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Dec. 14, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:08:45

No, Jill Biden Isn’t A Real Doctor | Ep. 1156

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	The world explodes when a Wall Street Journal columnist says Dr. Joe Biden should drop the honorific, the Supreme Court rejects Trump's Texas case, and vaccine distribution begins in the United States.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
	The Electoral College obviously votes today.
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	Okay, so we'll get to everything election 2020 related in just a moment, plus everything COVID related, but I'd be remiss if I did not note the big stupid controversy of the weekend.
	So the big stupid controversy of the weekend is there was an article that I found highly amusing.
	I'll just say it right now.
	It's a funny article by Joseph Epstein, who used to write for Commentary magazine, among other things.
	He wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled, Is there a doctor in the White House?
	Not if you need an M.D.
	Joe Biden should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic.
	OK.
	Fact check true!
	Fact check true!
	Okay, let's be real about this.
	Dr. Jill Biden is not a doctor in any sense you would actually need a doctor.
	I've had this debate many times publicly for a long time.
	This has nothing to do with actually Jill Biden as a human being.
	Here is my view when it comes to doctorate degrees.
	I am a lawyer, which means I am a jurist doctor.
	If I were to suggest that anyone call me doctor, like Dr. Shapiro, because I am a JD, you would think that I was an ass.
	And you'd be right, because that's an ass thing to do.
	There was a guy who lived around the corner from us many, many years ago.
	He got his PhD in musicology.
	And I'm sure he worked very hard on that dissertation in musicology.
	But let me just tell you, if you were at a dinner party, and somebody had said, you know, what's your name?
	And he had said Dr. Smith.
	And then later in dinner, he had had some sort of anaphylactic reaction to the food.
	And Dr. Smith had been called to the table.
	Because he had to do something.
	And they said, oh yeah, and what's your doctorate?
	And he said, musicology.
	I guarantee you, the person dying would have been very, very disappointed to learn that it was a doctorate in musicology.
	If you're ever on a plane, this happened before because, as everyone knows, my wife is an actual doctor, meaning a medical doctor, meaning somebody who can take care of you if you have a medical issue.
	If you're ever on a plane, and the pilot says, do we have a doctor on board?
	If you raise your hand because you're a doctor of gender studies, you're an asshat.
	You're not a helpful human being.
	There's a vast distinction between people who are medical doctors and people who are everything else.
	Now, if you want to be pedantic about this and say, yes, Dr. Jill Biden, well, she has a PhD.
	You want to call her Professor Jill Biden?
	That makes more sense, right?
	If she teaches or something.
	I mean, PhD, right?
	That's what we typically do.
	But the suggestion that somebody is Dr. Jill Biden and that she has no capacity.
	By the way, her doctorate is in education, which not to crap on the field of education.
	But to crap a little bit on the field of education, if you got like your doctorate in education, I'm sorry, that is not even in the same ballpark as even like a JD, let alone an MD or a PhD in maths and hard sciences.
	I'm a liberal arts guy, which means my degrees, it means so much less than anybody who's in mathematics or physics, let alone medicine, where you actually take care of people and try to make sure that they are okay physically.
	Hey, the reason that this comes up is, again, because people get confused about Dr. Jill Biden because everybody insists in the media on calling her Dr. Jill because, wow, she has a she has a graduate degree.
	Ooh, a graduate degree.
	Again, as a person with a graduate degree, let me just say graduate degrees, they don't mean squat.
	They don't.
	Okay, I'm crapping on my own degree right now, and I went to Harvard Law School.
	Yes, it doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot.
	It means that you're smart enough to get a degree.
	Congrats!
	But I'm sorry, if you got a doctorate in education because you wrote a paper called, I'm not kidding you, this is Dr. Jill Biden's dissertation at the University of Delaware.
	Okay, it is called, Student Retention at the Community College Level, Meeting Students' Needs.
	Groundbreaking content analysis of student college needs at community colleges.
	And you insist that everybody call you a doctor?
	This is no less irritating than when Barbara Boxer was grilling somebody from the military and he called her Mrs. Boxer or something and she said, it's Senator.
	If you insist on your, first of all, you've never met a medical doctor who does that.
	If you have to insist on your honorific, it's because you're being a douchebag.
	I don't care whether you're a man, whether you're a woman, that's the way it works.
	If you insist on your honorific because you're insulted that nobody calls you by your honorific, Okay, I've met, at this point, hundreds, probably thousands of doctors.
	Okay, not one of them has ever, if we're introduced, not one of them, if I say Mr. X, has ever said, no, it's doctor.
	It's only some schmuck who has a degree in classics who's like, no, no, no, it's doctor.
	Okay, because they want you to respect and agree.
	Well, guess what?
	Tough, tough noogies.
	Anyway, so this guy Joseph Epstein, he writes a piece saying that Dr. Jill Biden should stop calling herself Dr. Jill Biden because it's giving people the impression that she actually knows things about medicine, which of course she does not.
	By the way, if you think that that's a fictitious thing, Whoopi Goldberg suggested that Joe Biden make her Surgeon General.
	What's she gonna do?
	Educate your arm?
	Like, ooh, I'm gonna teach.
	I'm gonna teach about the educational strategies with regard to cancer analysis.
	Good stuff there.
	So yes, it is deliberately confusing when, again, it's a normal thing in America that if somebody says they're a doctor, we assume that they're a medical doctor.
	And if you want to be pedantic and contentious about this, then yes, you can call somebody a doctor if they got their degree in queer dance theory.
	But it is not the same thing.
	And everybody knows it's not the same thing.
	And all this really is, okay, everybody's response to this, which we'll get to in a second, everybody's response to this is basically a way For them just to claim that you're a misogynist if you don't want to call Dr. Jill Biden a doctor, even though I would not call a man with a degree in education a doctor.
	In any case, in any case, I'm sorry.
	I'm not impressed by your degree.
	I'm not impressed by the scroll upon which somebody has written a university name.
	And I have many of those scrolls.
	I am not impressed by any of that stuff.
	I'm impressed by what you do for a living.
	I'm impressed by the fact that doctors Especially in this time, it's so funny that this has become such an issue now, because, just gonna point out, in this time when we should be appreciating medical doctors more than perhaps any time in American history, when medical doctors are on the front lines, trying to save lives in the middle of a global pandemic, for people to be like, yes, and we should also call doctor this person who wrote a dissertation about the need for better funding at your local JUCO, is like, All right, guys.
	All right.
	I get the feeling that this might be a setup.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second because the original article is funny and then people lose their minds because everyone is stupid.
	We'll get to that in just one moment first.
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	Okay, so here is what this editorial said, this op-ed said by Joseph Epstein.
	It said, Madam First Lady, Mrs. Biden, Jill, kiddo, A bit of advice on what may seem like a small, but I think is not, unimportant matter.
	Any chance you might drop the doctor before your name?
	Dr. Jill Biden sounds and feels fraudulent not to say a touch comic.
	Your degree is, I believe, in EDD, a doctor of education earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title...
	Okay, so people are mad because he's sneering, sneering at Joe Biden.
	If she insists on being called Dr. Joe Biden, I join in the sneering.
	that no one should call himself doctor unless he has delivered a child.
	Think about it, Dr. Jill. And forthwith, drop the doc.
	OK, so people are mad because he's sneering, sneering at Joe Biden.
	If she insists on being called Dr. Joe Biden, I join in the sneering.
	If you insist on being called doctor because you got a doctorate in divinity.
	I'm with I'm with them, OK? And I get you know.
	He says kiddo.
	Wow, he said kiddo.
	Yes, I'm sure he would say that to a dude as well.
	This is not about sex.
	It's not about misogyny.
