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Dec. 2, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:08:36

Why Americans Have Election Trust Issues | Ep. 1148

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	Democrats continue to troll as the Trump team tries to lay out their legal case.
	The media continue their never-ending quest to cover for Joe Biden's picks.
	And a prominent actress declares herself a man.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Grab your mobile phone, dial pound 250, say Ben Shapiro.
	When you do, You'll save 50% off your first month. Dial pound 250. Say keyword Ben Shapiro. Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless. Go check them out right now by dialing pound 250 and saying keyword Ben Shapiro to save 50% off your first month and save month on month every month for the rest of time. Go check them out right now. Dial pound 250 and say keyword Ben Shapiro to get started. Okay, so one of the things that members of the media have been noticing is that there are a lot of Trump supporters who don't seem to trust the outcome of the election.
	Now, they're treating this with a great deal of shock, which is kind of amazing, since as of, like, 2017, a vast majority of Democrats have suggested that the 2016 results have been actively warped by not only Russian meddling, but by Russian vote hacking.
	There is serious doubt as to the electoral veracity of the 2016 election from Democrats.
	And now it's 2020, and now Republicans have questions about the electoral veracity of the 2020 election.
	And some of that is based on bad information that's out there, and some of that is based on the fact That what we saw across the country, at least in a huge number of swing states, were vastly different voting procedures than we have ever seen before.
	Procedures changed to allow millions of mail-in votes, whereas before you actually had to request an absentee ballot, now it was just sent to your house in some of these states.
	We saw procedures changed to the effect that over 50% of votes in many of these states were actually coming in early.
	I'm not a fan of early voting because there is often late-breaking news that affects exactly how you are going to vote.
	I mean, there's a good shot that if, for example, the Moderna vaccine numbers had been announced the week before the election, and then people had been voting on Election Day, that might have made a difference.
	Okay, so a lot of the procedures change.
	There's a lot of ballot harvesting in various states.
	There were a lot of open questions.
	And more than that, when we really talk about the fact that both sides, and it really is a both sides thing, both sides don't trust election results that don't swing their way, that goes to the lack of trust that is now undergirding our political system.
	And that lack of trust pre-existed Donald Trump.
	There's something that's been going on in the United States for a very long time.
	And that is that one side of the political aisle has been castigating as evil the other side of the political aisle.
	And then the other side of the political aisle began to think, okay, if they're castigating me as evil, maybe they're the ones who are evil.
	There's some interesting poll statistics starting in the 1990s showing that while Republicans mostly saw Democrats as people they disagreed with, Democrats mostly saw Republicans as people who were morally bigoted and morally wrong.
	And then, around 2008-2009, you started to see Republican feelings about Democrats shoot up into the stratosphere.
	You saw them starting to match Democratic numbers with regard to how much they thought that Democrats were not just wrong, Democrats were morally wrong.
	And we've been there basically ever since.
	And that is the result of a long-time campaign to castigate one side of the political aisle as morally bereft.
	And to gaslight everybody.
	And so one of the things that has happened also is that a media infrastructure, which now insists that the election was absolutely pure and clean as the driven snow, and there was no voter fraud anywhere, which is not necessary in order for them to ensure that Joe Biden maintains the vote and becomes president-elect, right?
	All the Democrats have to show, really, and all the media have to say is, sure, there was voter fraud, sure, there was voter irregularity, but it doesn't amount to the sort of numbers that would shift the election.
	That is a fairly well-justified statement, given the facts that are currently on the ground, but they're not doing that.
	Instead, they are saying that there is no voter fraud and no voter irregularity.
	The same media who declared that the voting systems, the Diebold voting machines, were hacked in 2004 and took that absolutely seriously, they suggested for several years on end that President Trump was an illegitimate president.
	Paul Krugman called Trump illegitimate, and then like two days ago, he tweeted out, nobody ever called Trump illegitimate.
	That sort of gaslighting is apt to make people wary about trusting the system.
	See, when you think that your opponents are morally bad, and not only that, when you see the possibility of some sort of crime to shift the results of elections, you're going to start to get wary.
	And I think a lot of Republicans look at this election cycle.
	This is not to say that they are right about the results of the election.
	And as we will see, the evidence of voter fraud and voter irregularity, there's evidence that it has happened.
	There's not evidence to suggest that it overwhelms the numbers of vote differentials that we see in states like Michigan or Pennsylvania or Georgia or Arizona, for example.
	But when Republican voters, when conservatives look at the situation across the country and they say, here are a bunch of Democrats who have said that they want to remake the United States Senate, that they want to get rid of the Electoral College, that they want to stack the Supreme Court.
	And we've had situations in the past, in very narrow elections, where we know that Democrats have engaged in soft forms of voter irregularity, at the very least.
	The one that comes to mind here is Norm Coleman losing his Senate seat in Minnesota to Al Franken.
	That actually created the 60th Senate seat for Obamacare.
	When Republicans look at that and they say, okay, they had the motive, right?
	If they could cheat to stop Trump, would they cheat?
	See, there are poll statistics showing that actually about 40% of Democrats think that if Democrats could have cheated, they would have cheated.
	That was a Gallup poll recently.
	So, there's a high level of mistrust in the other side.
	There's motive.
	Is there opportunity?
	Well, maybe there's opportunity, given all of the shifting variables of the vote count, given the fact that you have these heavy mail-in votes, given the fact that we've never seen anything like this in terms of the mail-in voting and the universal balloting.
	We've never seen turnout like this, at least not for a century.
	So they have the motive and the opportunity.
	And the question is, did they have the means, right?
	So did this happen, right?
	Usually a crime is motive, means, opportunity.
	Did they have the motive, means, opportunity?
	We know they have the motive.
	And we don't know about the means and the opportunity yet.
	I think that what Team Trump is trying to show is they had the opportunity, but they really haven't shown the means and they haven't shown that the actual crime occurred to the extent necessary to reverse the results of these elections thus far, right?
	But the motive itself is the rationale for why you are seeing this vast political divide.
	Because if you believe that the other side is willing to cheat, wouldn't you be suspicious that they did cheat?
	And so when people kind of treat everybody who is suspicious about the election as a rube or an idiot, That seems to be missing the point to me.
	And the point here is that you have spent years on end suggesting that you're willing to break any rule.
	You're willing to do anything in pursuit of Donald Trump.
	So why exactly would you suspect that Republicans would suddenly buy into him losing legitimately, especially when the polls seem to be so wrong in so many states, and especially when Republicans overperform the polls everywhere?
	You can understand, on a personal level, why Trump would look and say, okay, hold on.
	Republicans did really well across the country.
	I'm the only one who didn't do well?
	I'm the most well-known Republican in the country.
	Why?
	Now, listen, there's a countervailing logic here, which is that Trump is the most polarizing political figure of any of our lifetimes.
	That Donald Trump has probably more haters than he does people who absolutely love him, right?
	And so there's an alternative explanation, which is that, yes, he drove a lot of people to the polls, but he also drove a lot of people to the polls against him, right?
	That is perfectly plausible as well.
	But to understand why people are so invested in the election fight, you have to understand the gaslighting that has been going on for years and the moral consternation that has been directed at conservatives and Republicans for years.
	So to take an example, so Barack Obama, now considered widely by the media as a moderate unifying president, which is just insane because we are all old enough to remember Barack Obama being president.
	He was not moderate and he was not unifying.
	He was deeply divisive.
	I think in many ways the 2012 election broke the country because I think that Barack Obama in 2004 campaigned as a moderate unifying figure.
	That was his 2004 DNC speech.
	Go back and watch it.
	It sounds more like George W. Bush.
	Even though he was campaigning for John Kerry, it sounds more like George W. Bush than it does like Barack Obama circa 2010.
