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Dec. 9, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:12:23
The Spy Who Shagged Swalwell | Ep. 1153
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The congressman who accused Trump of treason may have been literally in bed with the Chinese.
The Biden team tries to grab a preemptive credit for vaccine distribution.
And Democrats are interested in COVID relief now that the election is over.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news of the day in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so we begin with the latest in the election 2020 development.
The Supreme Court yesterday rejected a Republican challenge to Pennsylvania's election results.
So effectively, this means that the Electoral College is going to vote the way that Pennsylvanians appear to have voted, meaning that President Trump in the Electoral College is in serious trouble.
We knew this already.
In order for President Trump to win in the Electoral College, he would have had to shift from the vote totals in Pennsylvania and Arizona and in Georgia as well.
We'll get to Georgia in just a moment.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Pennsylvania Republicans that would have blocked certification of the state's election results, granting those electoral college votes to Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden, according to Emily Zanotti over at Daily Wire.
CNN reports that the decision not to take up the appeal was unanimous.
Justice Samuel Alito was responsible for ultimately refusing the emergency appeal, but there were no justices dissenting to the decision.
Originally, Alito wanted to accelerate the process by which the court decided whether or not to take up the appeal, and then they voted 9-0, including all the conservative justices, not to take up that appeal.
There are solid legal grounds for them not doing it.
They suggest, for example, that internal state affairs are internal state affairs.
It's not up to the federal government to decide whether universal mail-in balloting is a good idea in a particular state or even whether it violates the state constitution in that particular state.
That's why you have a Supreme Court of the state of Pennsylvania as politically biased and terrible as it may be.
And I believe it is both.
Apparently, the justices also moved quickly.
Tuesday was the final day Pennsylvania could certify its election result and ensure that votes would be counted when Congress tallies up the final Electoral College vote in January.
The Supreme Court issued a one-sentence ruling denying the appeal just hours after a final brief was filed and just hours before the deadline.
The order said simply, the application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the court is denied.
This basically ends the possibility of legal challenges in Pennsylvania at this point.
You're hearing some people saying in the Trump camp that it wasn't a denial of a writ of certiorari.
Okay, the problem was that this case was never appealed for a writ of certiorari.
This case was simply appealed for injunctive relief, meaning stop Stop the certification of the vote and the court said we're not going to stop the certification of the vote.
So now if they wanted to move forward with this sort of case, they would have to appeal for a writ of certiorari, presumably after the Electoral College actually certifies its own votes.
So this means that time has essentially run out in Pennsylvania.
Now, this does not mean That time has run out in Georgia.
As we talked about yesterday on the show, there is this Georgia case that is actually fairly well substantiated, at least according to the plaintiffs, suggesting massive voter regularity inside the state of Georgia.
Jackie Deason, host of the Jackie Daly Show over at Blaze TV, was on this show, this radio show, yesterday, and she explained at length what the Georgia lawsuit was about.
Let's put it this way.
If the plaintiffs can demonstrate that what they are alleging is true, then it is quite possible that you could see the state of Georgia reversed.
Now, that would not reverse the results of the election.
You'd have to, again, reverse in Arizona and Pennsylvania, but it would be a massive thing if Georgia's votes were found to be so rife with fraud and voter irregularity that you have to reverse the actual results of the election there and then throw it into the state legislature for the selection of another slate of electors. Here is Jackie Deason, one of the lawyers on that case.
The suit was going forward before we had the video, based on very cut and dried points, such as about 2,500 bellends voted, about 66,000 underage people voted, about 5,000 voters voted who had left Georgia and registered in another state. Under Georgia law, that means you're automatically disqualified from voting and so much more. I
would say over 100,000 people are listed here who illegally voted who should not have voted and that's all the president has to show.
To either get a new election or to certify the current one.
So it should not be hard to demonstrate that given the nature of those allegations.
I mean, you're talking about about a 12,000 vote gap between Biden and Trump.
All you have to show is that 12,000 ballots or more were cast illegally or fraudulently.
And then the results of the election are thrown into turmoil and doubt.
And the numbers that Jackie is alleging right there are well in excess of 12,000 votes.
There's been talk on the on the side of the Georgia Secretary of State is my understanding that the plaintiffs in this particular case, the Trump team, that they are using outdated voter registration information and they are comparing the votes that were taken to that outdated voter registration information.
But we'll have to see because that one In a non-serious, non-well-substantiated lawsuit, a federal judge in Wisconsin quickly ruled against a request by the GOP in yet another one of Sidney Powell's Kraken lawsuits during a status conference on Tuesday afternoon.
This is according to Law & Crime.
U.S.
District Judge Pamela Pepper began the hearing by noting she would deny the plaintiff's request for an evidentiary hearing.
Spent the overwhelming majority of the rest of the proceedings explaining why that was her chosen and necessary court course of action.
The case concerned William Feehan, an elector for President Trump, whose lawsuit requests a court order that would, quote, overturn and decertify Wisconsin's election results, mandate a statewide manual recount of ballots cast in that presidential election, declare that Trump won the electoral college votes, and impound all election equipment.
The judge said that this is a pretty extreme request and that this actually, the original lawsuit did not actually contain the phrases necessary to support such a hearing.
She said that the authority to even hear the case was called into question.
She said there's no point in holding a hearing tomorrow.
I have to make a determination as to whether I have the authority to hear.
The case at all, because there are a bunch of justiciability issues raised by the state defendants and various interested amicus who have filed briefs cautioning Eastern District of Washington against accepting the case.
Again, this is a federal state issue.
This is one of the big problems that has been prevalent throughout this entire process, which is that the Trump team keeps going to federal court in order to file for injunctive relief instead of going to state court.
And one of the big problems here is that these are all internal state law issues.
And by the way, if you are a conservative, You should actually want these to remain internal state law issues and not be elevated to the federal level.
Why?
Well, you may have noticed that Democrats over the past few years have been attempting to federalize all of our state elections.
They've been attempting to grab control of state elections.
It's one of the platform planks for Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Is to quote unquote restore the Voting Rights Act provisions that required preclearance in particular districts across the country in terms of gerrymandering.
So you would have some commission staffed by Democrats at the top levels of the federal government determining how Georgia could redistrict or determining how Kansas could redistrict.
It would be a disaster area, so you should sort of be careful what you wish for in terms of seeking federal relief when it is internal state business exactly how they handle their election so long as they are not actually depriving the people of the state of a quote-unquote Republican form of government.
That actually is a federal guarantee, is a Republican form of government in each state under the Constitution of the United States.
So, bottom line is that the electoral college date is nearing.
It is December 9th.
December 14th is when the electoral college meets.
There's a safe harbor provision that says that all the states are supposed to certify by December 8th.
That doesn't mean it can't be reversed.
It means that the burden just went up.
And right now, the only serious lawsuit that I see On the table is that lawsuit in Georgia.
I will inform you if there are any others.
We'll bring you any other updates on all of that in just one second.
We're going to get to corruption inside Congress because it is pretty amazing how a story that should have engulfed the political world yesterday absolutely did not.
And it may have had something to do.
With the fact that the person who has now been engulfed in this particular scandal has a D next to his name.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so...
Yesterday, a massive scandal broke.
And this really is a massive scandal.
It turns out that there is a suspected Chinese spy who is targeting California politicians.
According to Axios.com, which is not a right-wing source, a suspected Chinese intelligence operative developed extensive ties with local and national politicians, including a U.S.
congressman, in what U.S.
officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China's main civilian spy agency between 2011 and 2015.
