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March 16, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:28
The WaPo’s Massive Trump Retraction | Ep. 1216
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The Washington Post issues one of the worst retractions in modern media history.
The media justified Joe Biden's absence from press conferences and the Vatican shocks the world by, you know, being Catholic.
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Alrighty, so the Washington Post has now beclowned itself in epic fashion.
The Washington Post is an extraordinarily biased source.
It has been an extraordinarily biased source for many, many years, but I have to say, this may be the worst major media correction I have ever seen in my life.
It's pretty astonishing.
So, you'll recall that way back in December, the Washington Post reported a call The call was supposed to be between President Trump and a Georgia investigator, okay?
And that Georgia investigator, he apparently told, according to the Washington Post, that this Georgia investigator would be, quote, a national hero if they found the fraud.
He apparently encouraged this Georgia investigator to, quote, unquote, find the fraud and said they would be a national hero if they did so.
Okay, now it turns out that those quotes were entirely fabricated, like top to bottom, made up.
According to the Washington Post correction, quote, two months after publication of this story, the Georgia Secretary of State released an audio recording of President Donald Trump's December phone call with the state's top elections investigator.
The recording revealed that the Post misquoted Trump's comments on the call, based on information provided by a source.
So in other words, they talked to a single source who was supposedly privy to the phone call.
That person made up quotes.
The Washington Post simply quoted that source without any sort of actual sourcing.
And then when the phone call broke, as in like a couple of months after the story, when it broke in February, March, then it turned out none of this was on the phone call and the Washington Post had to retract basically the center of the story.
Now, this is a separate phone call from the one that happened that we all heard the audio of of President Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State.
At the time, I said it was easy to mischaracterize that conversation as Trump telling Raffensperger that he needed to find votes somewhere that were fraudulent.
It was the opposite, right?
What he was saying in that phone call was he believed, I think baselessly, that there were a bunch of votes in Georgia that were improper and that Raffensperger was ignoring that evidence and he was encouraging to go find the evidence that Trump thought existed, but You could read it the other way.
But something that certainly never happened that we know at this point is that Trump never said that you would be a quote-unquote national hero if you find the fraud.
He didn't tell the investigator to find the fraud or say that she would be a quote national hero if she did so.
Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, asserting she would find dishonesty there.
He also told her she had the most important job in the country right now.
The headline and text of the Post report have now been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump, the newspaper says.
I mean, you know how dangerous that is?
Seriously, like, as a matter of journalism, you know how crazy it is that you had quotes in a headline that were attributed to the President of the United States based on a single unnamed source?
And it turns out that it was just a lie.
It was just made up.
The correction comes days after the Wall Street Journal obtained audio of the December call between Trump and the investigator.
Trump told Francis Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State's office, quote, when the right answer comes out, you'll be praised.
Watson reportedly responded, I can assure you that our team and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, we're only interested in the truth and finding information based on the facts.
The original Post report, according to The Hill, shook the political world just days after the January 5th runoff elections in Georgia, a contest both Republican senators lost, giving Democrats the majority in the upper chamber.
The original Post report was covered widely by many media outlets, including The Hill, which has also updated its report on the Trump call.
Hey, now, here is the thing that's amazing.
You will remember that there were other outlets that then confirmed the Post's reporting.
So what happened is the Post reported stuff that wasn't true.
And then it turns out that they had to walk that back.
But at the time, after the Post reported that Trump had said, find the fraud and you'll be a national hero if you do so, At the time, there were other outlets that confirmed the reporting.
And that led people who watch the media to say, OK, well, if you have a bunch of outlets that are now confirming the same story, well, now you can pretty much guarantee that the story is true.
Except what if that's not true?
What if the way that the media now do business when there is a Republican president is they find an anonymous source.
That anonymous source then tells their story to The Washington Post.
And then that same exact anonymous source goes over to CBS News and says that exact same untrue story.
And then CBS News says, based on our source, we can also confirm that we have heard that the story is true.
So basically, you now have a single source who is dictating news to a wide variety of mainstream media outlets.
And because these mainstream media outlets are granting these people the privilege of speaking on background, meaning anonymously, this means there is no way to confirm whether you have more than one source confirming the story is true.
Normally, when you have the Washington Post make a report, and then the New York Times confirms that report, the assumption is that there is one source for the New York Times and one source for the Washington Post, and so multiple sources have now double-sourced.
Double-sourcing is the way that journalism is supposed to work.
You're supposed to have two sources who corroborate a report, not just one.
Okay, but the way that the media now work is one anonymous source goes to the Washington Post and says something that's untrue.
That same person, because they've now been quoted anonymously in the Washington Post, the same person now goes to the New York Times, tells the exact same story, and the New York Times says, we can confirm the Washington Post's reporting.
But can you?
Because apparently you're now, like how many stories have been laundered into multiple outlets by one person?
I'm sure that this has happened multiple times.
If this happened one time, it happened many times.
According to the Daily Wire, Real Clear Investigation senior writer Mark Hemingway says this kind of mistake is beyond serious.
There's zero accountability in major corporate media and they continually insist they're the ones holding the line on the truth.
And always remember what should scare you about the media is what doesn't get exposed.
Note the headline on the post follow-up story.
It's sort of maliciously anodyne.
Recording reveals details of Trump call to Georgia's chief elections investigator.
It's not Trump's remarks grossly misrepresented across media because we credulously fall for political ops.
Mary Katherine Hamm of CNN.
She says that somebody should lose their job.
She said, so they made up quotes.
Wasn't the actual F. The header for the story could be a little clearer, like, our bad, we made fake news that led the national news for weeks, and this audio proves it.
For those in my timeline asking if it really matters because Trump is bad anyway, yes, it really matters.
Quotes being correct matters a lot.
Don't you see that's the issue?
If a reporter is so dead sure that, quote, Trump bad anyway, He's less inclined to question or vet his own stories.
And don't give me the corrections are an example of the system working stuff.
Sometimes they are.
Here, they're coming in three months later, when they are outed by a recording, and the correction and new story are designed to downplay as much as possible, not blare as loudly as the original.
Again, it's a pretty amazing thing.
So they directly misattributed quotes.
They didn't paraphrase, right?
