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Jan. 4, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:17:17
Election Showdown Week Begins | Ep. 1165
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Twelve Senate Republicans say they will join House Republicans in challenging electoral votes.
Two Republican senators fight for their lives in Georgia.
And The New York Times cheers on a hit job against a 15-year-old girl.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so!
We are back and better than ever.
It's a brand new year and surely this year cannot be stupider than last year.
Yeah.
So, about that.
So many things have happened while I was out.
Aside from my children badgering me, and aside from me not getting enough sleep as I should have over the break, it turns out many stupid things happened over the course of the break.
Perhaps the stupidest was this thing that happened in Congress yesterday.
I'm just gonna mention this briefly because it is indicative of where this year is going, and then we'll get to the actual big news stories of the day.
So, yesterday, Congress opened with a prayer.
The prayer with which Congress opened is, I believe, the stupidest thing I have ever heard in all my life.
In all my life!
And I've heard many stupid things.
I mean, I literally do a political talk show, so I hear stupid things on a daily basis.
So, yesterday, the person who opens with the opening prayer, Democratic Congress, obviously, opens by saying this.
We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and God known by many names by many different faiths.
A man and a woman.
So just to be straight, this human said, a man and a woman.
Now, as the designated Jew in your political life, let me just remind you, as a Hebrew speaker, the word amen is not an English word.
It comes from the Hebrew word amein, which you say after prayers, which can originally be traced etymologically speaking to the word emet, which means truth.
The idea of amein is solidarity.
May it be so, or it's true.
That's what amein means.
It was then brought into Greek and Latin and then passed along to English.
The word amen has literally nothing to do with gender.
It does not mean a man.
It means amen.
In other words, it's like hallelujah, right?
It's a sign of solidarity, right?
That's what it is.
It's an exclamation.
And yet somehow leftists have decided that the term amen, because it is spelled A-M-E-N and includes the word men, somehow is gendered language.
And so we are also supposed to say after prayers, a women.
So, a few things.
Number one, not only is that radically stupid on an etymological level.
I mean, you would have to take the word amen, take it down to the pit of despair from the princess bride, put the torture machine on it, and torture it until it tosses out some sort of gendered variant.
Not only is that stupid on that level, it would also then be meaningless.
Why would you end a prayer Any prayer, and then just say, man.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
It's idiotic.
Beyond that, it's doubly idiotic, because it turns out that people on the left don't actually believe that men and women are real concepts, right?
They're malleable, men and women.
So what they really should say, just to be tolerant, is not amen and a women.
They should say amen, a women, and a gender is a social construct that is unconnected to biological sex, but also a biological imperative.
And then bow their heads.
That's where that should end.
So, well done all the way through, everybody.
That's a great way to start the year.
And I think that the year can only get dumber from here, unfortunately.
Okay, so, over the weekend, huge news breaks from the Washington Post.
The huge news that breaks from the Washington Post is this phone call that President Trump and his Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, had with Brad Raffensperger, who is the Georgia Secretary of State.
It is an hour-long phone call.
The Washington Post originally released about a four-minute segment of it, then they released the entire transcript and the entire phone call.
And it's not great.
When I say it's not great, I think it's not great for several reasons.
I'm gonna explain what it is and what it is not.
So we're gonna play just a couple of clips from this hour-long phone call, because they give you an idea of what the phone call is.
Basically, it runs along a couple of tracks.
One is the president saying a lot of things about Georgia voting that are unsubstantiated by evidence to this point.
He says the tens of thousands of dead people voted in Georgia.
There's not evidence to that effect.
He says that Dominion machines are rigged.
There's not evidence to that effect.
He says a lot of things that are just not substantiated by the evidence.
That is track one.
It's just him throwing out a bunch of things that he has heard about the irregularities and voter fraud in Georgia.
And Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State, saying that's bad information.
That is track number one.
Then there is track number two.
And track number two is the president saying that, and he says this repeatedly, that he wants Georgia to basically rejigger their calculation so that he won the state.
So a lot of people are reading that statement as though Trump is trying to blackmail the Secretary of State of Georgia into manufacturing votes so that he wins the state.
But the two statements are related.
In other words, Trump believes that there was widespread voter fraud and voter irregularity in Georgia.
Again, he has not provided proof to that effect.
I believe that there is an ongoing court case to that effect.
Even if you were to flip it in Georgia, by the way, it wouldn't shift the outcome of the election because Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, etc.
But say, for example, that, you know, all that were brought in court.
You can make those allegations in court, but many of the things that he has alleged have not actually been proved.
The evidence has not been provided.
What he is saying in this call over and over again is the same thing that Trump always says, which is he has a bunch of ideas.
He spews them out, right, in a sort of garbled fashion.
And then he finishes up by saying, and here's what I want.
It's the same thing as the Ukraine phone call and a bunch of ideas about Joe Biden and about Burisma and about Hunter Biden.
He was not making threats.
There's not evidence here that he actually threatened Raffensperger with anything.
He doesn't have the power to threaten Raffensperger with anything because Raffensperger hasn't committed a crime.
When he says things like you're taking a big political risk, that happens to be true, right?
I mean, it is a big political risk for Raffensperger.
This has been true since Trump decided to basically contest the Georgia election.
But there are some things that are true about this call and some things that are false about the call.
And so we'll play a couple of clips of it, and then I'll explain what is true about the call and what is false about the call.
And then we'll get to the broader issue, which is that Republicans, as of Now, do you think it's possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County?
Because that's what the rumor is.
And also that Dominion took out machines.
One second, let's play the phone call first.
So here was President Trump with Brad Raffensperger talking about Dominion voting systems.
Now, do you think it's possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County?
Because that's what the rumor is.
And also that Dominion took out machines.
That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their machinery.
Do you know anything about that?
Thank you.
Because that's illegal.
No.
Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.
Have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?
No.
Are you sure, Ryan?
I'm sure.
Okay, so as you can tell, it's not that Trump is very thoroughly prepared when it comes to Dominion.
He's heard some things.
And again, this is not a shock.
This is how Trump has operated literally his entire political career, is that he hears a thing, he then puts it out of his mouth, and it is a different thing.
So he says, have you guys been shipping into Dominion voting machines?
And Raffensperger guy says, no, no machines have been shipped out of state.
And then he says, well, Have you taken parts out of Dominion voting machines?
And we're now in the realm of things that are unevidenced.
OK, so that is line one.
Then there's line two.
And this is the stuff the media is really going crazy over.
And that is Trump repeatedly talking about the number of votes by which he lost Georgia.
Right.
So he says, what are we going to do here, folks?
I only need eleven thousand votes.
Fellas, I need eleven thousand votes.
Give me a break.
So look, all I want to do is this.
I just want to find eleven thousand 780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.
So as you hear there, he says, look, all I want to do is this.
I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
OK, so what the media are saying, he is saying, is that he is saying to Raffensperger, I want you to manufacture those votes out of thin air.
And I don't care whether there was voter fraud or voter irregularity.
I want you to go under your bed and I want you to find votes for Donald Trump.
And then I want you to retally.
That's not what Trump is saying.
What Trump is saying is he believes that there was widespread voter fraud and voter irregularity.
Undoubtedly, there was more voter fraud and voter irregularity than the margin of victory for Joe Biden in the state.
And therefore, he should be declared the winner of the state.
