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March 5, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:24
Freedom Is For Neanderthals | Ep. 1209
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President Biden terms those who want to reopen society Neanderthals, eBay stops people from buying Dr. Seuss books, and we examine the radicalism of the Democrats' new voter registration law, H.R.
1.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so we begin with a perfectly obvious truism at this point.
Joe Biden is not in control of his own administration.
This is not a person who is sentient.
He's not a person who is with it.
Joe Biden always was a Trojan horse, and Democrats are not really making a lot of bones about this at this point.
They're pretty obvious about the fact that Joe Biden is just a moderate face for radical policy.
In fact, Nancy Pelosi said this out loud just yesterday.
She was doing a presser with the White House.
And this is the same presser where Joe Biden basically said, I'm ready to take questions.
And then the person behind the camera just kind of slowly faded.
Well, Nancy Pelosi was talking about Joe Biden and she explained what Joe Biden is.
He is just an instrument.
He's an instrument of power for these folks because Joe Biden is not with it.
Nor was Joe Biden ever quite as moderate as everybody liked to make him out to be.
Just because you're moderate compared to Bernie Sanders does not mean that you are, in fact, a moderate.
So here is Nancy Pelosi at WhiteHouse.gov explaining that Joe Biden is basically just a gumball machine.
You throw your liberal quarter in there and out comes the gumball.
In order to open these doors, we do not say open Sesame.
We say open Biden.
That's our magic word.
Open Biden.
I love it.
What is wrong with that person?
I mean, my goodness.
She's like a Bond villain, Nancy Pelosi.
But she is not wrong, right?
That is the way that the left views Joe Biden.
That's the way the media view Joe Biden.
Joe Biden was always a Trojan horse for these policies.
Some of us were warning people of this beforehand.
And make no mistake, the radicals are celebrating this.
Ezra Klein, the newest opinion columnist over at the New York Times, he has a piece called, Biden is the anti-Trump and it's working.
If you dial down the conflict, you can dial up the policy.
Because all of America is now about optics.
So if Joe Biden appears to be moderate, then he can push some of the most radical policy changes that we have seen in our lifetimes.
According to Ezra Klein.
American politics feels quieter with Joe Biden in the White House.
The president's Twitter feed hasn't gone dark, but it's gone dull.
Biden doesn't pick needless fights or insert himself into the cultural conflicts.
It's easy to go dazed without hearing anything the president has said, unless you go looking.
Well, right, because he's not actually alive.
He's just a houseplant sitting in the corner that they bring out every so often and say, look at the pretty houseplant!
And then meanwhile, in the background, they're like, what if we push this particular radical policy?
The relative quiet is deceptive, says as reclined policy is moving at breakneck pace.
The first week of the Biden administration were consumed by a flurry of far-reaching executive orders that reopened America to refugees, rejoined the Paris climate accords and killed the Keystone XL oil pipeline to name just a few.
Now the House has passed and the Senate is considering the $1.9 trillion American rescue plan, a truly sweeping piece of legislation that includes more than a half dozen policies like a child tax credit expansion that could cut child poverty by 50%.
that would be presidency-defining accomplishments It goes on.
The White House just sent Congress the most ambitious immigration reform bill in years.
It midwifed a deal to get Merck to mobilize some of its factories to produce a Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and now Biden is saying there should be enough of a supply for every American adult to get vaccinated by the end of May.
Imagine the administration is also working on an infrastructure package that, if early reports bear out, will be the most transformational piece of climate policy and perhaps economic policy in my lifetime.
Biden is blitzing.
OK, so a couple of things.
One.
If Donald Trump had been soft-spoken, I really, really doubt that the media would have suggested that his policies were better than they were.
The fact is that the media hated Trump's policy, and so they also hated his personality.
It's not really the other way around.
Remember, Donald Trump was a favorite among the left-wing glitterati until he declared himself a Republican, at which point he became the enemy.
Now, Trump didn't do himself any favors by shooting himself in the foot a lot.
But that is not the same thing as what is happening here.
What is happening here is that Joe Biden is saying ridiculous things on a daily basis, and yet everybody continues to cover for him because he's a Democrat.
It is that simple.
Joe Biden has not returned a sense of normalcy to the White House.
He's returned a sense of senility to the White House and the radical policy that the media loves.
And make no mistake, this is radical policy.
It is deeply radical policy.
So, for example, Democrats have been pushing forward H.R.1.
Now, you haven't heard a lot about H.R.1 because H.R.1 is not going anywhere in the Senate, presumably, but HR1 is this sweeping piece of voter legislation that essentially federalizes all elections.
And what it really does is it makes it easier to enshrine the worst sort of voting practices from across the country.
It takes like all the worst parts of voting practice from various states and then it enshrines them and requires them at the federal level.
Heritage Foundation had a good breakdown of HR1.
Here are just some of the things that HR1 would do.
According to the Heritage Foundation, HR 1 would seize the authority of states to regulate voter registration and the voting process, forcing states to implement early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting.
Right, so the universal mail-in balloting?
That is a rich mine to vein.
For a rich vein to mine, for all the people who would love ballot harvesting and would love to be able to game the system, that would become universal.
And by the way, it would also make it pretty much mandatory that elections would go on for weeks at a time because these absentee ballots take a while to count.
So whatever faith in elections still remains would quickly be lost with H.R.
1, but of course, that doesn't matter to Democrats.
H.R.
1 would make it easier to commit fraud and promote chaos at the polls through same-day registration.
Literally, you would walk up, and you would cast a provisional ballot, and you would register at the exact same time.
It takes a little while to process all of that, and it makes it kind of easy to confuse the system.
H.R.
1 would mandate 15 days of early voting, which diffuses the intensity of get-out-the-vote efforts.
I am very much against early voting, unless you have an actual medical reason you cannot vote on the day of.
It is called Election Day, not Election Month.
HR1 would degrade the accuracy of registration lists.
It would require states to automatically register all individuals, not even citizens, illegal immigrants, from state and federal databases.
This would register large numbers of ineligible voters.
HR1 would open the door for hackers and cybercriminals to commit massive voter registration fraud through online voter registration that is not tied to an existing state record like a driver's license.
H.R.
1 would make it a criminal offense for a state official to reject a voter registration application even when it is rejected under color of law because the official believes the individual is ineligible to vote.
H.R.
1 would require states to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to register, which would effectively ensure that if you're underage, you could then vote.
Also, by the way, H.R.
1 gets rid of penalties for voting mistakenly or supposedly mistakenly or fraudulently.
HR1 would require states to count ballots cast by voters outside of their assigned precincts, overriding the precinct system used by almost all states that allows election officials to monitor votes, staff polling places, provide enough ballots, and prevent election fraud.
