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April 12, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:30
They’re Not The “Resistance,” They’re The Powerful | Ep. 1233
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New police incidents roil the country as riots break out again in Minneapolis.
Corporate America activates against everyday Americans and the media promote COVID panic porn.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so we begin today with a couple of updates on policing situations that surely are going to be national stories.
Because anytime the police abuse a white person, that is not a national story.
If they abuse a black person, that is obviously a national story because it plays into the narrative that the police are systemically racist.
The first one that appears to be a bad police action is this situation with Joe Gutierrez in Windsor, Virginia.
According to the New York Times, a police officer in Virginia who confronted a uniformed Black Army medic at gunpoint and doused him with pepper spray during a traffic stop An exchange captured on video has been fired, officials said on Sunday.
The officer, Joe Gutierrez, was terminated for his role in the December 5th encounter involving Caron Rosario, a second lieutenant in the U.S.
Army Medical Corps, the town of Windsor, Virginia, said in a statement posted on its website.
Officials said an internal investigation had determined that Gutierrez's actions were not consistent with department policy.
They did not provide further details on when Gutierrez had been fired.
Body camera footage of the encounter has drawn widespread attention and criticism of Gutierrez, as well as another officer who was involved in the traffic stop.
Both officers were sued on April 2nd in U.S.
District Court in Norfolk by Lieutenant Nazario, who has accused the officers of using excessive force and violating his constitutional rights.
There was no lawyer listed for Gutierrez in court records.
Earlier on Sunday, Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia, a Democrat, said on social media he'd begun an outside review of the encounter.
He said, the incident in Windsor is disturbing and angered me.
I'm directing the Virginia State Police to conduct an independent investigation.
Our Commonwealth has done important work on police reform.
We must keep working to ensure Virginians are safe during interactions with the police and that enforcement of laws is fair and equitable.
Remember that time that Ralph Northam almost was forced to resign because way back when he dressed up in full-on blackface and or a KKK outfit, remember that time?
Yeah, he's still the governor over there.
The medic was driving to Petersburg, Virginia from a drill weekend the night of December 5th when he saw police lights flashing behind him, according to the New York Times.
According to the lawsuit and video footage of the encounter, Lt. Nazario, who is black and Latino, drove about a mile to a gas station because he'd been nervous about stopping on a darkened road.
Get out of the car, one officer can be heard yelling as Lt.
Nazario.
Nazario, remaining seated, repeatedly asks why he's been stopped and why the officers have drawn their guns.
He positions his empty hands outside the window.
I'm honestly afraid to get out of the car, Nazario says.
Yes, says Gutierrez.
You should be, according to footage from his body camera.
Nazario was wearing his army uniform at the time.
He says, I'm serving this country and this is how I'm treated.
What's going on?
And Gutierrez says, what's going on is you're fixing to ride the lightning, son.
After he was sprayed, Nazario began crying and cursing.
The police did not even arrest him and did not file charges.
In a report from that night, the officers said they had pulled over Nazario because his SUV didn't have any license plates.
Nazaro said he'd recently bought a Chevy Tahoe and was waiting for license plates.
Temporary ones had been taped inside the rear window and were visible, according to the lawsuit.
So that one appears to be just an awful case of police excess.
And the officer has been fired.
And so, presumably, he will lose a lawsuit.
If the evidence proves what the evidence seems to show there, the officer will be punished.
This, of course, will be treated as another example of tremendous police systemic racism.
Although, again, given the man's name, Joe Gutierrez, I'm not sure the man is white.
That is not a typically white name.
So it's a little bit harder to say that it's white on black racism if it was, in fact, For example, Latino on Black Latino.
Racism.
But they will say that the system is racist no matter the ethnicity of the officer in this particular case.
Meanwhile, in another case that is gaining national attention, there's a man who was shot to death in an encounter with police, this time in Minneapolis again.
There were riots last night as people attempted to use this as an excuse to go loot the local Walmart.
That is another thing that happened.
So, it seems to me that no matter the outcome with the police, looting the local Walmart is not the solution, as it turns out.
This encounter is, again, in doubt because we don't have all the details.
So, everybody heard that a black man had been shot by the police, and they immediately rushed to the judgment that the police had shot the man unjustifiably.
We don't know the answer to that.
And you're seeing the media also play this game where they take a sort of random detail from the arrest and then they use that to characterize the whole arrest.
They do this routinely in criminal encounters where they want you to believe that the encounter was truly about the random thing and not about something else.
And so, for example, in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case, the detail the media really fixated on was that Trayvon Martin was carrying Skittles and iced tea.
And this was supposedly indicative of the entire case, even though the actual case was about whether Martin was on top of Zimmerman and beating him into the ground, or whether Zimmerman was attacking Martin and all of that.
And same thing happened with Michael Brown.
The idea was that Michael Brown, the entire detail of the case was that he was, he had some $5 cigarillos, and this was deeply indicative of the case in some ways.
