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May 25, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:55
China Is Winning Because We're Surrendering | Ep. 1262
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As evidence mounts that COVID began in a Chinese laboratory, social media's crackdown on the lab leak theory looks worse and worse.
We discuss what has changed on the first year anniversary of George Floyd's death, and the media are fascinated with Joe Biden's weightlifting.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty.
The Chinese government, it appears, may not only have hid COVID-19 in their borders and just held on to that information long enough for COVID-19 to escape their borders and kill millions of people, but now appears that mounting evidence shows that this thing probably started or could have started in a Chinese laboratory.
Apparently this Chinese laboratory was performing gain-of-function research, where scientists take viruses, they make them more deadly, so they can learn exactly how to fight those viruses, except the containment protocols at this Chinese lab were not proper, and so some scientists got the virus and then proceeded to transmit it to others outside the lab, beginning the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed millions of lives and completely destroyed the world economy for a full year.
According to the Wall Street Journal, just a couple of days ago, three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S.
intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the COVID-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.
The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.
The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses, and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization's decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into COVID-19 origins.
Current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence for the assessment.
One person said it was provided by an international partner and still needed further corroboration.
Another person said the intelligence was a lot stronger.
November 2019 is roughly when many epidemiologists and virologists believe that COVID-19 first began circulating around the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
Now, there are a bunch of things to be noted here.
One, China did two things wrong here, if it turns out that the lab leak theory is correct.
One, they developed the virus and allowed it to escape in November 2019.
And two, In November 2019, they didn't tell anybody about it because as soon as China released the actual genomic sequencing of this virus, within a week, the mRNA vaccine sequencing was done.
So imagine if China had said, okay, we've got this thing, it's released in Wuhan right away.
And the rest of the world said, okay, we're shutting our borders right now.
Meanwhile, developing that mRNA vaccine, how many millions of lives would have been saved?
How many hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved?
Even if you just move up the timeline in terms of the vaccine development to, say, August instead of the release in November, you save everybody from that last wave of COVID.
You save hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States.
So what this means is that the United States, politically speaking, now has an excellent club to wield against the Chinese government.
And they should, because the Chinese government is an authoritarian menace.
The Chinese government is trying to expand its its appeal to countries around the world using its Belt and Road Program. Basically, they pledged that they will build infrastructure and help you with your 5G Wi-Fi and all of this. And in exchange, all you have to do is become a quasi-satellite of the Chinese state. They've been expanding their military presence in the South China Sea. They've been building bases in the middle of the ocean by just creating man-made islands. They took over Hong Kong a couple of years ago and nobody said boo.
No massive international sanctions, no nothing.
Hong Kong, which was guaranteed its safety and security and freedom, guaranteed by treaty with the British, the British did nothing.
The West did nothing.
And the Chinese marched right into Hong Kong and just took the place over.
And nobody did anything.
So this would be an excellent time to push back because, hell, has there ever been a better time to push back against an authoritarian garbage state than when they just unleashed a virus on the rest of the world that killed millions of human beings?
And the evidence here is looking stronger and stronger.
Scott Gottlieb, former FDA chair, and certainly a man not prone to exaggeration, he says there is mounting evidence that this thing came out of a lab based in Wuhan.
We haven't found the true source of the virus.
And with MERS and SARS, at this point with those outbreaks, those epidemics, we had found the intermediate host.
And it's not for lack of trying.
There's been an exhaustive search for what the animal host was for this virus, and it hasn't been found.
So I think the ledger on the side of the lab continues to grow.
And the question for a lot of people is going to be when are too many coincidences too much?
When does it just seem that there's too many things suggesting that this could have come out of a lab?
And right now, you know, there's more and more circumstantial evidence, certainly.
So what should the American administration be doing?
What should Trump have done?
Now what should Biden do?
First thing is you don't make this thing subservient to a WHO report.
The WHO was doing propaganda for the Chinese from the beginning of this pandemic.
First, they suggested that it wasn't airborne.
Then they suggested that China had done a wonderful job locking it down.
They did all of these reports in late January, early February.
The WHO is a Chinese tool throughout this process.
They were a wall, not a window.
They weren't providing transparency into China.
They were just doing the Chinese bidding.
They continued to propagandize on behalf of Chinese government for months after the beginning of this pandemic.
And yet, when asked questions about whether the WHO should lead this investigative process, the White House is punting.
Again, now, the White House has said, I mean, Joe Biden said in his last fake State of the Union address, I know it was garbled and it came out not in English because the President of the United States doesn't speak English anymore, he speaks potato, but the President of the United States did say in that speech, That China is a rising threat and we have to deal with that rising threat.
Now, the way that Biden wants to deal with the rising threat is by crippling the United States economy and leading on climate change or some such nonsense.
