The media cheer COVID authoritarianism while ignoring the science, Hollywood sneers at non-leftists, and Los Angeles decides to let crime flourish.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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The covid wave that is engulfing the country continues unabated.
We have not seen hospitals overrun generally in the United States yet.
We are starting to see obviously capacity being strained particularly in rural areas that don't have a lot of open ICU beds.
In big urban areas we're not starting to see that Quite yet.
One of the big problems right now is we don't have a lot of flex capacity.
What we mean by that is you can't shift resources from rural areas to urban areas the way that we did early on in the pandemic because the wave is hitting pretty much everywhere all at once.
If you look at each state chart, every state is now seeing increases in COVID cases, increases in hospitalizations, increases in ICU beds being taken up.
And we are expected to see that for at least the next week minimum, thanks to Thanksgiving.
Presumably, that will also happen after Christmas.
Public health authorities are telling people they ought to stay home.
Not because it is necessarily dangerous to travel in and of itself, but if you have COVID and you go somewhere else in the country, you could be seeding a new pocket of COVID in that place.
And right now, obviously, you could be asymptomatic while traveling.
Okay, with all of that said, and all the usual provisos, be careful, be reasonable, socially distance, make sure that you're not in direct contact with people who have pre-existing conditions, at least in close proximity to those people.
If you are in close proximity to virtually anybody, out of fear that you would spread this thing to others and they will spread it to somebody who's vulnerable, you should mask up if you are in close proximity with people, right?
These are all the reasonable measures that we have been told for months.
None of that has changed.
The glee with which our authoritarian legislators and governors and mayors, the glee with which they are shutting down society is truly something to behold.
It's really amazing because they're sneering at us.
They really are.
They're sneering at us.
They believe that they are the reasonable ones, they are the rational ones, and therefore they are capable of making their own risk-reward calculations.
Andrew Cuomo in New York, just a couple of weeks ago, was saying that he was going to have a gathering for Thanksgiving, including his 89-year-old mother and his two daughters, who are in their 20s.
Right, which is the definition of an intergenerational gathering.
And meanwhile, he was telling everybody else they need to shut down and not travel for Thanksgiving.
You had the mayor of Austin, who was literally telling people from his timeshare in Cabo not to travel.
You've seen Eric Garcetti, who's out there protesting with people during the Black Lives Matter protests without a mask, now telling everybody that they need to shut down their outdoor restaurants at the exact same time that he is telling Hollywood that they can go ahead and continue filming and they can continue doing their catering services in food tents directly outside of their shoots.
The hypocrisy!
From our leftist authoritarian leaders is astonishing.
And their self-congratulatory hypocrisy is really the most galling part.
Because it is not that they are doing this in sadness.
It is not that they are doing this with a level of regret.
Listen, we have no other choice.
We've tried everything else and this just isn't working.
And so in order to protect our medical capacity, we're going to have to use well-calibrated policies to shut down the possibility of spread.
Like that, I think we would all understand.
I mean, seriously, I think that if you have a major spike in a particular area and you're running up against hospital capacity, then there may be a necessity for suggesting, for example, that you have to limit indoor dining to a certain percentage of full capacity or that you only do outdoor dining.
There are times when you're going to have to use these sorts of measures.
I mean, even Sweden, which was sort of the case model of a country that had not fully shut down, even Sweden is now backing off and starting to throw in the towel on this particular subject.
According to Ala Pundit writing for Hot Air, The Swedish government is now backing off of its own procedures here.
Before, they had basically suggested that they were going to continue to allow everything to remain open, and that herd immunity would eventually be reached.
It turns out, statistically speaking, it just really didn't happen.
Instead, they started to see spikes again, just like the surrounding countries, and so they have now engaged in some of the same lockdown procedures that some of the other countries around them had engaged in.
Okay, so you have to follow the data, and you have to follow the policies where it leads.
But, at the very least, we should be assured that our politicians are not excited about limiting our freedom, that they are not excited about limiting our liberty, and that if they believe that freedom and liberty ought to be limited, it ought to be limited for them as well.
And yet the policy is not well calibrated.
And our politicians are patting themselves on the back.
Their arm, it's like Mrs. Incredible in the Incredibles.
The arm has lengthened, it's physically lengthened, so they can pat themselves on the back for what a wondrous job they are doing, even as people die, and even if they blew it in the first place.
The most obvious example of this is, of course, Andrew Cuomo, who wrote an entire book about his leadership during the crisis.
He did a presser yesterday, and he called in Anthony Fauci.
Again, I have not been critical of Fauci throughout this pandemic.
I think that he's been doing the best that he can as a general rule.
He didn't get it all right.
He said early on he shouldn't wear masks.
Then he reversed himself.
He suggested early on that schools should be closed.
Then he reversed himself.
But he's been doing the best that he can.
My problem with Fauci is his willingness to become a sort of popular figure of worship.
That part is ridiculous.
The fact that Fauci was posing for the cover of InTouch magazine and that he was throwing out first pitches at Washington Nationals baseball games and this kind of stuff, that is not appropriate for a public health counselor.
For somebody who is doing a public service job, the whole point of public service is not the plot, it is not the accolades, it is to serve the public.
It is not to be posing on the cover of magazines telling us what we all ought to do, the most popular doctor in America, this kind of stuff.
Okay, so he and Cuomo had a bout of self-congratulation.
This is really more on Cuomo, but this is just absurdity piled on top of absurdity.
While Cuomo is calling for mass shutdowns across his own state and across the country, and while he's evading responsibility for his own failures, he suggested that he and Fauci are just like the modern-day Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
Maybe in Righteous Kill?
Here is Andrew Cuomo.
Maybe we enlist you.
I'll do it with you.
We'll do an ad telling New Yorkers it's safe to take the vaccine.
To, you know, put us together.
We're like the modern-day De Niro and Pacino.
You can be whichever you want.
You can be the De Niro or Pacino.
Fauci and Cuomo, I'll give you a front boy.
Who do you want to be?
De Niro or Pacino?
Which one do you want to be?
I love them both!
I love them both!
I don't want to insult one or the other.
If I say one, I don't want to hurt the feelings of the other.
So either one!
Who's the politician?
That guy's a schmuck.
Andrew Cuomo, schmuck-tastic, that guy.
What a putz.
I mean, seriously, the fact that he's sitting there.
He's had over 30,000 people die in his state.
And he's seeing spikes again in his state.
He's saying, am I Al Pacino or am I Robert De Niro?
If I tell people to take the vaccine, they'll take the vaccine.
If I tell people to mask up, they'll mask up.
I mean, that guy has enjoyed flexing his power more than anybody in America, with the possible exception of Gavin Newsom out in California.
And the media have continued to portray him as some sort of great, popular hero, Andrew Cuomo.
And it's ridiculous.
By the way, he happens to be an absolute jerk.
Apparently, yesterday, a former Andrew Cuomo advisor put out a tweet thread talking about what a jerk he was.
Her name is Lindsey Boylan.
She said her most toxic team environment was working for Governor Andrew Cuomo.
And then she put out like a 13-tweet thread.
She said, I've had many jobs.
Waitressing at Friendly's as a teenager was an infinitely more respectful environment, even though I had bad customers who tipped for me.