It really has nothing to do with the heart of the case, but this happens repeatedly whenever the media cover a major police or racist, or supposedly racist interaction.
It's the same thing that's happening right here.
Now the story in this Brooklyn censor shooting is an air freshener.
So I'll explain why.
According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, A Brooklyn Center police officer fatally shot a man during a traffic stop Sunday afternoon, inflaming already raw tensions between police and community members in the midst of the Derek Chauvin trial.
Relatives of Daunte Wright, 20, who is black, told a tense crowd gathered at the scene in northern Minneapolis suburbs Sunday afternoon.
Wright drove for a short distance after he was shot, crashed his car, and died at the scene.
Protesters later walked to the Brooklyn Center police headquarters near North 67th Avenue and North Humboldt Avenue and were locked in a standoff with the police in riot gear late on Sunday night.
Officers repeatedly ordered the crowd of about 500 to disperse as protesters chanted Wright's name and climbed atop the police headquarters sign, by then covered in graffiti.
Police had to use tear gas, flashbangs, and rubber bullets on the crowd.
National Guard troops arrived just before midnight as looters targeted the Brooklyn Center Walmart and nearby shopping mall because, of course, When somebody, even if somebody is unjustifiably shot by the police, it seems like the best, probably the best thing you can do is just go hit up the nearby shopping mall for a pair of shoes or something.
Several businesses around the Walmart were completely destroyed, including the Foot Locker, T-Mobile, and a New York men's clothing store.
Quick judgment, if you use the opportunity of a tragic encounter between a person and the police as an opportunity to grab yourself a suit from the New York Men's Clothing Store, you're a garbage person.
Looting is not a proper response to bad things happening between the police and civilians.
Looting was widespread late Sunday into early Monday, spilling into North and South Minneapolis.
Reports said that stores in Uptown and along Lake Street were also being looted as well.
According to Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott, he issued a curfew order until 6 a.m.
They closed all school buildings.
They canceled all school activities.
This is just what this community needs, I'm sure.
He said, Now again, there's an investigation ongoing.
What are the actual details of this particular encounter?
right, a 20-year-old young man, our hearts are with his family and all those in our community impacted by this tragedy. Now again, there's an investigation ongoing. What are the actual details of this particular encounter? So apparently, the Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said Minneapolis will wake up to more National Guard stationed around the city due to reports of looting and shots fired during the standoff with police.
Rocks and other objects were thrown at law enforcement.
Brooklyn Center Police Department does have body cams.
There's likely video.
After the shooting, Brooklyn Central Police said officers pulled over another vehicle for a traffic violation shortly before 2 p.m.
in the 6300 block of Orchard Avenue.
So this is the actual story, that at 2 p.m.
before all this happened, there was a traffic violation.
The driver, who had a warrant, got back into his vehicle as officers were trying to take him into custody.
So the reason he was pulled over is supposedly because he had an air freshener that was blocking his rearview mirror or something.
They ran the plates.
They didn't think that the guy owned the car or something.
They pulled him over.
And the guy took off.
There was an outstanding warrant for him.
him. An officer discharged a weapon striking the driver.
The vehicle then traveled several blocks before crashing into another vehicle. Officers and medical personnel performed lifesaving measures. The driver was pronounced dead at the scene. A female passenger was taken to the hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening.
His family had said earlier that the shooting occurred in Plymouth, but it had not. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension will conduct an independent investigation.
So again, we will know more about this because there were body cameras and dash cams that were on during the incident.
And of course, as I say, when it comes to these particular incidents, the media like to fixate on particular details.
So Katie Wright, the alleged victim's mother, said all he did was have air fresheners in the car and they told him to get out of the car.
Well, he also had an outstanding warrant, apparently.
He got out of the car and his girlfriend said they shot him.
He got back in the car.
He drove away and crashed.
Now he's dead on the ground since 1-47.
Nobody will tell us anything.
Nobody will talk to us.
I said, please take my son off the ground.
Within hours of the shooting, a couple hundred people had gathered near the scene.
And then this turned into a riot.
So here's the bottom line.
We don't have details in this particular case, but that's not stopping the rioting.
There's sort of preemptive rioting in Minneapolis over all of this.
So that is the latest on the law enforcement front.
All you can say in these particular cases is that you ought to wait for the details to come out because the details usually clarify the situation rather than the initial reports.
We've had too many situations in which riots have broken out in major American cities on the basis of incomplete reports that are put out either by the media or by people near the scene of an alleged crime.
So, before the media jump into this is yet another example of police racism.
We probably should wait for exactly what happened here.
In that Virginia case, different story.
We have a lot more evidence because we have an actual body cam video and consequences will attend to all of that, as they should.
Okay, meanwhile.
We have a large issue in the United States that is worthy of talking about.