HR1 would ban witness signature or notarization requirements for absentee ballots.
It would force states to accept absentee ballots received up to 10 days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
What if they're not postmarked?
This was the big controversy over in Pennsylvania this last time around.
HR 1 would prevent election officials from checking the eligibility and qualifications of voters and removing ineligible voters.
It would ban state voter ID laws.
You would not be allowed to check somebody's ID at the polling places.
Voter intimidation or coercion that prevents someone from registering or voting is already a federal crime, but HR 1 would add a provision that criminalizing, hindering, interfering, or preventing anyone from registering or voting, which is so broad and vague that it could prevent providing any information to election officials about ineligibility, such as an applicant not being a U.S.
citizen, would be banned.
There's all sorts of other problems with H.R.
1.
It is a truly radical piece of legislation.
It would make it a violation of federal law to engage in quote-unquote partisan redistricting.
It would mandate the inclusion of the alien population, both legal and illegal, in all redistricting.
In other words, it would basically radically change the voting system of the United States.
It would not be status quo 2020, it would be much worse than that.
It essentially legalizes ballot harvesting, which I think is truly corrupt.
Ballot harvesting is the practice whereby you just go door-to-door with the Democratic list, and you only pick up their ballots.
And then Republicans only send out their people to pick up the ballots.
This is a pretty good way of ensuring that it is not about who casts the ballots, it is about who collects the ballots.
It's a serious problem, HR1, okay?
And this is being pushed forward, and the media love it, and the idea is if you oppose HR1, this is because you are some sort of vicious racist who doesn't want everybody to vote.
Everybody who's eligible should vote, and they should do all the things that they ought to do in order to vote.
But if you're too stupid to figure out how to register to vote, or if you don't feel like going down to the ballot box to vote on election day, this is your problem, frankly.
I am not against the idea that it ought to take a little more effort than simply clicking a box in order for you to vote.
Because guess what?
Voting is not just a right, it is also a privilege.
It is both.
It is both that you have a right to vote, but it is a privilege for you to be able to take part in our electoral system.
And if you choose not to do that, because you don't feel like following the steps, that one's on you.
I mean, frankly, if you can't follow the voting procedures, it's very easy to vote in the United States.
It truly is.
Then, I'm not sure that you should be voting.
If you literally cannot do it, right, if you have some sort of inability that makes you unable to do it, that is one thing.
But if you're a normal citizen and you just didn't do the steps, your fault.
Okay, in any case, all of this is being pushed forward by the Biden administration.
And again, this is considered perfectly fine because Joe Biden, it's open Biden, right?
So long as Biden is, this is the problem for Democrats.
If Biden were to plot, if something were to happen to Biden, God forbid, and Kamala Harris were to become president, she doesn't have a moderate mean.
She is not a person people see as moderate.
It would actually stymie their agenda in a lot of ways.
The media, by the way, are doing all of Biden's heavy lifting for him.
We'll get to this in just one moment.
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Okay, so.
Meanwhile, the media continued to provide cover for all of these radical plans.
Philip Bump, who's just awful, over at the Washington Post.
This is one of the most bizarre and overtly partisan pieces I have ever seen.
He wrote a piece.
It is titled, While the Senate read the coronavirus relief bill, nearly 900 Americans may have died from the virus.
Originally, it said 1,400 Americans.
Now, because fewer Americans are dying of COVID, he had to downgrade it to 900.
Okay, so his take is that the problem here is that the COVID relief bill needs to be rushed through.
Senator Ron Johnson and a bunch of other Republicans have held off on the process because they said, you know what?
We need you to read this.
It's a 700-page bill, 628 pages.
We need you to actually read it because we're not going to pass a $1.9 trillion spending bill without anybody having read the thing.
And this columnist fell a bump.
He's like, you know what?
If you read the bill, people will die.
We have now reached the point in American politics where if you read the bill, people will die is considered a good point.
Remember, Nancy Pelosi held up COVID relief for six months.
They held up COVID relief all the way through the election.
And the idea was that politics required that you hold up the COVID relief.
And by the way, COVID was much worse in October, November, December than it is right now.
Right now, thank God, COVID has waned in the United States.
We're at about 40,000 new cases every single day in the United States.
We are down dramatically in terms of the number of deaths we are seeing every day across the country.
We'll get to that in a second because the Democrats refuse to accept that, of course.
But the idea is if you even read the bill, people are dying.
This is how biased your idiotic media are.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post.
If you read the bill, people will die.
Oh, really?
How are those months where we didn't pass the bill?
How did that go?
Says Philip Bump.
At this moment, on this issue, time can be measured in human lives.
On average, nearly 2,000 people a day are dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
That's a death about once every 44 seconds.
It's an improvement over the end of January, but it's still a far faster rate than the country had seen for much of the pandemic.
CBS's Frank Thorpe reported the reading of the bill began at about 3.22 p.m.
By 4.01, the reader had gotten only to page 40, a rate of about 37 pages an hour.
The bill is 628 pages long.
So, if the texts of the bill were consistently dense throughout, it would have taken about 17 hours to read it.
Reading it would end about 8 a.m.
on Friday.
The readers did pick up the pace.
The reading of the bill completed after 10 hours, 44 minutes.
Given the current rate at which people are dying of COVID, that means about 880 Americans likely succumbed to the disease during that period.
Now, this is a particularly stupid point because you know what would have happened to those people if they had not read the bill?
They would have died.
These two things are utterly disassociated.
There's no connection between reading the bill and people dying.
And Bump acknowledges this.
He says, So then why are you connecting the two things if they're irrelevant?
Because again, all of politics is just about taking advantage of a particular crisis or, as the case may be, ignoring a crisis.
Down at the border, we are seeing thousands of children arrive every month.
Unaccompanied minors arriving every single month.
We don't have the space to house them.
They've been re-erecting all of the evil Trump era cages and tents.
And yet, because the Democrats don't want it to be a crisis, it's not a crisis.
Here's Jen Psaki once again saying, it is not a crisis at the border, even though it's pretty obviously a crisis at the border.
Does that mean that you consider it an actual genuine emergency?
Well, I would say that that's probably a question for the Department of Homeland Security, who obviously oversees that, and the Department of Health and Human Services, who oversees the facilities and the shelters where these kids are.
Certainly one of our concerns is that there are, Well, I mean, is it a crisis?
I guess it's not a crisis.
talking about earlier, an influx of kids at a rate and a pace that is going to require us to make considerations about where we're going to safely house them.
Well, I mean, is it a crisis?
I guess it's not a crisis.
Of course it's not a crisis, because if you were declared a crisis, you might actually have to do something about it.