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.
According to Axios, through campaign fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors, Fang 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 don't believe that Fang received or passed on classified information, the case was a big deal because there were some really, really sensitive people caught up in the intelligence network, according to a current senior U.S.
intelligence official.
Among the most significant targets of Fang's efforts, according to Axios, was representative Eric Swalwell.
Now, you may recall that Eric Swalwell spent years suggesting that Donald Trump was a Russian's cat's paw, who was actually compromised by his relationship with the Russians.
And now it turns out that in all likelihood, Eric Swalwell was schtupping a Chinese spy.
That seems to be the most plausible scenario here.
And a Tucker Carlson reported last night that this is exactly what intelligence sources are suggesting, was that Eric Swalwell was literally in bed with a Chinese spy And he was simultaneously decrying, or just a couple years later, he was decrying President Trump as being in bed with the Russians.
Here is Eric Swalwell circa 2019, suggesting that President Trump was a traitor working for the Russians.
You're a member of Judiciary.
Do you believe the President right now has been an agent of the Russians?
Yes, I think there's more evidence than he is.
Asian?
Yes, and I think all the arrows point in that direction.
And I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that he's not.
An Asian like in the 1940s where we had people who were reds to use at all times.
Like that.
In other words, working for a foreign power.
He's working on behalf of the Russians.
So he was working on behalf of the Russians.
Meanwhile, Eric Swalwell was working the Chinese.
Or the Chinese were working him.
Or there was mutual working.
In any case, 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, according to the political operative.
That same political operative who witnessed Fang fundraising on Swalwell's behalf found no evidence of illegal contributions.
Apparently, Fang didn't make direct contributions, but Fang did help place at least one intern in Swalwell's office, according to the same two people, and interacted with Swalwell at multiple events over the course of several years.
So here is the statement from Swalwell.
Are you ready for this?
Representative Swalwell long ago provided information about this person, whom he met more than eight years ago and whom he hasn't seen in nearly six years, to the FBI.
To protect information that might be classified, he will not participate in your story.
This is not edifying, gang.
It turns out that if you say that you are not going to turn over information because it might reveal classified information, and the entire story is whether you passed classified information to a Chinese spy, that is not a good look, Eric Swalwell.
According to the Axios reporters, in the years since the Fang probe, the FBI has prioritized investigations into Chinese influence operations, creating a unit in May 2019 within the bureau solely dedicated to countering Beijing's activities at the state and local levels.
U.S.
national security officials believe the threat posed by China has only grown with time.
A current senior U.S.
intelligence official says she was just one of lots of agents.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a 2020 speech, Beijing is engaged in a highly sophisticated malign Florence influence operation.
These efforts involve subversive, undeclared, criminal, or coercive attempts to sway our government's policies, distort our country's public discourse, and undermine confidence in our democratic processes and values.
So, apparently, Feng's friends and acquaintances said she was in her late 20s or early 30s when she was based in the U.S.
She was enrolled as a student at a Bay Area university.
By the way, there should be a basic principle at work here, which is that if you are a Chinese national who fully intends on returning to China and is not applying for American citizenship, then you should be put in line behind everybody else who wants to get into college.
We should not be educating, and that should be true by the way, of virtually all foreign nationals.
If you are a foreign national from any country, particularly a country that is adverse to the interests of the United States, the United States should not be providing you with some sort of discounted education at one of our top universities so you can then go back and work for your home government.
That is not something the United States should be engaged in.
It is not in the national interest of the United States to do so.
That is, again, that is particularly true when you're talking about a Chinese government that routinely, apparently, uses these sorts of educational institutions as gateways in order to enter into circles of influence.
We'll get to more of this in just one second because, as we will see, this would be a story that would blow up the world.
I mean, imagine that there had been a Republican presidential candidate in 2016 who was literally, apparently, sleeping with a foreign spy.
And that came out even a couple years later.
And let's say that that person was on the Intelligence Committee, okay?
Because Eric Swalwell, it turns out, is on the House Intelligence Committee.
Would that be a national scandal or would it not be a national scandal?
The fact that Axios reported this and that it didn't blow up in the media is demonstrative of just where our media stand.
They have to cover for Democrats under any circumstances.
By the way, you know who knows this?
Eric Swalwell.
He suggested the reason that he was being gone after here is because he was anti-Trump.
Yes, famous pro-Trump website Axios, right, of Jonathan Swan fame.
Yes, I'm sure they reported on Eric Swalwell because they wanted to get that guy because he was anti-Trump.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
Apparently Feng used political gatherings, civic society conferences, campaign rallies, and campus events to connect with elected officials and other prominent figures according to U.S.
intelligence officials, Bay Area political operatives, former students, and current and former elected officials who knew her.
U.S.
intelligence officials believe she was overseeing likely unwitting subagents whom she helped place in local political and congressional offices.
So, unwitting subagents would mean that she made friends with somebody, she then mainlined them into particular congressional offices, and every so often, she might call to check how things are going at that congressional office, for example.
Feng attended regional conferences for U.S.
mayors that allowed her to grow a network of politicians across the country.
She also engaged in sexual or romantic relationships with at least two mayors of Midwestern cities over a period of about three years.
At least two of those separate sexual interactions with elected officials, including one of these Midwestern mayors, were caught on FBI electronic surveillance.
According to two intelligence officials, Axios was unable to identify or speak to those elected officials.
And by the way, she was walking in high circles.
She volunteered for Ro Khanna's unsuccessful 2014 House bid.
He eventually ended up in the House in 2016 and is part of that social justice warrior AOC crowd.
He's sort of a Bernie Sanders acolyte.
Connors office said he remembered seeing Fang at several Indian American political gatherings, but did not have any further contact with her.
Apparently, by the way, worth noting, Swalwell's office was in fact contacted by the FBI and warned about all of this.
As Eli Lake over at Bloomberg has pointed out, kind of weird how Eric Swalwell's office was immediately notified that there was some sort of intelligence breach inside of his operation.
But when the FBI found out that perhaps the Russians were attempting to compromise the Trump campaign. They did not go to Trump and inform him that the Russians were attempting to compromise his campaign.
Just weird how that worked.
Apparently, Fang helped with a fundraiser for Representative Tulsi Gabbard in 2013, She appears in photos over multiple years with a host of California politicians, ranging from Kana and Swalwell to Representative Judy Chu of California and Representative Mike Honda.
Now, that doesn't mean that she compromised all of those people.
And it is true that politicians beat an awful lot of people, but the Swalwell thing is apparently a lot closer than that.
Apparently, U.S.
counterintelligence officials said they believe Fang acted at the direction of the China Ministry of State Security, that's the country's main civilian spy agency.
U.S.
officials first noted Fang through surveillance they were conducting on a different person, a suspected Chinese Ministry of State Security officer working undercover as a diplomat in the San Francisco consulate.
The suspected officer used that consulate as a base to do outreach to state and local level US politicians, including inviting them on trips to China.
By the way, this is not the first time that we have seen that the Chinese compromised American politicians.
For example, there was all sorts of talk about how the Chinese were essentially You think it would cause a political firestorm?
government, including with Senator Dianne Feinstein.