And that is that there's a huge swath of America that believes they're engaged in the quote-unquote resistance when they are in fact the dominant upper hand in American politics right now.
These folks are not the resistance.
They are the most powerful voices in our society and posing themselves as the resistance allows them to get away with quashing dissent.
I'm old enough to remember when the Democratic Party suggested that corporations should have no voice in politics at all.
Corporations were not people.
Corporations were bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
This is why we needed campaign finance reform.
Because if you owned a corporation and you gave money from your LLC to some sort of campaign, this meant that you were engaged in an attempt to strip American democracy.
Of all of its plenitude.
It was an attempt to get rid of the diversity of American democracy using institutional power.
Now, however, the left has realized that they ought to do with corporations what they've done with nearly every other institution in American society and simply grasp the means of distribution.
They're now going to leftize all of the means of distribution of institutional power in our society.
The greatest indicator of this, of course, is that apparently, on Sunday, there was a meeting of more than 100 chief executives and corporate leaders.
They gathered online Sunday, according to the Washington Post, to discuss taking new action to combat the controversial state voting bills being considered across the country, including one recently signed into law in Georgia.
So, you now have major corporations that have decided to just do the work of the Democratic Party.
And the reason they're doing the work of the Democratic Party is because they believe that the Democratic Party is in an unbreakable ascendancy right now.
They believe that the country is moving ever more leftward, and that there is no worry that there will be backlash from the right, and so they are just going to do what the Democratic Party wants them to do, And in return, presumably the Democratic Party will leave them alone a little bit, or grant them additional regulatory power, or give them tax breaks, or ensure, in some other regulatory fashion, that their opponents are stifled.
That's what's really going on here.
Because if you believe that all these major corporations gave two dams about Georgia's voting law, which again, does not restrict the right to vote.
It does not.
Voter ID is not a restriction on the right to vote.
Maintaining more ballot boxes than there were in 2016 is not a restriction on the right to vote.
Broadening voting hours in many counties is not a restriction on the right to vote.
But these corporations know that they have to just become another wing of the Democratic Party, the privatized wing of the Democratic Party, or the Democrats are going to come after them.
And so they are caving on behalf of the Democrats.
This is extremely dangerous stuff.
There are tens of millions of Americans who work for these companies.
I saw a chart over the weekend.
It showed the political donations from employees of America's biggest companies, nearly all, a majority of those, a majority of employees of those companies gave to Democrats.
So what we are watching is the complete hijacking of corporate America on behalf of the radical left.
And then you will watch a cram down happen internally inside these companies and an attitude taken with regard to the customer base that requires that you accede to their politics.
This is deeply dangerous stuff.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, Let us talk about the fact now is not a great time to go over to your local auto parts store because why would you ever do that?
You're going to stand in line.
Eventually, you'll get to the front of the line.
When you finally do get to the front of the line, they will ask you for details that you don't know, and then they're just going to order the part online anyway because they don't actually have it.
Then they upcharge you for it.
So why would you do that?
Instead, why don't you just cut out the middleman and go straight to the interwebs?
My friends at rockauto.com will take care of you.
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like airlines do.
Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
rockauto.com is a family business that serves auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com right now, shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
Best of all, prices at rockauto.com are always reliably low, and the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
The rockauto.com catalog is unique.
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You can quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle, and you can choose the brands, specifications, and prices you prefer.
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Head on over to rockauto.com right now.
See all the parts available for your car or truck right Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us, Fox?
So they know that we sent you.
That is rockauto.com.
Go check them out right now.
Okay, so these corporations...
have decided that they are going to just shift into the Democratic Party playbook.
And they're doing something different than corporations have done in the past.
Corporations have always given money to politicians.
This has been a thing for a very, very long time in American politics, and that is not rare.
Nobody would be surprised to see the heads of Google give money to Democrats.
Nobody would be particularly surprised to see the heads of Walmart give money to Republicans.
None of this was particularly shocking.
What is shocking is that corporate America is now seeking to punish the voters directly.
That is a different thing.
Okay, so corporations deciding that they want to give to this politician or not give to that politician, those are corporate political decisions that have been going on for a long time, right?
They have lobbyists.
Those lobbyists have been working in Washington literally for, at this point, centuries in America.
But there's a different thing going on when you have corporations that are openly targeting the voting population and attempting to bully them into voting the way they want.
That is a different thing entirely.
It's amazing.
The same left that will suggest that corporations are bullying their own employees for not pushing in favor of unionization.
That's not bullying.
That is just a free market exchange.
Those same people will be perfectly happy with corporations removing their business from places simply based on the politics of those places and how people voted in those places.
They are ecstatic that MLB removed the All-Star Game from Atlanta, Georgia because Georgian voters decided that they were going to vote in favor of Republicans in the statehouse.
Punishing the population is a very, very different thing than punishing particular politicians.
Nobody's saying you have to give to Republicans.
You want to be a corporation and give to Democrats?
