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Dec. 7, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:11:21
It’s All About Georgia | Ep. 1151
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Time Text
Two runoff Senate races heat up as President Trump arrives to campaign for Republicans in Georgia.
COVID continues to wash across America with hypocrisy and heavy-handedness ruling the day.
And Joe Biden demonstrates once again he is not a moderate.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
For peace of mind, whenever you go online, visit expressvpn.com slash ben.
Well, we'll get to all the news of the day and big news happening over the weekend.
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Okay, so over the weekend, President Trump headed down to Georgia to campaign for these Senate Georgia Republicans.
Now, I've been saying for weeks on end, anybody who is telling you that you should boycott a bunch of Republican races that will decide the fate of the United States Senate and could place the United States Senate at the tender mercies of, if Trump does not become president, Kamala Harris, or in any case, at the hands of Chuck Schumer, This is like the dumbest thing you could do.
And anybody who's telling you to do that is a grifter.
Anybody who's telling you that you need to boycott races because you're mad about what happened to Trump in Georgia, or you're mad about the national election, or you suspect voter fraud, so you're gonna stay home and simply hand Senate seats to John Ossoff?
Who is a radical Bernie Sanders leftist living off his parents' trust fund.
Or Raphael Warnock, a man so radical that he did full speeches from the pulpit in his congregation talking about the wonders of Jeremiah Wright.
Putting those people in the Senate as a solution to your upset about the Georgia presidential race is the dumbest thing you could do.
You know who agrees with me?
President Trump.
Okay, it's not me saying this.
This is President Trump saying this.
So, President Trump went down to Georgia, He said, listen, we are here to make sure that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue win.
It is important that they win.
I agree with President Trump.
Listen to the guy.
Here is President Trump down in Valdosta, Georgia, over the weekend.
We're gathered here tonight to ensure a very important word, ensure.
Because these are two great, great people that I know so well and respected by everybody in Washington and beyond.
That David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler win the most important congressional runoff probably in American history.
I really believe that.
I think it's an American.
There's never been a time like this where you have two at one time.
At least you have two beauties.
And you know what?
You also have two beauties running against them, but beauty in a different way.
Okay, so President Trump is endorsing the idea that you should go out and vote in Georgia.
And you should!
Again.
No matter how pissed off you are about Georgia and how it's been handling its business down there.
Whether that is based or whether that is baseless.
Okay, the bottom line is you need to vote for the Republicans against the Democrats in Georgia.
I do not, for the life of me, I will never understand people who are saying that they're going to boycott a Georgia Senate race and hand the Senate to the Democrats in order to do what?
Punish the Democrats for helping to cheat?
If that's your opinion?
Or for what?
Helping the Democrats rig future elections through all sorts of voting procedures?
What exactly is the logic there?
There is no logic.
This is something Trump himself said.
He said, if you don't vote, socialists win.
It was sort of an instinct of mine.
You know, you're angry because so many votes were stolen.
It was taken away.
And you say, well, we're not going to do it.
We can't do that.
We have to actually do just the opposite.
We can't do that.
We can't do that.
We have to do just the opposite.
If you don't vote, the socialists and the communists win.
They win.
OK, he is correct about this, of course.
And President Trump went on to describe some of the Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia.
He particularly went after John Ossoff.
He said this guy is a left-wing zealot, which, of course, is true.
John Ossoff is a radical left-wing zealot who is very proud to be endorsed by Bernie Sanders.
Crazy Bernie.
Ossoff supports defunding the police, supports the crazy Green New Deal.
That's another beauty.
Don't forget, the Green New Deal is really a hundred trillion dollars, okay?
It's a hundred trillion dollars.
There is no excuse for not voting against John Ossoff and Rafael Warnock in Georgia.
How radical are these two candidates?
Well, over the weekend, a top Jewish group slammed Democrat Senate candidates John Ossoff and Rafael Warnock in a statement late on Saturday night.
They campaigned with Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, who has referred to Jews as termites and accused them of stealing the homes of Palestinians, according to Ryan Saavedra over at Daily Wire.
The trio reportedly campaigned together on Saturday during a drive-in rally hosted by county-level Democrat parties in their attempts to drive voter registration.
Ossoff and Warnock's decision to campaign with Johnson, who has made anti-Semitic remarks in the past, comes as Warnock has faced scrutiny on the campaign trail for controversial comments he made a few years ago about Israel, in which he suggested that Israel was willy-nilly killing Palestinians for no reason.
This drove the Republican-Jewish coalition to put out a statement decrying the anti-Semitism of campaigning alongside Johnson.
The fact, again, remains that these are extraordinarily radical candidates.
And you know who pointed that out last night?
There were a couple of debates last night.
One was an actual debate, one was not.
One was a debate between Kelly Loeffler and Raphael Warnock.
Kelly Loeffler is the sitting United States Senator in Georgia.
She's appointed to fill that seat.
Raphael Warnock is running against her, of course.
They ran in this open primary, jungle primary election in Georgia.
In which Warnock won the plurality of the vote, but that's because Loeffler was splitting the vote with Doug Collins on the Republican side of the aisle.
So Loeffler went after Warnock repeatedly.
She said he's a radical liberal.
The left was going nuts about this yesterday.
How could she?
She kept saying over and over he's a radical liberal.
Well, here's an idea.
Don't run a guy who was involved in a church praising Fidel Castro.
Don't run a guy who praised Jeremiah Wright.
Don't run a guy who decries America as inherently racist if you don't want him to be called a radical liberal over and over and over in Georgia.
That would be your fault.
That's a you problem, okay?
You guys created that.
And so, when Kelly Loeffler points out that, in fact, this human is a radical liberal... Sorry, that one's on you.
Here's Kelly Loeffler doing that last night.
My opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock, has called police officers gangsters, thugs, bullies, and a threat to our children.
When I gave him the chance to apologize in our first debate, he declined.
He's also said that you can't serve God and the military.
He's used the Bible to justify these types of attacks and make other divisive statements.
What we need is someone who can bring together, that can help us get through this pandemic and rebuild our economy across this country and right here in Georgia.
That's what I'm fighting for.
fighting to do.
The only thing that he had to say to Loeffler over and over and over was, you won't say whether Trump lost Georgia.
There's only one problem with this particular strategy.
A plurality of Georgians believe Trump didn't lose Georgia.
There's a poll that was done over the weekend, and apparently, actually, a slight majority of people in Georgia actually believe that there was some hanky-panky in Georgia.
So here is Raphael Warnock trying to hit Loeffler with an unpopular proposition in Georgia as though this is going to win him the Senate race.
Here we are several weeks after the election, and Kelly Loeffler continues to cast doubt on an American democratic election.
It's time to put this behind us and get focused on the concerns of ordinary people.
While she's playing political games trying to represent somebody who doesn't live in Georgia, Georgians are wondering when are they going to get some COVID-19 relief.
OK, if we're talking about COVID-19 relief, which we'll get to in a little while, guess who's holding up COVID-19 relief?
The Democrats.
The Democrats.
And it has nothing to do with Trump.
It has nothing to do with the election or voter fraud.
The people who are holding up the COVID relief are Democrats.
So this is a weak T response.
And he had no responses to anything Loeffler said about him last night.
So if anybody watched that debate in Georgia, And then decides you're going to sit it out after Loeffler correctly points out how radical Warnock is?
You are making a grave error.
