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Dec. 23, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:33
Covid Relief Chaos | Ep. 1163
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After congressional Republicans vote for the COVID relief bill, Trump signals he'll oppose it, Joe Biden continues to call Hunter Biden's legal troubles Russian disinformation, and the Georgia Senate races will go down to the wire.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Don't get to all the news of the day in just one second.
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Okay, so it seemed like yesterday morning all was, if not well with the world, then at least somewhat more stable because a COVID relief bill had passed over the weekend, and it had passed with massive numbers.
I mean, we're talking like only six Republican senators voted against the COVID relief bill, and in the House, It was like low double digits of people who had actually voted against the COVID relief bill.
So finally, the checks were out the door.
Everything looked like it was fairly solid.
And as I went through yesterday on the program, there were some things that I think were wrong with the bill, like many things that were wrong with the bill.
The biggest thing that was wrong with the bill is that, as always, every giant bill from Congress is a crap sandwich.
And for ease of passage, what had happened is that the federal government, the legislature, they had actually put together the omnibus budget bill, which is $1.4 trillion.
They put that together in one giant package with the COVID relief bill.
So many of the complaints you were hearing about money going to Israel, for example, or about money being spent on the Kennedy Center, all of that was in the omnibus package.
It wasn't necessarily in the COVID relief bill as it was originally constituted, right?
They were passed together, but they're actually two separate bills.
So last night, President Trump decided that now that the thing had been passed, now that it had been negotiated, now that it had been passed, and this was a better version of the bill than what Democrats had proposed earlier, or even than Steve Mnuchin had been proposing to Nancy Pelosi months ago.
Remember, Democrats turned down a $1.8 trillion deal just a few months ago, and in return, they get a $900 billion deal over the weekend.
And Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, put out an actual graph showing how much he had moved Democrats in his own direction.
The HEROES bill, which was proposed by Democrats back in May, was $3.4 trillion.
The HEALS bill, which was proposed by Republicans back in July, was $950 billion.
The final agreement in December was $900 billion, so even lower than the HEALS bill in July.
Which is a good thing.
If you're a conservative, this is what is baffling me this morning.
If you're a conservative, You can take one of two positions, but you cannot take both.
And I'm seeing people take both, and it makes no sense to me.
Position number one is the Rand Paul position on this, which is, we should not really be doing relief right now.
What we should be doing is pushing reopening.
In fact, if you want to have a relief bill, you should do it in states.
You should have a California relief bill, since you're mandating that everything be shut down.
You should have a New York relief bill, since you're mandating that everything be shut down.
There's no reason that Florida, which is fairly open, should be paying the bills of New York.
There's no reason that North Dakota, which is wide open, ought to be paying the bills of California.
What we actually need to do is get people back to work.
We don't need to keep signing endless checks here.
And even if you are somebody who believes that the federal government ought to be signing some checks right now to get people through a hard time, and because the federal government has taken measures that make it harder to work, even if you believe that, you want to restrict the amount of money that is going out the door so that you don't have an unlimited willingness for people to stay home.
And this was one of the big battles here, is there are actual disincentives.
Once you start using the federal government to bail people out, to a large extent, you are creating what is called moral hazard.
You're encouraging people to stay home and not go back to work, even if they are healthy, or even if they've had COVID and recovered, or even if they are young and not particularly vulnerable to the disease.
And this is the point that Rand Paul is making, and this is the most conservative slash libertarian point, which is the federal government really should not be doing any of this stuff.
And so that is one perspective.
Here's Rand Paul making that argument yesterday.
There is no free money that can get us out of this situation.
The only thing that can save us is to open the economy.
If we give these tin-pot dictators, these governors, more money, they're less likely to open the economy.
The answer's not printing up and distributing free money.
It's opening the economy.
We're not even debating the real answer to this.
We're like, just print up the money and shovel it out the door.
The deficit be damned.
Okay, he happens to be correct about this.
And any conservative worth his salt would say this.
Would say that the fact that we are even considering pushing this money out the door is a breach of principle in certain respects.
Now, you can say that the breach of principle is somewhat necessary under these circumstances, and I'll probably agree.
But if you want to say that what we should really be focused on is pushing more money out the door, when what we are looking at is by March, the end of the pandemic, and right now we have tons of people who should be working who are not working.
I'm talking about you, teachers unions.
People who are saying you should not be back in school because it's unsafe for a 20-year-old teacher to be in a class of five-year-old kids.
That is not true.
Okay, so what Rand Paul is saying is one conservative perspective, and you can hold it, and I do hold that.
The other conservative perspective, right, is that the federal government is spending too much money on crap and they should be spending more money on other things.
You can't hold these two perspectives at the same time.
And the second one is not a particularly conservative perspective.
You can say that the federal government is wasting money on pork.
Well, what you can't do is sit around and say, you know what would be great?
Is if the federal government, which is pushing $600 checks out the door to everyone, right?
And that goes alongside unemployment insurance, which is still going out the door at $300 per week.
That is alongside state unemployment insurance.
That is alongside federal food programs and federal welfare programs.
Okay, the fact is that right now, normally, unemployment insurance will cover you up to like 50 or 60% of your salary.
Right now, people are getting like 85% of their salary.