So be it.
Don't expect a lot of help from Republicans on the other end.
Why would you?
But if you are a corporation and you are targeting the voting base itself, that is a completely different thing.
Frankly, this is a standard that we've had with our own advertisers here on shows like this one.
Now there are advertisers who have decided they no longer want to advertise with us.
That's their prerogative.
But, when you target the people who listen to the show, when you say the people who listen to the show are bad, or their views are bad, and they're not doing business because you don't like the views of the people who listen to the show, well then, you're on the other side.
A business decision is not the same as a political decision.
And these corporations are jumping full scale into making political decisions by attempting to blackmail states.
That is what they are doing right now.
And these are major corporations.
Remember, these are the people who are in institutional power.
These are not outsiders attempting to stop the march of fascism.
These are political insiders, extraordinarily connected, extraordinarily wealthy.
This is not the masses who are attempting to rise up against power.
This is the powerful.
The voters of Georgia are significantly less powerful than the heads of Google and MLB.
No question about it.
According to...
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor who organized the call, executives from major airlines, retailers, and manufacturers, plus at least one NFL owner, talked about potential ways to show they oppose the legislation, including by halting donations to politicians who support the bills, and even delaying investments in states that pass the restrictive measures.
Now, again, your prerogative, you don't want to give money to Republicans.
Again, don't expect that those Republicans are then going to rush to your defense when it comes to you proclaiming your allegiance to free market principles, because you don't give a damn about free market principles, obviously.
You're backing the party that stands against them.
But, by the same token, very different thing if you've decided you're literally going to boycott those states.
If you're going to boycott those states, now you've engaged in political warfare upon your own consumer base.
You've decided that people who don't think like you ought not consume your product.
Fine.
You believe that?
We will take you up on that.
We will 100% take you up on that.
And we'll fight back as consumers.
We'll start our own businesses.
These are dangerous, dangerous things.
And by the way, it seems to me perfectly justified that in an America in which anti-discrimination law rules the roost, in which anti-discrimination law, which has been in the ascendancy in the United States since the 1960s for originally some good reasons and now some very bad reasons, anti-discrimination law, which is rooted in the idea that freedom of association must be curbed in the name of ability to patronize,
If you believe that, then it seems to me well within the realm of possibility that states are simply going to start adding political orientation as a basis for non-refusal of service in states across the country.
That if you're going to do business in Georgia, you don't get to decide who you do business with based on politics.
Otherwise, you can just leave.
It seems like that is the way that a lot of these states are going to go.
I know that that discussion is being had at the highest levels in some of the red states that you're seeing right now.
Because governors are not going to allow their states to essentially become the preserve of corporations that wish to bludgeon their constituencies into silence.
According to the Washington Post, while no final steps are agreed upon, the meeting represents an aggressive dialing up of corporate America's stand against controversial voting measures nationwide.
You think they give a damn about this?
Seriously.
These controversial voting measures, by the way, again, are less restrictive than many voting measures in states like Delaware, for example.
These corporations didn't care five seconds ago.
But corporations Are notoriously slow to react and quick to overreact.
So they're slow to react to trends.
Then when they sense the trend, they react in radical hammer fashion.
Nothing is done with a scalpel.
Everything is done with a chainsaw.
And so instead of these corporations going to the Republican legislature in Georgia and saying, here are the provisions that we don't like, this one and this one.
Instead of doing that, they wait until the law is passed, and then they see that Stacey Abrams is super pissed.
And then they're like, oh, well, if Stacey Abrams is super pissed, maybe we ought to just cut off all business with the state of Georgia.
This is not going to work out well for you guys.
It's not going to work out well for you guys, because guess what?
If you guys decide not to do business in the state of Georgia, there are plenty of other people who are more than happy to do business in the state of Georgia.
The consumers don't go away.
The business is due.
All of this came just days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that firms should stay out of politics, echoing a view shared by many conservative politicians, and setting up the potential for additional conflict between Republican leaders and the heads of some of America's largest firms.
Now again, the media are playing this as though Republicans are the reactionary ones?
Nope, the corporations are the reactionary ones.
They're reacting to the predations of the radical left, and then Republicans are reacting to the fact that all of these corporations have decided to target their voters.
By the way, it's now coming out that Stacey Abrams seems to be a liar.
Stacey Abrams said that she had no impact on MLB moving the game.
Apparently, MLB spoke directly to Stacey Abrams before they decided to move the All-Star Game.
Leaders from dozens of companies, Delta, American, United, Starbucks, Target, LinkedIn, Levi Strauss, Boston Consulting Group, along with the owner of the Atlanta Falcons, were included in the Zoom call.
We'll have more on this in just one second, because this is a truly dangerous trend in American life.
It's going to lead to the breakup of the country.