If people weren't deathly afraid of him, they'd be saying the same thing, and you'd already know the stories.
Again, this is a former Andrew Cuomo staffer, but don't worry, the media treats him as though he is just a wonderful, wonderful man.
And again, all of this really comes down to, we have a class of people in this country who believe that they are better than you, they believe they know more than you, and they believe that they have to paternalistically guide you through life.
Another example of this, there's a piece in the New York Times today by a woman named Elizabeth Rosenthal.
She is a doctor.
She worked as an emergency room physician before becoming a journalist.
She's the author of a book called An American Sickness, How Healthcare Became Big Business.
So her piece today in the New York Times is titled, It's Time to Scare People About COVID.
You see, you're a fool.
And so she has to scare you about COVID.
Now, nowhere in this piece Does she actually cite data?
Nowhere.
Because if you knew the data, then you might be able to make a rational risk-reward calculation.
Instead, her idea is that we have to scare the living hell out of people about COVID, so they make absolutely non-rational decisions about their own level of risk.
So here's what she writes in the New York Times.
And again, this is the general perspective that so many elitists in our society have.
The rules don't apply to them, but they do apply to you.
And they have to scare you, because you're an emotional creature, and because you haven't been following the rules.
You're the person who's been violating all the rules, and so we have to scare you now.
Here's what she says.
I still remember exactly where I was sitting decades ago during the short film shown in class for a few painful minutes.
We watched a woman talking mechanically, raspily through a hole in her throat, pausing occasionally to gasp for air.
The public service message, this is what can happen if you smoke.
I had nightmares about that ad, which today would most likely be tagged with a trigger warning or deemed unsuitable for children, but it was supremely effective.
I never started smoking and doubt that few, if any of my horrified classmates did either.
When the government required television and radio stations to give $75 million in free airtime for anti-smoking ads between 1967 and 1970, smoking rates plummeted.
Since then, numerous smoking scare campaigns have proved successful.
Some even featured celebrities like Yul Brynner's posthumous offering with a warning after he died from lung cancer, As the United States faces out-of-control spikes from COVID-19, with people refusing to take recommended, even often mandated, precautions, our public health announcements from governments, medical groups, and healthcare companies feel lame compared to the urgency of the moment.
A mix of clever catchphrases, scientific information, and calls to civic duty, they are virtuous and profoundly dull.
Instead, it's time to focus on some sharp, terrifying realism.
Fear appeals can be very effective, says Jay Van Bevel, Associate Professor of Psychology at NYU.
I'm not talking fear-mongering, but showing in a straightforward and graphic way what can happen with the virus.
From what I could find, the state of California came close to showing the urgency.
A soft-focus video of a person on a ventilator featuring the sound of a breathing machine but not a face, it exhorted people to wear a mask for their friends, moms, and grandpas.
But maybe we need a PSA, featuring someone actually on a ventilator in the hospital.
You might see that person bucking the vent.
Bodies naturally rebel against the machine forcing pressurized oxygen into the lungs, which is why patients are typically sedated.
Another message could feature a patient lying in an ICU bed, immobile, tubes in the groin, with a mask delivering 100% oxygen, over the mouth and nose, eyes wide with fear, watching the saturation numbers rise and dip on the monitor, over the bed.
These PSAs might sound harsh, but they might overcome our natural denial.
Okay, here's the thing.
Nowhere, nowhere in this piece does she actually talk about the rates of death from COVID for particular populations.
This is my great criticism.
It's been my criticism since the beginning.
You have not been given data.
You have been given opinion.
Instead, you have been given large numbers like how many people have died or how many cases there are generally in the country.
You have not been given the striated data explaining what your risk factors are or the risk factors of people around you so you can make a rational decision.
Everybody understands it is possible to die of COVID.
The question is, what sort of daily activities are you going to rule out in order to prevent somebody from dying of COVID and what is your risk or their risk of dying of COVID?
This is how you make rational decisions.
The basic idea from our betters is that they're going to scare us into compliance with ridiculously authoritarian health diktats.
And when you compare this to lung cancer and smoking commercials, recognize that smoking is a voluntary activity.
And that not smoking is something that the vast majority of people do.
But not going to the grocery store, not going to hang out with friends, not going out into public areas for a walk without a mask, which is apparently what they're now telling you in LA you're not allowed to do.
That stuff is the stuff of everyday life.
We're not talking about smoking, an optional activity you may or may not enjoy.
We are talking about what is your risk factor if you let your five-year-old go to school.
And yet these jokers are telling us that the best way to get people to comply with dictates of non-rational behavior is to scare the hell out of you.
And then they wonder why we don't trust them?
If you are openly saying that your job is to scare me into complying with health measures that are not calibrated to succeed, then You know what?
You're the bad guy.
You're the bad guy.
And there's a reason that people are not trusting the experts here.
Because the experts have been completely inconsistent.
Because the rational risk-reward calculation has been thrown completely out the window in favor of policies that make no sense at all.
Admiral Brett Giroir, who's the Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services, He was pointing out yesterday that you're seeing cities around the country now starting to ban outdoor dining.
He said there's literally no data to support the idea that we should be banning outdoor dining.
It doesn't matter.
Apparently, you shouldn't dine outdoors unless you work in Hollywood, in which case you can totally dine outdoors.
And also, the best way to make people comply with this nonsense is to scare the living hell out of them, even if they are 20 and healthy.
And this is why whenever you see these stories, and you saw these stories from the media repeatedly, teacher dies.
Of COVID-19.
And then you find out, halfway down through the story, the teacher was never in school and acquired it at some other event.
Or you see these stories.
Ridiculous stories about outbreaks on college campuses.
And then they never tell you.
How many kids have actually died of this on college campuses?
The answer, best as I can tell, is close to zero.
And they never tell you this stuff.
Instead, it's all scare tactics.
And then when people say, well, I'm not sure that you should be that scared.
You can make a rational calculation.
They say that you're taking COVID lightly.
People are not going to obey ridiculous, insane regulations that make no sense.
Here's Admiral Bretouart pointing out that all these places shutting down outdoor dining are doing so not on the basis of science, they're doing so on the basis of political incentivization.
Political incentives right now for our authoritarian leaders is that if you lock down, you get all sorts of credit, and if you don't lock down, you get all sorts of blame, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is.
What really breaks my heart is that I don't know of any data that says you need to shut down outdoor dining or outdoor bars.
We really wanted to limit the indoor crowded places.
The evidence clearly does not support limitations on things like outdoor dining, particularly that are spaced outdoor bars.
You know, the evidence just isn't there.
And remember, shutting down completely, particularly if you don't have evidence, can be counterproductive.
It can be counterproductive.
As we'll see in a second, experts are saying that it can be counterproductive.
But don't worry, your media experts, who are certainly acting outside the purview of their expertise, are telling you that you must lock down forever ad infinitum, and if you don't agree, this is because you're a COVID denier, which is insane.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so again, our moral betters keep telling us that we ought to listen to them.
But the problem is that they are promulgating regulations that make absolutely no sense.
And then if you take account of countervailing concerns, like for example, the health effects of a completely destroyed economy, or the economic effects of shutting people's businesses down, then they tell you you're taking this thing too lightly.
So we're back where we were in March and April, where if you said, listen, if we're gonna formulate policy, we should look at trade-offs here.
