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Feb. 16, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:15
The Magical Misdirection Of The Media | Ep. 1196
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As President Biden's plans become more and more radical, and as Andrew Cuomo goes down in flames, the media desperately keep the focus right where they want it, on Donald Trump, who hasn't been in office for a long time.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Okay, so there's actual news happening in the world, but there's more important news than the actual news.
And that is our journalism and media, the hot, sticky journalism getting absolutely everywhere.
Our media are all over the Biden administration, top to bottom.
They are on it.
Let me read you a breaking headline from Newsweek.
You ready for this?
Joe Biden playing as Luigi wins in Mario Kart race against granddaughter at Camp David.
I don't know.
That was the question that was foremost on my mind in the middle of a global pandemic and in the immediate aftermath of a failed impeachment effort and, you know, with an economic downturn and maybe some foreign policy crises on the horizon.
And what I was really worried about was how did Joe Biden spend President's Day weekend?
You know, because I remember when Donald Trump went golfing, it was really, really bad because people were dying, man.
But Joe Biden, that guy was playing Mario Kart.
And because he was playing Mario Kart, that means he's cool.
During his weekend retreat at Camp David, Biden and his granddaughter Naomi played the racing video game and he won.
Boom.
Mic drop.
Old man wins Mario Kart.
Breaking news.
Naomi shared a video to Instagram and showed Biden competing against her on the arcade GPDX machines, complete with chairs and steering wheels.
Biden sat on the right as Luigi.
Mmm.
Naomi is Princess Peach on the left, Game Rant noted.
Despite not being at the same gaming level as his granddaughter, the commander-in-chief came out victorious.
Naomi joked on her Instagram story, Secret Service made an exception and let him drive himself.
a little rusty, but he won barely.
Wow.
Biden told reporters on Friday that he and his family plan to relax during the long weekend.
We're going to be up at Camp David for Valentine's Day, he said, adding they plan to just hang out with the family and do what we always do.
Well, I mean, this is this is the important stuff, isn't it?
I mean, I remember every single day on CNN, people focusing in on that COVID counter in the left hand side of the corner.
And I remember that.
It was really great.
You know, every single day it was, why is Donald Trump took a dump?
Do you know how many people died while he was taking a dump today?
It's incredible.
But Joe Biden, let's be real, COVID's over.
COVID's over because Joe Biden is president.
He has cured it.
It's gone.
Sure, it's not gone and everything's still shut down, but he's cured it.
And he cured it while playing Mario Kart, which just shows how magical he is.
And lest you think that I'm just picking on Newsweek, CNN has a piece today from Kevin Liptack.
It is one million words long.
It's called Inside the New President's Routine, Oval Office Fires and Early Bedtimes.
So basically, this is just an attempt to spin the fact that Joe Biden is super old and goes to sleep right after the early bird dinner at 7.45 p.m.
as him being, you know, comfortable.
Wow.
Man of the people.
The man adds a log to the fire himself.
As opposed to others who would have called in a full cadre of servants to add a log to the fire, Joe Biden is such a man of the people that he gets up, moves three feet, puts a log on the fire, sits down with his two magical dogs, and then goes to sleep at 7.30 p.m.
I gotta tell you, I'm very impressed with this president.
I don't even have to know what he's doing.
All I know is that he beat his granddaughter at Mario Kart over at Camp David, and also that he adds logs to the fire sometimes before heading down to the Denny's and then going to sleep.
It is really, really exciting stuff happening in our media.
Now, there is some stuff that's actually happening here.
Like, for example, the Biden administration is an actual governing administration.
And I know that our media got unbelievably lazy during the Trump administration.
See, here's the truth.
They like to portray themselves as the bulldogs during the Trump administration.
They were not bulldogs.
They really were not.
They spent every waking moment focusing in on whatever dumb thing Trump tweeted that day.
The amount of investigative journalism that they did that was outside of, like, the Russia stuff, which turned out to be a giant nothing burger.
Outside of that, the amount of actual hardcore investigative journalism they did was relatively restricted.
Because they had the easiest news beat in the world.
You wake up in the morning, the president's tweeting something, you go out and you yell about it on TV.
You go to the White House press briefing room, you yell at Kayleigh McEnany about it, you go home, and then the rest of the media talks about you talking about the president tweeting something about you.
It's like the easiest beat in the entire world.
And the truth is, journalism really died under Barack Obama because the journalists declared that Barack Obama was such an unbelievable, magical man that there was no reason ever to even cover the stuff that he was doing.
In fact, it was considered bad form to cover the stuff that Barack Obama was doing.
All you were supposed to do was cover the fact that he was the greatest human being who had ever walked planet Earth because he was the first black president of the United States.
This was historic.
And this meant that there was no reason to cover any of his scandals.
Remember, his only scandal, according to our journalism experts, was that he once wore a tan suit to a press conference.
And then they got to Trump.
And then it was like, OK, well, we could do investigative journalism or alternatively, what we could do is we could Mentally masturbate about Russia for like four years.
And also we could tweet, we could write a lot about his tweets and ask everybody.
You know what's great journalism?