Hey, so, according to the Washington Post, the discussion, which was scheduled to last one hour, but went on for 10 minutes longer, was led at times by Ken Chenault, the former chief executive of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck, who told the executives it was important to keep fighting what they viewed as discriminatory laws on voting.
Both Chenault and Frazier are, of course, black, and they coordinated a letter signed last month by 72 black business executives that made a similar point.
Now, all of this could stop if corporations just said no.
That's the amazing thing about this.
All corporations have to do is say, listen, we are not in the business of signing into debates over voter ID.
And it's just not in our purview.
What's in our purview is how, for example, the government regulates corporate earnings.
What is within our purview, this is part of the other problem, right?
So there are two problems.
One, corporations have moved beyond simply targeting politicians based on their stances and have decided to target overt populations, which is a big change.
The other thing that has happened in corporate America is that corporate America has decided They're not going to restrict their opinions to areas in which the corporation operates.
They're going to now have opinions on everything.
It's going to be like, what does Coca-Cola think about this law in Arkansas that says that children should not have medical experimentation done on them for purposes of transgender verification?
Well, I mean, their silence is deafening, right?
Well, we have now reached the point in corporate America.
We have reached the Taylor Swift's silence is deafening point in corporate America.
For those who are not aware of this meme, for years, Taylor Swift was fairly apolitical.
And then, everybody online kept saying, whenever there was a controversial thing happening in American politics, Taylor Swift's silence is deafening.
And those of us on the right were like, um, she makes music.
Why do you care about what Taylor Swift has to say?
And then, Taylor Swift got hit so hard, so much from the left, that she decided to go fully woke, and she started producing songs like 10 years late about gay rights.
She turned into pop star Never Stop Never Stopping.
In that movie, which is very funny, there's a Andy Samberg plays a character who's this pop star.
And he makes this pro-gay rights song, but he's like 20 years late on it.
And so everybody's like, why is he even making this?
That was Taylor Swift.
She makes this gay rights song like 10 years after gay marriage becomes a thing in the United States.
And everybody's like, why is she?
Well, it's pretty obvious why she was doing it.
She was bullied into it by the left.
Corporations are now the Taylor Swift of our politics.
Corporations have decided that they are going to, their silence is deafening.
They must speak out on everything the left demands of them.
Okay, guys, well, if that's the way you want it, that's the way you're gonna have it.
If you're going to engage in the ultra crepedarianism, Speaking outside of your purview, in which you are not commenting anymore about corporate tax rates or the restrictions on sugar imports from Cuba as Coca-Cola, but instead you're now going to comment on bathroom bills in North Carolina?
Then you are explicitly political actors and you will be treated as such.
And the consuming public will do so.
And Republican legislators will do so.
And that is not reactionary on the part of Republicans.
That is not them starting the fight.
That is them simply saying, if you guys have chosen to engage in this field, you will be treated as somebody engaging in this field.
You will be treated as an adjunct to the Democratic Party, which is what you are.
The call's goal, according to the Washington Post, was to unify companies that had been issuing their own statements and signing on to drafted statements from different organizations after the action in Georgia, Sonnenfeld said.
The leaders called in from around the country.
Some chimed in from Augusta, Georgia, where they were attending the Masters.
I noticed that Rob Manfred did not, in fact, the head of MLB did not, in fact, give up his membership to Augusta National.
And I've noticed that Coca-Cola has not moved its corporate headquarters.
I've noticed that CNN, by the way, has not moved its corporate headquarters, which is located in Atlanta, which means presumably they endorse the Georgia voting law.
That's the way this works, right?
Sonnenfeld, this professor from Yale, he says, there was a defiance of the threats that businesses should stay out of politics.
They were obviously rejecting that, even with their presence on the call, but they were there out of concern about voting restrictions not being in the public interest.
Yeah, sure.
Or they were there because they know they're getting blackmailed by the left, and they are deeply afraid that their investment pension funds, union pension funds, run by the SEIU, that are going to pull money from their stock price.
Well, again, this game can work both ways.
This can work both ways.
If, by the way, these folks think that joining with corporate America is going to gain you massive popularity, let me recommend that you take a look at the Republican Party, which joined with corporate America in nearly every iteration over the past 30 years and proceeded to lose massive amounts of power in the United States.
It turns out that you know what Americans typically don't like?
Big corporations cramming down their views.
And it's even worse when those big corporations have decided to move out of the realm of tax rates, corporate tax rates, and have decided to move into the realm of, what do we think your children should be learning in school?
I do not give two craps with Kenneth Chennault thinks my kids should be learning in public school.
I don't want to know what American Express thinks about this.
I have no interest in them.
And if they try to tell me what to do, I'm just not going to patronize their business.
I will take out a different credit card.
And if all of the credit cards decide to do this, there will be regulations that prohibit them from doing this in red states.
You can see how these corporations are going to wield their executive power in order to damage the American people.
And you can see it most clearly in the realm of social media.
So, for example, this is the most obvious and ridiculous example.