Plus, on top of that, they're now gonna be getting these $600 checks.
If you're a Republican, if you're a conservative, your goal was to negotiate enough aid to get people through the pandemic, but not so much aid that you're just signing people willy-nilly checks.
Okay, but now I'm seeing people who are, oh, well, it's so stingy.
If you're a Republican or a conservative, and your point is that the federal government is not spending enough money, enough money, I'm just wondering, What sort of principled argument you are using?
The best that you can say about this bill, seriously, from a conservative perspective, the best you can say is that it is a necessary evil.
But instead, what I'm hearing from a lot of conservatives and Republicans this morning is, well, why aren't we spending more?
Why aren't we throwing thousands of dollars out the door from the federal level?
Again, there's a difference between the states and the federal government.
I get it.
If the state of California told you you need to shut down your restaurant, the state of California ought to be repaying you in kind.
But the federal government is not responsible at this point for California shutting down your business.
California is responsible for shutting down your business.
And nonetheless, last night, so McConnell negotiated this deal, right?
There was gonna get a deal done because the fact is the political incentive structure is such that if no deal gets done, whoever stands in the way of a deal is going to be perceived as unsympathetic to people who are suffering out there.
And I get the political incentives for people in Congress.
By the way, quick note, If you're looking to members of Congress, to legislators, for the purest exposition of principles, you're looking in the wrong place.
I have an easy job.
I get to say what it is that I think every day.
I get to speak in terms of pure principle every day because I am not responsible to voters.
I'm responsible only for telling the truth to my listeners.
That's it.
From my own perspective.
Right, through the lens of conservatism.
But if you're a legislator, you are responsible to your voters, and you are going to have to win election battles.
And so looking to Congress as a place for principle is a very weird place to look for principle.
But, putting that aside, the fact is that what we are seeing right now is that Mitch McConnell, the Republicans in Congress, they cut a deal with the Democrats that is significantly better than anything that the Democrats were pushing for.
And now, President Trump comes out of the woodwork, and he says, you know what, we're gonna blow up the deal.
The deal's already done.
But I'm going to blow it up.
And the reason I'm going to blow it up is because I read a bunch of stuff on Twitter that mostly is not true.
He was getting a lot of plaudits from people on both sides of the aisle for a speech that he made last night, President Trump.
And the speech that he made last night was basically tearing into the omnibus bill.
And he ripped into a bunch of provisions of the Omnibus Bill, a lot of the spending.
He conflated it with the COVID Relief Bill, which is not correct.
Again, it is a separate bill.
It was passed together with the COVID Relief Bill.
But when he talks about, you're gonna hear him talk about a bunch of foreign aid issues here.
The foreign aid is not in the COVID Relief Bill.
It is not.
It is in the Omnibus Package.
It passes every single year.
So if you don't like it in there, we can have that discussion.
That's fine.
But to pretend that it has to do with COVID Relief, per se, is not particularly honest.
Okay, and then you're gonna hear Trump talk about how he wants more relief.
His own administration negotiated this deal, right?
He was working.
His people were working with McConnell.
They were working with Schumer and Pelosi.
They were working with, like, this deal was hammered out.
This deal was done.
And then Trump comes back in, and you're going to see from the reaction, particularly from the left, that they are overjoyed with this.
Now there are a lot of people out there who say this is smart for Trump politically.
And maybe in the run up to the election it would have been smart for Trump politically because he can always run as the outsider.
He can push against Congress people.
He can suggest that he is willing to do more than they are.
But on a principled conservative level saying I want to shove more money out the door without any real eye toward who is getting paid or what the amounts are and to propagate the lie that the only thing that is in here to help people is $600.
In checks, that is not true.
The United States has spent literally trillions of dollars to help people during this.
We are one of the Western nations that poured the most money out the door.
Okay, well, we're spending $900 billion in this bill.
That is not just $600 checks for everybody.
Anyway, here was President Trump yesterday.
He made some good points, right?
He said, you took too long to pass the bill.
That obviously is true, and that is because of Democrats.
Throughout the summer, Democrats cruelly blocked COVID relief legislation in an effort to advance their extreme left-wing agenda and influence the election.
Then, a few months ago, Congress started negotiations on a new package to get urgently needed help To the American people.
It's taken forever.
However, the bill they are now planning to send back to my desk is much different than anticipated.
It really is a disgrace.
Okay, it is not totally different than anticipated.
His administration was in.
I mean, I don't mean to undercut Trump here, but the fact is, everyone in his administration knew exactly what was in this bill.
They knew exactly what was in this bill.
They helped negotiate the bill.
The reason I'm upset today is because two things.
One, I don't, on a fundamental level, like the dishonesty of claiming that you don't know what's in a bill after you negotiated it.
Okay, if Mitch McConnell came around this morning, he was like, you know what, I never knew what was in that bill that I negotiated.
We'd all be like, that's weird.
That's a strange thing.
Two, It's hard to get Republicans and Democrats on board for anything.
And on a conservative principle level, again, you don't want to be pushing willy-nilly giant checks out the door without any sort of eye as to, number one, the incentive structure that you're creating in terms of getting people back to work.
And number two, yes, there is such a thing as a federal debt.
Yes, there is such a thing as a deficit.