Going and asking a random Republican congressperson from say New Mexico about what Trump tweeted that day.
That counts as journalisming in journalism in the world.
So now it's Biden.
And most of the journalism that's going to be done is going to be this sort of shoulder massaging stuff.
Politico had a headline today.
I'm not kidding.
So yesterday I talked about the fact that there are so Many members of the media who are willing to overlook the fact that the Biden administration is completely gaming the CDC when it comes to school reopening.
The school reopening standards are pretty clear.
They should be open.
You know how to reopen schools?
Open them.
Done.
They're open.
Magic.
When you're talking about particularly about elementary schools, the amount of Safety precautions that need to be taken are significantly lower than you're talking about for middle or high school.
And again, the data show that schools are not the chief modes of transmission to people who then die of COVID.
This is increasingly true as the vaccines start to roll out.
But here is how Politico is covering this.
So the Biden administration rolled out a bunch of CDC standards that are completely anti-science.
They suggest that, I kid you not, some 99% of all school children in the United States ought to be in hybrid or at-home learning only at this point in the pandemic.
Which is nuts.
It's completely anti-science.
There's no rationale for it.
And, Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, openly admitted that they created these standards specifically in order to please the teachers' unions.
So, how do our media cover this?
Here is Politico's headline.
Politico's headline is this.
The GOP tries to weaponize pandemic-exhausted parents against Biden.
Oh, you...
The story always and forever, as my friend Andrew Klavan has said, when Republicans do something bad, the headline is Republicans Did Something Bad.
When Democrats do something bad, it's Republicans weaponized Democrats doing something bad.
That's not a headline.
You mean the GOP opposes the Democrats and is going to talk about them doing bad stuff?
That's not a headline.
The headline is, are the Democrats doing a bad and stupid thing?
Our media are so in the tank for the Democrats, it is beyond all recognition, but of course, we know this already.
We'll get to more of this in just one second, because again, here is the dirty secret.
The dirty secret that is not a secret at all is that Joe Biden is radical, that his administration is radical, and they are pushing forward radical policy that even they cannot keep up with.
We'll get to this in just one second.
First, Let us talk about the fact.
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Okay, so what exactly is Joe Biden doing?
Well, he's blowing out the budget again.
$1.9 trillion in spending is what he's aiming for right here.
Now, the most well-accepted bipartisan estimates suggest that the economic shortfall in 2021 due to COVID is more like $450 billion.
Even that is probably too high, given the fact that most of these states should already be open.
Florida never closed.
Hey, if you walk around, my new home state, the best state in America from where I sit because, hey, the rest of you guys are getting hit with chill.
Florida, it's like 80 degrees outside.
It's pretty fantastic.
Also, it happens to be a free state where people can still go and do the things they want to do and exercise caution while doing it.
I take my kids to the park, it's fine.
I take my kids to the store with me, put on masks, it's fine.
Florida's been doing this right, so its economy has not been completely destroyed.
New York continues to do it wrong, they have the worst hospitalization rates in the nation, and their business has been completely killed.
Well, now Joe Biden wants to try out a $1.9 trillion spending package, which again, according to best estimates, is four times too large.
Four times too large.
And includes a bunch of crappy provisions.
So there are a lot of economists and they're saying, um, you know, guys, we already, before this package, have spent 102% of our GDP.
on government spending this year, which is the worst government spending binge since right after World War II, since 1946, since the decommissioning of the military in World War II.
Okay, so we are spending way too much money.
And Joe Biden wants to add on top of that another $1.9 trillion, which is nuts, right?
According to the New York Times, even the New York Times is like, well, you know, we might be spending too much money here.
Jim Tankersley and Gianna Smialek say, presidents who find themselves digging out of recessions have long heeded the warnings of inflation-obsessed economists.
See, even there, they're like, yeah, you know, inflation might be a problem, but we'll pretend that those people are crazy.
Who fear that acting aggressively to stimulate a struggling economy will bring a return to the monstrous price increases that plagued the nation in the 1970s.
Now, as President Biden presses ahead with plans for a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, he and his top economic advisors are brushing those warnings aside, as is the Federal Reserve under Chair Jerome Powell.
After years of dire inflation predictions that failed to pan out, the people who run fiscal and monetary policy in Washington have decided the risk of overheating the economy is much lower than the risk of failing to heat it up enough.
First of all, it's not the job.
The economy is not an oven.
The economy is a bunch of consensual transactions between free individuals.
You know how the government can make the economy better?
By getting out of the way of those free individuals involving themselves in transactions.
You know how the government can make it worse?
By creating vast regulatory infrastructures that disincentivize investment.
That's why the economy grew slowly under Obama.
I love the revisionist history that the reason that Obama's economy sucked is because Obama didn't spend enough money.
Obama went to $4 trillion a year and then he kept it at $4 trillion a year.
The United States used to spend about $3 trillion a year in the federal budget.
Now we spend $4 trillion a year in the federal budget that has never come down since the beginning of 2009.
And the idea is we didn't spend enough money.
If only we had spent more money.
No.