Then people said he wanted to kill grandma.
We are right back there.
It doesn't matter that the data now show that people can act safely and securely so long as they act reasonably.
Instead, we are supposed to simply fall for the same propaganda that we were pushed in in March and April.
And that is why you're not seeing in the establishment media any interviews with business owners.
Business owners who are being put out of business.
You're seeing it on shows like this one.
You're seeing it on shows on Fox News.
You're hearing it on talk radio.
You're not hearing it anywhere on CNN or MSNBC.
The business concerns.
Instead what you hear is that business owners who want to open up are bad people.
Here's a Minnesota bar owner who happens to be a woman of color speaking on Fox News about how the governor of Minnesota is now shutting everything down.
A governor cannot shut down businesses at a whim.
He cannot pick and choose who's going to be a winner, who's essential and who's not essential, because that's basically what he did.
He said that we are not essentials.
All Americans are essential to me.
And for him to pick and say that my business is not essential and that we have to shut down — I have two businesses.
I have a gymnastics gym and a restaurant.
And I have to shut down both businesses because he thinks we're not essential.
And for me, I'm not going to back down to tyranny.
Okay, and again, this is what it feels like right now, is are you going to back down to tyranny by agreeing with health officials who are promulgating regulations that are not reasonable in the extreme, and agreeing with the media that is willing to misinform you all the time?
Dr. Monica Gandhi told Yahoo News, she's an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco, it's not because the public is irresponsible, it's because they are losing trust in public health officials who put out arbitrary restrictions.
We are failing in our public health messaging.
She says there is a better way to engage in all of this.
She says a harm reduction approach would be to encourage masking and social distancing instead of demanding that people have no contact at all with friends or family they don't live with.
In other words, even during a pandemic, abstinence only is not effective.
But you are seeing public officials take the just say no approach.
Because there's only political benefit in just say no.
That way, if somebody does something wrong, you can always tell them that they broke your rules.
That way, you can never be blamed.
Only the people can be blamed.
Only the little people can be blamed.
After all, you said don't do it, ever.
Don't go out of your house.
Stay in a bubble.
Don't open your business.
Make everybody unemployed.
And the politicians get to sit there and they get to benefit.
And they get to smile and talk about how they're like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
When politicians enjoy their authoritarianism this much, it is demonstrative of a serious problem in American life.
Do you think this is the last time they're going to try to use this sort of authority?
I was a skeptic of this.
At the very beginning, there were a lot of people, friends, family of mine, who were saying, you know, this sort of power grab, We're uncomfortable with it because we're afraid that it could become something permanent.
I said, well, listen, there's a global pandemic on.
We don't know all the facts.
As the facts come out, these regulations will be relaxed.
The American people won't stand for it.
And then it became clear that a lot of Americans would stand for it.
And in fact, many Americans will call for it.
And so the question becomes, what now is the bar going to be for mayors and governors to declare an emergency and simply use all of the authority they've accrued to themselves to do whatever it is that they want?
This is dangerous, dangerous stuff.
Yes, individual liberty is at stake when you are not relating rational policy in any way to the risks that are currently out there.
And this is exacerbated by the fact that the media are utterly inconsistent.
There's only one consistent message from the media, and that is the message of the left.
It is certainly not the message of truth or the message of objective fact.
The media are wildly inaccurate about everything they cover with regard to this pandemic, and then they blame you for not believing them.
Perfect example of their misinformation today.
So, the media started repeating and featuring a woman named Rebecca Jones on TV last night.
I believe she was on CNN.
There are a bunch of stories printed about her.
She was originally a low-level worker in the COVID data center for Florida.
And the reason that she was fired, originally, she said that she was a whistleblower, and that she was trying to reveal data in Florida that Governor Ron DeSantis was trying to cover up.
And as it turns out, that was just a lie.
This is going back to, I believe, like, May?
In the middle of May, she was fired.
Okay, so they claim that she was the architect of Florida's COVID-19 dashboard and that she had tried to reveal data and that Florida had fired her for attempting to reveal that data.
That is not true.
Okay, so she actually was asked to manipulate, she said she was asked to manipulate data to support Ron DeSantis' plan to reopen Florida.
Instead, she was asked to temporarily disable the ability to export data from the dashboard so it could be verified that the data matched other sources.
She originally was actually fired because she was fired for insubordination.
According to the DeSantis administration, Rebecca Jones exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department, including unilateral decisions to modify the department's COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from Okay, so she was fired for performance issues.
Okay, the reason she's back in the headlines is because now she's out on Twitter claiming that the actual reason that she was fired is not just because she was revealing data and she was a whistleblower, but now she's claiming that Ron DeSantis authorized the police to raid her house Right, that all of her technology was seized at gunpoint by the authorities in Florida because Ron DeSantis is engaged in some sort of fascist takeover.
There's only one problem.
Not a word of that story is true.
The media are running with it anyway, because they don't care about what is true and what is false.
All they care about is their narrative, which is that governors who want to remain open are bad, and governors who are authoritarians are good.
Because in the end, they want those authoritarians to control you, not to control them, to control you.
We're gonna get to the actual story here in just one second, because the media are not telling you the truth, broadly read.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So, as I've been saying, there's this story out in the media that Rebecca Jones, the supposed data scientist over in Florida, she had her house raided at Ron DeSantis' behest.
It turns out that that is just an absolute falsehood.
The actual story is that according to the Florida Department of Health, someone hacked into a system used to send emergency communications earlier this month and sent an unauthorized message to members of the state emergency response team responsible for coordinating public health and medical response.
The November 10th message obtained by the Tampa Bay Times urged recipients to quote, speak up before another 17,000 are dead.
You know, this is wrong.
You don't have to be a part of this.
Be a hero.
Speak out before it's too late.
So who exactly hacked into the system then sent an unauthorized message?
Apparently, according to a court warrant, it was this.
It came from the ISP address of Rebecca Jones's house.
So, the reason that she was actually arrested is because she hacked into a public information system that she did not work for.
That is why she was arrested.
That is why her house was raided.
It was not because Rhonda Sanchez was trying to shut up the whistleblower.
Okay, but it doesn't matter.
The media are just gonna lie to you.
And they're gonna continue to lie to you.
And the media are going to continue to promulgate insane double standards.
So some of the media double standards include, you are a very, very bad person.
You are a very bad person if you choose to go out in public, even if you're wearing a mask, even if you're socially distancing, the fact that you have not holed up in your house.
Until the vaccine is available and maybe beyond.
This means that you are a bad person.
Not only that, if you're a member of particular religious communities, you're a particularly bad person.
So if you're a Jew in New York and you are attending a minyan, even if it's a socially distanced minyan, a group of 10 men praying together, then this means that you are a bad person.
You are responsible for the COVID surge.
However, if there are surges in minority communities, that's due to systemic American racism.
We are seeing the same narrative now promulgated with regard to vaccination.
So, there have been polls done, and what they show is that a huge percentage of Americans are quite unfortunately skeptical of taking the coronavirus vaccine.
Now, I'm not skeptical of it.
I will be happy to take it right here on air if it makes people feel any better.
I do not care.
I'm very much in favor of vaccinations.
