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May 20, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:10
The Democrats Need January 6 | Ep. 1259
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Democrats in the House rammed through a January 6th commission investigation.
Cryptocurrency takes a serious hit.
And Joe Biden continues his war with the teleprompter.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so.
Yesterday, the House rammed through, along party lines, essentially, a January 6th commission.
There were 35 Republicans who voted to create the January 6th commission as well.
Most Republicans voted not to go along with the January 6th commission.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the House passed a bill on Wednesday authorizing a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the January 6th pro-Trump assault on the U.S.
Capitol.
But the proposal could stall in the Senate after GOP leaders in Congress and former President Trump For the second time in a week, House Republicans found themselves facing a contentious vote that Trump has framed as a test of their loyalty, even as the party tries to focus on more unifying topics, criticism of the Biden administration and winning next year's midterm elections, which, of course, is the reason why they are pushing a January 6th commission to ignore the politics on the side of the Democrats who are pushing the commission.
The reason they're pushing this is because they wish to have this bleed over into the 2022 midterms, because the reality is that Joe Biden has not governed well.
The Democratic Party is not In high favor with the American public right now on a number of issues, Democrats are really struggling.
And so they have to redirect toward Trump.
And thankfully for them, Trump is still there to fight with.
But it really is about January 6th for them.
If they can continue to focus in on January 6th, if they can continue to focus in on Trump, this allows them to avoid the consequences of having to look in the face of their own governance.
Because remember, Democrats right now are in control of the House and the Senate.
And the presidency.
So 2022 naturally is going to be a referendum on the party in power.
This always happens.
Midterms are a referendum on the party in power.
The way that Democrats are hoping to shift that math is by making instead 2022 a referendum on Trump, who will have been at that point out of power for two full years.
And so what they're going to attempt to do is say, well, you know, however bad we are, Those Republicans, they're the ones behind January 6th.
They all remember how bad January 6th was.
And so we're going to do a full investigation.
And our investigation is going to focus in not only on failures, systemic failures that happen, right, with the Capitol Police or with the federal law enforcement.
The failures are going to focus in, the investigation is going to focus in on the rhetoric of people in the opposing political party, and we are going to attempt to link that rhetoric to the events of January 6th.
The Republicans know this, Democrats know this, which is why Democrats are pushing it, and Republicans are pushing back against it.
Now, could there be an investigation of January 6th that makes sense?
Sure, but it would actually fall under what congressional investigations usually do.
So, to understand what a congressional investigation like this would actually look like, were it designed to elicit something useful?
You actually have to look at the general purpose of congressional investigations.
So, 2003, there was a report for Congress that was put out by Lewis Fisher, a senior specialist in separation of powers from the government and finance division, this is from the Congressional Research Service, talking about what investigations typically look like.
And one of the things that is clearly true is that there are really only two specific functions that Congress is supposed to perform when it does an investigation.
One is that it could theoretically be performing legislative oversight of the executive branch.
So there was a failure inside the executive branch, the 9-11.
And so you need to look at how the system is structured.
FBI, CIA, were they talking to each other?
There was this Byzantine wall that was designed to prevent, for example, domestic law enforcement from using material and evidence that they could not use in a courtroom.
And that wall had to be breached in order to allow intelligence sharing between agencies.
That would be a good reason why you'd have congressional investigations.
Congress created these agencies and wanted to make sure that these agencies are performing their duties under the law.
That is a normal oversight investigation.
Then you have a legislative powers investigation.
In other words, the goal would be to look at legislation anew.
It's sort of connected to oversight, but the idea here is we're trying to figure out how the system actually works in practice now because we might actually want to think about whether or not we need to change the law, whether there are legitimate legislative concerns that undergird the investigation.
Now, what congressional investigations typically are not supposed to do, and they've really run afoul of basic kind of black-letter law here for decades on end, they're not just supposed to be fishing expeditions where Congress just calls random people in front of them and then has them testify about things that have nothing to do with these specific functions.
Remember, Congress is a body with a job.
It is not just a bunch of people who are supposed to sit there and talk to you about random stuff.
We have an entire commentariat that is designed to talk to you about random stuff and to talk to you about political implications of events that are happening around you.
That is not what Congress was designed to do.
Congress was supposed to be your legislative plumber.
They were there to fix issues.
They were there to make the system work.
To make sure the system worked.
If Congress was doing an investigation of, for example, steroid use in baseball, there are a lot of folks, including people like me, who said, I don't like steroid use in baseball, but I have no idea what this has to do with Congress.