They put it in quotation marks.
They said Trump said X. Trump never said X. They did it based on anonymous sourcing.
And then they laundered that into multiple media outlets.
And this was, by the way, this was quoted in the impeachment papers for Trump the second time around.
That report was quoted in the impeachment papers.
I think it was charge 10 in the impeachment papers.
Okay, that's pretty unbelievable.
So they laundered a false piece of news into an impeachment.
And then they wonder why we don't trust them.
Then they wonder why the credibility of the media is on edge.
It also demonstrates full scale that the fact-checking media are just garbage.
It shows that the fact-checking media are willing to cover for pretty much anything so long as it comes from one of their buddies.
Because the way that this works is that if you are a member of the establishment-approved media, you can say anything, and your fact-checking buddies will cover up for you.
But if you are a member of the non-establishment media, then they will come after you with a pickaxe for saying something that is true, but they disagree with.
It really is an impressive show here.
And the fact, again, that the Washington Post blew this story so badly, and the fact that the entire media are now rushing to the defense of the Washington Post, should tell you something.
It should tell you something.
So it is pretty amazing.
Again, the original Washington Post story did break, I believe on January 6th is when it originally broke.
Or, I'm sorry, the original news was broken before January 6th.
And January 5th is before the Georgia runoff, I believe.
So it may have had an impact on an incredibly tight Georgia runoff election.
That's not exactly a shocker.
But that's not actually true.
to the Washington Post fact checker.
He said, the Washington Post reporting on Trump's call to the Georgia Secretary of State, undisputed as the audio tape was obtained from the start, was the article cited in the impeachment article.
Trump naturally pretends otherwise, but that's not actually true.
Actually, they reveal, they actually refer to, I believe, both stories.
So, impressive showing by the media, but this is what our media are now.
CNN spends all day just covering Fox News.
That's all the media do.
The media cover people in conservative news, and they report false stories, and they monitor the false stories through multiple media outlets, and then they give themselves nice fact checks.
Very, very convenient stuff for our mainstream media who are doing an excellent job journalisming.
Because this is what they do.
And again, the false news always rockets around Earth faster than the real news.
You wonder why President Trump had a lot of ground to cover?
He had such fertile ground when he would talk about fake news.
The answer is because we in the conservative community have known for decades that the media do this kind of crap.
This goes well back before Bernard Goldberg put out the book Bias in the early 2000s.
I remember my parents canceling their subscription to the Los Angeles Times in the mid-90s over the Los Angeles Times running a picture of a supposedly Palestinian man supposedly being beaten by an Israeli soldier on their front page.
The caption was false.
It turned out that it was a man attempting to escape Palestinian rock throwers and an Israeli soldier shouting at the people trying to throw rocks at the guy.
The fake news has been a thing for quite a while, and all the mistakes are in one direction.
When is the last time they made a mistake in the direction of conservatives?
Can you name one?
I mean, literally one.
Can you name a mistake that has been made in the direction of Republicans?
The answer, of course, is no.
And these kind of stories happen regularly.
People lose their jobs over this kind of stuff.
I mean, we've talked on this program in the past several weeks about the media simply taking comments by particular people and then deliberately misinterpreting them to get them fired.
There's an entire Washington Post story that came on the heels of a Georgetown professor being fired for saying something not racist, and the entire angle of the story is that it was racist.
There are a couple of types of bias that the media can go through.
One is selection bias.
What they cover and what they don't.
They won't cover Andrew Cuomo being a corrupt toolbag until a couple of months after the election.
Then they'll start covering it.
So selection bias is one thing.
And then there is the way they cover stories, right?
The angle of the story.
That is another area of bias.
And then the third is the worst kind of bias.
And that is where they will just believe whatever confirms their priors.
And then they will just report that credulously out.
And then later, if they get it wrong, they'll walk it back.
Let's not pretend that these folks have any stake in the objective truth.
When I say these folks, I don't mean everybody in the media, but there are enough of them that it is indicative of a broader problem in the media they refuse to face up to.
It's pretty incredible.
Another perfect example of the media simply laundering a story into a non-story, or rather laundering a non-story into a story.
So Peter Pischke is a columnist for the Post-Millennial.
He has a piece today about a doctor who's basically been railroaded out of the American Medical Association.
Here is what he says.
Until last week, Dr. Edward Livingston was a celebrated academic, known for his compassion and for being a wise hand at difficult topics.
He was the deputy editor of JAMA, the AMA's scientific and scholarly arm and host of its successful JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast.
Now, he is persona non grata.
Does anyone care about the truth when a juicy narrative is afoot?
Will we burn everything down to get to the sin of racism even when none occurred?
If you Google Livingston's name, you'll find such damning headlines like, JAMA Posts Podcast on Structural Racism.
Here is the backlash.
JAMA apologized and deletes tweet that questioned racism in medicine.
Market watch.
No physician is racist.
Twitter calls foul on JAMA podcast.
Med page today and dozens more like it.
Facing such an impossibly overwhelming force, the panicking AMA fired Livingston, memory hold an episode of a podcast and announced a formal investigation.
As the finishing touch, AMA CEO Dr. James Madera declared what amounts to the AMA pledging itself to anti-racism as popularized by Ibram X. Kendi.
So what exactly happened here?
Well, Dr. Livingston is innocent of racism.
He himself is an adherent of what the New Left calls anti-racism.
I know because I did what the media wouldn't in my homework.
Whether it be out of laziness or purposeful manipulation, publications like Medscape Business Insider, Forbes, The Hill, and The Root all condemned Livingston.
Not a one bothered to even provide a copy or transcript of the offending audio.
Living Sins Detractors so-called proof is a singular bad podcast alert tweet and some uncontextualized lines of dialogue.
The declarative shout for racism is a tweet, the kind of which an intern might write or post as mangled copy from show notes, which was sent out by the JAMA Twitter handle.
It read, no physician is racist.
So how can there be structural racism in healthcare?
An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors in this user-friendly podcast from the date, the great Dr. Katz, NYCHH and EHL JAMA.
The odds that a deputy editor of one of the most influential journals of medicine wrote his own podcast alert is an absurdity.