He's not ordering Raffensperger to manufacture votes out of thin air.
He's not ordering Raffensperger to magically come up with 12,000 votes.
That's not what he's doing.
It's bad enough what he's doing.
Now, the reason it's bad enough what he's doing is because if you actually care about voter fraud and voter irregularity, you shouldn't be tying that to results.
What you should say is I'm concerned about voter fraud.
I'm concerned about voter irregularity.
There are a bunch of outstanding allegations that have been made that you have not answered.
And so I want specific answers on those, not because the margin of victory Is the key issue, not because I want you to get to that 12,000 votes and flip the state, but because I care about voter fraud and voter irregularity.
So for people who seriously want to rejigger the system, it can't be a self-interested pursuit.
It can't be I care about voter fraud and voter irregularity because it hurt me.
It has to be I care about voter fraud and voter irregularity generally, right?
That is the biggest problem with Trump's phone call.
The specter of a candidate in an election calling up the election official as President of the United States and telling him that he is upset that the margin is 11,000 votes and that he doesn't really care about the voter fraud and voter irregularity.
All he cares about is the margin.
That's ugly stuff.
Is that criminal stuff?
No.
People who are suggesting that this is criminal activity, that's silly.
It's not criminal activity.
People who are suggesting that Trump is quote-unquote threatening Raffensperger.
I read the entire transcript.
There really is not evidence of threatening behavior by Trump.
You can say there's a power imbalance in the conversation.
That's certainly true.
It's certainly true that when the president calls you up and says he wants you to find a thing, you feel pressure to find the thing.
That does not mean that there's an actual Attempt by Trump to actually punish Raffensperger in any way other than the sort of overtly political yelling at Raffensperger, which he's been doing for months since the election itself.
Okay, so that was the big story last night is the tape and people suggesting that Trump was trying to get Raffensperger to manufacture votes.
That part of the story is not true.
It doesn't mean the phone call was good.
Again, kind of like Ukraine, the phone call can be bad.
And also, it cannot be what the media is saying that the phone call is.
Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the broader issue, right?
Because the phone call is Off to the side and somewhat irrelevant to the broader issue of what Congress is going to do on January 6th.
We're going to go through the entire process.
We're going to talk about what various Congress people and senators are talking about doing right now.
We'll get to that in just one moment first.
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Okay, so meanwhile, the big story through the week is not gonna be this Trump tape, which is going to disappear into the ether as far as people who care about it within the next 48 hours.
The media are gonna try and blow it into Trump did something quote unquote impeachable or he committed some sort of criminal offense.
No, again, a thing can be bad.
It can be immoral without the thing being criminal or impeachable.
Okay, but the bigger question is what's going to happen on Wednesday.
So just to set the stage, the way that this typically works, okay, the actual process under the Electoral Counts Act is that, and the Electoral Counts Act was created in 1887.
I'll explain the background in just a second.
The way that this works is that members of Congress are empowered to object to individual state electoral college returns.
It is the Congressional Research Service, summing up the Electoral College Act as it currently stands.
stands, quote, objections to individual state returns must be made in writing by at least one member each of the Senate and House of Representatives.
If an objection meets these requirements, the joint session recesses and the two houses separate and debate the question in their respective chambers for a maximum of two hours.
Right.
You have the House goes to one side, the Senate goes to the other side.
They yell at each other about whether these electoral college votes should be counted.
The two votes, the two houses then vote separately to accept or reject the objection.
They then reassemble in joint session and announce the results of their respective votes.
An objection to a state's electoral vote must be approved by both houses in order for any contested votes to be excluded.
So on what grounds can you challenge electoral college votes?
Well, you can challenge on two grounds.
One, that they were not regularly given.
That's the language of the statute.
Or two, that the electors were not quote-unquote lawfully certified.
So regularly given means that the elector was bribed or fraudulent.
That's what regularly given means.
That we find out that an elector was supposed to vote for Donald Trump and voted for Joe Biden because Hunter slipped him cocaine or something, right?
And then lawfully certified means that the governor Has to actually certify the ascertainment process.
Right?
So lawfully certified just means that the governor did what he's supposed to do.
And if it was not lawfully certified, then the House can debate this sort of stuff.
Under those particular challenges, electors would then be discarded, and that would change the math necessary for victory.
Now, it is not unprecedented for these challenges to happen.
It is unprecedented for the size and scope of the challenge now being contemplated by the Republicans to happen.
We'll get to that in a second, but it's not unprecedented.
Back in 2005, January 6th, 2005, according to CNN, Alleging widespread irregularities on Election Day, a group of Democrats in Congress objected Thursday to the counting of Ohio's 20 electoral votes, delaying the official certification of the 2004 presidential election results.
The move was not designed to overturn the re-election of President Bush, said Ohio Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones and California Senator Barbara Boxer, who filed the objection.
The objecting Democrats said they wanted to draw attention to the need for aggressive election reform in the wake of what they said were widespread voter problems in Ohio.
The House of Representatives and Senate met, this is again in 2005, in a constitutionally mandated session to count the electoral votes.
Vice President Dick Cheney presided over the session.
The results from each state, read in alphabetical order, were ticked through quickly until Ohio was called, and then a clerk wrote a letter from Boxer and Tubbs-Jones, and then the chambers had to split, and then they argued about each other, were with each other, and then they came back together, and that was sort of the end of that particular process.
Now it is worth noting that there was fairly significant, if not support, then tacit unwillingness to shut down Barbara Boxer by some top Democrats.
Now, it is true.
John Kerry, who was the candidate for the Democrats, disassociated himself from this effort.
He said, listen, the election's over.
Challenging the electoral votes is useless.
There's no reason to do this.
But among people who went silent, James Clyburn, who's now the majority whip for the Democrats, this is Nathan Wurzel reporting, Frank Pallone, now chairman of Energy and Commerce Committee, Maxine Waters, who's chairwoman of Financial Services, Ed Markey, who's now a senator, and John Lewis.
So there was some support for this, or at least tacit support, for this process back in 2005.
Now Barbara Boxer, of course, is claiming there's no comparison.
Now, there absolutely is a comparison.
Barbara Boxer was the dumbest member of the United States Senate until her retirement.
She has not gained in intelligence since leaving office.
Here was Barbara Boxer on CNN the other day.
Well, there's no comparison to what Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones and I did in 05.
Number one, John Kerry had conceded the race.
We have a president here who's orchestrating kind of an overthrow of the election.
Secondly, we said up front, we had no interest.
We said up front, we had no interest in overturning the election.
All we wanted was to focus on voter suppression that we saw.
in Ohio.
Okay, but that of course is not true.
The only reason that they challenged the electoral results in Ohio is because they wanted to focus on overturning the election.
Okay, so there is precedent for this.
Is there precedent for the candidate themselves to support this effort?
No, not really, at least not for 140 years or so.
Is there precedent for large swaths of Congress backing this sort of effort?
No, there's not.
So that is, in fact, unprecedented.
So it's not unprecedented for this sort of thing to happen.
And it's not unprecedented for these challenges to happen.
It happened in 1969, about the 68 election.
It happened again in 2005.
But for this level of support to be thrown behind it, that is somewhat unprecedented.
So we're going to go through the legality here, because I know there's a big debate here on the right about what is legal and what is not, what the Constitution is designed to do, how you cancel electoral votes.