I understand that for a lot of Republicans, when a Republican's in office, they're like, ah, debt, deficit, who cares?
And then a Democrat comes in, they're like, ah, well, now I really care about the debt and the deficit.
That's not the way it works.
Either you care about it or you don't.
I'm with Rand Paul on this one.
I really am.
I think that the fact that there even is a COVID relief bill ought to be up for debate.
But if there's going to be one, then you want it to be restricted to the amount of actual need out there.
There's still hundreds of billions of dollars, apparently, unspent from the original Paycheck Protection Program.
A bunch of that money went to waste and fraud.
I understand that the easiest thing in Washington, D.C.
is just to shovel money out the door in giant bags, but that's actually not good policy.
Okay, so here is President Trump yesterday saying that he wants $2,000 in relief.
Where is he coming up with $2,000?
Nobody knows.
I mean, seriously, nobody knows.
It was just something that was going around on Twitter yesterday.
There's no actual rationale why it would be $2,000.
There's $600 in relief.
That is not the only thing.
I keep saying this over and over because people are just not telling you the truth.
That is not the only thing in the COVID relief package.
There is extended unemployment insurance.
There's paycheck protection programs that are designed to allow your employer to continue to pay you.
Their grants are not forgivable unless they use the money to pay their employees.
Anyway, here's President Trump blowing up the deal, basically, and saying, okay, now I want $2,000 in relief.
Despite all of this wasteful spending and much more, the $900 billion package provides hardworking taxpayers with only $600 each in relief payments, and not enough money is given to small businesses And in particular, restaurants whose owners have suffered so grievously.
I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000 or $4,000 for a couple.
Okay, I mean, I'm sorry, but this is so not conservative.
It makes the heads been.
This has nothing to do with conservatism.
It really does not.
And by the way, the administration was celebrating this earlier on Monday.
Steve Mnuchin, his own Treasury Secretary, he said earlier, Yesterday, on Tuesday actually, he thanked Trump for his leadership.
He said, we are fully committed to ensuring that hardworking Americans get this vital support as quickly as possible and to further strengthening our economic recovery.
He said, hundreds of dollars in direct payments authorized by the bill could begin reaching individual Americans as early as next week. Now, how can you tell that this is a bad idea?
The reason that you can tell that this is a particularly bad idea, is this giant increase in $2,000 relief checks, is because Democrats are like, this is amazing.
Let's do this thing.
It's very reminiscent of that point when Dianne Feinstein was sitting across from Trump during some negotiation over guns.
And Trump said something and Dianne Feinstein started actually cackling in the room.
She started laughing in the room because suddenly he was mirroring her policy priorities.
In a second, I'm going to show you what the Democrats are saying about this.
And guess what?
They're super excited about it.
So, conservatives, I have a question.
If Democrats are ever super excited about a thing, should you be saying to yourself, that's a great idea?
Like really, when's the last time Democrats said, you know what?
Amazing, let's do it.
That it turned out great for America and great for conservatives.
We'll get to this in just one second.
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OK, so President Trump concludes his speech last night.
He says, I want a better package or the next administration will have to negotiate one.
And for all of those in the media who are immediately jumping to, well, it looks like he's finally accepting that this election is over, and not so fast.
He says, the next administration might be me.
I'm also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items from this legislation, and to send me a suitable bill, or else the next administration will have to deliver a COVID relief package, and maybe that administration will be me, and we will get it done.
Thank you very much.
So everybody is obviously honing in on that last line.
Maybe the next administration will be me.
Barring some sort of cataclysmic event, obviously that's not going to be true.
The Electoral College has voted January 6th.
The House will vote to confirm.
There's nobody in the Senate who has yet joined on to a challenge in the House to the Electoral College vote.
Okay, but putting aside that, the simple fact of the matter is that what Trump is doing here is very pleasing to Democrats because he has now set up a political Basically, a vice for Republicans.
If Republicans don't go along with his call for massive expenditures, then Democrats will now get to claim that Republicans are ungenerous because Trump himself has called for a massive increase in expenditure.
And if Republicans do go along with that massive increase in expenditure, then a lot of conservatives are gonna say, hold up a second, you guys are just blowing through this money like it's nobody's business.
Like, what exactly are you doing?
Plus, if you voted for this bill, and now Democrats hold up the works, You, like, whatever victory you won from this bill is actually not a victory.
Like, here's the thing, a lot of Republicans were immediately out there touting the bill.
They were saying, listen, we finally got this done, bipartisan bill, we're bringing relief to the American people.
Now Democrats, who were claiming all along that Republicans were ungenerous, have Trump on their side, saying that Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, are ungenerous.
On a political level, this is really not good for Republicans.
It is quite damaging for Republicans.
And you can see how this is playing out, right?
You can see how happy the Democrats are.
So Chuck Schumer, again, as a conservative, as an American, whenever Chuck Schumer is happy, I am not a happy camper.
Chuck Schumer immediately tweeted out, I'm in, what do you say Mitch?
Let's not get bogged down with ideological offsets and unrelated items and just do this.
The American people deserve it.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez immediately tweeted out, let's do it.
Rashida Tlaib and I already co-wrote the COVID amendment for $2,000 checks.
So it's ready to go.