You want to put that dude in the Senate?
You want to put that bad dude in the Senate?
Bad, bad idea.
Meanwhile, Jon Ossoff did a debate with David Perdue's podium.
So David Perdue was like, you know what, I'm not debating this guy because every time I do a debate with this guy, all he does is slander me, so forget it.
So he did a debate last night in which he just talked to an open podium.
And it turns out that Jon Ossoff can't even win a debate against an open podium.
I mean, he lost a race against Karen Handel for Congress.
Very hotly contested race in Georgia just a couple of years back.
And now he is back debating empty podiums.
So here he was, and this was supposed to be a great winning moment for him.
Yeah, not so much.
Well, it's a strange situation to be asking a question of a sitting United States Senator who is not here to debate as he asks for the votes of the people to be re-elected.
Senator Perdue, I suppose, doesn't feel that he can handle himself in debate, or perhaps is concerned that he may incriminate himself in debate.
both of which, in my opinion, are disqualifying.
Okay, that guy?
Yeah, hmm, okay, good times.
When the opposite podium is actually more interesting than you are in a debate, like at least when Clint Eastwood did the empty chair thing, it was actually kind of funny and interesting and creative.
This guy lost a debate to an empty podium, which is really, really difficult to do, Jon Ossoff.
OK, in just a second, we're going to get to the continuing controversy over the election because President Trump didn't just talk about why he should vote Republican in Georgia in the Senate elections.
He also talked about his own election and the prospect for his for a second term or a Joe Biden first term.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First.
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Okay, so, President Trump in Georgia continued to maintain that Democrats rigged the election.
So here's President Trump in Valdosta.
Now, notice, members of the media were very upset that Trump was propagating two messages at the same time.
One is that he got jobs in Georgia.
The other is that Republicans should, in fact, go out and vote for Republican Senate candidates in Georgia.
Now, you can hold those two thoughts in your mind at the exact same time.
But see, for the left, what they want is for Trump to completely ignore the Senate races.
What they would like, this is the reason why they were celebrating Trump talking about voter fraud.
They were saying, this is great.
Trump, he's going to go down to Georgia, he's going to talk voter fraud, and he's going to discourage people from voting.
That's not what Trump did.
He went down there.
He says, listen, I got jobs.
I feel like we're going to move forward with the process, but I feel like I got cheated.
And also, you should go out and vote for the Senate candidates.
And Democrats were unduly angry at this because, of course, they were hoping that Trump would go down there and basically do exactly what Lin Wood and Sidney Powell have been doing and tell people not to vote for the Senate candidates because Democrats, all they care about is that Republicans lose power.
They don't care how it happens.
They just care that Republicans lose power.
Anyway, here is Trump talking about the possibility of voter irregularity in Georgia.
You must go vote and vote early starting December 14th.
You have to do it.
They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, but we will still win it.
We will still win it.
We'll still win it.
And they're going to try and rig this election too.
OK, so again, that's actually not a horrible get out the vote message, which is they're going to try to rig the election.
So get out and vote really early and make sure that they can't do with the mail-ins what I'm saying they did with the mail-ins.
No, Trump pushing that message is actually not a bad message.
Now, I'm getting a lot of mail from people who are asking, like, why do so many Republicans believe that this election was rigged?
Why do so many Republicans seem to be clinging to the idea that Trump was cheated in this election?
Well, I mean, listen, there are some puzzling questions about the election, like the fact that Trump seemed to underperform the rest of the Republican ticket.
I think there are plausible answers as to why that happened, if indeed it turns out that voter irregularity and voter fraud are not responsible for the current results.
There are people saying, okay, he got He overperformed among minorities, he underperformed in the suburbs, but why didn't that amount to a Trump victory?
So why are so many Republicans buying into Trump's narrative that this whole thing was voter irregularity?
The answer is this.
When people have been lied to for years and years and years and years, then the same people who lied to them for years and years and years turn around and say another thing, people are immediately going to assume it's a lie.
It's really that simple.
If you spent four years claiming that Donald Trump was not the legitimate president in 2016 because he was manipulating the system with the Russians, nobody is going to believe you when you say that he was booted from office in a fully legitimate election.
You literally could not...
Acknowledge that it was a legitimate election in 2016, and now here you are in 2020 saying, well, suddenly it's a legitimate election again.
Nobody's going to believe you.
When you blow out your own credibility, it makes it very difficult for anybody to trust you on issues like, is this current election legit?
Was there any voter fraud?
Was there any voter irregularity?
It makes it very difficult for anybody on the right to believe anybody in the media who, less than three months ago, was claiming that Donald Trump was going to rig the election through getting rid of mailboxes.
That Donald Trump was going to engage in voter suppression.
And then they flip and suddenly it's the cleanest election in the world.
No one is going to believe that.
Now, it may be that the election was not rigged.
It may be that the election was clean.
Or it may be that two things could be true at once.
The election was not decided by voter fraud and voter irregularity, but the processes by which the election happened did tend toward Democrats, and they are not the way we should run elections in the future.
And the media helped rig this election via its refusal to focus on actual stories that damaged Joe Biden And lying narratives over and over and over again, ranging from Trump is responsible for COVID, to Trump is a white supremacist, to Trump is a Russian plant, right?
All of those things can be true at once.
But here's one thing that is certainly true.
If you look at a list of institutions Americans trust right now, media is at the very, very bottom of that list.
And so members of the media keep shouting into the wind, it was a clean election.
And then they wonder why people don't believe them.
The answer is because you don't have any credibility.
One of the reasons you have no credibility is because you are willing to go along with any democratic narrative you possibly can.
So over the weekend, John Brennan, who's a Democrat, he was the head of the CIA under Barack Obama.
He was on with Chris Wallace, and he was saying that there was no spying on the Trump campaign.
Now, John Brennan is also one of the people who's out there saying today that it was a super clean election.
Why would I believe John Brennan?
The man actually lied to the Senate.
He lied to Congress.
He said that he had not been spying on the Senate.
That was not true.
And now he's saying there's no spying on the Trump campaign, and then in the same sentence, he's saying it was a clean election.
See, the source matters when it comes to credibility.
Now, this is not an argument, again, as to whether the election was clean or whether the election was dirty.
It is an argument that when all of the main sources who declare that they are telling you the truth have been lying to you for years, it makes it very, very difficult for people to buy into that.
Here is John Brennan saying an untrue thing.
As we have said previously, the Steele dossier was not used in any way to undergird the judgments that came out of the intelligence community assessment about the Russian actions in the 2016 election.
And so the Steele dossier was something that I never looked at from a standpoint of credibility, because it wasn't something that the CIA had acquired.
And so I think people point to the Steele dossier as this reason why the whole thing was a hoax.
No, there was so much other evidence and intelligence to support those judgments.
OK, there wasn't a lot of other evidence.
There wasn't a lot of other judgment.
And he also maintained that there was no spying, period, on the Trump campaign, which, of course, is just not true.
And there are members of the Trump campaign like Carter Page and members of the intel community who have now been informed as to the evils of the FISA warrants taken out against Carter Page have fully admitted that the FISA warrants never should have been taken out against Carter Page.
Here's Brennan just denying there was any spying on the Trump campaign at all, which, of course, is not correct.
Looking back at 2016, were there some mistakes made in terms of the FISA applications, other types of things?