	I understand that everything on the left has to be massaged into some sort of charge of sexism, racism, bigotry, or homophobia.
	But I'm sorry, telling a white lady in her late 60s that she should stop calling herself doctor because she is not an actual medical doctor, that is not sexist.
	It's not.
	Just because she happens to... First of all, I don't even know that the charge sexism makes sense anymore from the left, considering that they believe a man can be a woman, or a woman can be a man.
	But even if you were to assume that it makes sense now, I'm just wondering exactly why it would be sexist to say that anybody, anybody at all, should not be called a doctor unless they are an actual medical doctor.
	By the way, this came up when I was at Harvard Law.
	There was a... And I'll keep dropping that reference, because if you're not impressed by Harvard Law, then you certainly should not be impressed by a degree from University of Delaware in education.
	In any case, I remember when I was at Harvard Law, an actual prestigious law school, okay?
	And I'm not impressed by it, you shouldn't be impressed by it either.
	A professor one day was in the class, and a student raised, it was a woman, she raised her hand, and she was called upon, and the professor did not mention her honorific.
	Okay, it turned out that she had a doctorate in some classics field or something.
	And one of the other students said, you should call her doctor.
	And the professor immediately responded, if I have a heart attack, can she help?
	And she said no.
	And he said that I'm not calling her doctor.
	Agree.
	Agree.
	According to this columnist, I taught at Northwestern University for 30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree.
	I have only a BA in absentia from the University of Chicago, an absentia because I took my examination on a pool table at headquarters company Fort Hood, Texas while serving in the peacetime army in the late 50s.
	I do have an honorary doctorate, but I have to report the president of the school that awarded it was fired the year after I received it, not, I hope, for allowing my honorary doctorate.
	During my years as a university teacher, I was sometimes addressed usually on the phone as Dr. Epstein.
	On such occasions, it was all I could do not to reply, read two chapters of Henry James and get into bed, I'll be right over.
	I was also often addressed as Dr. during the years I was editor of the American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of Phi Beta Kappa.
	Let me quickly insert, I am also not a member of Phi Beta Kappa, except by marriage.
	Many of those who so addressed me, I noted, were scientists.
	I also received a fair amount of correspondence from people who appended the letters PHD to their names atop their letterheads, and have twice seen PHD on vanity license plates, which struck me as pathetic.
	In contemporary university, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself doctor is thought bush league.
	Okay, then he talks about how we've kind of watered down the degree and honorary doctorates are also watering down the degrees.
	He points out that honorary degree recipients and commencement speakers have included people like Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers.
	He says political correctness has paid to any true honor an honorary doctorate may once have possessed.
	If you are ever looking for a simile to denote rarity, try rarer-than-a-contemporary-university-honorary-degree-list-not-containing-an-African-American-woman.
	Then there are all those honorary degrees bestowed on Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, and others who, owing to their proven or alleged sexual predations, have had to be rescinded.
	Okay, so it's supposed to be a funny little piece, right?
	This thing blows up and people lose their minds because HOW DARE YOU!
	HOW DARE YOU!
	for now, forget the small thrill of being Dr. Joe and settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Joe Biden.
	Okay, so it's supposed to be a funny little piece, right?
	This thing blows up and people lose their minds because how dare you?
	How dare you?
	Dr. Joe Biden created the vaccine that is going to cure COVID-19.
	Wait, no, she didn't do that.
	Dr. Jill Biden could take out your appendix if you had a pe- Nope.
	Dr. Jill Biden could probably even act as a psychologist- Nope.
	Dr. Jill Biden has her degree in math- Nope.
	Okay, so people are getting offended for no reason, because who cares?
	First of all, who cares?
	Second of all, it's a funny piece.
	Third of all, he happens to be right.
	You shouldn't call yourself doctor, man, woman, or frog, whether you happen to have, unless you happen to have an actual degree in medical science.
	Period.
	End of story.
	Again, this has been my hard and fast position for a very long time.
	Michael Knowles' wife has a PhD in something or other.
	I don't even remember what.
	And I've mocked Knowles for years about this.
	I've said to Knowles over and over and over that my wife is a real doctor.
	His wife is not a real doctor.
	Fact check true.
	Okay, so any case, people lose their minds.
	But here's where it gets wild.
	Here's where it gets wild.
	Okay, so Michael La Rosa.
	is the spokesperson for Jill Biden, previously at Dr. Biden Spokes and Traveling Press.
	By the way, that is her actual Twitter handle, Dr. Biden.
	She's not a medical doctor.
	She isn't.
	And as somebody who watched my wife go through and helped her through like a million years of school and residency and leaving home at odd hours so that she could go to the hospital and treat patients, let me just say that anyone who equates a doctorate in education to a medical doctorate is an idiot, a fool, and a moron.
	In any case, her handle is at Dr. Biden.
	Okay, and here's what Michael La Rosa tweets.
	At James Toronto, who is the editor of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.
	You and the Wall Street Journal should be embarrassed to print the disgusting, sexist attack on Dr. Biden running in the Wall Street Journal opinion page.
	If you had any respect for women at all, you would remove this repugnant display of chauvinism from your paper and apologize to her.
	Okay, so just a note, that is the spokesperson for the supposed incoming First Lady of the United States who is openly calling for an op-ed page to retract an op-ed.
	You know, normally, As the editor of a, or editor emeritus of a major publication, let me just point out, normally when you retract something, it's because of factual errors.
	You don't retract opinion pieces.
	I'm amazed, amazed, that the same people who are fine with the New York Times running full-on op-eds from Chinese propaganda outlets, running full-on op-eds about the glories of sex under socialism in Eastern Germany, which is something the New York Times did not all that long ago.
	That these same people are like, you said Dr. Jill Biden should stop calling herself doctor?
	How dare you, sir?
	Take down this disgusting, sexist slur!
	And what's amazing?
	The media agreed.
	Because our media, they love the First Amendment, and they are really upset with attacks on the press.
	Unless, of course, the attacks on the press are being made by Democrats, in which case they're over in the corner going... Like Tom Holson Amadeus.
	Doug Emhoff, who is the husband of Kamala Harris.
	He wrote, Dr. Biden earned her degrees through hard work and pure grit.
	Pure grit?
	It's an education degree from the University of Delaware.
	I'm sorry.
	She went out on the railroads, you know, like, pure grit.
	She was, again, University of Delaware, earning a degree in education.
	Not the same.
	Like, did she work herself up from the slums to get an education degree at the University of Delaware?
	Wow, what a rags to riches story that is.
	I mean, that's like those tales of people back in the 1800s who would, like, get on their covered wagons, make their way out West, build log cabins with their own hands.
	I mean, that pure grit.
	When I think grit, I think pioneers and a lady who got an education doctorate from University of Delaware.
	Grit.
	She earned her degrees through hard work and pure grit.
	She's an inspiration to me, to her students and to Americans across the country.
	I mean, well, see, the story would never have been written about a man, said Doug Emhoff.
	Well, that's not true.
	That's 100% not true.
	Let's say that Newt Gingrich had insisted that people call him Dr. Gingrich because Gingrich has a PhD in history.
	If he did that, how many people do you think would write op-eds mocking him for that?
	One million?
	What's the upper boundary on that?
	Is there an upper boundary?
	People who have not yet been born would mock Newt Gingrich for that.
	If a Republican had a professorship in some other form of work and insisted on being called doctor, the mockery would never end.
	But you get Charlotte Clymer.
	Who's, again, this liberal activist who very often can be found in the op-ed pages of these major newspapers writing in light of that WSJ op-ed on Dr. Joe Biden.
	What a stunning coincidence that comparatively uncredentialed white men only seem to get up their hackles about PhDs being referred to as doctors when it's a woman and or person of color using that honorific.