But here would be a great way to fight the rising and looming authoritarian threat of China, would be standing up to China, using this as the lever to actually effectuate change inside of China and get the rest of the world to isolate China.
Right now would be an excellent time to do all of that.
See, here's the thing.
It's not that China is eating our lunch because China is strong.
China is not strong.
If China wins, it's because we are surrendering.
If China wins, if China continues to gain global power, it's because the West has decided they're just not going to stand up to Chinese aggressiveness.
China's economy is not all that strong.
It is based on extraordinary amounts of debt.
It is based on being able to cram that down on its billion citizens.
And the fact of the matter remains, The Chinese government is an authoritarian, horrifying state that enslaves people and treats people as chattel.
And the fact the West isn't standing up to them is a stain on us, frankly.
Okay, so how's the White House dealing with all this?
They're saying, well, you know what, let's not jump to any conclusions here.
And they're saying, we are not going to launch an American-led investigation into what happened at this Wuhan lab and an investigation into why the Chinese covered it up for months.
Now instead, we're just going to leave it to the WHO.
You know, let's not jump to any conclusions.
They're downplaying an actual opportunity to get the world to side against China, which is what the West should want right now.
Here is Jen Psaki downplaying this.
An international investigation led by the World Health Organization is something that we've actually been pressing for for several months in coordination with a range of partners around the world.
We need that data.
We need that information from the Chinese government.
What we can't do and what I would caution anyone doing is leaping ahead of an actual international process.
We don't have enough data and information to jump to a conclusion at this point in time.
It's an international process led by the WHO, which is a Chinese proxy group at this point.
And meanwhile, Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, she says, well, you know, the fact that we're downplaying the lab leak hypothesis and the fact that it was downplayed for a full year and that social media was banning people, that's really just because of Trump.
OK, here's the deal.
If in America you are more concerned about the quote unquote threat of Trump than you are about the international rise of an authoritarian communist state, I think that probably you've lost the thread here.
Here is Maggie Haberman saying it's really Trump's fault that we didn't believe the lab leak theory.
Or you could have looked at the evidence, guys.
Instead of just yelling at Tom Cotton about how evil Tom Cotton is for mentioning the lab leak theory, you could have investigated it.
I mean, you do work for the most powerful newspaper in the United States, Maggie Haberman.
Part of the issue when this was first being reported on and discussed back a few months after the pandemic had begun was that then-President Trump and Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, both suggested they had seen evidence that this was formed in a lab, and they also suggested it was not released on purpose, but they refused to release the evidence showing what it was.
And so because of that, that made this instantly political.
I think that it was, you know, example 1000.
When the Trump administration learned that when you have burned your own credibility over and over again, people are not immediately going to believe you, especially in an election year.
However, that does not mean it's not worth discussing.
It's not, except that everybody decided it wasn't worth discussing, and we'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so the fact remains that the media decided that they were going to attack the lab leak theory basically from the very beginning.
According to a piece in The Federalist, Christopher Bedford writing, A New York Times business correspondent in Hong Kong, a weekend editor at The Guardian who lives in New York, a British business insider reporter with a focus on the Saudis, and an executive editor of The Daily Beast.
A 48-year-old blogger who works for Rachel Maddow, a union activist who covers extremism, far-right politics, and media disinformation for The Huffington Post, and the 29-year-old editor of The Arkansas Times.
A breaking news reporter at The Washington Post, who wrapped up her most recent internship in May 2016.
A 2016 University of Pennsylvania graduate who covers young people doing big things for Forbes.
A 45-year-old former George Will intern who writes for CNN and David Frum.
What do these people have in common, aside from their political ideology?
Every one of them is part of a machine that launders smears and opinions through newspapers, magazines, and television channels, presents the cleaned-up product as unimpeachable truth to the public, and then uses the fresh-minted facts to protect friends and herd enemies.
It's called the news, and here's how it worked for Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton's completely plausible theory that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab.
That Hong Kong business correspondent?
She wrote this headline for the Times in February 2020.
Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins.
Scientists, the slug reads, have dismissed suggestions that the Chinese government was behind the outbreak. But it's the kind of tale that gains traction among those who see China as a threat. Republican who floated virus conspiracy says common sense has been my guide, The Weekend editor at The Guardian dismissively explained.
A GOP senator, our award-winning Saudi investigator declared, keeps pushing a thoroughly debunked theory that the coronavirus weapon, that the Wuhan coronavirus is a leaked Chinese biological weapon gone wrong.
Senator Tom Cotton flogs conspiracy theory dismissed by actual scientists, the editor of the Daily Beast howled.
Tom Cotton's veiled threats aren't really helping, Maddow's blogger chimed in.
So, the bottom line is that none of this was true because they didn't bother to actually investigate it.