	Go back to his 2008 campaign, and he was campaigning as Captain Unity.
	Then in 2010, he started to realize that if he could cast all of his political opponents as villains in a morality play, where he was standing for a new racially multicultural system and his opponents were standing for bigoted American racism, and he was the person who's gonna transform the system, then he could still win election, even though he had significant opposition and wasn't doing a particularly good job.
	And then he won in 2012 on that basis.
	Now that president, that very, very divisive president, a president who routinely disparaged the Constitution, and suggested the Constitution of the United States was a barrier to progress in the United States.
	A president who himself declared repeatedly that he did not have the constitutional power to simply not enforce immigration law and then decided, you know what, I'm just going to go ahead and do it anyway, and then declared he was not going to enforce immigration law with regard to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the DACA program.
	Now, Barack Obama is going on his book tour.
	This book includes a bunch of rips on the American system.
	It includes the basic idea that everyone who opposed him was a racist.
	And yet he is being propped up by the media as somebody who has nothing but moral leisure domain to say exactly what he pleases.
	He is a person with unending moral certitude and he's being granted unlimited moral capital by the media.
	So here is Barack Obama saying to Stephen Colbert, an absolute sycophant.
	He's no longer even a pretend comedian, Stephen Colbert.
	He's just an absolute democratic sycophant.
	That's all he does for a living.
	I mean, he's no different than Brian Stelter at this point.
	Here is Stephen Colbert with Barack Obama, and Barack Obama saying that he should have known that the Constitution didn't have to be followed.
	Well, you did know that, which is why you consistently violated it, but it's this sort of stuff that drives Republicans up a wall to the point where they say, we don't trust the media, we don't trust the systems designed by Democrats, and we don't trust the media to talk about systems that are very often designed by Democrats or lauded by Democrats.
	Here is Barack Obama, again, driving people up a wall.
	We found out from your successor that there's a whole bunch of stuff you don't actually have to do.
	And people still can see you president.
	Who knew?
	Do you look at him and go, like, I didn't have to do any of that stuff?
	I know.
	I don't do this stuff?
	Are there any things that he chucked out you went, oh, if only I'd known I didn't have to do that.
	I think there's a lot.
	I thought... Respond to subpoenas?
	You know, follow the Constitution?
	Yeah, that's a drag.
	Okay, the idea that Barack Obama was a constitutional president... I mean, Stephen Colbert is such a damned joker.
	What a liar and a joker he is.
	My goodness.
	The idea that Barack Obama followed the Constitution or had one ounce of anything beyond disdain for the Constitution is a laughable joke.
	And it drives people up a wall.
	It drives people nuts.
	It drives me up a wall.
	I wrote an entire book about how Barack Obama did not follow the Constitution over and over and over again.
	Barack Obama suggesting that I love that Stephen Colbert says to Barack Obama's face, you know, did you know that you didn't have to respond to subpoenas?
	He literally invoked executive privilege to stop Eric Holder from having to testify and turn over documents in Fast and Furious.
	Yes, Barack Obama was very well aware he did not have to respond to subpoenas.
	And by the way, In very many cases, it turns out constitutionally, the executive does not have to respond to all subpoenas that are put forth by the legislature.
	But the basic idea here that Barack Obama was a great defender of the Constitution, while Donald Trump is some sort of great underminer of the Constitution, is nuts!
	It's nuts!
	And when you get told over and over again that things that are not true are true, and that people who violated the Constitution are actually constitutional defenders, and people who are deeply divisive, like Barack Obama, and sneer at the American people, like Barack Obama, are actually defenders of the common man and the Constitution, at a certain point, You, too, are going to say, to hell with all of this.
	I don't believe anything you have to tell me, up to and including your sudden belief in the American electoral system.
	Remember, just about six weeks ago, before the election, Democrats were the ones who were out there saying that the electoral system was rigged.
	They were saying that Donald Trump was going around burning mailboxes and removing them from street corners.
	And now they flip on a dime and they say the election is absolutely clean.
	You can see why people are a little suspicious.
	Now, listen, suspicion doesn't mean that the election gets overturned.
	You actually have to prove in court your case.
	But to pretend that people have no real emotional reason to be suspicious or concerned?
	That's ridiculous!
	Of course they have reason to be suspicious and concerned.
	To pretend that the American people are supposed to just accept on a dime the media's shift from Trump's going to steal the election to Trump definitely was unable to steal the election and Biden didn't steal the election.
	It's a pretty wild shift, is it not?
	The shift from Barack Obama is the greatest, unifying, incredible figure of all time, a constitutional president, to Joe Biden will be exactly that, and Donald Trump was an outlier.
	Like, we all know that you people are lying.
	We know that you are lying, and we know Democrats are lying, and we know that the media are abetting those lies.
	We're gonna get to more of this in just one second, because this is my firm belief, is that Barack Obama drove the country insane, and that we've been basically insane ever since.
	And the media were complicit in this.
	And Barack Obama doing his book tour right now?
	And repeating lie after lie after lie about America, about his own administration, about what he was as president?
	And the media just parroting that crap?
	All that's doing is spinning this stuff up.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so it is not just Barack Obama engaging in this sort of gaslighting.
	Susan Rice, who lied to the American people repeatedly about Benghazi.
	You'll recall that she suggested that it was essentially a spontaneous expression of rage at a random YouTube video.
	It was ridiculous.
	Susan Rice, who is a radical on foreign policy, radically anti-Israel, radically against American power exerted in the world.
	She certainly was no friend to transparency.
	Susan Rice, who wrote an outgoing document on the way out of the White House saying, and by the way, we did everything right on this Russia probe.
	Bye, catch you later.
	Note to file.
	We are amazing.
	Susan Rice, friend of democracy, she writes a piece today in the New York Times called Our Democracy's Near-Death Experience.
	Now is no time for complacency.
	The next Congress must shore up our institutions.
	It appears our democracy dodged a bullet, or more precisely, multiple concerted efforts by the president, To torpedo its very foundations.
	Now again, hearing from Democrats about torpedoing the foundations of the democracy after a three and a half year campaign to oust President Trump based on Russian collusion bullcrap is pretty rich.
	It's pretty rich.
	But I'm up for it.
	I mean, let's be lectured on democracy by Susan Rice.
	She says, while President Trump rages relentlessly about election fraud, many Republican leaders continue to parrot false denials of the validity of President-elect Joe Biden's clear victory.
	Yet, so far, our democracy has withstood the greatest stress test of our lifetimes.
	Okay, this is not the greatest stress test of our lifetimes.
	It's not even close to the greatest stress test of our lifetimes.
	I mean, seriously, I would say that COVID is a greater stress test of the democracy considering how many individual liberties have been violated by state and local actors than anything that Trump has done with regard to the election.
	The systems have held.
	We have courts in place.
	State legislatures have voted to certify.
	Governors have voted to certify.
	This stress test has not been particularly compelling, frankly, in terms of the impact that it has done to the system itself.
	And when we were talking about stress to the Constitution of the United States, it seems to me that Obamacare, which mandated that you buy health insurance, the Obamacare mandate, which was unconstitutional in the extreme, was more of a stress test for the Constitution than anything that Donald Trump has done as President of the United States.
	But that's not Susan Rice's case.
	She is a defender of democracy, guys.
	And you should trust her, because she is trustworthy.
	She says Mr. Trump and his political allies have been employing nearly every weapon at their disposal to try to retain the White House, notwithstanding the will of the people.
	She says Trump supporters worked assiduously to suppress the vote by denigrating the legitimacy of mail-in ballots during a pandemic.
	Okay, so we're still gonna go.