The reason that the economy recovered unbelievably slowly under Barack Obama is because Barack Obama held back the economy with a regulatory thicket.
It's because business owners understood that Barack Obama did not like them and that Barack Obama thought that the Regulatory infrastructure was necessary to hem them in, and so they kept money on the sidelines.
Trillions of dollars were on the sidelines.
A lot of that money was getting put in the stock market.
Not a lot of that money was going to building new businesses.
And then, Trump came into office, and the economy started to do really, really well.
It started to do better than it was under Barack Obama.
You could see it in terms of the wage increases.
People started hiring.
People started competing in the marketplace.
Now you're going to see a slower recovery, not just because of COVID, but because you're going to see this regulatory infrastructure come back.
And it doesn't matter how much money you blow into the system the way that Joe Biden is doing.
Right now, what we have is not a lack of demand.
Okay, what we have is, well, I mean, we do have a lack of demand, but it's an artificially created lack of demand.
It is not a problem of people have a bunch of money they are not willing to spend, and so we need more money in the system.
The problem right now is people are afraid to go to the store because of COVID, and when that ends, the economy will go back to normal, and everybody knows this.
But in the meantime, Joe Biden is using this as a lever in order to push his favorite economic policies.
Nonetheless, according to the New York Times, we shouldn't worry about inflation at all.
Just dumping money into the system has no impact, according to the New York Times.
Democrats in the House plan to spend this week finalizing Biden's plan to pump nearly $2 trillion into the economy, including direct checks to Americans and more generous unemployment benefits with the aim of holding a floor vote as early as next week.
The Senate is expected to quickly take up their proposal.
As soon as it clears the House in the hopes of sending a final bill to Biden's desk early next month, Fed officials have signaled they plan to keep holding rates near zero and buying government-backed debt at a brisk clip to stoke growth.
So we're going to keep borrowing money, effectively speaking, and pumping money into the economy.
We're going to keep that Fed rate at zero, and we're going to toss $2 trillion into the economy.
This is a recipe for inflation.
The only reason that inflation may not happen right now is, again, because demand is artificially suppressed.
But when demand stops being suppressed, you're going to start seeing price inflation at a fairly radical clip.
The Fed and the administration are staying the course despite a growing outcry from some economists across the political spectrum, including Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury Secretary and top advisor in the Clinton and Obama administrations who say Biden's plans could stir up a whirlwind of rising prices.
Nobody better embodies the sudden break from decades of worry over inflation in Washington and elite circles of economics than Janet Yellen.
Yellen spent the bulk of her career fighting in a war against inflation, but at a time when the American economy remains 10 million jobs short of its pre-pandemic levels and millions of people face hunger and eviction, she appears ready to move on.
Yellen said, I've spent many years studying inflation, worrying about inflation.
We face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country.
We have got to address that.
That's the biggest risk.
The problem, again, is not that people, broadly speaking, need a giant infusion of cash right now to spend.
The big problem right now is that there is an artificial lack of demand caused by COVID regulations.
Everyone knows this.
The economy was doing great up until March.
Then COVID hit and the economy sucked.
So what caused the recession?
Hey, this is pretty obvious to everyone, which is why if you look at the unemployment rate in states like North Dakota, which really never shut down, the unemployment rate by state right now, you can see which states shut down and which states did not shut down.
Here are the states that have very low unemployment rates.
Nebraska, which hasn't really shut down.
3% unemployment rate.
3% in December of 2020.
South Dakota, 3%.
Iowa, 3%.
Vermont, 3%.
Utah, 3.6%.
Kansas, 3.8%.
Alabama, 3.9%.
Even states that have been hard hit, but didn't shut down their economy.
Kansas 3.8%, Alabama 3.9%.
Even states that have been hard hit, but didn't shut down their economy.
Even states like Texas, which is pretty hard hit, has a 7.2% unemployment.
Okay, when you look at Florida, right?
Florida never shut down.
Florida's been pretty hit hard.
6.1%.
Okay, now let's look at the states that were hit the hardest.
California, 9%.
9% as of December 2020.
Could that have to do with the massive COVID regulations they put in place?
Nobody could go to work.
How about New York?
New York's been shut down for the duration.
Their unemployment rate has been 8.2%.
I have a question.
Is it because we need more government interventionism in California and New York, or less government interventionism in California and New York?
You want to know why business has been leaving those places for places like Florida?
That is the reason why.
Okay, meanwhile, that giant $1.9 trillion spending package?
That, of course, is exciting people like Bernie Sanders.
So Bernie Sanders, every single one of Bernie Sanders' tweets ever is, That bad thing should not happen.
And that is why you need this unrelated program to solve the bad thing that should not happen.
Here is the reality is life is filled with death.
Death is bad.
Therefore, we should have socialism.
You're like, what?
What are you talking about, dude?
Let's go back to eating that pudding.
Here's Bernie Sanders tweeting about the $15 minimum wage.
You want to talk about a policy that is calibrated to do the reverse of what you are attempting to do?
So we are hearing right now that people are lacking jobs, right?
People are missing jobs.
Particularly low-wage individuals are lacking jobs right now.