In fact, PolitiFact had a fact-checking article.
You'll remember.
They fact-checked a Tucker Carlson Tonight guest who repeated the lab leak theory.
That fact-check was written by Daniel Funke in September of 2020.
Funke graduated from the University of Georgia in 2017.
He received a News Lab Fellowship from Google.
They placed their student at the Poynter Institute in Florida.
Which works for PolitiFact.
It's the institute behind PolitiFact.
In his new job, Fiumke fact-checked a number of COVID claims, smacking down the largely acceptable lab origin one more than once, and making himself an authority on the facts.
But here's the thing.
He was wrong.
And now he covers misinformation for USA Today.
Okay, so the reality is, of course, that the media decided very early on that the lab leak theory was a bunch of nonsense, and then they just repeated this ad infinitum, and they were just wrong in the same way that they were wrong about so many things with regard to COVID throughout the pandemic, because they decided that Trump was more of an enemy than China.
They decided that Trump was more of a threat to the country than China, and so anything Trump said, or anything a Trump associate said, or anything that targeted China must be wrong.
They went from China is a threat to China is not a threat in record time.
And now, they refuse to acknowledge that China ought to be punished for what they did here.
China did, in fact, inflict this virus on us, regardless of whether there was a lab leak or not.
China did not let anybody know about this stuff, even though it was circulating since November, December, they didn't let anybody know.
Even a month would have saved 100,000 lives.
They didn't let anybody, and now, that it appears that this appeared in a Chinese government-run lab, and that the containment protocols that failed, and they still didn't let anybody know, so they knew from the very outset what this was, That is what the mounting evidence appears to suggest, at the very least.
This would be an opportunity to fight back against Chinese dominance, and instead, nobody's doing it.
Instead, Facebook cracked down on people who mentioned the lab leak theory.
According to the New York Post, January 5th, 2021, New York Magazine's latest cover story, The Lab Leak Hypothesis, concludes that COVID-19 is a human-engineered virus that escaped from a Wuhan lab.
The very same theory that moved Facebook to suppress a Post opinion piece for weeks last year.
Steven Mosher only called it a possibility in these pages in February of 2020.
Facebook quickly moved to suppress the column as false information and wouldn't unblock it until April 17th.
Nicholson Baker's feature goes into great length on issues most are touched on.
Baker believes the virus was made more infectious in the laboratory, perhaps as part of a scientist's well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine, and then it accidentally escaped.
But Facebook's fact-checkers put a false information alert on the New York Post column in February of 2020 and blocked Poster's friends from reading it for themselves, never mind the careful caveats and the Post's own clear opinion label on the piece.
Media figures accused the Post of spreading a conspiracy theory, so Facebook shut this down originally.
And it wasn't just Facebook shutting it down.
Twitter suspended a Chinese virologist who claimed that coronavirus was created in a lab and fled to the United States.
According to the UK Independent, in September of 2020, Twitter has suspended the account of a Chinese virologist who claimed COVID-19 was man-made and created in a Wuhan lab.
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who claims to be a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health, had her Twitter account suspended by the social media site earlier this week.
The virologist, who had more than 60,000 followers on Twitter before her account was suspended, made headlines when she claimed to have evidence the Chinese government was involved in creating the virus.
Twitter introduced a policy in May to label posts that contain information about COVID-19 which has been disputed or is controversial.
The site said the policy was introduced to quote, provide additional explanations or clarifications in situations where the risks of harm associated with a tweet are less severe or people may still be confused or misled by the content.
Okay, so there are a couple of strains that have crossed here.
One is the pro-Chinese bent of so many people in the modern marketplace and in government.
And the second, is the social media willingness to do whatever the work of the Democratic Party is on a given day, including shutting down information being disseminated that actually turns out may be accurate.
I mean, we knew that already.
All of this is incredibly dangerous because China is not waiting around.
China is using its own disinformation processes.
China lies on a regular basis.
In fact, the countries that didn't get hit all that hard by COVID were the ones who didn't believe China at the beginning.
Taiwan wasn't hit particularly hard.
Because they immediately said, okay, we know the Chinese government lies, so we're just going to ignore whatever they say and shut down travel.
And yet the West was like, completely credulous about this stuff and continues to be completely credulous and continues to push forward the WHO.
There are a couple of reasons for this, and we'll get to them in just one second.
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Okay, so there are a couple of things that are crossing, a couple of sort of strains that are crossing here to create the space for China to continue to ascend despite the fact that it just unleashed a virus on the rest of the world.
Strain number one is the cowardice of the media that refuses to investigate issues that an authoritarian government tells them are not an issue, so long as Democrats are kind of soft toward that authoritarian government.
Joe Biden for years has been saying that China is sort of an opponent.