Yes, apparently there were, but that doesn't mean that there was criminal intent and there was no spying on Donald Trump's campaign.
And it's very clear from Robert Mueller's investigation that there were a lot of activities that I think were very unprincipled, unethical.
And it'll be up to individuals in the future to determine whether or not there was any criminal activity that took place during that time.
I love to hear about unprincipled, unethical criminal activity from a guy who openly lied to the United States Senate and was forced to back off of it.
He's definitely a credible source.
We should believe him, probably.
He seems credible.
We'll get to more on the credibility of members of the media and the claims that are being made about voter fraud and voter irregularity in just one second.
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Okay, so all of this has led to a sort of radical skepticism about anybody.
See, here's one of the problems.
Skepticism about John Brennan, totally justified.
Skepticism about members of the media, who five minutes ago were declaring this election was going to be dirty and rigged for Trump, now declaring that because they think Biden won the election, everything was clean as the driven snow.
I understand distrust of those people.
The shift to anybody who now does not go along with the Trump loss because of voter fraud and voter irregularity narrative, that shift is too much.
Okay, so for example, Maria Bartiromo.
She was asking John Ratcliffe, who's the Director of National Intelligence, who got to Bill Barr.
Nobody got to Bill Barr, the Attorney General.
Bill Barr has been an excellent Attorney General.
He's done a lot of the things that Trump supporters would want.
Also, he happens to be a person who has abided by the law.
Bill Barr has been an excellent, straightforward, clear, and convincing Attorney General.
But here's Maria Bartiromo suggesting that somebody got to Bill Barr.
Okay, once he gets to the point where you're suggesting Bill Barr was bribed in order to go along with this election, that's not correct.
Bill Barr himself put out a statement last week saying the media had taken his comments about voter fraud too far.
He had said, I have seen no systemic evidence of voter fraud.
He did not say we've been doing massive investigations into systemic evidence of voter fraud.
He says, any evidence that's brought to light, we are going to investigate.
But at no point did he say that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence, right?
Just because I haven't seen voter fraud doesn't mean voter fraud didn't occur.
But here's Maria Bartiromo going too far.
Again, if you've gone to the point where everybody on the right side of the aisle who is skeptical about voter fraud allegations in the absence of convincing evidence is now bought off or something, that's too far.
Again, skepticism warranted.
I was the first person, I think, to say every legal vote needs to be counted and every illegal vote needs not to be counted.
This has now become the talking point on the right.
I was the first person to put it out there.
That is totally worthwhile and it is totally true.
And just because a media member who's been non-credible from the start begins to suggest over and over and over that the election is over does not necessarily mean the election is over.
The election is over when the Electoral College votes on December 14th.
End of story.
States certifying their votes means that those states have now certified their votes.
And there's not much that can be done about that absent a court order.
But for people to start going after Bill Barr, that is a bridge too far.
Here's Maria Bartiromo going a bridge too far.
Speaking of threats and bullying, who got to Bill Barr?
I've got to ask you your thoughts on where we are here with A.G.
Bill Barr and John Durham.
It seems like it's an about-face.
We were expecting a real investigation into what took place and why Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation into Donald Trump, still has no accountability.
OK, so again, nobody got to Bill Barr.
This idea that somebody got to Bill Barr is absurd and ridiculous, and people should not be implying that sort of stuff.
Bill Barr has been a very good AG.
And meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, he came out and he said somebody in Washington directed voter fraud, but I don't know who.
OK, these kind of allegations are not particularly helpful.
Again, he's the president's lawyer.
Bring the evidence.
I want the same thing that Rudy Giuliani wants, that most of you want, right?
I would like to see Trump remain in office.
I would love that!
It would be great!
Okay, what I would also like is for a legal process to take place where Rudy Giuliani brings the evidence that he has been suggesting over and over he is going to bring.
And I don't mean that he brings affidavits that are unbacked by other supporting evidence.
Anybody can file an affidavit, especially one that is not filed in court.
I mean, if you want to change the outcome of the election, you're going to need to prove your case in court.
End of story.
I didn't create the process.
You didn't create the process.
The process is the process.
If you want the election outcome to change, that is the way it's going to change.
It does not help when Rudy just goes on TV and then says things like, some vague unspecified power in Washington, D.C.
fixed the election.
Like, I don't even know what that means.
That's not evidenced.
So how am I supposed to judge whether it's true or not?
Each one of them has, in one degree or another, almost the same pattern of activity.
One a little bit more than others.
This was a pattern that was set by somebody in Washington, because everybody else carried it out exactly in the same way.
And they did it in the crooked cities.
They didn't do it everywhere.
I don't know who was in charge of it.
All I can tell you is, it looks like a very well planned, very well executed Situation.
Okay, again, those sorts of vague allegations are not going to be particularly useful.
Again, if you want a result, if you just want to bitch about the election, they're useful.
If you want an actual result, you're going to have to do the hard work of pinning all this stuff down.
I know that's a high burden.
I understand it's a high burden.
That doesn't mean that things are going to change absent meeting the burden.
That's just the way it is.
Okay, like, I don't mean to be the bearer of bad tidings here, but I would like Trump Like you, I would like Trump to remain President of the United States.
If you want him to remain President of the United States, then putting out speculation about how Trump definitely could not have lost, or putting out statistical anomalies, that's not going to be enough.
You're going to have to actually prove it.
You're going to have to actually prove it.
Again, I'm talking about the practical, on-the-ground messaging.
You're going to have to actually show it in court if you want the results to change.
Otherwise, I mean, I suppose that we can move along and just believe that everybody's done their job.
But if the job's gonna get done, somebody's gonna have to do it.
And that person, presumably, is gonna have to be Trump's legal team.
Okay, in just one second, we're gonna get to Joe Biden and his awful plans.
We'll get to that in just one second, then we'll get to COVID and everything else that's been happening over the weekend, because there's a lot.
First, it's doorbell season, the busiest time of year at your front door.
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OK.
Meanwhile, quick note here.
So there's a story that came out from Michigan.
A couple of dozen protesters, according to the Detroit Free Press, a couple of dozen protesters gathered in front of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's home Saturday night, shouting through megaphones against the certification of the election, demanding a forensic audit.
A portion of the demonstration was broadcast live on Facebook around 930 p.m.
The protesters are seen walking up to Benson's Detroit home, some wearing paraphernalia from the Trump campaign, carrying American flags.
John V.F.
Peters, who posted a live video, said we are over here in the freaking dead of night, man.
We are letting her know we're not taking this BS election.
We're not standing down.
We're not giving up.
You're not going to take this election from a man who earned it completely 100% by a freaking landslide.
This isn't over.
Benson said the protesters gathered in front of her home as she and her four-year-old son were finished putting up Christmas decorations.
Okay, so... Basic rule of thumb here.
No matter how pissed off you are about the election, how about this?
Stay away from people's houses.
We're gonna have to share this country after this is all over.
I said this to the left, and I'll say this to everybody.
Stay away from other people's houses.
It was bad when the left descended on Tucker Carlson's house.
It is bad when restaurants throw Sarah Huckabee Sanders out.
And it is bad when you descend on somebody's home, where they are with their children, because you don't like something that is happening in politics.
Do not do it. It is a bad thing.
And meanwhile, speaking of things that are bad happening in American politics, so Joe Biden has been promoted as this magical sort of moderate who's gonna bring the country together, which of course is a joke.