We're going to go through all the details in just one second, so you know more than you did before this show began.
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Okay, so let's do a little bit of background here about what the electoral college certification process is supposed to do.
And why it currently is constituted the way that it is constituted.
So, the Constitution of the United States says this.
This is from the 12th Amendment.
Okay, so we'll stop right there for just a second because there are some people who are now claiming that Vice President Mike Pence is supposed to somehow not count the votes.
That it's his job to determine whether the votes are legit and then just not count the votes that he doesn't like.
That is not legally based, okay?
The vice president does not have the power to do that.
That would be ridiculous.
Like, on just a normal constitutional level, the idea of the vice president being able to unilaterally decide who's president is totally crazy, particularly when you're talking about the vice president very often being on the same ticket as a person who is running.
Can you imagine back in 2004, Dick Cheney just deciding, you know what?
I preside over the Senate.
Guess what?
Bush won.
Don't even have to count the votes.
Can you imagine in 1980, Jimmy Carter's vice president just saying, you know what?
My job to count the votes.
My job.
You know what?
Jimmy won.
Sure, he lost, but he won.
It would be crazy to have that.
That is not the constitutional system.
That is not the constitutional structure.
That's clearly not the intent of the Constitution.
Okay, so by the way, worthy of mention here is Lin Wood.
So Lin Wood, who's this lawyer from Georgia who's been, he was part of the original Kraken team and all of this kind of stuff.
Lin Wood's a crazy person.
And not only has he been telling people not to vote in the Georgia Senate runoffs, which we'll get to in a little bit, he is now suggesting that Vice President Pence is going to be in jail.
Okay, I'm just going to point out that if you're paying attention to Lin Wood, at this point you're, You're being- I don't know what to tell you.
He's crazy.
Okay, he tweeted out over the weekend.
Okay, other things that Linwood has tweeted over the past 24 hours.
Pompeo will save the election.
Pence will be in jail awaiting trial for treason.
He will face execution by firing squad.
He is a coward and will sing like a bird and confess all.
Okay, other things that Linwood has tweeted over the past 24 hours, quote, I believe Chief Justice John Roberts and a multitude of powerful individuals worldwide are being blackmailed in a horrendous scheme involving rape and murder of children captured on videotape.
I have the key to the files containing the videos.
I've also shared this information.
This blackmail scheme is conducted by members of 10 of the world's most well-known and elite intelligence agencies.
One of those groups was hacked by a group known as Lizard Squad.
The blackmail files of rape and murder were obtained by this group and copy was provided to Isaac Cappy.
After Cappy received the hacked files from members of Lizard Squad, he gave files to one friend and the encryption key to another friend.
He provided this information to his friends shortly before he was murdered in May 13, 2019.
Members of Lizard Squad were jailed for hacking.
Jeffrey Epstein used this same blackmail scheme of child rape and child murder to either further his own interests or those of any intelligence agency with whom he worked.
Um, yeah, uh, okay.
So, that's Lynwood.
So, I'm gonna go with not Lynwood's legal analysis.
Other legal analysis that is not very good.
Peter Navarro, who is the president's special trade representative, said on Fox that Mike Pence has the power to delay the inauguration.
He does not.
This is not correct.
And by the way, if January 20th arrived and Joe Biden had not actually been designated the president-elect of the United States beforehand, you know who'd become president?
Trump doesn't just keep being president on January 20th if the office is vacant.
Then the House of Representatives decide who's president.
So get ready for President Pelosi if this is actually how you think it's gonna go.
So I'm just pointing out the bad legal analysis so you know where it is.
Here's Peter Navarro, who is not a good lawyer.
Vice President Pence, he has the authority to give that 10-day window to do what needs to get done, and I cannot imagine when he looks at the facts, he won't vote the right way on that.
And you know, Peter, the interesting thing is that that 10 day window is it is something that they can change the date.
The first January 20th cannot be changed.
That's constitutional.
But this whole certification thing, the dates.
Well, it can be changed, actually.
We can go past that date.
We can go past that date.
We can go past that date if we need to.
No, you can't.
OK, so.
What is the actual process?
We're going to get to the actual process and what is now being challenged, right?
Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, a bunch of Republican senators are jumping on board.
We'll get to the legal analysis here because it's become quite controversial.
And it's become quite controversial because I think some people are trying to politically make this into some sort of litmus test.
It is not, in fact, a litmus test.
The legal analysis here is, I think, pretty faulty.
And strategically speaking, it is not going to end with Trump being retained as President of the United States.
There's literally no way for that to happen under the current process.
Even if it were legal, it would not be effective.
Okay, so we're gonna get to that in one second.
I'm gonna analyze the whole issue for you.
We'll go through all the arguments, because people who I really respect on the legal side are making counter-arguments.
We'll go through all of them, so you'll have all the information at your disposal.
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Alrighty, so now let's go through the actual Electoral College process.
So I've told you about how challenges take place under the Electoral College Act.
You need to know the history of the Electoral College Act to know what we are attempting to avoid.
Okay, so the reason that the Electoral College Act was originally passed, I'm gonna give you all the legal background on all the relevant laws, and then you can decide for yourself whether you think there's a good effort or a bad effort or a malign effort.
Yeah, we'll get to it.
Okay, so let's begin with the 1876 election.
So the Constitution is actually not particularly clear on what happens if there is controversy within a state sufficient that the electors, that separate slates of electors are sent to Congress.
So here's what happened in 1876, right?
Remember, this is only about a decade after the end of the Civil War.
So the prospect of violence is still very real.
There's still very large-scale questions about voter suppression and voter fraud, particularly in the South.
So, it's an election between Rutherford B. Hayes, Rutherford B. Hayes, who is the Republican, and Samuel Tilden, who is the Democrat.
So, Hayes' support is entirely Northern, with the exception of New York, which went for Samuel Tilden, because New York had some fairly severe feelings about race, obviously, that were pretty wrong and despicable.
Copperheads were big in New York.
So Samuel Tilden wins New York.
And in the South, there are a bunch of states that are in controversy, because it's pretty obvious that the South is very much in favor of Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, but a lot of people can't vote.
A lot of people, there are carpetbaggers, like there are some real problems of voter irregularity, and there are serious questions as to who really should be able to vote, considering that 11 years earlier, a lot of these people were literally fighting each other in the streets.
Okay, so, during that election, during the 1876 election, multiple Southern states actually sent several competing slates of electors.
Republicans claimed in those Southern states that voter intimidation and fraud had been the reason that Tilden was declared the victor in places like Louisiana and South Carolina.
Tilden had won the popular vote by over a quarter million votes nationwide.
He did not have an electoral college majority.
He was stuck at 184 electoral votes.
At the time, he needed 185 to win.
Rutherford B. Hayes had 165 electoral votes.
So basically what would happen is that multiple slates of electors were now being sent from these states.
So the state legislature would send a slate of electors.
They would say, okay, Tilden won the state.
We're sending our electors over to Congress.
And then the Republican governor would be like, nope, I'm sending my own slate of electors because of voter fraud and voter intimidation.
I don't believe the voter outcome.
I'm sending my own slate of electors.
Okay, so there would actually be two somewhat legitimate competing sources of slates of electors in 1876.
Democrats at the time controlled the House of Representatives.
Republicans controlled the Senate.
Hayes supporters, who are Republicans, argued that the Vice President should count the votes under the Constitution and disregard slates he didn't like, right?
