, they basically remain dead, right?
Even throughout the Bush administration, the growth of government never really stops after 9-11, right?
The growth of government really picks up and accelerates after 9-11.
But the basic idea in Americans' minds that government can't solve all your problems and also that people ought to be treated racially as individuals, right?
Everybody should be treated as an individual.
These basically become centralizing principles and they exist in both parties.
In 2008, Barack Obama runs on both those principles.
In 2008, Barack Obama says, we need change, right?
Because it's the middle of a recession.
We need change.
Fundamental change.
But he doesn't define the change.
And so people say, OK, well, he's sort of moderate, right?
Joe Biden himself says he's the first guy that white people find non-threatening.
And what he means by that is that he's not Jesse Jackson out there on the barricades shouting about how America is endemically racist.
So, Barack Obama comes along and he campaigns as basically blah.
He campaigns as unity candidate who in his very personage is going to declare an end to the racial conflict that has plagued the country for so long, the nation's founding sin.
He is going to alleviate that founding sin by allowing America to say, look how far we've come, look what we've been able to accomplish.
He comes in on the wings of eagles in 2008, blowing out John McCain, an actual war hero.
And he comes in on the wings of having like five minutes of legislative experience and making one speech in 2004 at the DNC.
That is his entire experience.
Okay, so he comes in, and then what does he proceed to do?
He proceeds to not only revivify both of the 1960s narratives, but to tie them together.
Right?
In his person, he proceeds to tie them together.
Two narratives again.
Government can solve all your problems.
And two, America, its systems are itself racist.
And what he says is, government can only solve all of your problems if the right people are running the government.
And also, if you refuse to acknowledge that government can solve all of your problems, it's because you want the systems to remain racist and exploitative.
And that's why Barack Obama can so easily shift into this language where he suggests, okay guys, you know, if you oppose my agenda, it's because you're racist.
It's because you don't like me personally.
It's not that you reject the fundamental notion that government can solve all these problems.
It's because you hate me.
It's because you're in favor of exploitation.
It's because you're in favor of racism.
So in his memoir, Barack Obama makes this absolutely clear.
This was always his campaign, right?
This is what he did in 2012.
He revivified those two dead narratives.
He tied them together.
He created a coalition out of it, the Coalition of the Ascendant.
And then he won in 2012.
And Democrats have been trying to remake that coalition ever since.
And the problem is that Joe Biden actually campaigned in the same way that Obama did in 2008.
But the coalition that he's relying upon is Barack Obama's 2012 coalition with a few add-ons.
The base is not Barack Obama's wide base of 2008.
The base is still that core of 2012 from Barack Obama.
And so he's going to be very hard-pressed to reject those people who made him and who are going to continue to support his agenda.
This is why the radicals are in charge.
So Barack Obama's memoir makes all of this perfectly clear, apparently.
According to CNN, which has an early copy of this huge doorstopper, Obama writes, Now it's weird because Donald Trump switched a bunch of states that Barack Obama had won.
deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.
Which is exactly why Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.
For millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.
Now it's weird because Donald Trump switched a bunch of states that Barack Obama had won.
Barack Obama won Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania.
He won Florida.
Donald Trump switched all of those.
He flipped all of those.
So were all those people not racist when Barack Obama was in office and then racist later?
How did that happen exactly?
But again, Barack Obama believes that anyone who opposes his agenda, the radical left agenda that says government can solve all your problems, government is the only thing we have in common, is what the DNC put up on its big board at the 2012 DNC.
If you don't believe that, it's because you hate Barack Obama.
It's because you hate black people according to Barack Obama.
And he says this over and over and over.
He says, quote, about Sarah Palin joining the ticket in 2008, quote, Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, and antipathy toward black and brown folks were finding their way to center stage.
Again, Barack Obama identifying himself as America, and if you oppose Barack Obama, you oppose America, and namely, you really, really don't like black people, is what Barack Obama suggests.
And he keeps suggesting it over and over and over.
There are only two reasons, according to Barack Obama, to ever oppose Barack Obama.
