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Dec. 11, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:08:28
Is Secession Upon Us? | Ep. 1155
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Rush Limbaugh sets off fireworks when he suggests secession might be inevitable.
106 House Republicans backed Texas's election 2020 lawsuit.
And the media finally pay attention to Hunter Biden.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben, we'll get to all of the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so.
The world of commentary exploded yesterday.
Why?
Well, because Rush Limbaugh on his show was talking about the fact that we have a massive culture gap in the country.
Now, this is obviously, obviously true.
It is obviously true that there is a massive culture gap between the left and the right.
It is also obviously true that there are many members of the radical left Who have such a bizarre vision of the United States that it is mutually exclusive with traditional visions of how the United States is supposed to work.
And if you have a country where people have fundamentally different conceptions of words like freedom and justice, where you have completely different notions of what constitutes virtue and vice, It's going to be very difficult for those people to live together.
The only way that you can have people live together who disagree about these sorts of things is to basically say that the government should not be cramming down its particular vision on anybody.
That the government should be small.
This was one of the things that the founders knew well.
They realized that there were many states.
The states live differently.
People in the localities within those states live differently.
And therefore, an overarching, very powerful federal government would actually be more likely to fracture than the opposite.
They knew this because this is exactly what had happened with Great Britain.
Because Great Britain had basically said, we're going to rule from above.
And the American colonies had said, we live a different lifestyle.
We are thousands of miles away from you, and we don't even know about your decisions, and we don't have representation, so we're out.
And so the founders knew this.
The founders recognized that in a world where people have vast disagreements, the only way that you're going to get them to agree to remain in union with one another is if you do not cram down too many things upon them.
The founders also recognized that there had to be certain baseline levels of agreement on things like virtue and vice.
And this is why John Adams famously suggested that the Constitution of the United States assumed a population that lived within certain moral bounds and certain moral strictures.
Because he said, if you have a non-virtuous people, it will rush right through the constitutional boundaries like a whale through the cords of a net.
And so all of this has been long agreed upon.
There's nothing controversial about the idea that if we have nothing in common, things are sort of going to fall apart.
This is something that Rush Limbaugh mentioned yesterday.
And until five seconds ago, the media would have agreed.
Until five seconds ago, the media would have said, look at this terrible, terrible country with Donald Trump.
As the head of it.
Can we live in peace and harmony with these people?
No, we can't live in peace and harmony with these people.
We're going to have to break apart.
I mean, this whole thing is just falling apart.
Then they believe that Joe Biden was elected and suddenly it's unity time again.
And this is what the media always do.
They suggest that unity is only to be had when their perspective is dominant.
When they win, then we are supposed to be unified.
When they lose, then we are supposed to fall apart.
Now, there are many of us who are pointing out during the first term of Trump that this thing was falling apart, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are running the show, because there are fundamental disagreements in the United States over what the United States represents, ought to represent, what our vision ought to be for the future.
Is it a vision of liberty, or is it a vision of forced equality?
From the top down.
So Rush mentions this yesterday, and of course the world sets aflame because the idea is that Rush is very bad for saying this.
Now, they do this every time an election is over and a Democrat appears to have won.
And back in 2008, after Barack Obama won, Rush said he hoped that Obama failed.
He didn't mean that he hoped that Barack Obama tried to do good things and failed.
He said what he meant was, and it was very obvious what he meant at the time, he meant that he hoped that Barack Obama's progressive agenda was a failure because he did not want to see that progressive agenda enacted on the United States, right?
It was very obvious what he was saying.
The media decided to go nuts anyway.
Well, you know, eight, four, what is it, 12 years later?
12 years later, Rush Limbaugh says something fairly similar here, which is, the country seems to be falling apart.
That is perfectly obvious.
Here was Rush yesterday.
I actually think that we're trending toward secession.
I know that there is a sizable and growing sentiment for people who believe that that is where we're headed whether we want to or not.
Whether we want to go there or not.
I myself haven't made up my mind.
I still haven't.
Given up the idea that we are the majority and that all we have to do is find a way to unite and win.
The media went crazy over this because how dare Rush Limbaugh in a time of glorious democratic victory suggest that the country is kind of falling apart?
Well, the problem is that one half of the media was doing that.
And meanwhile, half the left is like, yeah, you know what?
You're right.
We should go our separate ways.
So Amy Siskind, Who is a liberal commentator, obviously.
She tweeted out a graphic from circa about 2004 when members of the left were very, very angry about George W. Bush winning reelection.
And what this graphic was is it showed Alaska in red and most of the Midwest in red, with the exception of like Illinois and Michigan.
and I believe Wisconsin there, and virtually all of the rest of the country is in red.
It's like the Northeast and the West Coast and the Midwestern states that voted for John Kerry, and then the rest of the country is red. And the suggestion was that all of the blue states would join with Canada, and all of the red states would become quote unquote Jesusland. It would be the United States of Canada and Jesusland. That was the ridiculous suggestion that was being put forth by folks on the left as early as 2004, which is that these differences are irreconcilable.
Now, I gotta tell you, the differences of 2004 look pasty in comparison to the differences that we currently hold in the United States.
We have a huge percentage of the population of the country that apparently believes that the country is systemically racist, and unfixably so.
I believe that government can solve all of your problems from the top down.
All that is required is sufficient willpower to do so.
And I believe the Constitution ought to be put completely aside in order to make all of this happen.
But to pretend that it is not the left's fevered hatred for folks on the right that has really driven so much of the sort of secession talk is to ignore who is in control of the institutions of culture.
We know who's in control of the institutions of culture.
We know who's in control in Hollywood.
We know that in Hollywood, it is people on the left who are in control, and they wish to purvey a particular view of the world.
And they wish for you to buy this particular view of the world, and if you do not, then you are going to be castigated in Hollywood as a backward redneck.
We know that the folks who are in charge of the media have one particular view of themselves and their own viewpoint, and they believe they are objectively right.
And if you disagree with them, you are objectively wrong.
And therefore, you ought to be cast out of the bounds of polite society.
The folks in the university system have created their own little religion of wokeism, where you cannot work.
You cannot work unless you believe in the fundamental tenets of quote-unquote social justice warrior nonsense.
The social justice movement is predicated on a certain level of post-modernist philosophy that suggests there is no such thing as objective truth or objective right, but there is such a thing as objective identity, and we can base our viewpoint on whether your objective identity Meaning your race, or your ethnicity, or your sexuality, whether these things are victimized in the United States.
And if you don't abide by that particular viewpoint, well then, you'll be thrown out of the academy.
The institutions are controlled by the left.
The only way that the right has fought back, really, has been in the world of politics, winning the occasional vote.
Winning the House in 2010, winning the Senate in 2014, winning the presidency in 2016.
Right.
So occasionally the right fights back, but they don't fight back in the realm of culture.
And as long as the culture continues to polarize, so long as you turn on the TV and all you get is one side of the political aisle railing at you day in and day out, it's going to feel more and more as though we're going to have to pull apart.
The founders knew this.
This is nothing new.
And people today know it.
So to pretend that we would have unity but for people like Rush Limbaugh or people on the right is to really suggest that we would have unity if you would just agree with us.