Those are the people who got hurt.
Everybody who was able to work from home and work on a computer, all those people are doing fine.
In fact, many of those people are doing great, right?
All those journalistic fellows over at the New York Times, they're doing amazing.
They're stoking the flames of shutdown politics.
Meanwhile, they're still doing fine.
They're just getting the Grubhub delivered to the door as opposed to going to the local bistro.
That is the only thing that has changed for them.
Meanwhile, low-wage workers across America can't go back to work because of all the lockdown politics.
And the solution for Democrats is to raise the minimum wage so as to throw half of them out of work.
So Bernie Sanders tweets out, a $15 minimum wage is not a radical idea.
Well, if Bernie Sanders says it's not radical, I take him at his word.
He says, what's radical is the fact that millions of Americans are forced to work for starvation wages while 650 billionaires became over $1 trillion richest during a global pandemic.
Yes!
We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
Okay, I have a question.
I have several questions about this.
First of all, you can't be forced to work for starvation wages.
It's against the 13th Amendment.
If you were working for starvation wages, on a technical level, you would be dead.
Starvation wages, presumably, By the terminology itself means it is not a living wage.
A living wage, what Bernie Sanders means, presumably, is that he wants a wage that is higher.
Okay, you want a wage that's higher.
Now, here is the problem.
By setting a $15 minimum wage, what you are actually doing is increasing the wage artificially beyond the point of employability.
Let's say that there are two people who are out of work.
One is a college graduate.
One is a non-college graduate.
Before, maybe you hire the non-college graduate because the college graduate is demanding too much money.
Now, you've got a $15 minimum wage, which means you've got to pay $15 either way.
So, who are you going to hire?
The college graduate or the high school graduate?
Minimum wages put the people who are lower down on the economic spectrum out of work.
They make sure the people who maintain their jobs make a little bit more money.
But the people who don't get those jobs, their minimum wage is zero.
It is zero, because they don't have a job.
Their minimum wage is now zero.
A point that Thomas Sowell has made over and over again.
When you set a minimum wage, you're not actually setting a minimum wage.
You're setting a minimum wage of zero for most of the people who are out of work, and a minimum wage of, say, $15 for the people who get to retain their jobs.
The other thing that's going to happen, obviously, Is that people are going to start implementing technologies.
Right now, there are many stores out there that are thinking, okay, well it costs maybe a thousand bucks to put in a machine.
Instead of spending the thousand bucks, I hire somebody at low wage, teenager at low wage, who needs a job, and I have that person do the job.
It's cheaper than putting in the machinery.
If you want to replace the entire restaurant business with robots, this is a pretty good way to do it, is to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks.
You want to know why, over the past decade, you have seen grocery stores that now have self-checkout counters?
The reason that you have grocery stores with self-checkout counters is because unionized labor drove up the price of labor for people who do the checkouts.
So the stores were like, okay, well, either I could deal with this union, or I could just pay a machine.
Zero dollars.
I could just put the machine right there, and then we're done.
You worry about the cost of automation?
Automation becomes less expensive than labor when you artificially raise the price of labor.
Everybody knows this.
By the way, you know who knows that minimum wage is kind of a problem?
There's this candidate.
His name was Bernie Sanders.
According to Vox.com, in early June 2019, Bernie Sanders traveled to Walmart's annual shareholder meeting to confront company executives over their moral culpability for the low incomes of many of the company's employees.
Walmart is the largest private employer in America and is owned by the Walton family, the wealthiest family in the United States, Sanders said.
And yet, despite the incredible wealth of its owner, Walmart pays many of its employees starvation wages, wages that are so low, many of these employees are forced to rely on government programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing.
So, quick note there, he's actually got the chain of events backwards.
When you create government incentive programs that pay people, What you end up doing is artificially lowering the wages because companies no longer have to pay $10 an hour.
They know the government's filling in $5 an hour, so instead they pay the other $5 an hour.
All of this is just basic logic.
But here's the problem for Bernie Sanders.
Sanders's campaign paid many of its staffers in the 2020 campaign, primarily in the traditionally low-paid field department, less than $15 per hour.
Oh, isn't that amazing?
As per our usual arrangement, folks on the left, they have a standard that they wish that everybody else would uphold, but they have no interest in upholding it themselves.
In just a second, we're gonna get to more radical policy from the Biden administration that we should ignore because Joe Biden is putting another fire on the log and playing his Luigi, which, by the way, is a form of cultural appropriation, as far as I'm concerned.
We'll get to more of this in a moment.
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Okay, so, meanwhile, there is the race policy that will undoubtedly follow this administration.
We've already seen it implemented at the local level.
The Biden administration has repeatedly suggested that equity is to guide all of its decisions.
As we have talked about at length on this program, when folks on the left say equity, they do not mean equality.
What they mean is that any program that does not achieve equal outcome on the basis of group, any program that does not achieve that is considered racist.
And to be anti-racist, whenever you see somebody saying, I'm doing the work, I've become an anti-racist.
It doesn't mean I've become a not-racist.
It means I've become a person who wants to tear down all existing structures of power, castigating them as systemically discriminatory.