One is you were stupid, and the other one was you were racist.
It could also be both.
So in 2010, after his party got shellacked, because it turns out Americans reject it, Obamacare.
They did not want Obamacare.
Which to me was just as damning.
As far as I was concerned, the election didn't prove our agenda had been wrong.
Shocker.
It just proved that I'd failed to rally the nation, which to me was just as damning.
Oh, it was just about how the American people were too stupid to understand what he was saying.
Hey, Obama also says that the reason that he picked Joe Biden to go and negotiate with the Republicans, he literally says this, is because if he picked Joe Biden, Joe Biden was white.
And maybe he'd be able to get his agenda through.
Maybe he'd be able to get his radical agenda through if he put a white face on it.
Because again, the only reason to oppose the agenda was not because you opposed the agenda.
The only reason to oppose the agenda is because, you know, like black people.
He says, quote, One of the reasons I'd chosen Joe to act as an intermediary, in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen, was my awareness that in McConnell's mind, negotiations with the Vice President didn't inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with black, Muslim-Socialist Obama was bound to do.
Okay, so again, the idea here is that Joe Biden was only picked because he was white, right?
Because the American people are just a bunch of vicious, horrible racists.
He talks about the Henry Louis Gates incident.
He says the reactions my comments on on Gates this Henry Lewis Gates where he said the Cambridge police acted stupidly after arresting Gates after Gates refused to show ID.
He says my first indicator of how the issue of black folks in the police was more polarizing than just about any other subject in American life.
Those feelings just continued during the rise of Palin and the Tea Party Obama writes recalling how Michelle Obama caught a glimpse of a Tea Party rally on TV.
She seized the remote and turned off the set, her expression hovering somewhere between rage and resignation.
It's a trip, isn't it, she said, that they're scared of you, scared of us.
Again, that is what Barack Obama did to the country.
Instead of us being able to hash out economic issues, instead of us arguing about the size and scope of government, instead of us acknowledging two basic truths, people should be treated as individuals on the economic level and people should be treated as individuals With that regard to race, Barack Obama reversed both of them and tied them together.
That is the Democratic Party.
The reason this is important is not because of Barack Obama.
It's because the Democratic Party is now built on that fused pillar.
It is built on the graft between socialistic ideology and intersectional ideology.
They've been tied together, and that is the root of the Democratic Party today.
Democrats are not going to be able to escape this.
They cannot run away from it.
It was born in Barack Obama.
It is not going to die with Barack Obama.
It is now in the bloodstream and it ain't going away.
That ideology, that intersectional, socialistic ideology, that is not going away.
It has been revivified.
And if you think that Joe Biden is going to be able to ignore it, I have serious doubts that he will be able to ignore that.
Okay, so at the end of every week, I try to do a little bit of Bible talk because it's a little bit inspirational going into the weekend.
Since we are talking about socialism and property rights, There's been a weird idea in a lot of philosophy, a lot of Western philosophy, going all the way back, and not only Western philosophy, philosophy globally, that private property isn't evil.
If you read Rousseau, the idea is that everybody lived free, and the first person who put up a fence had somehow sinned against original creation.
There was this idea of the noble savage living in the wilderness and not believing in private property.
Now, as it turns out, on an anthropological level, that simply is not true.
People actually did mark off territory, they did claim territory, And that's always been true.
But the idea is that property itself is the root of all evil.
Now that is a misread of New Testament principles in Christian circles, right?
The actual quote from the New Testament suggests that greed is the root of all evil.
Not that property itself or property ownership is the root of all evil, but love of money.
Not money.
Love of money is the root of all evil.
The quote from the New Testament about how it's easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, that is descriptive.
It is not normative.
It doesn't mean that if you're rich, you can't enter heaven.
It means it's very difficult for a person who is rich to enter heaven because they have the lure of money at them at all times.
Okay, but one of the things about the Old Testament, the Old Testament is pretty damn clear that private property is not just something that is good, it is necessary.
That there is something endemic to human nature that claims property.