He's not a moderate, nor is he a magical, magical man.
Joe Biden says, we're gonna need to take the vitriol out of politics.
Here was Biden over the weekend.
We've got to take the vitriol out of politics.
I know there's a lot of people on both sides who want to continue to go after and punish the opposition.
I get that.
I get the fact that an awful lot of Americans are disappointed I was elected president.
Fortunately, there's 7 million more that were happy than disappointed, but I get that.
And there's a lot of Democrats who are angry and want to strike back at Republicans.
What I've said from the beginning, and I think I've conducted myself this way throughout my career, I learned that early lesson.
It's always appropriate to question other men and women's judgment, but never their motive.
Okay, yeah, I'm sure of that.
He literally said that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back in chains.
He created borking and then bragged about it.
You know, Joe Biden is not a unifying figure.
And how do you know he's not a unifying figure?
Because he has now picked Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, should he be inaugurated president in January.
For those who don't know Xavier Becerra, the man is a radical leftist.
He's a radical leftist.
He's been Attorney General of the state of California, where I was a resident until very, very recently.
And he is just terrible.
He's absolutely terrible.
So not only has he spent his career trying to protect Obamacare, but also he has gone after pro-lifers in extraordinary ways.
Susan B. Anthony list put out a statement that said far from uniting the country Biden has proven yet again He's an extremist on abortion. This is going to SBA list president Marjorie Dannenfelser But Sarah is aggressively pro-abortion a foe of free speech as attorney general of california He continued what his predecessor kamala harris started by persecuting citizen journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood's role in baby parts trafficking Not only that he went all the way to the supreme court to try to force california's pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise and refer for abortion a policy the court rejected as unconstitutional
And Congress even voted in favor of partial birth abortion.
This pic underscores the importance of winning in Georgia to prevent pro-abortion forces from taking control of the United States Senate.
So Becerra, what's being referred to there, is a case in which Becerra went directly after David DeLayden.
So David DeLayden was a pro-life activist, and Becerra announced charges against DeLayden and somebody else working with him, a woman named Sandra Merritt, saying the state would not tolerate the criminal recording of confidential conversations.
What were those confidential conversations?
DeLayden did secret recording, For reporting purposes of Planned Parenthood employees talking about selling fetal tissue.
Right?
And so, what did Xavier Becerra do in the state of California?
Did he turn on Planned Parenthood?
Did he investigate Planned Parenthood?
Of course not!
Of course not.
Instead, the state of California, led by Xavier Becerra, went after Dladen.
So DeLayden claimed the video showed footage of Planned Parenthood selling the tissue.
Planned Parenthood said the footage was misleadingly edited, of course.
Now, they were talking pretty openly about the cost of particular pieces of fetal tissue that they were selling.
Planned Parenthood.
And they did talk about that pretty openly in the tape.
And then they claimed that it was deceivingly edited and all of this.
So Becerra didn't go after Planned Parenthood, of course.
Instead, he initiated prosecutions against DeLayden and Merritt.
So this is who Joe Biden has decided should lead up HHS.
Which is just ridiculous on its face.
And one of the reasons that Biden selected him is because, of course, Joe Biden needs more Latinos in the cabinet.
Because Joe Biden has already vowed that he's going to select people based on the color of their skin, rather than the content of their character.
There was worry that he was actually going to make him Attorney General.
So, frankly, I'm a little bit relieved that he's talking about Becerra for HHS as opposed to Becerra over at AG.
I can't even imagine who he's going to put over at AG.
I mean, that's just a disaster area.
The HHS position is the third role at the helm of the Biden team's pandemic response to be filled in the past few days.
Biden is looking to Jeff Zients, the co-chair of the transition, as the White House coronavirus coordinator.
He led the White House National Economic Council under Barack Obama.
And of course, he is looking at Vivek Murthy, co-chair of the administration's COVID Advisory Board, as the Surgeon General.
He's also giving a special slot to Anthony Fauci.
Quick note on Anthony Fauci, by the way.
So, I was just at the local grocery store the other day, and they had some of these magazines out.
And there, looking at me, glowing from the cover of like an InTouch magazine, was Anthony Fauci.
And I thought to myself, isn't that guy like just the COVID relief guy?
Isn't that guy like the COVID guy?
Why is it that he is on the cover of InTouch magazine?
Why is he being given glossy treatment by the entire press for being an advisor with regard to a coronavirus pandemic?
And the answer, of course, is because he was perceived as anti-Trump, he's seen as a critic of Trump, and therefore he gets the rosy treatment.
Deborah Birx never got that treatment because Deborah Birx, as much as she disagreed with Trump, really kept it under wraps and understood she had a job to do within the framework of an administration.
But my respect for Anthony Fauci drops fairly radically once you start posing for magazine covers like In Touch.
With your stethoscope around your neck.
At that point, you're just doing a little bit of self-promotion.
Okay, speaking of self-promotion, COVID policy continues to be extraordinarily bad across the country.
So California has now locked down tens of millions of citizens.
According to CNN, Southern California and San Joaquin Valley residents will be under a stay-at-home order after the ICU capacity in the two regions fell below 15%, triggering a mandate issued by the governor earlier this week that aims to bring down the soaring number of COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Now, to be fair, there is flex capacity at some of these hospitals, A lot of these hospitals always run at near capacity in terms of the ICUs because you're always doing surgeries.
Hospitals that run at 50% capacity are not called hospitals.
They are now called boarded up old hospitals that don't exist anymore because the way the system works is that the beds have to be filled in order for people to get paid.
So instead, what we're talking about is telling people to stay home if they have optional surgeries so that we can fill those ICU beds with people who have COVID.
That does not mean that we have not seen a surge.
We have indeed seen a surge.
It does mean that all of the talk, especially in major areas with pretty significant medical resources like Los Angeles, they're talking about telling people to stay home.
They're not talking about L.A.
being completely overwhelmed by COVID cases.
The California order went into effect last night at midnight for 27 million people.
It includes LA and San Diego.
That follows a proactive order issued by six San Francisco Bay Area jurisdictions on Friday for its almost 6 million residents.
It also went into effect on Sunday.
Again, Newsom on Thursday announced any region that fell below the 15% ICU capacity threshold would be placed under stay-at-home orders.
Southern California reported that its ICU availability fell to 12.5% on Saturday.
In San Joaquin, it was 8.6%.
California has been surging.
Now, quick note.
California never stopped its lockdown.
So for all the talk about harsher lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, California never went back to business as usual.
There was no point, really, at which the restaurants opened indoors.
There was no point at which people started treating normal, everyday activities as normal, everyday activities.
Most of the businesses in L.A.
were still boarded up and closed down.
People were not going into their regular jobs.
This has been true since March.
So, the basic idea that government was going to be able to enforce quarantine and this was going to magically quash everything, there's not a lot of evidence that that is the case.
Schools that are already open for in-person learning can remain open along with critical infrastructure businesses.
Retail businesses can stay open, but only at 20% capacity.
Restaurants are limited to takeout and delivery alone.
And the order is in effect for at least three weeks.
Now, here is one of the problems.
These orders, scientifically, do not make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
So, for example, you're not allowed to do outdoor dining anymore in, like, LA County.
They've decided you're not.
The evidence on outdoor dining, there is none that outdoor dining is spreading this thing.
There's evidence that indoor dining is spreading this thing.