Right?
That's what it means.
So this is the stuff that the Biden administration has been pushing.
They've been pushing it in vaccine policy.
They've been pushing it in educational policy.
They've been pushing it in economic policy, in environmental policy.
They literally said that Ibram X. Kendi's idea of how the world should work is the way they are going to govern, which is scary as all hell.
Because first of all, in many cases, it is violative of the basic principle of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which is that people ought not be treated on the basis of group or race.
They ought to be treated instead on the basis of their individual identity.
Instead, this is not what is happening, and we are seeing it crammed down in our educational system primarily.
So, Christopher Rufo, who writes for City Journal, and he is the director of a group called Discovery, the Center on Wealth and Poverty.
At Discovery Institute.
So he has been keeping track of the woke equity politics that is now being mainlined into our educational system.
So take a gander at this.
Chris Rufo tweets out, the principal of Eastside Community School in New York sent white parents a tool for action.
It tells them they must become white traitors and then advocate for full white abolition.
Okay, this is nuts.
So let's take a look at this for just a second, because while the Biden administration, I keep mixing them up because this is just Obama administration part three, because the Biden administration has embraced the basic equity playbook here, this is what they mean.
They haven't gone all the way yet, but they will, don't worry.
We're very, very early on.
So they have been distributing at the school the eight white identities by a person named Barnor Hess, And the eight white identities stretch from white supremacist in the red to white abolitionist in the green.
They say there is a regime of whiteness and there are action-oriented white identities.
People who identify with whiteness are one of these.
It's about time we build an ethnography of whiteness since white people have been the ones writing about and governing others.
Okay, what the hell does any of that mean?
Well, let's get a little more specific.
Here are the eight white identities according to Barnor Hess.
Again, this is being taught now at schools in New York.
And by the way, at schools that are liberal in LA, same kind of thing.
You're gonna see this brought into public education with a vengeance over the course of the next few years.
Okay, that's the prediction.
Here are the eight white identities according to Barnor Hess.
He says, one, white supremacists, right?
These are the worst people.
And this is what all of American society is.
Clearly marked white society that preserves names and values white superiority.
That makes it that you're a white supremacist, okay?
Second, white voyeurism.
Wouldn't challenge a white supremacist.
Desires non-whiteness because it's interesting and pleasurable.
Seeks to control the consumption and appropriation of non-whiteness.
Fascination with culture.
Example, consuming black culture without the burden of blackness.
So if you listen to rap, but you're white, this means that you're probably a white voyeurist.
You're a white voyeur.
Right, you're not a white supremacist, but you're kind of white supremacist adjacent.
Because you're like a white supremacist in that you like all the structures of power, but you also like listening to rap music.
Then there's white privilege.
Maybe you critique supremacy, but a deep investment in questions of fairness and equality under normalization of whiteness and the white rule, sworn goal of diversity.
So, now if you say that you like diversity, but you also believe in things like fairness and equality on an individual level, this means that you are suffering from white privilege.
Because of course the entire system is white.
And so if you say that you want everybody to be treated equally on an individual level, this means you're upholding a system that has been supremacist in the past and is supremacist today, so you're actually just privileged.
Okay, then.
Fourth level.
This is all cult crap, by the way.
This is just cultic nonsense.
Fourth level.
Okay, now we are rising.
So we went from the worst and we're moving toward the best.
Get ready for it, gang.
Fourth, white benefit.
You're sympathetic to a set of issues, but only privately.
You won't speak or act in solidarity publicly because benefiting through whiteness in public.
Some people of color are in this category as well.
So this would be like Candace Owens.
So if you're a black person, but you don't speak in or act in solidarity with whiteness in public, Or against whiteness in public, this means that you're of white benefit.
Actually, according to these folks, Candace is probably a white supremacist.
May you white voyeurist.
Same thing for Shelby Steele.
A white benefit person is a person who is actually a Black Lives Matter sympathizer, but doesn't speak out very loudly about it.
Then there's white confessional.
White confessional is some exposure of whiteness takes place, but as a way of being accountable to people of color after you're seeking validation from people of color.
Okay, so this is all the people who marched in the Black Lives Matter protests but are white, who posted a black square on Instagram.
You're a white confessional because you can see your own whiteness, But you're only seeking validation from people of color.
Now you might think to yourself, okay, like, that should be about as radical as it gets here.
You're basically saying that the system, you're conceding all the points.
Don't worry, there's more.
White critical.
Now we're getting to the people who are reaching saintly levels of anti-whiteness.
White critical.
You take on board critiques of whiteness and invest in exposing or marking the white regime.
You refuse to be complicit with the regime.
Whiteness speaking back to whiteness.
This is white people telling other white people that they are too white.
Because why do you make white white?
Make white white.
And finally, you can be a white trader.
You actively refuse complicity.
You name what is going on.
Your intention is to subvert white authority and tell the truth at whatever cost.
You need them to dismantle institutions.
And finally, you're a white abolitionist.
This is like the highest level.
You have cleansed yourself of all sin.
You have purged yourself.
You're full Robin DiAngelo.