This is the issue that we were discussing before.
The two sides instead agreed to set up a special committee charged with developing a way of solving the issue.
The Senate voted 47-17 in favor of this.
The House did the same, 191-86.
The way that this committee worked is that five representatives were selected by the House, five senators were selected by the Senate, four Supreme Court justices were named, and then a fifth Supreme Court justice would be selected by the other four.
So they came up with a committee, five members of the House, five senators, five Supreme Court justices.
Democrats argued that every single election should be investigated.
Republicans argued instead that governor's certification was the final word.
Democrats then tried to filibuster vote counts from nearly every state.
Eventually, Democrats basically just gave in because the committee came down and found that the slates of electors from the governors should be respected.
The real outcome here was not solved by the commission.
It was not solved by an investigation or anything like that.
The real outcome was solved by one of the worst things that has happened in the racial history of the United States, the Compromise of 1877, under which Rutherford B. Hayes became President of the United States, despite losing both the popular vote and probably the Electoral College vote.
Okay, so you have this mess of an election, only solved by the end of Reconstruction, essentially, which is not much of a solution.
So, they come up with the Electoral Count Act.
grow. Later investigations, by the way, showed no wrongdoing by Rutherford B. Hayes. It did show Democratic attempts to bribe election officials in disputed states. Okay, so you have this mess of an election only solved by the end of Reconstruction, essentially, which is not much of a solution. So they come up with the Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 sets out the process that we referred to before, which is that the vice president opens these votes, he counts the votes, and then a member of Congress and a senator can get together and challenge the votes of both
houses, then recess to go debate it. And then they come back together. And if both votes of the congressional bodies decide that they are going to throw out votes from a particular state because they're illegitimate or something, then they go ahead and they do that.
Okay, now.
Even that is not strict enough, really.
Okay?
Because the fact is that the Constitution was not really meant to have a majority in Congress simply decide who the President of the United States is.
That's really not what was supposed to happen here.
That would actually allow the federal government to override state governments.
The real question, and this is what the Electoral Count Act says, is you have to have specific grounds for challenging votes.
One would be something like bribery of electors, and the second would be that the governor did not certify the slate of electors.
Right?
Those would be the actual grounds.
Okay, how do slates of electors get certified?
So, according to Section 5 of U.S.
US Code Title III, this is passed in, I believe, 1948.
It says, quote, if any state shall have provided by laws enacted prior to the day fixed for the appointment of the electors, for its final determination of any controversy or contest concerning the appointment of all or any of the electors of such state by judicial or other methods or procedures, and such determination shall have been made at least six days before the time fixed for the meeting of the electors, such determination made pursuant to such law so existing on said day, made at least six days prior to said time of meeting the electors, shall be conclusive and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes
as provided in the Constitution, and as here and after regulated so far as the ascertainment of the electors appointed by such state is concerned.
In other words, if a state takes advantage of the safe harbor provision, remember this, we discussed this late in December, if the safe harbor time hits, Okay, which is made six days before the time fixed for the meeting of the electors and the states have certified their votes, we are done here.
Okay, now challenges really are not relevant because at least when it comes to lawfully certified.
In other words, once the governor says, this is the slate of electors and he does so within the safe harbor period, these are now the electors.
Okay, and the challenges to the electors cannot be based on whether they were quote unquote lawfully certified.
It can only be based on regularly given, right?
Which would mean normally bribery or fraud.
So that is where things sort of stand.
That is the legal background for all of this.
So over the last couple of weeks, there's been growing momentum for challenging electoral votes in Congress in the same way that Barbara Boxer did in 2005, in the same way that some Congress people did in 1969.
And this has been led on the House side by Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who said over the weekend that they were gaining a lot of momentum.
He said, our fight for honest and accurate elections gains momentum.
Jim Jordan and I co-lead conference call with 50 plus congressmen who join and fight for America's Republic.
Morale is high.
Fight.
Okay, so apparently there are over 100 Republican congresspeople who are joining onto this effort.
As Chip Roy of Texas has pointed out, it's odd that all these congresspeople who were literally elected in the same election in which they're now claiming that electoral college votes should be thrown out are challenging the electoral college votes but not their own election.
That's kind of a weird thing.
I mean, they were elected by exactly the same ballots.
They're now challenging.
But the question is whether they have any real serious legal grounds to do so.
Okay, so Preliminary question.
Aside, we'll get back to that in a second.
The legal grounds for this.
On a strategic level, this is not going to work.
The reason this is not going to work on a strategic level is perfectly obvious.
The Democrats control the House.
So let's say that Republicans challenge these electoral college votes in the House.
They get some senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and a lot of people who I like, right?
Steve Daines, a lot of people to sign on to this.
And then the House is recessed to discuss the votes.
Who thinks that the Democratic House is gonna be like, you know what?
After all, we decided that we're gonna just disregard, you know what?
Slates of electors from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada.
You know what?
You're totally right.
You're 100% right.
Nancy Pelosi is gonna come forward, teeth of clack, and be like, Donald Trump, you're totally right.
Okay, so that's not going to happen, right?
I mean, let's just be practical about this.
That's not going to happen, which means the electoral votes don't get thrown out.
End of story.
We're done here.
Which suggests that this is really about one of two things.
Posturing by some people.
Because they want to appear that they are fighting even though there really is no available avenue left.
Right?
The election is over.
It was over the day the Electoral College voted with certified slate of electors.
The certification process is a formality.
It was always a formality.
Except since 1876.
So instead, what you are seeing, because in some cases it's either posturing or it's an attempt to fight voter fraud by drawing attention to it, is that this is what Congress people are saying.
And so Josh Hawley puts out a statement, this is the senator from Missouri, who I think is pretty clearly attempting to run for president in 2024 and capture a lot of the Trump base.
So, he said, here is his statement.
I mean, it is true, by the way, that some Democrats in Congress tried to object to certification of electoral votes during the 2016 election.
That was gaveled down by Joe Biden in the Senate.
I mean, it is true, by the way, that some Democrats in Congress tried to object to certification of electoral votes during the 2016 election.
That was gaveled down by Joe Biden in the Senate.
Joe Biden was the was the vice president at the time.
How he said they were praised by Democratic leadership in the media when they did.
They were entitled to do so.
Now those of us concerned about the integrity of this election are entitled to do the same.
And you can.
I mean, no one's saying you can't try this.
I'm just saying it's not really well legally predicated.
And the basic model here, which would be that any time you don't like the outcome of an election, you and a majority of Congress can simply throw out all electoral college votes.
That is clearly not what the constitutional structure was meant to create.
Remember, the Electoral College is supposed to represent the states.
Remember that.
Not members of the federal government.
Not the popular vote.
The point of the Electoral College is that the states are supposed to appoint the electors.
Once the states have appointed the electors, the federal government does not have cause to simply throw out slates of electors absent obvious evidence of fraud that was not presented in court here.
Because, again, court after court, many of them Trump judges, said you're not even... I mean, the Trump team didn't even allege fraud in a lot of these cases, particularly Pennsylvania.
In any case, Halley says, I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6th without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.
Okay, so we'll get to this argument in a second, which is that the electoral college vote from Pennsylvania should be thrown out despite state certification because it violates the federal constitution.
That's an argument that my friend Mark Levin makes, and it's an interesting argument.