Now listen, I don't think folks on the left have to agree with me in order for us to have a baseline level of unity so we can move forward as a country.
I think we can disagree on tax rights.
We can fight over tax rights.
I think we can disagree on certain social issues.
And I think that that's Totally within the bounds of us still being the American family.
I think once you get to the point where you believe the Constitution ought to be overthrown in favor of an administrative state ruled from above by unelected officials who can interfere in every area of individual rights, well, now you're talking about something different.
And to sort of gloss over these philosophical differences, simply because you think Joe Biden was elected, demonstrates the agenda of so many in the media making an issue over what Rush said yesterday.
In a second, we'll get to Barack Obama, who, again, has been pasting over these issues.
Barack Obama is a seminal figure in the tearing apart of the country.
And if you want to watch gaslighting in real time, all you have to do is watch Barack Obama's book tour, because the media have declared that he is, in fact, a unifying figure.
Again, anytime a Democrat wins, according to the media, that means he's a unifying figure.
Anytime a Republican wins, that means the country is on the brink of falling apart.
For me, the question is not who wins and who loses elections.
The question is what values are being promulgated and how much do those values cast an entire other side of the political aisle out of the family of Americans.
Wish everybody else out into the cornfield.
We'll get to this in one second.
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Okay, so...
Barack Obama is a good indicator of where the media stand on this whole should America fall apart or not thing.
So Barack Obama was great at one thing, and that was lying about his actual philosophy.
So what he did, over and over and over, is he suggested that he liked the Declaration and he liked the Constitution, he just didn't like anything about the Declaration and the Constitution.
So he would say things.
Like, the Declaration and Constitution signify who we are, and then he would immediately cut back directly against the philosophy of the Declaration and the Constitution.
He would suggest that we're not black Americans and white Americans, we're all Americans, and then he would say that Cambridge police officers acted stupidly, and that America had racism in its DNA, and all the rest of the sort of stuff.
So Barack Obama is a very, very divisive guy.
The media continued to try to paint him as a unifying figure, because again, in the view of the media, their view is unifying, any other view is divisive.
So here's Barack Obama the other night suggesting that the only reason conservatives didn't love him was Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
I ended up getting enormous support in these pretty conservative, rural, largely white communities when I was a senator.
And that success was repeated when I Ran for president in the first race in Iowa.
By my second year in office, I'm not sure if I could make that same connection because now those same people Are filtering me through Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and an entire conservative media infrastructure that was characterizing me in a way that suggested I looked down on those folks or I had nothing in common with them.
Suggested?
You did look down on those folks.
You said in 2008 that those folks were bitter clingers who cling to God and guns and xenophobia.
Suggested?
Suggested?
No, the big problem is that conservative media was telling the truth about Barack Obama, and he didn't like that.
He liked it better when the media were simply lying about Barack Obama and his agenda.
And when people talk about the separation of the country, you have to understand that the media acting as a filter for Democrats may help the Democrats win, but it is not going to unify the country in any serious way.
It's just a way of pasting over serious differences in the body politic in order to achieve leftist victory.
That is what the media are doing every single day.
And by the way, the members of the media, if they were forced to the choice right now, they don't disagree with Amy Siskind.
They look at red states with absolute scorn.
They look at people who live in the red states with absolute scorn.
I went to law school with a lot of these folks.
They look at the people who don't live in the big cities and they look at them like they are hicks and like they are rednecks.
They look at religious people in particular as though they are stupid and backward.
They believe that their sort of secular worldview ought to take dominance and predominance over religious worldviews.
They are some of the least tolerant people I know.
And I have lived in blue areas my entire life until the last two months.
Literally my entire life.
I spent my entire life in L.A.
and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And I can tell you that the notion that folks like Barack Obama do not look down on the so-called backward rednecks in the middle of the country is a lie.
They do look down on those people.
They believe those people's values are wrong.
This is why Hillary Clinton said that people in America were going to have to change their own religious values in order to get in touch with the times.
You think that doesn't pull apart the country?
It does pull apart the country.
Okay, now, this brings us to a larger point, okay?
And the larger point is this.
If we wish to share a country, we are going to have to accept that there are limits to how much you get to interfere in somebody else's life.
And what this means is we ought to want to maintain a principle, which is that states ought not interfere with other states.
If you actually want to share a country, maybe you don't want to share a country.
Maybe you want the country to fall apart if you're on the left.
Or maybe you're on the right and you say, OK, well, you know what?
We're never going to win this battle.
The battle's over, so I give up.
So fine, let California go its own way.
Let New York go its own way.
Let Massachusetts go its own way.
And we're done here.
OK, well, if that's your proposal, then make a proposal.
But if you believe that the country ought to stick together or if you believe that there is a silent majority that has been forced into silence, then one thing that you should definitely want to make sure of is that the folks in California and New York don't get to run things in Texas.
You want to make sure that the federal government doesn't get to dictate procedure in terms of law with regard to Texas or Mississippi or Florida or Alabama or Missouri or any other red state, right?
You want to make sure that the federal government actually makes room for differences of opinion.
And this is why it is very important.
The world of law is not the same as the world of culture or even the world of sort of political thinking.
The world of law establishes supposedly neutral principles.
Once those principles have been established, they are very difficult to disestablish.
Once you maximize power in the federal government, it is very difficult to then dissolve power in the federal government.
So if you make a rule, for example, that benefits people on the right at one time, at the level of the federal government, And then the left takes over that federal government, then those same powers are going to be available to people on the left.
And this is something that the right should have been aware of for quite a while, which is that if the right bought into the notion of bigger government in order to promulgate their agenda, the left eventually takes over all those instruments and then uses those instruments against precisely the people who wanted those instruments of power put into place in the first place, which is why the right has traditionally been a small government party in the United States.
It's why conservatives in the United States have typically wanted the government out of your business.
It's why there is this sort of right libertarian alliance.
Because the right in the United States has understood that power is a double-edged sword.
Right now, you may be wielding it, but sooner or later, somebody's gonna grab that sword from the other side and they're gonna use it against you.
I bring this up in the context of this current Texas Supreme Court case with regard to the 2020 election.
We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so this brings us to this Texas Supreme Court case.
So Texas filed a case with the Supreme Court.
They were trying to elevate the case directly to the Supreme Court.
So the Constitution of the United States provides that the Supreme Court has direct jurisdiction over controversies between the state.
So that means that it doesn't have to go through the appellate procedure. It goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. Now there is a debate inside sort of original circles as to whether the Supreme Court has to take up that case or whether the Supreme Court can reject that case.
So really what is going up to the Supreme Court right now is a petition that the Supreme Court will allow Texas to bring this case.
17 other states have now signed on to this case as well.
And the case essentially amounts to Texas and a bunch of other red states, 16 other red states, who are filing a lawsuit alleging that a series of swing states did not properly implement election law inside their own borders.
And therefore, these 17 Republican states were disadvantaged in the electoral college.
And therefore, the federal government should step in and basically rewrite all of the election rules in these particular states.
That's the essence of the case.
And the case makes a couple of claims.
Some of them are pretty flimsy, legally speaking.