White abolitionist.
You change institutions.
You dismantle whiteness.
You don't allow whiteness to reassert itself.
But by the way, what's amazing about this is that you're still the one in power, right?
You're the white person who's in power and you're acting on behalf of people of color.
You are now a white abolitionist.
Okay, this is the crap they are teaching to school children.
It's racist nonsense.
There should be lawsuits on the basis of this.
But get ready.
This sort of stuff is going to be mainlined into American politics.
Because as soon as you start using the term equity, this is where it's going.
We all know this is where it is going.
We're going to get to Andrew Cuomo and the collapse of the Democratic COVID narrative in just one second.
First, let's talk about a simple fact.
You're spending a lot of time with screens these days.
Here's one of the problems.
If you spend a lot of time with screens, it can affect your sleep patterns.
It can affect your headaches.
It can really have an impact on your mental and bodily health.
Like it really is not great.
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All right, we're gonna get to more in just one second.
First, As you know, actress Gina Carano was recently cancelled by Lucasfilm and Disney+.
Why?
For the great crime of being a conservative.
It's very obvious that that was the case.
The Hollywood Reporter said they'd been looking for months to drop her because she was conservative.
And then they found an excuse and they dropped her.
By the way, they didn't even bother asking her for an apology.
They just canned her.
Now that would have been A normal story of Hollywood cancellation, except for the fact that we here at The Daily Wire, we are dedicated to fighting back against this crap in two ways.
One, we want to make entertainment that competes with the big boys.
And two, we want to make sure that when people who are conservative get canceled, there is a home for them, which is why we announced a movie deal with Gina literally the day after she was dumped by Lucasfilms.
That's correct.
She'll be developing, producing, starring in an upcoming film.
It's going to be released only to you guys, The Daily Wire members.
We've all been saying it for a long time that conservatives need to do more than complaining and critiquing.
We need to actually stop running away from the culture war.
We need to engage.
Well, we can only do that with your membership.
We are really excited to be announcing our new partnership with Gina.
The woke mob thinks they're in control.
They have another thing coming.
Now, here's the thing.
Again, Disney is going to spend $8 billion per year on Disney Plus.
Per year.
We've got you!
So, we need your help.
Making movies is really expensive.
Making culture is really expensive.
Getting into the culture war is really expensive.
But, here's the thing, they've left themselves really vulnerable.
And the more they keep canceling talented people, the more we are going to work with those talented people.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code Gina, that's G-I-N-A, to get 25% off your membership today.
Also, Gina Carano will be joining us for the Sunday special this week.
I'm really pumped about it.
I think you are going to love it.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So again, the reality here is that the Biden administration is pursuing radical policy across the board.
And I got to say, it is incredible to see how when a Democrat is in power, everybody just sort of comes out of the closet with their true agenda.
Here I'm speaking of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest of all doctors, except for Dr. Jill Biden, who indeed is the most wonderful of all doctors.
So Dr. Anthony Fauci, and for months and months and months and months, he was supposedly the most knowledgeable person in politics, completely apolitical.
Not political.
Just speaking for the science.
That's all he was.
He was captain science.
Sure, he was on the cover of InTouch magazine.
Sure, they were creating votive candles of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
And sure, he's flipped his mind about 83 times on masking and not masking and schools and not schools.
And sure, now he's come back and he's like, you know what?
We need a stimulus package, which is a perfectly politically driven idea.
We need a stimulus package in order to reopen schools.
By the way, you know how you know that's not true?
Because if you actually look at the Biden package, this $1.9 trillion package that they are now pushing, if you look at the funding for schools, you will notice something very, very weird.
Hey, would you like to hear the weird thing?
The weird thing is, here is the spending by year for the schools.
You ready?
For the Department of Education.
For 2022, some $32 billion For 2022.
For 2023, $32 billion.
And for 2024, $25 billion.
Now, I have a question.
$32 billion and for 2024 $25 billion.
Now, I have a question.
Why do you need that for pandemic relief?
Seriously, 2024 is like three years away by my calculations.
And yet you're talking about spending $25 billion on pandemic relief in 2024.
I have a feeling this has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID relief.
Nonetheless, now Fauci is free.
And so Fauci can be just as much of a Democrat as he wants to be.
So here's Anthony Fauci saying, you know, like what we need right now is to keep the focus on Trump.
That's the really important thing.
We won't keep the focus on any of the incompetence among the Democrats who are actually in power in most of the major institutions across our nation.
Let's keep the focus on Trump.
So here's Anthony Fauci talking about how he was worried about catching COVID at the Trump White House.
You know who's not in the White House anymore?
Donald Trump.
You know what's irrelevant?
This.
I think you'd have to be oblivious not to consider the fact that if you get infected, that you are already in a category of someone who has a high risk of having a serious outcome.
I didn't fixate on that, but it was in the back of my mind because I had to be out there.
I mean, particularly when I was going to the White House every day, when the White House was sort of a super spreader location.
I mean, that made me a little bit nervous.
Well, you know, and there he is smiling at this.
Well, you know, it's good.
It's good to have scientific sources like Dr. Fauci talking about this stuff.