Over the weekend, it broke that Patrisse Cullors, who is 37, and one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, has now bought a $1.4 million home in Topanga Canyon.
Now, being from California, I can assure you Topanga Canyon is super white.
That is an extremely white area.
In fact, it is 88% white and 1.8% black.
So Patrice Coolers, as soon as she made some money off of BLM, she bought a nice house right there in Topanga Canyon.
Apparently, it is a pretty expensive house that has a vast great room with a vaulted and beamed ceiling.
The realtors write that the large backyard is ideal for entertaining or quietly contemplating cross-canyon vistas framed by mature trees.
The AP reported that Black Lives Matter took in $90 million in donations last year.
It's not clear if or how Colors is paid by the organizations.
Its finances are opaque, which means, of course, that people are taking out vast quantities of cash.
Whenever the finances of an organization are opaque, you can be pretty sure that whoever's at the head of the organization is doing pretty well.
So Patrisse Cullors' first opportunity, she immediately takes her $1.4 million home in super white Topanga Canyon.
Okay, so here's where this becomes more than just a hilarious story of more limousine liberal hypocrisy.
Okay, that is Jason Whitlock, who is the black writer for The Blaze now, Jason Whitlock.
He was apparently barred from Twitter for tweeting out the story.
Apparently, they locked his account.
He tweeted out, Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%.
She's with her people.
And this got Jason Whitlock's account locked.
It got his account locked because that's the way all of this works now, is if you violate what corporate America would like for you to say, there's a good shot that you're going to be targeted by corporate America.
You can see this happening also, by the way, in terms of COVID.
Because the entire left now has an interest in pushing COVID panic porn, which we'll get to in just one second.
But YouTube, as we mentioned last week, pulled a COVID roundtable with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
So Ron DeSantis had Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford and a couple other scientists on a panel.
And on that panel, members of the panel said that small children should not be wearing masks.
It's a waste of time.
That is at least a debatable opinion.
That is certainly not well established, that five-year-olds need to be wearing masks.
They are not good at wearing masks.
There's a good case that they do not transmit the disease in anything like the numbers that adults transmit the disease.
And when they do transmit the disease, it tends to be a weaker strain of the disease, apparently, because they're The disease count is just not as high.
The germ count is not as high.
Okay, so that is a very reasonable and debatable opinion.
YouTube pulled the entire video because this, of course, contradicted the nature of the stuff that YouTube wants to put out there about COVID, all of which prompted Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist from Stanford, mind you, to say, this is crazy.
I'd love to have a debate with somebody at YouTube because apparently some low-level dope at YouTube believes they know more about epidemiology than Bhattacharya does.
I mean, it's really crazy.
It's one of these things where you look at it and you say, how can you have an open discussion about a policy that affects every single person's life when you can't actually even make a point based on scientific evidence?
They want to make you think that the only way forward is these lockdowns, but we can see that they've failed.
Let's have that debate.
Bhattacharya is right about this, but again, it's corporate America's power that is allowing them, particularly in the social media sphere, where they are in the free speech sphere, to just shut down alternative methods of debate.
And this becomes particularly relevant when you see neutral service providers like Amazon Web Services shutting down Parler at the beginning of the year, simply because they said, based on a lie, that Parler was the chief organizing mechanism used in order to organize the January 6th riots.
The chief organizing mechanisms, by all available evidence, were Facebook and Twitter.
It was discussed apparently on Parler, but apparently more of the discussion was happening on Facebook and Twitter.
You didn't see those guys getting pulled down by Amazon Web Services.
But again, contravene what corporate America wants you to know about particular issues, or what corporate America wants you to think about particular issues, and they will use every means at their disposal in order to come after you.
This is deeply dangerous stuff.
And they are, in fact, promoting lie after lie about America, America being systemically racist, the new Jim Crow in Georgia, and COVID still on the loose.
We're going to talk about the COVID panic porn in just one second because it's beyond the pale at this point.
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Alrighty, we'll get to more in just a second about the media's panic porn.
Again, they are shutting down.
Debate on issues that are very debatable.
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The amount of panic porn that is now being pushed on you by the media is truly astonishing.
I was noting this over the weekend.
So people, it's amazing.
YouTube will pull down, pull down a reasonable conversation among scientists about whether or not small children need to wear masks.
Or whether they ever needed to wear masks.
They'll pull that down over at YouTube.
But you can say the most insane crap about vaccines and their ineffectiveness, and that apparently is fine so long as you're on the left.
So for example, Joy Reid over the weekend tweeted out that she was with Jonathan Capehart.
She said, Nope.
Hashtag The Sunday Show.
I'm one vax down, but even when I get the second shot, I'm too scurred to be out there wildin'.
No flying and no indoor activities for me.
Nope.
Hashtag the Sunday show.
Okay, this is vaccine denialism, right here.
You wanna talk about denialism?
This is denialism.