The other evidence against Livingston, quotes devoid of context from the podcast episode.
This episode featured public health expert, Dr. Mitch Cass, CEO of NYC Health Plus Hospitals, in what was the fourth part of a series dedicated to fighting racism in medicine, of which Livingston was a participant.
Here is the line shared by the media to justify indignation.
Quote, structural racism is an unfortunate term.
Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help.
Many of us are offended by the concept that we are racist.
You don't need a degree from a J-school to see that the media are cherry-picking this comment.
According to anti-racists, structural racism is what happens when parts of society get ordered in such a way that it disproportionately hurts minorities or folks like me, the disabled.
The media wants you to believe that Dr. Livingston, a Jewish descendant of immigrants, is a closeted structural racism denier.
That is just not true.
Here is the full context of the closing remarks.
Quote, Structural racism is an unfortunate term to describe a very real problem.
There are structural problems in our society.
There are neighborhoods that are impoverished.
The quality of life is poor in those areas because we may put factories in them or have major thoroughfares that travel through them, but we strive to have a society that's more equal, etc., etc., etc.
Okay, so, this doctor never denied that there is structural racism.
By the way, the notion of structural racism is widely open to interpretation.
The basic idea that if there is some sort of Inequality of outcome, that this means the system is itself racist, is a logical absurdity.
It's not real.
But that's not even what this doctor is saying.
This doctor is a left-wing adherent.
He's an anti-racist.
It didn't matter.
He lost his job with JAMA anyway.
Because again, the lie matters more than the truth.
So long as there is somebody to get today, so long as there is somebody you can take out of context today, the media will just do it.
All the way from a random doctor to the President of the United States.
Because they are all in the tank.
These networks are in the tank.
These newspapers are in the tank.
You cannot trust them.
And then, because you can't trust them, Their next move is to shut down any other place you can get news, which is why you have columnists for the Washington Post clubbing social media saying they shouldn't allow places like my place, Daily Wire, to have any traffic.
It's why you have people in the mainstream media going after Substack so individual journalists can't actually write what they want to write.
They must maintain the monopoly on their faux version of the truth.
Okay, in just a second, we'll get to more on their faux version of the truth, because the bias is so eminently obvious.
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Okay, so when I say that the media have a bias, I mean that their bias is extraordinary.
Joe Biden, president of Houseplant, he's just there to hide the water stain.
The water stain is the radical policy.
President House plans is there to provide a moderate face, to be barely alive and never talk to the media and avoid all questions, and for the media to cheer this.
Because remember, the Trump administration was dishonest and obstructionist.
They didn't provide the media with the information they needed.
The Biden administration doesn't do press conferences and lives regularly, but the media cheer them on.
Are you noticing why?
Might it have something to do with the fact that the media love Joe Biden's policies and they're big fans?
Thus, you have this tweet from Politico.
Honestly, like, this is a North Korean-style tweet.
Wow, gaffe-free, guys.
Did you know that Joe Biden's been gaffe-free?
Weird, because every time he talks, I play a gaffe if he's on the show.
Every single time.
with a largely gaffe-free White House debut after a lifetime of verbal stumbles.
Wow, gaffe-free, guys.
Did you know that Joe Biden's been gaffe-free?
Weird, because every time he talks, I play a gaffe with his on the show.
Every single time, without fail.
The President of the United States cannot get through three sentences without stumbling.
He cannot.
It is a physical impossibility for him at this point.
He is in a state of decline.
It is sad to say, and frankly, it's bad for him, it's bad for the country.
I wish it weren't true.
I wish he were fully himself and fully healthy.
But he clearly is not.
But the media are just going to pretend that he is gaffe-free.
So not only is he gaffe-free and stumble-free, they're like, wow, I mean, it's been an incredible, you know why?
Because they are hiding him in the basement, gang.
He hasn't done a press conference.
He hasn't answered an unfriendly question since January 20th.
By my calendar, it is now March 16th.
So it has been almost two full months since he took office, and he has not taken an unfriendly question yet.
Instead, he takes questions like, what flavor of ice cream do you like?
And how are those White House dogs doing?
It's unbelievable.
And the media are treating this as though he's just good at this.
He's not good at this.
You guys are just bad at this.
It's not that Joe Biden is good at his job.
It's that you guys are crap at your job.
According to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, he says, wake me when more than one person asks questions at a time and when Joe Biden isn't acting as Joe's wingman.
Okay, my prediction, this will not age well, It shouldn't even age at all, at least not among the White House press corps, who might be wondering when Biden's absence from the briefing room will finally get some notice from their colleagues in the media.
There's been a curious lack of pressure from media outlets over access to Biden, even more so from media outlets that adopted slogans like, democracy dies in darkness, during the previous administration.
What exactly does largely gaffe-free mean?
Is that anything like praising a spouse for being frequently faithful?
Largely gaffe-free.
Politico's actual write-up apparently is a little bit better than the tweet, but not by much.
They say, Joe Biden disciplined messenger?
Disciplined messenger?
Okay, he just loses the thread in the middle of questions.
He says things that make no sense.
They literally shut down White House feeds so he doesn't answer questions.
But he's gaffe-free, guys.
Not only that, you have full articles from the Washington Post, your source for establishment news.
A full article in the Washington Post defending Joe Biden for not doing press conferences.
The title, quote, Biden is due for a news conference, but they can be risky.
Oh, can they?
Tell me more, media specialist.
They can be risky, guys.
Who knew?
You know what the solution to that is?
Never have a press conference.
But if you're a Republican and you never have a press conference, you're super bad.
But if you're Joe Biden, you know, it's understandable because press conferences can be risky.
President Biden will hold his first formal news conference before April Fool's Day, the White House says.
Even if he held one today, it would be the latest any new commander-in-chief has faced a formal Q&A session with the press corps in a century.
His aides know the delay doesn't resonate much outside the Beltway.
On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain retweeted a former Hillary Clinton adviser's mocking point that not doing a press conference won't cost Biden.
For 20 years, presidential aides have been telling me that news conferences are high risk and low reward.
A setting in which reporters largely set the agenda, questions can come out of left field, and one revealing comment or misstep from the president can define the exchange.
But that's just it.