What in the world is Congress doing having hearings on steroid use in baseball?
Makes no sense.
Congress isn't going to legislate on that particular issue.
Congress really has no interest on drug use in a particular sport.
It's kind of a weird thing for Congress to be doing.
However, 9-11 is a sort of different story.
Okay, so January 6th, Lies along the 9-11 lines in the sense that there are actual government oversight functions that need to be performed.
So for example.
If there were members of Congress who are actively involved in criminal behavior, were there rules that were preventing them from being involved in that criminal behavior?
Or were there members of the executive branch who breached their duty, and therefore there needs to be an oversight function of the executive branch?
All of that would be legitimate.
Or if you wanted to look at the law, how exactly is it that the White House works with the Speaker of the House to determine security protocols on Capitol Hill?
Does that need to be changed in order to prevent a future January 6th?
That sort of stuff would be legitimate.
But what everybody understands here What everybody knows is that the goal here is not that.
The goal here is to link every Republican that Democrats can find with January 6th, because this was the goal immediately after January 6th, right upon January 6th happening.
This immediately shifted from everybody of good faith and good heart is horrified by what's happening.
We were all there.
We all remember it.
We remember that Mitch McConnell got up on the floor and he reamed the protesters.
He spoke out against Trump's language between November 4th and January 6th.
You'll remember that it was Mitch McConnell who oversaw the certification of the election.
Vice President Pence oversaw the certification of the election.
I know we all want to forget about the fact that the process actually ended up working, that many of these Republicans ended up voting for the certification of the election, and it was indeed Republicans in every state.
Every battleground state had high-ranking Republicans who were helping to oversee these election results, right?
Georgia was all Republicans overseeing the certification of those election results.
So the system worked.
You may not like how the system came out, but the system did in fact work, and Republicans worked within that system.
It was Republicans, again, who oversaw that system on the federal level as well.
What actually happened on January 6th is that President Trump gave a rally at which he made claims about the election that were not true.
But he also told people, and they always cut this part out with the ellipses, to peacefully protest and then go home and yell at their congresspeople about the election.
Okay, so Trump did not encourage people to breach the Capitol building.
Then, a bunch of idiots decided, you know what would be a great idea?
What if we breached the Capitol building in an attempt to either hunt down legislators, or to just delay the process, or to be idiots.
And then, hundreds of them were arrested.
So the real failure there would have been, for example, the Capitol Police.
The real, on a systemic level, if you were going to investigate this properly, it would be about the Capitol Police.
Who did not deploy the, like, all of that's legit, but that is not where this investigation is going.
Again, when it comes to congressional investigations, Subpoena power is generally tied to legislative power or oversight power.
Those are the powers that are supposed to be exercised here.
And the reason I keep coming back to that is because it is fairly obvious that that is not where this is going.
Again, according to this paper from the Congressional Research Service, Judicial rulings do recognize a greater sweep to congressional authority in 1927.
The Supreme Court faced a situation where Congress looked not into the activities of people in the private sector, but rather the conduct of the executive branch.
And the court stated that the power of inquiry with the process to enforce it is an essential and appropriate auxiliary of the legislative function.
Congress couldn't legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information.
But again, it was designed to proceed along the lines of legislative purposes.
This is the governing Supreme Court precedent.
Legislative purposes.
Okay, so we'll get to it in a second, whether the House is actually pursuing legislative purposes.
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So again, legislative purposes would be the language, right?
Because if you're talking about just criminal investigations, we have Full-on branches of government that are designed to do this.
We have the DOJ.
We have local law enforcement.
We have state law enforcement.
We have all sorts of law enforcement bodies, which is why, again, there are hundreds of people who have been arrested over the January 6th riots.
Okay, so back to this January 6th commission.
This is now being used by the media as a litmus test of whether you're okay with what happened on January 6th.
And that, of course, is not correct.
You can point out that the January 6th commission does not seem like it is directed at eliciting information that is going to allow Congress to fix the process.
It seems more like it is designed to elicit a political response just in time for the midterm elections.
And that is not an unfair point, because everything in Washington, D.C.
is politics, and to pretend otherwise is simply silly.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared his opposition to the House bill earlier on Wednesday.
He joined House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in dismissing the commission as unnecessary and unfair.
McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor that after careful consideration, he'd come to the conclusion the House bill was slanted and unbalanced.
He pointed to other investigations underway by law enforcement officials and in Congress.