The vaccines are extraordinary.
They're one of the great scientific accomplishments of the last several centuries.
To have a vaccine inside of a year that is 99% effective at preventing serious disease and death, it's a miracle.
The notion that you are still not going to be flying, by the way, the evidence that this was transmitted on flights is non-existent.
There is no evidence at all, literally none, since the beginning of the pandemic, that airline flights were a chief source of transmission for the virus.
Again, there are great HEPA filters on the planes.
When I say not a lot of it, I'm not aware of a single study that says that airplanes were a chief vector of transmission throughout this pandemic.
Not that you can catch it on an airplane, but that they were a chief transmission vector or a key transmission?
No.
There's no evidence of that, as far as I'm aware, whatsoever.
Not only that, once you get the vaccine, what in the world are you talking about?
The vaccine is super duper effective, like incredibly effective.
But apparently, that sort of denialism is not only okay, it is welcomed on the left.
That after you've had the vaccine, you still won't go out, you still won't engage in society, which of course necessitates the government step in and take care of you.
If everybody followed Joy Reid's advice, we'd all be stuck in our homes forever.
And the government would just keep signing us checks based on cash that does not exist.
So that is simple vaccine denialism, and it's being taken up by the horrible media coverage.
Our media are so garbage at this.
I mean, unbelievably garbage at their coverage.
So, for example, CNN put out a story that is totally wrong about how to fly safely a year into the pandemic.
Now, here's the thing.
You could fly safely throughout the pandemic.
You could, if you wore a mask and you were on a plane.
You were pretty much okay.
Again, there is no, I'm not aware of any surge of documented cases that began on an airplane.
You can say that people traveled with COVID on the other end of the airplane, they spread it when they got into an apartment building or something, but that's not the same thing as saying the airplanes were the chief factor of transmission.
Okay, put that aside.
Here's what CNN says, and this is just statistically illiterate.
They said, Real world studies of the Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna vaccines show they are only 90% protective against COVID, not 95% as reported in clinical trials.
Translated into reality, that means for every million fully vaccinated people who fly, some 100,000 could still become infected.
No.
Wrongo.
That is statistically illiterate.
So first of all, when they say they're 90% protective against coronavirus, that means they are 90% protective against getting coronavirus.
Okay?
That does not mean they are only 90% effective in preventing death or serious diseases from coronavirus.
That's still a 99 to 100%.
Okay, beyond that, that's not how statistics work.
Okay, if there are a million people who fly on planes, and there's a vaccine that are taken by everybody, right?
Everybody has taken the vaccine, but it's only 90% effective in preventing the transmission of the disease.
That doesn't mean that there are 100,000 people who are going to get the disease.
Okay, as National Review points out, translated into actual reality, a 90% effective vaccine refers to a reduction in the odds of a vaccinated person being infected relative to somebody who has not taken the vaccine.
That is, in a given group of say 2,000 people, if 100 unvaccinated people would ordinarily get COVID, just 10% vaccinated, just 10 vaccinated people in the same size group would get the virus.
That does not mean that 200 vaccinated people would get the virus.
In other words, you have to have what's called a base rate.
If there are a million people who fly on planes and 100,000 people are not protected against the virus, it doesn't mean all 100,000 people get COVID.
That's never been true.
The hell are you talking about?
A tiny percentage of those people will get COVID.
And then of those people, 90% will not get COVID if they're vaccinated.
That's what that stat means.
So instead, CNN is openly panicking you that if you fly and you're vaccinated, you're still going to get COVID.
You wonder why with media coverage like that, people are still worried they're going to get COVID after being vaccinated?
Okay, another piece of news that the media are blowing way the hell out of proportion.
If you look at Drudge today, which has just become Huffington Post, Drudge has a headline at the top of its page in all red, Pfizer can't stop South African strain.
Now, if you read that headline, what would you think?
What would I think?
So I've had the Pfizer vaccine at this point.
Okay, so what would I think?
I would think, okay, well, that means that if the South African strain hits me, I'm screwed, right?
Pfizer can't stop the South African strain.
Wrong!
Okay, that is not what the story says.
What the story says is, quote, The South African variant of the coronavirus is notably more adept at breaking through the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine than other variants are.
Israel has used the Pfizer vaccine almost exclusively to vaccinate millions of citizens, with a version by Moderna used minimally.
A team from Tel Aviv University and the Khalit Healthcare Organization sequenced the swabs of 150 Israelis who tested positive for COVID-19 despite having been vaccinated.
Okay, so there are 150 Israelis who tested positive for COVID after having been vaccinated.
Six to seven million people in Israel have already been vaccinated.
So number one, you're already talking about pretty much statistically almost nobody who got the virus after having been vaccinated.
Then, in that subgroup, what did they find?
That subgroup of 150 Israelis who tested positive for COVID-19 after having been vaccinated?
Here's what they found.