You know, he probably should, but like the first, the entire article is about how it makes perfect sense why Joe Biden is not doing press conferences.
Yes, we know, because then he doesn't have to ask her questions about his garbage policy.
We understand.
And by the way, the policy is in fact garbage.
So instead, Joe Biden is just doing what Joe Biden does.
He just goes directly to the cameras.
Okay, so Joe Biden is now going to be taking a victory lap on COVID relief.
He is not going to be running around taking questions from the press.
He's not going to do any sort of interview in which difficult questions are asked.
He'll get softballs from George Stephanopoulos.
He's now scheduled to sit down with George Stephanopoulos, which is essentially like scheduling a lie down with your masseuse.
George Stephanopoulos, former Hillary Clinton aide.
It will never cease to be a source of amazement to me that George Stephanopoulos is somehow considered an objective source of news when he was the chief of staff for Hillary and Bill Clinton.
It's unbelievable to me.
It's the equivalent of, what if we just made Karl Rove a news anchor?
Seriously, what if we just made Jared Kushner a news anchor?
Like, what in the world are you talking about?
Are you insane?
But George Stephanopoulos over ABC News.
Like, what in the world?
But he's gonna sit down with Joe Biden.
It'll probably be super hard-hitting.
I mean, I assume that the questions will be along the lines of, so Joe, how are the dogs doing?
And also, Joe, just how much help are Americans going to get from you?
It'll be stuff like that.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, taking a very, very slow victory lap on COVID relief, pretending that all of this spending was necessary.
It absolutely was not.
And again, the democratic economic program, all the things that people tend to think of as the bugs are the features.
They want to blow out the spending.
They want to devalue the currency.
They want to raise taxes.
These are all part and parcel of a broader plan to claim that capitalism is failing because the more you intervene with capitalism, the more capitalism has a tough time.
And then when things fail, you can get more government interventionism.
When you blow out the currency the way they are doing right now, when you blow out the spending, this is not going to alleviate income inequality.
It's going to exacerbate income inequality because the income inequality can only be changed by people at the bottom getting richer.
That only happens when they get better jobs over the course of time, not by simply signing people checks.
The way that Joe Biden apparently thinks poverty is cured is with helicopter cash.
This has never been true any time in human history.
But here's Joe Biden taking a very slow victory lap with a couple of metamucil breaks.
Over the next 10 days, we'll reach two goals, two giant goals.
The first is 100 million shots in people's arms will have been completed within the next 10 days.
And 100 million checks in people's pockets in the next 100 days.
Shots in arms and money in pockets.
That's important.
The American Rescue Plan is already doing what it was designed to do, make a difference in people's everyday lives.
We're just getting started.
You're just getting started?
You just blew it out for $2 trillion.
Only $800 billion of which was even designed to go directly to Americans.
And the vast majority of those Americans still have jobs and are earning incomes and still have savings from the last go-around.
Again, the unemployment rate in the United States right now is about 6%.
It is not 20%.
It is not 30%.
It is not 40%.
It is not 20%. It is not 30%. It is not 40%.
In states that are open, the unemployment rate is 3%.
Now, Joe Biden is living off the benefit of the fact that there's going to be a natural economic recovery here simply as people go back to work.
This is the most artificial economic depression in the history of the American state.
Not close.
I mean, we were going great guns.
We had an unemployment rate that was down to about 3%, which is effectively full employment.
And the wages were rising.
We had more open jobs than people seeking the jobs.
So the wages were rising.
And then COVID hit, and it artificially tanked the economy because all the governments forced everybody to stay out of their jobs.
So that means that when everybody goes back to their job, there will be a vast recovery.
I mean, Joe Biden is one lucky son of a gun.
Because number one, he can be not alive and receive the plaudits of the media.
Number two, the economy is going to go grey guns simply by dint of the fact that it was before, then there was an artificial drop, and now the artificial drop is ending.
This is why Goldman Sachs predicts that the economy is going to be growing at 8% for 2021.
Axios says if Goldman's forecast is correct, it would mark the largest economic expansion for the U.S.
in generations.
Not only would 8% annual growth denote a stupendous turnaround from the coronavirus pandemic, it would significantly outpace the firm's growth expectations for the U.S.
as recently as late 2020.
According to Goldman, we have raised our GDP forecast to reflect the latest fiscal policy news and now expect 8% growth in 2021 and an unemployment rate of 4% at the end of 2021, the lowest among consensus forecasts, that falls to 3.5% in 2022 and 3.2% in 2023.
But!
We expect inflation dynamics to mirror those last cycle and therefore expect this forecast to translate to only 2.1% core PCE inflation in 2023.
Okay, well, what they are saying is that inflation is not going to spike over the course of the next couple of years because the economy is going to be superheated.
But what happens by 2024?
At a certain point, you have to pay for this stuff.
And this is what Joe Biden knows.
So what is his plan to pay for this stuff?
To avoid inflation.
As inflation starts to rise, what you're going to see Joe Biden push for is higher taxation.
That is the other end.
So Joe Biden gets exactly what he wants.
He's a high-tax, high-spend.
This is what he wants.
The taxation is a feature, not a bug.
Remember, the Democratic Party wants to tax you.
It is not that they tax you because they need the money to do good things.
They want to tax you.
I'll never forget in 2008, Barack Obama being asked on a Democratic primary stage whether he would raise the capital gains tax even if it resulted in less tax revenue for the government.
Because one of the things about tax revenue is that a growing economy produces more tax revenue and a shrinking economy produces less tax revenue.
So if tax policy creates a shrinking economy, would you still want higher taxes on capital gains?
And Barack Obama's answer was, yes, for purposes of fairness.
Democrats want higher taxes because they think that the government is good and you are stupid.
They think that the government should sign you checks and you should stay home.
They think that you can't make decisions about your own life, whether it is mask wearing or economic spending.
Raising taxes is something they want.
And by the way, if you believe that their taxes are going to stop at $400,000, that if you make over $400,000 a year, they'll raise taxes, but if you make below, they won't, that's a lie.
They're gonna raise taxes in a variety of areas that hit people in the middle of the income spectrum because the kind of spending they are doing right now requires it.
There is no way around it.