For example, they make a due process claim, suggesting that substantive due process was not taken.
Essentially, it's not fair.
It's not fair is not a legal argument.
From an originalist perspective, it's not fair is probably the worst legal argument.
Due process.
Was never meant to be quote-unquote substantive.
It's getting a little bit arcane, but substantive due process is the basic idea under the Constitution.
The basic idea is that you cannot have your life, liberty, or property removed without due process of law.
Now you would say to yourself, due process of law means that there has to be a trial.
There has to be a trial by jury.
There has to be a law in place.
It can't be an ex post facto law.
It has to be a law that was in place before you committed a crime.
That's what due process means.
The Supreme Court has crafted out of whole cloth this bizarre position that there is such a thing as substantive due process, which, if you think about that phrase for a second, it makes no sense at all, because process and substance are not the same thing.
They are opposites, in fact.
There's the substance, and then there's the process that you use when you apply it to the substance, right?
A substance of a crime would be like murder.
The process would be how you adjudicate whether somebody has committed murder or not.
Substantive due process is basically the Supreme Court deciding it's not fair.
So under the rubric of substantive due process, for example, The Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a right.
So substantive due process has long been a bugaboo in right-wing legal circles.
The Texas case relies on substantive due process.
It makes the claim that this is not fair because Texas has certain voting procedures and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania violated their own voting procedures and therefore that's not fair.
Okay, the reason that they're making that claim, of course, is because presumably they think that if the electors in those various states are not selected on the basis of the popular vote in those states, but by the state legislatures, all of which are red, then presumably they will vote for Trump and it will shift the outcome of the election.
Now, Texas, in the case, doesn't say that.
They say, no, no, no, we're just concerned about the state of the law here.
But that seems rather dicey, considering that they didn't file this lawsuit until the last five minutes, right?
If they were really that concerned about the state of play in these various states with regard to internal election law, they theoretically should have filed the lawsuit long before.
They should have filed the lawsuit when Pennsylvania first redid its mail-in balloting initiative back in 2019, when a Republican legislature voted for universal mail-in balloting in 2019 before the pandemic, by the way.
Now, there are certainly Constitutional concerns on the state constitutional level in a large variety of these states, Pennsylvania being the most obvious.
In Pennsylvania, it is true that the state constitution suggests that you require a constitutional amendment in order to radically redo its voting laws the way that they were done in 2019.
Like, that's a legit cause of action.
Should that be elevated to the Supreme Court?
Typically, the Supreme Court says, listen, the federal government has nothing to do with internal deliberations with regard to the creation of electors in a presidential election.
Now, what the Texas case is claiming is that the Constitution of the United States says that state legislatures shall determine the method of how electors are selected.
So the state legislature could delegate that to the population, the state legislature could pass laws regarding how people are to vote, but it has to come from the state legislature is the claim that Texas is making.
Now, that claim is fairly plausible on its face.
The problem is that in law, you have to show a discrete, particular injury.
Okay, you have to have what is called standing.
So, as I pointed out on the show yesterday, if producer Colton gets hit by a car, I can't sue the guy who hit Colton with the car on Colton's behalf.
Colton has to sue.
Or his family members have to sue.
His heirs have to sue, right?
I can't sue because I don't have standing.
Okay, so for Texas to claim that it has standing to challenge the internal laws of a place like Pennsylvania with regard to its voting, It sounds good on the surface if you want the election to change, but it is actually a very, very bad legal principle.
The reason it is a bad legal principle is now you have opened the door.
This is what I mean when I say you do not want to appeal to the federal government as your solution to all problems, because once the federal government has a particular power, it's going to use it against you.
If, let's say, the Supreme Court were to take up the Texas challenge and say, you know what?
Texas is right.
Texas was disadvantaged and affected because Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Georgia, their election laws were poorly drawn and didn't actually prove fraud, by the way.
Nothing in the Texas lawsuit actually alleges fraud or voter irregularity actually happened.
It doesn't actually allege that.
It just says that the procedures used here violated the state constitutions within those states.
Let's say that the Supreme Court went along with that argument.
Saying that Texas has standing to sue because Texas is part of the Electoral College and therefore they're disadvantaged if Pennsylvania screws up its own voting.
Here is the problem with that.
The problem with that is that you now end up in the position where any state could sue any other state for a law implemented in that second state As long as it had an indirect effect on the first state.
So, for example, California could sue Alabama on the basis of Alabama's abortion laws by claiming that, listen, if people in Alabama can't get abortions, you know, they're flying into California in order to do that.
And that means that Alabama's abortion laws, they affect us.
And there's a right to privacy under the Constitution of the United States under Roe versus Wade.
And therefore, California would have standing to sue.
Okay, this is not the world you want.
If you want the country to hold together, you do not want there to have to be uniform laws across the entire country on a wide variety of issues in which states can sue each other to provide for that uniformity.
Then you do basically have a bare majoritarian cram down, right, effectuated by the Supreme Court.
You actually don't want this.
Okay, so you can think that some of the claims made in the Texas lawsuit are legit, but they don't have standing.
To provide them standing would be a constitutional error of pretty extreme magnitude.
And not only that, even if they were granted standing to judge that Texas could change election law inside Wisconsin or inside Pennsylvania, that is a sword you do not want to grant the Supreme Court.
That is just not something you want the Supreme Court involved in.
Right now, there are a majority of Republican appointees on that bench.
Okay, in 10, 15 years, that probably is not going to be the case, or at least there's a shot it won't be the case.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so that state action that Texas is taking is an attempt to move beyond what is the norm in terms of interstate relations and to actually maximize the power of the federal government to control what happens within states.
This is something Republicans should not be in favor of.
Remember, Democrats are openly proposing the rewriting of the Voting Rights Act to allow federal preclearance of gerrymandering and redistricting in Republican states.
They want to take control from the top down.
And now they wouldn't even have to do that via the legislature.
Now they could just do it through the Supreme Court.
California could say, listen, We have a certain number of Congress people, because we draw our districts properly.
But, you know, down in Georgia, they don't draw their districts properly.
And so we are suing in the Supreme Court, saying that our congressional delegation has been watered down by the Georgia congressional delegation, and therefore the Supreme Court is going to have to re-gerrymander Georgia.
Is this something you want?
Do you want the Supreme Court, at the behest of California, re-gerrymandering, redistricting Republican states?
One of the great glories of the American system is that you have delegated powers.
Actually, honestly, one of the guarantees against widespread voter fraud, and I mean like national voter fraud, is the fact you do not have a centralized voting system in the United States.
A centralized voting system makes it more likely, not less likely, that there's going to be voter fraud.
In fact, inside states, one of the best guarantees against voter fraud and voter irregularities is the fact that the system itself is decentralized down to the county and precinct level.
And so, again, I can agree with a lot of the feelings about how the election rules were done in Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for example, randomly suggesting that you can count ballots after the day of the election is crazy.
The original decision by a Republican legislature in Pennsylvania to go along with universal mail-in balloting is idiotic.
There are serious problems in these electoral strategies, and they do provide for the possibility of fraud.
And it is true that Democrats are pushing procedures like getting rid of voter ID in a variety of states that would make it easier to commit voter fraud.