Biden, of course, supports the commission.
He's going to need 60 votes to advance in the 50-50 Senate.
That means at least 10 senators would need to vote with all of the Democrats.
That probably is unlikely.
Even some kind of wavering Republicans, people like Susan Collins, have said they don't really like the way that this commission is structured, particularly because it allows Democrats the full capacity on the commission to select all the staff.
As we saw with the Mueller investigation, who you select for your staff makes an awful lot of difference in the final product that is produced by any quote-unquote independent body.
The Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus had endorsed the commission, according to the Wall Street Journal, saying the plan had won support from more than 75% of the 58-member group, but it is strongly opposed by McCarthy and other House GOP leaders who say that it is counterproductive and also too narrowly focused on the events of January 6th.
Right, so the Republicans are also saying, okay, fine, if you want to do this as a political thing, like how much is rhetoric contributing to political violence in the United States, then you do need to make this a truly bipartisan investigation, and you need to look at things like, for example, the congressional baseball shooting, Or like the BLM riots over the summer?
Or like Antifa over the summer?
How much does rhetoric contribute to violence?
If that's really what we're talking about here, if that's the direction you want to go with the January 6th Commission, if the issue is not what systemically went wrong to allow the walls of the Capitol to be breached, if the issue instead is how closely is rhetoric tied to action, well then, you do have to broaden out the scope of the inquiry.
That is not an unfair argument.
The language agreed upon by the Democrats and a couple of Republicans, particularly John Katko from New York, states that the focus of the commission will be, quote, the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol and targeted violence and domestic terrorism relevant to such terrorist attack. Katko has said that the scope could include events that occurred before or after the date of January 6th if commissioners chose. McCarthy and McConnell say the commission should examine political violence broadly defined, including the actual murder of a Capitol police officer who was ran by a car on April 2nd and riots
during racial justice protests last summer.
McConnell said that he was open to hearing hearing arguments for and against the commission on Tuesday.
And then McConnell sort of reversed himself and he said that he wasn't particularly interested in this particular process.
OK, so Democrats, of course, are jumping all over this and they are suggesting that this just demonstrates that Republicans don't want to hear the truth about January 6th.
I think we know the truth about January 6th.
And by the way, if Democrats wanted full investigative power, they could just have investigated this in the context of like an impeachment investigation, which they didn't.
They decided to ram through a very poorly and vaguely worded impeachment charge against Trump on grounds of incitement, which is really weak tea in terms of legal speak.
And then they decided to ram that through without an investigation.
So it's been politics top to bottom here, and the January 6th Commission is just as political.
Again, there could be an iteration of the January 6th Commission that makes sense, where you talk to the actual law enforcement officials responsible for not staffing up at the Capitol, and you look at the response time.
Sure, you look at whether there was a delay in the executive branch receiving orders to go in response to the crisis at the Capitol.
All of that could be encompassed.
But if this is going to turn into a broader conversation about whether Refusal to acknowledge election results inevitably leads to this sort of activity.
Then, of course, you would be remiss to not investigate people on the other side of the aisle for doing the exact same thing.
And we'll get to more of this in just one second because, as always, when Democrats do something highly political, the media say that they are doing it on principle.
And when Republicans do something highly political, Democrats say they are doing it for highly political reasons.
This follows that pattern.
We'll get to more of it in just one second first.
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Alrighty, so naturally, Democrats are jumping on this and saying, it sounds like Republicans are afraid of the truth.
Well, it seems like Democrats are afraid of the truth if they don't want to have a broader commission based on BLM.
We can play this game all day long.
Basically, if you don't want an investigation of an issue because you're afraid it's going to get politicized, then we can just claim that apparently you're afraid of the truth.
Here is Nancy Pelosi clicking and clacking her way through this one.
It sounds like they're afraid of the truth.
And that's most unfortunate.
But hopefully they'll get used to the idea that the American people want us to find the truth.
And that is what we intend to do.
And to do it in a way that is as unifying as possible.
That's why we yielded.
Unifying as possible.
If I wanted to go to another committee, I would have done it sooner.
But I didn't want to go there.
No, what she wanted to do was get a little bit of cover from people like John Katko so that she could pretend that it was a bipartisan commission after making it not bipartisan because the entire staffing process is controlled by Democrats.
Again, you could have had an impeachment inquiry.
You did.
You impeached Trump on this inside of a week because it was just so urgent to get rid of Trump before he left office, like a week later.