And naturally Lindsey Graham, who has really tied himself very closely to Trump, he tweeted out, appreciate the fact that Speaker Pelosi supports President Trump's idea to increase direct payments to $2,000 per person.
The American people are hurting and deserve relief.
I know there is much bipartisan support for this idea. Let's go further.
He says, I hope Speaker Pelosi will agree with President Trump.
Big tech needs to be reined in by winding down Section 230 liability protections.
I have reason to believe this combination will lead to President Trump supporting the NDAA, that's the National Defense Authorization Act, and COVID-19 omnibus packages.
So that is Lindsey Graham playing a little bit there.
I mean, what he's saying right there is, sounds great.
We'll do these checks.
Also, I'm going to put in a bunch of poison pills Democrats don't want to actually kill the bill.
But again, you can see the Democrats are very enthusiastic about all of this.
Joe Biden is already calling for more spending.
The day after Congress approved a hard-fought $900 billion stimulus package, Joe Biden, according to the New York Times, called the measure a down payment on Tuesday and vowed to enter office next month, asking lawmakers to return to the negotiating table.
He said, Congress did its job this week.
I can and I must ask them to do it again next year.
Unending aid, unending spending, right?
Not tied to the actual changing circumstances of COVID, not tied to how states are treating this thing differentially, not tied to the future fiscal circumstances of the country.
But simply because blowing money out the door is always an easy political win.
It's always an easy political win.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi in Congress, she was worried apparently the COVID relief package would not pass the House, so she split the $900 billion aid bill off of a $1.4 trillion ombust bill after progressives objected to millions in spending to buoy corporations and large-scale industries about $600 checks for most individuals.
So one of the things that is worthwhile noting is that that omnibus package, which again is a crap sandwich, it did include some good things like funding of the military.
Congress split the COVID relief and government funding legislation past Monday into two separate votes, allowing members to vote against the part that includes military and Homeland Security funding without putting the package carrying the economic stimulus money in jeopardy.
So one of the things that is worthwhile noting is that that omnibus package, which again is a crap sandwich, it did include some good things like funding of the military. Democrats wanted to vote against some of those things. So they separated off the two bills after they were packaged together in the Senate to allow Democrats to vote in favor of that bill.
Meanwhile, President Trump continues to militate against members of the Republican Senate.
He's going after John Thune, who's the number two in the Senate.
He tweeted out last night, Republicans in the Senate, so quickly forget, right now they would be down eight seats without my backing them in the last election.
RINO JOHN THUNE, MITCH'S BOY, SHOULD JUST LET IT PLAY OUT.
SOUTH DAKOTA DOESN'T LIKE WEAKNESS.
HE WILL BE PRIMARIED IN 2022.
POLITICAL CAREER OVER.
THIS COMES SHORTLY AFTER TRUMP TWEETED OUT THAT MITCH MCCONNELL, THE SENATE MAJORITY LEADER, ONLY WON HIS SEAT IN KENTUCKY BECAUSE TRUMP DID LIKE A ROBOCALL FOR HIM, WHICH OBVIOUSLY IS NOT TRUE.
AND MITCH MCCONNELL WON BY 1,000 POINTS.
HE WON BY 1,000 POINTS IN THE ELECTION BEFORE THAT.
IF YOU LOOK AT THE POLLS, IT BUDGED THE POLLS BY LIKE A POINT MAYBE.
IF YOU ATTRIBUTE All of that change to Trump's intervention in that particular race.
So here is sort of the situation as it currently stands.
Going forward, one of the things that I care very much about, and you should care very much about if you are a conservative or Republican, or if you're just an American who would like to see stability and decent policy going forward, is Republicans maintaining the Senate.
If Republicans don't maintain the Senate, then you'll have an unchecked Democratic majority, high on its own woke farts, pushing forward with all of its radical policy.
So it's kind of important that Kelly Loeffler win her race in Georgia and that David Perdue win his race in Georgia.
One of the things that was going to allow them to win their races in Georgia is championing the fact that they were part of this COVID relief bill.
In fact, David Perdue released an ad as soon as the bill passed championing the bill, right?
Here is David Perdue's ad backing the bill.
This came out like literally within like an hour of this bill actually passing.
John Ossoff opposed past COVID relief and encouraged Democrats to block additional aid for months.
But Senator Perdue never gave up.
Perdue again delivered real, meaningful help for Georgians.
$900 billion in new COVID relief, direct checks to Georgians, critical funding for vaccine distribution, small businesses, public schools, and help for folks out of work.
Ossoff obstructed.
Perdue delivered.
I'm David Perdue, and I approve this message.
Okay, so he pushed that message, like, as soon as the bill was out, right?
Ossoff opposed the bill, I'm in favor of the bill, I wanted to help people, Ossoff didn't.
Okay, and suddenly, here comes Trump, jumping into the middle with just a giant sign reading, ignore everything that David Perdue just said, the bill sucks.
How is that in any way politically helpful?
Putting aside the policy, which again, I think the policy is deeply flawed.
I think that there is no reason at all that North Dakotans, via their taxpayer dollars, should be subsidizing California in lockdown policy that has been a complete failure.
I think it is simply ridiculous that we are going to have states that have taken more rational policies with regard to COVID paying for states that did not do that.