This thing will be vetted all the way down to the ground by the time that it is released to people who are of my age range.
It has already been vetted.
It is already going out in the UK.
In fact, it is a blight on the FDA that a vaccine that was developed in the United States by an American company, Pfizer, is going out in the UK before it's going out in the United States.
It just demonstrates the crappiness of our bureaucracy.
But beyond that, there are a huge percentage of Americans who are skeptical about the vaccine.
And that's not just the usual sort of skeptical about the vaccine crowd.
This includes a huge percentage of people who are skeptical about this particular vaccine for a wide variety of reasons, some from the right because they have some sort of conspiracy theory about the profitability of the vaccine.
I've been hearing weird rumors about how Fauci owns stock and this or that.
That's not how vaccines get developed.
We're not rolling out a vaccine to make Anthony Fauci rich.
That's a bunch of nonsense.
And then on the left, you hear, I don't trust the vaccine specifically because it was developed under President Trump.
That one came directly from Kamala Harris, which is completely crazy.
OK, but what the media have said is that the refusal to get a vaccination, it is blameworthy if you are of a particular group.
And if you are of a different particular group, then it is not blameworthy.
So if you're a white person and you are skeptical about the vaccine, this is because you're an anti-vaxxer.
If, however, you're black and you're skeptical about getting the vaccine, this is because of America's long history of systemic racism.
There's a long piece in the Washington Post today called, amid history of mistreatment, doctors struggle to sell black Americans on coronavirus vaccine.
So you're not seeing any of the sort of moral opprobrium attached to black Americans who don't want to get the vaccine that you are seeing to a huge number of other Americans who don't want to get the vaccine.
What is the rationale?
Because the history of healthcare in the United States is intertwined with racism, says the Washington Post.
Fewer than half of black Americans say they will get the COVID vaccine, which is wild considering that COVID is disproportionately affecting black Americans.
It is actually more important for black Americans to get the COVID vaccine than nearly any other racial group in America.
63% of Hispanics and 61% of white people say they will get it.
Many black people say they do not trust the medical establishment because of glaring inequities in modern day care and historical examples of mistreatment.
This deep-seated skepticism has led to a burst of confidence-building efforts across the country, some led by the nation's top black doctors and scientists and funded by the U.S.
government.
So far, the response has been mixed at best with many black Americans, like those in certain black congregations, saying they want more information or cannot count on the federal government to work in their best interest.
And one of the reasons that they are skeptical is because they are thinking back to the Tuskegee, the infamous Tuskegee study that was done in the 1930s, in which federal health officials conducted secret experiments on black men to study the progression of syphilis, obviously an act of official evil from the United States government at the time.
Okay, but that also happened in the 1930s.
Okay, it is now, last I checked, 2020.
The very notion that we are supposed to act as though it is legitimate for more legitimate for black Americans to refuse a vaccine because they're worried about systemic American racism in 2020 thanks to stuff that was evil that was done in the 1930s.
Like, the double standard here is, again, pretty wild.
So if you're an American of any race who wants to open a business, the media don't want anything to do with you.
You're bad, you don't care about other people.
If you don't want to get the vaccine because you're skeptical generally, you're bad, and the media don't want to have anything to do with you.
If, however, you're a black person who doesn't want to get the vaccine, then we have long pieces about how it is perfectly reasonable for you not to want to get the vaccine because back in the 1930s, the American government was racist.
You wonder why people don't trust the public health officials or the media who are supposed to be disseminating information because there's always an agenda.
There is always an agenda.
And that agenda is being propagandized by people in Hollywood.
Again, it's elitists in the media and in Hollywood and in government who believe they ought to rule your lives and decide what is morally okay and what is morally not.
And this is how you end up with the specter of Pete Davidson on SNL on Saturday Night Live.
Telling people over the weekend that if you're protesting lockdown, you look like a baby.
I'm noticing that Pete Davidson was sitting on the set of Saturday Night Live like a foot and a half from another human being while he was saying this.
I saw the protest.
People were outside the bar shouting about freedom, taunting the cops, chanting that they should arrest the governor.
But it's Staten Island, so I assumed that it was just like a typical last call.
And are you against these protests?
I mean, kind of, but I'm also just happy I'm no longer the first thing people think of when they say, what's the worst thing about Staten Island?
I take it that you found these protests frustrating.
Yeah, man, they're making us look like babies.
You know, it's bad when even people in Boston are like, ah, drink at home, you queers!
OK, first of all, I'm still not sure why people find Pete Davidson humorous.
But beyond that, Pete Davidson is sitting at his workplace a foot and a half from another person wearing a mask.
A foot and a half from another person wearing a mask.
But he gets to lecture you about what you ought to do.
And his business, I've noticed, is not being destroyed.
Also, you may have noticed there's a live studio audience for SNL.
You know how?
Because they actually designated, I'm not kidding, they actually designated live studio audiences, employees, for purposes of essential services for SNL.
Okay, so it only applies to the little people.
It only applies to little people like you.
You own a business.
You want to spend time with your family.
The rules must be applied to you.
And you are a bad person if you buck the rules or if you protest.
The level of arrogance that is applied to one half of the American population is just insane.
It's just insane.
And you'll be ripped up and down, by the way, if you note this.
So Matthew McConaughey committed this grave sin.
So McConaughey happens to be, he is on the left.
Last I checked, he's a Democrat.
I know that he's in favor of gun control, he spoke at March for Our Lives, but he happens to be sort of more culturally moderate.
And so he was on a show with Russell Brand, and he said, the far left in Hollywood is arrogant toward conservatives, and the world just caved in on him.
How dare he say this?
Because there is one thing that the left cannot stand, and that is someone calling out their bullcrap.
Here was Matthew McConaughey calling out their bullcrap and getting a bunch of crap for it.
There is a lot on that illiberal left that absolutely condescend, patronize, and are arrogant towards that other 50%.
You and you say, hey, we want to get out the vote.
We want people to go be able to go vote.
We're going to do a campaign to let people vote.
I'm like, 100%.
Yes, everyone.
Is there anyone who would say no to that?
And then they can't help themselves.
At the very end of it, they go, so we don't let those criminal get back in office.
Whoa!
You're like, no, don't say the last part.
You lost 50% of your audience.
Okay, McConaughey got a bunch of crap from people in Hollywood for this.
How dare he?
Because how dare he point out that there's an entire other side to the political aisle?
This is the kind of scorn that Hollywood has for you.
This is the kind of scorn the media have for you and your politicians.
This group of elitists who all traffic in the same circles, these people believe they ought to rule you from above.
And if you buck that system in any way, regardless of the industry that you are in, then you will be called out and you'll be ostracized.
You'll be socially ostracized.
We're going to get to more of that in just one second because, you know, it does feel in the United States, and it has felt for quite a while, I'm firmly convinced that this is what the Trump backlash has been about.
I'm firmly convinced that it feels, if you are on one side of the political aisle, which is to say anywhere to the right of Karl Marx at this point, but certainly anywhere to the right of Hillary Clinton, that you are under constant assault.
You're under constant assault from authoritarian government officials, from a media that will lie to you and about you, You're under assault from Hollywood that wishes to promulgate messages that run directly counter to your values.
You're under assault from social media that censors your viewpoints.