There's no evidence that outdoor dining is spreading this thing.
Nonetheless, they shut down the outdoor dining in LA County.
However, under emergency mandates, The film industry is still allowed to have food outdoors, under tents, because the film industry has been deemed essential by the state of California.
So these asshat hypocrites, they're saying that you can't open your restaurant outdoors, but so long as you're working for Gavin Newsom's favorite industry, all of his friends in Hollywood, all the glitterati, well then you can eat at a food tent directly off-site.
You can definitely make sure that all of the grips can have their food catered by some sort of food truck, I'm losing everything.
Everything I own is being taken away from me.
which, last I checked, is called outdoor dining.
In fact, here's one California restaurant owner protesting this over the weekend.
I'm losing everything.
Everything I own is being taken away from me.
And they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio, which is right over here.
And people wonder why I'm protesting and why I have had enough.
And...
They have not given us money and they have shut us down.
We cannot survive.
My staff cannot survive.
Okay, she's 100% right.
And there she is.
You can't see the video.
Pointing at a tent that is set up with picnic tables so that this film crew can make sure that they eat outside.
So only if you're a member of the special favored industry do you actually get to eat outdoors.
Everybody else, if you're in a restaurant, you are absolutely screwed.
You're done.
But if you work for one of Eric Garcetti's favorite industries in Los Angeles, or if you work for one of Gavin Newsom's favorite industries in California, well then you are totally fine.
Because so much of this is political.
So much of this is about catering to a particular voter base.
So much of this is about keeping industries that you like open and closing industries that you don't particularly like.
By the way, Eric Garcetti's response to this, so he responded directly to this lady, Erica Garcetti suggested that his heart goes out to her, but we have to stop the virus.
He said, my heart goes out to Miss Marsden and the workers of the Pineapple Hill Saloon who have to comply with state and county public health restrictions that close outdoor dining.
No one likes these restrictions, but I do support them as our hospital ICU beds filled to capacity and cases have increased by 500%.
We must stop this virus before it kills thousands of more Angelenos.
But how about that tent that's right there with the outdoor dining?
No comment on that from Eric Garcetti.
All of which has led the sheriff of one California county to say, I'm not going to enforce these rules.
If you think that I'm going to drive up to a business that is serving outdoor dining and shut them down, you got another thing coming.
Here's a California sheriff saying this yesterday.
These closures and stay-at-home orders are flat-out ridiculous.
The metrics used for closures are unbelievably faulty and are not representative of true numbers and are disastrous for Riverside County.
While the Governor's office and the state has threatened action against violators, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department will not be blackmailed, bullied, or used as muscle against Riverside County residents in the enforcement of the Governor's orders.
Hey, that is exactly right.
Good for that guy.
Good for that guy.
And just a second, we're gonna bring you proof that full-scale lockdowns aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Again, I'm not saying that you can't restrict indoor dining to a particular capacity if you are in a hard-hit area.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't wear a mask when you're close to other people.
You should wear a mask when you're close to other people.
I'm saying the orders in places like L.A.
County make no sense and they are politically driven because they make no sense and they are politically driven.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, more on COVID policy and Democrats continuing to hold up COVID relief in the middle of a pandemic.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, If you're not already a Daily Wire member, now is the time to join.
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All righty, so all these lockdown orders, they're supposedly going to protect you, right?
Well, Griff Witt reporting for the Washington Post, quote, the governor had been sounding the alarm for more than a month.
By mid-November, it was clear to Michelle Lujan Grisham She would need to take extreme measures to head off the most serious emergency New Mexico has ever faced.
With COVID-19 cases rising exponentially and hospital beds dwindling, she dragged her state back to the darkest days of spring when restaurant dining was banned, non-essential businesses were closed, residents were ordered to stay inside unless absolutely necessary.
She said, quote, New Mexico has crushed this virus before twice.
We're going to do it again.
Three weeks later, victory remains a distant prospect.
Instead, Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, is on the verge of acknowledging just how grim conditions have become.
She will, she said in an interview, soon allow hospitals to move to crisis standards, a move that frees them to ration care depending on a patient's likelihood of surviving.
Given the severe strain on medical systems statewide and the lack of available ICU beds as COVID hospitalizations near 1,000 statewide, according to Jason Mitchell, the chief medical officer at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, he said, there was likely no other choice.
He said, we're headed there very quickly.
There's no more room at the inn.
New Mexico has consistently won praise among public health experts for its aggressive approach to combating the virus.
Lujan Grisham issued a stay-at-home order in March when there were fewer than 100 cases statewide.
She's gone as far as locking down entire cities to stem the spread.
A study by Oxford University found the state's approach was among the most restrictive and also the most successful, with New Mexico dodging the spring and summer surges that afflicted so many other states.
But with pandemic fatigue growing and political resistance building, New Mexico has not escaped the outbreak raging nationwide this fall.
Even though there's evidence the governor's November shutdown orders are helping reduce case numbers, experts say there's only so much they can do with a virus that zealously exploits any weakness.
Okay, so here's the bottom line.
Unless you lock people in bubbles in their homes, then this thing is going to move through the community.
Because that has been true literally the entire time.
Locking down is not the answer.
Treating people as rational human beings is the answer.
And one of the bigger problems here is, again, this goes right back to the argument we were making at the beginning about voter fraud.
Okay, when you have sources who make themselves untrustworthy and then they ask you to do a thing, even if the thing happens to be correct or factual, you are not going to trust the sources.
When you had your medical sources telling you, first of all, you should go out and party it up in February because the Wuhan virus wasn't gonna hurt you, which is literally what we had Democrats and Republicans, by the way, doing, Then people are not going to pay attention to you.
And then when you say, don't wear a mask, masks are useless, as Anthony Fauci said in early March.
People are not going to pay attention to you later when you're like, you need to wear a mask everywhere.
And then when you say, we need to lock this thing down for 15 days and then we'll be good.
And then, you lock everybody down for the rest of their lives.
People aren't gonna listen.
And when you say, here's a lockdown order, but it's not gonna apply to me, I'm gonna go out to a restaurant.
People are not gonna listen to you.
When you blow out your own credibility, instead of saying to people, listen, here are the facts.
The fact is, this thing, striated by age, right?
If you're very young, if you're a kid, it ain't gonna hurt you.
If you're under the age of 20, the likelihood that you're going to be dead from this disease is lower than the likelihood you will die of the flu.
If you are older than that, and you don't have a significant preexisting condition, there's a 99.5% chance that you're going to be fine.
These are the actual stats, by the way.
By the way, that 99.5% stat statistic, that is true for the entire population overall, including people with pre-existing conditions.
Because right now, the best information we have is that this thing has about a 0.05% death rate overall for the population.
That this thing is not, sorry, a 0.5% death rate for the entire population.
Okay, so that means that 995 out of every 1,000 human beings who get this, including people who are elderly, including people with pre-existing conditions, will live.
So, instead of talking to people as though they are reasonable and telling them what they can do that is reasonable, instead, you set these outside standards.
I get it.
I do.
I understand that if you want to protect people, you think that you're going to set what, in Judaism, you call a fence around the law.
The problem is that when you set fences that nobody's going to abide by, they breach the fence and then they proceed to run roughshod over the rest of the recommendations.
It also happens to be true that when you propagate misinformation routinely, that you can't swivel on a dime and hope people will trust you.
So here's an example.