By the way, Dr. Fauci, the all-sacrificing Dr. Fauci, who, by the way, has the highest salary of anyone in the federal government, apparently, he was awarded a $1 million prize for speaking truth to power.
Not kidding you.
According to the Daily Wire, on Monday, the nation's top infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, received a $1 million Israeli prize established by late Italian-Israeli philanthropist, Dan Daveed.
Fauci was honored with the Dan Daveed Prize for his service in public health and speaking truth to power during the pandemic, according to NPR.
As the COVID-19 pandemic unraveled, Fauci leveraged his considerable communication skills to address people gripped by fear and anxiety and worked relentlessly to inform individuals in the U.S.
and elsewhere about the public health measures essential for containing the pandemic's spread.
In addition, he has been widely praised for his courage in speaking truth to power in a highly charged political environment.
Speaking truth to power?
Uh-huh.
Oh, yeah, that's what he's doing right now when he, you know, just starts repeating all of the Democratic talking points about COVID.
Speaking of which, you may have noticed that Andrew Cuomo is completely falling apart.
So there was a bit of odd juxtaposition yesterday.
So Andrew Cuomo, over the last couple of days, was awarded an Emmy.
He was given a television Emmy for his massively incredible performance during the COVID pandemic, which has ended with the second highest death per million ratio in America and currently the highest hospitalization rate in the nation, after he wrote a book about his amazing leadership.
A bunch of Hollywood celebrities stopped by to talk about this.
Because when we're talking about health, the people who know the most are obviously celebrities.
So here is Spike Lee and Ben Stiller and the rest of the crowd praising Andrew Cuomo.
To my governor, the governor of the Empire State, Andrew Cuomo.
Congratulations, Andrew, on your much-deserved Founders Award.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, you are the man.
What?
I was trying to think of something that I could say to you that would be funny.
And so I called your brother, Chris, who could not understand why you were getting an Emmy since he's the one on television.
In the darkest stage of the pandemic, Billy Crystal, your daily briefings live from New York gave us hope, gave us clarity, gave us the truth, and gave us something that we were not getting from Washington.
Oh, okay.
So, um, it's good.
All the celebrities came out and that same week, like within 48 hours, it turns out that Andrew Cuomo not only was lying about how many COVID patients had died in nursing homes, but that he was covering it up and he was lying to his fellow Democrats.
And then he did in one of his trademark press conferences, like these Emmy award-winning press conferences, right?
He did one yesterday in which he just lied blatantly, but he was very clear about lying.
So, I mean, I guess there's that.
So here's Andrew Cuomo talking about how honest he was while he was lying.
To be clear, all the deaths in the nursing homes and in the hospitals were always fully, publicly and accurately reported.
The numbers were the numbers.
Always.
People did request information beyond the place of death.
Not just how many in a nursing home, not just how many in a hospital.
Okay, so we were always honest except for the fact that we were lying.
And by the way, everybody on the right knew he was lying since May.
Everybody.
This was well-reported for, well now, about, what, seven, eight months?
Minimum?
Nine months?
And now the media are getting around to reporting all of this.
My favorite part of this press conference is where Andrew Cuomo says that he accepts responsibility for letting people think he did anything wrong, which is like the best apology ever.
Here's Andrew Cuomo.
Man, this guy, he is such a jerk.
And you guys propped him up as a hero.
Let it be known.
For months and months and months, he was the hero, DeSantis was the villain.
DeSantis actually ran his state correctly.
Cuomo's run his state like a garbage heap.
Here is Cuomo.
Man, the balls on this guy, it's pretty incredible.
You'd never knock down all these conspiracy theories, the political conspiracy theories, because they generate ten a day.
But we should have done a better job of providing as much information as we could, as quickly as we could.
And we should have done a better job on that.
Yes.
And no excuses.
I accept responsibility for that.
I accept responsibility for letting people think I did anything wrong.
Whoops!
What an incredible, incredible dude.
By the way, he then went on and he said deaths in nursing homes were inevitable.
Inevitable.
This guy who praised himself for his leadership, he's like, yep, I let the olds die, and you know what?
It was gonna happen anyway, so whatever, man.
I got an Emmy.
COVID did not get into the nursing homes by people coming from hospitals.
COVID got into the nursing homes by staff walking into the nursing home when we didn't even know we had COVID.
Staff walking into a nursing home even though they were asymptomatic because the national experts all told us you could only spread COVID if you had symptoms.
And they were wrong.
The truth is, it was in the middle of a terrible pandemic.
with this. It's possible that COVID was present in those facilities earlier. Also, you know, the way that you get rid of COVID? By not having the patients be in contact with other olds in the nursing homes. And then, of course, Andrew Cuomo suggested that if those old people were going to die, they were just going to die anyway. You know, that's just the way it's going to work.
The truth is, it was in the middle of a terrible pandemic.
The truth is, COVID attacks senior citizens.
The truth is, with all we know, people still die in nursing homes today.
People still die every day.
We're testing the staff twice a week.
There's no visitation.
People still die.
Okay, yes, how many would be the question?