And Martiisan writing back in August of 2018 for the Washington Post, imagine if it emerged that the Republican chairman of the House or Senate Intelligence Committee had a Russian spy working on their staff. You think it would cause a political firestorm? This month, we learned that Senator Dianne Feinstein had a Chinese spy on her staff who worked for her for about 20 years, was listed as an office director on payroll records, served as her driver when she was in San Francisco, all while reporting to China's Ministry of State Security through China's San San Francisco consulate.
The reaction of the mainstream media at the time was barely a peep.
Feinstein acknowledged the infiltration.
She said, five years ago, the FBI informed me it had concerns.
An administrative member of my California staff was potentially being sought out by the Chinese government to provide information.
But she said he never had access to classified or sensitive information or legislative matters and was immediately fired.
But again, that is just the latest.
That is just the 2018 version.
Now we have versions that were coming out same period in which apparently Chinese spies were sleeping with American politicians in order to gain access to intelligence.
Senior U.S.
intelligence officials provided multiple defensive briefings around 2015 to warn targeted local and national politicians about Fang's connections to Chinese intelligence and potential Chinese assets in their offices.
And again, U.S.
intelligence officials provided multiple briefings to White House officials and members of Congress on the case.
And then Feng immediately left the U.S.
when this became public.
She had planned to travel to Washington, D.C.
to attend a June 2015 event.
Shortly beforehand, she said she couldn't attend because she needed to go back to China.
She went back to China, and she just stayed in China at the time.
Now, the reason that they've been going to the Bay Area, the Chinese, is because this is, number one, a place for people to hide.
There's a heavy Chinese population in the Bay Area.
Apparently, some of America's most powerful politicians got their start in the Bay Area as well, right?
I mean, Gavin Newsom is a Bay Area politician, Kamala Harris is a Bay Area politician, Dianne Feinstein is a Bay Area politician, Swalwell is a Bay Area politician.
Apparently, according to Axios, the MSS has a unit dedicated solely to political intelligence and influence operations in California.
Silicon Valley is also a great way and a great place to infiltrate.
And of course, the Bay Area has a heavy Chinese population, so it wouldn't be too hard to plant a mole in that population and then, you know, create a life for that person.
That, of course, is no indictment of the extraordinary Chinese-American population in the Bay Area.
It is just a recognition that if you're going to hide a spy in a population, you need people who seem to be members of that population, obviously.
So, this is where things stand apparently.
In 2011, she enrolled as a student at CSU East Bay.
She served as president of the school's Chinese Student Association and president of the campus chapter of Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs, which is a national organization encouraging Asian Americans to get involved in civic affairs, and then she used that as a lever in order to get into politics, and she had an uncommonly close relationship With the Chinese embassy, and she used these Bay Area campus organizations as a sort of calling card to allow her to gain access to power.
Several acquaintances in political circles told Axios Fang was charismatic and well-liked.
Others described her behavior as secretive and even suspicious because she was, as it turns out, a spy.
According to Axios, Fang's ties to Swalwell, which began when he was a council member for Dublin City, California, demonstrate China's long game.
Swalwell rose to prominence rapidly in late 2012, became one of the youngest members of the U.S.
House.
In January 2015, Swalwell was assigned a seat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, serving as lead Democrat on the subcommittee on CIA oversight.
Apparently, Fang's earliest known engagement with Swalwell occurred through that Chinese Student Association, and she developed close ties to Swalwell's office at that time.
And for her, targeting Swalwell made sense because his 2012 campaign relied heavily on Asian American support, which made his ties to the Chinese community particularly important.
Now again, we know of the ties with Swalwell.
We also know of a couple of ties to an older Midwestern mayor from an obscure city who referred to Fang as his girlfriend in 2014.
Fang also had a sexual encounter with an Ohio mayor in a car that was under electronic FBI surveillance.
So the bottom line is that the Chinese believe that they have a way into American politics, and they're not wrong.
It also happens to be the case that the intelligence community announced halfway through this year that they were targeting the Biden campaign for victory.
They wanted the Biden campaign to win.
They were very adverse and angry at the Trump administration for its anti-China position, and they were hopeful that Joe Biden would be a solid replacement.
So look for this sort of activity to pick up.
Also look for the media to completely downplay the Swalwell allegations.
For his part, Kevin McCarthy, who is the House Minority Leader, and by the way, as we'll see in just a second, the House majority for the Democrats is now down to two seats, two.
Okay, which is pretty amazing, considering that, again, they were expected to pick up seats because Biden has picked Marsha Fudge now to run Housing and Urban Development, which means they only have 220 Democratic seats in the House.
Okay, that democratic delegation is rife for problems.
Okay, so the Democratic Party is in trouble, and don't worry, the media are going to not make a big issue out of Representative Eric Swalwell.
Here is Kevin McCarthy, by the way, who is saying that Swalwell should definitely not be on the Intelligence Committee.
He says, Representative Swallow has long been disqualified from serving on the Intel Committee.
For years, he peddled Russian disinformation for political gain.
Now we find out he was involved in an effort by a reported spy to gather information for China.
Swallow is a national security liability.
Okay, in just one second, we are going to get to Joe Biden and the people he is picking because again, that Democratic delegation, that Democratic coalition, it looks like it's on the rocks already.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is picking people for his supposed team.
He doesn't know who they are.
He's just being fed a certain number of people by various interest groups.
And this is seriously how he's picking cabinet members.
He's not really picking them for qualifications.
He's picking them solely based on intersectional criteria.
This is how he's ending up with Xavier Becerra, who's a wildly partisan hack from California, Attorney General of the state of California who's gone after pro-lifers, has gone after churches for health and human services, which is just a disaster because one of the great moves by the Trump administration was to depoliticize health care by allowing religious institutions not to cover care that violated their religious prescriptions. Remember, the Obama administration wanted to force nuns to at least sign off on contraceptive coverage for
people. The Obama administration would love for religious business owners to have to pay for for abortions, essentially.
Well, presumably Xavier Becerra would want exactly the same thing.
So, Joe Biden names him to the cabinet, mainly because he is Latino.
The funny thing here is that Biden clearly has no idea who he is.
He completely blows his name.
I mean, in magical fashion, if a Republican blew Becerra's name this way, there would immediately be cries of racism, because how dare you mispronounce Xavier Becerra's name?
Here is Joe Biden absolutely mangling this thing.
For Secretary of Health and Education, I nominate Javier Baqueria.
You know, Javier Becerra, excuse me.
Woo.
Baqueria.
Well, you don't want to come down with a bad case of baccaria.
Sounds like that would hurt.
Sounds like that could be unpleasant.
So there is Joe Biden, who is not with it.
Again, the man is just a facade for whatever the rest of the Democratic Party wants him to be.
He is not some sort of stalwart standing in the gap in favor of moderation and unity, as the media would like to portray him.
Some of the other people he is picking, he has selected Representative Marsha Fudge of Ohio to serve as Secretary for Housing and Urban Development in his administration.
It's a weird pick, because Democrats honestly need the votes in the House.
Taking a vote out of the Democratic House, now there will have to be a special election to fill that particular seat.
It's a very, very weird move, except for the fact that he wants more black faces inside his administration.
He has said this, right?
It's not me saying this, this is him saying this, which is racist, okay?
If you suggested that you were simply staffing your administration on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation, that basically you were casting some sort of diverse street gang for Netflix, Then everybody would rightly point out how racially insensitive that was, but that's exactly what Biden is doing.
So he's picked Marsha Fudge of Ohio to serve as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Tom Vilsack has been picked for ad secretary.
Of course, Vilsack was already in that position, right?