And then you held it up for several days before even submitting it to the Senate.
So this is politics all the way down.
Nancy Pelosi pretending to stand on principle is one of the most ridiculous things in life.
Here's Chuck Schumer doing the same thing.
Letting the most dishonest president in American history dictate the prerogatives of the Republican Party will be its demise.
Mark my words.
Whatever that means for Democrats, it's bad for America.
We know, we all know, there needs to be a thorough and honest accounting of what took place on January 6th.
The greatest attempted insurrection since the Civil War.
Okay, the greatest attempted insurrection since the Civil War?
Uh, no.
I mean, really, no.
The greatest attempt— We literally had $2 billion in property damage over the summer with people who wanted to destroy the systems of the United States.
We had federal buildings attacked en masse.
It's not even the greatest insurrection attempt of the last 18 months.
Okay, it was evil, and it was egregious, and the images were horrifying, and the criminals should go to jail.
It was a bunch of morons who went into the Capitol building, were promptly dispersed and arrested within like five hours, and then the entire system just went on as before.
So no, no, but again, the goal here, it's not about January 6th.
What this is really about is Democrats attempting to prolong the incident of January 6th, and raise that as the specter, and then suggest that all Republicans are in defense of that.
And so they created this catch-22 for Republicans.
Either they go along with this very biased commission that is designed to elicit a response saying that all Republicans are responsible for January 6th, or Republicans say, we're not going to go along with that commission.
And then Democrats say, well, see, they won't go along with the commission because they're in favor of January 6th.
So either way you go, Democrats are going to claim that Republicans are in favor of January 6th.
Meanwhile, Democrats who are running for Senate have decided to make a big issue out of this.
Of course, Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, who ran a very short-lived, ill-fated presidential campaign last time around, and now wants to run for Senate in Ohio because, of course, Rob Portman's seat is open.
He decided the best strategy here would be to get up and shout a lot, and the media would pay attention to him.
Benghazi, you guys chased the former Secretary of State all over the country, spent millions of dollars.
We have people scaling the Capitol, hitting the Capitol Police with lead pipes across the head, and we can't get bipartisanship!
What else has to happen in this country?
Cops!
This is a slap in the face to every rank-and-file cop in the United States.
If we're going to take on China, if we're going to rebuild the country, if we're going to reverse climate change, we need two political parties in this country that are both living in reality, and you ain't one of them.
Okay, just a couple of questions on that particular clip.
One, when he says that if we want to fight climate change, then we need to do the January 6th Commission, I'm confused as to how these two are related.
When he starts ranting and raving about how it's disrespect to cops not to do a January 6th Commission, this is coming from the same party that has been ripping on the police as systemically racist for well over a year, minimum.
I mean, actually longer than that, going all the way back to the Obama administration.
And cops are quitting en masse.
So you've picked an odd example of things that are disrespectful to the cops.
The media are trying to play that aspect of this up.
Of course, they did this a little bit falsely yesterday.
There was a letter yesterday that was released by basically an unknown number of anonymous Capitol Police officers, and the media played it up as though the actual U.S.
Capitol Police had sent out a letter calling for the January 6th commission.
The U.S.
Capitol Police immediately denied that and said that is not correct, but not before Nancy Pelosi and members of the media like Olivia Beavers decided that they would pump out The news that the US Capitol Police had called explicitly for an investigation in January 6th commission later Olivia Beavers, this reporter, she had to actually walk that back.
She had to delete her tweet.
Her original tweet had something like 6,000 retweets and 12,000 likes, and it was replaced with a tweet saying, oh yeah, no, it was just a couple of anonymous Capitol Police officers who said they wanted a January 6th commission.
That tweet had like 33 likes because that's the way things work on Twitter.
If it's information that confirms your priors, it goes viral.
If it's information that does not confirm your priors, it does not.
Meanwhile, CNN playing up exactly the Democratic Party line here, that is Republicans are choosing party over country.
That was literally the chyron on CNN.
Which is pretty strong editorializing here from CNN.
Now we know what Republican House leaders will do when confronted with a domestic terror attack on our Capitol.
Nothing.
It's the most cynical and spineless act imaginable.
It's the definition of putting party over country.
Because of opposing a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection on January 6th, Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is once again choosing Trump over the truth while carving out his own profile and cowardice.
Don't worry, guys, this is all just journalisming.
It's all just journalisming.
Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Again, the entire January 6th commission theory here is not that they want to get to the bottom of the systemic law enforcement failures.