We're not seeking to stifle their growth.
We're not seeking to check them.
They're not an enemy.
They're more of a geopolitical competitor.
The Democratic Party has taken this line for a long time.
Then, when Trump was president and became quite militant with China, and became a lot more competitive with China, then all of a sudden, the Democratic Party shifted into high-dudgeon.
Oh, how dare he shut down travel from China?
That's racist.
If you say China virus, that's racist.
If you say Wuhan virus, that's racist.
Let's go down to Chinatown and start just licking people on the face.
To make sure that nobody is racist against the Chinese because Trump said Chinese virus, even though every sentient human being knows that what Trump meant is that the virus began in Wuhan and that the Chinese government covered it up.
Every sentient human knew that's what that meant, not that Asian Americans were somehow to blame for the Chinese government's actions.
But the Democratic Party shifted into anti-Trump gear rather than into a unifying gear in which we asked serious questions about the actions of the Chinese government.
By the way, there is kind of a high level of bipartisan agreement that China is a problem, and yet somehow this doesn't turn into actual action.
So that's number one.
Number two, and this is a broad and deep issue in the American economy, the change in strategy that was effectuated by Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration in opening China.
At the time, you can see why they did it.
They were attempting to Take China off the chessboard as sort of an ally of Russia and then turn China against Russia and split the two.
You understand why they were trying to do that?
And there was a going theory that if market forces were allowed to percolate in China, that this would somehow effectuate an opener, a more open regime in China.
It turns out that instead what happened is that American consumers and American producers and American business people became completely dependent on the Chinese.
So one of the horrible things about the expansion of capitalism into China.
The expansion of capitalism into China has had a couple of great things about it and a few horrible things.
Number one, that is good.
It has raised the living standards of actual Chinese people by leaps and bounds.
And poverty has been greatly alleviated in China because they have addressed free markets and allowed free markets to provide cheaper and better products to China.
At the same time, however, they've used free markets in order to establish a broader base and a more strengthened base for authoritarianism.
Not only that, it turns out that corporations are not great defenders of free markets and free market liberties, they're more defenders of profit margin.
And so what that means that they're willing to do business with the Chinese, even if the Chinese are not truly engaging in free markets, they're engaging in mercantilism, right?
State-sponsored industry, which is really what the Chinese government does.
And so capitalism, Capitalism does allow for the free exchange of products and that is good for consumers.
But what capitalism cannot do is overthrow regimes.
Capitalism allows for states that actually utilize it to become more powerful.
States that engage in the free market become more powerful.
But that's also true for authoritarian states that engage in the free market.
So, the key there would be, if you were facing down the Soviet Union, for example, to strengthen free markets in the United States, grow the economy extraordinarily, and then spend on the military.
This is how Reagan impacted the Soviet Union to the point where they had to basically pull out of Eastern Europe and collapse.
But if the Soviet Union had instead been engaged in the world market, if the Soviet Union had embraced elements of capitalism to strengthen its own regime, the Soviet Union would probably still be around.
China is proof positive of this.
And this is why it is so disquieting when you see so many prominent Americans who are speaking up on behalf of China.
They're so shy about offending China because they're afraid that their market share in China is going to go down.
Capitalism has a set of underlying values, but you can embrace profit margin without embracing the underlying values of capitalism, which is what China is doing and what so many business people in America are doing as well.
And that's truly frightening.
So for example, John Cena, actor, former WWC star, WWE star rather, John Cena, he made the mistake of suggesting that Taiwan is a country.
Now, Taiwan is indeed a country.
Taiwan is a separate country from China.
And China likes this formulation, that it's basically one country, but that Taiwan is sort of an extension of China.
But Taiwan is its own independent country.
It has been since the late 1940s, when Chiang Kai-shek fled China and Mao took over in China.
Taiwan is a free state.
The United States gives weaponry to Taiwan to protect itself from Chinese aggression.
And yet more and more we are seeing celebrities who are coming out and just doing the bidding of the Chinese.
So here is John Cena apologizing for calling Taiwan its own country.
Speaking in Mandarin.
I have to say that I have done a lot of interviews on the topic of speed.
A lot, a lot, a lot.
The fact that John Cena came out and said he loves China and that he is and that he apologizes for suggesting that Taiwan is its own country is insane.
Right?
So what exactly did he do?
So apparently, Sina gave an interview to a Taiwanese broadcaster promoting Fast and Furious 9, right?
F9.
And he said Taiwan is the first country that can watch F9.
CNN Business says Taiwan is a self-governing democratic island, but China claims it as its sovereign territory despite the two sides being ruled separately since the end of a civil war over 70 years ago.
Beijing considers any suggestion of Taiwan's independence crossing its red line and has been increasingly trying to use economic power to police speech on the topic around the world.