You cannot have European styles of living without European style taxation.
And the highest tax brackets in places like Scandinavia kick in when you're making about $60,000 or $65,000 a year, not when you're making $400,000 a year.
Plus, you're going to now experience what we call bracket creep.
So it is easy to say that if you make over $400,000 a year, then you're going to get increased taxation.
But what happens as inflation starts to kick in?
What happens as people start to inflate the value or deflate the value of the U.S.
dollar and what bought you a bagel yesterday is half the money that it would cost you to buy a bagel today?
What happens when your wage rises simply to compensate for the rising prices of goods and services?
What happens then?
What happens when $400,000 today is actually the equivalent of $200,000 five years ago?
You get bracket creep.
In other words, you don't even have to change the absolute number.
All you have to do is wait for inflation to catch up and push people into quote-unquote higher income brackets even though they can't buy more for their money.
So what is Joe Biden planning?
He's planning a massive tax expansion.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so.
We'll get to Biden's tax plans in just one second.
First, we've been talking about it for a week now.
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Alrighty, so.
Joe Biden is now pushing massive tax hikes.
According to Bloomberg, Joe Biden is planning the first major federal tax hike since 1993 to help pay for the long-term economic program designed as a follow-up to his pandemic relief bill.
So that was fun, right?
He gave you free money, except it ain't free.
Because there ain't no such thing as free money.
At a certain point, that money has to come from somewhere.
There are only three places that you can get money when you spend money like this.
One, in the bond market.
You sell bonds, you take that money, and you hand that to Americans.
There's only one problem with that.
The bond market is going to go under if you keep doing this over and over and you blow out the debt so that nobody thinks they're going to get paid back with a dollar that is of the same value as the dollar they are paying you today for the bond.
That is the second step.
None of these three things are good, which is why you should really consider before you decide to spend trillions of dollars that do not exist.
Well, here's the thing.
Again, Joe Biden wants the taxes.
Democrats love the taxes.
The taxes are their friend.
Because they get to then claim that they are punishing the rich.
This is a class warfare point.
It is not about the efficiency and efficacy of America's economy.
This is an economy that is producing, without tax hikes, a 3% unemployment rate.
And your solution is to take all those job creators and tax the living crap out of them?
What do you think they're gonna do?
If you tax economic activity, why would I, at a certain point, I'm going to either move to avoid taxes, right?
I just, I'm not gonna pretend I didn't do that with California.
I personally took my family and left California in large measure because of their extraordinary income tax rates.
I didn't feel like paying on top an additional 13 to 15% of my income to the garbage state of California.
I didn't feel like doing that.
So people will find ways to not do that.
Okay, and if you raise the capital gains tax, you know what?
People will just take that money and they will put it into savings.
They just will not spend.
They will take that money off the market and they will put it on the sidelines.
Trillions of dollars sat on the sidelines during the Obama administration for precisely this purpose.
The minute that Donald Trump took office, a lot of that money came off the sidelines, which is one of the reasons why you saw this economic boon.
Okay, right now, Joe Biden is living off the fact that there is, again, this artificial economic expansion that comes in the wake of an extraordinary artificial economic depression.
So he doesn't actually have to feel the impact of his own bad economic policy, and he's counting on that.
He's counting on you not noticing, because again, if the economic growth rates are 7% as opposed to 8%, that's a pretty big difference, actually.
But you're not gonna feel it, because the expansion is so great.
So it's all fun and games, as long as it lasts.
But then, it doesn't last, and then there are consequences to this kind of crap.
For the Biden administration, the planned changes are an opportunity not just to fund key initiatives like infrastructure, climate, and expanded help for poorer Americans, but also to address what Democrats argue are inequities in the tax system itself.
By the way, again, whenever you hear people say that people at the top aren't paying their fair share, what would be the fair share?
The top 1% of income earners in the United States pay something like 30% of all tax revenue through income tax to the federal government.
The top 50% pay 100%.
The top 10% pay something like 80% of all taxes in the United States.
So, no, you're right, it's not fair.
It's not fair because you know what would actually be fair?
A flat tax rate.
I speak as someone who has paid taxes in nearly every income bracket in American life.
And I've earned a very middle class income before and paid the tax bracket.
And I've paid the top tax bracket as well.
And let me tell you, I'm paying a lot more in tax by percentage now than I ever was making $60,000 a year.
It is amazing to me that people continue to maintain the absolute fiction that people at the top are not paying their way.
It's just not true.
All net taxes in the United States are paid by the wealthy.
All.
Not some, all.
They are paid by the wealthy.
Net taxes are the taxes that you pay minus the government benefits that you receive.
Because if you're at the top of the income spectrum, you receive no government benefits.
According to Sarah Bianchi, head of the U.S.
Public Policy at Evercore ISI, his whole outlook has always been that Americans believe tax policy needs to be fair.
Fair.
See, this is the beautiful thing about the mush forward fair.
Fair just means whatever Joe Biden says it means today.
That's what fair means.
It's not about efficiency.
It doesn't have a measurable outcome.
It's just about fair.
So all of this is not really about helping the economy so much as it is it about the ruse of using the government to cram down a version of fairness on the American public that comes straight from Joe Biden's adult brain.
Wonderful.
Meanwhile, it is amazing.
People want the government to control your life.
Have you seen the government lately?
When you see Kamala Harris up at the podium saying, we're from the government, we're here to help, when was the last time the government did a great job with something, like a fantastic job?
The reality is that even the vaccine programs, those vaccines were developed by private industry.
They're being largely distributed by private industry in places like Publix or CVS.
They're being distributed in doctor's offices.
If they are being distributed by an efficient government, that's only because of state governments.
When's the last time the federal government did something you thought, wow, that was efficient?
That was amazing.
I'm so glad they did that.
And I don't mean just making up money and giving it to you.
That's not an actual task.
That's not something that they actually administer well.
Speaking of things they don't administer well, Joe Biden continues to ignore the growing threat on the border.
According to the Washington Post, Biden faces growing political threat from border up people.
Again, every headline from the Washington Post is, how is it hurting Joe's feelings?
How is the news hurting addled Joe's feelings today?
Sean Sullivan and Nick Miroff writing, Representative McCarthy, he says this is worse than a crisis.