And from journalists who will go digging through all of your old posts to find something that they can use as a club to cudgel you.
You're under assault from corporations and from your bosses who might fire you if a bad old tweet is resurfaced.
It feels like that.
It feels like the walls are closing in.
And that is not a coincidence.
There is a plan from elitists to make the walls close in on you.
Because they must.
They must achieve your silence.
They must achieve not just your silence, but your ascent.
They want you to be complicit in the destruction of your own values.
That is the goal here.
And that is why it feels monolithic.
That's why it feels like a tsunami right now, a cultural tsunami.
And Trump was a middle finger to that.
That middle finger is not going to go away post-election, regardless of what happens, regardless of how this election ends up being adjudicated, regardless of what the Electoral College does.
That push to take over all of the institutions of power in our society, from government, to Hollywood, to academia, to the education system, to all of the main outlets of media, to social media, that push is going to continue unabated from the left because they're engaged in renormalization of American values.
They're engaged in institutional captures so they can cram down on you a particular agenda and then ostracize you if you dare to speak up against it.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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All right, we're gonna get to more of the cultural scorn that is now being ladled onto you if you are of a particular ilk.
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And so this monolithic culture war that is being waged by every institution in American society on one side of the particular aisle, it is particularly strong in Hollywood, which is a monolithic media culture.
I mean, the people in Hollywood are 100% on the left, except for people who are underground.
There are many, many people who are underground.
I've met with heads of studios who are conservatives.
We meet in anonymous places.
Wearing baseball caps to ensure that nobody recognizes us because everybody is afraid of what will happen if, God forbid, it is found out that they don't agree with this overwhelming left culture in Hollywood.
Well, the problem is that the content that Hollywood puts out, of course, echoes all of the left's messaging.
So, perfect example, The Hollywood Reporter today reporting, ABC's The Rookie is leaning into calls for a more nuanced approach of how cops are portrayed.
We want to change things for as long as we get to do this show.
When the writing staff of The Rookie remotely reconvened in June, they weren't exactly sure what to do.
Not only were they setting out to make a third season of their ABC drama during a pandemic, they had to break stories for a cop show, as countless Americans took to the streets in protest of George Floyd's murder days earlier by Minneapolis police, and of the systemic racism that made his tragedy all too common.
By the way, I just gotta point out, I'm old enough to remember when the media used to say things like alleged murder.
Right?
Isn't it kind of amazing that the media just go George Floyd murder?
I mean, really, that's actually an issue that is under contention and will be under contention at the trial for Derek Chauvin, who's the cop in that particular case.
But the media just say George Floyd's murder as though there is no issue under contention there, factually speaking.
It just demonstrates that the media have no actual objective fact standard.
According to executive producer and writer Terrence Paul Winter, he says, we've always been aspirational in our storytelling, but we realize being aspirational isn't good enough. We can't do one special episode where we feel good and solve racism in the end and then go back to our usual thing the next week. We want to change things for as long as we get to do the show.
So they have decided that they are going to put in a bunch of messages promoted by the interest Now Color of Change is a far-left interest group.
This is not unusual for Hollywood.
For many, many years, for example, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has pre-screened Hollywood shows to make sure that portrayals of gays and lesbians don't make gays and lesbians into villains, and also that there are enough gay and lesbian characters on particular shows for them to get the GLAAD stamp of approval.
So this is not unusual.
Color of Change, apparently, is now going to be doing the same for Hollywood shows.
The civil rights advocacy nonprofit, which has sprawling initiatives pursuing criminal justice, voting rights, and economic reform, is becoming more and more involved in the entertainment industry in an effort to help it move away from the unhelpful narratives audiences see on camera.
What we see on TV, it impacts the way we vote, the way we react to people, even the way we either believe Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization or not, says Color of Change Culture and Entertainment Advocacy Director Kristen Marston, who's consulted on more than 100 TV series about issues facing black Americans.
These things are so foundationally important.
100 different TV shows.
So now, basically all of these shows are going to be run by Color of Change.
That is the idea here.
I mean, that's pretty incredible stuff.
Color of Change has taken several steps to make it easier for the film and TV to show up for the black community since the summer.
The group partnered with Michael B. Jordan in June on Change Hollywood, an initiative that aims to provide concrete steps that can be taken by studios, production companies, and agencies to invest in, quote, anti-racist content, authentic black stories, and black talent.
Anti-racist content doesn't mean anti-racism content.
It means content that is designed to tear down the system in true Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi fashion.
Hollywood is just a propaganda machine for the values of the left, which is why they cancelled cops.
It's why they cancelled Live PD.
It's why they thought about cancelling Paw Patrol.
The fact is that Hollywood is repeating these messages because there is a monolithic culture war that is going on.
All of the institutions have been taken over by people who agree with the left.
And now it's going to be crammed down on you from every possible angle.
And this does have real life effects.
It does.
Here is one of the real life effects.
So Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gaskin issued a directive yesterday to prosecutors.
He announced the following misdemeanors in LA will be declined for prosecution with exemptions.
Trespassing, disturbing the peace, driving without a license, prostitution, and resisting arrest.
All of those misdemeanors will now be declined for prosecution.
So if you resist arrest, right, an officer comes to arrest you and you resist arrest, then this will be declined for prosecution in LA.
Prostitution, no longer a crime in LA.
Driving without a license is no longer a crime in LA, which is madness.
I mean, that's craziness.
Disturbing the peace and trespassing.
So you just walk onto somebody's property.
No problem anymore.
They've decided they're just not going to enforce these laws anymore.
Why?
Because we know the police are bad.
Now, simultaneously, you'll hear that the police should be used to track down all of you bastards who've been having family gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We gotta activate the cops to do that, because the cops are great in those circumstances.
But you know, when they are enforcing laws against, say, trespassing or prostitution, Or breach of peace.
Then, all of a sudden, the cops are bad again.
The culture war is driving more of the division in the country than anything else.
I know there are a lot of people in America who want to attribute America's current divisions to issues of race or issues of class.
Those are not the current divisions in America.
What we have is a culture war on our hands.
What we have is one culture that suggests that the other half of the culture is evil and needs to be extirpated from American society.
There's a reason that the Democratic Party has put together an intersectional coalition not with white working-class Americans.
That was historically what Democrats thought they were doing, right?
They were going to get impoverished minority members who wanted more government programs together with white working-class people who wanted more government interventionism and that would be their coalition.
And then they discovered in the 1960s and beyond, they discovered that instead they were going to aim at college-educated Americans.
So it's gonna be white woke people who are college graduates getting together with the intersectional coalition and they were going to be fighting against quote-unquote traditional American values, right?
They're gonna be tearing down the systems in favor of anti-racist systems.
That is the battle that is going on right now.
And it motivates nearly everything.
And if you're looking for a common theme to everything from cheering on authoritarianism from the top of government to a culture war that decides that the police are bad and that anybody of the right must be thrown out of the halls of polite society, that is the common thread.
That is also the common thread to the backlash.
It is not a racial backlash.
There's this going theory on the left that the reason for the Trump coalition and the reason the white working class rebelled is because the white working class don't like seeing the intersectional coalition.
Well, that doesn't explain why Trump won an increased percentage of Latinos and blacks in the last election cycle.
The answer is not that.