	These same people who keep saying that the vote was the cleanest ever, they're also saying that Trump was responsible for voter suppression.
	Remember, these are the same jackals who suggest that Stacey Abrams is the actual governor of Georgia, thanks to no information whatsoever of voter suppression in Georgia.
	Seriously, what was the smear?
	That Hunter Biden was a bag man for himself and maybe for other members of the family?
	Seems pretty well substantiated.
	First, the Trump campaign labored to concoct bogus conspiracy theories to discredit Biden by falsely smearing his son Hunter.
	Falsely smearing?
	Where is the smear?
	Seriously, what was the smear?
	That Hunter Biden was a bag man for himself and maybe for other members of the family?
	Seems pretty well substantiated.
	That's not a smear.
	She says Trump supporters work to denigrate mail-in balloting by saying that it's corrupt to send people mail-in votes without them requesting it.
	That doesn't seem like it's undermining democracy.
	That seems actually kind of plausible, does it not?
	I mean, I moved from California to Florida.
	I voted in Florida.
	My old address in California received mail-in votes.
	It received mail-in ballots.
	I didn't use them, obviously, but they were out there.
	That's not a good thing.
	She says, third, some of Trump's most ardent supporters intimidated voters at the polls, heeding calls to stand by and go into the polls and watch very carefully.
	They deployed, sometimes armed, in black and brown communities under the guise of ensuring no fraudulent votes were cast.
	Okay, if you actually engage in voter intimidation, that's criminal activity and will be prosecuted.
	There are plenty of political people who are at the polls standing outside of the demarcated line beyond which you are not allowed to do politics.
	And then she goes forth, in the run up to election day, Trump dispatched an army of litigants to enlist the courts in curtailing access to the polls.
	Oh, you mean that he filed lawsuits, which is like the definition of doing a legal thing since you are now filing lawsuits.
	But she says, and this undermined democracy.
	So what do we have to do?
	What do we have to do?
	She says the lesson we must learn is not a reassuring one.
	A determined autocrat in the White House poses a grave threat to our democratic institutions and can severely undermine faith in our elections, particularly when backed by partisans in Congress.
	Oh, you don't say.
	I look forward to hearing how Democrats plan to alleviate this problem of autocrats in the White House overrunning the boundaries of the Constitution and perverting the American people's perspective on what the values of the United States are.
	Tell me more, Obama administration official.
	So, she says, what is the solution?
	To vote out Republican incumbent senators in Georgia.
	That's the answer, because then Congress can apply some of its lessons.
	So, for example, they could enact the For the People Act to combat corruption, strengthen ethics rules, and improve voter access, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the protections of the 1965 legislation.
	That would require, by the way, the federal government to give preclearance to redistricting in a variety of southern states.
	So it'd be good.
	Democrats could now draw the districts, despite the fact that states are given the power to draw the districts.
	That would be the idea here from Susan Rice.
	Also, if you elect Democrats to the Georgia Senate.
	According to Susan Rice, you can fix all of the problems with the system, presumably by getting rid of the Electoral College, or moving to do so, by packing the Supreme Court, which is something the Democrats have been threatening to do, and by willy-nilly adding states like Puerto Rico and Washington DC to the Senate, thereby stacking the Senate in favor of Democrats.
	Yeah, all of that is definitely going to shore up democracy.
	Why do people have trust issues, guys?
	I don't get it.
	Why do people have trust issues?
	And meanwhile, the media continue to demonstrate why people have trust issues by defending literally everything that any Democrat will ever do.
	So, for example, the incoming Biden team, right?
	One of the people who is going to be joining that team is Jen Psaki.
	Okay, and Jennifer Psaki is a longtime Obama-era official.
	She was at the State Department.
	We've talked about her on the show.
	Then she went to CNN, which is basically just moving over to the PR department for the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.
	Now she's moving back into government because there's that revolving door again.
	Okay, so over the past... Why don't people trust the system, guys?
	So over the past 24 hours, a picture emerged that she tweeted out.
	It's her own damn fault because she's an idiot.
	She tweeted out a picture of herself meeting with Russian officials wearing one of those kind of furry Russian hats whose names I don't remember.
	And on the front of it was the Russian Red Star, like the Soviet-era Red Star with the hammer and sickle on the hat.
	It was a pink hat with the Soviet-era Red Star with the hammer and sickle.
	Okay, and USA Today, so people on the right started tweeting this out, saying, yeah, that sounds like not a person I want in charge of communications.
	Okay, that sounds like not great.
	Okay, so, USA Today fact-checked the photo.
	Right, here is USA Today's fact-check.
	Why don't we trust our media?
	The claim, a photo shows Jen Psaki, Joe Biden's pick for press secretary, wearing a hammer and sickle hat while posing with officials from Russia.
	Our ruling, missing context.
	That is not a fact check, okay?
	A fact check is false or true, not missing context.
	Missing context is a political spin by definition.
	If I say two plus two equals four, and you say fact check, missing context, like what?
	No, first you have to evaluate whether the claim itself is true.
	It is true.
	It is true.
	Matt Wolking, a spokesperson for President Trump, took to Twitter and shared that photo.
	He said, here's Jen Psaki hugging Russia's foreign minister and Russia's chief foreign affairs propagandist while wearing a pink hammer and sickle hat.
	And apparently, so USA Today fact-checked this and they said, well, you know, it's missing context.
	What exactly is the context?
	The context is that she was pictured with then-Secretary of State John Kerry and officials from Russia, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova.
	They just completed a diplomatic meeting in Paris as part of a run-up to peace talks.
	And they brought unusual gifts, like Kerry brought Idaho potatoes for Lavrov, and Lavrov had a gift for Psaki.
	I failed to see how this undermines the fact check.
	Why is that missing context?
	That is not missing context.
	That's a reality.
	The fact that it never occurred to her, hey, maybe it's a bad idea to put on a hat with a logo that represents the murder of tens of millions of human beings.
	That should say something, but no, don't worry.
	Jen Psaki is wonderful.
	The media have told us so, and we must trust the media.
	We must trust them.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	So again, the media's coverage of Jen Psaki.
	Here's the New York Times take on Jen Psaki.
	You ready for this?
	Okay, by the way, should mention, Jen Psaki responded to this photo of Jen Psaki posted by Jen Psaki of Jen Psaki wearing a hat with a hammer and sickle on it.
	By tweeting this, quote, Oh my God, this is so rich.
	So a few notes.
	One, the entire democratic infrastructure repeated the propaganda that Donald Trump was a Russian tool for three years.
	For three years, everyone in the media, everyone.
	Anyone who repeats it is unwitting or not.
	Simply a puppet of the propaganda machine.
	Oh my God, this is so rich.
	So a few notes.
	One, the entire democratic infrastructure repeated the propaganda that Donald Trump was a Russian tool for three years.
	For three years, everyone in the media, everyone.
	So were they all unwitting tools of the Russian propaganda machine?
	Second thing, she posted the photo in the first place.
	That's not Russian disinformation.
	You don't just get, like, this is, this is the part that's going to drive everybody up a wall, is that the media proclaim that Jen Psaki is actually a representative of truth.
	But according to Jen Psaki, Jen Psaki posting a photo of Jen Psaki posing, wearing a hat with a hammer and sickle on it is Russian disinformation.
	I mean, that's some real deep cover right there.
	The Russians somehow got to Jen Psaki several years ago to post disinformation that would be used against Jen Psaki later.
	The Russians are so good at this crap, they went back in time and they somehow turned Jen Psaki of 2014 so that Jen Psaki in 2020 would be in trouble now.
	But don't worry, guys.
	She is an expositor of pure truth.
	Here's the New York Times' take on Jen Psaki.