And when the federal government is not the one responsible for the lockdowns, I'm wondering how you justify the federal government shelling out future taxpayer bucks for lockdown policy in particular states.
It is a subsidy to states that are locking down more tightly.
Even if you want to make the argument it ought to exist, it ought to be as carefully tailored as possible to not create the moral disincentive to work and to get back to work and to end the lockdowns.
But no, apparently everybody is just so excited about the possibility of getting a check in the mail that they're just like, okay, well, make it $2,000.
By the way, if I were the Democrats, strategically speaking, I'd say $5,000.
Why the hell not?
Make it UBI.
Seriously, like, go for broke.
Because Trump obviously is going to say whatever you want him to say at this point on this particular subject.
I think if Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer came back right now and they said $10,000 a person, Do you think Trump would go for it?
He might.
He might.
And that would put down Republicans between a rock and a hard place.
Strategically speaking, frankly, I'm shocked that Democrats aren't doing exactly that.
In just a second, we'll get to how this impacts the Georgia race.
Because if all this unenthuses Republican voters in Georgia and Democrats pick up the Senate, there's gonna be a lot of hurt on the way for Americans and for Republicans in general.
OK, so meanwhile, the polls are showing that in Georgia, these things, these are really, really tight races.
There has not been a lot of poll data coming out of Georgia because everybody is so skittish about these polling numbers.
And they should be skittish about these particular polling numbers because, I mean, they got it wrong last time.
But, according to a new SurveyUSA election poll, both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are leading the Republican incumbents in Georgia's upcoming runoff.
This week's survey showed Ossoff increasing his lead over David Perdue from an identical survey taken three weeks ago—this is Breitbart reporting—jumping from a 2-point lead to a 5-point lead, 51-46.
Warnock leads Kelly Loeffler by 7 percentage points, with the results remaining the same way they did in the same poll released three weeks ago.
Now, there is a margin of error of 5%.
There's also an RMG research survey that came out recently, which pointed to tight races in Georgia with the GOP incumbents and Democratic challengers statistically tied.
These are very, very tight races, very tight races.
And basically taking away a win from Georgia Republicans at the last minute.
Makes no political sense whatsoever.
I mean, the Democrats can taste this thing.
They can taste control of the Senate.
Kamala Harris was down in Georgia campaigning, and she's making pretty clear what she wants here.
Here's Kamala Harris saying Georgia can change the course of the country.
That is correct.
She is not wrong about this.
The problem is she wants to change the course of the country radically.
I was just in Georgia, in Columbus, and talking with folks about our candidates, Reverend Warnock, Raphael Warnock, and John Ossoff, and just reminding folks, you know, 2020's been a rough year, and I know we're all going to be happy to say goodbye, but 2020 won't be over until January 5th.
Amen, amen.
Because that's the day Georgia votes that can change the course of our country.
The good news about Kamala Harris is everything is hilarious to Kamala Harris.
All the things.
There are no clips of her not laughing awkwardly.
So that's that's exciting stuff.
But she's right that the Georgia races matter an awful lot.
Well, one piece of news in the Georgia race that is going to go wildly underreported by the mainstream media, your establishment media, apparently.
According to the Washington Times, Jessica Chasma reporting.
Oluye Ndoye, now the ex-wife of Democratic Senate candidate, Raphael Warnock, told police officers following a March dispute in Atlanta that he is a quote unquote, great actor, and that she's been trying to hide his behavior from the public for a long time, according to newly aired body cam footage.
Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, aired footage of the incident late Tuesday, Ndoye tearfully telling a police officer, this man's running for United States Senate.
All he cares about right now is his reputation.
I work at the mayor's office.
This is a big problem.
I've been trying to be very quiet about the way he is for the sake of my kids and his reputation.
I've been trying to keep the way that he acts under wraps for a long time.
Today he crossed the line.
So that is what is going on here.
He's a great actor.
He's phenomenal at putting on a really good show.
Apparently, Warnock was not charged with the crime in the March incident.
His then-wife accused him of deliberately running over her foot with his car.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the couple were amid divorce negotiations at the time, finalized their split about two months later.
It is true that an officer said in a police report there were no visible signs of injury to her foot.
In the video, Warnock told the officers his wife was lying.
He said, The footage aired about two weeks, of course, before the election.
Kelly Loeffler put out a statement saying, It'll be fun to watch as the Democrats run directly away from Believe All Women as soon as it puts this Georgia Senate race in danger.
We have to have the Marxist Raphael Warnock in the Senate.
watch. Georgians deserve answers to these very serious allegations. His ex-wife's voice deserves to be heard. It'll be fun to watch as the Democrats run directly away from believe all women as soon as it puts this Georgia Senate race in danger. We have to have the Marxist Raphael Warnock in the Senate, the anti-Semitic Marxist Raphael Warnock in the Senate, even if it means ignoring our own believe all women supposed principle.
And meanwhile, remember that time that we were told that talking about voter fraud and voter irregularity was real bad?
That you're not allowed to talk about that sort of stuff without evidence?
Well, James Clyburn is now saying that basically Georgia is going to be all about voter suppression.
This is how the left plays the game.
It really is amazing.
Whatever the right says, even if they're saying the exact same thing as the left, is wrong.