He'd returned to that post held during the Obama administration.
So basically, the entire Biden team is retreads, people he was friends with when he was in the Obama administration, and a bunch of racially diverse faces he knows nothing about.
That is the entire administration.
Fudge was basically picked because her allies had urged him to nominate her to run the agriculture department.
And instead he was like, you know what?
I'm gonna pick Vilsack for agriculture.
You get to do housing and urban development.
Representative James Clyburn, who was of course a big ally of Biden during the campaign, he was the one who had suggested that Fudge be picked for the cabinet.
But as even the New York Times notes, picking fudge adds strain on Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose majority in the House had shrunk to a handful of seats after the elections in November.
Biden's decision to select fudge for his cabinet means Democrats must win another special election to fill her seat or risk the party's margin shrinking even further.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of that Biden intersectional cabinet.
So you recall there was a bit of an intersectional battle going on over the defense secretary position.
Michelle Flournoy was widely perceived to be the frontrunner for Secretary of Defense, and many members of the Democratic coalition were super excited because we need a woman to be the head of the Defense Department.
It would have been a groundbreaking move to have a woman be the head of the Defense Department.
Sure.
The term woman doesn't actually mean anything, but still super duper important because the category woman is both completely malleable and meaningless and also incredibly, incredibly important to break glass ceilings or some such.
In any case, he didn't pick Michelle Flournoy.
Apparently Biden didn't pick her because number one, he wasn't particularly close to her.
There are also some questions about her lobbying for outside of government organizations on K Street.
Instead, he chose Lloyd Austin.
So Lloyd Austin, is a four star general who retired about four years ago.
This means that the Congress needs to pass a waiver in order to make him Secretary of Defense.
Lloyd Austin also happens to be black.
So this is going to be Joe Biden's cover.
I mean, to get away with it with his own coalition.
He, over and over in this piece in the Atlantic, he just keeps mentioning the guy's race.
Like, it's super important that this guy is black.
Now, we have had high-ranking black officials.
We've had Colin Powell as Secretary of State.
We had Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State.
Under the Obama administration, we had an attorney general who was black.
The notion that it is like a groundbreaking thing to have black people in position.
I mean, we had a president of the United States for two terms who was black.
This idea that we needed the Secretary of Defense to be black because otherwise the intersectional coalition is displeased just demonstrates how fragile that coalition is.
If all you can do is hold that thing together with spit and tape because really it's just a bunch of various interests and you just do a bit of pork barrel rolling, selecting cabinet members by race and sex, that is not a solid coalition.
Joe Biden's excuse for why he picked Lloyd Austin is pretty astonishing.
He says, in late August of 2010, I traveled to Iraq for the fifth time as vice president.
While there, I participated in the change of command ceremony for US forces Iraq.
President Obama had charged me with overseeing the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
We were committed to ensuring the orderly withdrawal of our forces and equipment from Iraq.
Standing in the Gharash, Al-Faw Palace, once home to Saddam Hussein, but by then part of Camp Victory, I watched as General Lloyd Austin assumed leadership of a national security priority on behalf of the President of the United States.
Just over a year later, in December 2011, I returned to Al-Faw Palace, joining Austin in a ceremony honoring American and Iraqi service members as our forces left the country.
General Austin got the job done.
He played a crucial role in bringing 150,000 American troops home from that theater of war.
Now, I do recall that immediately upon withdrawing from Iraq, ISIS proceeded to establish a caliphate directly in that region, and Iran rushed to fill the vacuum.
And you would think that Joe Biden forgot that, but apparently Joe Biden did not forget that because then he praises Lloyd Austin for having to put together the operation that went and fought ISIS afterward in the same piece.
So really well done there, Vice President Biden.
Again, he just keeps pushing on his race in this piece.
He says he was the 200th person ever to attain the rank of an Army four-star general, only the sixth African-American.
He was the first African-American general officer to lead an Army Corps in combat, the first African-American to command an entire theater of war.
If confirmed, he'll be the first African-American to helm the Defense Department, another milestone in a barrier-breaking career.
And so it's pretty obvious why he is picking Lloyd Austin.
I mean, Lloyd Austin may in fact be a very good general.
I don't know that much about the guy.
I do know that he was delegated hundreds of millions of dollars in order to build up some sort of ground force to oppose the Assad regime in Syria and came up with something like 60 fighters with something like $500 million or something.
But with that said, maybe he's great at his job.
That ain't why Biden picked him.
Okay, speaking of which, you can see this coalition already starting to fracture.
Bernie Sanders, he says, I'm not seeing enough progressives in this administration.
I want more of my people in this administration.
If you think that the Bernie Sanders wing of the party is simply going to sit down and shut up, you have another thing coming, which means that Biden is going to have to do one of two things.
Either he's going to have to continue brushing off Bernie and his friends, Or with a very, very slim House majority, he is going to have to start catering to AOC and Bernie, and this administration will just become a Potemkin village in favor of the radical left.
Here's Bernie Sanders expressing his displeasure.
My point has been, from day one, that those voices, that movement, deserves representation in the cabinet.
And if your question is, have I seen that yet?
No, I have not.
I've seen some good appointments, people that I like, I think people who are really, really smart, experienced, but I have not seen people from the progressive movement, per se, in that cabinet.
Okay, so what exactly is Joe Biden going to do about that?
Continue to brush off Bernie, or as that House majority shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, is he going to have to start catering more and more to his radical left flank?
In just one second, we're going to get to Joe Biden's supposed outreach effort to conservatives, which even members of the media, they're immediately like, why is he even bothering?
Stop doing outreach to conservatives.
So first of all, I think it's a sham.
But second of all, I also think that the media will not allow him to do this, even if it were genuine.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let me tell you about one of my favorite foods.
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Alrighty, in just one second, we're gonna get to Joe Biden's supposed outreach efforts to conservatives.
And then we'll get to his attempt to hijack all of the progress made under President Trump against COVID and pretend that he is responsible for it.
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All righty, so Joe Biden is playing a game with the media where he pursues hard left policy and hard left cabinet picks by the way, while simultaneously claiming that he's Captain Unity.
This is his favorite thing to do.
He's been doing it throughout the campaign.
He's here to unify Americans, to bring them back together.
And listen, if you were going to treat conservatives with any level of consideration and class, That would amount to something better than what we've had from the left for several years and many years at this point.
But I don't think that's likely to happen.
I think what is likely to happen is he's going to say, I reached out and they slapped my hand.
You can see the predicate being set right now.
According to Bloomberg, the Biden administration plans to create a position to find common ground with conservatives, according to Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond, a senior advisor and director of the Office of Public Engagement for Joe Biden.
He said during a Wall Street Journal CEO Council Monday night, Yes, I cannot wait to see them recruit Jeff Flake or John Kasich in order to reach out to conservatives.
because it's about moving forward. We cannot stay where we are. Yes, I cannot wait to see them recruit Jeff Flake or John Kasich in order to reach out to conservatives. Good luck with that.
Now, I'm skeptical because I just don't think that it's going to be a genuine attempt to reach I think that there is too much in the Democratic platform that is directly related to culture war anti-conservatism for the Democrats to credibly do this.
But members of the media are even more upset about the possibility that Joe Biden might reach across the aisle in terms of actual policy.
So Paul Waldman has a piece of the Washington Post saying you should never reach out to conservatives.
This is my favorite part of the revisionist history of the last 15 years, is where Democrats suggest that Barack Obama tried to reach out across the aisle.