Texas Democrat whose district hugs the border with Mexico isn't happy with how President Biden's team has responded to the surge of migrants trying to enter the United States.
His people need to do a better job of listening to those of us who have done this before, he said Monday.
Representative McCarthy, he says this is worse than a crisis.
Here's Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader.
It's worse than a crisis.
I thought I would see a crisis, but this is really a human heartbreak.
We have a brand new facility to care for these children.
They built it beyond capacity, thinking they would never reach it.
Today, they just set the anniversary that they broke capacity.
More than 1,040 children, and it's only growing every day.
How many children didn't make it?
How much is human trafficking being increased by what's happening?
And it all started with these presidential policies.
Okay, he happens to be correct about this.
According to the Washington Post, Biden is now facing fire from a variety of places on the political spectrum.
Centrist Democrats are afraid that his border policy is going to turn the 2022 election against them.
Liberals and immigration activists are upset because of how migrants are being treated because they just want people let into the country willy-nilly.
Republicans, of course, are pouncing.
Lots of pouncing.
The Washington Post is deeply worried about the political impact on Joe Biden of all of this.
They say it's not clear that voters are going to see it how Biden sees it.
Trump demonstrated that immigration can be an explosive issue that upends the political landscape, suggesting it could be a real threat to a president who is otherwise coasting on high approval ratings.
And the dilemma is greater because so many crossing the border are minors.
The president is receiving high marks from most Americans for his efforts to curtail COVID, including a sweeping $1.9 trillion relief bill.
That has left Republicans scrambling to find a potent issue as they seek to retake the House and Senate in 2022.
Many Republicans believe immigration may be that topic.
Ah, it's the Republican pouncing that's the problem, not the thousands of kids being held in cages.
By the way, immigrant teens are now going to be held at the Dallas Convention Center.
This is how bad things have gotten at the border.
The U.S.
government plans to house up to 3,000 immigrant teenagers at a convention center in downtown Dallas as it struggles to find space for the surge of migrant children at the border who have strained the immigration system just two months into Joe Biden's presidency.
American authorities encountered people crossing the border without legal status more than 100,000 times in February.
That is a level higher than all but four months of Donald Trump's presidency This, of course, is a challenge for President Joe Biden and his credibility.
Which, of course, is the big thing.
We have to worry about Biden.
We shouldn't worry about the policy, just worry about Biden these days.
Speaking of which, if you think that this White House is not radical enough, they're now at war with the Popes.
That's exciting stuff.
So the White House has announced that they are at odds with the Catholic Church.
It is always a source of great bemusement and amusement to me when the media find out that the Catholic Church believes Catholic things.
This is one of my favorites.
So, every so often, the media will have a headline.
And the headline will be something like, Catholic Church still against same-sex marriage.
Right, like they have been for, you know, 2,000 years since, like, the Gospels?
I mean, shocking.
Now, here's the thing.
It actually is shocking because so many religious institutions have just caved and decided they don't give a damn about anything the Bible says anymore.
That basically all church is supposed to be is some warmed-over pizza, a guy playing the guitar, and some vague chant about spirituality and finding your bliss.
Basically, churches have turned into 1960s yoga sessions.
But it turns out that the Catholic Church, one of the historic institutions of Western civilization, it still has a doctrine.
That doctrine actually exists on abortion and same-sex marriage.
And I understand that they're surprised because they think that Pope Francis, after having knocked over the Catholic Church's position on capitalism under Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church's position on Economics and individual freedom under Benedict.
They've decided basically to embrace liberation theology under Pope Francis, who is a very, very left-wing pope.
I know that they're still shocked to learn that Pope Francis, you know, still being Catholic, actually doesn't believe in abortion on demand and thinks it's a grave crime, and also doesn't believe in same-sex marriage.
But it is still a source of amusement to me that the entire media is going to be shocked by this.
And they are.
They're shocked.
Now, here's the reality.
They're not shocked.
Their goal is to make institutions like the Catholic Church defunct.
That has been their goal for quite a while.
Either hijack an institution or destroy it.
This is the way that the modern American left and the international left works.
All institutions must either be hijacked or destroyed.
If you can't destroy the military, you hijack the military by turning it woke and then having members of the military march to Marjorie Taylor Greene's office because she said that Guam was a foreign country, idiotically.
So people went to her office from the military to show that Guam is actually a U.S.
territory.
Like, I have no idea why that is necessary or relevant.
You know, you might want to face up to China at some point, guys.
But every institution must be turned.
And so the Catholic Church must be turned or destroyed.
This, by the way, is one of the reasons why the media went so hard after the Catholic Church in the wake of what was a monstrous and egregious pedophilia scandal inside the Catholic Church.
Two things can be true at once.
One, that was a monstrous cover-up by the Catholic Church for which the repercussions still have not been fully paid.
And two, The kind of child abuse that you saw in the Catholic Church has been happening in American public schools for generations, and nobody talks about it because, frankly, the left loves the public schools.
So two things can be true at once, right?
You never hear about the scandal of kids being abused in public schools because you're not allowed to talk about that.
But they will focus all their ire on the Catholic Church.
Again, the differential treatment is the critique, not that people should get off scot-free for the mistreatment of children, God forbid.
Okay, but the point here is that for the media, the Catholic Church is an enemy.
And to pretend it's anything but is ridiculous.
They will occasionally say nice things about Pope Francis when Pope Francis mirrors their garbage about climate change and how we need a redistributionist global economic policy.
But the minute that Pope Francis actually cites things that have, you know, something to do with Catholic doctrine, as opposed to fringe stuff that the Bible really doesn't talk about, then they get all uptight.
So, the White House has now announced that Joe Biden is at odds with the Pope on same-sex unions because the Pope came out and said that the Catholic Church cannot bless same-sex unions.
Again, a position that has not changed for several thousand years, does not arise from animus, arises from natural law theology.
Natural law theology, which has been a major part of church thought since Thomas Aquinas, and really there are proto-roots of natural law theology even before that, The basic idea of natural law theology is that God created the universe in a certain way.
That certain way gives us clues as to what human behavior should look like.