The bottom line here is that what they wish to do is castigate everybody who disagrees with them politically and then lump them in with January 6th.
And again, it's just set up for a catch-22.
The catch-22 is that you're unpatriotic if you are against the January 6th commission.
You are in favor of January 6th if you're against the January 6th commission as constructed by the Democrats, even if you offer an alternative.
And, also, if you go along with the commission, and then that biased commission comes up with a report saying that every Republican was complicit in January 6th, which, of course, has been the Democratic Party line since the day of January 6th.
If you do that, then, of course, you're also unpatriotic.
So, it's a catch-22.
Basically, side with Democrats or you're unpatriotic is the line.
And this holds true throughout American public life.
The new rule from the media, the new rule from Democrats, is that if you side with Democrats, you're patriotic, and if you don't side with Democrats, you're unpatriotic.
And that holds true for every radical theory they push forward.
So we've seen a wide controversy break out over the use of critical race theory in schools.
So first, we actually need to define what exactly critical race theory is and where it comes from.
I've talked to you at length about what critical race theory is and I've talked about the origins of critical race theory.
It began basically with the thought that America's systems were quote unquote institutionally racist.
Stokely Carmichael was perhaps the first prominent person to talk about this in 1966.
Carmichael suggested that while the federal government had barred discrimination on the basis of race, racism could not be alleviated by that.
Inequality and outcome could always be chalked up to historic racism and the structure of institutions built in a time of racism, which made some sense in 1966 when we were literally just exiting legalized racism and legally imposed racism.
It makes a hell of a lot less sense in 2021.
And Carmichael made an argument that, as we would say in law school, it was an argument that proved too much.
It was too broad an argument.
His argument was that forever and always, any evidence of disparity in outcome was evidence of discrimination inside systems.
So it was that basic idea that launched the critical race theory project in the late 70s and early 80s.
The chief expositors were a couple of people named Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanczyk.
They wrote an entire book about critical race theory and laid out its basic principles.
First, that racism is ordinary and not aberrational, that everybody is racist, that systems are racist, and that we shouldn't use racist as a slur so much as just a description of the way life is.
Second, that our system of white over color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.
That you are invested in racism, even if you don't think that you're invested in racism.
So the system is designed to create racially disparate outcomes, and if you defend any aspect of the system, it's because you have a deep psychic need for such racism.
Critical race theory pioneer Derrick Bell, who was a mentor to Barack Obama, wrote that the whole liberal worldview of private rights and public sovereignty, mediated by the rule of law, needed to be exploded.
It was a worldview premised upon the public and private spheres.
It was an attractive mirage that masks the reality of economic and political power.
In other words, basic things like private property and individual rights.
These are simple masks for white supremacy.
According to Derrick Bell, even purportedly good outcomes like, for example, a rising black middle class, that was just the system perpetuating itself by basically granting crumbs to people who had been historically downtrodden.
This is what critical race theory is, and it has been mainlined into the Democratic Party at this point.
It is deeply unpatriotic.
It suggests that the origins of the country are rooted in racism and slavery and evil.
It suggests that every institution in American life is shot through with that.
Now, if Republicans sound off against that, this is now considered unpatriotic by our mentors on the American left.
So CNN's Don Lemon did an entire segment explaining that actually critical race theory is more patriotic than patriotism itself.
He went and interviewed Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is most famous as the founder of the intersectional theory of law and politics.
Intersectionality started off As a basic, fairly true theory, which is that people can be discriminated against in a variety of ways.
So, if you're a black woman, you can be discriminated against on the basis of two characteristics, being a woman and being black.
Now, as it turns out, actually black men have lower economic outcomes in the United States than black women do.
But, put that aside, her basic theory was that if you're a member of several different intersectional groups, the intersection of those groups created your identity, and that was how you would be treated in American life.
Which is really reductionist.
Because it wasn't just that she was making a legal point, which is that discrimination law didn't account for multiple patterns of discrimination, which is a fair legal point.
She was making a broader point that has now been extrapolated from that, which is that if you are a member of various victimized groups, this means That almost like a tally sheet, we can determine how victimized you are in American life and give your views greater legitimacy because you're speaking as a member of various historically victimized groups.
Here's Kimberly Crenshaw defending critical race theory, which is what the Democratic Party is pushing.
Critical race theory is basically just a name for let's tear down all of the systems and restore systems of actual discrimination, reverse discrimination, in order to restore some sort of equality of outcome.