	Mr. Biden's choice of Jennifer Psaki, 42, a veteran of the Obama administration, who is generally viewed by reporters as fair and accessible, as his chief spokeswoman embodies that return to normalcy approach.
	Mr. Biden, officials said, was particularly drawn to Ms.
	Psaki by her background at the State Department.
	There, she worked under Secretary of State John Kerry and grew comfortable delivering 90-minute briefings on foreign policy issues like a dispute over the South China Sea.
	At the White House, Psaki intends to bring back the daily press briefing, which has all but been phased out over the past four years.
	It is not clear, however, when those sessions might resume, given the constraints of the pandemic.
	But Ms.
	Psaki views a central part of her job as restoring faith in the words spoken from behind the podium.
	The clown games are over, said Susan Rice, who went out on national TV and lied to the American people over and over about Benghazi.
	Jen will represent the professionalism and decency and commitment to transparency that has been a hallmark of Joe Biden's career.
	Yes, when I think of Joe Biden, I think of a transparent, a commitment to transparency, particularly with regard to MBNA and other credit card companies located in Delaware, who are basically helping to finance his real estate purchases in sweetheart deals.
	He's Captain Transparency, is Joe Biden.
	Who knew?
	Who knew?
	But don't worry, guys.
	They're going to tell you the truth about the election.
	Now, again, does this mean, does any of this mean that the election has been proved to be fraudulent?
	No, you actually have to prove that in court.
	But can you see why people might be just a tad suspicious when the media overwhelmingly proclaimed that the election was fine?
	There's a knee-jerk reaction that is understandable, which is if the media says it, it probably isn't true.
	I get it.
	I do.
	I understand it.
	Here's another example of this.
	So Janet Yellen, she's been widely praised by the media as a consensus pick.
	Now she served under Barack Obama as the Federal Reserve chairperson.
	And there she was very much in favor of a sort of inflationary approach to the currency.
	She's very much in favor of lowering interest rates.
	Well, yesterday, she did a presser in which she talked about using the Treasury Department in order to promote certain goals.
	Now, last I checked, the Treasury Department was basically there to ensure the stability of the American currency.
	That's what the Treasury Department is there to do.
	Not according to Janet Yellen, it's not.
	According to Janet Yellen, a moderate figure well-beloved by Wall Street, according to your mainstream media, she says that she's going to use the Treasury Department to resolve racial inequality and climate change.
	She doesn't explain how, but sure, grab control of the nation's monetary supply and use it to press forward your particular brand of radical politics.
	That sounds like a real moderate thing to me.
	Here's Janet Yellen being a quote-unquote moderate.
	Out of our collective pain as a nation, we will find collective purpose to control the pandemic and build our economy back better than before.
	To rebuild our infrastructure and create better jobs.
	To invest in our workforce.
	To advance racial equity and make sure the economic recovery includes everyone.
	To address the climate crisis with American ingenuity and American jobs.
	Oh, so we're just gonna blow money through a leaf blower, basically, to favored members of the Biden coalition.
	But don't worry, she's a moderate guy.
	She's a total, total moderate.
	And why exactly would we have doubts about electoral veracity when it comes to the fact that we still have, we are now over a, about a month away from the election, right?
	Today is December 2nd.
	The election happened November 3rd.
	They're still counting votes in places like New York and Iowa.
	Not kidding.
	And it's getting pretty dicey in these vote counts.
	According to Politico, a month after Election Day, razor-thin congressional elections in an open Southeast Iowa seat and the upstate New York seat held by Democratic Representative Anthony Brindisi are still unresolved, with Democrats barely trailing in both districts.
	The implications are unusually serious in a tightly divided House.
	The latest blow for Democrats came Monday, when Iowa officials certified Republican Marionette Miller-Meeks as the winner of her race after a recount found her leading Democrat Rita Hart by just six votes out of 394,000 cast.
	394,000 casts, 0.002 percentage points.
	When we began this recount, Rita Hart was down by 47 votes.
	Hart campaign manager Zach Munier said in a statement Monday, Hart of course says that she is going to launch a legal challenge.
	Meanwhile, a recount has yet to begin in New York, where the disorganized, decentralized election system has muddled the outcome of a close rematch between Brindisi and former GOP representative Claudia Tenney, currently separated by roughly a dozen votes.
	There's still a thousand ballots remaining in dispute or uncounted, including large numbers of provisional ballots, and these ballots are suspiciously trickling in just in time to be counted.
	Our campaign is committed to seeing that all and only legal votes count, said Sean Kennedy, a Tenney spokesperson.
	The voters' will must be respected and the integrity of the election process maintained.
	So what exactly is happening in New York?
	This one's real rich, okay?
	A New York state judge is reviewing updated county vote totals on Monday afternoon before setting the next steps, which could include a re-canvas.
	So, excellent.
	We're gonna have a New York State judge, presumably a Democrat, look over all of the balloting.
	Yeah, this shouldn't make you suspicious, like, at all.
	It's all gonna be fine.
	It's all gonna be fine.
	Meanwhile, over in Iowa, Hart has two days to contest under state law.
	Now that Iowa's Board of Canvas certified, Miller makes his win.
	Her challenge would be referred to a judicial panel that would include the Iowa State Supreme Court Justice to determine the victor of the election.
	Meanwhile, the House could simply refuse to seat Miller-Meeks and create a committee to review the matter.
	So, Politico's already paving the way for election results not to be respected in Iowa.
	Wow, you mean Nancy Pelosi might actually set aside election results with the help of her Democratic friend so as to ensure that a seat remains Democratic in Iowa?
	Does that count as undermining democracy or not?
	Just for the record.
	Is that undermining democracy or not?
	So, good times in these voting systems.
	And all of this brings us to the latest with regard to President Trump's election legal moves and where we currently stand.
	We'll get to all of that in just one minute.
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	♪ Okay, so here is where things currently stand.
	So, over the last 24 hours, the head of the DOJ, A.G.
	Barr, he has said that he has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.
	Now, what he didn't say is there is no voter fraud.
	Because, obviously, in a country of 158 million voters, which is how many people voted in this last election cycle, there will be some voter fraud and there will be some voter irregularity.
	He has said that we have not seen evidence that would overcome the barriers The electoral barriers for Trump in places like Michigan, 150,000 vote differential, or in Pennsylvania, about an 82,000 vote differential, or Wisconsin, about a 20,000 vote differential, or Georgia, about a 13,000 vote differential, right?
	That's what Barr is saying.
	And, you know, I would take Barr at his word on that, given the fact that Barr is not exactly a Trump opponent, right?
	I mean, Barr has done a good job as AG following the law.
	So Barr, Immediately drew criticism from the Trump attorneys.
	The Trump attorneys put out a statement in which they said, with all due respect to the AG, there hasn't been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation, which is kind of fair.
	I mean, the DOJ has not been doing a full-scale investigation.
	We have gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they've not examined.
	We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud.
	As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ.
	The Justice Department also hasn't audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth.
	Nonetheless, we will continue our pursuit of the truth through the judicial system and state legislatures and continue toward the Constitution's mandate and ensuring that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is not.
	That is Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, Trump's legal team.
	Now, here is the thing.
	If they wish to actually overturn the results of the election, it's not going to be enough to be doing these sort of public-facing press conferences with members of state legislatures.
	Those state legislatures are not going to vote to overturn the results of the election.
	It's just not going to happen.
	Let's be perfectly frank about this.
	The idea that Republican legislatures in places like Arizona or Michigan or Pennsylvania are going to disenfranchise what people think is the current counts in these places without evidence that all those votes are that without real evidence that the votes themselves have been tampered with.
	What we have right now from the Giuliani-Ellis team really is a lot of allegations of the possibility of vote hampering.