And the Catholic Church's stance on same-sex marriage has been that Nature created two sexes.
Those sexes were made to procreate and thus human sexual relations should be based on that assumption.
Which obviously leads to male-female reproduction and male-female sexual relations within the context of marriage.
This has been a long-standing church position.
There's nothing immoral or amoral about it.
It is a natural opposition.
Well, now the White House is coming out and saying that the White House disagrees with the church's stance.
Despite the fact that Joe Biden considers himself a devout Catholic, he disagrees with the Pope on this.
Well, let me just tell you something.
Joe Biden is not a devout Catholic, if by devout Catholic you mean he agrees with church doctrine, which is usually the way that you define people being devout in a particular faith, is that they agree with the core doctrines.
If you say, I'm a devout Jew, but also I don't agree with the Sabbath, You're not a devout Jew.
You're just not.
You can identify as Jewish thinking, you can be of Jewish ethnicity, but you're not a devout Jew if you just reject the Sabbath outright.
And it's hard to be a devout Catholic if you just reject church doctrine on core issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But, again, this is all part and parcel of a broader leftist attack on institutions.
So, speaking of those broader leftist attacks on institutions, Don Lemon of CNN is very angry at the Vatican today.
So, number one, I don't I think that Don Lemon is a great source on Catholicism.
Like, if you are looking for your source on Catholicism, I typically would not go to the guy who was essentially doing wolf calls at waiters, according to, I think it was a New York Magazine profile of Don Lemon.
He was wolf calling and assessing the sexual attributes of male waiters during an actual sit-down interview.
This was considered charming at the time, right?
That's the way this works.
Don Lemon, though, has some thoughts on Catholicism in the Vatican.
Why do—why is—why?
Just why?
And the answer is because, of course, he's left-wing.
And the left will not rest until the Catholic Church is wiped out of existence.
Or hijacked.
For liberation, theology, and they get rid of their social policy.
Everything must mirror the left.
The left cannot stand that anyone thinks differently than they do.
Here is Don Lemon.
Listen, I respect people's right to believe in whatever they want to believe in their God.
No, you don't.
But if you believe in something that hurts another person or that does not give someone the same rights or freedoms, not necessarily under the Constitution because this is under God, I think that that's wrong.
And I think that the Catholic Church and many other churches really need to re-examine themselves and their teachings because that is not what God is about.
God is not about hindering people or even judging people.
God is not about judging people?
That's a new one!
I'm not going to take lessons on God from Don Lemon.
First of all, anybody who tells you that God is not about judging people is an abject moron.
That is literally one of God's rules.
That is like the chief rule when it comes to humankind, is judging people.
Read a Bible.
The notion that God doesn't judge people?
Then what is the purpose of Him?
Just say that you're an atheist.
Just say that you don't believe in a God that actually cares about humanity.
If God cares about humanity, then God judges humanity.
This has been a long-standing part of religion.
Every major religion.
Every single one that believes in a monotheistic God believes that God judges people.
But again, only the religion of leftism says that we're not judgmental except that you're immoral.
I mean, the number of self-contradictory statements there from Don Lemon is truly incredible.
He says, I respect anybody's right to believe what they want religiously, except if they believe you know things I disagree with, like God judges people and has standards for human behavior.
If they believe that, then they're bad people and immoral, and they need to rethink their teachings.
Listen, I don't think that Don Lemon needs to rethink his beliefs about homosexual activity.
It's a free country.
He can think whatever he wants.
In fact, it's a free country.
And as long as he's not harming anybody else, he can act however he wants.
But guess what?
He doesn't get to dictate to me how I lead my life or how I teach my kids or what I believe.
I thought that was the basic line, that was the basic agreement, was it not?
But no, that is not the agreement, because when self-expression becomes key, institutions must die.
When self-expression and self-identity become key, institutions must die.
We have now entered the expressive individualism phase of American life, where all of society is supposed to comply with your view of yourself.
And if I refuse to comply with that view, I have done you a harm.
Now, I've never done Don Lemon a harm.
I haven't.
I haven't told him what he cannot and can and cannot do by law.
I have not said that the government should impose in his life in any way of which I am aware.
None of that.
Right?
He is free to engage in whatever he wants to engage in so long as it does not harm another human being.
Okay, but I am fully free to say that I believe that he engages in sinful activity.
I am fully free to do that without that constituting a harm.
But if you're an expressive individualist, if you believe that the chief goal of happiness is to define yourself without regard to what others believe, but others have to mirror your own self-belief, this is how you end up with a 2,000-year-old institution called the Catholic Church needs to be destroyed because I, Don Lemon, have hurt feelings.
Right?
All of religion has to change because my God doesn't, my view of God doesn't comport with traditional religious views.
And my view of God says that everything I do ever is right.
And because my view of God says that, if you believe that God does not think that that is right, this means that you are intolerant and bad.
So again, one of the things that you are seeing here from the left, on a broader religious level here, is the attempt to impute bigotry to people who have religious beliefs rooted in natural law.
And the attempt to impute emotivism to your political opposition.
Emotivism is a term coined by Aleister McIntyre, the Catholic theologian, I believe he teaches over at University of Notre Dame.
And Alistair McIntyre, who wrote a great book called The After Virtue that is totally worth the read, he talks about emotivism as one of the chief mechanisms of American society at this point.
Is that we don't actually, we don't believe that people's arguments come from a place of logic and reason.
We believe that people's arguments come from a place of emotional, of emotionality.
And because we believe that, it is easy to attribute to somebody who has a different belief some form of animus.
And that's what you see from Don Lemon right there.
He can't credit people who disagree with him on the nature of sin with a different premise on what God does and what God is for and what is to be derived from nature and natural law.
He can't do that.
Instead, it comes from bigotry.
And you have to redo your entire church to comply with Don Lemon's view of God so that he feels better about himself.
In fact, Don Lemon has other thoughts on Jesus.
Did you know this?
So he has thoughts on God.
Apparently God exists, but is nonjudgmental and is basically just your high school diversity advisor.
That's who God is.
God is just a being who created you to do whatever the hell you want without any level of judgment and without any requirements for your behavior, which means that he's utterly irrelevant.
There is no reason to have God if that is what you believe.