Criticories Theory just says let's pay attention to what has happened in this country and how what has happened in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes so we can become that country that we say we are.
So Criticories Theory is not anti-patriotic.
In fact, it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it because we believe in the 13th and the 14th and the 15th Amendment.
We believe in the promises of equality and we know we can't get there if we can't confront and talk honestly about inequality.
OK, that's just untrue.
OK, so when she says that proponents of critical race theory believe in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendment, Derrick Bell explicitly says that he doesn't believe in processes like due process.
He doesn't believe in things like equal justice before law.
Right.
Those are those are merely fig leaves for systems of white supremacy and racism.
What she's talking about is not actual critical race theory.
What she is talking about is something broader and simpler and And really not associated with CRT.
She's saying something that is true, which is that history has an impact on the present.
But one thing that you'll notice from critical race theorists is that they actually don't want to attempt to even quantify what impact history has on the present.
Because quantification could lead to the conclusion that the vast majority of disparity today is not the result of historic discrimination.
The vast majority of disparity today is the result of individual decision-making that is not equally distributed by communities.
That is what critical race theory does not want to argue.
Okay, well, so these folks are making that argument that deeply undermines basic and fundamental American principles.
And then they're surprised when there's blowback, and they suggest that any blowback is evidence of your racism.
Again, it's trying to create these sort of unfalsifiable theses.
So the thesis from the left on January 6th that's unfalsifiable is the right is responsible for January 6th, broadly speaking.
And if you say no, we're not, then that's just evidence that you don't take January 6th seriously.
And they're doing the same thing with regard to American racism.
They say that if you oppose CRT, it's because you're a racist.
And if you accept CRT, it's because you're accepting your own racism.
And not only that, if you oppose it, if you oppose CRT and you point out the shortcomings of people like Nicole Hannah-Jones, who's a prevaricator and a liar, if you point out that she should not have a tenured position at a major American university because she is not qualified to do so, Because she has fabricated history?
Because she ignored criticism?
Because she has doxxed people?
Because she's a terrible candidate to be a professor at a major university?
Then this means that you're a racist.
We'll get to Nicole Hannah-Jones and her fate at University of North Carolina in just one second.
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Alrighty, so.
The University of North Carolina has now rescinded a tenure offer to 1619 project author Nicole Hannah-Jones.
She should never have been offered this in the first place.
According to a report by NC Policy Watch, UNC is backing down from offering Hannah Jones a tenured position at its journalism school because she's not a journalist.
Well, instead, they will offer her a fixed five-year contract, according to a report by NC Policy Watch.
The change in plans comes three weeks after it was announced that she would have a tenured position at the university, which is kind of incredible.
They choose just to offer tenure right off the bat.
Usually, you have to earn your way into tenure at a major American university, particularly if you have no academic background.
The way Nicole Hannah-Jones has no academic background.
She's not a professor.
She's not a PhD.
She hasn't taught at a major American university.
Very weird to be offered a tenure-track position right off the bat.
That's very strange.
It's not what we wanted.
I'm afraid it will have a chilling effect.
UNC's Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
It's not what we wanted.
I'm afraid it will have a chilling effect.
Okay, so first of all, UNC, yeah, if they wanted to hire her and they knew this going in, they should give her the.
Frankly, I think UNC should give her the tenure track position because I think that people should recognize UNC for what it is.
But should they ever have offered it to her?
No, they should never have offered it to her because she absolutely does not deserve it.
She's 100% not a person who deserves a tenure track position or a tenure position right off the bat at a major American university.
The fact that she was granted it is just evidence of how deeply CRT has seeped into the American system of thought.
So there are a lot of people on the left who are saying, let's cancel culture.
If Nicole Hannah-Jones is not given a tenure position at University of North Carolina.
Okay, well, here's the deal.
Again, should she be canceled?
Should she lose that position?
She never should have been offered it, and it's a taxpayer-funded institution, University of North Carolina.
Taxpayer-funded institutions are not the same as private universities.
If she'd been hired at a private university, I would say she should keep her job.
If she's at a public university, that's your taxpayer dollars.
Taxpayer dollars are a very different thing.
Alrighty.
Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies, you may have noticed, took a serious dive over the course of the last couple of days.
According to the UK Daily Mail, Bitcoin has rallied after plunging below the $40,000 mark for the first time in more than three months.
As Tesla boss Elon Musk insists the company will not sell any of its holdings in the cryptocurrency.