The answer is a culture battle is being waged, is being crammed down on you.
You can feel it.
The number one question I get every single day from people, I'm talking people in the highest halls of power.
I'm talking about athletic stars, everybody ranging from athletic stars to the heads of major Hollywood studios is, I am afraid that if I speak up, I'm going to get fired.
What do I do?
From the most powerful to people who are just high school students and are afraid that their friends will never talk to them again.
Or teachers who are afraid they're going to get fired.
Or factory workers who are afraid that their bosses are going to throw them out.
I get these sorts of questions.
I probably get dozens of these questions every single day.
Cancel culture is real.
Okay?
And cancel culture is ugly.
And cancel culture is tied to an ideology, which is that the elitists get to decide what is appropriate and what is not, and then they get to cram it down with the force of government behind them.
And the culture wars are going to continue apace.
It's going to get more and more radical because one thing you have to acknowledge is that the intersectional coalition that is pushed by the Democrats, and when I say intersectional coalition, what I mean is this.
Kimberly Crenshaw was a theorist, basically a critical race theorist, who suggested something true and then built on that an entire Implausible fiction that has become sort of the going concern of the left.
The truth was that in America, you can be discriminated against for multiple reasons.
So for example, you can be discriminated against as a black woman in a way that you are not discriminated against as a black man because you're discriminated against because you're both black and a woman, right?
The intersection of your identities is the place of discrimination.
Okay, that is quite possible.
There's nothing really wrong or implausible with that theory, but she then built from that a sort of postmodern Victimhood hierarchy whereby we can determine who is most victimized by the number of intersectional groups to which they belong.
And then we give those people the most credit in tearing down the system.
Those are the people who need to be listened to and otherwise you should sit down and you should shut up.
Right?
That is the intersectional theory that has been pushed.
Well, the problem is the intersectional coalition is filled with victim groups or supposed victim groups who are constantly pushing for the next item on their agenda.
They're growing more and more radical over time.
You can see this, right?
Every element of the intersectional democratic victim group coalition is pushing for more and more radical policies.
So you have places like Color of Change pushing defund the police, and you have the LGBT movement not just pushing for leave us alone and let us have gay marriage, but pushing for religious institutions must be forced, forced into acquiescence with our policies.
You've got the transgender groups pushing for the idea that men, biological men, must be allowed into women's bathrooms.
All of these groups are pushing for whatever is the next agenda item.
And the problem is, as those agenda items grow ever more radical, there is a majority of Americans who oppose that stuff, including many minority members.
And they start to push back against it.
This is why the left has to win the culture war.
It is a battle of life or death for the intersectional woke coalition.
They have to grab those commanding heights of culture and cram it down on you.
And everybody feels it.
This is why these issues matter.
They do matter.
To pretend they don't matter is to ignore the actual battle that is happening every day in the lives of Americans.
Because guess what?
Tax rates matter an awful lot less than whether you believe that you're going to be leading a life of social isolation because all of your moral betters have decided on Twitter that if you don't use specifically preferred pronouns, this means you are a bad person not to be conversed with.
This is why it does matter when the Supreme Court turns down a case from a group of parents asking whether it is a violation of their kids' rights for boys to be allowed in the girls' locker room.
This does matter.
Those issues are not side issues.
They are core issues because they go to the question of whether or not a majority of Americans are still capable of mobilizing in defense of their own rights and in defense of basic truths and basic reason.
The goal here is to enervate.
Whether we are talking about COVID policy and your acquiescence to shutdowns that are not rational, or whether we are talking about ridiculous gender policies that are being pushed by the left.
The goal here is to silence you.
The goal is to take a majority and silence it.
And we talked about the silent majority in the United States.
Trump has talked about this a lot.
The truth is, you are the silenced majority.
And all the institutions of culture will be brought to bear in order to silence you.
That is the common thread.
And the question is, are we going to fight back or are we not going to fight back?
Alrighty, meanwhile, a couple of stories of corruption that have been breaking on the scene.
So this is a pretty incredible story.
Well, it turns out that Ilhan Omar, member of the squad, ideologue extraordinaire, well, it turns out that her husband just got a bunch of COVID-19 loans that he didn't need.
According to Hot Air, and this is Ed Morrissey reporting, Ilhan Omar's 2020 campaign paid the firm co-owned by her husband, Tim Minette, over $2.7 million for services rendered, allowing the couple to keep a significant part of the $5.7 million they raised for her re-election.
They raised $5.7 million for her re-election, and nearly half of it went to the firm co-owned by her husband.
Which is one hell of a grift right there.
The E Street Group LLC was by far the biggest recipient of Omar's campaign, accounting for half of all disbursements.
The second-ranking recipient was the state Democratic Party with just under $400,000.
At the same time that E Street Group and MyNet slash Omar scored big incomes with the campaign, they also scored big on COVID-19 relief, according to Fox News.
Public records now show that the E Street Group, co-owned by Omar's husband, Tim Minette, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans.
Federal Election Commission filings also show the firm received payments for other campaigns, including $175,000 from the Committee of Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and nearly $130,000 from the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
So why exactly was the E Street Group LLC in need of taxpayer support?
Why did a member of Congress who personally benefited from campaign donations through E Street Group allow her husband's firm access to $635,000 in subsidized relief loans in the first place?
You might think that this should get the attention of federal prosecutors.
I mean, it is not a shock that Omar suddenly announced in mid-November that she'd be cutting ties with her husband's firm after winning re-election in Minnesota's 5th congressional district.
The Star Tribune noted at the time this was not a spontaneous demonstration of transparency.
She cut ties because an outside group had filed a complaint about her campaign finance ties.
The FEC, according to the Star Tribune, has taken no public action in response to a complaint last year from a conservative group alleging money from Omar's campaign paid to now-husband Tim Minette and his E Street Group LLC for personal travel expenses.
The contract was a lucrative one for E Street Group.
The Omar campaign reported paying more than $1.1 million for advertising and consulting in the third quarter of the year alone.
This is a grift.
Ilhan Omar is obviously corrupt, or if she is not corrupt, she best show her cards, because that is about as corrupt as it looks.
Speaking of corruption, fascinating story from Axios today, demonstrating that suspected Chinese intelligence operatives developed extensive ties with local and national politicians, particularly Democrats.
Who could have predicted such a thing?
Including a U.S.
Congressman.
Axios did a year-long investigation, and what they found was a political intelligence operation run by China's main civilian spy agency between 2011 and 2015.
Apparently, while the suspected operatives' activities appear to have ended during the Obama administration, concerns about Beijing's influence operations have spanned President Trump's time in office and will continue to be a core focus for U.S.
counterintelligence during the Biden administration.
The woman at the center of the operation is a Chinese national named Fang Fang, or Christine Fang.
She targeted up-and-coming local politicians in the Bay Area and across the country who had the potential to make it big on the national stage.
Through campaign fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors, Feng was able to gain proximity to political power, according to current and former U.S.
intelligence officials and one former elected official.
Even though U.S.
officials do not believe that Fang received or passed on classified information, the case was a big deal because there was really some really sensitive people caught up in the intelligence network, according to a current senior U.S.
intelligence official.
Again, this is Axios reporting on ties between Democratic politicians and a Chinese spy.