In their study, the prevalence of the South African strain among vaccinated individuals who were infected, despite their inoculation, was eight times higher than its prevalence in the unvaccinated infected population.
Though the number of infections among the vaccinated was relatively small, the findings indicated that this variant was far more successful in getting through vaccinated individuals' defenses than other strains.
So number one, when we say relatively small, we are talking about nearly everyone in Israel got the Pfizer vaccine.
You have like 150, 200 people who actually got infected afterward.
And your takeaway from that is that the Pfizer vaccine is not protective against South African strains, You're talking about a margin at the very, very, very tip top right here.
You're talking about a tiny group of people got infected after the vaccine.
And of that tiny group of people, more people were infected with South African strain.
Also not noted in the study, did any of those people get super sick and die?
Nope.
So it turns out that Pfizer is still extraordinarily effective against all of the strains.
In fact, in lab tests, Pfizer has been proved to be effective against the South African strain, according to Dr. Marty McCary of Johns Hopkins University.
So, like, no.
That's ridiculous.
If your takeaway is that you got a Pfizer vaccine and now you're going to die of the South African variant, no!
Wrong!
Okay, but that is the takeaway from the media.
This is all panic porn.
And you know who's been pushing that panic porn?
Naturally, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci is pushing the panic porn.
Over the weekend, Fauci said, That he would still not do a lot of things after getting the vaccine.
Right?
He still said that he would host people at home but stay away from crowded indoor spaces after getting the vaccine.
He said, I don't think I would, even if I'm vaccinated, go into an indoor crowded place where people are not wearing masks.
Why?
Explain.
Explain, doctor.
Really, explain.
It's 99 to 100% effective against death or serious disease.
So now what you are saying is that if you're afraid of getting a mild disease, you should stay away from public places.
My God.
He said we shouldn't claim victory over the virus yet because case counts are surging in several states.
Okay, again, I'm going to look at the case counts right now.
Okay, I'm going to bring up the case counts right now.
Right now, case counts in the United States are in fact not surging.
They are not surging.
Okay, over the April 10th, there were 67,000 diagnosed cases of COVID in the United States.
That was April 10th.
February 23rd, there were 74,000 cases diagnosed.
We are not surging.
We are completely flat in the numbers of diagnosed cases in the United States.
And in terms of daily new deaths, we are at the lowest point that we were since, at this point, looks like September, October of last year, when people thought maybe we were already hitting the end of this thing.
So, his takeaway is just nonsense, but they're trying to scare the hell out of you, and then, they're trying to bully you into silence if you're not scared.
The goal here is to scare the hell out of you, so then, they can overreach as much as they could possibly want.
By the way, how crazy are they getting about all of this?
How nuts?
Okay, they're getting so nuts about all of this, that now, they've decided that they are targeting Amy Chua, the famous professor over at Yale Law School.
So, apparently, she was having little gatherings at her home, where she was meeting with students who were having trouble, and people decided that she had to be COVID policed.
She writes a letter, says, I received an email from a Yale Daily News reporter named Julia Brown, who informed me she was working on an article about how you will not be leading a small group at the law school next year, and that there will likely be a formal announcement about it on Monday.
This was the first I'd heard about it.
The reporter's email implied that the decision had been made on the basis of an allegation that I'd been recently hosting parties at my house, ridiculous allegations I'd never heard for before from anyone.
Finally, the email contained a shocking number of confidential details about an agreement I reached back in 2019, which the Daily News was apparently preparing to publish.
And apparently this then went public, and they're trying to basically kick her out of these small group sessions because she was hosting small groups of people at her home who had been vaccinated.
I'm sorry, we are now living in the middle of a major corporate crackdown on free speech.
The institutions of power have decided that they no longer need your opinion.
Instead, they're going to be shaping your opinion from above.
And they're going to be doing so on the basis of their own self-satisfied sense of who they are.
And they're going to be cheering on the Biden administration as they do the same.
So if you don't want that, it is past time to fight back on all of this.
Because you simply cannot trust the corporate media.
You can't trust your corporate leaders.
There are no institutions standing between you and the naked face of an authoritarian left that seeks to cram down its values on you and against you.
Yeah, that was a weird thing.
For those who missed it, on CNN, Brian Stelter said it was really bad that hosts at Fox News hadn't taken selfies getting the vaccine.
Super, super bad.
All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Moll's show where he discusses how Brian Stelter wants to watch conservatives get the vaccine.
Yeah, that was a weird thing.
For those who missed it, on CNN, Brian Stelter said it was really bad that host at Fox News hadn't taken selfies getting the vaccine.
Super, super bad.
Meanwhile, Joy Reid is out there saying things like, even after I get the vaccine, I'm not gonna go out in public ever again.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Brian Stelter wants to watch conservatives get the COVID vaccine.
Pete Buttigieg says the roads are racist.
And a public university demands that students adopt the woke religion.
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