Alejandro Mayorkas, who's the head of the Department of Homeland Security, says the Well, it's a challenge, not a crisis.
It's a challenge.
See, COVID, which is now on the wane, is a crisis requiring us to blow out the spending to the tune of twice the actual amount, sorry, four times the amount of actual damage done to the economy in the year 2021 by COVID-19.
And we know that the shortfall is gonna be about $400 billion, $450 billion this year in terms of COVID-19 doing damage to the American GDP.
We are about to blow out the spending to the tune of $1.9 trillion and inflate the currency to boot.
But that's because we have a crisis, of course.
But when we have thousands of unaccompanied minors showing up at the border and no way to deal with them, that's just a challenge because we don't actually want to do anything about it.
Here's Alejandro Mayorkas.
What we are doing is building the capacity to address the needs of those children, and we are guided by some core principles.
Number one, we act in the best interest of the children, and we act in the best interest of the American people.
And thirdly, we adhere to our values and principles as a country.
And so in fact, the numbers are significant.
The challenge is significant and our plans are well underway as we build the capacity to address the needs of the children and we are rebuilding from scratch.
Nope.
Nope.
Here's what's actually happening.
According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is preparing to convert its immigrant family detention centers in South Texas into Ellis Island style rapid processing hubs that will screen migrant parents and children with the goal of releasing them into the United States within 72 hours.
OK, so their solution is not to hold people until we know whether they ought to be here.
It is to process them and send them into the interior within 72 hours.
That is their plan.
And then they wonder why there is a surge at the border.
Of course, there's a surge at the border.
You're literally saying to people, if you show up here within 72 hours, you're just in the United States.
And we know that there is no real way to date these people.
And we know that the Biden administration wants to amnesty all of them.
Of course, you're going to get a massive surge at the border.
They're creating the crisis.
The crisis is Biden created.
Russell Haught, a senior official with ICE, notified staff of the rapid processing plan in an email on Thursday.
It said arrivals by unaccompanied minors and families this year are expected to be the highest numbers observed in 20 years.
20 years!
Not a crisis.
Just a challenge.
And not even really a challenge.
We know what to do here, which is to apparently just release people into the interior.
Don't worry, guys.
It is not actually a crisis that requires them to do anything.
In fact, it is a massive transformational change to the immigration system.
That is what we are actually watching.
According to the Washington Post itself, transforming family detention amounts to a wholesale repudiation not only of Donald Trump's policy, but also Barack Obama's.
Remember, Obama actually deported a lot of people.
It presents a significantly different vision of how to handle the fast-changing character of mass migration at the southern border.
For decades, single adults dominated the flows northward into the United States.
The number of families and minors has increased substantially.
Before the COVID pandemic, migrant families and unaccompanied minors were a majority of those taken into custody at the southwest border.
During the Obama and Trump administration, families were released or deported, but some were held in dormitory-style facilities for weeks or months.
Now, they're basically just going to release everybody.
So, You wonder why there's a crisis?
It is because it has been created by the Biden administration.
Don't worry, guys.
It's open Biden.
Open borders, open Biden.
That's all this is.
Because Biden's a moderate, of course.
Not only is Biden a moderate, Biden knows what's best for you.
See, the way that open Biden works is that if he declares that something is not a crisis, it's not a crisis.
And if he declares that something is a crisis, then it requires instant action this moment in accordance with his greatest wishes.
So, when we have thousands of people just entering the United States willy-nilly, that's not a crisis, so we should just release them into the interior.
If, however, we have a COVID pandemic that is clearly on the wane, if we have vaccines that are being put into arms at the rate of two million a day, if we have all of that, if the caseload in the United States is now at lows we have not seen for months, And has been dropping precipitously.
If all of that, that's still a crisis, because it's a useful crisis.
Make no mistake, for Democrats, the only question about a situation, and whether it is a crisis or not, is whether it is useful to their political agenda.
And right now, COVID is useful to the political agenda.
By the way, not just of the Biden administration, but useful to members of the media.
In one of the more shocking admissions recently, the CEO of WarnerMedia, which is the parent company of CNN, a person named Jason Killar, he was at a virtual tech conference on Thursday, and he actually said, he actually said out loud that the pandemic is a great thing for the news cycle.
Which, by the way, is the same remark that you'll remember Jeff Zucker originally made about Donald Trump in 2016, that he was great for the news cycle, so they gave him a billion dollars in free media coverage and made him president.
Well, because the media love COVID, so they're not going to let it go.
Here is Jason Killar saying exactly this, essentially.
If you take a look at the ratings and the performance, it's going well.
And I think it's going well because A, the team at CNN is doing a fantastic job.
And B, it turns out that the pandemic and the way that we can help inform and contextualize the pandemic, it turns out it's really good for ratings.
And then later he came out and he was like, I wish I could be more thoughtful about my communication.
But here's the thing.
We all know, we all know that the media have a very large stake in the continuation of crisis pandemic coverage.
They do, because they don't want to cover Biden as a crisis.
They don't want to cover the Biden administration as doing anything radical.
They don't want people to know about that.
What they do want is to mirror the priorities of the Democratic Party, and the priorities of the Democratic Party right now are to treat immigration as a non-crisis and to treat COVID as a massive crisis, despite the fact that what was a crisis even three months ago is not a crisis now.
COVID is no longer a crisis in the United States.
Our ICU beds are not being threatened.
The people are not getting this at the same rate.
We are reaching herd immunity, just as Marty McCary of Johns Hopkins University suggested.
But again, crisis is an opportunity.
So what does that mean for the Biden administration?
For the Biden administration, what that means is that anybody who attempts to end the crisis is a bad guy, which is why the other day you heard Joe Biden stumble out there and suggest between bites of oatmeal that those who wanted to reopen states and get rid of mask mandates were Neanderthals.
It was Neanderthal thinking.
It was Neanderthal thinking.
Yes, freedom is Neanderthal thinking.
You and your ability to choose what to do as an individual, that's Neanderthal thinking.
The galaxy brains out there, the ones who have been saying for months and months and months that lockdowns were the only sure policy, and the ones who say right now that schools cannot reopen, those galaxy brains, they should rule.
But you, the individual, deciding how you wish to live your life, what risk you wish to undergo, you, you are a Neanderthal.
Babylon Bee had a great headline about this.
Neanderthals out partying while civilized people hide in caves.
That's pretty much right.
Okay, so how much, by the way, do the members of the Biden administration disdain the American public and their ability to make decisions for themselves?
How much do they think that the people of the United States really ought not rule themselves?
A lot.
The fundamental distinction between left and right in the United States right now is that the left loves the people collectively, but hates individual decision-making.