Despite the turbulence, celebrities and others who bought in early are still up big, but small investors who jumped on the Bitcoin trend in the past few months May have suffered some ruinous losses.
This is one of the problems with Bitcoin right now is that because the amount in circulation in terms of being used by that many people is still not that high, it can be disproportionately affected by swings from celebrities who decide that they're not going to engage in more Bitcoin use.
For example, investors had rushed out of cryptocurrency earlier Wednesday after China sparked a market panic when officials announced a regulatory crackdown.
And this just demonstrates, by the way, How important Bitcoin is going to be for the future of economic freedom, because more and more governments are going to start cracking down on Bitcoin in the same way that during the 1930s, governments started cracking down on the private ownership of gold.
Because if you can trade in currencies that are not government currencies, this allows you to divest from the government's inflationary policies.
And this is the thing that the government cannot allow.
This has always been my great fear for Bitcoin, which effectually is just a form of precious metals that has been that has been digitized. That's really all that Bitcoin is.
The volatility in Bitcoin right now is in effect of nobody knowing whether or not governments are going to even allow the circulation of Bitcoin. But long term, I'm not sure the governments can prevent it, which is why I've been a Bitcoin fan for quite a while. The Bitcoin had hit like 30% drop before it retraced most of its losses after Elon Musk's vote of confidence.
By late afternoon trade in New York, the currency was still down about 10% on the day, but well off its earlier lows.
Musk indicated that his company would not sell any of its Bitcoin holdings.
He tweeted on Wednesday morning, Tesla has diamond hands.
Diamond hands is slang popularized by Wall Street bets, which is a Reddit forum indicating a refusal to sell even in the face of falling prices.
Tesla stock was down about 2.6% in afternoon trading.
Good for Musk for pushing Bitcoin, frankly.
He said, I know one person wrote on Reddit, I know today looks terrible and lots of people lost too much money.
They can't afford to lose, but markets always bounce back.
So let's not do rash decisions.
Life is more important.
That, of course, is true.
Long term, Bitcoin is going to be something that I believe remains worthwhile, particularly as governments try to stop it.
In fact, again, the value in Bitcoin lies in the fact that governments are going to try to stop it in the first place.
All right.
In just one second.
We are going to get to Joe Biden's continuing gaff-tastic journey through the universe.
It is pretty incredible.
As I've said before, Joe Biden must feel like the luckiest guy in the world every morning because he wakes up, somebody tells him he's president, and then he realizes for the first time every single morning that he's president.
It's like Christmas every morning for Joe Biden.
He wakes up in the White House like, where am I?
Like, you're president.
He's like, oh my God.
Come on, man!
All righty, coming up, we're going to get to Joe Biden's continuing journey.
It is amazing to watch.
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Meanwhile, Joe Biden is continuing his journey toward senility and we all get to watch it It does make for exciting TV.
Yesterday, he was speaking to the Coast Guard, and he sort of randomly insulted the Coast Guard class because they weren't responding to the fact that he is the least inspirational politician in modern American history.
He is just a houseplant of a human.
Here he was yesterday getting weird.
I can only assume that you will enjoy educating your family about How the Coast Guard is, quote, the hard nucleus around the Navy forms in times of war.
You are quite, you're a really dull class.
Come on, man.
Is the sun getting to you?
I would think you'd have an opportunity when I say that about the Navy to clap.
Oh my God.
He's the one who's running this radical agenda.
Oh, great.
Perfect.
Yes, we've all made an excellent selection.
OK, that was only round one.
So the teleprompter really knocked him down right there.
And I mean, it was an ugly knockdown.
I mean, he was cut.
In this corner, the manager was stitching him up a little bit.
Then he came back out for round two and he really started jabbing at the teleprompter.
And then the teleprompter, unfortunately, came up with just a clean uppercut.
Here is the teleprompter versus Joe Biden.
Here we go.
I brought with me a former Academy grad.
who now serves as my Coast Guard Millie.
Lieutenant Commander Jena...
Now, I'm gonna embarrass her.
Jena McCrone of the class of 2007.
Oh, the teleprompter!
Oh!
Strong overhand right from the teleprompter, and the president is on the canvas!
Oh, he's struggling to his feet.
He's struggling.
He's up!
He's up!
He waves off the referee.
He goes in, and oh no, the teleprompter is on him again!
We need to see more women at the highest levels of command.
We have to make sure that women have the chance to succeed and thrive throughout their careers.
There's a saying we use in a different context, a Chinese saying, it says, women hold up half the world.