	What a striking happenstance.
	And yet, what also a depressing irony when so many women and or physicians have related having their MD credentials doubted or assumed to be less than credentials in medicals.
	The social justice crap that just spills from the mouths of these people is unreal.
	It's unreal.
	Okay, so here's the amazing part of all of this.
	So what happens next?
	What happens next here?
	So Northwestern University then condemns Epstein.
	So just going to point out that people with doctorates, who the New York Times doesn't refer to by their actual honorifics, here's just a list.
	This is put out by Sonny McSonnyface, Sonny right over at Twitter, and this happens to be correct.
	Newt Gingrich, Tammy Duckworth, Madeline Albright, David Petraeus, H.R.
	McMaster, Ben Sasse, Kirsten Sinema, Sebastian Gorka, Henry Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, James Schlesinger, Ash Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ben Bernanke, Tony Evers, Gina Raimondo, William Perry, Shaq also has an honorary degree, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Norman Borlaug.
	They've even called Dr. Ben Carson just Ben Carson.
	The New York Times, circa 2017.
	Like, Dr. Ben Carson is an actual medical neurosurgeon.
	And they call him just Ben Carson.
	But it's very bad, guys.
	Super, super bad.
	But here's the thing.
	How is all this reacted to?
	Not with the usual rolling of eyes that would be sort of normal over all of this. But instead, people react like, they're right. Make the Wall Street Journal and Joseph Epstein pay. This is the part where it becomes sort of an important issue.
	Like the rest of this is just sort of dumb, but it becomes an important issue when all of a sudden you start seeing the cancel culture coming for people who say something as, as frankly, plain to see as the only people who should generally be called doctors in American lives are people who can take care of you if you break your leg.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so here's where it gets wild.
	So, it's not just the people get on Epstein's case, which, you know, you want to get on his case.
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	Okay, so here's where it gets wild.
	So it's not just the people get on Epstein's case, which you know, you want to get on his case to free country, the Northwestern University where he taught for like 30 years, they put out a condemnation, a condemnation of him.
	Now I can imagine other Northwestern University grads having done worse things than saying that a person calling themselves doctor for a doctorate in education is stupid.
	But Northwestern University reserves their ire for Joseph Epstein.
	Here's what they put out.
	According to the campus editor at Daily Northwestern, Northwestern condemned the opinions expressed by former English lecturer Joseph Epstein in a viral Wall Street Journal piece on Joe Biden's doctor title.
	And you, while supporting academic freedom and freedom of expression, wrote in a Saturday statement and does not agree with Epstein's opinions laid out in the op-ed.
	The university emphasized a doctoral designation is well-deserved by any individual who has earned a Ph.D., M.D., or in Biden's case, an E.D.D.
	Northwestern is firmly committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion, and strongly disagrees with Mr. Epstein's misogynistic views.
	I have a question.
	What's misogynistic about that?
	Seriously, somebody has yet to explain why it's misogynistic.
	I understand Joe Biden's a woman or self-identifies as such, which is the way Democrats do this thing these days, but I do not understand what is misogynistic about that view.
	It is completely sex-neutral.
	If a doctor of whatever random liberal arts, a doctor of film, insisted on calling himself doctor, we would all laugh at him, and rightly so.
	Well, I mean, if that's your standard, that I can't mock anybody's degree, well, then I think your standard is stupid.
	By the way, worth noting, apparently Northwestern University actually removed Epstein from their website.
	They actually, like, took down his profile from their website.
	Well, I mean, if that's your standard, that I can't mock anybody's degree, well, then I think your standard is stupid.
	By the way, worth noting, apparently Northwestern University actually removed Epstein from their website.
	They actually like took down his profile from their website.
	So they weren't just, they weren't canceling him, but they were a little canceling him.
	Meanwhile, the Washington Post ran a piece by Monica Hess, one of their columnists, titled, I kid you not, the Wall Street Journal column about Joe Biden is worse than you thought.
	My God, worse than I even thought.
	Well, I mean, I thought it was like the worst thing since basically Mein Kampf.
	Now you're telling me it's even worse than that?
	What could possibly be worse than that?
	I mean, my thoughts on that epod, I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever read.
	Like, I thought it was worse.
	Honestly, I thought it was significantly worse than Ibram Kendi.
	Like, it was the worst thing I've ever read.
	And I don't know what to say.
	If it's even worse than that, What will we do?
	Here's how Monica Hess opens her idiotic piece of the Washington Post.
	In one of my favorite episodes of the West Wing, Abigail Bartlett, a trained surgeon and fictional first lady, speaks with a White House attorney about a looming scandal.
	The lawyer addresses her as Mrs. Bartlett, to which she responds with the iciest correction, Dr. Bartlett.
	Okay, so first of all, just a quick note.
	If you start your Washington Post article by quoting the West Wing for your source of expertise, I'm not going to listen to you anymore because you're stupid.
	Done.
	End of story.
	This is the scene I went searching for on Netflix after reading an exceptionally bad column in the Wall Street Journal.
	And then if you witnessed online outrage about this column, it was probably over these aforementioned paragraphs.
	Let's dispense with them quickly.
	There's nothing comical about toiling for years to achieve a credential that is technically and socially correct for Jill Biden to use.
	No, it's a little funny.
	It's a little funny.
	The fact that she accomplished this later in life is admirable.
	The title of her dissertation sounds important and not unpromising.
	Okay, so everybody loses it, right?
	Okay, and finally, the Wall Street Journal responds to this.
	So the Wall Street Journal puts out a piece by Paul Gigault.
	Paul Gigot is the journal's editorial page editor.
	And he says, Joe Biden says it is time to heal America's divisions after the Trump presidency, and the Wall Street Journal has praised him for saying so.
	Presumably, he intends less rancor with the press as part of this mandate.
	On that score, my run-in with the Biden team this weekend was very Trumpian.
	The catalyst was our Saturday op-ed by Joseph Epstein.
	This has triggered a flood of media and Twitter criticism, including demands I retract this piece, apologize personally to Mrs. Biden, ban Mr. Epstein for all time, and resign and think upon my sins.
	The complaints began as a trickle but became a torrent after the Biden media team elevated Mr. Epstein's work in what was clearly a political strategy.
	Elizabeth Alexander, the soon-to-be First Lady's communications director, said, Okay, so first of all, anytime somebody says, be better, kiss my ass.
	That should always be the immediate response.
	If somebody says, be better, stick it where the sun don't shine, sideways.
	Mrs. Alexander, Miss Alexander, called me after her tweet to register her disapproval personally, which is fine.
	Her job is to flack for her boss.
	Part of my job is to listen to complaints.
	We had a frank exchange of views, as the diplomats say.
	I invited her to send in a letter for publication.
	Meanwhile, Team Biden continued to push the sexist theme.
	Doug Emhoff, husband of Kamala Harris, tweeted, Dr. Biden earned her degrees through hard work and pure grit.
	Pete Buttigieg's husband, Jason Buttigieg, tweeted, the author could have used fewer words to just say, you know, in my day, we didn't have to respect women.
	Oh my god.
	Yeah, thank you, Jason Buttigieg.
	Needed that.
	Why go to such length to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?
	My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power.
	There's nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.
	It's the left's version of Donald Trump's enemy of the people tweets, says the Wall Street Journal op-ed editor.
	The difference is that when Mr. Trump rants against the press, the press mobilizes in opposition.
	In this case, the Biden team was able to mobilize almost all of the press to join in denouncing Mr. Epstein in the journal.
	Nearly every publication wrote about the Biden's response, reinforcing the Biden New York Times line.
	An opinion writer argued Jill Biden should drop the doctor.