And they love the people because they believe that they can mobilize the mob to do whatever they want, which seemingly is true a lot of the time.
On the right, we're kind of scared of the mob because the mob usually has terrible ideas, but we like individuals and wish they would make their own decisions.
Okay, so here is Jen Psaki deriding individuals making their own decisions.
In fact, she was asked specifically by a reporter whether Biden's Neanderthal comments went far enough.
And she basically agreed that they didn't go far enough.
That basically, if you are an individual who wants to go out and live your life after you've been vaccinated, for example, or you're not that afraid of COVID, or you're not dealing with people who are vulnerable, if you're one of those people, then you're a lizard brain.
You're a dum-dum.
Here is Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary, basically deriding a huge number of Americans.
Why doesn't the president consider ratcheting up his rhetoric beyond Neanderthal and personalizing his concern?
Why doesn't, for example, why doesn't he think about saying, folks, here's the deal.
If you don't wear your mask, people are going to die because of you.
That would certainly get people's attention.
Well noted.
I will say the president has been clear that if people wear masks for 100 days, 60,000 lives could be saved.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
What we really need is to scare people and tell them that they're killing people because they haven't heard that from the media for months.
They haven't heard it at all.
It's a brand new idea.
Then Jen Psaki specifically defended the Neanderthal comment with a tactic that you should never use in a personal relationship.
Here is Jen Psaki on Biden's Neanderthal comment specifically.
And how does comparing someone to a Neanderthal help convince them to change course and get on board with your public health message?
The behavior of a Neanderthal, just to be very clear, the behavior of.
Look, I think the president, what everybody saw yesterday, was a reflection of his frustration and exasperation, which I think many American people have, that for almost a year now, people across the country have sacrificed.
Okay, I mean, it's just, it's unreal.
And that is a horrible tactic in a personal relationship.
So, note, dudes, if you are dating a lady, And you say, you're acting like a bitch.
And she says, did you just call me a bitch?
And you say, no, no, no.
I said, you're acting like a bitch.
That's not going to work.
That's not going to work because it's unbelievably stupid.
Jen Psaki just said that about the American people.
No, he didn't call you a Neanderthal.
He said, you're acting like a Neanderthal.
Oh, that's so much better.
Thank you, Jen.
We all feel better now.
Come on!
Come on!
But this is what they think of you.
They think you are unable to make your own decisions.
Because again, the entire left worldview is dependent on the idea that people are the creation of systems.
So if people make their own decisions, and those decisions are bad, it's because the system is bad.
And that means that we have to change the system.
And the only way to change the system is with top-down control.
Top-down control is the only answer, always and forever.
And as the pandemic wanes, the media, who are just the PR wing of the Democratic Party, will not let it wane.
They will not let it happen.
The New York Times has a piece today titled, Plan to ditch the mask after vaccination?
Not so fast.
Here is the case they make.
With 50 million Americans at least partly immunized against the coronavirus, and millions more joining the ranks every day, the urgent question on many minds is, when can I throw away my mask?
It's a deeper question than it seems, about a return to normalcy, about how soon vaccinated Americans can hug loved ones, get together with friends, go to concerts, shopping malls, restaurants, without feeling threatened by COVID.
Certainly many state officials already.
On Tuesday, Texas lifted its mask mandate, along with Mississippi.
But the pandemic is not over yet, and scientists are counseling patients.
Ooh, the science to science!
It seems clear small groups of vaccinated people can get together without much worry about infecting one another.
Okay, so quick note.
Why small?
Why not large?
Any ideas here?
If you're vaccinated, what's the problem?
The answer is there really isn't one, but they're still pushing it.
When vaccinated people can ditch the masks in public spaces will depend on how quickly the rates of disease drop and what percentage of people remain unvaccinated in the surrounding community.
Why?
Scientists do not know whether vaccinated people spread the virus to those who are unvaccinated.
Well, actually, we do have some early data, and the answer is they really don't.
Again, the early data demonstrate that the transmission rates from people who are vaccinated is extremely low, extremely low.
But we have to hide this from the American public so we can scare them into staying in their houses so we can pass $1.9 trillion pork bills that do all the priority work that Democrats are looking for it to do.
And we have to keep the schools closed so we can keep paying off the teachers unions.
And we have to push all the left-wing priorities by suggesting that Americans are bad and stupid and Neanderthals.
They say it's not uncommon for a vaccine to forestall severe disease but not infection.
Inoculations against the flu, rotavirus, polio, pertussis are all imperfect in this way.
I mean, that's true, but you know what?
Pertussis is out there.
My daughter actually got pertussis after having the vaccine.
I mean, that does happen.
Pertussis weakens the symptoms.
Pertussis vaccine weakens the symptoms of pertussis.
Okay, does that mean that we all started wearing masks, like, all the time?
The answer, of course, is no.
And now, coronavirus variants that dodge the immune system are changing the calculus.
Some vaccines are less effective at preventing infections with certain variants.
In theory, they could allow more viruses.
Yeah, a lot of theory here.
A lot of theory.
But guess what?
People are not going to keep living this way.
Especially because, what, we're going to do this for another year?
We're just going to do this interminably?
For a disease that, at its worst on average in America, killed five people per thousand who actually got it?
Disproportionately, people who are elderly in nursing homes and we can make special protections for and special provisions for?
The answer is no.
The answer is no.
But, again, there is an agenda here.
And the agenda is that we are never going to give up control.
Once people have control, they don't want to give up the control.
And it is amazing to watch, because the reality is this should not be, it really is not, a red-blue thing.
There is one state that people on the left are completely ignoring these days, by the way.
It is a state that just reopened.
And you know what state just reopened?
You ready for this?
The state is, wait for it, Connecticut.
Deep red Connecticut is now reopening as well.
According to the Hartford Courant, Governor Ned Lamont on Thursday announced he will roll back COVID-related restrictions in Connecticut starting March 19th, allowing restaurants to operate at full capacity, loosening rules on sports and entertainment venues, lifting the state's travel ban.
The state will maintain some key measures like a mask mandate.
Oh, well, you know, if it's got a mask mandate.
Social distancing rules, a curfew for restaurants, and closure of bars.
Restaurants, retail stores, houses of worship, other businesses will be allowed to reopen at full capacity within the confines of the remaining rules.
Okay, by the way, if you reopen a church at full capacity, or a restaurant at full capacity, and the mask mandate's still in place, at restaurants, people aren't gonna wear the masks.
Everybody knows what this is.
So Connecticut is doing the same thing, effectively speaking, that Texas and Mississippi are doing.
They're just lying about it by saying that they have a mask mandate.
You can't have a mask mandate at a restaurant.
People are eating and drinking.
So if you open the restaurants to full capacity, indoors, effectively speaking, the pandemic's over.