And then Don Lemon also believes that the way to cure American racism Is to teach that Jesus wasn't white.
Man, Sunday school lessons with Don Lemon are weird.
I gotta tell you, this is a weird Sunday school with Don Lemon.
We also have to start being realistic about God and the Bible.
And if you are a person of faith in this country, and we know America is built on faith and religious freedom, then we have to, I think, a good way of starting is to present the true identity of Jesus.
And that is as a black or a brown person, rather than someone who looks like a white hippie from Sweden or Norway.
Then we can come to a true reality about what America really is and then try to figure out how we fix this issue of racism in the country.
I have a question.
What in the actual F is he talking about?
Like seriously, what is he talking about?
Everyone knows, who has studied the Bible, that Jesus was not, in fact, of Nordic persuasion.
Jesus was a Jew, right?
He was from Judea.
He was a Jew, okay?
He probably looked like my father-in-law, who's from Morocco.
He was not a black person.
If by black you mean he was African, No.
No, that is not true.
So, no on that.
Also, every single person who has ever read the New Testament understands that Jesus was Jewish.
It's one of the fundamental bases of the New Testament, is that Jesus was a Jew.
Anybody who believes that Jesus was not a Jew is just ignoring the text of the New Testament.
Just ignoring it straight out.
So I'm pretty sure that everyone kind of knows that Jesus was a Jew.
And you know what that means?
And by the way, what in the world does the perspective on traditional values have to do with the racial identity of Jesus?
He can't explain this.
So, we are now in a world in which God is the golden calf.
This is what's truly amazing, is that people like Don Lemon, talking about God here, God is just the golden calf.
So if you read the Bible, if you read the Book of Exodus, then the people, when Moses goes up on the mountain the second time, he goes back up on the mountain, he goes for 40 days.
It's a pretty good story, I'll still tell it.
Moses goes back on the mountain for 40 days after having given the Ten Commandments with God's help.
Or rather, the other way around.
God gives the Ten Commandments with Moses' help.
So Moses goes back up the mountain for 40 days.
He stays too long, and the people downstairs get upset, and they get angry, and they're not sure where the leader went, and so they decide to erect a golden calf.
They go to Aaron, who is Moses' brother, and they say, we need a golden calf to lead us now.
And so Aaron, who's afraid that they're going to kill him, he says, give me all your gold, and he throws the gold into the fire, and out comes the golden calf.
Okay, the golden calf is bad.
It's bad, right?
The golden calf is a representation of the idea that human beings are apt to create their own gods, and those gods are apt to be reflective of them.
Because when people create their own moral standards and then attribute that to God, that is a deep, deep sin.
To pretend that God agrees with you, rather than you agreeing with God, is in fact to make a mockery of God.
In fact, my friend Dennis Prager, this is his entire take on the commandment in the Bible that you're not allowed to take the Lord's name in vain.
He says that God really doesn't care if you say GD.
What God really cares about is the idea that you are taking your own opinion then attributing it to God.
But this is what Don Lemon is doing now, right?
He is saying that he gets to define who Jesus was, he gets to define who God was, and if his definition does not meet with the Bible's definition, the Bible's wrong.
The Vatican's wrong, you see.
All these institutions are wrong.
Traditional institutions are wrong.
They must be torn down on behalf of our golden calf.
And our golden calf is our own values.
So take a back seat.
Sit down.
Your values don't matter any longer.
And by the way, Joe Biden agrees with this.
Devout Catholic Joe Biden agrees with this.
Because Joe Biden Says that he is a devout Catholic, but also disagrees with fundamental Catholic doctrinal points.
He's not even doing the Mario Cuomo idea, where Mario Cuomo suggested that this was his original formulation, that he was not a personal believer in abortion, but he didn't want to use American law to cram that down.
I think it's a bad political argument when it comes to the protection of human life, but at least you can see the division there.
I personally, in my life, believe X, and I abide by the doctrine of the Catholic Church, but I don't believe that that ought to be imposed at the top level.
Right?
I, as an Orthodox Jew, believe the same thing.
I believe in the Sabbath.
I don't think it's the government's job to force everybody to comply with the Sabbath.
But that is not what Joe Biden is claiming.
Joe Biden says he does not agree on same-sex marriage.
He does not agree on abortion.
But he's a devout Catholic.
That's a form of idolatry.
What Don Lemon is doing here is a form of idolatry.
The entire left, leftist ideology, is idolatry.
It is the positioning of a God that is other than actual monotheistic Judeo-Christian God.
And by the way, even Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, right?
It's an entirely different concept of what God is.
God is just your friend who's supposed to pat you on the shoulder and tell you you did a good job no matter what you did.
God is your high school guidance counselor.
And a gumball machine, by the way, because if you ask something of God and he doesn't give it to you, then that's because God is bad.
It's not your fault.
It's not that you ever have to change.
That is a recipe for complete institutional collapse.
The left knows this, which is why they are pushing it.
That's why the attack on the Vatican matters.
Not because I think that I give a damn what Don Lemon actually thinks of religion, but because it is indicative of a broader left-wing assault on religion as an outgrowth of animus, as an outgrowth of bigotry.
It is why it's such a mistake for folks on the right not to argue in terms of natural law.
Not to argue in terms of personal happiness or what identity actually constitutes, and instead to sort of do this rearguard action where the right doesn't defend its own religious precepts.
Instead they're like, yeah, just leave us alone and we have the right to do what we want to do.
All of that is true, but they're not going to leave you alone.
So you're going to have to argue for the value of your own positions.
You're going to have to explain why your positions are correct, why there is natural law to back them.
The left is intolerant and they will not leave you alone.
If you're a religious person and you have shied away from the fight, if you're a religious person and you think, okay, I'm just going to lead my life and they'll leave their lives and everyone will be fine with each other.
No, they're going to make you bake the cake.
They're going to make you mirror their own beliefs.
And they're going to declare that you are godless if you don't do what they want you to do.
They're gonna declare that all these institutions have to be torn down, and what do you get for going along with them?
All you get for going along with them is a temporary reprieve, because next time they disagree with you on something, they'll tear you down right over again.
They will just do it right again.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
The Matt Wall Show, airing 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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