I disagree with the legal analysis.
House.
How he says I cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega corporations including Facebook and Twitter to interfere in the election in support of Joe Biden.
Okay, that part is true.
But you don't challenge electoral votes because Facebook and Twitter were really bad.
Those two things are completely disconnected.
I totally agree that Facebook, Twitter, big tech, social media, the media itself were worth 10 points to Joe Biden in this election.
There's no question about that.
But that doesn't give you a legal predicate for challenging electoral college votes.
In any case, Howley says, for these reasons, I follow the same practice, Democrat members of Congress have in years past and object during the certification process on January 6th to raise these critical issues.
Okay, well, then because Howley does that, right?
Then because Josh Howley has challenged the electoral votes and you now have one Senator, that was the question is whether one Senator would go along with members from the House to actually jump into this process.
Because of that, you see a lot of other members of the Senate who, again, want to demonstrate fealty to Trump and demonstrate fight and demonstrate that they don't like the outcome of the election, jumping on board.
Again, I don't think there's a lot of legal basis to this, as I will explain in just one second.
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Okay.
We're going to get to more of the legal analysis in just one second because it's kind of fascinating.
And we're also going to get to the Georgia race.
There's still a lot more to get to because we're on break for like a week and a half.
First, there are a million reasons that people believe lies about conservatives.
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All right, so Josh Hawley signifies that he is going to join Mo Brooks and he is going to challenge these electoral college results.
And he says that he wants to do so in order to put a spotlight on what has happened in Pennsylvania and on allegations of voter fraud and also on Big Tech.
So, yeah, again, I think that what he says about Big Tech is 100% right.
I don't know what it has to do with challenging Electoral College votes.
So, this prompts a bunch of other Republican senators to jump on board, including Senators Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Marsha Blackburn, Mike Braun.
Senators elect Cynthia Loomis from Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
And they put out a statement.
It said, the election of 2020, like the election of 2016, was hard fought and in many swing states narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud violations and lax enforcement of election law and other voting irregularities. Now, the problem here, of course, is that when you say that it featured unprecedented allegations, you actually, if you're going to challenge Electoral College votes, you actually have to show unprecedented, unprecedented evidence, right?
Unprecedented allegations.
I mean, we can do unprecedented— Democrats do unprecedented allegations.
And I will point this out here, too.
I mean, Democrats did unprecedented allegations for four years.
They claimed that Donald Trump was a Russian tool, that Vladimir Putin had hired Trump, basically, to become president of the United States, and that Trump had gained the office simply by cooperating with Vlad.
So that was an unprecedented allegation.
Turns out they didn't have unprecedented proof, and so it came to nothing.
But when Democrats complain that allegations are not sufficient, take that with a grain of salt.
Whenever it's a Democrat pushing allegations, the allegations are sufficient.
I'd hope that conservatives are a little bit more consistent, that allegations are never sufficient.
You need actual evidence to back the allegations, whether we are talking about bullcrap about Brett Kavanaugh, or bullcrap about the Covington Catholic kids, Or whether you're talking about bull crap, about systemic American racism, like actual evidence would be necessary, not just allegations.
So it's not enough to say unprecedented allegations of voter fraud.
You actually have to show proof.
But, say the Senators, the allegations are not believed just by one individual candidate.
They are widespread, because 67% of Republicans say the election was rigged, and so do 17% of Democrats and 31% of Independents.
These are all the Senators on the Republican side who are going along with the challenge.
Some members of Congress disagree with that assessment, as do many members of the media.
But whether or not our elected officials or journalists believe it, that deep distrust of our democratic processes will not magically disappear.
It should concern us all.
It poses an ongoing threat to the legitimacy of all subsequent administrations.
Okay, so let's just be straight about this.
All those doubts are not going to go away because Congress has a two-hour session where they yell at each other.
That's not going to happen.
And they're not going to go away if there is some sort of jointly appointed electoral commission, which is what Cruz et al.
are calling for.
They are calling for a following of the 1877 precedent.
Now remember, the Electoral Count Act was designed explicitly to avoid the 1877 Commission.
Because that commission, it turned out, was completely partisan.
And not only was it completely partisan, the only way that that crisis ended up being resolved was the end of Reconstruction.
So it wasn't like that was a wildly great precedent to set.
And that it worked fantastic.
So we should go back to that.
But they're calling for an electoral investigation.
It'll take 10 days.
Now, let's be real about that.
Who thinks that at the end of 10 days, everybody who was disquieted about the rather serious allegations of voter fraud and irregularity are gonna be, oh, you know, they took 10 days.
I mean, they took a whole 10 days.
Now I feel better.
Not going to happen.
Obviously.
So just on a practical level, it's not going to quell fears.
It is not going to end the way that Republicans want it to end because Democrats control the House.
So that's just not going to happen.
Nonetheless, Vice President Pence's Chief of Staff said that he welcomed the effort by some lawmakers to raise objections.
Mark Short said, Now, listen, again, they can do that.
They can raise objections, bring forward evidence.
about voter fraud and irregularity, and therefore welcomes the effort of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence.
Now, listen, again, they can do that.
They can raise objections, bring forward evidence.
It's not going to be practical, and it's not going to end with any change here.
Senator Tom Cotton, who again, is a very pro-Trump senator, right?
Cotton is really a pro-Trump guy from Arkansas.
He put out a statement on why he was not going to join these efforts, and I think this is systemically correct.
The point that he's making is you don't want to set the precedent whereby the Congress of the United States decides to completely overlook the certified electoral college results in various states in favor of simply ruling at the federal level which votes should be counted and which votes should not.
That's a huge mistake.
Especially because, let's just, on a practical level, point something out.
Republicans, since 1992, since 19, well, sorry, since 1988, Republicans have won the popular vote, a grand total, of one time.
Since 1988, Republicans have won the popular vote, a grand total of one time, once.
Since 1988, since I was four years old, Republicans have won the popular national vote in a presidential election one time.
So Republicans, rightly, are big fans of the Electoral College.
I think on a systemic level, they should be big fans of the Electoral College, because I think the states should have a say in who gets to be president.
But that's the point.
If you have Congress overruling the states, not on the basis of proved fraud, not on the basis of proved voter irregularity, but on the basis they don't like the results, you're setting the precedent whereby, in four years, Vice President Kamala Harris Let's say that Biden is on his last legs.
Harris runs to succeed him.
And now you have her ruling at the top of the Senate on her own loss and simply saying, you know what?
I won the popular vote.
The Electoral College count doesn't matter anymore.
Republicans made clear that last time.
We're done.
I win.
How's that gonna go?
That gonna go great?
I don't think so.
It's setting a very, very, very negative legal precedent here that is going to be extraordinarily counterproductive.
And by the way, it's not going to end with Trump retaining the office of the presidency.
Again, Democrats in the House would have to agree with Republicans in the Senate to throw out Electoral College votes, which is not going to happen.
So it is bad law.
It is bad policy.
And it is not effective in any real sense, which means that it's kind of virtue signaling, unless people actually think it's going to work for some odd reason that I can't comprehend.
Like, there's no way this works.
It's just not going to work.
Okay, so Tom Cotton makes this clear.
Again, this is not about opposing Trump or not opposing Trump.
This is about recognizing that there are consequences to messing around with the legal system.
I didn't just vote for Trump.