Here's a great example of people propagating information that just is not true, and then reversing themselves willy-nilly.
So for months, we heard that if you open schools, it was a disaster.
Mostly we heard that from a media that was convinced that Trump had to be wrong about everything.
Because Trump was out there saying, you need to open the schools.
This is silly, it's bad, it's hurting kids.
And teachers unions were saying, no, no, no, we need to keep the schools closed.
And for months, the media were like, you know what?
Trump's the worst, man.
Let's keep those schools closed.
We don't know how dangerous it's going to be.
It could kill little kids.
We don't know.
Doesn't matter.
The stats show that little kids are not dying of this.
It still could kill little kids, right?
It's deeply, deeply dangerous.
And then people take that to heart.
And this leads to footage like this footage.
This is from Oregon of a teacher stopping an anti-lockdown protester to scream and shout like a crazy person because she is very upset that people are protesting against lockdowns.
And she's talking about how her parents, her kids' families are dying of COVID and how she's at risk.
Here's a little bit of that footage.
Do you know why I'm here?
I'm a teacher.
I work at school.
Now!
You know, I am a teacher.
I teach students.
I'm gonna kill or die here.
And that sort of hysteria.
I mean, that is hysteria.
There's no other way to put it.
That sort of hysteria is utterly unjustified, but it's been pushed by teachers unions and by the media.
The Chicago's teachers union over the weekend Tweet it out.
It's got 20,000, 28,000 members.
They tweeted out, quote, Sexism, racism, and misogyny.
Sexism, racism, and misogyny.
Right?
This has been the narrative of the left.
It's been the narrative of the media.
So, why exactly would we trust the media when it comes to either shutting down or reopening?
Because here is now the editorial board of the Washington Post coming along in December, right?
In the middle of the worst outbreak that we've seen thus far.
An editorial board that was like, ah, you know, we're not sure about this whole school thing.
We're not, you know.
Here is the editorial board of the Washington Post.
What could have changed in the last month?
Could there have been an election or something?
Because here's the new headline.
Students have already lost too much time.
They need to be back in classrooms.
Oh, weird.
Because those of us who were saying this months ago were castigated and are still being castigated by the teachers unions as people who don't care about the lives of teachers who are bad, uncaring, unfeeling evil.
Now here's the Washington Post that was propagating a lot of this panic porn for months on end.
And they're like, you know what?
It's time for kids to go back to school.
Yeah, no bleep Sherlock.
But you think I'm going to trust you on that?
Wrongo!
Not going to trust you on that.
I'm going to trust people who've been fairly consistent throughout this whole thing, looking for reasonable measures.
But here comes the Washington Post, and why look at that?
They think Joe Biden was elected president, and now they've reversed themselves on schooling.
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers, principals, administrators, and parents across the U.S.
have worked mightily to help students keep learning.
Students develop new curricula, schools develop new curricula, provided children with portable computers labor to give some semblance of structure to remote learning. Even with these efforts, remote learning has failed to provide anything approaching the quality of education that can be delivered by a teacher in a classroom. It's clear that there are pernicious effects of keeping children out of schools. We recently asked a top official in a Washington area jurisdiction who insisted on anonymity, why there wasn't more of a push to figure out ways to return children to the classroom.
The answer was there was no political pressure.
Parents of means can give their kids the help and resources they need or switch them to a private school.
Parents of minority or disadvantaged students with the most to lose have the least clout.
Well, maybe it's because you in the media didn't do your damn jobs on the COVID pandemic all the way from the beginning, and you're still not doing your job.
You're still not doing your job.
You continue to purvey the panic porn that suggests that everybody is equally likely to die of this virus.
You keep suggesting over and over that full-scale lockdowns that are completely hypocritical in their actual application are totally fine.
When's the last time, by the way, you saw a business owner who'd been completely destroyed on CNN or MSNBC?
You only see it on Fox News.
You only hear about that from my show or shows like it.
You won't hear it in the media.
But this is the media that asks you to trust them?
This is the same media that's blaming Trump for a lack of COVID relief.
Well, now Nancy Pelosi has completely flipped on COVID relief, and nobody in the media will even notice it.
So Nancy Pelosi, who has held up a COVID relief package for months on end for no apparent political reason other than to get beyond the election because she thought it would hurt Trump, now she says, we're not leaving Washington, D.C.
without the relief.
And the media are like, oh, look at that.
Nancy Pelosi, leader.
It's incredible.
Here's Nancy Pelosi being a giant hypocrite.
We have to have an omnibus, and we're hoping that that will accelerate the discussions on the omnibus.
We are going to keep government open.
You know, we're not going to have a continuing resolution, but we need to take the time to do that.
And then, as I said, we saw a framework.
They're putting Now they have to turn it into text.
And then so we'll take the time we need and we must get it done.
And we must get it done by this before we leave.
We cannot leave without it.
I mean, and the media just went right along with this.
The media are just like, oh, look at that.
Nancy Pelosi leader.
Yeah, I trust you guys.
I trust you guys on COVID.
I trust you guys on COVID relief.
I trust you guys on voter fraud.
Or I don't trust you on any of this stuff.
It is your lack of credibility that has led to a rise of radical, almost deconstructionist skepticism in the very notion that there is such a thing as a fact or truth.
Now, there are a lot of people in the media who've said we live in a post-truth era.
Yeah, you created it.
You created the post-truth era.
If you want a revision of that era, if you want to go back to a truth-free era, how about this?
How about you be the skeptics?
And I mean that you need to actually check your own side.
Ask tough questions of Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden, and maybe, maybe at that point, somebody will start, from the right, thinking they are a credible source.
Otherwise, shut up.
Nobody trusts you.
I mean, you're ridiculous.
You're just ridiculous.
Alrighty.
Meanwhile, there's a fascinating piece.
That I think demonstrates the blindness of the left when it comes to deep economic issues in the United States.
It's a piece in the New York Times today that I want to go through in a little bit of detail because it really is indicative of where we are in our current political discourse.
And it demonstrates that for so much of our current political discourse, a lot of it is about how members of the left simply refuse to acknowledge that their policies have ever failed under any circumstances ever.
It's pretty impressive.
Okay, so there's a piece in the New York Times over the weekend called, Why Did Racial Progress Stall in America?
It's written by Shailen Romney Garrett and Robert Putnam.
So I've recommended Robert Putnam's work on the program before.
Robert Putnam has done some really interesting work on isolation in America.
He wrote a book called Bowling Alone, in which he discussed the fact that multiculturalism and diversity might not actually strengthen a community.
What strengthens a community is a common sense of vision.
And then you can have whatever kind of racial or ethnic diversity you want, so long as everybody shares the same kind of common philosophy, right?
So inside a church, you can have a very ethnically diverse church and everything still works perfectly.
But if you have a bunch of people who conflict on fundamental ideas, then diversity is not in fact a strength.
Diversity could be very divisive, which is just common sense.
He writes about this in Bowling Alone.
He talks about the death of social institutions.
So a lot of his work is actually quite good, Robert Putnam.
But this piece is really indicative of the tremendous blindness the left has to the impact of its own preferred government policies.
So according to this piece in the New York Times, In the popular narrative of American history, black Americans made essentially no measurable progress toward equality with white Americans until the lightning bolt changes of the Civil Rights Revolution.