On Tuesday, Sina offered an apology on Weibo, China's popular Twitter-like social media platform.
Speaking again in Mandarin, Sina did not refer to Taiwan by name or discuss the incident in detail, but he did say he did a lot of interviews and made a mistake.
He said, I'm sorry for my mistake.
I must say now, it's very, very, very important that I love and respect even more China and the Chinese people.
Now, you will note that F9 took in $160 million over the weekend.
$136 million came from China.
So the reason John Cena is doing this is, of course, because he wants to make money, because his studio wishes to make money.
In the same way that the NBA has defended China for taking over Hong Kong, for the same reason LeBron James came out and ripped at Daryl Morey, then the GM of the Houston Rockets, for having the temerity to say that Hong Kong ought to be free.
Instead, LeBron James, great civil rights crusader, came out and said that Daryl Morey didn't know what he was talking about, which is a shot coming from LeBron James, who never knows what he's talking about.
But LeBron makes his money from China.
The NBA makes its money from China.
If you make your money from China, then you seem quite willing to overlook China's human rights violations.
So China is picking on a couple of vulnerabilities in the West.
One, the West has lost a sense of self-confidence, lost a sense of its own values.
It's lost a willingness to defend its own values in the face of Chinese aggression.
And so it refuses to call out China.
And two, China, Because it can cram down suffering on its own citizens has been able to use its mercantilist style of economics.
It's economically fascist style of economics in order to provide giant markets for foreign products while pumping out cheap goods and services.
Making the rest of the world more dependent on China than China is on the rest of the world.
Now, the dirty secret, of course, is that China is incredibly dependent on the rest of the world, but the rest of the world never wants to pull that trigger.
The rest of the world never wants to say to China, no.
The rest of the world doesn't want consequences for China.
And so China could win this thing by default.
China could continue to grow, despite the fact that it is an internally weak economic regime, despite the fact that China is bordered by countries that are not in love with it.
The fact that the West has decided to give up here and not press back on what is a great leverage point with regard to COVID-19 and the lab leak, and the possible lab leak, it's demonstrative again of a West that is in a process of slow-moving retreat.
Now, meanwhile, as we've mentioned, social media did a wonderful job of doing Chinese propaganda work.
They shut down any mention of the lab leak theory.
And this is just one impetus.
For the crackdown on social media that is now occurring around the United States.
There's a lot of talk by red states about what can we do to reopen social media to the dissemination of information.
Remember, all of these ridiculous fact-checkers shut down your ability to disseminate information with regard to the lab leak thesis.
It's pretty amazing.
The way that social media works is they have all of these bullcrap fact-checking institutions.
Those fact-checking institutions then push out their own opinion pieces, quote-unquote rebutting other people's opinions, and then Facebook just uses those fact-checkers as an excuse to shut down anything that the fact-checkers say shouldn't be on the platform.
So yesterday, Ron DeSantis in Florida pushed forward a bill he signed into law, a bill that cracks down on social media's ability to ban you.
Now, I haven't read the bill.
What I have seen of the bill, I think that it's got some legal problems with it.
But the basic idea that DeSantis is pushing forward, which is that social media cannot be allowed to willy-nilly ban people on the basis of completely arbitrary and obfuscating rules, he's not wrong about this for sure.
Right, DeSantis pointed out yesterday, you know, that for a year, if you contradicted the WHO on anything, then they would just pull down your information.
Well, now Anthony Fauci is suddenly signaling that he's willing to hear the lab leak hypothesis.
So DeSantis is like, okay, so are they going to pull Fauci off social media now?
Now we have information that this very well may have emanated from the Wuhan lab, that it was a leak from the lab.
But you remember when people last year were raising that as something that needed to be investigated, they were deplatformed for talking about the lab leak.
They were censored for having said that, and now even Fauci admits that this may be something that very well is the case.
Are they going to now censor Fauci and pull him down off social media?
Okay, the corporate world is moving in tune to China.
Right, according to National Review, the Disney-owned studio Searchlight pressured the American magazine Filmmaker to remove a quote from its profile of Chinese director Chloe Zhao because it was critical of China's authoritarian regime, according to a Hollywood Reporter article published on Friday.
Speaking with Filmmaker about the inspiration behind her first film, Songs My Brother Taught Me, Zhao said she identified with the main character, a Native American teenager looking to flee South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, because she hoped to escape the dictatorial grip of the Chinese Communist Party when she was a child.
It goes back to when I was a teenager in China, said Zhao, being in a place where there are lies everywhere.
You felt like you were never going to be able to get out.
A lot of info I received when I was younger was not true, and I became very rebellious toward my family and my background.
I went to England suddenly and relearned my history.
Studying political science at a liberal arts college was a way for me to figure out what is real.