I stumped for Trump.
I told you why you should vote for Trump.
I'm quite upset with the outcome of the election.
Tom Cotton is quite upset with the outcome of the election.
That doesn't mean that what we are now pursuing here is good policy or effective policy.
So Cotton put out a statement.
He said, quote, I share the concerns of many Arkansans about irregularities in the presidential election, especially in states that rushed through election law changes to relax standards of voting by mail.
I also share their disappointment with the election results.
I therefore support a commission to study the last election and propose reforms to protect the integrity of our elections.
And after Republicans win in Georgia, the Senate should also hold more hearings on these matters.
Nevertheless, the founders entrusted our elections chiefly to the states, not Congress.
They entrusted the election of our president to the people acting through the Electoral College, not Congress.
They entrusted the adjudication of election disputes to the courts, not Congress.
Under the Constitution and federal law, Congress's power is limited to counting electoral votes submitted by the states.
Correct.
If Congress purported to overturn the results of the Electoral College, it would not only exceed that power, it would establish unwise precedents.
First, Congress would take away the power to choose the president from the people, which would essentially end presidential elections and place that power in the hands of whichever party controls Congress.
Second, Congress would imperil the Electoral College itself, which gives small states like Arkansas a voice in presidential elections.
Democrats could achieve their longstanding goal of eliminating the Electoral College, in effect, by refusing to count electoral votes in the future for a Republican president-elect.
Okay, so Cotton happens to be legally correct about all of this, right?
This is right.
Cotton's explanation is correct.
Okay, so that leaves one outstanding legal debate that is interesting on an intellectual and a legal level.
So, Mark Levin.
Friend of mine, really good guy, really obviously terrific conservative who's done enormous work in convincing Americans why conservatism is a good idea.
So late in the year, he put out a piece trying to explain why electoral challenges were a good idea, particularly with regard to the Pennsylvania vote.
So here's what he says.
He says specifically, Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Federal Constitution could not be more explicit.
It states, in pertinent part, each state shall appoint in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.
This language is purposeful.
During the Constitutional Convention, there were various proposals suggested for electing a president.
Should the president be directly elected?
That proposal was rejected because the founders feared a purely democratic process could be hijacked by a temporary majority.
Should the president be chosen from within the national legislature?
That proposal was also rejected.
Should the judiciary play a role?
That idea was rejected.
The electoral process rested first and foremost on the state legislatures directing how the electors would be chosen.
The reason?
While rejecting the direct election of a president, the framers concluded that the state legislatures were closest to the people.
Okay, so basically he is saying that because Pennsylvania did the wrong process for putting together their voting procedure, because courts and the governor intervened in the process, that this means that the entire state electoral college vote should be thrown out because the federal government is empowered with ensuring that each state appoints in such a manner as the legislature directs a number of electors.
On the face, that makes some sense, right?
I mean, the Constitution says state legislatures have to decide the process, and in Pennsylvania, it was not state legislatures that were deciding the process.
And the problem is that a bunch of courts have already decided that this is not correct interpretation.
And in fact, the actual meaning of the Constitution here is relatively clear.
What it means is that the Electoral College is decided by the state legislature.
The legislature decides exactly the manner in which the Electoral College is selected, but it doesn't mean that they have to be in charge of every single detail.
So, for example, there is a judge, a recent Trump appointee named Brett Ludwig, and he ruled specifically on this argument.
And here's what he said.
As used in the Electors Clause, the word manner refers to the form or method of selection of the presidential electors.
It requires state legislatures merely to set the approach for selecting presidential electors.
Put another way, it simply refers to the mode of appointing electors consistent with the plain meaning of the term.
So what does that mean?
It means that you could have chosen to appoint electors directly, right?
The state legislature could just select the electors, or the state legislature could do it by congressional district, or they could simply have the governor appoint the electors.
But once they decide, then they decide, right?
The approach, form, method, or mode that a legislature sets for appointing presidential electors is by general ballot at the general election.
Okay, so the same logic applies in Pennsylvania.
Here is what the judge said in this particular case.
He said, issues of mere administration of a general election do not mean there has not been a general ballot at a general election.
Plaintiff's conflation of these potential nonconformities with constitutional violations is contrary to the plain meaning of the elector's clause.
If a plaintiff's reading of manner was correct, any disappointed loser in a presidential election able to hire a team of clever lawyers could flag claim deviations from the election rules and cast doubt on the election results.
In other words, the Pennsylvania State Legislature said that the popular vote of the state of Pennsylvania was going to decide the outcome.
Okay, then counties went ahead and did a bunch of different procedures for gathering the popular vote.
A lawyer could simply say, well, the legislature didn't decide how that was going to happen, so therefore the process is broken and you can throw out those state electors.
That is not what the Constitution means in this particular circumstance, I don't think.
I understand where Mark is coming from.
I don't think that that is correct.
And again, I think that it sets the federal government over these states as to how they actually do their election processes, which is a mistake.
You don't want the federal government actually doing that because the federal government could be controlled by Democrats, guys.
As David French points out, and this is a good point, It is quite possible that then Democrats can object to Texas's electoral vote for Trump because Texas Governor Greg Abbott invoked emergency powers to modify statutory restrictions regarding the delivery of mail-in ballots.
So the legislature didn't actually decide how the vote went in Texas either.
So this is sort of the contrary argument to what Mark has been arguing.
And again, I think Mark's argument is interesting.
I don't think that it is fully convincing, to me at least.
Meanwhile, Andrew McCarthy, again, a big ally of Trump, has a long piece today about this process.
As he points out, the law makes pretty clear that once the state certifications are done, they are now conclusive.
Says Andy McCarthy, it is not a matter of whether it is the result we would have preferred or even whether it is a result we suspect.
It is the law.
This undeniable fact has been recognized by seven federal judges, including judges recently appointed by Trump, who have examined the Trump claims, rejected them, and disclaimed any authority under the circumstances to disturb the state's determinations.
If despite all of that, Democrats were trying to orchestrate a congressional do-over, Republicans would be pointing out, with due indignation, the Constitution makes the election of a president, like the ratification of the Constitution, a matter of state sovereignty.
Under our foundational law, it is the state, not the people, not Congress, that determine which candidates are receiving electoral votes.
The 12th Amendment requires that the count has to be done in the presence of lawmakers, over which the vice president presides, But this sort of power grab is really not justifiable under the Constitution or under prevailing law, says Andy McCarthy.
And this seems correct.
Not only that, but it's pretty obviously gonna fail.
Even if you agree with the argument that there's solid legal grounds for challenging these electoral results, Democrats control the House.
They're not going to vote to throw out electoral college votes in these various states.
So when people say, the reason I'm spending a lot of time on this is because there are a lot of folks who seem to want to turn this into some sort of conservative litmus test.
Like, if you're truly conservative, you're a true believer, then you will back these electoral college challenges.
I think that there's a fairly solid conservative case.
When I say fairly solid, I mean very solid.
Conservative case to be made.
They're actually undermining a bunch of fundamental principles that you are going to be sad you undermine in five minutes.
And when you say that the federal government should have the capacity to simply throw out electoral college votes on any basis they want, essentially, without providing proper evidence, That is not a precedent you want to set.
Republicans in presidential elections have traditionally relied on the Electoral College to provide them victory.
Again, considering that since 1988, one election, 2004, has been a popular vote victory for a Republican.