Among the most significant targets of Fang's effort was one Eric Swallow, D, Farding, California.
Fang took part in fundraising activity for Swalwell's 2014 re-election campaign, according to a Bay Area political operative and a current U.S.
intelligence official.
Swalwell's office was directly aware of these activities on its behalf, the political operative said.
FEC records don't indicate Fang herself made donations.
But Fang did help place at least one intern in Swalwell's office and interacted with Swalwell at multiple events over the course of several years.
Amid a widening counterintelligence probe, federal investigators became so alarmed by Fang's behavior and activities that around 2015, they alerted Swalwell to their concerns, giving him what is known as a defensive briefing.
Apparently, Swalwell immediately cut off all ties to Fang, and Fang left the country unexpectedly in mid-2015.
Axios concludes, the case demonstrates China's strategy of cultivating relationships that may take years or even decades to bear fruit.
The CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, knows that today's mayors and city council members are tomorrow's governors and members of Congress.
Beijing has been engaged in serious act of intelligence gathering.
And honestly, it was doing the kind of stuff that you see in shows like The Americans.
At least two separate sexual interactions with elected officials, including one of these Midwestern mayors, were caught on FBI electronic surveillance of Feng, according to two intelligence officials.
She volunteered for Ro Khanna's unsuccessful 2014 House bid.
He eventually ended up joining the House in 2016.
Khanna's office said the FBI did not brief him on her activities.
Fang helped with a fundraiser for Tulsi Gabbard in 2013.
She appeared in photos over multiple years with a host of California politicians, including Khanna, Swalwell, representative Judy Chu of California, and then-representative Mike Honda, Democrat of California.
Apparently, Honda said he had no memory of meeting Fang, but it's pretty obvious that she was gathering political intelligence.
China continues to be an enemy.
And apparently they were targeting people who were just around Joe Biden.
According to a top U.S.
official, he told a think tank last week U.S.
intelligence has seen a sharp uptick by the CCP to influence Democrat Joe Biden's team and those around him.
According to National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina, he told Aspen Institute that China has launched an influence campaign on steroids targeting Biden.
That is according to Ryan Saavedra of Daily Wire.
He said, I think the last few months, parallel to the elections, we've been dealing really heavily on the COVID-19 front and China's efforts to thwart that, not only in the vaccine, but also in the promulgation of a supply chain and the movement of a vaccine all the way to inoculation.
But we've also seen an uptick on influence campaigns to the new administration.
Obviously, the attempt by China to influence Biden is nothing new.
You'll recall that in the middle of the campaign, there was a report that came out that the media then studiously ignored, suggesting that China was in fact attempting to influence the election from outside in favor of Joe Biden.
Remember that Evanina released a statement In the middle of the year, in August, saying, quote, So, China is engaged in influence operations, and it is worthy of keeping an eye on them, especially considering the kind of nicety with which Joe Biden has treated China.
its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States and pressure political figures it views as opposed to China's interests and deflect and counter criticism of China. So China is engaged in influence operations and it is worthy of keeping an eye on them, especially considering the kind of nicety with which Joe Biden has treated China.
Remember, he refused to label them an opponent. Instead, Joe Biden has suggested that their flourishing would be good for the world, which is an arguable proposition at best.
Just ask the people of Hong Kong, who now live under the tender mercies of the Chinese government.
Okay, meanwhile, the media continue to suggest that we have a crisis of faith in American democracy.
Weird, because they didn't seem to think there was a crisis of faith in American democracy when they spent four years declaring that President Trump was a Russian plan.
But now, Eugene Robinson is deeply worried about the future of American democracy.
He writes in the Washington Post today, democracy requires faith.
President Trump and his unscrupulous enablers, including most Republican elected officials, are cynically destroying that faith for millions of Americans.
I fear the nation will pay a terrible price.
Oh, have you yet acknowledged that Stacey Abrams is not governor of Georgia?
Have you acknowledged that the Mueller report turned up absolutely nothing of relevant interest with regard to Trump-Russia collusion?
.
But Eugene Robinson is deeply worried about the institutions of our democracy.
The insane irony of hearing from Democrats who have spent years undermining fundamental institutions of American democracy, saying that the Senate is bad, saying the Electoral College is bad, suggesting that Trump was going to burn the mailboxes to stop the vote.
And now they're turning around, they're like, well, Trump won't accept the results of the election.
Democracy is in threat.
No, it's not.
There's a process and the process is playing out.
But they're hitting the panic button now.
Jim Clyburn is suggesting that there are some fragile, that there are some threats to our fragile democracy.
Remember, James Clyburn is also the sort of character who has suggested in the past Holocaust comparisons.
I believe he compared, I believe, Republicans to Nazis at one point in the last several weeks.
Here is Jim Clyburn, the Democratic Majority Whip.
There are some genuine threats to this fragile democracy of ours.
We've seen that play out now for the last four years, and it's now being put on steroids.
And so anytime this kind of invitation that this president is giving to people around the country, and that comes to the floor of the House, it's serious.
I don't think it will prevail.
Right, so it's a threat to democracy, says Jim Clyburn.
It's all a threat to democracy.
Okay, I mean, if you're talking about threats to democracy and the undermining of faith in public institutions, this guy literally said, I believe the week after the election, that Donald Trump was like Adolf Hitler for refusing to concede the results of the election.
No?
I'm gonna go no on that?
And then I've been telling people for a long time now, I'm beginning to see what happened in Germany back in the 1930s.
I never thought that could happen in this country.
How do you elect a person president, then all of a sudden give him the authority to be dictator?
That's what we're teetering on here.
That's what Hitler did in Germany.
Meanwhile, as far as whether the process is working, the process is working.
Okay, right now there's apparently one kind of final lawsuit that is happening in Georgia.
Eric Erickson has been very skeptical of the lawsuits filed by the Trump team and Lin Wood and Sidney Powell in places like Georgia.
He tweeted out this morning about this case in Georgia.
While I remain skeptical, it is the first case the Trump team has filed that is based on actual voting data that alleges a number of people voted who should not have and that their voting exceeded the margin of victory.
They have the names of the voters, et cetera.
They filed the case this past Friday.
They forgot to pay the filing fee, so it got thrown out.
Today is the last possible day to file it and get a judge-to-reverse certification of the election.
But he says this is a serious, credible lawsuit.
So, that is good news, right?
I mean, that is what you want.
You want a serious, credible lawsuit.
You don't want more press releases.
You don't want more hearings that are public but not actually legal in intent.
What you want, if you want to change the outcome of the election, is proof of the allegations that have been made.
And apparently, that is now being brought in a lawsuit in Georgia.
Which is probably a good thing, considering that these so-called Kraken lawsuits were all dismissed over the course of yesterday.
Hot air reporting, a federal judge swatted down Sidney Powell's so-called Kraken lawsuit in Michigan, ruling her team never provided evidence of either fraud or legal errors.
A Michigan federal judge, Linda Viparka, ruled against a request from Powell to force the state to award its electoral votes to Trump, despite Joe Biden winning the state by about 150,000 votes.
A 36 page opinion said in fact this lawsuit seems less to be about achieving the relief plaintiffs seek as much of that relief is beyond the power of this court and more about the impact of their allegations on people's faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government.
They don't have any really further next steps.