Arm yourself with information and then challenge that too.
Spotlight, and by extension Disney, then demanded the American media outlet filmmaker omit Zhao's testimony, trying to appease its Chinese business partners, especially because Zhao is the director of their big new property, The Eternals.
So Zhao, who just won an Oscar for Nomadland, and she had said all of this anti-Chinese government stuff, and now Disney is trying to crack down on the magazine that printed it.
China is going to win because so many people in the United States are unwilling to put aside greed in favor of the national interest.
And China is going to win because the American government does not even wish to stand up for American values in the face of the Chinese authoritarian threat.
That is a full-scale disaster area.
Okay, in just one second, we are going to be getting to the one-year anniversary of the George Floyd death.
What has changed since then?
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Alrighty, so, meanwhile, your garbage media, which continue to cover up the situation with regard to the Wuhan virus, Your garbage media continue to suggest that great things have happened since the death of George Floyd one year ago.
It's always weird to call it an anniversary because an anniversary sort of connotates, has positive connotations.
Obviously, there are no positive connotations to the now legally adjudicated murder of George Floyd.
But the media are trying to suggest that great and wonderful things have happened since the death of George Floyd.
I'm just wondering where the evidence is of this.
Eugene Robinson has a piece over at the Washington Post today, titled, The Great Work of Art That Followed George Floyd's Death.
What exactly is that great work of art?
It is the giant painting, Black Lives Matter, on the streets of Washington, D.C.
Says Eugene Robinson, I remember waking up June 5th to see the words Black Lives Matter unfurling in 35-foot-tall, bright yellow letters on what had been the southernmost two blocks of 16th Street Northwest, directly across Lafayette Square from the front windows of the White House.
It was, for me, an electrifying moment.
With her stirring and audacious counterattack on President Trump, D.C.
Mayor Muriel Bowser showed Trump how wrong he was.
She had city workers block off the street and asked artists to begin painting the slogan around 3 a.m.
Once protesters realized what was happening, they joined in as willing assistants.
The moment I decided to create Black Lives Matter Plaza was when I came face-to-face with a line of federal police blocking a street in my legal jurisdiction, Bowser wrote in an op-ed in The Post later that month.
Here we were in my hometown in the capital of the United States of America, With people all around us protesting for change, demanding reforms to the racist, broken systems that killed George Floyd and so many black Americans before him.
But instead of bringing the country together, the federal government was blocking the streets.
It was clear the president was doing everything he could to tear us apart.
The plaza's importance, says Eugene Robinson, owes not just to what it says and how boldly it expresses that sentiment, but where it is.
Because, of course, it's dead center in the middle of Washington, D.C.
Cities across the country admirably emulated Bowser and established their own Black Lives Matter plazas, including on 5th Avenue in Manhattan in front of Trump Tower.
But none equaled the scale, scope, slyness, or perfection Of the original.
It's good.
Bowser now has plans to make the lettering more permanent because it needs to endure as long as does the nation it instructs as Eugene Robinson.
Ah, wow.
The glory.
The glory.
Meanwhile, the murder rate in Washington, D.C.
is up tremendously.
I mean, like, a large percentage.
Murder rate in Washington, D.C.
over the last year, it has risen to its highest number in 15 years, according to The Washingtonian.
So, apparently, the legacy of Black Lives Matter in Washington, D.C.
is a lot more black people getting killed in Washington, D.C., which, of course, is the legacy of Black Lives Matter all over the country.
Because if you actually cared about black lives, you might want to pay attention to how many black people have been murdered since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is predominantly dedicated to ripping on the police and suggesting that they were the chief threat to black life.
In fact, if you want to go to the city where George Floyd actually died, if you want to go there and see what the legacy of George Floyd's murder has been and the aftermath, The BLM movement, their legacy?
Well, it turns out that the legacy has been one of tremendous crime and murder in the aftermath of the BLM movement, which has done nothing good for the country.
I'm still waiting to hear the good thing that BLM has done for the country.
I keep hearing there's a racial reckoning.
Okay, so where is the good that has come out of this?
If the best you can come up with is that a bunch of yellow letters were painted on a street in Washington, D.C.
while more black people were being killed in Washington, D.C.
last year, then I don't see the good that came out of this.
Maybe just like big yellow letters, but if the yellow letters say Black Lives Matter and more black people are getting killed, I fail to see how exactly you have effectuated the message that you are seeking to effectuate.
The same thing is true in Minneapolis.
According to Heather McDonald in the Wall Street Journal, 19 children in Minneapolis have been shot this year, an increase of 171% over the same period in 2020.
Their relatives wonder where the protesters are.
Why ain't nobody mad about a 10-year-old, my grandson, fighting for his life?
Asked Sherry Jennings.