If that narrative were charted along the course of the 20th century, it would be a flat line for decades, followed by a sharp, dramatic upturn toward equality beginning in the 60s, the shape of a hockey stick.
In many ways, this hockey stick image of racial inequality is accurate.
Until the banning of de jure segregation and discrimination, very little progress was made in many domains.
Representation in politics and mainstream media, job quality and job security, access to professional schools and careers, or toward residential integration.
However, on a number of other measures, the shape of the trend is surprisingly different.
This is something that I've pointed out, Walter Williams, the late economist, late great Walter Williams pointed out, Thomas Sowell has pointed this out, is that actually black economic progress before the Civil Rights Act was stronger year on year than it was after the Civil Rights Act year on year in the black community.
There's a tremendous myth that has been purveyed by the media, which is that everything sucked until the Civil Rights Act for black Americans.
And again, this is correct that when it comes to actually by law allowing segregation, that's true.
You still had segregation that was overtly practiced in the South up till the mid-60s, but the notion that black Americans were unable to economically progress in the United States generally, and particularly outside the South, was absolutely 100% not true before the Civil Rights Act, right?
Just statistically speaking, this is the point these authors are going to make, and then they're going to completely miss the point.
So they say in our book, The Upswing, how America came together a century ago and how we can do it again.
We examined century-long data, tracking outcomes by race and health, education, income, wealth, and voting.
What we found surprised us.
Shouldn't have, because this has been well-known for a long time.
In terms of material well-being, black Americans were moving toward parity with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era.
What's more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped, even reversed.
Understanding how and why not only reveals why America is so fractured today, but illuminates the path forward toward a more perfect union.
In measure after measure, according to these authors, remember these are folks on the left, positive change for black Americans was actually faster in the decades before the Civil Rights Revolution than in the decades after.
Now by the way, this is not an argument that the Civil Rights Revolution was bad.
I'm going to explain in a second where everything went wrong in terms of Racial inequality in the United States, because it was moving toward parity.
Then the Civil Rights Revolution happens, which is definitely a good thing.
And then things slow.
So why did they slow?
Their answer is wrong.
Their diagnosis is wrong, but their actual description is correct.
So they point out, the life expectancy gap between black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest.
By 1995, the life expectancy ratio was the same as it had been in 1961.
There's been some progress in the ensuing two decades, but this is in part due to an increase in premature deaths among working-class whites.
In other words, the white life expectancy went down.
It's not that black life expectancy went up.
They point out the black-white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity.
College completion followed the same trajectory until 1970, and then sharply reversed.
So black Americans, more and more of them were going to college, more and more of them were graduating high school, and then we hit the 1970s and it started to reverse.
Racial integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is often believed.
Accelerated sharply in the wake of Brown vs. Board, the trend leveled off in the early 70s, followed by a modest trend toward re-segregation.
Also, income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970.
rate between 1940 and 1970. As of 2018, Black-White income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968, 50 years ago. Even taking into account the emergence of the Black middle class, Black Americans on the whole have experienced flat or downward mobility in recent decades.
The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970 and then stagnated and then reversed.
The racial wealth gap is now growing as Black homeownership plummets.
Long-run data on national trends in voting by race is patchy.
The South saw a dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed by decline and stagnation.
What data we have on national black voter turnout indicate nearly all the gains toward equality with white voter turnout occurred between 52 and 64 before the Voting Rights Act passed and then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.
These data reveal a too slow but unmistakable climb toward racial parity throughout most of the century that begins to flatline around 1970, a picture quite unlike the hockey stick of historical shorthand.
Okay, now, here is where they go wrong.
So they get the description correct, and then they get the diagnosis completely wrong, because the picture they're painting is now a much more accurate picture, which is black income growth, life expectancy, Job occupancy.
All of these things are rising steadily up until you hit about 1970, and then everything flatlines or reverses.
So, what exactly happened?
Here is their answer, and it's wrong.
Okay, so here is the answer of leftists who cannot understand, or liberals rather, who cannot understand that their policy prescriptions have failed.
They say, we draw attention to the unexpected shape and timing of these trends, not as an attempt to argue that things are or were better for black Americans than they might appear.
Quite the contrary.
Gains on the part of black Americans were due almost entirely to their fleeing the South by the millions during the Great Migration, right?
This part is true.
That if you leave the South, which is segregated, and you move to Chicago, LA, Detroit, Philadelphia, this meant better access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunities.
It is also true that there is a persistent reality of exclusion, segregation, and racial violence in a lot of these places.
In the last half century, however, collective progress has halted.
Many who have fought so hard for this progress have now lived to see it reversed.
He says it is against, these authors say, it is against this backdrop of stillborn hopes and intergenerational reversals that Black Lives Matter protesters have taken to the streets.
Okay, and so the implication is that things are the same in 1968 as they were for black Americans like today, which is just not true.
Okay, it's not true legally speaking.
It is not true certainly with regard to policing.
So what is their explanation for why the reversal?
So they have two answers.
The first is simple and familiar, white backlash.
Substantial progress toward white support for black equality was made in the first half of the 20th century.
When push came to shove, many white Americans were reluctant to live up to those principles.
Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68% of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement.
In fact, many felt the Johnson administration was moving too fast in implementing integration.
Johnson's rejection in 68 of the Kerner Commission's recommendations of sweeping reforms to address racial inequality suggested his fine-tuned political sensitivity had detected a sea change in white attitudes since he, more than any other previous president, had led the project of racial redress.
Okay, and then he tries to compare this to the heels of Reconstruction when there was this big backlash against Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Okay, then he talks about the second idea.
Okay, the second idea is what he says is the I-we-I curve.
This is Robert Putnam and Sheryl, sorry, Shailene Romney Garrett.
He talks about the I-we, they talk about the I-we-I curve.
This is their second explanation for something bad that happened.
So first is white people got bad.
Like in 68, suddenly they've been getting better, and then they just got bad in 68.
And then they say there's something called the I.B.I.
Curve, an inverted U charting America's gradual climb from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent back into egoism over the next half century.
Ah, the soul of Americans was completely corrupted.
So basically, everything sucked at the beginning of the 20th century.
Then we got very community oriented, thanks to FDR and LBJ.
And then we reversed and went into the greed years.
Again, this is just a full-on liberal narrative that happens not to be true.
These authors say the moment America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequality largely coincides with the moment Americans we decades gave way to the era of of I.
At the mid-60s peak of the I-we-I curve, long-delayed moves toward racial inclusion had raised hopes for further improvements, but those hopes went unrealized as the whole nation shifted toward a less egalitarian ideal. A central feature of America's I decades has been a shift away from shared responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism.
Economic inequality has skyrocketed.
Along with it have come massive disparities in political influence, a growing concentration of political economic power in the hands of a few billionaires.
Now, here's why this is so ridiculous.
On an economic level, the government is way bigger than it was in the 60s.
Like, way bigger.
Regulations are significantly more restrictive in many areas of American life now than they were back in the 1960s, because we have literally hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations that have been promulgated ever since.
The government has never spent more money than it is right now.
We are spending $4 trillion a year.
So this idea that you are now freer than you ever were economically in the United States is just not true.
But say these authors, the lessons of America's I We I century are thus twofold.
First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we're in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception.
We turned the tide from I to we once before and we can do it again.
But we can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms.
We have to be more inclusive in the definition of we.
Okay, so all of this ignores what actually happened in the 1960s and 70s.