	Few were swayed.
	This strategy worked to protect Joe and Hunter Biden during the campaign.
	It's no surprise they're keeping it up as they head to the White House.
	Northwestern University did its part by denouncing him and appearing to purchase an emiratis listing from the website.
	This is how cancel culture works.
	The outrage is overwrought because whether you agree or disagree, Epstein's piece was fair comment, the issue of Joe Biden's educational honorific isn't new.
	As long ago as 2009, the LA Times devoted a story to the subject from a piece by Robin Abakarian.
	Joe Biden on the campaign trail explained his wife's desire for the highest degree was in response to what she perceived as her second class status on their mail.
	She said, I was so sick of the mail coming to Senator and Mrs. Biden, I wanted to get mail addressed to Doctor and Senator Biden.
	That's the real reason she got her doctorate, he said.
	First of all, if that's the real reason you got your doctorate, that's the douchiest reason I've ever heard.
	You're offended by your mail?
	No one— What?
	Like, seriously.
	My wife did not get a medical degree so that it would say Mr. and Dr. Shapiro on the mail.
	Okay, and as somebody who's quite proud of the fact that my wife got her degree, like, I'll wear around the UCLA medicine— Like, she's never worn a Harvard Law gear thing.
	I wear around UCLA medical gear, like, all the time, because I'm proud of my wife for doing what she has done.
	Okay, she didn't become a doctor so that she could put it on the mail.
	In fact, I asked her about this last night, and my doctor wife immediately said, I don't care about that.
	If somebody called me Mrs. Shapiro as opposed to doctor, you think I care?
	I know what I do for a living.
	Why would I care about that?
	I mean, she also added, first of all, my first identity is actually not as my job.
	My first identity is as a mother and a wife.
	But beyond that, like, why would I care about that?
	If you're so insecure that you need everybody to call you doctor when you don't actually, you're not even a medical doctor, then I don't know what to tell you.
	Seriously.
	Many readers, according to the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, said Mr. Epstein's use of kiddo is demeaning.
	But then Joe Biden is also fond of that locution.
	In his 2012 Democratic Convention speech, he even used it to refer to his wife.
	Mr. Epstein also infuriated dozens of educators defending their doctorates.
	But that status isn't sacrosanct or out of bounds for debate.
	Mr. Epstein's point applies to men and women.
	His piece also mocked men for their honorary degrees.
	Mrs. Biden is now America's most prominent doctorate holder and is taking a leading role in education policy.
	She can't be off-limits for commentary.
	By the way, the journal editorial page's longtime stylist used doctor only when referring to medical doctors.
	Henry Kissinger gets a mister.
	Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, is Mrs. Cheney despite her PhD.
	If you disagree with Epstein, fair enough.
	Write a letter or shout your objections on Twitter.
	The pages aren't gonna stop publishing provocative essays merely because they offend the new administration or the political censors in the media and academia.
	See, this is where it gets ugly.
	Okay, so the fact is, as we've been talking about for a very long time, it is not that the media are pro free speech.
	It is not that the media are in favor of freedom of the press.
	It's that the media are in favor of their ability to say whatever they want to say, so long as it is leftist.
	And everybody else should shut the hell up.
	This ties into a broader narrative that really does have some implications for broader national politics.
	We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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	Okay, so this ties into a broader conversation about the media's attempts to quash other members of the media.
	There's a long article in Buzzfeed over the weekend talking about how people at Facebook are very upset.
	Why are they so upset?
	They're upset because Facebook isn't shutting down enough opinion.
	Now, the establishment and legacy media rely on a monopoly.
	They rely on their monopoly over the distribution of information.
	They are angry that Facebook broke that monopoly, and now they want Facebook to reimpose that monopoly from the top.
	So there's this long article in BuzzFeed from Ryan Mack and Craig Silverman.
	After the US election, key people are leaving Facebook and torching the company in departure nights.
	Ooh, ooh.
	Okay, quick answer to this.
	As a person who heads a company with over 100 employees, Yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
	Seriously, if you want to quit and write me a nasty note about how you don't like working here, tough badoogies.
	I don't care.
	And Facebook should treat it the same way.
	They're one of the biggest companies on planet Earth.
	But they're supposed to be concerned because some woke staffer is mad at them?
	Apparently the answer is yes.
	According to BuzzFeed, on Wednesday, a Facebook data scientist departed the social networking company after a two-year stint, leaving a farewell note for their colleagues to ponder.
	As part of the team focused on violence and incitement, they dealt with some of the worst content on Facebook and they were proud of their work at the company.
	Despite this, they said, Facebook was simply not doing enough.
	With so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content, the task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more Sisyphean than it already is, the employee wrote in their badge post, a traditional farewell note for any departing Facebook employee.
	It also makes it embarrassing to work here.
	Embarrassing.
	So what sorts of things are they really angry at?
	Apparently...
	They're very angry.
	They're very, very angry that there are a bunch of conservative websites that are getting traffic.
	Using data from a Facebook tool called the Hate Bait Dashboard, which can track content from groups and pages that leads to hateful interactions, the data scientists listed the 10 US pages with the largest concentrated volume of likely violating hate speech comments in the past 14 days.
	So, they're not actually saying that the content from these websites is hateful.
	They're saying that people might post hateful contents under the content.
	Okay, which we don't control.
	So here, wait for it.
	You ready?
	All pages were associated with conservative outlets or personalities, including Breitbart News, Fox News, The Daily Caller, Donald Trump's campaign and main accounts, and Ben Shapiro.
	Ah, there it is.
	They also shared a sample of the hateful comments posted on a recent Breitbart News post about Nancy Pelosi's support for transgender athletes.
	Wow, those are, that's driving the hate speech.
	You see, if you put up stories that people are not covering in the mainstream media, and then people comment in nasty ways, that's the fault of people putting up stories that we just didn't want to hear.
	So, the media have been openly stumping for the shutdown of free speech.
	There's another article from The Guardian over the weekend, a woman named Ariel Bogle.
	Could be a man, I'm not sure actually.
	Ariel can be both a male and female name.
	In any case, Ariel Bogle writes, sinister sounds, podcasts are becoming a new medium of disinformation.
	See, any, any alternative source of information will come under fire.
	Anyone.
	And all you have to do, the sin does not have to be grave.
	All the sin has to be is saying something like Dr. Jill Biden is not an actual medical doctor.
	Or that men exist and women exist and they are separate entities.
	That mammalian species are sexually dichotomous.
	To say such things brings the ire of the woke upon you.
	And all methods of distribution unapproved by the establishment legacy media must be shut down.
	So we've got BuzzFeed trying to push Facebook to shut down publications like Daily Wire or Daily Caller or Breitbart or any place else on the right.
	And now they're coming after podcasts.
	So you have this entire article in The Guardian that is very, very angry.
	Why are they so angry?
	They're angry because Joe Rogan exists.
	Apps such as Apple and Google Podcasts are significant gatekeepers of what kind of audio content reaches our ears, says Evelyn Dueck, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, although they function more as directories for organizing and discovering shows than as social networking platforms and have varying degrees of oversight and control.
	Podcasts can serve as an entry point and a point of legitimation for unfounded claims, says Dr. Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and a moderation expert.
	The net effect is not only to put fake, bogus, and debunked claims into the larger public conversation, but to shift the needle entirely on the public's attention in areas of concern.
	Most podcast platforms already have content policies.
	Apple prohibits the promotion of violence.
	Spotify bans content that incites hatred based on race or gender identity, among other things.
	But the adequacy of these policies, not to mention if or how they're enforced, remains opaque, especially if the problematic content is espoused by a program guest rather than the host.
	And this is a problem because it's a pedestal.