I mean, that is what you are saying.
But it's a blue state, so we're just gonna ignore that.
Texas, Mississippi, Florida, those are the bad ones, of course.
We're gonna get to the most vaunted of all doctors, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
We're gonna get to Dr. Fauci, who is loving this.
Loving it!
We're gonna get to that in one second.
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Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the greatest doctor of all time, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
But first, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire member.
Today, it is Courtrageous8 on Instagram, who perfectly captures what we're all thinking this week.
In this picture, two examples of the world's greatest beverage sit atop a large stack of Dr. Seuss books, with more of his products placed around the table.
The caption reads, I can't wait to catch all the leftist tears as I read Dr. Seuss' greatest works.
Hashtag, leftist tears tumblers.
Hashtag, can't cancel the goats.
Well done.
Your tumblers will indeed be overflowing.
Thank you for the picture, for being a Daily Wire member, and for standing up against the cancellation of Dr. Seuss.
Honestly, our society is so screwed and stupid.
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of discussing minimum wage on my radio show with Representative Ro Khanna.
It is very refreshing to talk with people outside of your political safe space.
And what did we talk about?
We talked about minimum wage.
Well, here's the thing.
I thought that that discussion was interesting, and I thought that, frankly, the points made on minimum wage by By Representative Khanna, we're not particularly convincing.
I thought that because I know the facts.
And here's the thing, you can know the facts too.
All you have to do is check out our new series, Debunked.
In Debunked, every week, I break down a new lefty myth, a new lefty idea.
We break it down based on facts and logic.
Last week, we dropped an episode on minimum wage.
So you would know a lot about minimum wage.
You'd be able to fight that one out on social media with your friends.
You'd be able to stand up for your own point of view.
This week, we are breaking down public sector unions, why they are dangerous, why they're a problem, particularly those teachers unions that Joe Biden loves so much.
If you want to get the simple facts and logic that debunk leftist claims on these issues, Tune in.
Debunked is available exclusively to Daily Wire members.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code debunked to get 25% off your new membership.
That is code debunked.
you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So quick note here.
The United States, this last month, added back 379,000 jobs.
379,000 jobs.
But, Remember, it's still a crisis.
We're still in the middle of a crisis, right?
We need more spending.
We need to blow out the spending.
More Fed spending.
Can't open the schools.
Crisis, crisis, crisis.
That is the message from the Biden administration and the best doctor of all time, except for Dr. Jill Biden, who is the greatest medical doctor I've ever seen.
I single-handedly watched as Dr. Jill Biden took a man who was clinically dead and sent him to a junior college.
Hey, Dr. Jill Biden is unbelievable at what she does.
Anyway, Dr. Fauci, who's the second best doctor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, he is now out there again, down-talking the possible reopening of American society, suggesting that we can never reopen, effectively speaking.
Here he was, on CNN, doing his routine, the song and dance, saying, I don't know why we're easing restrictions until we're below 10,000 cases per day.
We can't do it.
Maybe zero, maybe negative.
Maybe we'll have to go back in time and cure people.
For us to reopen.
Dr. Anthony Fauci.
I wouldn't want to see a light switch go on and off with regard to restrictions, Jake.
I would like to see, as we get the level of virus in the community to a very low level, well, well below the 60,000 to 70,000 new infections.
Somewhere, you know, I'll just pick a number, even though, you know, there's not a good model there yet, but I would say less than 10,000 and maybe even considerably less than that.
I mean, let's get it all the way down to zero.
I mean, that's what we should do.
And if we don't do that, we can never reopen.
So we're never reopening.
And then I can be on TV every single day.
And they'll give me prizes.
And they'll talk about how important I am.
And people will light votive candles to me.
And, um, people will call me sexy.
Even though I'm 80.
It's weird.
I mean, why are we listening to him?
I just don't know.
Honestly, he's a horrible advocate for his own position.
He down-talked the efficacy of vaccines.
He lied about the herd immunity numbers.
He lied about masking.
And why is that guy still... And the answer is that any tool for the crisis-as-progress mentality is a tool worth using.
So Fauci is now saying it's inexplicable why you'd want to... Is it inexplicable, though?
Really, question, is it inexplicable?
Because I can explain it.
Seriously, it's actually quite explicable.
All I have to do is look at the numbers.
I will bring them up right now.
Okay, the reason that it is explicable to reopen right now is because the daily new cases as of early January were 280,000, 300,000 on January 8th.
308,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 on January 8th.
300,000 on January 8th.
308,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 on January 8th.
Today, we are down to about 40,000 new cases a day.
And so, did I just explain it?
I feel like I explained it.
I have another number that would explain it.
ICU capacity was being challenged in January.
Right now, there's not an ICU department in America that is being challenged by COVID.
So, that was explicable.
In fact, I just did it.
Inside of like 10 seconds.
Isn't that amazing?
But it's inexplicable why you'd want to pull back now, says Anthony Fauci.
It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.
I understand the need to want to get back to normality, but you're only going to set yourself back if you just completely push aside the public health guidelines, particularly when we're dealing with anywhere from 55 to 70,000 infections per day in the United States.
That's a very, very high baseline.
Okay, so again, this is like At this point, the reason that they don't want to reopen is because they don't want individuals to have free choice.
End of story.
They also don't want schools to reopen.
So Fauci, who's been on every side of this position, again, he's had more positions on school reopening than the Kama Sutra recommends, as I've said before.
He says that now schools need to change their ventilation systems before opening.
Okay, well, anything else?
Anything else, Bobbo?
Like, seriously, like, how many more things can you just throw out there?
We can't reopen until we have full ultraviolet lighting systems in all of America's schools, even though the data is that the schools should be open, like right now, in full, with kids there.
Here is Fauci.
We've got to make sure that the schools have the resources to do the kinds of things they need to do, which would be making sure they have masks and PPE, making sure that the ventilation system can be improved to be able to diminish the likelihood that there'll be spread of infection.
Okay, whatever.
I mean, honestly, whatever.
These are the same people who are touting Andrew Cuomo while he lied for months.
about what you can do, the kinds of things you can do, the steps, the masking, the distancing, the kinds of things that we know can help protect the children and the teachers.
Okay, whatever.
I mean, honestly, whatever.
These are the same people who were touting Andrew Cuomo while he lied for months.
The same people, I mean, Fauci said that Cuomo's response was like the ideal response.
Speaking of which, new report from the Wall Street Journal and now verified by the New York Times, Andrew Cuomo's aides rewrote nursing home reports to hide the higher death total.
So right now they're trying to oust him in New York, supposedly based on the sexual harassment stuff.
It has nothing to do with that.