That property is something we have to recognize as something inherent.
It is not, in fact, a social construct.
It is not something that human beings placed on each other as a method of exploitation.
Property is a way for us to imprint our stamp on the world.
There's a great book by the historian Richard Pipes on property that is well worth getting.
He talks about this at length, the sort of ideology and philosophy of property.
Now, on the right, in American politics, There's a lot of talk about why private property is useful.
There's sort of a utilitarian take on capitalism, which is that capitalism works, right?
It makes everybody richer, it makes everybody more prosperous, it allows for more freedom, and thus it is good.
But there's very little sort of moral explanation of why property ownership is good.
Property ownership is good because you are not just your body.
You are the things around you, right?
When you think of your family, you think of them As an extension of you.
And you think of your house as an extension of you.
And you think of your things as an extension of you.
And this goes all the way back to childhood.
You can see little kids fight over objects all the time.
It actually takes civilization in order to get them to learn sharing.
But little kids have an innate capacity.
Animals have an innate capacity to claim things.
They want to claim the things around them.
That is not inherently bad.
What is, in fact, it can be very good because it allows people to stake a claim and then stand on that claim.
So that comes up in this week's Parsha, in this week's Torah portion that the Jews read every week.
This is the portion in which Sarah dies called Chayisara.
It's from the book of Genesis.
So after Sarah dies, Abraham is trying to find her a burial place.
And he goes to Hebron, and he buys the cave of Machpelah, Maarat Machpelah.
This is still now disputed territory.
It has always been Jewish territory.
According to Jewish philosophy, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Adam, are all buried.
I've actually been there.
It's an amazing place, Hebron.
It is in Judea and Samaria.
It has been made somewhat dangerous by the fact that there are a lot of terrorists who have tried to attack this particular area.
And Muslims also do not allow Jews to go into particular areas of the Mart Hamach Pella for most of the year.
But the place still exists.
That is the first territorial claim that the Jewish people make in the land of Israel through a property purchase.
And so what happens is that Abraham goes to Hebron.
He sees this cave.
He says, I want to buy that as a burial place for my wife.
And the people who own the place, they say, you know what?
We're just going to give it to you.
And he says, if it is your will that I bury my dead from before me, listen to me and entreat for me to Ephron, the son of Zohar, that he may give me Machpelah, that's a double cave, which belongs to him.
It's at the end of his field for a full price.
Let him give it to me in the midst for burial property.
Now Ephron was sitting in the midst of the sons of Heth, and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the hearing of the sons of Heth of all those who had come into the gate of a city, saying, No, my lord, listen to me.
I've given you the field and the cave that is in it.
Behold, I've given it to you before the eyes of the sons of my people.
I've given it to you.
Bury your dead.
And Abraham spoke to Ephron in the hearing of the people.
And he said, but if you only would listen to me, I'm giving the money for the field.
Take it and I'll bury my dead there.
And Ephron said, my Lord, listen to me, a piece of land with 400 shekels of silver.
What is it between me and you?
Bury your dead.
And Abraham listened to Ephron and Abraham weighed out to Ephron the silver he had named in the hearing of the sons of Heth, 400 shekels of silver accepted by the merchant.
Right, so the question is, it seems like Ephron is trying to do a nice thing.
Why is Abraham so insistent that he buy the field?
And the answer is because property claims matter.
And as you can tell, certainly in the Middle East, property claims matter.
Property ownership matters.
And a consensual exchange of property between people is an endemic good because it clarifies the boundaries between people.
When we do not believe that property matters, you end up encroaching on those boundaries rather regularly.
Those boundaries become points of contention rather than points of clarification.
There's the old Robert Frost phrase that good fences make good neighbors.
That happens to be true.
Property ownership makes for a polite society.
It makes for a better society.
It makes for a freer society because it is an extension of the reality that there are individuals who have claims to things that you do not have claims to.
And that is something that is worth remembering as we move forward into a brave new era.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here on Monday.
Try not to burn everything down.
See you then.
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