	It can be a pedestal for bad views, guys.
	And so we need to stop all of this podcasting.
	We need to stop all of this internetting.
	We need to stop freedom of information.
	See, this is the part that's scary.
	All these people in the media who are saying that Trump was a threat to the freedom of the press.
	No, you guys are the threat to the freedom of the press.
	You are.
	You're a threat to the freedom of the press, freedom to distribution of information and content you don't like.
	You will attack podcasts if you think that podcasting becomes a popular source of alternative information.
	You will attack Facebook for even allowing the distribution of alternative sources of information.
	This is ideological fascism In effect.
	This is not saying fascism as a top-down government system, but the culture of free speech requires more than a legal commitment to free speech.
	It requires a cultural commitment to free speech.
	I've never called for Pod Save America to come down from these podcasting platforms.
	I guarantee you, folks on the left, within minutes, we'll be calling for this podcast to come down from podcasting platforms.
	I've never called for Huffington Post to be restricted in its reach at Facebook.
	But the New York Times has an entire column, several columnists, dedicated to the proposition that Daily Wire should be restricted in its reach on Facebook, ranging from Charlie Warzel to Kevin Roos to Kara Swisher.
	The kind of push in the media for everybody in the media to mirror the perspectives of the left is pretty damned obvious.
	It's pretty obvious.
	And this is why they, because here's the thing, so long as no alternative is proposed, they can continue to present their objective.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	In fact, let's say you moved a 100-person company out of the town where he lived just to avoid him, and then he followed you like a lost dog from Homeward Bound.
	And let's say that you just want to get rid of this person.
	Let's say that this person had the bizarre perspective until the last five minutes that doctor is an honorific that should be applied to pretty much everybody who earns a doctorate as opposed to just medical doctors.
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	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	First.
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	Yes, that is a thing that is happening.
	That's dailywire.com slash subscribe to get 20% off your membership with code WATCH and access to all Okay, so again, the purpose here of restricting alternative sources of information is not only to create a market monopoly in which you can only view one side of the aisle, it's to reestablish the idea that if you are a leftist, you're actually objective.
	Because if there's no other side of the aisle, then you can promote yourself as objective.
	This is what members of the establishment media did for literally decades.
	And Walter Cronkite, a motivated leftist, and Sam Donaldson, a motivated leftist, and Dan Rather, a motivated leftist, and these were your news anchors, the people you were supposed to believe.
	And because there was no real alternative source of information in real time, it meant that they could get away with as much political bias as they wanted to ladle into their programming.
	And this is how you have idiots like Chris Cuomo who end up being perceived as somehow, somehow objective journalists.
	Here's what Chris Cuomo tweeted.
	Objective journalist Chris Cuomo, just journalisming all over the place, that hot sticky journalism getting everywhere.
	He tweeted, with Trump saying, we just begun to fight when it just ended.
	This is actually barely parody.
	He's talking about an SNL sketch, making fun of Newsmax.
	They did a sketch called Sportsmax in which people refuse to admit the Jets ever lose.
	The description is actually funnier than the sketch was.
	In any case, Chris Cuomo tweeted out with Trump saying, we just begun to fight when it just ended.
	This is actually barely parody.
	We need to remember the retrumplicans at their worst and strive to hold all those in power to a much, much, much higher standard lest we wind up here again.
	Yes, speaking truth to power.
	That's something that Chris Cuomo does on a regular basis while making jokes about his brother's nostril size as tens of thousands of people die in his brother's state.
	Yes, Chris Cuomo.
	That's a dude who speaks truth to power.
	I really look forward to Chris Cuomo's interview with Andrew Cuomo about the latest sexual harassment allegations against his brother.
	Yeah, I have a feeling that's not going to come up.
	Ryan Saavedra reporting over the weekend.
	Sexual misconduct allegations were alleged against New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo on Sunday, a development that comes alongside news that Joe Biden reportedly considered Cuomo to be Attorney General.
	The allegations against Cuomo were made by one of his former advisors, progressive activist Lindsey Boylan.
	Boylan made the allegation on Twitter in a series of tweets on her experience with sexual harassment.
	She tweeted, Yes, Governor Cuomo sexually harassed me for years.
	Many saw it and watched.
	I could never anticipate what to expect.
	Would I be grilled on my work, which was very good, or harassed about my looks?
	Or would it be both in the same conversation?
	This was the way for years.
	Not knowing what to expect, what's the most upsetting part, aside from knowing that no one would do a damn thing even when they saw it?
	No one.
	And I know I'm not the only woman.
	I'm angry to be put in this situation of all.
	That because I am a woman, I can work hard my whole life to better myself and help others, and yet still fall victim as countless women over generations have, mostly silently.
	I hate that some men, like Governor Cuomo, abuse their power.
	This was as Joe Biden was apparently considering Cuomo for Attorney General.
	So very, very solid stuff.
	I look forward to the media reporting in detail on these allegations, just as they did with Brett Kavanaugh, with no evidence other than Christine Blasey Ford saying things that could not be verified in any way, shape, or form.
	Here is what USA Today reported.
	Here is their headline.
	You ready?
	The aid has not yet provided any validating evidence for the allegations or specified details on harassment.
	Cuomo's office has denied the claim.
	Oh, that's oh, that's how you cover allegations now.
	I get it.
	So when somebody accuses Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape, then you're like, oh, you know, we should probably do, you know, like put her on the cover of magazines with her face made up of words like that on the cover of Time.
	That's probably what they should do.
	But when a lady accuses Governor Cuomo of sexual harassment.
	You don't ask questions.
	You don't try to find other people in the office and ask them if they ever saw evidence of it.
	You just say, well, you know, I guess we can move on.
	We're done here, right?
	We're done here.
	I look forward to Chris Cuomo grilling his powerful brother and speaking truth to power.
	I also look forward to the media really covering in detail The fact that one of their favorite Senate candidates, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, who is an anti-Semite, right?
	I mean, he's done speeches defending Jeremiah Wright over and over again.
	He did a speech in which he suggested that Jews were just shooting down Palestinians like, quote-unquote, birds of prey is what he called the Israelis.
	Real nice guy, Raphael Warnock.
	So, just to fight that anti-Semitism, he's bringing down to campaign with him Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Linda Sarsour.
	That's a solid way of fighting antisemitism, is to bring in the three most well-known antisemites in America outside of Richard Spencer to campaign with you.
	Really subtle right there, what he's doing, Raphael Warnock.
	And I'm seeing the blanket coverage on this, right?
	Like, I'm looking right now, I'm searching.
	Sarsour Warnock.
	Okay, let's search the news and let's see how many people are covering the fact that Raphael Warnock is bringing down to campaign with him a bunch of people who are radical antisemites.
	Oh, well, I see that the Jewish Journal covered it, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency covered it, and the Washington Times covered it, and that would be it.
	That would be the complete list.
	So really, really solid stuff, everyone.
	You're doing a great job media-ing.
	Your journalism is just beyond parallel.
	Meanwhile, out the hill, speaking of journalism beyond parallel, listen to this headline, okay, about Kelly Loeffler.
	You think the media haven't taken sides here?
	So Kelly Loeffler is running for Senate in Georgia.
	She's the current sitting senator of Georgia.
	She shellacked Raphael Warnock in their debate.
	You know that because people were claiming that she had a bug in her ear.
	As soon as anybody says there's a wire, you know that person won the debate.
	Anyway, Here is Sarah Paulos reporting for The Hill.
	That was not their original headline.
	Their original headline was That was their original headline.
	The original headline was, Leffler's campaign refuses or defends photo with white supremacists.
	That was their original headline.
	They changed the headline.
	Editors.
	Wrong!