He's just embarrassing to them and they're finding a different reason to take him out back and cap him.
It's that simple.
They want to bury him in a shallow grave in Iowa and fill it in while he's still breathing.
And the reason that he really has to do that, the reason they have to do that to him, is because of his COVID policy.
But they can never admit that it was his COVID policy because that would be admitting that it was their COVID policy that was bad.
The reality is that Andrew Cuomo shouldn't just be not in office.
He might need to be in jail for his actual activity during COVID.
But they touted him as the anti-Trump.
They cheered him.
And so now they have to look for some ancillary reason to get rid of the guy.
According to the New York Times, top aides to Governor Andrew Cuomo were alarmed.
A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included accounts of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.
The number, more than 9,000 by that point in June, was not public.
And the governor's most senior aides wanted to keep it that way.
They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the New York Times.
The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet in what critics have called a months-long effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.
Again, this was in June.
It was in June.
Could you guys have done a little digging right then?
Or are you too busy flogging his stupid book about his leadership during COVID and cheering him as a possible nominee should Joe Biden fall off a short chair and die?
I mean, these people are just absurd.
The New York Times is absurd.
All these people are ridiculous.
I'm glad they can report on it in March of the next year when Andrew Cuomo becomes a liability.
Seriously.
And they were doing this while he was writing a book.
Of course he was doing it while he was writing a book.
Of course.
Of course.
Meanwhile, again, the down-talking of the possibility of reopening continues on a daily basis.
It's wild.
The reality is that things are going pretty well.
And one of the reasons things are going pretty well is because we are now tranching out vaccines developed under Trump with plans developed by governors all across the United States.
Really isn't because of the feds.
It's because of the governors.
And that is going well.
And the same administration that is pushing the idea that there is inequity in vaccine distribution, and kind of poo-pooing, or at least winking and nodding at the idea that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is a one-shot vaccine that is slightly less effective than the two-shot vaccines, but is still pretty damned effective, that if you have too many brown and black people who are getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, maybe that is a sign of systemic inequity.
The reality is that that Johnson & Johnson shot, just like all these other shots, is essentially a medical miracle.
Even the New York Times acknowledging that now.
Saying people are eager for Johnson & Johnson's vaccine.
But again, it's all about inequity in the distribution of the shots.
Simultaneously, the Biden administration is claiming we're doing a great job with our shots.
And also, nobody deserves credit for the vaccine.
So you have Rochelle Walensky over at the CDC saying, we are on track with these vaccines and tranching them out.
We're doing an amazing job.
And then you have Jen Psaki over at the White House saying, you know what?
I don't think we should give the Trump team any credit for the vaccine.
Nobody deserves credit for the vaccine, says Jen Psaki.
I don't think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died of this pandemic.
So what our focus is on and when the president's focus is on when he came into office just over a month ago was ensuring that we had enough vaccines.
We are going to have them now.
We had enough vaccinators and we had enough vaccine locations to get this pandemic under control.
There's no question and all data points to the fact that there were not enough of any of those things when he took office.
And so he is the magic man.
So Biden deserves credit for everything, but the development of the vaccine, no one deserves credit for that because a lot of people died.
Really well done there, Jen Psaki.
And by the way, this crisis mentality, the continuation of the crisis mentality so that Democrats can continue to push forward bad policy, that is on every single front.
It's on every single front.
It's not a crisis if it's immigration.
It is a crisis if it's COVID.
And by the way, it's also a crisis if you once heard a rumor from a guy on 8chan about how there was like a Boogaloo thing happening on March 4th.
So now we are learning that Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police are asking, are demanding more fencing, more troops, and more money for Capitol security.
They want to keep the troops there another two months.
Two months!
This is crazy towns.
January 6th was an act of evil.
Also would have been stymied by a few more troops there.
The response from Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats is perfectly political.
It is, we are going to keep troops here pretty much forever.
We're going to keep this barbed wire here as an immortal monument to the evils of President Trump and the people who supported him.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi is basically just saying that.
Nancy Pelosi came out yesterday.
She said, we have to keep these fences here and the barbed wire.
And, you know, it looks as though we're in a third world country now and we have troops here, like all the time, sleeping on the grounds.
And sure, they're not properly fed or kept, but, you know, we need them here.
Yesterday, no one showed up.
March 4th was supposed to be another one of these magical riot days, didn't happen, nothing.
Like zero zip zilch, no one showed up.
And Nancy Pelosi's like, well, we gotta keep these people here pretty much forever as a reminder, as an eternal reminder that Trump supporters are bad.
Between COVID, where we need to have vaccinations more broadly in the Capitol so that many more people can come here and do their jobs, and the threat of all the president's men out there, we have to ensure with our security that we are safe enough to do our job.
All the president's men out there?
Impeding.
All the president's men out there?
You know who was out there yesterday?
No one.
No one.
Washington Post today, quote, at the Capitol, a March 4th threat from militant Trump supporters proves a mirage.
Oh, who could have predicted such a thing?
On the day when former President Donald Trump's most delusional supporters swore he would return to power, Washington looked, on Thursday morning, much the way it has for the past two months.
National Guard members armed with M4 rifles braced for a rebellion that never came.
Razor wire lined miles of steel fencing that went unbreached.
Trump remained in Florida, where it was 70 degrees and sunny.
It was nice down here yesterday, actually.
Beautiful weather.
The angst stems from another misguided belief within QAnon, the extremist ideology that claims Trump has been working in secret to overthrow a cabal of blood-drinking, Satan-worshiping Democratic pedophiles.
After repeated unfulfilled prophecies, the group's supporters declared in recent weeks that Trump would retake office on March 4th.
Okay, now, here's the thing.
What is the good evidence that they were going to actually do anything yesterday?
At some point, it would be nice to see some of that evidence, considering we're now spending millions and millions of dollars to keep troops there and make sure that they never leave, apparently.
And now apparently, amazingly enough, they've decided in the media that the next state that we have to worry about is March 20th.
Where are they getting the information that we have to worry about March 20th?
I am not kidding you.
From a guy named Ken.
Not kidding.
According to Newsweek, quote, some QAnon supporters seem to rebrand the March 4th conspiracy in the wake of community suspicion.
While two individuals affiliated with the false theory simply suggested Trump's inauguration would take place sometime in the spring, one man, identified as Ken, told Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel the former president, quote, will be inaugurated again on March 20th.
Well, I mean, if Ken says so, I guess we have to spend hundreds of millions of... I guess we have to spend...
Millions of dollars.
Not hundreds of millions.
We have spent millions of dollars keeping thousands of troops in Washington, D.C.
because of Ken.
Because Ken said so.
No, this is not at all political.
At all.