Because a cop didn't shoot him, is that why?
Minneapolis homicides between January 1st and last week were up 108% compared with the same period in 2020.
Shootings were up 153%.
Carjackings were up 222%.
The crime increase began after Floyd's death and has never let up.
Nor has the assault on law enforcement that began with the arson destruction of the 3rd Precinct building on May 28th, 2020.
Officers are routinely punched, kicked, and hit with projectiles.
There was a near-riot in downtown Minneapolis in the early hours of May 22nd following a shootout among club patrons.
Two people were killed in that shootout.
Eight people were wounded.
Responding officers called for backup across the Twin Cities at what the department called an exceptionally chaotic scene.
The previous weekend, officers were maced and pelted with rocks and debris while trying to disperse disorderly crowds.
So, um, 200 officers, by the way, have gone on leave or left the Minneapolis Police Department since May 2020.
So right now, Minneapolis PD is understaffed by nearly a third.
Same thing has happened in Seattle, where 20% of the PD has quit.
You're seeing the same thing happening in New York.
You're seeing the same thing happening in Los Angeles.
So what exactly is the great legacy here of Black Lives Matter?
According to the media, which is celebrating the one-year anniversary as though this is something worth celebrating.
Number one, the death of a person is never worth celebrating.
Maybe one-year commemoration is a better way of putting it.
Media are commemorating one year since George Floyd's death, suggesting that great and excellent change has been wrought upon the United States.
Where is the great and excellent change?
The answer is, there is no great and excellent change.
All that's happened is America is more racially polarized.
Lies have been told about the police.
Lies have been told about America as a systemically racist country.
And you are told that if you disagree with this, then you are part of the problem.
And meanwhile, more black people are getting killed this year.
So well done, everybody.
By the way, the Biden administration has no answer on this.
They still cannot explain exactly how something good has happened this year.
Jen Psaki was asked about the rising crime problem across the United States.
She blamed guns.
Weird, because there were lots of guns the year before.
But it seems like only this year has there been a massive increase in murder.
Here's Jen Psaki.
Is there a crime problem in this country?
Well, I would say certainly there is a guns problem.
And that's something the president would say.
And there are communities where local violence and community violence is an issue.
And that's one of the reasons that we have proposed and have now are implementing funding for community violence prevention programs across the country.
Unbelievable.
Is there a crime problem?
No, there's a guns problem.
Weird, because the guns were there before the last year.
There is a crime problem fostered and pushed by a Democratic administration, fostered and pushed by Democrats in Congress, fostered and pushed by a Democratic media.
Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the United States, actively attempted to bail out rioters in Minneapolis in the middle of the George Floyd protests.
And then you... Yeah, so what a great reckoning we have wrought here.
What an incredibly great reckoning.
In a second, I'm gonna bring you the story of a Black Lives Matter activist who actually was shot in Britain the other day because the story has something to say about where the threat to black lives truly comes from in Western countries.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty.
We'll get to more in just one second.
First, a lot has happened in a month.
It's time you took off the mask and watched a few guys sit down and try to make sense of all of it.
That is why you should join me, Jeremy Boring, Michael Molls, Matt Walsh, and Andrew Klavan tomorrow night, Wednesday, May 26th, for another cigar and reason-packed episode of Backstage, in which my colleagues...
Attempt to imitate masculinity by drinking whiskey and smoking cigars.
And I sit there and I drink very girly drinks and don't smoke.
It streams at 7 o'clock p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central on DailyWire.com and on our YouTube channel, DailyWire.
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All righty, so this is a really indicative story as to where the threat to black lives truly is.
A British Black Lives Matter activist named Sasha Johnson was critically injured after a shooting in London.
So, the original reports suggested that perhaps it was political.
It appears it was not, in fact, political.
It appears that this was an act of gang violence in which she was caught in the crossfire, tragically.
According to the Washington Post, a British Black Lives Matter activist is fighting for her life after being shot in the head During the early hours of Sunday morning, Sasha Johnson, a 27-year-old mother, is in critical condition after the incident, which comes amid numerous death threats, according to a statement from the political party she is affiliated with.
Police did not name Johnson, but confirmed the woman was shot in London Borough of Southwark at around 3 a.m.
on Sunday.
Now, notice the Washington Post coverage.
If you just read that first paragraph, you would assume that this was a result of the death threats coming from political opponents.
But the reality is, according to the police, that there is nothing to suggest the shooting in South London was targeted or linked to her activism.
Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Telley said, this was a shocking incident that has left a young woman with very serious injuries.
Our thoughts are with her family, who are being provided with support at this terribly difficult time.
Speaking to the BBC on Monday, Johnson's friend Imarn Aiton said she did not think the activist was the intended target, saying she believed instead the incident was linked to a disagreement between rival gangs.