	Senator's note, the headline on the story was updated at 8.45pm to reflect that Senator Loeffler condemned Chester Dole's white supremacist who posted a photo with the senator.
	An earlier version of the story included incorrect information.
	Wrong.
	An earlier version of the story had a headline with incorrect information.
	In the story it said that Loeffler condemned the white supremacist and said, I take pictures of lots of people, which happens to be true, right?
	As a quasi-celeb, I can tell you I take lots of pictures of lots of people.
	I'm sure there are lots of pictures of people who are unsavory because I've probably taken, at this point, producer Colton can tell you because he's traveled with me, I've probably taken easily 20,000 pictures of people over the course of the last couple of years.
	Easily.
	Okay, and I assume there's some of those people who will go on to do terrible things or who have done terrible things in the past.
	Okay, so Loeffler cracked back against it, and The Hill reported that she had not, because that is how your wonderful media work.
	And then you wonder why people don't trust the media.
	Like, understand that all of the systemic distrust issues that we are having right now over election 2020 spur directly from gigantic mistrust of the media.
	So when President Trump says that nobody trusts the media, when he says that you guys didn't even follow up on the Hunter Biden stuff when it was reported at the end of the election, he happens to be correct about that.
	Right.
	This is what Trump was saying over the weekend.
	He said, listen, Hunter Biden, Joe lied about Hunter from the debate stage.
	This is true.
	Right.
	Joe Biden said from the debate stage there were not even any allegations of Hunter Biden corruption.
	That is a lie.
	That is not true.
	There was Trump over the weekend pointing this out.
	Hunter Biden this week has confirmed two investigations on him, one on Jim Biden.
	The word is you're disappointed that William Barr knew about this in the spring.
	Well, everybody is.
	Who isn't disappointed?
	Joe Biden lied on the debate stage.
	He said there's nothing happening, nothing happening, and Bill Barr should have stepped up.
	OK, and Trump happens to be correct.
	Trump happens to be correct that the media actively downplayed the story and refused to report the story.
	Now, of course, they can report the story.
	But when Trump says that Biden ran from the basement, he doesn't just mean that Biden stayed in the basement.
	What he means is nobody asked him a tough question the entirety of the presidential run.
	I said this early on.
	There are a lot of people who say the election was rigged because of voter fraud and voter irregularity.
	I haven't seen the evidence to back that up.
	What I have seen is the clear evidence that the media rigged the election by refusing to cover any relevant information about Joe Biden while suggesting that Donald Trump was responsible for hundreds of thousands of dead people thanks to COVID and that Donald Trump was a white supremacist who was in hock to Russia.
	That is how you rig an election.
	Okay, seriously.
	So here is Donald Trump pointing out that Biden ran a race from the basement and was able to get away with it.
	The spirit, the liveliness, the whole thing, even the fundraising, the money that's pouring in to fight this.
	It's one thing to say, you know, you ran a great race.
	Congratulations.
	I'm OK with that.
	But they didn't.
	They didn't run a good race.
	They were a horrible race from the basement.
	They ran a race where he didn't even run.
	OK, so Trump's takeaway from that is that he couldn't have lost because Biden didn't run.
	And the answer is the media ran.
	I mean, that really is the answer.
	The answer is not that Biden necessarily lost the vote count because he was jobbed Trump.
	The answer is that Donald Trump was not right.
	He was correct about this.
	He was not running against Joe Biden primarily.
	He was running against a media that wished to see him burned and is willing to defend Democrats.
	And that's not going to stop.
	If Joe Biden is inaugurated January 20th, that is not going to end.
	It is not as though they go back to the business of journalism, your mainstream media.
	Instead, they get into the business of targeting you.
	Trump is just the person that they were attacking instead of you.
	Now they'll get back to attacking you, the regular Americans, for whatever it is you're doing today.
	They'll dig up your Facebook posts.
	They'll dig up your Twitter.
	They got to fill that feed somehow.
	They got to generate those anger clicks from the left.
	So how are they going to do that?
	They're going to do that.
	They won't have Trump to kick around anymore.
	Presumably they'll still keep reporting on him even if he's not president.
	But they'll just turn and they'll go after you.
	That is the idea.
	That red state America is bad.
	Anybody who is a Republican is bad.
	Anybody who's a conservative is bad.
	And meanwhile, they will ignore actual breaking developments until it's a little more convenient to cover them.
	Speaking of which, some breaking news on the Hunter Biden story.
	So according to Michael Balsamo and Eric Tucker, reporting for NBC Philadelphia, a subpoena seeking documents from Hunter Biden asked for information related to more than two dozen entities, including Burisma, according to a person familiar with a Justice Department tax investigation of President-elect Joe Biden's son.
	The breadth of the subpoena, issued Tuesday, underscores the wide-angle lens prosecutors are taking as they examine the younger Biden's finances and international business ventures.
	Hunter Biden's ties to Burisma in particular have long dogged the policy work and political aspirations of his father, Joe Biden, now the president-elect of the United States.
	It's unclear whether Hunter's work at the Ukrainian company is a central part of the federal investigation or whether prosecutors are simply seeking information about all his sources of income in recent years.
	A lawyer for the younger Biden, George Messires, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment for the story.
	A spokesman for the Biden transition team declined to comment.
	Hunter Biden said he only learned of the investigation last Tuesday, but of course that's number one.
	It may be true, but that investigation was launched apparently in 2018.
	By the way, I share Trump's ire that the DOJ didn't announce this investigation was going on.
	I understand there's such a thing as a covert versus an overt investigation, but the difference between a covert and an overt investigation is mainly public knowledge of the investigation going on.
	Now, there were reports back in October that Hunter was under investigation.
	It would have been very easy for the DOJ to confirm or deny that story.
	They didn't.
	Instead, they held out until past the election, saying that it fulfilled their mandate not to interfere in an election.
	Well, if it's already public knowledge that an investigation is going on, and then you just keep it quiet until after the election, that is, in fact, election interference.
	The younger Biden joined the Board of Burisma in 2014, around the time his daddy, then VP, was helping conduct the Obama administration's foreign policy with Ukraine.
	And this is my favorite.
	President Trump and his allies have long argued without evidence that Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine influenced the Obama administration's policies toward the Eastern European nation.
	Well, that's not all they argued.
	They also argued that Hunter was clearly taking advantage of Daddy's name in order to get the job, and that Joe almost certainly knew about that.
	Okay, that is a lot harder to argue against.
	In announcing the process in February with regard to collecting information on Ukraine, William Barr, the AG, cautioned the department had to be careful about any information coming from Ukraine, of course, but it is true that the federal investigation had been ongoing.
	We also now know, according to the Washington Examiner, that a former business partner of Hunter Biden reportedly said in an email Biden didn't disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in income on his tax returns.
	Eric Schwerin, former president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, sent an email to Biden in 2017 saying he needed to amend his 2014 tax returns to include about 400 grand in income he made as a member of BRISMA.
	The email says, in 2014, you joined the Burisma board.
	We still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income.
	That was according to an email dated January 16th, 2017.
	The email reportedly notes that Biden, the son of Joe, made 1.2 million bucks in income when factoring in the 400 grand he made as board member of Burisma.
	NBC noted it didn't have access to the hard drive.
	Apparently this email was provided by Rudy Giuliani's attorney, Robert Costello, who had gotten the 100 hard drive from that computer repair store.
	In Delaware.
	So, presumably now the media will cover this sort of stuff?
	Because now they think it's over.
	But, you wonder why people don't trust the system?
	It's because the media, to so many people, are the system.
	The media are the glasses with which you view the information.
	And if it turns out those glasses are broken, people aren't going to trust the information behind the glasses.