If the left says it, however, it is completely right.
So five minutes before the election, Donald Trump was burning mailboxes in order to pervert the vote.
Five minutes after the election, it was the cleanest election that ever was run.
Five minutes after the election, Republicans were like, maybe there's some questions about voting procedures here.
And Democrats were like, how dare you question these voter procedures?
And then when there's a Georgia election coming up, all of a sudden it's back to, Republicans are engaged in voter suppression.
James Clyburn, Democrat House Majority Whip from South Carolina, has a big piece in the Washington Post today suggesting that racism in Georgia, of course, is going to prevent Raphael Warnock from winning.
He says, Some of the most pernicious devices in favor of racism historically, which included racialized campaigning, numbered posts, full slate voting, and the 50% plus one voting requirement, purposefully diluted black votes and helped produce decades of white-only elected officials.
This led my home state, which had eight black members of Congress in the 19th century, to go 95 years, from 1897 to 1992, without black representation in Congress.
Although the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed some of these devices, several remain, including the 50% plus one requirement, known today as the runoff election.
So hilariously enough, You have now James Clyburn suggesting that runoff elections are themselves racist.
The goal of runoff elections is to be racist.
He says the recent results in Georgia demonstrate the continued effectiveness of the 50 plus one runoff requirement in keeping black candidates from reaching elected office.
If the candidate who got the most votes in the November 3rd US Senate special election in Georgia had been declared the winner, we would be preparing to swear in the Reverend Raphael Warnock to the upper chamber of Congress.
Instead, he's in runoff with the candidate who finished seven points behind him.
And people think the 19th century is ancient history.
Okay, first of all, According to the certified results in Georgia, Joe Biden just won the state.
OK, so on the back of supposedly Stacey Abrams organizing efforts, that's a questionable contention, but that's what the Democrats are claiming.
And yet here's James Clyburn saying that Georgia is basically the same now as it was in 1882, which is totally crazy.
I mean, patently insane.
Also worth noting, if Georgia did not have the 50 percent plus one requirement, You know who'd also be in the center right now?
David Perdue.
The two senators who were elected would have been Raphael Warnock and David Perdue, who beat John Ossoff by two full percentage points in the last election.
He barely missed that 50% plus one.
He got in like 49.6% or something in that election.
49.6% or something in that election.
But according to James Clyburn, the 50% plus one thing is racist.
Says James Clyburn, voter participation is always a challenge in runoffs, a challenge made worse this year amid rising cases of COVID-19.
There's the fact that Georgia purged tens of thousands of African-Americans from its voter rolls before this election cycle.
Okay, is there an allegation that Georgia purged somebody who's a legit voter?
Seriously, when people talk about purging the voter rolls, who showed up wanting to vote and was rejected from being able to vote despite being a legitimate voter?
Can you show those people?
Can those people talk?
Let's hear about those people, because I'm not hearing a lot of evidence of that.
I don't see Twitter, however, notifying everybody at the bottom of James Clyburn's post that these facts are in dispute.
James Clyburn is very angry, says the 50% plus one runoff requirement is a relic of our difficult past.
I've long argued for a proportional and cumulative voting, counting mechanisms that are fairer and more representational and used effectively in other countries.
And in some local elections here in the United States, yada, yada, yada, it's all racism.
All the way down, it's all racism.
So Democrats preemptively declaring that no matter what happens in the Georgia elections, unless they win, then that is obviously indicative of deeper American racism.
The consequences of what happens in Georgia are going to reverberate.
They do matter an awful lot.
Those elections are happening January 5th.
So if you are a Republican in Georgia, go out and vote.
Go out and vote.
Do not be disheartened.
Do not give in to whatever the chaos of the day is because it really does not matter as much as what's going to happen over the next few years if Democrats should grab control of the United States Senate now that Joe Biden has been elected by the Electoral College.
You do not want Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker in the United States Senate.
That is not something that you want.
So please, get out and vote.
In just a second, we're gonna get into the consequences of democratic rule, because it turns out that wokeism is extraordinarily dangerous.
It's not just bad for the country.
It's not just divisive.
It is extraordinarily dangerous.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, coming up, we're going to get into how wokeness kills, because it really, really does.
We'll get to that in a second.
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The consequences for those Georgia runoff races, those are dire.
Because if the Democrats gain control of all auspices of government, look the hell out.
Wokism is a mind virus.
It is a virus that will infect you, as Gad Saad has said, the author.
It is in fact a mental virus.
And it is really, really bad and has serious consequences.
There's an excellent investigation over at the Washington Free Beacon today about where exactly these CDC standards came from.
Remember, we've been talking for a week and a half here about the COVID standards for vaccine distribution being used by the CDC, which prioritized race above age, which is nuts, right?
They were saying that essential workers who are of color ought to be getting the vaccine before 75-year-old white people, which is, I'm sorry, insane and racist and horrific on every level.
on every level.
The Washington Free Beacon did a deep dive into exactly where this garbage policy came from.
Here's what Erin Siberian reports, quote, In 2015, Dana Bowen Matthew, the dean of George Washington University Law School, published a paper concerning racial disparities in healthcare.