We're just going to keep them there interminably as a reminder that all the President's men might be out there.
They might be out there waiting and watching.
All of this is a little over the top, if you have not noticed.
Okay, meanwhile, The book burning continues anew.
It continues each and every day.
Honestly, this story is in some ways even scarier than the story about the Dr. Seuss estate pulling six of his books, including classics like And I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo.
When they pull those books, that is terrible and awful.
And it is self-censorship of an extraordinary order.
It is a willingness to cave in the face of a woke, censorious, authoritarian left.
It degrades our culture.
It degrades our freedoms.
It is bad, okay?
I don't know when it became a controversial thing to say that self-censorship of classic children's literature is bad, but it's bad.
But it's now gone even further than this.
eBay is now taking down your ability to even list these books.
So, you said to yourself, listen, I had an extra copy if I ran the zoo.
And now those things are selling for like $650.
Because when you make things at Samizdat, when you ban material like they did in the Soviet Union, it turns out that people are going to try and get a hold of the material.
When that happens, The prices skyrocket.
So a lot of people went to eBay to sell this stuff.
Now, eBay has decided that they are going to remove the Dr. Seuss books.
You cannot, as a third party, sell these Dr. Seuss books.
Now, eBay is another one of these neutral service providers, right?
eBay is supposed to be, like Amazon was, supposed to be a neutral service provider, right?
They don't have an editorial point of view.
And in fact, if you looked at eBay yesterday, you could still buy copies of Protocols of the Elder's Design.
You could buy, which is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory first created in Tsarist Russia.
You could still buy copies of Mein Kampf.
Those were available at decent prices.
You couldn't buy copies, however, if I ran the zoo.
According to Newsweek, following Dr. Seuss Enterprises' recent decision to discontinue publishing and licensing on six of the famous children's authors' books because of problematic content, demand for the titles in question spiked.
But even though the resale market for the controversial Seuss books has been strong, eBay has started to remove listings for the titles, citing its policy on offensive material.
This writer actually has access to a worn copy of one of the out-of-print books and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street and listed it on eBay late Tuesday afternoon.
On Thursday morning, this writer received an email from eBay saying the listing was removed for violating an offensive material policy.
The automated email said, quote, Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren't allowed.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises has stopped publication of this book due to its negative portrayal of some ethnicities.
As a courtesy, we have ended your item and refunded your selling fees.
And as long as you do not relist the item, there will be no negative impact to your account.
So in other words, they're going to punish you for having listed a book you did not write and that you do not agree is a racist book.
They're gonna punish you if you refuse to abide by their strictures.
So now eBay is in on the act.
In its email on Thursday, eBay included the fine prints of its policy.
One portion of the message, which gives an overview of the policy, reads, quote, items including figurines, cartoons, housewares, historical advertisements, and gollywogs with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, for example, through caricatures or other exaggerated features.
An eBay spokesperson clarified the company's position further.
At eBay, we have a strict policy against hate and discrimination to ensure our platform remains a safe, trusted, and inclusive environment for our global community of buyers and sellers.
Please see our offensive policies material.
We're currently sweeping our marketplace to remove those items.
In absolute absurdity.
So, I guess that Huck Finn is next.
Can't list your second-hand copy of Huck Finn.
Because, I mean, Huck Finn has the N-word in it.
It does.
Just a reality.
And as we know from the New York Times, anything that has the N-word in it is bad.
Unless it's written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, in which case it is good.
So eBay has now removed your ability to even sell secondhand Dr. Seuss books when neutral platforms, neutral service providers, become the tools of the woke in their censorious attempts to remove and erase history.
And removing and erase, by the way, non-offensive children's books, there's not a single human being who, until the woke got ahold of it, ever looked at If I Ran the Zoo and said, wow, this is so brutally offensive, I can't believe it.
Or Mulberry Street, which is even less controversial.
It's amazing.
By the way, what is on the NEA reading list, according to Jared Stepman over at The Daily Signal?
What's on the NEA reading list?
Well, if you're a kid, you can't read.
And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street, which I read to my kids yesterday.
I did it just to show them.
Just to show them.
I felt a little sort of thrill of disregard for the woke when I read Mulberry Street.
This is how stupid everything has become.
What books does the NEA recommend you read?
You can't read to your kids about an imaginary parade in which a Chinese person carries chopsticks.
You cannot read that.
That is terribly bad.
But you should, and it is recommended by the NEA, the National Education Association, that you read to your children, Julian is a Mermaid, about a little boy who sees women dressed as mermaids and wants to dress like them.
Also, The Prince and the Dressmaker, about a prince who secretly wears dresses at night.
They recommend you read this.
Not you're allowed to.
They recommend it.
It is recommended by the NEA.
There's also Americanize, Rebel Without a Green Card about an illegal immigrant from Iran.
There's also We Are Here to Stay, voices of undocumented young adults also about illegal immigration.
There is also stamped racism, anti-racism, and you.
Oh, it is from Ibram X. Kendi.
So overt, bizarre racist, Ibram X. Kendi.
That guy, they recommend his books.
By the way, speaking of Ibram X. Kendi, Ibram X. Kendi is such an unbelievable, ridiculous, backwards racist that he actually tweeted this out yesterday.
And this is the Kafka move right here.
The heartbeat of racism is denial.
And too often, the more powerful the racism, the more powerful the denial.
The heartbeat of racism is actually hatred and bigotry, but he doesn't care about hatred and bigotry.
He cares about being able to label anyone he wants racist.
So if you deny that you are a racist, this makes you a racist.
That's why it's called a Kafka move.
Because, like Franz Kafka, in the trial, you are guilty if you say that you are innocent, and you are guilty if you say that you are guilty.
If you are a witch, then you will absolutely sink to the bottom of the river.
Then you will absolutely float if you're a witch.
If you're a witch, you will float.
And if you are not a witch, you will sink.
That's how we'll find out whether you're a witch or not.
So that guy wrote a crappy children's book, and we are going to use that as the basis for teaching children.
We're going to actively teach children about racial essentialism, but if they see a cartoon picture of Asian people carrying a mythical animal in a book about a child running a zoo, then obviously that is going to create all sorts of racist sentiment.
Amazing stuff.
Really solid stuff here from our culture.
Our culture is doing a great job.
And it's going to extend to movies now.
Long piece in the Hollywood Reporter by Rebecca Keegan today.
Racist.
Sexist.
Classic.
How Hollywood is dealing with its problematic content.
As streamers build out their lucrative libraries, they're experimenting with label warnings, context panels, and even purges.
These are valuable properties you cannot just disregard.
You want to keep them, but you have to make sure they don't damage the brand, they say.