	Just like in poker, very often you see players wearing sunglasses so you can't read their eyes.
	Well, if the media are sunglasses for the Democratic Party agenda, How can you trust what's behind the sunglasses?
	There's no way to trust what is behind the sunglasses.
	Okay, speaking of which, over the weekend, there was some dust up in Washington D.C.
	in which four people were stabbed, 33 people arrested.
	There was a violent clash between pro-Trump activists and suspected members of Antifa in Washington D.C.
	on Saturday night following a rally for the president's supporters.
	This is according to Emily Zanotti reporting for Daily Wire.
	Thousands attended the rally on Saturday, according to local media, calling for a halt to certifying some states' presidential election results pending investigations into what some believe to be widespread voter fraud efforts aimed at helping Biden.
	A suspected barroom brawl between pro-Trump demonstrators and anti-Trump activists, which took place following the march, turned into a violent conflict between the two factions, per Fox News.
	The outlet noted chaos erupted in Washington, D.C.
	on Saturday night.
	Hours after two pro-Trump rallies ended, groups of Proud Boys and Antifa activists clashed under cover of darkness, with police repeatedly forcing them apart amid reports of brawls and stabbings.
	At least four stabbings occurred near a bar that served as a gathering spot for the Proud Boys.
	The victims were hospitalized, possibly with life-threatening injuries, a D.C.
	Fire Department spokesperson told the newspaper.
	So, that is where things currently stand.
	It's not clear who the aggressor was.
	It is fair to say that everywhere Antifa goes, there is violence.
	There have been a number of incidents with the Proud Boys as well, obviously.
	The two groups apparently were lobbying fireworks at each other before engaging in close-quarters combat, and the police ultimately deployed pepper spray to control both sides of the altercation.
	So, ugly stuff on all sides there, obviously.
	Okay, meanwhile, Today is the day that the Electoral College is supposed to vote.
	Here is how that process works.
	The vote begins, or began, this morning at 10 a.m.
	Eastern Time.
	It continues through the day.
	Each state goes through the process.
	Apparently, it's going to be broadcast and livestreamed.
	Now, according to the Constitution, electors meet by law.
	They meet by law on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.
	That's supposed to give you enough time to resolve any disputes regarding the November 3rd election.
	The electors then meet in places across the country, very often in the state legislatures.
	And then each of the 538 electors cast a vote for president and one for vice president as well.
	There are laws in 32 states and the District of Columbia that require electors to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in their state.
	There are 17 states that allow so-called faithless electors to vote for their choice.
	But that is extremely, extremely rare.
	The electoral votes are then counted by the House and Senate on January 6th.
	That is when the House and Senate certify the vote.
	It is highly unlikely it will be stopped in Congress once all the Electoral College votes have actually been sent in.
	And that is particularly true because the Supreme Court knocked down that big Texas case that was pending last week.
	We talked in length about it on Friday.
	I thought there were serious problems, legally speaking, with the Texas case.
	If you were going to overturn results of the elections, you actually have to show voter fraud and voter irregularity.
	You can't merely suggest that the process itself is flawed, and certainly you have to have standing to sue.
	In other words, you have to be a party inside the state.
	You cannot simply allege that another party inside a state that is not your own is performing some sort of sin.
	That opens the door wide to serious violations of federalism principles.
	You can see California suing Texas based on Texas's abortion law, saying you're throwing people to California to have abortions that causes taxpayer resources to be used out here, and therefore we're going to sue Texas for its implementation of Roe versus Wade, for example.
	That is not a principle you want to see applied, broadly speaking.
	The court killed any chance that that lawsuit would move forward.
	The order rejected Texas's attempt to nullify the results in four other states.
	The decision, I believe, was 9-0.
	The so Thomas and Alito voted issued a statement that that point that that suggested that states should have an unfair right to sue each other directly at the Supreme Court.
	They said they would have at least let Texas file the suit.
	But saying that they would have let Texas file the suit doesn't mean they would have let Texas win the suit.
	So that is more of a legal issue as far as original jurisdiction.
	So there's a question in the Constitution, if a state sues another state in federal court, does the Supreme Court have to hear it?
	Because original jurisdiction now goes directly to the Supreme Court.
	They don't have to work their way up the chain.
	Does the Supreme Court have to take the case?
	Alito and Thomas basically said, yeah, we think the Supreme Court has to take the case.
	Seven of the other justices said, no, they don't have to take the case.
	But that is an ancillary question to how that case would have done at the Supreme Court.
	Thomas and Alito also said they would reject Texas's request to stop the four pivotal states from casting their votes for Biden.
	No justice said that he or she would have blocked those votes.
	It was a pretty straightforward decision in the same way that that Pennsylvania case was a straightforward 9-0 decision.
	When you have 9-0 decisions, it's usually a pretty clear-cut decision, legally speaking.
	Beyond that, there was a Wisconsin case that was pending, and it turns out that Team Trump was just not making the sort of allegations that are likely to result in the change to the election.
	I know these are uncomfortable facts, but uncomfortable facts they may be, they're still facts.
	Andy McCarthy points out, over at National Review, that there was a federal district court rejection of another Trump campaign lawsuit on Saturday.
	It was the sort of last lawsuit that was pending.
	Number one, the rejecting was done by a Trump-appointed judge.
	One of the passages in the decision, according to Annie McCarthy, is worthy of note.
	He says with the electoral college meeting just days away, the court declined to address the issues in piecemeal fashion and instead provided plaintiff with an expedited hearing on the merits of the claim. On the morning of the hearing, the parties reached agreement on a stipulated set of facts and then presented arguments to the court.
	Okay, so normally, what that means is that the court was saying to Team Trump, okay, show me all your evidence of voter fraud and voter irregularity.
	Like, now, put it out.
	We gotta expedite this thing.
	Give me your, so they got their chance to put it in court.
	Instead, Team Trump stipulated that they agreed that there was no widespread voter fraud or voter irregularity evidence.
	And they stipulated and agreed to that in court.
	As Andy McCarthy points out, a stipulated set of facts in this context is an agreement between the lawyers for the adversary parties about what testimony witnesses would give and or what facts would be established if the parties went through the process of calling witnesses and offering tangible evidence at a hearing or trial.
	In a real controversy in which one or both of the parties are making hotly disputed factual claims, there are almost no stipulations.
	For example, a defendant who vehemently denies that he committed stock fraud may be willing to stipulate that 20,000 shares of a common stock were sold, but other than that, the defendant will demand adversary call fact witnesses who claim he defrauded them so he can cross-examine them.
	But here, the Trump campaign has been claiming extensive voter fraud and lawbreaking, and then they stipulated an agreement to the basic facts with Democrats.
	So, what did they say the case was really about if it wasn't about voter fraud and voter irregularity?
	Three differences over the manner in which the election was administered.
	To all of which, as the judge pointed out, the campaign could have objected before the election if the matters had actually been of great moment.
	So it turns out that the legal strategy in Wisconsin was deeply flawed as well.
	So that means that the Electoral College is going to move forward with its vote today.
	That is not a particular shock.
	Worth noting here that all of the members of the media who've been screaming and crying about the violation of critical voting protocol should note that the process worked here, okay?
	And it worked to their favor.
	There were court cases filed.
	Court cases were nearly all dismissed.
	Team Trump's legal strategy went one and 53, something like that.
	Like one win and some 50 some losses.
	And that Georgia case, I believe, is still pending with regard to voter fraud and voter irregularity.
	That's the only serious case still on the docket.
	We'll see whether they have the proof to push that through.
	Meanwhile, the same people are promoting the idea that it is deeply undemocratic to file lawsuits or wonder about voter fraud and voter irregularity.
	are completely ignoring the fact that Democrats have now been requested by a Democrat to overturn the results of an election in Iowa.