Apparently, the injunctive relief was denied.
Not only was the injunctive relief denied, there was another lawsuit that was thrown out.
The Georgia lawsuit from Sidney Powell, again, this is the Kraken lawsuit, was thrown out by a judge who was a George W. Bush appointee.
The judge said state courts need to hear those sorts of cases, not federal courts, and said the plaintiffs do not have standing, and also dinged Sidney Powell for untimeliness, because they could have challenged this a while back.
Meanwhile, the calls for a special session of the legislature in Georgia, those are going unheeded, mainly because it's not super legal.
According again to Hot Air, despite public castigation by Donald Trump and demands from four state senators, both Governor Brian Kemp and Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan announced they would not call a special session to choose new presidential electors.
Under both state and federal law, the legislature is not able to pick new electors anyway.
They say, while we understand four members of the Georgia Senate are requesting the convening of a special session of the General Assembly, doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option allowed under state or federal law.
State law is clear.
The legislature could only direct an alternative method for choosing presidential electors if the election was not able to be held on the date set by federal law.
In the 60s, the General Assembly decided Georgia's presidential electors will be determined by the winner of the state's popular vote.
Any attempt by the legislature to retroactively change that process for the November 3rd election would be unconstitutional and immediately enjoined by the courts, resulting in a long legal dispute and no short-term resolution.
Meanwhile, President Trump is trying to do the same thing with the Pennsylvania House, apparently.
According to the Washington Post, President Trump called the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives twice during the past week to make an extraordinary request for help reversing his loss in the state, reflecting a broadening pressure campaign by the President and his allies to try to subvert the 2020 election result.
The calls, confirmed by House Speaker Brian Cutler's office, make Pennsylvania the third state where Trump has directly attempted to overturn a result since he lost the election, allegedly, to Vice President Joe Biden.
He previously reached out to Republicans in Michigan, They didn't do it.
He tried to pressure Brian Kemp to do it.
That's illegal.
And now he's trying to do this with the Republicans in the State House.
Cutler told the president the legislature didn't have the power to overturn the state's chosen slate of electors.
The House Speaker was among about 60 Republican state lawmakers who sent a letter to Pennsylvania's congressional representatives urging them to object to the state's electoral slate on January 6th.
That is when Congress is set to formally accept the results.
Although such a move is highly unlikely to gain traction, at least one Pennsylvania Republican said that he would probably try to do that.
So, is any of that likely to succeed?
No.
So that Georgia lawsuit is where it's at, and they have to file similar lawsuits that actually evidence the harms alleged in places like Pennsylvania.
Because remember, even if Georgia were to be overturned, Trump still is behind in Arizona, and he is behind in Pennsylvania.
He would need to win Georgia and Arizona and Pennsylvania, or reverse the Constituted results there in order to overturn the status of the election in those states right now.
So for all those people who are saying that this is all a threat to democracy, it's not a threat to democracy.
There's a process.
The process is moving forward.
If Team Trump is going to show their proof, then now would be the time to do it in places like Georgia as well as in the other states.
And there are allegations out there.
The allegations are out there.
I talked on this program yesterday.
about this tape. I've talked to about a week ago. There's this tape that emerged from Fulton County showing people allegedly taking boxes of ballots and then processing them after telling everybody to essentially clear out of the room. And then I talked on the show about the claims of the officials involved who suggested there was nothing really unusual about this, that the ballots had been there because everybody knew the ballots were there.
They were not hidden.
These boxes of ballots, basically, they're absentee ballots.
You have what are called ballot cutters.
The cutters take off the signature portion of the ballot because ballots are supposed to be anonymous.
And then you process all of the ballots after you box them up.
The allegation is that these were fake ballots or that these were stacked ballots or something like that.
Border fraud took place, the Republican observers were cleared out, and then these were all processed through the machines.
The state has said no normal process is that you take out those boxes and you process them, and that even if people made the mistake of leaving, There were state election observers who were there within an hour of that happening, and also there were cameras in the room.
There are outstanding questions to be asked about that case.
It should be fairly easy to prove if a bunch of ballots were put through that were never registered, if the numbers don't match up, if the number of registered absentee ballots does not match up with the number of signature slips.
Does not match up with the number of votes that were actually processed.
That would be a pretty easy way of telling if there's voter fraud.
All that stuff is going to have to come out in the wash.
Molly Hemingway has a good piece over at the Federalist talking about open questions with regard to that video.
That piece is worthy of a little bit of review.
She points out that, well, the state claims that people were not cleared out of the room.
So the state said people were not cleared out of the room.
That never happened.
There was no official who said that everybody should leave.
But as Molly Hemingway points out, Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Schaffer has consistently said that that is what happened at State Farm Arena beginning hours after the election.
He said, 2 p.m.
November 4th, Fulton County told our observers last night to go home because they were closing up and then continued to count ballots in secret.
That is backed by sworn affidavits from two Republican observers.
They further alleged they were kept an unreasonable distance from the ballots, even while they were at State Farm Arena.
And the video seems to back that up as well.
So as Molly Hemingway says, on the one hand, you have sworn affidavits from observers saying supervisors told ballot counters to go home for the evening shortly after 10 p.m.
and a video showing everybody leaving at that time.
On the other hand, you have two government officials promising no one was told that counting was over.
ABC News did report that ballot counters were sent home at the time Republican observers said everyone was told counting had stopped.
Apparently, the election department sent the ballot counters home at State Farm Arena at 10.30 p.m., according to Regina Waller, the Fulton County public affairs manager for elections.
Now, the sort of debunking of this story focused in on the idea that a state election board monitor said that he was present at the vote counting location beginning at 11.52 p.m., but that leaves about an hour and 20 minute gap between when the room was cleared and when he showed up.
Now, does that mean that voter fraud took place?
No, not necessarily.
Again, it's all on video.
And it is unclear on the video whether these ballots were there, whether they were not there.
Apparently, people who are in the know in Georgia suggest that the ballots had been properly tabulated before and put in the boxes and everybody knew the boxes were there.
That's really the key question here.
With that said, should all of these questions be pursued?
Absolutely.
I assume that that is the basis of that lawsuit in Georgia.
So we'll continue to bring you the latest.
Is that a threat to democracy, that lawsuit in Georgia?
I don't see why.
It's a lawsuit.
And just like all the other lawsuits, it will be processed and it will be gone through.
Meanwhile...
There's that Pennsylvania case that is going to probably be elevated to the Supreme Court at this point.
The Pennsylvania case is not allegations of voter fraud.
It is allegations that the Pennsylvania state legislature had no power to create universal mail-in balloting back in 2019 because the state constitution requires an amendment in order to allow that sort of process.
Senator Ted Cruz has announced that if that does make it to the Supreme Court, he will argue it in front of the Supreme Court.
Is that likely to overturn the results of the election itself?
The remedy is probably not to overturn the election results, but it will speak to the ways in which these election processes have been perverted in order to make it less clear, not more clear, who is voting and how.
You can hear a lot more about that story over on the Michael Noll Show today.
Michael's episode is out and available right now when we wrap here.
Might head on over there because he's got the inside scoop, maybe.
The man does a show with Ted Cruz, so you should have the inside scoop over there.
All right.
We'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we will see you here tomorrow for much, much more.
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