	And we have certain allegations that people think they have seen things, but they have not provided any supportive evidence to back that up.
	If you think that Republican legislatures in those states are, like just as a realistic descriptive matter, not what they ought to do, what they are going to do.
	If you think the Pennsylvania legislature or the Michigan state legislature is going to disenfranchise millions of its own voters, In order to throw out the purported results of those elections on the basis of these sort of press conferences?
	That is wrong.
	Now, does every one of these allegations deserve to be addressed?
	Absolutely.
	But they need to be brought in court.
	Okay, court, court, court.
	This needs to be brought in court as a matter of process.
	If you want the election results changed, this cannot be done in front of these hearings, in front of the state legislature.
	They need to be brought in court.
	There are legal penalties and legal sanctions brought for attorneys who make false claims in court.
	There are legal sanctions that can be brought for people who are going to be saying false things in court.
	So if you're going to swear under oath and you do that in some sort of hearing with the state legislature, yes, theoretically, they could go after you for perjury.
	The likelihood of that is extraordinarily low.
	If you do it in court, the likelihood is higher.
	That means that you actually have skin in the game.
	So, bring it in court.
	Listen, I would love nothing better than for Trump to retain the White House come January.
	But you're gonna need to actually bring the evidence in court at this point.
	So right now, the Trump campaign is bringing some of these cases in court in Wisconsin.
	They filed a petition on Tuesday challenging Wisconsin's presidential vote results with the state Supreme Court.
	The petition was submitted as Trump appointed U.S.
	Attorney General William Barr said the DOJ didn't find evidence of widespread voter fraud sufficient to overturn the election.
	The petition alleges that Wisconsin election officials were directed to fill in missing information on ballot envelopes, issued absentee ballots without receiving applications, and allowed people to improperly claim a confined absentee voting status.
	The petition takes issue with election officials in Madison hosting an event where officials collected and checked ballots in city parks, not polling stations.
	Election law experts said the case might have a better chance than other recent lawsuits.
	The court is highly unlikely to grant the campaign's request to invalidate 221,000 absentee ballots.
	Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes.
	This is one of the cases where there's actually a pretty good case here that election law was violated.
	But the question is, is the proper remedy to disenfranchise all of the absentee voters?
	So Trump team says, yeah, because we don't know how many of those absentee voters were actually victimized.
	We don't know what the numbers here are.
	And the courts have basically said, we're not going to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters based on the speculative possibility that some of these people voted illegitimately.
	So the fact that the case is legally well predicated, which the Wisconsin case appears to be better predicated, or the fact that, for example, the Pennsylvania case that is being pushed by Team Trump is well predicated, does not mean the remedy that is sought is going to be the remedy that is actually provided by a court.
	So for example, in Pennsylvania, again, there are grounds for these lawsuits.
	The problem is that the remedy that the Trump team wants, which is to overturn the election results, I mean, frankly speaking, courts are unlikely to grant it.
	OK, but here is Senator Ted Cruz pointing out that the Supreme Court should take up an emergency appeal filed in the Supreme Court challenging election results in Pennsylvania.
	He points out the Pennsylvania Constitution requires in-person voting, except in narrow and defined circumstances.
	Late last year, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law that purported to allow universal mail-in voting, notwithstanding the Pennsylvania Constitution's express prohibition.
	This appeal argues Pennsylvania cannot change the rules in the middle of the game.
	If Pennsylvania wants to change how voting occurs, the state must follow the law to do so.
	Okay, now, that is not wrong.
	That is not wrong.
	Right?
	He says, ordinarily, the U.S.
	Supreme Court would stay out of election disputes, especially concerning state law.
	These are not ordinary times.
	So, you know, the case that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and some of the federal courts have made is this is an internal Pennsylvania issue.
	The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gets to determine the voting procedures along with the legislature.
	This really is not up to the federal Supreme Court.
	For example.
	But, with that said, a well-predicated lawsuit, right, a lawsuit that has some legit claims, that does not necessarily mean that the remedy that you seek is going to be the remedy that you actually get.
	Meanwhile in Arizona, there was a small victory for the Arizona Republican Party.
	According to the Arizona Mirror, Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelly Ward's attempt to invalidate nearly 1.7 million votes for Joe Biden will begin with 200 ballots.
	She and her attorneys searched for evidence of election fraud or misconduct they have thus far been able to show.
	Ward is asking a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to declare Trump the rightful winner of Arizona's 11 electoral votes, even though Trump is down in the count by about 10,000 votes.
	She says election workers didn't allow Republican observers to get close enough to ensure signatures weren't mistakenly verified.
	She has yet to provide evidence that there were duplicated ballots or that ballots were changed, but she is asking a judge to allow them to inspect tens of thousands of ballots to see whether election workers actually intervened on a one-to-one level.
	Now, as Doug Ducey of Arizona has said, that is highly unlikely.
	We have Democrats and Republicans in the room verifying these signatures.
	With that said, the judge did agree to let Ward look at 100 envelopes and 100 duplicated ballots to see if there were any red flags.
	So they'll have until Thursday to see whether that drags up any information.
	And again, it's not as though the team Trump is not putting forward some people who are claiming voter regularity and voter fraud.
	For example, they had one of these hearings in front of Republican state legislators in Michigan yesterday.
	A Michigan poll watcher explained that he saw Republicans being ejected from rooms throughout the day.
	I am an unaffiliated Michigan voter who was trained by the GOP to be a poll challenger on Wednesday, November 4th, beginning in the late morning until around 8 p.m.
	because I was told that they needed help.
	They were understaffed.
	I witnessed the room erupt in thunderous applause and derogatory cheering as Republican poll workers were picked off one by one and ejected from the room repeatedly by police escort throughout the day.
	By the end of the day, they had picked off so many GOP poll workers that there were probably only a few dozen left to monitor all of the processing stations in the room, which I'm told was between 130 and 160.
	Okay, so again, he would need some supporting evidence to demonstrate this.
	It would not be one affidavit.
	You would need a bunch of the poll workers at that particular station to say that, and you would presumably need somebody inside the room saying that the remaining poll workers were actually changing the outcomes of the ballots.
	And presumably, you could do a hand recount the way they did in Georgia, and you could actually see whether the printed-out ballots in person, for example, measured up to Dominion voting machines, which is what happened in Georgia.
	So what is true and what is false here?
	The truth is there are people who are making pretty significant allegations.
	What has to happen is they need to make them in court where they can actually be properly adjudicated.
	Again, if you don't just want this to be a PR campaign, then you actually need the process to play out and you need to do this in court.
	Doing these things in front of the Oversight Committee at the Michigan Legislature is not going to accomplish Trump's goal of getting the Michigan election overturned.
	Just being realistic with you, that's not going to happen.
	The only thing that is going to happen here is if you can bring evidence in court sufficient to prove your case.
	The Wall Street Journal Point out at least some of the claims that are being made are being overstated, for example.
	So, for example, they point out that, you know, there's a lot of talk about ballot dumping, like late night ballot dumping.
	But the fact is, a lot of these states didn't follow Florida's procedure.
	So Florida allowed the tabulation of mail-in balloting before the actual election day.
	That meant that instead of you getting these late night ballot processing dumps, Instead of that, you actually had everything tabulated up front, and then the mail-in ballots came in early, and then you had the actual day of balloting, and that came in, and within like an hour and a half, we knew exactly what was going on in Florida.
	Unfortunately, it was Republican legislatures in these areas that actually stopped the early tabulation of mail-in voting, presumably because they were afraid that the numbers would leak and it might discourage Republican votes.
	When it comes to poll watching, according to the Wall Street Journal, judges have dismissed affidavits submitted by the Trump camp as rife with speculation and guesswork and inadmissible as hearsay.