People still die is not You guys, you guys made that.
You guys made this human being into your hero.
That was you.
Okay, so here's the thing.
As all this unspools, Biden's crappy economic policy, his crappy COVID policy, his crappy racial policy, as Andrew Cuomo falls apart, the media are focused in on what matters most, Donald Trump.
And they're not going to let Donald Trump go away.
They just won't.
Now, Trump probably doesn't want to go away, but here's the reality of the situation.
Donald Trump is no longer president.
He will not be relevant to the political conversation for at least another couple of years if he decides to launch another campaign, which frankly, I don't think he's going to do, because if I were him, I'd be incredibly tired of this, wouldn't you?
So, Trump is not the relevant political figure at this point.
Where are the Democrats putting their chief focus?
They're putting their chief focus exactly where you would think they're putting their chief focus directly on Donald Trump.
So they're going to continue to drag this out.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now pushing for the creation of a special panel to investigate the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol a day after several lawmakers called for a bipartisan commission and report similar to the one drafted in response to the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Pelosi said, now as always, security is the order of the day.
The security of our country, the security of our capital, which is the temple of our democracy, the security of our members.
To protect our security, our security, our security.
Our next step will be to establish an outside independent 9-11 type commission to investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the January 6th, 2021 domestic terrorist attack on the US Capitol complex.
Okay, what do you think this is?
What do you think?
Like, here's the thing.
I have an idea.
Let's say that you wanted to do a full investigation of what happened on January 6th and call witnesses and everything.
You could have done that, you know, and then maybe after that you could have had like an impeachment charge because apparently you can now bring impeachment after the person's out of office.
And you could have done that, or you could even have done that investigation between the House impeachment charge and the Senate vote, but you didn't do any of that stuff.
You rushed it forward for political purposes, and then you got it off the table for political purposes, and now you just want to keep this hanging around for political purposes for years on end so you can keep pretending that Donald Trump is the most relevant person to the political conversation.
You're seeing this in the media today, by the way.
Well, you know, this is still Trump's party.
It's Trump's party.
Okay, here's the deal.
The party is always the party of the prior president until precisely the moment it isn't.
That is the way that politics works.
The Democratic Party was the party of Barack Obama until it was the party of Hillary Clinton in 2016 until it was the party of Joe Biden now.
The Republican Party was the party of George W. Bush until it was the party of Mitt Romney until it was the party of Donald Trump.
This is the way presidential politics works.
There are a lot of people today being like, well, it's a Trump cult because you see all these people who are condemning Republicans for voting against Trump in this impeachment trial.
No, Trump is just taken as a litmus for Republican solidarity.
It's that simple.
When you ask Republicans about how they feel about Trump, even those who are pretty uncomfortable with a lot of stuff that Trump did, even many of those people are not like, you know what?
I think what would be great for the party is to completely divide it down the middle on the question of Trump because he's out of office.
Sounds like a great plan.
Here's the reality.
Democrats need the looming specter of Trump in order to justify all of the radicalism they are now pursuing.
In order to justify the fact they are bad at their jobs and they are pursuing radical policy.
And again, the media are addicted to this stuff because the media's ratings go down when they don't talk about Trump.
If they talked about Joe Biden's budget or how Joe Biden likes to toss a log on the fire and that was all they were covering, you think anybody would click on Politico?
You think anybody would watch MSNBC?
Obviously not.
Obviously not.
So the Democrats are gonna continue to push this stuff forward.
And not just that, they're gonna push forward more radical policy on the basis of Trump.
They have a Democratic representative named Jacobs.
And she came out and she said, you know what we need?
We need a truth commission!
Yes!
A truth and reconciliation commission, like South Africa.
This is what she told the most reliable of reliable sources, Brian Stelter.
We need a truth and reconciliation commission in the United States, which is the most Orwellian garbage I've heard in at least 37 seconds.
So here she is, Representative Sarah Jacobs from California, calling for a truth commission.
You know, a truth commission, a lot of people will think of South Africa.
We've used them in countries around the world.
And basically what it is, is it's communities all the way up to the national level having conversations about both the glory and the glory of our history and what happened, both throughout the history of our country and leading up to and on January 6th, so that we can come to a common narrative moving forward of what we want our country to be.
Yeah, this is all great.
This is all great.
And all they have to do, the Democrats, is just keep shouting Trump, because the orange man will remain bad, and he will remain the focus and the locus of the entire democratic universe until such time as he is no longer convenient for those purposes.
Meanwhile, while you and the media are distracted out here with Trump, this, with this other hand, that is where they are pursuing their radical policymaking, which again is going to make the country worse in a wide variety of ways, but the media have no interest in that.
Misdirection is at hand.
The Democrats are engaging in it every single day.
Do not follow the bouncing ball.
Follow instead the actual activity that is taking place in the halls of government.
Okay, we're gonna be back here today with an additional hour of content.
Plus, the Matt Walsh Show is airing today at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Today, Matt will be discussing a famous male YouTuber who appropriates womanhood by pretending to be pregnant.
Good times, good times.
Matt always comes up with the most interesting stories.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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