She traced those disparities back to the founding fathers and argued their persistence today reflects the structural violence of American society Matthew was one of 11 people who helped draft the Center for Disease Control's ethical framework for allocating COVID-19 vaccines.
She is also listed as a health equity consultant to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which voted in November to vaccinate essential workers before the elderly, partially on the grounds that the elderly skew white, only to pull back on Sunday in the face of outrage from across the political spectrum.
The committee openly acknowledged its initial plan would result in more deaths than vaccinating older adults first.
But, said the panel, the plan would reduce racial disparities, something they deemed more important than saving lives because essential workers, unlike adults over 65, are disproportionately Black and Hispanic, the two groups that have borne the brunt of the pandemic.
So how exactly did the committee reach that conclusion?
According to meeting minutes, presentation slides, public statements, and even civil rights directives, the now-scuttled plan didn't come out of thin air.
Rather, it reflects the reductive racialist worldview that is rapidly gaining ground in education, media, nonprofits, and now the U.S.
federal government, a worldview with concrete policy implications and concrete human costs.
That policy agenda was seeded by outside consultants like Matthew, who told the New York Times that racial inequality, quote, requires us to prioritize by race.
But it was also ceded by the CDC itself, which in September hosted a series of trainings on racism, sexism, and other systems of structured inequality in direct violation of President Trump's executive order barring such programs from government agencies.
It was even ceded by the chairman of the CDC committee, Jose Romero, who said in July that minorities, quote, need to be moved to the forefront of the vaccination line.
The result was an explicitly race-conscious plan that would have prioritized shrinking the case gap between races over saving the most lives.
The plan contained glaring double standards, such as the assumption that age-based policies would be discriminatory but that race-based ones wouldn't be.
It relied on omission, distortion, and equivocation to make a highly contentious judgment seem self-evident, building bureaucratic consensus upon shaky foundations that were anything but apolitical or science-based.
The consensus coalesced in September when committee members met to discuss their framework for vaccine equity and prioritization.
At the meeting, Sarah Oliver, an epidemiologist with the CDC, delivered a presentation on the criteria the government should consider when developing a plan for rolling out a coronavirus vaccine.
She began by reviewing three other frameworks from the WHO, Johns Hopkins, and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, on which her working group had drawn.
Equity, said Oliver, was a cross-cutting consideration for all three frameworks, suggesting the CDC would be in good company if it prioritized that value.
But all three frameworks considered harm reduction to be an important goal.
In fact, they prioritized saving lives over reducing disparities.
Oliver just ignored that.
So, for example, the Hopkins framework talks about structural racism, but concluded by suggesting adults 65 and older get vaccinated before most essential workers because their prioritization would likely avert the greatest overall harm.
The CDC framework, however, adopted different priorities.
Of its five proposed principles, maximize benefits and minimize harms, equity, justice, fairness, and transparency.
Two explicitly mentioned racial health disparities.
The equity principle, said Oliver, will make sure that vaccine allocation reduces rather than increases health disparities.
And fairness includes a commitment to not exacerbating existing disparities in health outcomes.
It's amazing.
It's just amazing that this was rammed through and it just took public scrutiny for people to say, hold up, you're actually going to end up killing more black and brown people on an absolute level, even if they, as a percentage of the population, represent fewer deaths on the relative level.
It's insane that this is pushed through, but the consequences of wokeness are death.
The wages of wokeness are death, for sure.
And now speaking of COVID policy, Democrats continue to push forward with this sort of stuff.
Ayanna Pressley, the Democrat from Massachusetts and the adjunct member of the squad, the Ringo star of the squad, she said yesterday that we ought to prioritize prisoners for the vaccine.
That's right.
Don't focus on the elderly.
Focus on people who have committed crimes and are in prison.
I do want to acknowledge that I had to overcome some of those distrust issues myself.
The medical community exacting ostensibly medical apartheid on black Americans, on indigenous people, on Guatemalans, on our most marginalized communities.
They have violated the trust, and that is very real.
And I'm going to continue to fight for our most vulnerable communities who have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, for our healthcare workers, for our essential workers, for incarcerated men and women to be prioritized in the distribution of the vaccine.
And why in the world should incarcerated men and women be prioritized for distribution?
If they are more vulnerable on a health level, then they should be prioritized.
If they're not more vulnerable on a health level, what the hell are you talking about?
You're gonna prioritize a fairly healthy 25-year-old rapist above grandma?
Explain.
Explain.
But there is no explanation other than group justice matters significantly more than individual justice.
And saving lives takes a backseat to wokeness in the democratic priority structure.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, remember Captain Optimism over here?
So Joe Biden came out yesterday.
He did a big speech about COVID and he said, our darkest days are ahead of us, which is exciting news from Joe Biden, who declared that he was going to crush the virus.
I look forward to him crushing the virus by literally doing nothing.
He's going to sit in his basement and then there's going to be the parade of vaccine.
It's going to trot out and then he's going to hobble out to the front of the parade, grab a baton and pretend he's leading the parade.
That's his actual plan.
Here is Joe Biden talking about how it's going to get it's going to get really, really bad now.
One thing I promise you about my leadership during this crisis.
I'm going to tell it to you straight.
I'm going to tell you the truth.
And here's the simple truth.
Our darkest days in the battle against COVID are ahead of us, not behind us.