	According to the Des Moines Register, in Iowa's second congressional district, Rita Hart, the loser by six votes to Marianne Miller-Meeks, has picked a path that will inflame.
	Her team skipped the appeal process available through Iowa's courts and instead elected to petition the U.S.
	House of Representatives panel directly to oversee a recount before the full House decides the outcome.
	So basically, she's asking the Democrats in Congress to overturn the results of the election through their procedures, and then take the seat back.
	Okay, that's just as undemocratic as anything the Democrats are accusing Republicans of.
	It's just not getting any of the same sort of media coverage, number one, because it's a congressional race, but number two, because it is a Democrat, which is always worthy of note.
	Okay, meanwhile, in some actual good news, the COVID vaccine is going out en masse today.
	Tons of doses going out today, which is excellent, excellent news, of course.
	And the BioNTech head, he's worked on the vaccine.
	He says that we should be getting back to normal by the end of next summer because at that point, all the vaccines are out there and life is what life is.
	We know that we have a solution and we know that we can produce many doses of vaccines and we know that there will be also other vaccines which have shown efficacy.
	And therefore, we should be confident that we will be able to control this disease and the pandemic.
	That is Dr. Ugar Sahin, who is one of the heads of BioNTech, which worked with Pfizer to develop the vaccine.
	2.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine are beginning to arrive.
	A lot of those are going to the most populous places in the country.
	So first in line are 17 million healthcare workers and 3.7 million nursing home residents.
	And then you get essential workers, teachers, first responders, and then you get 89 million people with pre-existing conditions.
	Now, here's the thing.
	I think that probably we should actually be working on people with pre-existing conditions first.
	If you're an essential worker, but you're 25 years old and healthy, you really should not be in line before somebody who is 65 years old and has serious pre-existing conditions.
	So the tranching doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
	Nonetheless, this is the way that the distribution is going to go.
	And the number of doses varies fairly widely by state in the early going.
	California is about to get 330,000 doses.
	Colorado is going to get 47,000 doses.
	But smaller states are going to get far fewer.
	Delaware only gets about 9,000 doses.
	Florida gets 180,000 doses.
	So, the vaccines have begun to roll out.
	That is a massive win for the Trump administration.
	The media, however, are suggesting that it is the Trump administration's fault that people are skeptical about the vaccine, because there's a lot of questions about who wants to take the vaccine.
	And let me be clear, the vaccine, in terms of the studies, has been proved to be effective.
	Does that mean that children should be getting it?
	Probably not.
	At least not as at first blush.
	They should be like last in line.
	Number one because they are at least risk of this thing and number two because they are the least likely to transmit this thing or have intergenerational contact with people who are elderly.
	As I say we should be trenching this thing out and you know people should be able to assess their own level of risk when it comes to getting the thing versus not getting the thing or damage if you do get the thing as opposed to not getting the thing.
	If you're 17 years old and you are Not only unlikely to die of this thing, it's less likely to kill you than the flu.
	You may be like, well, not sure I'm into it.
	That's understandable.
	With that said, the widespread vaccine skepticism that has now cropped up on the left is clearly a product of the media hating Trump.
	Now the media are going to turn around and try and blame Trump for the vaccine skepticism they themselves created on MSNBC.
	Here we go.
	They were blaming Trump for blue state vaccine skepticism.
	Yes, and unfortunately this happened because of just the horrible precedent that got set by the president and members of the Trump administration to politicize a number of treatments and even some of the efforts leading to a vaccine to this point.
	That is Dr. Kavita Patel, a former Obama official, obviously.
	So it's about politicization.
	Never mind the fact that everybody in the process says the process was never politicized.
	In fact, the United States lagged behind two other countries, the UK and Canada.
	We were the third country to actually approve the distribution of the vaccine.
	Here's the FDA chief, in fact, saying external pressure was not the issue in us deciding to greenlight this thing.
	Jake, we have been very clear, and I'll say it again here, that nothing guided our decision.
	No external comments, no external pressure, other than the science and data guided our decision-making.
	If you look at the timetable here, immediately after the Vaccine Advisory Committee, Our team spent that night, we decided to go forward, and you know by early morning, before 7am, we issued a statement saying that we were moving forward working with Pfizer to get the authorization out.
	And then we worked throughout the day to do that.
	Our timeline, how we approached this, was based upon our thorough review of the science and data.
	That's the promise we made to the American people, the transparency around that, and that's what we did.
	So we're just going to whitewash completely the fact that Andrew Cuomo and Kamala Harris and a bunch of Democrats were casting absolute doubt on the efficacy of the vaccine developed under the Trump administration.
	Instead, we're going to pretend that it was Trump putting pressure on the FDA.
	I mean, the media's malfeasance with regard to COVID is the reason that people have serious COVID trust issues with regard to solving this thing.
	Another reason is because there are so many people who seem to be in the media eager to shut this thing down.
	I mean, just super eager to shut down the economy, like really eager to talk about how bad things are going to be for years on end.
	So Bill Gates, who has given a lot of money to the development of vaccines like this one, Bill Gates went on national TV with Jake Tapper where he explained that life would not return to normal through 2022.
	2022, and that we should not open bars and restaurants for four to six months.
	That's easy for Bill Gates to say.
	He's one of the richest people on earth.
	How about the people who actually own those restaurants?
	2022, are you kidding me?
	Here's how this is actually going to work.
	Once the vaccines go out, and once we've given the possibility of dosing to everybody, everybody's going back to work.
	And people are not going to wear masks.
	They're not going to do it forever.
	They're not that interested in doing this for a long time.
	It's not going to happen.
	But the sort of blithe dismissal Bill Gates has for normality is pretty incredible.
	Of course, it's easy to do that when you are, you know, jetting around on private jets and living on private islands.
	Here's Bill Gates.
	Certainly by the summer, we'll be way closer to normal than we are now.
	But even through early 2022, unless we help other countries get rid of this disease and we get high vaccination rates in our country, The risk of reintroduction will be there, and of course the global economy will be slowed down, which hurts America economically in a pretty dramatic way.
	So we'll have, starting in the summer, about nine months where a few things like big public gatherings will still be restricted.
	But, you know, we can see now that somewhere between 12 to 18 months, And we have a chance if we manage it well to get back to normal.
	Nope.
	Wrong.
	Watch.
	Once everybody has the opportunity to get vaccinated, and then the people who want to do, we're going back to normal.
	Okay?
	And nobody's going to pay attention to what Bill Gates has to say about any of this.
	And this is true with regard to masking.
	It is true with regard to everyday activity.
	Nobody is going to stay away from their families.
	By the way, a huge percentage of the spread is not in public events.
	It is family gatherings.
	So, it's not these big super spreader events that are the real danger, really.
	It is people who have COVID going back home to mom and dad.
	People are not going to put off life.
	for another two years.
	Not happening.
	Not happening.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today for two additional hours of The Ben Shapiro Show.
	While you wait, check out The Matt Walsh Show.
	It's streaming on Daily Wire, 10.30 a.m.
	Pacific time, 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern today.
	We'll be discussing United Airlines kicking a family off their flight because their two-year-old wouldn't wear a mask.
	By the way, quick note on that story, two-year-olds are not gonna wear masks and you should not be kicked off a flight because your two-year-old won't wear a mask.
	That's insane.
	Okay, but beyond that, I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
	Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Our Supervising Producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Production Manager, Paweł Lajdowski.
	Our Associate Producers are Rebecca Doyle and Savannah Dominguez.
	The show is edited by Adam Sajewicz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Production Assistant, Jessica Kranz.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright 2020.
	Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
	You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
	But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

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