However, to set up the generalized legal principle, which is what Supreme Court cases are about, the generalized legal principle that a state can sue another state for law applied inside that second state that doesn't really affect the first state directly is just a disaster.
It opens a can of worms in serious, serious fashion.
Well, nonetheless, about 106 Republican congresspeople have jumped into this race.
By the way, I'm noticing that folks on the left are suddenly respecting federalism again.
Again, this is one of these beautiful things that the left does.
So the left hates federalism.
As long as states' rights mean that right-wingers actually control states, this means that states' rights are really bad.
They want nationalized rule from the top.
The minute that they think they're getting something out of federalism, suddenly federalism becomes good again.
So federalism was really bad when Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona, started enforcing immigration law.
At that point, they were like, you know what?
The federal government has supremacy.
The supremacy clause suggests that Jan Brewer is not allowed to enforce immigration law on her own.
Then you have California, and California's like, you know what?
We're going to enforce environmental law on our own.
And the left's like, federalism!
Federalism's very good now.
So pay no attention to the ridiculous spinning of the left, because for the left, Institutions are merely an element of power, right?
They just grab power and they use it whenever they can.
And I understand the backlash to that on the right, which is, okay, fine.
So we'll grab the institutions and we'll use the power when we have the power.
We won't worry about the institution of neutral principles.
The problem is that it is much easier to move under the guise of already established neutral principles than it is to violate the neutral principles.
Institutional checks and balances and institutional norms still do exist.
And the more of those that are blown up, the easier it's going to be for future people to grab hold of sort of this empty area and then use it in their own favor.
So, 106 House Republicans have now signed on to this lawsuit.
According to Yahoo.com, on Tuesday, Texas's Attorney General filed a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, alleging that the states improperly manipulated voting rules.
Seventeen red states have since filed in support of the suit, even though Texas and several other states had implemented the same mail-in and early voting rules by the same methods.
In a further paradox, 106 GOP House members also joined Texas's suit as amici curiae, despite the fact many of them had been re-elected on the same exact ballots.
In other words, they were coming from states.
They're challenging the electoral methods used in the same states where they were elected, which obviously is sort of a weird oddity.
Not every congressional Republican is on board with the Texas suit.
Senator Ben Sasse suggested that Texas' Attorney General was begging for a pardon and filed a PR stunt rather than a lawsuit.
Now, I'm not going to suggest that that's the case.
Maybe it's perfectly genuine on the part of Ken Paxton, who is the Texas AG.
I'm just saying that the principle that would be established by the case itself is not a particularly good principle.
What is irritating in the extreme is, again, many things can be true at once.
One can be that I think that this lawsuit is badly predicated.
I think that it sets a bad principle going forward, legally speaking.
I think that if you were going to prove voter fraud, you do it the way that Georgia is talking about doing it.
You do it the way that the Georgia GOP is talking about doing it.
You file actual suits that demonstrate actual voter fraud.
You bring evidence.
You bring names.
You bring voter lists.
You don't say, I don't like the procedures in that particular state.
That is not my own state.
And so, you know what?
I'm filing a lawsuit and directing it directly to the Supreme Court.
Like, that's not the way this should work.
Truly, it's not the way.
Now, that can be true.
It can also be true that there's real suspicion in states like Georgia that irregularity happened.
There's also truth to the idea that the voting rules in these states are garbage and that we shouldn't have had mass mail-in voting this year.
Somehow, Israel was able to carry out 97 elections in the last year.
I mean, really, they have an election like every 12 hours in Israel now.
They carried them all out in person, effectively, and it was fine.
And it turns out that we had mass voting at the beginning of November, and that did not cause a mass spike in COVID cases.
So the notion that we had to do universal mail-in balloting is really, really stupid and really, really silly.
All of that can be true.
It can also be true that the media's overwrought reaction to the Texas lawsuit is irritating and stupid.
And that the same people who are complaining about the threat to democracy are fine with threatening democracy when it suits their purposes.
And this is why nobody has any trust in the other side.
You want to talk about the country splitting apart?
There are two ways that the country could split apart.
One is that people just keep wrestling over the institutions of power so as to cram down their own particular view on everybody else.
The other doesn't even require that.
The other is that there is such loss of faith in the other side That everybody assumes that everybody has bad intentions, which leads to the first eventuality, right?
If you believe the other side has bad intentions and they're going to grab the government gun and point it at you, you are more likely to want to grab that gun first, right?
Then it's a, then it's a use the government gun or be killed by the government gun situation.
And this is why so many Republicans have reacted to Democrats threatening democracy over and over and over by saying, okay, well, you know what?
We don't really, you know what?
We're not going to be the ones standing in the breach here.
So it is somewhat irritating when we hear all of these folks on the left suddenly decrying the challenges to elections and the complaints about voter fraud and voter irregularity and voting procedure when literally two months ago, this is all they were talking about.
Donald Trump and Louis DeJoy, the head of the post office, the postmaster general is going to remove mailboxes.
Donald Trump is engaging in voter suppression.
We had record voting this year, by the way.
Okay, and then as soon as the election's over, it's like, oh no, it's clean.
How dare you challenge the election?
This sort of gaslighting leads to the lack of trust, which leads to the belief that people will game the system, that they will engage in voter fraud, that they will try to grab that government gun and use it against you.
And so when you have Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC saying, people are dying while they file this Texas lawsuit.
I don't remember Mika Brzezinski being quite so upset when people were literally dying as there were mass protests in the streets over the bullcrap notion that America is systemically racist.
This kind of gaslighting from the media does have a real downstream effect on how people think about the institutions of government.
And it actually leads to the centralization of government paradoxically.
Instead of people saying, I disagree with you, you disagree with me.
So maybe the federal government should be less powerful.
It turns into, I disagree with you.
I suspect that you are going to try to use the federal government to cram down your viewpoint on me.
Therefore, let me grab the power of the federal government and use that to cram down my viewpoint on you.
Okay, so here is Mika Brzezinski.
Again, this is just, I would say, deeply irritating and annoying.
These are Trump's deaths.
This is Trump's virus.
It's not Trump's presidency anymore.
And yet he continues to try and grab onto it in some pitiful or self-centered effort to create a media empire beyond his departure.
And exactly what is that departure going to look like?
Is he going to hold on to the curtains and be dragged out of there while people are dying?
I don't even know how to describe this behavior.
It wouldn't be allowed in a three-year-old child.
Ah, come on.
I'm sorry.
The overwrought.
Trump is filing lawsuits and it's just so terrible.
And how dare anybody file lawsuits?
Four years of Russian collusion crap and this is what you buy.
This is what you buy.
That doesn't mean that all of what's been going on for the last several years in terms of attacks on our institutions is good.
But to pretend that it started with Trump or that Trump is some sort of break in kind from what has been happening before is quite silly.
In fact, I think the silliest element of this was, you know, exactly this sort of historical ignorance.
Michael Beschloss, who is the NBC historian.
He tweeted out yesterday that Donald Trump keeps complaining about the press.
And he's like, Lincoln never complained about the press.
Lincoln literally shut down 300 newspapers and jailed people who disagreed with him.