At no point did Barack Obama ever care about reaching out across the aisle.
That was not a thing he cared about.
He saw the other side of the aisle as vicious and racist.
He basically says so directly in his memoir.
And yet, there's this myth-making that every Democrat is bipartisan and every Republican is a partisan hack, even though George W. Bush was the most bipartisan president of my lifetime.
It doesn't matter.
The idea is that Republicans are direly partisan and political, while Democrats are wonderfully unifying.
Paul Waldman has a piece today.
He's saying President-elect Joe Biden is not giving up on reaching out to people who didn't vote for him, even as most of them seem to believe he's at the head of a plot to steal the election, and a significant portion believe he's a global conspiracist of satanic, pedophile, cannibal sex traffickers.
Oh, God, these people.
How many people think that?
Like, seriously, inside the Republican coalition, how many people think that Joe Biden is the head of a global conspiracy of satanic, pedophile, cannibal sex traffickers?
Like, how many?
Three?
Okay, but apparently, according to Paul Waldman, it's running rife through the Republican halls of power.
Biden is determined, though, just as so many Democrats were before him, says Paul Waldman, is Democrats famous for reaching across the aisle.
And like them, he'll probably fail.
It's the right thing to reach across the other side of the aisle, says Paul Waldman.
He'll be supporting policies he believes are good for the whole country, not just places in the country that supported him.
But it won't help.
This is a never-ending obsession with Democrats.
How can we get conservatives to like us more?
Is there some special strategy we can deploy or argument we can make that will open up their hearts and minds to what we have to say?
You may have noticed Republicans never bother to ask themselves how they might reach out to liberals.
They appoint no people to carry out this task.
They publish no essays in their journals about how to go about it.
They hold no think tank forums to explore the problem and consider solutions.
They'd much rather dream up new voter suppression schemes to make it more difficult for liberals to cast their ballots.
This is my favorite brand of leftist thought is, how dare anybody on our side reach out to the other side?
The other side is evil.
We shouldn't reach out to them.
And sure, we're bipartisan.
Sure, we think it's a great idea, but the other side is just so evil.
The castigation of the other side is completely evil.
You know, people who believe in demonic possession of Joe Biden, or people who believe in voter suppression.
So you can't reach out to them.
The goal here is not, of course, bipartisanship.
The goal is not to come together around any sort of common theme.
The goal here is to make sure that that never happens.
So according to Paul Waldman, the truth is that Democrats reach out constantly.
Constantly!
I have a question.
When is the last time a Democrat reached out to you to try and understand your position?
When Hollywood makes a movie called Hillbilly Elegy that is designed to try and understand people who might have voted for Trump, the critics immediately savage it by saying that there should be no movies that attempt to understand those voters.
Instead, Democrats keep banking on this coalition of the ascendant nonsense that they coined in 2012.
So no, Joe Biden's not going to be bringing anybody together because his own party will not let him, and because Joe Biden is wedded to certain principles that undercut the possibility of coming together.
If you want the country to come together, there have to be shared principles.
Democrats reject many of those shared principles.
They don't have to.
They don't have to.
Some of those shared principles would include the idea that America is fundamentally a good country.
I think Joe Biden deep down actually kind of believes that, but he has been roped into the 1619 Project mentality by his own intersectional coalition.
I think that deep down, Joe Biden is not averse to the basic idea that individual rights matter, but I think that he has been roped into the idea that individual rights ought to be put aside in favor of specific benefits for particular members of the coalitional group.
There are ways Americans can come together, but not if you have the kind of divides the Democrats have been embracing for years on end, and the culture war castigation of anyone who disagrees as an element of evil.
Okay, meanwhile, on COVID, President Trump announced yesterday the FDA is about to authorize the distribution of the vaccine that is already being distributed in the UK.
Here is President Trump announcing this yesterday.
We're very hopeful that the FDA will authorize the Pfizer vaccine within days.
We've got to get it moving.
And Moderna vaccine almost immediately thereafter.
Large numbers of tests and samples have been done.
So hopefully that'll go very quickly.
If authorized, tens of millions of vaccine doses will be available this month.
Then we'll get it distributed very quickly.
We have that all set.
Okay, so because Trump is actually succeeding in helping to develop the vaccine with Operation Warp Speed, and because there is in fact a distribution plan in place, the media immediately suggests the reason that Trump came out and talked about it yesterday is because he's afraid Biden is going to get credit.
Well, first of all, Biden shouldn't get credit.
He has no power.
How the hell would Biden get credit for this?
You know that's what's gonna happen, by the way.
We'll hit January, February, and it'll be, look at how Joe Biden solved the pandemic.
Isn't that incredible?
He'll have done absolutely zero things that solved the pandemic, and the media will be slobbering all over him.
It'll be just like after Barack Obama was given the Nobel Prize for being a breathing human.
Who is black, right?
I mean, who became president.
That's the only reason that Barack Obama was given the Nobel.
I mean, to his own credit, he himself was like, I don't even know why I'm being given this award.
But watch as Joe Biden is given that sort of credit.
Here's NBC getting very angry that Trump would want credit for some of his achievements in fighting COVID.
This is really an opportunity for the president who is afraid that his successor Joe Biden is going to get a bulk of the kudos since he's going to have to oversee the distribution process when he takes office next month.
He is very concerned about that.
And we know that because he has said it wasn't Joe Biden who did anything on the vaccines.
It was all me, me, me.
That seems to be his focus today here at the White House.
Oh, it's all me, me, me, me, me, as opposed to Joe Biden, who keeps saying over and over that you have to listen to me and wear a mask.
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Joe Biden has done zero things.
Zero things.
And by the way, all he'll be doing is implementing plans that were already in place if and when he takes office.
Meanwhile, over in Britain, there are some fears over the COVID vaccine.
I assume these will be short-lived after a couple of health care workers had anaphylactic reactions Hours after the taking of the vaccine, British authorities then told anyone with a severe allergy to food or medicine not to take the vaccine right away.
The FDA, according to the Daily Mail, is due to meet tomorrow to discuss greenlighting the vaccine in America after being lambasted for taking a week longer than the Brits to get it off the ground.
In a preliminary analysis posted online on Tuesday, one group of FDA scientists said it was safe.
It is always hard to tell when you have, like, two bad reactions out of tens of thousands of reactions, whether that is because of the vaccine or whether it was because of something else.
Among the 20,000 people who were given the vaccine in Pfizer's global trial, 137 had allergic reactions.
So did 111 people who were given the placebo.
So scientists basically said, okay, well, obviously the vaccine is not the deciding factor right here.
There were four people among the 20,000 who did get Bell's palsy after receiving it, which is a type of facial paralysis.
Trial scientists said it was not necessarily the jab that caused it.
That was on par with the general rate of Bell's palsy in the wider population.
But the British Health and Medicare Products Regulatory Agency is now warning people with a severe food allergy or medical allergy not to get that drug.
In America, that applies to at least 200,000 people who have food allergies and many more who have drug allergies.
Apparently, the two healthcare workers both carry EpiPens.
No other information has been given.
It's also unclear if they're the only ones who had adverse reactions at this point.
The Pfizer vaccine Okay, there's a large swath of skepticism regarding the benefits of taking the vaccine.
not they can now take the second or whether it's safe for them to do so is under scrutiny.
It's also unclear if they'll be able to take any other type of future vaccine by Moderna.
Okay, there's a large swath of skepticism regarding the benefits of taking the vaccine.