	Other claims made in public circulate largely without being tested.
	A poll watcher from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, alleged last week that 47 USB cards used in the election are missing and they're nowhere to be found.
	There is no proof.
	Lorraine Hagan, the chief elections clerk in Delaware County, said we're aware of the allegations, but all votes on scanners have all been accounted for.
	Meanwhile, people who continue to claim that Dominion was hacked and that Dominion voting systems are the problem, the evidence on that is really, really scanty because the totals from Georgia's hand recount using Dominion systems were basically exactly right.
	Also, it just happens to be true that Dominion is not a Venezuelan creation.
	The claims that were being made by Sidney Powell were so crazy that even the Trump legal team decided we are just not going to be complicit in them, right?
	I mean, Sidney Powell got tossed off the team after the big Kraken speech just last week.
	There's an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by a person named John Polis, who is one of the people, he's the president and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems, talking about some of the claims with regard to Dominion Voting Systems and rebutting some of them.
	It has no ties to Hugo Chavez.
	It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections.
	None of Dominion's systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack as any state certification lab could verify.
	There's no vote flipping algorithm.
	Third party test labs chosen by the Bipartisan Election Assistance Commission accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology perform complete source code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system.
	States replicate the process for their own certifications.
	Post-election canvassing and auditing also exist to provide additional assurance of the vote total accuracy.
	He also points out the tabulation machines are tested publicly before bipartisan witnesses before and right after election day.
	On Election Day, poll workers verify voter identity, including signature check.
	Voters mark a paper ballot to vote.
	Absentee voters use pens.
	In-person voters use ballot marking devices.
	In both cases, voters verify the marked paper ballot before casting it in a secure ballot box through an air-gapped scanning tabulator.
	I know because they use Dominion Systems, I believe, here in Florida.
	And so when I voted, this was how the system worked.
	Okay, so if we're going to get any sort of election change here, then you're going to actually have to show widespread evidence, not just speculative possibility.
	results accurately.
	So if we're going to get any sort of election change here, then you're going to actually have to show widespread evidence, not just speculative possibility.
	The speculative possibility leads to a lot of incredulity about the results in public.
	Maybe that's the point, maybe that's not the point.
	But if you want the election results overturned, what you actually need is to show the evidence in court.
	And I will say that everybody on both sides of the aisle should be pretty unified in the basic idea that, can we, like, there are people who are nuts out there, like, really nuts.
	Stop threatening people.
	You know, people who work at Dominion Voting Systems, people who work at the Georgia Secretary of State office.
	Stop with that crap.
	Like, really, it's not, this is a civilized society.
	No matter your side of the aisle, as a person who's received his fair share of death threats, that's garbage, obviously.
	So that, number one.
	Number two, are we going to suggest that Trump is responsible for that because he's casting doubt on the elections?
	Again, I have a very hard time with all of the rhetoric suggesting that when a president says something, he is then directly responsible for people doing bad things with the things that he says.
	So Georgia's voting systems manager, I got him, Gabriel Sherman, yesterday in a press conference where he went after Trump, suggesting that threats of violence are due to Trump.
	Okay, unless Trump is threatening violence, that's not due to Trump.
	Trump can be saying things that I disagree with.
	He can be saying things I think are not true.
	And that does not mean that he is responsible for violence any more than Bernie Sanders, who routinely says untrue things about the American healthcare system, is responsible for acts of violence done to Republican Congress people.
	It has to stop.
	Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language.
	Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions.
	This has to stop.
	We need you to step up, and if you're going to take a position of leadership, show some.
	Okay, I mean, has anybody defended the language?
	Like, seriously, who's defending the language?
	If they are, they should not be, obviously.
	Okay, meanwhile, in other big news, William Barr, the AG, he has appointed John Durham's special counsel.
	This is a real troll move, and it's pretty awesome.
	So John Durham is, of course, the special counsel who has been investigating the Operation Crossfire Hurricane beginning, right?
	That is the FBI investigation into Trump-Russia collusion.
	And Durham has been investigating the origins to look at the FBI conduct.
	So William Barr, apparently, shortly before the election, He appointed John Durham as a special counsel so that he could complete his work without being easily fired.
	According to the AP, under the regulations, a special counsel can be fired only by the attorney general and for specific reasons such as misconduct, dereliction of duty, or conflict of interest.
	An attorney general must document such reasons in writing.
	So, believe it or not, Adam Schiff came out and he was like, we should fire John Durham.
	So remember that time when Adam Schiff was saying that Robert Mueller should never, ever, ever be fired, and that firing Robert Mueller would be the worst thing in the entire world?
	I agreed, by the way, that it would be a bad move for Trump to fire Robert Mueller, because I thought he would come up empty.
	Which he did.
	But Adam Schiff was saying, like, he's a special investigator.
	You cannot fire your own special counsel.
	That can't be done.
	You can't fire Robert Mueller.
	That would be super bad.
	Now Adam Schiff's like, maybe we should get rid of this John Durham guy.
	You know, he's looking into how this whole Russian collusion crap got started.
	What if we just fired him?
	Like, do we really need to pay attention to the special counsel rules?
	How about let the investigation go forward?
	How about let it move forward?
	Naturally, Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York and head of the House Judiciary Committee, said the appointment erodes trust in the DOJ.
	He questioned how it was allowed under the special counsel rules.
	He said we should not lose sight of the larger picture.
	In the waning days of the Trump administration, the AG has once again used the powers of his office to settle old scores for the president.
	The special counsel rules say the appointed person should be outside of government, bar pointed to specific provisions in his memo that would allow him to go around that rule.
	A senior DOJ official told the AP, although the order details it is including but not limited to crossfire hurricane, the Durham probe has not expanded at this point.
	But hey, the rules are special counsel gets to do whatever he wants.
	Those rules were not created by the Republicans at this point.
	They were created by the Democrats with regard to Robert Mueller.
	So now Democrats are going to have to live with those consequences.
	Meanwhile, Democrats continue to hold up a COVID relief package.
	So, Republicans right now.
	Are trying to move through a COVID relief package.
	Mitch McConnell has been having a little bit trouble locking down Republican support.
	I think he will get it.
	Pushing a new relief package that amounts to just under a trillion dollars.
	According to CNN, McConnell has been in private discussions with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, getting a clear sense of what President Trump is willing to sign into law in his final days in office.
	As McConnell drafts a new bill based on those conversations, Democratic leaders are making their own counteroffer to jumpstart the talks.
	Uh-huh.
	Sure they are.
	All they would have to do, by the way, is just pass this thing.
	McConnell said, the one thing we all agree on, we don't have time for messaging games.
	We don't have time for lengthy negotiation.
	The issue is we want to get a result.
	I'd like to remind everybody, the way you get a result is you have a presidential signature.
	So meanwhile, McConnell has been pushing this $908 billion bipartisan plan a group of senators introduced on Tuesday. And some of the Democrats are on board. Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, he said, let's do it. Let's get this done.
	It's a really positive development. And this amount of money could get us through what is likely to be a very hard and very deadly winter.
	This isn't big enough to be able to get us to the point where the entire country is vaccinated, but it might be enough to make sure that millions of Americans don't go hungry, don't starve, don't die out on the streets this winter when their jobless benefits expire and when protections for evictions expire.
	Okay, so we have Democrats on board, and Mitt Romney is on board, right?
	Mitt Romney says this is a crisis, I'm not big on spending, but you have to pass something.
	So you have a 14-senator group that is proposing this bill, and Mitch McConnell is starting to push this bill too.
	So what exactly is the holdup?
	The Democrats, or is Mitt Romney pushing it?