So we need to prepare ourselves to steal our spines.
As frustrating as it is to hear It's going to take patience, persistence, and determination to beat this virus.
He's always going to tell you the truth, meaning that every death in America, Donald Trump is responsible for it.
Also, he's telling you the truth, which is that we all need to wear masks until the end of time.
If I think of a truth teller on COVID, Joe Biden is definitely not the first name that comes to mind.
But the good news is that George Clooney is excited about it.
He says America is in better shape on COVID thanks to Joe Biden.
And if George Clooney says it, I definitely believe it because George Clooney is a handsome man.
I feel like we're in so much better shape because I do think this, you know, moments meet the man or woman.
And this moment is Joe Biden's moment.
He is a compassionate, kind man.
And we're going to need that after we've lost probably, it'll be close to 400,000 people by the time we get this under, you know, under our, in our rear view mirror.
Okay, the compassion, right?
That's what's necessary.
Now, how about vaccine prioritization in proper order?
How about you don't staff up your COVID relief team and your COVID team with a bunch of people who agree with the woke standards the CDC tried to promulgate?
How about that?
Meanwhile, Chris Hayes, really bringing America together also over on MSNBC, says, this is all Trump's fault.
He's gonna have almost another 3,000 deaths today.
Just another day in the slow motion preventable catastrophe that unfolded the way everyone knew it would because the person with the most important job was a manifestly venal narcissist.
Okay, I have a question.
Has he?
There is a continent called Europe.
So that's exciting.
There's a continent called Europe, and hundreds of thousands of people have died in Europe as well.
The United States is not number one in deaths per million.
In fact, the United States trails a bunch of European countries in deaths per million.
But according to Chris Hayes, Donald Trump was out there basically with an aerosolizer, like an Acme pump from an old Warner Brothers cartoon, just seeding the air with COVID.
Just really well done there.
Speaking of Joe Biden, by the way, worth noting that Joe Biden continues to claim randomly that all the Hunter Biden stuff is Russian disinformation.
So that's again, he's so honest, right?
He's honest that you can trust him to tell you the truth.
Also, if you point out that his son has been under investigation for presumed tax fraud since 2019, he will tell you that's Russian disinformation.
Captain Honesty over here.
You still think that the stories from the fall about your son Hunter were Russian disinformation and a sneer campaign, like you said?
Yes, yes, yes.
God love you, man.
You're a one-horse pony.
I tell you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I promise you, my Justice Department will be totally on its own making its judgments about how they should proceed.
Thank you.
Um, what is a one-horse pony?
Is there such a thing as a two-horse pony?
He meant a one-trick pony, obviously, but a one-horse, a two-horse pony would be something to see.
Like a circus act.
That sounds amazing, a two-horse pony.
In any case, there is Joe Biden lecturing the media that they should not ask him particularly difficult questions.
Now, I will say, That Joe Biden did not pick the worst person he could have picked for his education secretary.
So that is other news from Team Biden.
So all of his picks were going to suck.
This one sucks slightly less than some of the people he could have chosen otherwise.
So apparently he's going to nominate Miguel Cardona, the commissioner of public schools in Connecticut, as his education secretary, according to the Washington Post.
Settling on a low-profile candidate who has pushed to reopen pandemic-shuttered schools and is not aligned with either side in the education policy battles of recent years.
He was named Connecticut's top school official last year.
If confirmed, it will have achieved a meteoric rise.
Obviously, some of this has to do with Biden's deep desire for the quote-unquote racially diverse cabinet.
This, of course, is always in the first line of these reports.
The bottom line is that because Because Miguel Cardona is Latino, this means that he is no longer subject to any sort of scrutiny.
But the good news is that he's not picking Randy Weingarten of like the American Federation of Teachers.
So one good thing about Cardona is that Cardona, he did want to reopen schools in Connecticut.
So that is definitely a good thing.
It's likely he will be confirmed probably because of that.
Now, he has been not great on school choice.
He has not been excellent with regard to charter schools either.
But he has repeatedly stated the need for in-person schooling and equity terms.
So that is a good thing.
At least he is in favor of reopening the schools.
One final ironic note here.
So remember that time when we were told that Joe Biden was going to walk back all of Donald Trump's immigration policies because Donald Trump is a horrible racist?
It turns out that Joe Biden is going to keep a lot of Donald Trump's immigration policies.
Apparently, according to Hot Air, The Joe Biden promised that on day one he was going to roll back all of Trump's policies with regard to asylum.
It turns out, nope.
Top advisors to President-elect Joe Biden said Monday they will not immediately roll back asylum restrictions at the Mexico border and other restrictive Trump administration policies, walking back some of Biden's campaign promises for day one changes.
Yeah, because it turns out that Trump is responsible for an awful lot of good policy, even if Democrats don't like the way that he talked.
So, you know, that's better than the alternative, I suppose.
Alrighty, later on today, Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show, will be guest hosting the two additional hours of content on The Ben Shapiro Show.
Make sure that you are subscribed for that.
Otherwise, I will see you here tomorrow in the run-up to Christmas.
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Dr. Fauci gets the vaccine, Joe Biden promises that our darkest days are ahead, and President Trump smacks down Congress' crooked coronavirus relief package.
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