There was a tweet that sort of went viral yesterday in which somebody suggested that you are 99% likely to live if you get COVID and you're only 95% likely to live if you That's not exactly correct.
Basically, the vaccine is 95% effective in preventing you from obtaining COVID in the first place.
And then after that, the remaining 5% of people, then they have basically a 99% shot at living.
This particularly means that when we tranche this thing out, we should be tranching it out in terms of people who are most at risk.
In other words, if you have a five-year-old kid, I'm not sure that a five-year-old kid needs to get the vaccine.
I mean, five-year-old kids are not at risk from this thing.
Now, my kids do get the flu vaccine.
I get the flu vaccine.
I'm a big believer in vaccines.
And if a vaccine can lessen the severity, which is what the early data, preliminary data, suggests from these COVID trials, they suggest that people who got severe COVID, the vast majority of them were in the placebo group.
They were not in the actual vaccination group.
And according to the CDC, the vaccine may help you from getting seriously ill, even if you do get COVID-19.
We should be tranching this out to the populations who are most at risk, obviously.
And by the way, if you do get the vaccine, you should expect there are going to be some mild side effects.
That is not rare.
There are some mild side effects, like your...
Arm is going to hurt.
There were severe side effects in a certain percentage of patients in the Moderna trial, according to Science.com.
Most people would escape severe side effects.
There were transient reactions, again, like your arm is sore, but there are some more severe side effects defined as those that prevent daily activity.
They usually last around a day, according to the studies that have already been done.
The independent board that conducted the interim analysis of Moderna's trial found that severe side effects included fatigue in about 10% of participants, Muscle pain in about 9%, joint pain in 5%, headache in 4.5%.
Severe side effects also included fatigue and headache and the Pfizer vaccine trial is about 3.8% and 2%.
That's a higher rate of severe reactions than people may be accustomed to, but people are getting over this fairly quickly and these are not generally long lasting so far as the data present right now.
Now, What is Joe Biden doing about all of this?
I mean, this is all incredible, right?
I mean, we've developed an mRNA vaccine in record time.
It has never been done before, anything remotely like this.
So Joe Biden, naturally, is suggesting that he has the solution.
The solution is he's going to tell people to wear masks on the first day.
And now, the rate of mask adherence in the United States is very high.
By polling data, people are wearing masks.
Even out here in Florida, where we are much looser with the guidelines than they were in California, nearly everybody is wearing a mask at nearly all times in the area where I'm living.
So I can tell you, people are wearing the masks.
But Joe Biden somehow thinks that if he says mask, mask, mask, mask over and over again, that this is going to cure the pandemic.
Or alternatively, he knows that it won't.
It's just that the media will give him credit because this is one area where Trump chose to draw a contrast for no rational reason I can think of.
Here was Joe Biden.
I'm going to ask for a masking plan.
Everyone for the first hundred days of my administration to wear a mask.
It will start with my signing an order on day one to require masks where I can under the law, like federal buildings, interstate travel on planes, trains and buses.
I'll also be working with the governors and mayors to do the same in their states and their cities.
We're going to require masks wherever possible.
Okay, just a quick note here.
If you fly commercially in the United States, you're wearing a mask on the plane.
Yeah, that's already existing.
As far as interstate travel on trains, I assume that the same case is true.
In other words, he's already doing stuff that everybody knows they're doing.
I mean, he's not actually changing anything.
This is all posturing for the cameras and the media just eat it up.
The media love it.
They also love the fact that Anthony Fauci spoke from a Biden presser yesterday.
He made his debut as a member of the Biden team yesterday.
Here was Anthony Fauci yesterday speaking from from Biden's podium.
I believe, as you do, that in the fight against this pandemic, we must lead with science and that a key piece of our ongoing work is communicating consistently with the American people.
Whether it's maintaining social distancing and not congregating indoors or the hundred day challenge you described on masking or to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
These actions are bold.
They're bold actions.
My God, it's amazing.
Remember we kept hearing about the suck uppery of the various public health officials to Trump.
That's some serious sycophantic crap right there.
Everybody already knows this stuff, we've been talking about it for months, but apparently it's bold action.
Bold action now from Anthony Fauci.
Okay, in one second, we're gonna get to Joe Biden and the coverage of the media about all this, because here's the thing.
It turns out that he's not actually following the science in certain particular areas.
Okay, so all of this Biden policy, right?
These magical policies, the media are just in love with them, right?
He's got Anthony Fauci out there saying that he's taking bold action.
He's not taking bold action.
He's not changing anything.
All this stuff is already in place.
Okay, but here's how the New York Times is covering Joe Biden's plan to fight COVID.
Remember, Joe Biden would not be inaugurated until the end of January.
According to the New York Times, You might at this point stop and ask yourself, what was the plan if Trump were to be reelected and stay in office?
pandemic vowed on Tuesday to get at least 100 million COVID vaccine shots into the arms of the American people during his first 100 days in office.
You might at this point stop and ask yourself, what was the plan if Trump were to be reelected and stay in office?
The plan is 100 million shots.
So literally nothing changed.
His entire plan is the Trump plan.
And this was the entire campaign.
It was so annoying.
Joe Biden would just say the same crap that Trump was saying.
And then he'd be like, I have a new, I have a new plan.
And my plan is to get gas bleeding.
And he'd be like, oh yes!
Oh!
Oh!
It turned into Meg Ryan and When Harry Met Sally.
Every time Joe Biden would say, like he would take out Trump's plan, read it verbatim.
And they'd be like, that's an amazing plan, Joe Biden.
It turns out that Joe Biden's been able to get away with plagiarism literally his entire career, including of Trump's vaccine plan.
He said he would make it a national priority to get children back to school during that time.
Oh, well, would you, Joe Biden?
Hmm.
Some people were saying for months that kids should be back in school, including President Trump.
And guess who was saying, you know, we're not sure about that would be members of your own campaign.
Appearing in Wilmington, Delaware to introduce members of his health team, Biden pledged to run, quote, the most efficient mass vaccination plan in U.S.
history, but did not say how and through what companies his administration would purchase vaccine shots.
Mr. Biden also implored Americans to wear masks during his first 100 days in office and said he would make doing so a requirement.
Biden said, my first 100 days won't end the COVID-19 virus.
I can't promise that.
Well, you literally promised that in your campaign.
You said that you weren't going to end the economy.
You were going to end the virus.
So what happened?
I mean, all of a sudden, you're Captain Accuracy?
Hmm.
He says, I'm absolutely convinced in 100 days we can change the course of the disease and change life in America for the better.
Well, that's a non-vague standard there.
By the way, I can also predict that in the first 100 days of the next administration, that the pandemic will wane.
You know how I can predict this?
Because of course it's going to wane.
Every single public health official says it's going to wane.
We're going to hit the worst of this in December and in January.
And the vaccines are going to be rolled out by the tens of millions by January, February, and March.
So wow!
Okay, Nostradamus over there!
Biden's announcement offered a telling split-screen counterpart to an event being held at the same time as the White House.
A vaccine summit, where Trump boasted about what he called a monumental national development by drug companies to develop a vaccine for the virus in about nine months.
Okay, that's not just what Trump characterized that as.
That is a monumental national achievement.
We have never had a vaccine developed this way, not nearly that fast.
It, on average, takes vaccines, you know, five, ten years to be developed.
He did not address the growing death toll or devastation across the country, but he used the occasion to suggest, yet again and without evidence, people have tried to steal the election.