So what actually happened in the 1960s and 70s is there was a building momentum inside the United States, an excellent, great momentum toward racial equality in law, right?
The basic idea was going to be that everyone was going to be given the same opportunities of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Everyone would be finally given the guarantees of the 14th Amendment, equal protection under law.
And racism would be officially abolished.
There would be no government programs that were explicitly designed along the basis of race.
And those opportunities would be open.
Okay, the story of struggle of black Americans triumphantly moving toward racial progress and economic progress in the face of actual legal barriers is just, I mean, it's an unbelievable story of bravery and greatness over the beginning of the, from the end of the Civil War to 1965.
And then by 1970, everything is reversing.
Why?
It is not because American souls suddenly were put on back burner, because Americans suddenly became selfish again or something like that.
And it is not because it is not because of quote-unquote white backlash where white people who had literally just said, OK, how about this?
How about we actually get rid of all of this discrimination in law?
They're like, you know what?
Now that we did that, we're going to discriminate.
There's another possibility, and the possibility is there was a very change in the definition of what constituted racial discrimination in the United States.
This is a point that Shelby Steele has made.
It's a point Christopher Caldwell has made in his book, The Age of Entitlement.
The change in definition was made by LBJ himself.
The change in definition was, instead of racial equality being provided under law, in other words, the law cannot discriminate against you, instead, Racial equality would be enforced by law.
Racial equality in outcome, right?
Lyndon Baines Johnson suggested that the goal was not to simply make the playing field level.
The point was to push people who had historically been behind up to the starting line of the race.
He said this in a very famous speech at Howard University.
It's just unfair because there are people who are behind and there are people who are ahead, thanks to historical influences.
And the only way for us to make things fair again is to now discriminate against the people who are ahead in favor of the people who are behind.
And that's where you get a backlash, right?
That's when the government starts to actually impose policies that are not about enforcing equality of rights, but instead enforcing a government idea of what equality of outcome would look like.
So one example of this is forced busing, which by the way, wildly unpopular in both white communities and black communities, as it turns out by opinion polling from the 1970s.
So instead of saying, okay, every kid has to have equal access to the local school, In the neighborhood in which they live.
Instead, they say, you know what?
We're looking for a specific racial mix.
And in order to do that, we're going to bus your kid to a particular school that is not in your community.
Outside of your... This started in Boston, by the way.
Outside of your community.
And parents went, you know what?
I don't want my kid to be part of a social experiment.
I want my kid to go to school where I live.
And if people live in my neighborhood and they want to go to school, they're great.
But I'm not sending my kid all the way across the city to teachers in a school I don't know with kids I don't know.
And spending an hour on a bus every morning.
I'm moving out to the suburbs.
And so you get white flight out of cities like Boston.
Is that racism?
So the left would say, of course that's racism.
That's the evils of the American soul.
Or is that just parents being parents and protecting their kids being used in social experimentation?
I wouldn't blame black parents for doing that.
I wouldn't blame white parents for doing that.
I wouldn't blame any parent for doing that.
Because your parent, as a parent, your goal is to protect your child and get them the best available educational opportunity.
The best way to end it.
If you want to preserve integration in public schools, you let the schools be local and you let black kids go to the local school, whether it is white or black, and you let white kids go to the local school, whether it is white or black.
So forced busing is a good example of how the government tried to cram down on popular policy.
And it ended up achieving exactly the reverse of what government wanted to do.
The same thing is true when it came to welfare programs that were put in place by the LBJ administration.
The Johnson administration suddenly started suggesting that there were positive rights, rights to housing, rights to a job, rights to certain levels of remuneration.
Right?
That there was going to be welfare payments that were made on the basis of single motherhood.
And you suddenly see the single motherhood rate start to skyrocket.
In 1960, the single motherhood rate in the black community was 20%.
Today, it's in excess of 70%.
There's a reason for that.
The reason for that is government policy.
In fact, if you look all the way back to the early 20th century, black Americans had a higher rate of marriage than white Americans did.
This is not a cultural thing.
This is a government policy created thing.
So the mistake that was made in the 1960s was not the pursuit of racial equality under law.
It was the pursuit of racial equality as an outcome under the law, which meant the direct application of inequality between citizens.
That was the backlash.
It did create a backlash.
It not only created a backlash, it also undermined the very sort of equal standard that promulgates good living.
Because it turns out if you pay people to do bad things decision-wise, they will do bad things decision-wise.
But the left believes the government is always the solution, right?
So the problem is they can never acknowledge that these government programs were a failure.
They can never acknowledge that the war on poverty has been an extraordinary failure.
We've spent tens of trillions of dollars in various war on poverty programs, and the poverty rate is about the same now as it was back when they were first started.
The racial inequality rates are about the same now as they were back when government first tried to get in the business of guaranteeing an equal outcome.
Government should never have been in the business of trying to guarantee an equal outcome.
Government's only mandate is equal justice under law.
That is the only mandate.
Okay, and that mandate, which suggests that there is a regime of rights and that if you properly exercise those rights and you ought to be protected in those rights by the government, that you have a fair shot at success, that's what government should have been doing.
So what these sociologists are missing, of course, is the most basic point of all, which is that when you incentivize people differently, then you get different outcomes.
Take housing, for example.
When you shift the nature of housing from, you're not allowed to discriminate in public housing, to, we are going to subsidize particular types of housing and particular types of community regardless of the financial straits of those communities.
You are not, in fact, solving the underlying problems.
This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis in the 2000s.
That was directly related to the Community Reinvestment Act.
It was directly related to the fact that the federal government was subsidizing subprime mortgages to people who did not have good credit scores.
And it turns out, when the real estate market started to tank, a lot of those people could not pay their debts.
Were those people being done a favor?
They were not being done a favor.
Okay, again, remember those stats.
Home ownership gaps between blacks and whites were actually narrowing between 1900 and 1970.
And now, black homeownership has been plummeting.
That is a result of government policy.
It's not a result of selfishness or cruelty.
That's a result of government policy that is not directed at incentivizing behavior that leads to homeownership, particularly.
Treat people the same under law, and you will get similar behavior from people under law.
Treat people differently under law, and you will get people being treated differently under law.
This has been true throughout human history.
It will continue to be true.
And until the left recognizes this, gaps are going to continue to increase.
They're not going to decrease.
And all of these All of these supposedly compassionate liberals who believe that government can come in and solve all of these problems and create equality of outcome, they're doing precisely the reverse of what they tried to do.
And they're making the country worse in the process because they're implying that if you oppose those programs, then you are not quote-unquote anti-racist.
Their whole idea here is that if you believe in equality of rights before the law, this makes you a bad person, right?
This is the Ibram Kendi thing.
This is the Robin DiAngelo thing.
This is all the morons in the media who keep saying anti-racist when what they actually mean is you oppose the complete destruction of equal justice before law.
Ibram Kendi openly says the only answer to injustices of the past are injustices today.
He overtly calls for the end of individual rights in the name of collective outcomes.
And that is what is being pushed right now.
And there should be a backlash against that because it's un-American.
Not only is it un-American, it is utterly unproductive and it does not not only unify Americans, it also creates more inequality in effect.
The fact that the liberals refuse to recognize this and the fact that the evidence is staring them right in the face.
Right in the face.
And they just refuse to recognize it.
It truly is an incredible, incredible thing.
Alrighty, 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.
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