So you picked a poor example, official historian over at NBC.
Institutional distrust is growing.
It's growing because we don't trust each other, and we don't trust each other mainly because one side of the political aisle decided a very long time ago that people on the other side of the political aisle were elementally evil and needed to be curbed by the power of the federal government.
And the blowback you get is going to be on the institutional level, and it is bad.
It is not good blowback.
I think that the institutions of the United States ought to be preserved.
If the right is attacking them, I think that's bad.
If the left is attacking them, I think that's bad.
But I think that is a natural outgrowth of an entire political strategy, militarized and weaponized by the left, to castigate one entire side of the political aisle.
Indeed, the side of the political aisle that traditionally has sided with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as racist, sexist, bigoted homophobes who need to be curbed by the power of the federal government.
Okay, in just a second, we're going to be getting to the Biden team, because Joe Biden, I get the feeling that Joe Biden kind of just wants to sit there.
Like, that's actually what he wants his presidency to be, is just him sitting there.
Indeed, he's selected president by the Electoral College December 14th.
I have a feeling that Joe Biden really just kind of wants to not do anything.
He's so happy to be there because he spent his entire life trying to get there that he is sort of cracking back against the more radical members of his coalition.
But I don't think he's going to be able to hold back those tidewaters.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let us talk about the fact that if you are an American citizen, you need to protect yourself.
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Alrighty, in just one second, we're going to get to Joe Biden supposedly attempting to hold back those tidewaters and failing, it seems.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Today, it's Kyle Cushman of North Carolina who sent in this outstanding Triple threat Tumblr shot to our mailbag in the picture.
A smiling baby boy is sitting on the couch, clearly thrilled by his family's latest acquisitions.
The message reads, Indeed.
That is the essence of parenting excellence.
Right there.
You want to be a great parent?
for getting the all access subscription.
I thought you might enjoy this picture of my very cute and squishy baby son, Henry, surrounded by the best beverage vessels the world has to offer.
Indeed, that is the essence of parenting excellence.
Right there, you wanna be a great parent?
You need to do exactly what just happened in that picture.
Thanks for the picture.
Congrats on that adorable, squishy baby.
If you are not already a Daily Wire member, now is the time to join.
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Meanwhile Joe Biden trying to hold back the tidewaters here and failing with regard to So I think that Joe Biden basically just wants to sit around.
That's basically his plan.
I mean, he's enjoyed it for the entire campaign.
Why not enjoy it into the future?
He's building his entire team with basically just his friends.
It's going to be that 70s show.
He's just going to sit.
In that basement, smoking that bong and passing it around with, like, Susan Rice, who he likes, with Dennis McDonough, who he likes.
He sort of picked a bunch of randos that are his friends.
And then he's like, you know, I have a bunch of open positions.
Let's just pick lots to see who exactly gets what open position.
So somehow, Susan Rice is going to end up his domestic policy advisor.
Now, recognize that she was the national security advisor under Obama.
So magically, she has more from a foreign policy non-expert to a domestic policy non-expert.
So that's excellent stuff.
Also, he is choosing Dennis McDonough What?
He's never served in uniform.
He has no experience with the military.
It doesn't matter.
Joe Biden is so senile at this point, apparently, that he's just like, he's like, I have friends and those friends, look, look, Dennis, have you ever met a man in the military?
Dennis, have you?
Come on, man.
You met a person in the military.
Yeah, you're Secretary of Veterans.
And he sort of drifts off.
According to the Washington Post, however, the choices provided a fuller picture of the type of government Biden is building, one that relies heavily on officials who have spent decades in public service and has several historic firsts among the nominations.
God, the media are just, their tongues are so far.
Okay, I mean, it's just, it's horrifying.
It's the human centipede over here.
But it's had less space for rising Democratic stars and representatives of the party's liberal wing.
This is prompting opposition, not just from Republicans, but also from some of the Democrats and liberals who kept Biden united during the general election campaign.
And here is where it's gonna break out into the open.
Prepare thyselves.
And so Time Magazine, I love this.
Time Magazine decided on its person of the year.
So who should be the person of the year?
The truth is the actual people of the year should be Big Pharma, right?
Much maligned Big Pharma that developed a vaccine for COVID inside of a year, right?
Which is unbelievable.
Like, inside of nine months, they went from zero to 100, and now hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine for a contagious, deadly disease are going to be rolled out over the course of the coming months.
They didn't win it.
No, the people who won it, of course, were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Now, it's called the Person of the Year, you may have noticed, right?
Person of the Year.
Person, last I checked, was singular.
Now, I know that we use singular and plural Alternatively, these days, I know that you are allowed, as an individual human, to say that your pronouns are they and them, which is insane in and of itself.
But apparently, also, person of the year now means people of the year, because they didn't just feature Joe Biden on the cover of Time.
They featured Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris' only accomplishment was getting her ass so kicked during the primaries that she dropped off before California could even vote, and then being the right race and the right gender.
Those were her great accomplishments in this race.
Really, because if she were not black and she were not a woman, there's no way in hell that Joe Biden would have selected her.
How do I know?
Because he didn't select Amy Klobuchar, right?
Who's actually in a swing state.
He overtly said that he was picking somebody for her race.
It doesn't matter.
The media are so excited about the possibility of Joe Biden dying that they're like, you know what?
Just stick Camelot and everything.
They're just going to turn them into this two headed monster.
We're going to pretend like at no point was Mike Pence featured as like a person of the year with Donald Trump.
The vice president is a warm bucket of spit.
That's in the John Adams famous phrase.
It's a useless office, essentially, the vice presidency.
It's basically just president in waiting.
And the media can't wait, man.
Joe Biden ought to get a food taster.
Every time he's with the media, he ought to have that food taster tasting his food.
You can just see members of the media just sitting there in the room.
They got a blow dart in the back.
Great, Kamala's president now.
That's where this is going.
They cannot wait.
Putting Kamala Harris on the cover of Time Magazine as a person of the year.
Oh man, they are so eager to get rid of this guy.
They're so eager.
And they're even more eager.
Because Biden seems to still be, in some ways, an institutionalist.
I say in some ways, because he's not overall an institutionalist.
But he's making enemies among the progressive left in his own party.
Listen, you gotta give credit where credit is due.
When Joe Biden said, like Joe Biden said, in this sort of stealth phone call that he was doing with community activists and all this, he said in the phone call a couple of things that are actually worthy of note.
One, he took the Abigail Spanberger, moderate congresswoman from Virginia, Democrat position, that they shouldn't defund the police because defund the police is a phrase being used to beat up Democrats, which obviously is true.
He said we might lose that Georgia Senate race if we keep saying that over and over.
So Joe Biden cracking back against the hard left inside his own administration.
Here was that from that phone call.
I also don't think we should get too far ahead of ourselves on dealing with police reform in that because they've already labeled us as being defund the police.
Anything we put forward in terms of the organizational structure to change policing, which I promise you will occur.
Promise you.
Just think to yourself and give me advice whether we should do that before January 5th because that's how they beat the living hell out of us across the country saying that we're talking about defunding the police.
We're not.
We're talking about holding them accountable.
Okay, so Biden is cracking back against the left-wing of his party.