Meanwhile, the next administration was clearly taking shape, according to the New York Times.
The senior officials will face the immediate challenge of slowing the spread of the coronavirus.
Amazing, it's just, wow, so impressive, so wonderful, so bold, so unbelievable.
Okay, and they're gonna follow the science.
I mean, this is what we've been told.
They're going to follow the science.
Except that they're not.
Okay, so, Joe Biden turned this into a racial issue.
This has been one of my bugaboos since the beginning of the pandemic, is the desire by the media to turn this into a racial issue.
A disproportionate number of black and Latino people are dying of the virus.
Now, the suggestion is this is because of systemic American racism.
There is no evidence whatsoever this is the effect of systemic American racism.
Okay, poverty leads people to be in close quarters with other people where they live.
It leads them to have to work at jobs in which they're in close quarters with other people.
And that means that COVID transmits more easily.
It is also quite possible that certain segments of the population, and I include among these segments of the population, Orthodox Jews, by the way, have a tendency to get together in large groups when they often should not.
And this transmit the virus at higher rates than other people.
But the media have been pushing this idea since the very beginning that if a disproportionate number of black Americans die of COVID-19, that can't have anything to do with the disproportionate pre-existing conditions in the black community, like heart disease and obesity, which in fact are disproportionate in the black community. Instead, it has to do with the fact that America is racist. So here is Joe Biden making that case. This is not science. This is just racial pandering.
More than 285,000 dead Americans because of COVID-19 and counting. Last week, COVID-19 was the number one cause of death in America.
For Black, Latino, and Native Americans, who are nearly three times as likely to die from it, COVID-19 is a mass casualty.
Okay, so it's a mass casualty actually for people with pre-existing conditions who happen to be elderly.
This is why I say this is unscientific.
If you have two categories that could apply to a particular descriptor, one is more scientifically exact than the other.
So, this is a perfect example.
A disproportionate number of Black Americans are dying of COVID-19.
That would suggest that the virus is targeting Black people.
But, a better descriptor would be, COVID-19 disproportionately affects those with pre-existing conditions.
Black Americans tend to have those pre-existing conditions in higher numbers.
That is why Black people are dying at higher rates than other people.
And this happens to be true in Europe as well, not just in the United States.
Okay, so perhaps if you were going to tailor a program to vaccinate, you would tailor it toward health condition, right?
You wouldn't tailor it toward race.
You would tailor it toward health condition because otherwise you are committing what is called in statistics a category error, right?
You're using a category that is not the most descriptive category in order to take a measure that is not going to be the most closely tailored to solve the problem.
This is why I say that Biden and company members, the media, they're playing politics with this sort of stuff.
If you actually want to target the people who are most vulnerable, you wouldn't do it by race.
That is a category error.
You would do it instead by pre-existing condition.
You wouldn't even do it by age, by the way.
You would do it by pre-existing condition.
Dr. Marty Makary is a regular guest on this program from Johns Hopkins University.
He did a study where he and his fellows over at Johns Hopkins, they analyzed 250,000 American deaths.
This is about a month ago.
And what they found is that for people who are enrolled in Medicare, basically everybody in the United States above the age of 65, the grand total number of people enrolled in Medicare who died of COVID with no pre-existing conditions, none, was 2,500.
Out of 250,000 dead.
What does that suggest?
That age isn't even the deciding factor here.
Pre-existing condition is the deciding factor here.
So if you're going to roll out the vaccine, the way that you should tailor the vaccine rollout is not by race.
It is not even by age.
It is by pre-existing health condition.
And here's where the rubber meets the road.
Because when it comes to vaccine distribution, that is not what is actually being done.
So for example, There is a doctor named Angie Rasmussen, and Angie Rasmussen tweeted out, as we start to absorb the data that Pfizer submitted to the FDA and get ready for vaccines to roll out, we need to start thinking about distribution.
I agree with Scott Gottlieb, equity needs to be front and center as we consider how to do this.
Equity, not health, equity.
Okay, she's quoting an op-ed from Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner under Trump, who said, the best option may be to inoculate those over 65 with a focus on low-income communities.
Well, no, the focus should be on tranching this out by pre-existing condition.
That's the way that you actually handle this thing.
Now, that will disproportionately fall on people over the age of 65 and in low-income communities, right?
But the idea of treating this as an equity issue as opposed to a health issue is designed explicitly to divide us politically, because the idea is that all health issues are, are in fact equity issues, right?
Any inequality of outcome is inequality in the system itself.
This is the push that is being made by the Biden team.
This is why Biden hosted a professor named Nunez Smith, who suggested that blacks and Latinx Americans were suffering from a quote-unquote grief gap thanks to COVID.
Turning this into a racial issue, that is not what the health Guidance suggests.
Black people are not dying because they are black.
The virus isn't racist.
And neither is the health system.
I'm sorry, but if you go to a hospital, doctors are not sitting there going, OK, black guy, push him over to the side.
Let him go without the respirator.
We got a white person here.
We got a fat old white guy.
He's probably going to die.
We got a healthy black person there.
Put that healthy black person aside because he's black, not because he's healthy, because he's black.
That is not what is happening in hospitals across the United States.
Nonetheless, Biden has to turn this into a racial issue.
And this is going to be Captain Unity over here.
So here's Professor Nunez-Smith, a member of the Biden health team.
It is not a coincidence, and it is not a matter of genetics, that more than 70% of African Americans and more than 60% of Latinx Americans personally know someone who has been hospitalized or died from COVID-19.
The same disparities ingrained in our economy, our housing system, our food system, our justice system, And so many other areas of our society have conspired in this moment to create a grief gap that we cannot ignore.
Okay, this is such gross politics.
It is.
This person, her name is Marcella Nunez-Smith.
She's a racism scholar, and she's going to head up Joe Biden's COVID-19 Equity Task Force.
She's a top Yale University academic, and she was signed up to serve in the Biden administration.
Her work on health inequalities, and particularly those entwined Dr. Nunez-Smith told the AP recently the scale of the disparity means almost 50% of people in this country know someone who has died of COVID-19.
effects, the deadly exacerbation of existing disparities in health, income, and well-being across the US population as a whole is, according to the UK, independent.
Dr. Nunez-Smith told the AP recently the scale of the disparity means almost 50% of people in this country know someone who has died of COVID-19.
But this is going to be just another excuse to engage in radical leveling.
This is the same kind of person she describes how she herself, she's a graduate, I believe, of Yale School of Medicine, I believe.
She herself has often been subject of racial microaggressions in her medical career.
A lot of the time, she told the site, if it was a patient not of color, they'd make assumptions about my role.
To this day, as an attending physician at Yale, patients are constantly handing me their trays and asking if I can call their doctor.
And I'm their attending physician of record, and we have met several times.
Okay, um, then your patients are idiots.
I mean, I hate to break it to you, that might be because your patient's a moron.
Doctors and nurses wear different uniforms at hospitals.
My wife works at hospitals.
They don't wear the same coats.
But again, the basic idea that all disparities can be chalked up to systemic American inequalities, this is how these things get political.
And so when Joe Biden says he's guided by the science, no, he is absolutely not guided by the science.
He is guided by politics, always and forever, and so are the Democrats more broadly.
To pretend otherwise is to ignore what exactly a Biden team is going to be doing on COVID, claiming all the credit for all the achievements of the Trump administration, while simultaneously suggesting that the American system is racist, sexist, bigoted, and homophobic.