You're gonna need that Electoral College.
You're gonna miss it when it's gone.
So don't screw around with this process.
It is a mistake.
It is also a mistake to make this the paramount consideration, considering that there is an actual big election coming up this week.
The election of 2020 happened in 2020.
It is now 2021.
In the next two days, there is a massive election.
As in tomorrow, there is a massive election in Georgia.
That election is going to decide control of the Senate.
Regardless of what sort of processes are attempted in the next week, regardless of the political positioning of various senators or congresspeople, Joe Biden will be certified the winner of the election.
He already was by these various states.
Okay, so now the question becomes, what's going to happen in the Senate?
Just on a practical level, what's going to happen in the Senate?
And the answer is, if Democrats take the Senate, it's going to be a full-on disaster area.
Republicans in Georgia, get out and vote.
Get out and vote.
By the way, not just me saying this.
Trump is saying this.
His kids are saying this.
His team is saying this.
Get out and vote.
You need to vote in Georgia.
You cannot hand control of the Senate over to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
That's nuts.
There is no rationale whatsoever for handing over two Senate seats to Raphael Warnock, a Marxist radical, and John Ossoff, a trust fund socialist.
Don't do it.
So, David Perdue, who did beat Jon Ossoff by about 80,000 votes in the last go-round.
He just missed by a few votes, finishing above that 50% mark that would have sent him back to the Senate.
Perdue said over the weekend, if the Democrats are in charge, America is not going to be the same.
That is correct.
The bulwark against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is going to be a Republican Senate.
Do not blow it, guys.
Here is Perdue's ad over the weekend.
Now we take Georgia and then we change America.
To make sure that we don't have a Republican Senate majority so that we don't have to negotiate.
We win these two seats.
Plus Kamala Harris breaking the time.
It'll be like getting 60 votes.
When we take back the Senate and have the majority, we will have a lot to do.
Total Democratic control.
That's their goal.
If they're in charge, America will never be the same.
Save America.
Vote for David Perdue on January 5th.
Okay, and the media are all in, all in, on, on John Ossoff.
I mean, they are, they are all in on Ossoff.
They're all in on Raphael Warnock.
They are going at it with a vengeance.
It's amazing.
It's amazing how hard they are going for the Democrats.
So, Raphael Warnock.
who was in this runoff, right?
Ossoff is with Purdue and Warnock is running against Kelly Loeffler.
So, Raphael Warnock is getting just the golden treatment from the media.
Here's a headline from the New York Times about Raphael Warnock, a racial radical who has said openly anti-Semitic things, who has praised Jeremiah Wright, who has praised Louis Farrakhan, who did groundwork for a church visit from Fidel Castro.
Okay, this nut job.
Who, by the way, was briefly arrested for obstruction over investigation of child abuse at a summer camp back in the 90s.
And then later he was released and cleared.
Whose ex-wife suggested that he ran over her foot with a car, her foot with a car, and that he was a liar and all of this.
That guy is being treated with just the greatest, the greatest sort of kid gloves by the media.
Here's a headline from the New York Times, you ready?
Raphael Warnock, from the pulpit to politics, doesn't shy from uncomfortable truths.
Wow, what a hero, what a hero.
Now, well that seems to me, defending Jeremiah Wright's not an uncomfortable truth, it's you being a jackass.
But according to the media, this makes you a powerful voice, a powerful voice.
I mean, just incredible.
So the New York Times goes on and on about what a magical, magical man Raphael Warnock is.
The Washington Post has a piece.
I mean, this is all times.
The media are just disgusting.
I mean, they're disgustingly, partisanly biased in an insane way.
They did cost Trump the election, no doubt.
The lifestyle section of the Washington Post.
Lifestyle, not an opinion piece, lifestyle.
Raphael Warnock's campaign for the moral high ground.
What an amazing man he is.
He's so amazing.
For the past 15 years, Warnock has been the senior pastor at the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the same church once led by his hero, Martin Luther King Jr.
The flamboyant, preacher-pol style Warnock cultivated may be alien to many Americans, including many white Christians, but it is deeply familiar to those who grew up in and around Southern black churches.
In those churches, preachers make it their business to tell uncomfortable truths about American life, including the shameful ways the country treats its African American citizens.
What a hero.
What a hero he is.
Meanwhile, the media will just allow the Democrats to lie about Republicans over and over and over again.
So, for example, John Ossoff suggested that Republican Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a Klansman.
That is just a lie.
It's an overt lie.
Kelly Loeffler has taken pictures of thousands of people.
Here's the bottom line.
she took pictures with was a Klansman.
She didn't know the guy from Adam.
Doesn't matter, Jon Ossoff just goes on national TV and lies about it.
He has not received one iota of blowback from the same media who claim they are guardians of the truth because in fact they are not.
They're just guardians of Democrats.
Here's the bottom line.
Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a Klansman.
Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a Klansman.
And so she is stooping to these vicious personal attacks to distract from the fact that she's been campaigning with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.
I mean, we deserve better than that here in Georgia.
Okay, that is just a lie.
It's just a lie.
They're using it in the fact check.
That's not on the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Here's Kelly Loeffler slapping the pathological liar, Jon Ossoff.
Georgia knows that John Ossoff is a pathological liar.
He's a trust fund socialist whose only job has been working for the Chinese Communist Party in recent years.
And look, here's the deal.
If we're going to tell lies about my campaign, let's tell the truth about who he's campaigning with.
This is the truth.
Radical liberal Raphael Warnock has been involved in child abuse, domestic abuse.
So I'm not going to be lectured by some 33-year-old trust fund socialist who's a pathological liar.
Okay, I mean, she's right about this amazing how Ossoff and Warnock, I mean, the media are trying to cram the Democrats into power.
They're trying to do it.
If you're in Georgia, do not sit out the election.
I know you're pissed about what happened in 2020.
I know you are.
Turn the page because what's coming next is gonna be a lot, lot worse if Democrats take control of the United States Senate.
By the way, speaking of just the media being a bag of garbage, a couple of quick bag of garbage media stories for you here right now.
Okay, so bag of garbage media story number one.
So remember that time when we were told that California is just wonderful with COVID?
California was doing great.
I lived in L.A.
until very, very recently, and L.A.
was just—it was wonderful.
They shut down everything.
You couldn't go outdoor dining.
You couldn't hike.
You couldn't do a bunch of stuff for months at a time.
And they did an amazing job.
They crushed the curve, right?
I mean, they just did an amazing, amazing job.
There is only one problem.
In fact, they did not do an amazing job.
You can crush the curve, but it turns out that the curve then crushes you.
Because if you decide on wide-scale lockdown, then when people go out, they will infect each other at extraordinary rates.
And that's exactly what has been happening in L.A.
County, which now posted its third highest single-day total for coronavirus cases on New Year's, reporting 19,000 cases.
That means that over the last seven days, there was an average of more than 16,000 new COVID cases a day reported in the county, about 12 times bigger than the comparable figure from November 1st and the highest figure ever recorded.
The tally reported Friday pushed the average number of new daily COVID cases over the last week to over 16,000, Precisely around the same time, epidemiologists warn people infected around the Christmas holiday would begin to become infectious.
The hospitals are being overwhelmed.
They're being overrun in LA County.
It is a full-scale disaster area.
Speaking of full-scale disaster areas...