We'll see how well that goes for him.
But more importantly, he actually said, there's a bunch of stuff that I'm not going to do via executive order.
He said, I'm not going to ban assault weapons via executive order.
It's not something that I'm going to do.
Because I think that that's not constitutional now.
I will note, Barack Obama said the exact same thing about deferred action for childhood arrivals.
He said it dozens of times.
He said, I don't have unilateral power to suspend immigration law.
Then he went ahead and did it because, of course, Democrats very often are just violating the institutional precepts they already know they don't want to abide by, right?
They say that they like those institutions.
Then if they have to break them, then they break them.
OK, but.
Democrats are pushing Biden really hard on this stuff.
He is not.
I have serious doubts that Joe Biden is going to be the great bulwark here.
According to the New York Times today, Joe Biden is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale quickly and by executive action, a campaign that will be one of the first tests of his relationship with the liberal wing of his party.
Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan.
But Democratic leaders, backed by the party's left flank, are pressing for up to 50 grand of debt relief per borrower executed day one of his presidency.
More than 200 organizations, of course, including the disreputable American Federation of Teachers as well as the NAACP, have joined the push.
There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them, said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
If we don't deliver quick relief, it's going to be very difficult to get them back.
So Joe Biden has said that he does not want to do this.
He wants to do this through legislation.
Now, this is why I think that secretly, if you're Joe Biden, you gotta be praying that the Democrats lose the Georgia Senate races.
Seriously, because then you get to claim that you were doing your best, but that you didn't get anything done.
The economy does really well because you can't wreck the economy with a Democratic majority in the Senate pushing a bunch of stupid crap.
And then you get to claim that you, to your progressive base, you were doing the best you could, but Mitch McConnell was standing in the way.
And also, you get all the benefits of Republican governance with none of the cost.
If you're Joe Biden, that's what you're hoping for.
I don't think that he is going to be that bulwark.
I don't think that Joe Biden is going to be the bulwark of normalcy and institutional fealty.
I think the chances that if Democrats were to gain the Senate in Georgia, they nuke the filibuster are 100%, which is why Republicans should go out and they should vote in Georgia en masse.
And by the way, the data suggests that that's what Republicans are doing.
They're not being dissuaded by Lin Wood and other grifters.
I mean, that is a grift move, okay?
As soon as you say that you should not vote for Republicans in a Georgia Senate election and let Raphael Warnock become a member of the Senate because you're angry about Georgia's election procedures, you've now joined a grift, okay?
That is a grift move.
I understand that people are angry.
I get it.
I do.
But that does not mean that you simply cede the seat to a radical Democrat Marxist.
That's a nutty idea.
But it's why Republicans need to hold the Senate.
If you're Joe Biden, honestly, your best shot at life may be a Republican Senate.
But Joe Biden is not going to be the guy who stands for institutional normalcy for long.
I have serious doubts that he is going to be exactly the sort of bulwark that he claims that he is going to be.
Now, meanwhile, the Hunter Biden story continues to move forward.
That Hunter Biden story is finally being you're allowed to cover it now.
That's exciting stuff.
Isn't that fun?
So the New York Times says investigation of Joe Biden's son is likely to hang over Biden as he takes office.
Why wouldn't it have been nice if the investigation of Joe Biden's son Had actually been covered, you know, before the election?
Wouldn't that have been a nice, good thing?
Well, now the New York Times is covering it because the election's over, gang.
As I pointed out yesterday, your media are just the PR wing for the Democratic Party.
Now it is safe to talk about the fact that Hunter Biden is corrupt as the day is long, and was trafficking in daddy's name, and everybody knew about this for years, including Joe Biden.
Now we can talk about it.
So the New York Times says the newly disclosed federal tax investigation into his son will test President-elect Joseph R. Biden's stated commitment to independent law enforcement while leaving him in a no-win situation that could prove distracting at best and politically and legally perilous at worst.
Unless President Trump's Justice Department clears Hunter Biden of wrongdoing before leaving office, the new president will confront the prospect of his own newly installed administration deciding how or whether to proceed with an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal prosecution.
Already, some Republicans are demanding a special counsel be appointed to insulate the case from political influence, which would be the gift that keeps on giving.
I have a feeling that that will happen before the end of the Trump administration, if indeed it comes to an end on January 20th.
I have a feeling that a special counsel will be appointed so that Joe Biden can't simply come in and quash the case against his son.
And by the way, anybody who suspects that Joe Biden wouldn't do that, that he is just, he's so institutionally loyal, that he'd be like, yeah, just go ahead with your prosecution there of Hunter.
I'm sure that's exactly what would happen with Joe Biden.
On a campaign trail, meanwhile, Biden excoriated Trump's efforts to use the FBI and DOJ to go after his enemies.
But the reality is, of course, that the FBI and the DOJ acted independently of Trump, so much so that the DOJ did not announce the investigation until now.
The DOJ had suggested it was a covert investigation, which is kind of crazy considering that there was already news of this investigation floating around in October.
There are rumors that this investigation was floating around in October, and the FBI and DOJ just refused to confirm it because they didn't want to get involved in the election, which is crazy because that's called getting involved in the election.
But in any case, the FBI and DOJ are indeed investigating Hunter Biden, and now we are allowed to cover it.
Meanwhile, Team Biden is running from this.
So Joe Biden was asked specifically about Hunter Biden, and the reporter who asked was immediately shooed out of the room the other day.
Are you talking to him?
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Let's go.
Catch you later.
See you later.
Now, remember, it was Donald Trump who's a threat to the freedom of the press.
But ask a question of Joe Biden and you will immediately be ushered outside of the room if you are a reporter.
Also, quick flashback here.
Remember how the media covered this thing in the first place?
Remember when Christiane Amanpour suggested there was literally no evidence of Hunter Biden's corruption on CNN?
Very trusted journalist over at CNN.
This was solid stuff.
You're okay with our interest being sold out to profit?
Joe Biden and his family?
When we're suffering during a pandemic from Communist China, he's doing shady business deals with Communist China?
You're comfortable, okay?
As you know perfectly well, I'm a journalist and a reporter and I follow the facts.
And there has never been any issues in terms of corruption.
Now let me ask you this.
Yesterday, the FBI... Wait, wait, wait!
How do you know that?
I'm talking about reporting and any evidence.
Reporting and any evidence?
Oh yeah, it turns out that he's been under federal investigation since 2018, which is why it is so rich.
I just have to point out, our esteemed journalistic colleagues over at CNN, it is so rich and wonderful that Kate Baldwin of CNN, one of their anchors, she put on a sweater on Air Thursday.
It said on it, in pink writing, facts first, Because now we are just in the position of posturing.
Journalists are in the position of posturing as though this is what they do.
If you have to say that as a journalist you're facts first, that means that everybody suspects that you're not.
It also happens to be particularly rich, not just that you wore this obnoxious sweater, which is a sweater designed to say, I am better than you.
It's really a sweater designed to alienate everybody.
But also that this was immediately put online for sale by Lingua Franca for $380.