And that all, it's amazing.
Every problem has the same solution, if you're a Democrat.
Every problem has the same solution.
And that is to blame the American system for any inequality of outcome in any arena of American life.
From maternal mortality, which has confounds, what we call statistical confounds, that are reasons for differentials in maternal mortality across races.
Very often it has to do with maternal weight, for example, and maternal health.
But what the left keeps doing is then they just remove one step.
They say, oh, well, yeah, but the reason that those health circumstances exist is because America is racist in the first place.
It's the god of the gaps.
It's the racism of the gaps for Democrats.
And so if there is a disparity, they can't actually see the racism in the healthcare system.
So instead what they do is they say, well, you know, it's probably not the racism in the healthcare system.
It's racism in the system that created the healthcare system.
And if you say, well, yeah, but that system is not racist either.
They say, yeah, but it was the preconditions of that system that created the healthcare.
It's always one step Removed, right?
You always just zoom up one step in order to finally find the racism that you have been seeking.
And that is the politics that Joe Biden is bringing to the table.
Does that sound science-based to you?
Now, speaking of a non-science-based policy, Democrats continue to hold up COVID relief.
Mitch McConnell has made, at this point, several proposals.
The Trump administration made more than a trillion dollars of proposals for COVID relief before the election.
And you'll recall that Nancy Pelosi, just a couple of days ago, announced that she had held up COVID relief for political reasons.
That is a total game changer.
She came out and she said, yeah, sure.
Now I like to negotiate, you know, what changed?
Well, now there's a new president and a vaccine.
So she's overtly admitting that she held up relief to Americans who were being forced into poverty by the federal and state governments.
And she held that up because there was an election coming.
That is a total game changer, a new president and a vaccine.
So there's nothing to, these are different.
What was then before was not more of this.
This has simplicity.
It's what we've had in our bills.
It's for a shorter period of time.
But that's OK now because we have a new president.
OK, that's amazing.
I mean, there she was just admitting straight out the reason she didn't pass COVID relief that tens and tens of hundreds of millions of Americans require at this point is because she was playing politics before the election.
By the way, it backfired on her since she lost a bevy of House seats.
Dick Durbin has admitted the same.
Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois.
He admitted the Democrats held up the relief for the election as well.
There was some exuberance involved because an election was coming.
And they were both outbidding one another and trying to find some common ground.
They didn't reach that point.
But to return to those pre-election days and sentiments, political sentiments, is very difficult.
We are looking at the reality now of a new president coming on board in just a few weeks.
With President Trump leaving, we are trying to find something that we can agree to on a bipartisan basis, on an emergency basis.
Oh, wow.
So, you know, we were all enthusiastic and people were outbidding each other and we just decided not to do any of those deals because the election was coming.
So Democrats are pretty open about all of this.
Well, now they have flipped on a dime and now they're saying we need the relief.
Right now we need the relief.
The pure political brinksmanship that Democrats were engaged in is so ugly and so gross at this point.
And so Joe Manchin from West Virginia has been fairly consistent in wanting a COVID relief bill.
He's now saying nobody should go home until it's done.
Weird, because you could have done this two months ago, guys.
There's not one senator or one congressperson that should go home for Christmas if it's not done.
I don't know how you face the people that lost rent, food assistance, shelter, the basic necessities of life, and you're gonna say, well, we're gonna go home and have a nice Christmas.
Yeah.
Good luck.
Okay, and he happens to be correct about this.
Now, yesterday, the media started pushing the idea that Republicans were holding up the COVID relief bill.
Doesn't matter, they've pushed a bunch of COVID relief bills.
McConnell has pushed a bunch of them.
So McConnell yesterday was attempting to put in the COVID relief bill liability protections for employers who didn't want to close down.
So Democrats want you to be able to sue your employer if they want you to be at work in the middle of the COVID pandemic and then you get COVID.
Republicans say, no, we have a free society.
And if you don't want to show up for work because you're afraid of COVID, well, then you don't show up to work and then your employer can do what your employer wants to do.
Democrats object to this basic thing.
And so McConnell knew this was a sticking point for Democrats.
He said, why don't we throw that in a future bill?
We'll throw a couple of things in a future bill.
In fact, we'll throw that in a future bill and we'll also throw It remains my view that we ought to pass what we can agree on.
not going to do it. And then they claim that Mitch McConnell is the person refusing to compromise.
Here's McConnell yesterday proposing a non-controversial relief bill.
It remains my view that we ought to pass what we can agree on. And I think that's a pretty broad area that includes PPP, vaccine delivery, additional assistance to health care providers, and a variety of other things that are not controversial.
Okay, but Democrats want the controversial stuff in there because every crisis is an opportunity, whether it is Joe Biden's medical team pushing racial equity issues on the basis of COVID, or whether it is a COVID relief bill that Democrats want to stuff with a bunch of crap, and then they'll hold up for the election just for political gain.
Everything is politics.
All of the things are politics.
So here's where things currently stand according to the New York Times.
Jumpstarting negotiations with days to spare, the White House on Tuesday offered Democrats a $916 billion pandemic stimulus proposal that would meet their demand to provide some relief to state and local governments and include liability protections for businesses that have been a top priority of Republicans.
The offer from Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, to Pelosi was the first time the Trump administration has engaged directly with the Democrats.
The plan does not include a proposed revival of $300 weekly enhanced unemployment benefits, though it would extend other federal unemployment programs set to expire in the coming weeks.
Instead, it would include another smaller round of direct payments to Americans amounting to $600 per person.
Well, that is because as people get back to work and as the vaccines roll out, the idea of continuing to extend weekly enhanced unemployment benefits of $1,200 a month, that is a real disincentive for a lot of people who need to get back into the job market, right?
This has been a serious concern ever since Congress started passing these COVID relief bills.
The original $2.2 trillion stimulus law enacted in March distributed a round of $1,200 stimulus checks and established those enhanced unemployment benefits at $600 a week through July.
Later, Trump extended those at $300 a week for most workers.
The proposal put forward by Mnuchin would not address lapsed benefit would have the one-time payment.
Pelosi, of course, said the president's proposal must not be allowed to obstruct the bipartisan congressional talks that are already underway, calling the cuts to unemployment insurance benefits unacceptable.
Weird, because Mnuchin offered way the hell more before the election, but Pelosi didn't want any bit of it because she was too busy trying to trying to pretend that Republicans were obstructing COVID relief for political gain.
It's so gross.
It's really gross.
Representative Kevin McCarthy says it's a very good offer.
He says it focuses on things that need to be there.
And earlier, of course, McConnell signaled openness to a deal.
He floated the possibility of removing both that liability provision and funding for state and local governments.
First of all, the fact that Democrats want the trial lawyers to get rich off of COVID is pretty insane.
McConnell said dropping both parties' top priorities could smooth the way for a narrower deal funding vaccine distribution, schools, and small businesses as well.
So, is something going to get passed?
I'm sure it will.
Is this deeply political stuff?
You bet your ass it's deeply political because for the Democrats, there is no other way.
There is no other way but for it to be deeply political now and going forward.
And after all, now that they think they won an election, this means that magically it's time to deal.
Alrighty, so while you wait for two additional hours of The Ben Shapiro Show later today, head on over right now to The Michael Molls Show, where he will be talking about a former Israeli space chief describing a galactic federation of aliens.
Weird stuff.
Sounds like the UN.
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