	We've got people unemployed, we've got businesses shutting down, we've got states and localities getting ready for layoffs of large numbers of people.
	It's simply unacceptable for us not to respond to help in this circumstance.
	Now I happen to be a deficit hawk.
	I don't like borrowing money.
	I don't like spending money we don't have.
	But the time to borrow money, maybe the only time to borrow money, is when there's a crisis.
	And this is a crisis.
	We want to help people at this particular time.
	Well, one problem.
	Democrats are holding this thing up.
	Republican lawmakers, according to Fox News, condemned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after Democratic leadership announced a bill to federally legalize marijuana will hit the House floor on Wednesday.
	House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, said the chamber will be considering multiple more bills, including the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, the MORE Act.
	Great.
	And voting will take place Wednesday through Friday.
	Also, there will be another bill reviewed seeking to ban breeding and private ownership of big cats.
	Because everybody watched Tiger King over the pandemic.
	Republicans were like, um, what are you doing now?
	Kevin McCarthy tweeted out this week your house majority Democrats.
	They are tackling the tough issues by holding a vote on legalizing pot and banning tiger ownership.
	Nothing for small businesses, nothing for reopening schools, nothing on battling the pandemic, just cannabis and cats. Steve Scalise, the house minority whip, he tweeted out, let me get this straight.
	Nancy Pelosi is blocking a bill to deliver unused Paycheck Protection Program funds to workers and small businesses.
	But she managed to find time for a vote on POT legislation this week.
	Retweet to tell Democrats to quit blocking aid for Americans in need right now.
	Remember, this has been held up by Democrats for months.
	Steve Mnuchin basically went to Pelosi and he was like, you know what, whatever you want, I am happy to give it to you.
	And she's like, you know what?
	I'm just going to ignore you right now until the election is over.
	It did not pay off to her benefit, by the way.
	Democrats did really, really poorly in the House.
	Nonetheless, they're still holding this thing up.
	So just remember, when you hear Democrats talking about how Republicans are responsible for all of the harms of COVID-19, it is Democrats who are holding this thing up.
	This is why when Joe Biden says help is on the way for the economy, I don't believe you.
	I don't believe you.
	In fact, the best hope for Joe Biden, should he, God forbid, take office in January, if Joe Biden is deemed president-elect on December 14th by the electors, if Joe Biden takes office, the only thing that will cut in Joe Biden's favor, if I were Joe Biden, honestly, I would be rooting for Republicans to win those two Senate seats in Georgia.
	Because that way, I could proclaim that I was all for these progressive priorities that wreck the economy, and then I would never be able to implement them.
	And then I would be considered bipartisan because the economy would be good.
	Right, that would be your best, like Joe Biden has to be rooting for his own interests to basically be cut against by the presence of Republican Senate.
	Here was Joe Biden yesterday saying help is on the way for the economy.
	It was Joe Biden's brand of help.
	I think we can all be spared it.
	A first-rate team that's going to get us through this ongoing economic crisis and help us build the economy back, not just build it back, but build it back better than it was before.
	A team that's tested and experienced.
	It includes groundbreaking Americans who come from different backgrounds, but who share my core vision for economic Oh, goody, goody gumdrops.
	I cannot wait for this doofus to start intervening in the American economy.
	By the way, there's a story that's going around about the COVID relief package, like the first one, the Paycheck Protection Program.
	So remember, Congress approved $521 billion.
	in small business grants and loans under the Paycheck Protection Program.
	About $380 billion went out the door.
	So now, people in the media, they're going nuts over the Paycheck Protection Program.
	Why?
	Well, first of all, they're trying to provide cover for Democrats not passing more of it.
	But what is their big complaint?
	Their big complaint is they have now found that over 25 Paycheck Protection Program loans worth more than $3.65 million were given to businesses with addresses at Trump and Kushner real estate properties paying rent to the owners.
	So these are not businesses owned by Trump or Kushner.
	These are businesses that rent at real estate owned by Trump and Kushner.
	So the idea is that the entire Paycheck Protection Program scheme was a $500 billion payout to accomplish $3 million given to businesses that rent from Trump and Kushner.
	Wow!
	Scandal of scandals!
	You mean they own real estate and people rent from them?
	That's crazy!
	Well, I mean, if they're renting from Kushner or renting at a Trump property, that means they should not receive a Paycheck Protection Program loan.
	It's not like they have employees.
	It's not like they have bills to pay.
	The loans to Trump and Kushner properties included a $2 million loan to the Triumph Restaurant Corporation located at Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City.
	The company reported the money didn't go to keeping jobs and it later closed.
	Okay, is it owned by Trump?
	The Triumph Restaurant Corporation?
	Is it owned by Trump?
	I missed that part.
	If the answer is no, who cares?
	But this is apparently a very big scandal.
	Again, just more PR done for the Democrats on the basis of pseudo-reporting of nonsense.
	Two tenants at 725 5th Avenue and Trump Tower received more than $100,000 and only kept three jobs.
	How many jobs were they supposed to keep with a $100,000 grant?
	Like, what exactly are you paying people?
	I mean, it's such a non-scandal, but of course the media are covering it as though it was a scandal because they always have to fill the barrel with scandal.
	Just ridiculous, ridiculous stuff.
	So are these folks going to fix the economy?
	I think not.
	I think the chances of that are very, very low.
	Okay, again, and by the way, in more bad media coverage, just a quick note, in more bad media coverage, so last night, very late last night, a story broke that was supposed to be a bombshell.
	And it was that the DOJ was investigating a possible criminal bribery scheme for a presidential pardon.
	Hey, and the media immediately went nuts.
	This means someone inside the White House was going to be bribed to get Trump to give a pardon.
	It's going to be just like Mark Rich, except how Mark Rich was totally fine.
	That was totally fine with Bill Clinton.
	Don't look over there.
	It wasn't like Mark Rich on second thought, but it's really bad.
	It's like a bribery scheme, right?
	And probably it's going to ensnare Trump.
	Finally, they'll get Trump even as he's leaving.
	They'll frog march him out.
	And then the DOJ comes out like, well, actually, no government official was or is currently a subject or target of the investigation disclosed in this filing.
	Whoops.
	So for like several hours last night, it was all people could talk about.
	Did somebody bribe Trump for a pardon?
	And then, the DOJ's like, nope.
	Most of that document's redacted.
	You guys are just filling in the gaps with what you wish were there.
	It ain't there.
	Well done, media, but clowning itself once again.
	Okay, now, I would be remiss today if I did not discuss one of the great issues of our time.
	And that is that the actress Ellen Page, who is, was, and shall remain a woman, is now a man.
	So let me read you the headline from CNN, which conveys zero information.
	We have now been forced as a society to simply say nonsense.
	To simply just say things that are nonsense, that don't make any sort of logical sense, that don't actually translate from English to reason.
	Okay, so here is the headline, and you tell me if you know what the hell this means.
	Okay, ready?
	Elliot Page, Juno star, shares transgender identity.
	Do you have any idea what that means?
	Like, seriously, do you have any idea what that means?
	When I first saw the headline, Elliot Page, I thought, whoa, Ellen has a brother?
	No, it turns out that Ellen Page is now identifying as Elliot Page.
	And the media, instead of saying, here's a headline with content, Ellen Page announces she identifies as man, wishes to be called Elliot Page.
	Right, now I would have the whole story.
	But Elliot Page Juno star conveys nothing because Ellen Page was the star of Juno.
	So I'm like, wait, was her brother in that movie?
	Like, I don't even know what you're talking about right now.
	Because the media have created this bizarre standard whereby if a person declares themselves a member of the opposite gender, the entire world, especially in the media, must immediately flip on a dime, stop calling them by the name everybody knew them as, and stop calling them by their biological sex.