So, if you too wish to mirror the journalistic priorities of CNN, then you can buy a $380 sweater in the middle of an economic downturn and a pandemic, so that you can look like Kate Baldwin on CNN, talking about facts first on a network that routinely ignores facts.
Solid stuff right there.
And then they put up, did Lingua Franca, a little poem.
It's almost like a haiku of stupidity over at Lingua Franca.
said smoke with true red embroidery 100% cashmere hand-stitched in New York City facts are facts they aren't colored by emotion or bias they're indisputable there is no alternative to a fact facts explain things what they are How they happen.
Facts are not interpretations.
Once facts are established, opinions can be formed.
And while opinions matter, they don't change facts.
We stand with our friends at CNN who start with the facts first.
Also, you're gonna need to allow 2-3 weeks for the embroidery plus shipping time 1-3 days.
$380 so that you too can look like a reporter on a garbage news network that promulgates opinion as fact and then pretends that they are facts first.
My goodness, CNN.
What a mockery they are.
And what a mockery they continue to be.
Okay, now, I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is some good news in the country.
The NIH director announced that Americans may start receiving vaccinations on Monday for COVID-19.
The FDA is supposed to approve this thing over the weekend.
The tranching is supposed to start with people in nursing homes, as it should.
It's also going to start with frontline healthcare workers, as it should, because you don't want healthcare workers in hospitals getting infected and then infecting other people in the hospital who do not have coronavirus.
This should be tranched out according to health condition, right?
It should start with people, not even by age, but by pre-existing health condition, and then tranched out over the course of the next few months.
This is all happening under the Trump administration.
Joe Biden deserves zero credit for this.
Zero, zero, zero.
And watch, the media will try to provide him with credit, As though he has come up with a plan here?
At no point has Biden or anybody else in the Democratic Party come up with a plan here.
This is a Trump administration masterstroke Operation Warp Speed.
Trump deserves every single bit of credit here.
Democrats deserve essentially none.
I mean, this is the president's largest initiative.
It is the most powerful scientific initiative undertaken by the United States.
In all likelihood in history.
The only thing that could possibly mirror it is attempting to land a man on the moon.
But it is amazing stuff.
Here is the National Institutes of Health director announcing that Americans may start their vaccinations on Monday.
When you say very soon and very soon, do you mean, you know, today's Thursday?
Do you mean we might see shots injected on Monday?
Is that reasonable?
It's entirely possible.
I don't want to preempt the FDA.
They're going to need to look at the comments that were made today by this advisory committee, but I think it's quite reasonable.
Okay, meanwhile, how are the media covering this?
Well, MSNBC was having on an analyst to suggest that the GOP is using COVID to kill people.
This guy.
Here he was.
The real blame here is Mitch McConnell, is the Republicans, is the president, is a party that does not want to help people, that is working on one side to actually make sure the pandemic kills as many people as possible.
That seems to be the logical consequence of their policy.
And then to make sure that all the people who managed to survive it, despite their policy, suffer economically and beyond.
Solid analysis there from Anand Giridharadas, who is a commentator for MSNBC, that their goal is to kill as many people as possible.
Really, really good stuff, which is presumably why the Trump administration has developed the fastest vaccine in the history of humanity, and hundreds of millions of doses will be put out there within the next couple of months.
By the way, speaking of news that the media Largely downplayed.
Yet another peace deal was signed in the Middle East yesterday.
Full normalization of relations between Israel and Morocco.
This makes the fourth country to sign normalization of relations with Israel over the course of the last six months alone.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel and Morocco agreed to normalize relations, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said Thursday, marking another advance in U.S.
efforts to strengthen ties between once hostile nations in the region.
This is the Wall Street Journal reporting.
The U.S.-brokered deal was the fourth in four months between Israel and Arab countries that have refused to recognize the nation since it was created in 1948.
Netanyahu said this will be a very warm peace, adding that Israel and Morocco would quickly set up liaison offices and introduce direct flights between the two countries.
A Moroccan official didn't comment on any agreements to recognize Israel while welcoming Trump's declaration of Rabat sovereignty over Western Sahara, which is a departure from decades-long U.S.
policy.
Basically, Western Sahara is a giant desert.
There are about 600,000 people who live in the entirety of the Western Sahara.
It's been under dispute for decades.
Morocco has had effective control of it.
The United States sort of recognizes Morocco's sovereignty over that area.
And meanwhile, Morocco signs a peace deal with Israel.
OK, the entire Biden foreign policy makes no sense.
It continues to make no sense.
If there were any justice in the world, Trump would win the Nobel Peace Prize.
He's made four separate deals in the Middle East, in an area where no one could make a deal other than America surrendering to Iran over the course of the last 20.
That's an amazing accomplishment.
Naturally, the media make Kamala Harris the person of the year, along with Joe Biden, for being a human on the cover of Time magazine.
Alrighty, so just to finish this week, I thought that I'd bring back a little bit of Bible talk because, you know, I think that there's some important things to be learned from the world's most important document.
It is, by numbers, the world's most important document.
Also, fun statistic, the number one most stolen book on planet Earth is the Bible, which sort of defeats the purpose.
In any case, The portion of the Bible that the Jews read this week is the portion discussing the Joseph story, the beginning of the Joseph story.
Anyway, you'll remember that Joseph is the son of Jacob.
Jacob has 12 sons and Joseph is tossed in a pit by his brothers.
This is the subject of the musical Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Right, that's the, so Joseph gets tossed in a pit, he's eventually sold to a band of traveling Midianites, he ends up in Egypt, where he ends up in jail, eventually, and then ends up becoming essentially second in command to Pharaoh, after which he reunites with his brothers.
That's sort of the short form of that particular story.
But there's another story embedded in the Joseph story that's kind of important.
The reason it's important is because it discusses one of the other brothers.
So to understand why this brother is important, you have to understand that in subsequent Jewish history, the kingdom of Israel gets divided.
If you read the Tanakh in Hebrew, the writings and the prophets in English, What you see is in subsequent Jewish history after King David, there's King Solomon.
Then after King Solomon, the kingdom starts getting divided, right?
King Solomon has a son, there's a rebellion against his son, and eventually the kingdom of Israel splits up into the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah, right?
This is why Jews are called Jews, right?
It's after Judah.
They're not called Israelites, they're called Jews.
So who is Judah?
Who is Yehudah in the Bible?
In Hebrew, Jews are called Yehudim.
So Judah is obviously a pretty seminal character.
So who is he in the Bible and what makes him special?
What distinguishes him from his brothers?
After all, he was the fourth son of Leah.
He's not the firstborn.
He's not the oldest.
He's not even the firstborn among the children of his mother because Jacob has four wives to produce children.
He has two handmaidens and then he also has two wives.
In any case, Judah does not look like the guy who is going to be the leader, right?
Maybe Joseph will be the leader.
He's the most clever.
Maybe Reuben will be the leader because he's the firstborn.
Instead, it ends up being Judah.
And to understand why that is, we have to understand one specific quality of leadership that Judah has, and that makes it possible for the tribe of Judah to sort of be the leading tribe.
Because the idea in Jewish thought, and also in Christian thought, is that the leadership of Israel will come from the tribe of Judah.