Okay, so this was not political.
This was not people who oppose Black Lives Matter.
This was just a gang shooting, and that is far more typical of black people who are being killed in the United States and in Britain than the notion that the cops are out there murdering people.
And yet the lie is that the reckoning, the racial reckoning that has to take place on both sides of the Atlantic apparently, that racial reckoning is about the systems of the United States.
Here's the problem.
When you start to dismantle those systems, including the system of policing, more black people die.
And that is the legacy that Black Lives Matter is going to have to carry forward here.
Meanwhile, our media really focusing in on the most important things.
The media have an entire, there's an entire article in the Washington Post today called Weightlifting Gatorade Birthday Calls Inside Biden's Day.
I mean, this is some heavy duty stuff right here from the Washington Post.
I remember when they used to write these puff pieces about Trump and what his day looked like.
Oh wait, no, they used to write how terrible he was for ordering two scoops of ice cream and having a button on his desk for Diet Coke.
But Joe Biden, man, we need articles about how fit he is, how with it.
I mean, the real reason they're writing this article about weightlifting, Gatorade, and birthday calls, the reason that you're reading about his weightlifting and Gatorade is because you're supposed to believe that the guy plays linebacker for University of Florida rather than being a doddering old coot who can't string together a sentence.
Here, by the way, is Joe Biden versus the teleprompter as per his usual arrangement.
This is the Rumble in the Jungle, Battle Royale.
Joe Biden versus his, this time he's not even versus his teleprompter.
This time the teleprompter tagged in a sheet of paper and Joe Biden gets confused by a sheet of paper sitting right in front of him.
But there's, you know, there to be, you know, beginning this effort for 2021 is, I think we've learned a few lessons from last year as well.
There's helpless, there, you know.
Being there to help clear roads, rebuild main streets.
And so that the families can get back to their lives.
That's a theme it does every single day.
Okay, so you see a barely animate man stumbling through his own notes.
That's what you see.
Here's what the Washington Post sees.
During a speech in Pittsburgh in March, President Biden held up the index card he keeps in his right breast pocket to track the nation's COVID deaths, inadvertently revealing a glimpse of his private schedule on the backside.
930, join videotapings with the First Lady.
945, proceed to Oval Office.
950, hold for Ron, shorthand for a meeting with Chief of Staff Ron Klain.
As Biden proceeded through the day, from a 30-minute lunch to a prep session for a cabinet meeting, he had ticked through each item with a slash from a black pen.
Check, check, check.
My God, the efficiency, the massive virality of that guy, that man, who, again, looks like something from Tales of the Crypt, right?
The door... Come on, man, and you know, and the thing, and...
But according to the Washington Post, that dude is the most alive dude you have ever seen.
He is so alive.
He's like from the movie Alive.
He is that alive.
It was a rare glimpse inside the president's actual life.
The extreme scripting and almost surreal regimentation that defined Biden's days from his arrival in the Oval Office just after 9 a.m.
to his brief walk back to the White House residence for dinner with his wife by 7 p.m.
More than most public figures, Biden has sought to keep one foot in the normal world as he has ascended the rungs of power.
But the presidency is testing that impulse in an entirely new way.
Current and former advisors say Biden's typical day reveals a creature of habit with well-worn routines and favorite treats.
Okay, now they're just describing him like you would describe your dog.
Right, it's a creature of habit with well-worn routines and favorite treats, from orange Gatorade to chocolate chip cookies.
A tactile politician eager to escape the Washington bubble who meets privately with people who write him letters. The patriarch of a sprawling Irish Catholic clan who abruptly interrupts high-level meetings to take calls from family members.
It marks a sharp contrast with former President Trump, whose days often ran both early and late with tweets that were frequently angry or inflammatory, and whose time was often consumed by rambling rallies, spontaneous calls to TV hosts, and random unscripted activities.
Did it ever occur to the Washington Post the reason that Biden has to be scripted is because he's not alive?
Literally this week, we found out that Joe Biden said he was going to scale back his infrastructure package to try and make a deal with Republicans.
And then the White House staff said, oh, actually, we're just going to ignore Joe.
And no, we're not doing that anymore because he's not running his own administration.
But the good news is The Washington Post has an entire article about how wonderful and alive Joe Biden is.
The man drinks Gatorade and he weightlifts, too.
I mean, if you were worried that the guy falls downstairs, let me just tell you, he weightlifts like a champ.
He begins his mornings with a workout that often includes lifting weights.
He meets regularly in person with a trainer.
His current Peloton preferences are something of a state secret, but apparently he rides his Peloton.
Wow!
Wow!
Put that man in a triathlon?
That's how this is gonna work out.
Amazing.
They are just state-run media.
They are just state-run media.
All righty.
We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
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