The growth of COVID again in New York is getting pretty severe.
And Andrew Cuomo has an idiotic plan.
So this bag of tools, I mean, he's just this awful, awful governor who presided over the worst death rate in the United States, with the exception of New Jersey.
Just a horrifying death rate, tens of thousands of dead in his state, because he decided to ship the elderly back into nursing homes with COVID.
This awful, awful governor who suggested for months that he didn't trust a vaccine developed under the Trump administration.
Now this guy is blowing it when it comes to tranching out the vaccine.
So here's how we should be tranching out the vaccine.
Okay, because these things have expiration dates.
Once they're out of the fridge, they're out of the fridge.
The way that it should work is that everybody who is elderly gets a shot.
Everybody who's elderly gets a shot.
And if you hit the end of the day, and there ain't nobody elderly around, you inoculate anybody who's there.
Because you don't want to waste the doses, right?
Because once they're out of the fridge, they're done.
So you want it better that somebody who is not in line should get the shot, than that somebody doesn't get the shot who's not in line, right?
Wasting doses is idiotic.
It makes no sense at all.
And in fact, there are lots of countries that have been doing this exactly right.
Israel is an excellent example.
Over a million people have already been vaccinated in Israel.
They have drive-thru lines.
You literally just get in your car, you drive to one of these drive-thrus, and you get the shot.
Here in Florida, there have been people lining up at places where the shots are available.
They're not wasting shots.
So Andrew Cuomo's plan, however, is he is so interested in the quote-unquote prioritization because he wants, I don't know, racial equity achieved via the inoculation of essential workers who are disproportionately minority or some such nonsense.
He is actually threatening to fine people millions of dollars if they take the vaccine out of order.
So he would rather that vaccine doses be spoiled than they go to somebody out of order.
Here is this dolt who's been treated as the godsend of COVID treatment.
Here's this moron, Andrew Cuomo.
I'm going to sign an executive order that says we're very clear the vaccines are a priority.
There's not going to be any politics at play as to who gets a vaccine.
And we look to the CDC, federal government, for guidance.
And we will not tolerate any fraud in the vaccination process.
Anyone who engages in fraud is going to be held accountable.
The executive order I'm going to sign today says a provider could be fined up to a million dollars and revocation of all state licenses.
Okay, so if you're knowingly not eligible, right, you came to the end of the day, there's nobody in line and there's a janitor there and he wants the vaccine.
You give him the janitor, he wants to fine you a million dollars and revoke your certification.
This is a recipe for losing doses of the vaccine.
Idiocy.
And that guy, give that guy an Emmy.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Follow the science.
The science.
Speaking of which, quick scientific note.
The state of California, apparently over the holiday, they moved to change insurance language on double mastectomy for gender dysphoric females, from cosmetic to reconstructive, to ensure no age limit for the procedure.
Okay, so if you are a woman, and you believe that you are a male, and you want to have double mastectomies, right, you want to cut off your breasts, Now, to make sure that insurance companies cover it, they are suggesting that your breasts are, I'm not kidding you, this is how California now describes normal human female breasts.
You ready?
Quote, abnormal structures of the body caused by congenital defects.
That's right, you don't have a condition called gender dysphoria.
What you have is an abnormal body.
Your body is abnormal for having grown in direct relation to its genetic source.
Your breasts are now abnormal structures of the body caused by congenital defects.
Trust the science, guys.
Trust the science.
I think that these people have everything well in hand.
Well in hand.
Okay.
Final note on the media.
I would be remiss if I didn't cover the story because it did, again, blow up over the break.
I know there's a long show today, but...
We missed about a week and a half of news.
So, the New York Times continues to promulgate cancel culture in extraordinary ways.
In extraordinary ways.
So, Dan Levin had a piece over the holiday that's just insane.
It was called a racial slur, a viral video, and a reckoning.
A white high school student withdrew from her chosen college after a three-second video caused an uproar online.
The classmate who shared it publicly has no regrets.
So what exactly is this story?
This shows you how far our culture is trashed.
This is why we gotta fight back in the culture, guys, because our culture is trashed.
According to the New York Times, this is a multiple thousand word story from the New York Times.
Quote, Jimmy Galligan was in history class last school year when his phone buzzed with the message.
Once he clicked on it, he found a three second video of a white classmate looking into the camera and uttering an anti-black racial slur.
The slur, he said, was regularly hurled in classrooms and hallways throughout his years in the Loudoun County School District.
He brought up the issue to teachers and administrators, but much to his anger and frustration, his complaints had gone nowhere.
Okay, so he held onto the video, and then he made a decision that would ricochet around Leesburg, Virginia, a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Okay, they're gonna try and connect a 15-year-old girl to Robert E. Lee by the name of the town.
This is excellent journalism in here from the New York Times.
Quote is from Galligan, whose mother is black and father is white.
I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word.
He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.
Okay, so this guy's a sociopath.
You're a sociopath, okay?
It is a sociopathic behavior to, when you're 15 years old, tuck away a video of a person who is 15 or, he was 17, I guess, and this kid was 15.
Tuck away the video of a 15-year-old to wreck her life because she said, and I'm kidding you, what she said was, she's driving, right?
For the first time.
She looked into a camera and said, I can drive, N-word.
But the N-word was not like, With the E-R at the end.
It was with the A-H.
Right?
Like the commonly used N-word in rap music.
Which, again, is gross, and there shouldn't be a distinction, but there is that double standard.
She obviously did not mean it as a racial slur against black people.
That's perfectly obvious from the video.
She's a 15-year-old girl who's doing the rap, thug life kind of crap that the media have decided is actually a good idea for people to do.
Okay, so she does that.
This sociopathic kid decides to hold back that video until the girl is admitted to college and then to release it online to get her thrown out of college.
And the New York Times shares this as a reckoning.
As a reckoning.
They want to ruin your life.
They want to.
The media want to ruin your life.
They want every Facebook thing you have ever put up, every tweet you have ever said, anything you have ever uttered to be on tape, so they can hold it back and then use it as a club against you to ruin your life when the time is right.
And to teach a broader lesson.
What broader lesson was taught other than this kid is a jerk and the New York Times is disgusting.
Galligan had not seen the video before receiving it last school year, by which time he and Groves were seniors.
By then, she was a varsity cheer captain who dreamed of attending University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team was reigning national champion.
When she made the team in May, her parents celebrated with a cake and orange balloons, according to the university's official color.
The next month, as protests were sweeping the nation, Groves, in a public Instagram post, urged people to protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, and do something in support of BLM.
And then, Galligan released the video.
So she did the liberal woke signaling and he said, nope, nope, nope.
Here's a video of you doing a bad thing that I'm going to deliberately interpret as racist and that I'm going to ruin your life because you said that you were in favor of BLM.
And the New York Times cheers it, cheers it.
Groves was removed from the university cheer team.
She withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials.
She was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media.
This is the culture the left wants to create.
This is the culture war.
It should be fought at every single turn.
And the media?
You gotta replace them.
That's why you should subscribe to Daily Wire.
We're trying to replace them.
These jackasses should not have any power.
Disgusting from the New York Times.
Disgusting from that fellow student.
Gross all the way around.
All right.
We'll be back here today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Mowles Show on today's episode.
Mike will be talking about cops invading homes to break up New Year's parties.
That's a thing that was actually happening.
That episode is available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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