It's an absolutely stupid position not to make sure they represent at least half of what we do.
Okay, so teleprompter comes with the clear TKO, third round, the precedent goes down again.
The teleprompters, I mean, it's like the Washington generals versus the Harlem Globetrotters here.
I mean, this is, it's ugly.
The teleprompter wins every single time.
I'm not, I'm not even sure what the point of these fights is anymore.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, she's standing in the wings, and as I've said before, the problem for the Democratic Party is they're reliant right now on two things.
They're reliant on the continued viability of Joe Biden as a political figure, and they're reliant on being able to keep Donald Trump in January 6th front and center.
Keeping Joe Biden as a viable political figure is not great because the reality is the person standing behind him is deeply unpopular.
A poll on Kamala Harris a little bit earlier last week demonstrated that her unfavorable ratings are underwater.
She's 48% unfavorable, 41% favorable, and really bad ratings with independents.
Her ratings with independents are like 50% unfavorable.
People do not like Kamala Harris.
By the way, you know why?
Because nobody likes Kamala Harris.
Even Joe Biden doesn't like Kamala Harris.
Apparently, according to Edward Isaac DeVere, who is the author of a new book about the 2020 election, apparently first lady doctored Joe Biden.
Doctor, the greatest doctor of all time.
She apparently used a naughty turn of phrase in 2019 after Kamala Harris took aim at Joe Biden.
The incident came as a result of that election cycle's second Democratic presidential debate, in which Kamala Harris randomly called Joe Biden a racist for opposing forced busing.
Apparently, the First Lady opined in a call with supporters, quote, with what he cares about, what he fights for, what he's committed to, you get up there and call him a racist without basis?
Go F yourself.
This is the first time I've ever liked Dr. Jill Biden.
She is truly a doctor, a wordsmith, par excellence.
According to the author, Delvere, he says, the debate was just one night in the campaign, but what it revealed about Biden and about Harris and about how issues of race and identity factored in for Democratic primary voters had implications that stretched into the running mate selection process and beyond.
The report said, Well, apparently they got over that rather quick.
But there's a problem for them.
What happens come 2024 if you're the Democrats?
called herself a friend of her son's, although Beau was not her biological child.
She raised him his entire life as if he were, tried to tear her husband down to score a point at a debate.
Well, apparently they got over that rather quick.
But there's a problem for them.
And what happens come 2024, if you're the Democrats?
The next few years do not look easy if you are the Democratic Party.
If you forecast this out, the economic growth is not booming the way that it was supposed to.
Joe Biden is responsible for an inflationary cycle that is beginning right now.
Maybe it gets under control, maybe it doesn't.
Joe Biden is responsible for continuing chaos in the Middle East.
He's responsible for continued divisions here at home.
He's responsible for continued confusion over masking and over COVID and over all of this stuff.
I mean, even though Americans are starting to feel like we're pulling out of the woods on COVID, he's still got his CDC director out there saying that we're not out of the woods and that we still have to be super careful.
Like, the mixed signals coming from this administration are quite astonishing.
Here's the CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, terrible at her job yesterday, saying, well, you know, we're still not out of the woods yet.
I think we would be remiss to say that we are out of the woods.
This pandemic, this virus has sent us too many curveballs to say that we, too early to declare victory.
Certainly with virus circulating in other parts of the world, that is in high degree that gives the opportunity for more variants to emerge.
So I still, it's among the things that keeps me up at night.
Okay, so he's still trotting out, Rochelle Walensky was awful at this job, talking about how she's staying up at night.
Okay, we are down to the lowest level of daily cases measured since like early March, right?
March of the beginning of this pandemic, right?
We had, as of May 19th, we had something like 28,500 cases in all of the United States, a country of 330 million people.
The last time that we had 28,000 diagnosed cases in a day was like June of last year.
Okay, and that's when the testing was way lower than it is right now.
The baseline at that point was much higher than the actual number of measured cases.
The number of coronavirus deaths on a day-by-day basis in the United States is down into the hundreds.
Okay, so, yes, we are basically out of the woods at this point, but Biden's been continuing to trot that out.
So, what does this mean?
It means that this administration is a bit of a disaster area, that the person standing in the wings is deeply unpopular, and this is why, for all that is holy, they have to keep the focus on Trump, they have to keep the focus on January 6th.
They must.
Because if ever the focus shifts to the Democrats, the Democrats have real troubles come 2022, and even bigger troubles come 2024.
All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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