Every month, Disney convenes an eclectic group of advisors via video conference to tell the media conglomerate what it and the many entertainment companies it has acquired over its nearly 100-year history have gotten wrong.
Every single month, they're doing these woke struggle sessions.
It's a long list.
Song of the South, Jar Jar Binks.
I mean, Jar Jar Binks is wrong, but I don't know why.
Why is Jar Jar problematic?
I mean, I understand that he's a terrible character, but we're canceling Jar Jar now?
MISA!
I mean, first of all, I will say that anybody who caps Jar Jar is a hero to me, but if they won't cap Jar Jar, that seems like they're on the dark side.
That episode of The Muppet Show where Johnny Cash sings a duet with Miss Piggy in front of a confederate flag.
You know how many people were radicalized by that?
You know how many people became white supremacists because they saw Johnny Cash sing a duet with Miss Piggy in front of a confederate flag?
So many people joined the KKK because of that?
We've had some raw conversation on these Zooms, says Gil Robertson, president of the African American Film Critics Association, who sits on Disney's advisory council alongside representatives from groups like the Coalition of Asian Pacifics and Entertainment and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, as well as representatives from various departments at Disney, including programming, public policy, diversity, and inclusion.
Disney asks Robertson and his colleagues to watch content that may contain stereotypes or insensitive imagery and offer their perspectives.
Here's the thing.
You are now outsourcing your wokeness to these groups.
These groups only survive by finding things to be offended by.
You know what would happen to these groups if there were nothing offensive?
Or if they actually reported the truth, which is that they are not offended by any of this stuff?
You know what would happen to them?
No one would need them!
They're not going to un-woke themselves out of a job.
When Disney hands over power to all of these interest groups, What they are doing is saying to them, you now have an incentive to call things racist so that we have to keep coming back to you for our latest re-up.
So now they're trying to reframe classic films on TCM.
TCM host Ben Manquat says, nobody's canceling these movies.
Our job is not to get up and say, here's a movie you should feel guilty about for liking, but to pretend the racism in it is not painful and acute.
No, I don't want to shy away from that.
This was inevitable and welcomed and overdue.
Or we could just let people make their own decisions about things.
I know, terrible, terrible idea.
So, Tropic Thunder, I guess, is bad.
It's offensive, Tropic Thunder now.
Robert Downey Jr.
got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for that, by the way.
Older shows and movies are still big business, says The Hollywood Reporter.
On Disney+, nearly 80% of the TV demand was for these streaming services licensed in library shows.
Only about 20% was for original shows like The Mandalorian, which also have to be wiped clean, by the way, of anyone who thinks differently, as we learned about Gina Carano.
In 2019, Miramax's 700-film library was valued at $750 million.
The libraries at Disney and WarnerMedia are multi-billion-dollar assets.
But the need for studios to reckon with their racist histories took on a new urgency last summer as Black Lives Matter protests were unfolding.
No, no, they didn't actually.
They seriously did not.
Nobody cared about this.
Nobody was clamoring for it.
You just decided to do it preemptively because the woke control your companies.
And because you know that the woke are loud and squeaky and they bother you.
So now they're gonna contextualize everything or maybe even remove it.
Maybe even remove it.
Drawing attention to problems in their own archives does carry risk for studios.
Kermit cancelled asked a headline on the conservative website, The Daily Wire, when Disney rolled out disclaimers on 18 episodes of The Muppet Show.
When the host of Fox & Friends asked Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton about disclaimers on February 24th, the lawmaker brought up the studio's relationship with China.
Yeah, that is correct.
These types of cancel culture critiques have not deterred the studios.
No, of course they haven't.
Why would they?
Because here's the thing, they have a monopoly on the entertainment properties.
They can always just remove it.
And that's what eventually will happen.
If you think that the content warnings are gonna be enough, they won't.
Eventually, the woke are going to demand that these things just go away permanently because they're harmful.
And no matter how many times you warn people about context, trigger warnings aren't enough.
They have to be removed.
And unlike in the real world, where Gina Carano can get fired by Disney and we can pick her up, If I could buy the rights to If I Ran the Zoo and just sell it via daily wire, I absolutely would.
But I can't, because Dr. Seuss Enterprises is taking it down and they own the rights.
Same thing is gonna happen at Disney.
They're just gonna take down intellectual property and bury it and kill it.
And the world will become a less interesting and fun and eclectic place.
Because this is what cancellation does.
This is what censorship does.
Even stuff you disagree with.
I know this is a hard thought for the same people who used to believe in the ACLU, but even the ACLU no longer believes in the ACLU.
And here's the thing.
There is no end to it.
Like, no end to it.
Michael Strahan, good example.
No matter how much you apologize, it will never be enough.
Disney can put the context warnings, TSTCM can do this new contextualizing series, they can do all that stuff.
It won't make one iota of difference, because in the end, there is no end.
So here's the thing about religion.
Religion, when you repent before God, God accepts it.
The woke, when you repent before the woke, they murder you.
They kill your career, they destroy your life, Chris Harrison, who's the host of The Bachelor, or was, and now has been deemed unfit to be the host of a silly dating show because he had the temerity to suggest that a woman ought to be given grace for going to an antebellum-themed party in 2018 after her black boyfriend on the show suggested she be given grace.
He's been canceled.
He went on Good Morning America, and he apologized for himself.
He said that he was insufficiently sensitive and all this.
Created the impetus for Michael Strahan to now declare that he was not sufficiently sincere.
His sincerity was not good enough.
And so he must remain canceled.
Here's Michael Strahan.
His apology is his apology.
But it felt like it got nothing more than a surface response on any of this.
And obviously, he's the man who wants to clearly stay on the show.
But only time will tell if there is any meaning behind his words.
Only time will tell.
But there's no way for him to prove it.
Because you're not going to let him back on the show.
Because you don't want him back on the show.
Our culture has shown its neck to the woke, and the woke are just cutting it off.
I mean, that is all that is happening here.
So, how do you fight back against it?
Well, first of all, make your voices heard.
Make it clear to Disney that if they begin to cancel shows that you like, you're not gonna take your money there.
Find alternatives.
Create new projects.
That's what we're doing here at Daily Wire, and we need your help.
This is why I recommend it to everybody.
Get a membership at Daily Wire.
We are pushing into the culture war because culture is upstream of politics.
But recognize that what the left does right now, their greatest trick, is that they will take a seminal piece of literature, like Dr. Seuss, they'll cancel it, and then they'll say, why are you even paying attention?
You ought to be paying attention.
Because these are indicators of a culture that is in complete collapse.
The only way to shore it up is to stand up for the culture, even stuff you disagree with.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out the Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's show is every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
So, head on over to dailywire.com this evening at 7 p.m.
Eastern and tune in.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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