	You end up with complete nonsense.
	Just complete bleh coming out of the mouths of the media.
	Now listen, Ellen Page can identify however she wants.
	I don't care.
	Really, it makes no difference to me.
	She is an adult human.
	She can do whatever she wants.
	It is a free country.
	However, it being a free country, I am also free to point out that Ellen Page is, was, and shall remain a woman.
	Because Ellen Page is, in fact, a woman.
	Now, I'm happy to call Ellen Page Elliot, if she wants to be called Elliot, because people change their names all the time.
	And you can, in fact, change your name by declaration.
	You cannot, however, change your sex by declaration.
	Or your gender by declaration.
	That is not how this works.
	There is no other area of life in which people simply declare themselves to be a thing, and everybody goes, oh, okay.
	An objectively verifiable thing.
	You can declare your sexual orientation, or you can declare a thing that you like.
	You can declare that you're a fan of this particular band.
	You can declare that you have a sexual attraction to X, Y, or Z. That's all subjective.
	And all we have to go on is your behavior, which is objective, and your subjective self-assessment.
	However, when you're declaring something as core as your sex, there is no objective measure whatsoever whereby Ellen Page is a man.
	None.
	She is a woman.
	And yet we are immediately told by the media that to even address Ellen Page or Elliot Page as a she is discriminatory.
	It's very bad and very discriminatory.
	And so you end up with complete inanities and insanities.
	Okay, so Ellen Page declared that she is now a man, okay?
	But she also declared that she is a queer man.
	Now, this is confusing, because if she were a queer man, this would mean that she is attracted to men, which would technically mean that she's a straight woman, right?
	Because if she is an actual woman attracted to men, this would make her a straight woman, but we know she's not that, because she was a lesbian, right?
	So she is married to a woman, as far as I'm aware, and that means that she is a lesbian, but now she is a man, And according to her, this means that she is a white, straight male.
	So how is she queer?
	She's a white, straight male.
	So here is how Wikipedia tries to sum this up.
	You ready for this?
	According to Wikipedia, in January 2018, Page publicly announced his marriage to dancer and choreographer Emma Portner.
	So this means that Ellen Page is a gay man married to a woman, according to Wikipedia.
	Which makes no sense at all.
	Like, in any way, shape, or form.
	And you're expected to simply mirror this.
	Not only that, the left has particular standards with regard to who gets to play parts in movies.
	So, for example, Ellen Page, now Elliot Page, I'm saying Ellen Page not because I wish to offend Elliot Page, but because until five seconds ago, nobody had ever heard of Elliot Page.
	Nobody knows who the hell I'm talking about.
	So I'm going to use the name that people know her as.
	And then over time, if you want to call it Elliot Page, that's fine.
	But for like today, I feel like it's fair to mention that Ellen Page and Elliot Page are the same person.
	So that if somebody tunes in and hears Elliot Page, they don't think Ellen has a brother.
	Okay?
	So, here's the headline from TV Insider.
	Elliot Page reportedly to continue in same role on Umbrella Academy.
	Now, Umbrella Academy on Netflix, it started off that the series itself is based on a comic book.
	In the comic book, Ellen Page, who, again, is a woman, and is in the series a cisgender woman, right?
	Like a woman who is a woman.
	is a straight woman in the first season.
	In the second season, Ellen Page becomes a lesbian because Ellen Page is a lesbian in real life, I guess.
	I mean, I assume that's what the plan was there and that it has something to do with how Ellen Page wanted to act because my understanding is that's not something directly from the comic book series.
	If it is, forgive me.
	That's fine.
	Who cares?
	Okay, but here's the part that's hilarious.
	So according to Variety, they say there are no plans to change The character Ellen Page plays her gender on The Umbrella Academy.
	So the series is publicly showing their support, and they say they are proud of their superhero.
	We love you, Elliot, but Elliot will be playing a woman.
	Now, I've been firmly informed that this is discrimination and cultural appropriation.
	When Scarlett Johansson, a straight woman, was slated to play a transgender man in a movie, This was considered very, very bad form.
	In fact, only trans people could play trans characters.
	So I have a question.
	If Elliot Page is in fact a man, the way that the media have declared that she is a man, then why is she allowed to play a cisgender woman?
	Is that not cultural appropriation?
	If a normal, non-trans man decided to play a woman today, everybody would suggest that this was a violation of long-standing norms.
	It was cultural appropriation.
	But if a woman declares herself a man, Then you have to make a choice.
	Either she is a man, in which case she can't play a woman anymore, or she is not a man, in which case she's not a man.
	But, because our culture is unbelievably stupid, it is both.
	Right?
	That is the way that this works.
	So, good news!
	Elliot Page can still play women, and also can play transgender men.
	Presumably can also play men-men, which is really exciting.
	One further note on all of this.
	If you feel like this is crazy and that this is being crammed down on you, that is because it is.
	That is because this is not a fringe phenomenon anymore.
	This is something the Democratic Party fully embraces and pushes.
	Yesterday, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he said that he is fully with Joe Biden on mandating from the federal government that transgender people be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice.
	Now it seems to me that if my wife is uncomfortable with a male walking into a bathroom or a locker room where she is undressing at the gym, that that is perfectly within her purview.
	That seems like not inappropriate at all to me.
	But the federal government has now decided under democratic auspices that men and women are exactly the same.
	That gender is completely fluid.
	None of this makes any internal sense, by the way.
	If men and women are completely the same, there's no reason for you to declare yourself a man.
	Man equals woman means woman equals woman.
	Right?
	I mean, this is just the basic transitive property.
	In any case, here is Chuck Schumer fully greenlighting the Democratic agenda, which is fully in line with all of this silliness and anti-logic nonsense.
	And again, Ellen Page or Elliot Page is allowed to do whatever she wants to do today, but she does not get to dictate what the rest of us say about things as basic as biological sex and capital T truth.
	But here is the Democratic Party pushing this stuff.
	Joe Biden said that on his first day of office, he will give transgender students access to sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity in all federally funded schools.
	Do you think he has the ability to do this, and do you agree with this decision?
	I agree with the decision, and I know he'll check things out thoroughly legally.
	Okay.
	I'm sure that this will all work out just fantastically well.
	And don't feel bullied.
	Don't feel as though you are being forced to change long-standing and, for all of human history, held opinions.
	about the non-malleability of sex.
	It is all because you're discriminatory in your mind.
	Don't worry about the fact that this is all illogical and makes no sense.
	The media have told you that a thing is so, and therefore, it is so.
	And therefore, and also, if you mention it, it's because you are, it's because you're obsessed with these issues.
	This is one of my favorites, is that you say something as radical as men and women are exactly the same and a man can become a woman, and then I say no.
	And they're like, why are you even paying attention to this?
	Why are you even making an issue out of this?
	I'm not.
	You guys are.
	I'm sorry, but you purveyors of new truths that have nothing to do with science, logic, reason?
	The answer is no.
	The answer is no.
	I do not go along with your mandatory take on the world, and I don't think Americans should either.
	That's not an excuse for being nasty to people.
	That's not an excuse for discrimination.
	It is a recommendation that we all speak real truths when they are available.
	And it happens to be a real truth that Elliot Page is, was, and will remain a woman, even if Elliot Page believes that she is a man.
	And you're under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to suggest that men can become women, or to teach that to your children, which is really what the left wants out of this whole deal, in the end.
	All right, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boren.
	Our Supervising Producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
	Our Associate Producers are Nick Sheehan and Rebecca Doyle.
	The show is edited by Adam Siavitz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Nika Geneva.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
	You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
	I think there are enough of those already out there.
	We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
	So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
	Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.

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