Okay, so the story of Judah begins basically when Judah decides that he is going to prevent Joseph from dying by selling him into slavery.
So what happens is that Joseph has all of these dreams.
And the dreams seem to suggest that he is going to predominate over his brothers.
And his brothers are like, this is a threat to us.
Our father prefers Joseph over us.
We're afraid that Joseph is going to take revenge on us.
And so let's kill him.
And so there are two ideas that are put forth.
One is put forth by Reuben, who is the firstborn.
And Reuben's idea is we are going to, Reuben, his idea is that we are going to Throw him in a pit.
I'm going to come back later.
I'm going to get him out.
We're not going to kill him.
He doesn't say this to his brothers.
He has this idea that he's going to save his brother Joseph from anything bad happening to him.
So instead of just killing him outright, we'll throw him in a pit.
That way we're not directly responsible for his death.
If he dies in the pit, he dies in the pit.
What can we have done?
And then I'll come back later and I'll get him out of the pit.
Judah instead says, OK, what we're going to do is we are going to throw him in the pit.
But then he says, what is the gain if we slay our brother and cover up his blood?
Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, but our hand shall not be upon him, for he is our brother, our flesh.
So the idea is that we're not going to kill him at all.
We'll sell him into slavery.
Okay, and Ruben comes back.
Joseph's been sold.
And Ruben starts mourning.
And he says, the boy is gone, and where will I go?
Right?
I'm responsible.
What's going to happen to me?
And so they all decide that because they're afraid that Reuben is gonna bear the consequences of Joseph being sold into slavery, that they are going to cover this thing up.
And they take the dream coat, the Technicolor dream coat, and they put blood on it, and then they go back to Jacob and they say, our brother got killed, and Jacob goes into mourning.
So that is the first instance that we see of Judah, is that Judah is trying to deflect direct blame from his brothers by suggesting that they sell Joseph into slavery.
Okay, the second thing, that we see about Judah is this really weird story about his daughter-in-law.
So Judah, like a little bit later, like right after this in the Bible, it says, at about that time that Judah was demoted by his brothers, that he was now looked upon and scorned by his brothers.
Like his brothers were angry at him for having done all of this.
So he turned away and he came to an Adulamite man named Hira.
And Judah saw the daughter of a merchant named Shuah.
He took her and he had a couple of kids.
And then one of his kids marries a woman named Tamar.
Okay, and that kid dies.
Tamar marries the brother.
This is common ancient practice.
Tamar marries the brother.
That second brother dies.
At this point, there's another brother.
And Judah says, you know what?
I don't want him to marry the youngest brother.
Right?
Because she obviously is kind of a black widow here.
And whatever happened to the first two brothers will likely happen to the third brother.
I don't want all my kids dead.
Tamar realizes that he has what is called the loverite obligation.
And so, actually, Judah, somebody from the family has to marry her, so it ought to be Judah.
So, in this really bizarre situation, she dresses up as a prostitute on the side of the road, and she has sex with Judah, who doesn't recognize her, and she conceives by him.
And then, later, he hears that she's pregnant.
And people come to him and he's like, okay, well, ancient times, death penalty for this sort of thing.
And they bring Tamar to him.
And she, instead of saying, you know, this is your kid, she instead presents his signet ring to him, which he had given her as payment.
And he, instead of going ahead with the ruse, he says, she's right.
The child is for me because I did not give her to my son.
And then she ends up having kids.
So what is the point of this sidetrack of the story?
Right?
It literally has nothing to do with the rest of the story.
Like, we don't know what it has to do with Joseph.
It breaks up the narrative.
What exactly is going on here?
The answer is that Judah, after creating a whole narrative about Joseph, just so he did not have to take responsibility, and Reuben didn't have to take responsibility, and no one would have to take responsibility, Judah changes.
Something happens to Judah.
And suddenly, he starts taking responsibility for things that are happening.
Right, suddenly he's presented like an amazing opportunity to completely abdicate responsibility.
Got a woman here.
She's three months pregnant.
He impregnated her.
She does not actually name him as the father.
And he could just say, okay, take her out and be done with her.
And instead he says, nope, that's my kid.
I've sinned here.
It's my fault.
And the kid is legitimate, obviously.
And this ends up being the seat of the Davidic line.
The Davidic line doesn't end up getting started in a very honorable fashion.
It gets started by the daughter-in-law of a man who's supposed to marry her, acting like a prostitute, literally, on the side of a road, in order to get pregnant by him.
That is not the way that you would... If you were going to write the history of your nation, this is typically not the way you start writing the history of the most prestigious dynasty in your nation, is with this.
And Judaism is filled with this sort of stuff, which is one of the reasons I love it.
It's because Judaism and Old Testament religion is filled with these very shaded and contradictory and inhuman stories of people.
It is not about whitewashing the past.
It's about acknowledging the sins of the past and recognizing that out of those sins very often comes something good.
But the thing about Judah that is unique here is, again, the fact that he accepts responsibility for the bad things that he has done.
And this becomes the common pattern with Judah, to the point that, when later in the story, he faces Joseph, right?
He comes down to Egypt.
Now Joseph is the second in command to Pharaoh.
And Judah comes down, and Joseph is attempting to see if his brothers have learned anything from what they did to him a long time ago.
And he says, I want you to bring your youngest brother, Benjamin, who is Joseph's full brother, right?
All these others are his half-brothers.
And he says, I want you to bring Benjamin here, I want to imprison Benjamin.
And Judah instead says, take me instead.
He says the same thing to Jacob.
To get Jacob to let them send Benjamin, he says, you know what?
I'll put my life on the line.
Reuben says, I'll take my sons, and you can take my sons instead.
He says that to Jacob.
Something happens to Benjamin, then you can do something to my sons.
But Judah's like, you know what?
No.
You can do something to me.
He says, I will take the full responsibility.
He says, send the lad with me.
We will get up and go.
We will live and not die, both you and also our young children.
I will guarantee him.
From my hand, you can demand him.
If I do not bring him to you and stand him up before you, I will have sinned against you forever.
And this becomes the common theme for Judah.
Judah is always the guy who takes responsibility.
So...
What do we learn about this from leadership?
The one quality we know above all about Judah is that Judah takes the hit.
Judah takes the blame.
Judah is willing to accept the responsibility.
Because accepting the credit is easy.
That's the easy part.
Accepting the responsibility is the tough part.
And that's something to remember when we select our leaders.
So here's the bottom line.
When you live in a democracy and you select your leaders, it's up to you to determine what qualities you're looking for, one of the top qualities you should be looking for.
As Harry Truman once said, is the buck stops here.
If your leaders are not willing to say that the buck stops with them, and if it appears they are trying to always escape responsibility by blaming somebody else, or blaming the American public, or blaming something else, well then, that person probably should not be the leader.
Alrighty.
Now, if you want to hear a different take on the Texas lawsuit than the one you heard on this show, head on over to Michael Knowles' show right now.
He's talking about it.
And then later today, Andrew Klavan will be guest hosting two additional hours of my show, The Ben Shapiro Show.
So make sure to tune in for that.
Have a wonderful Hanukkah if you celebrate it.
Otherwise, we'll see you here next week.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright 2020.
You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.
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