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May 27, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:08
Joe Biden Will Spend All Your Money Before He Goes | Ep. 1264
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Joe Biden proposes a $6 trillion budget that would sink the economy and raise the national debt to record levels.
The Biden White House continues to foster wokeness in America's military-industrial complex.
And the Biden administration decides to take China's word for it on the origins of COVID-19.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so Joe Biden, breaking news, has now proposed a $6 trillion budget.
A $6 trillion budget.
That's insane.
So just to get this straight, in his first six months, He has now proposed a $2 trillion stimulus plan, which actually got passed.
He has proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that has not yet been passed.
He's proposed a $2 trillion American Families Plan, which has not yet been passed.
And now a $6 trillion budget, which is $12 trillion.
The entire GDP of the United States in 2019 was $21 trillion.
The highest levels that we have spent in terms of government spending to GDP ratio in the past decade, You're looking at from 2015 and forward, it's like 35%.
Okay, now you're talking about spending well in excess of 50% of GDP.
Okay, and people are like, well, yeah, but that's just spending this year.
I mean, next year, he's not gonna spend all that this year that's tranched out over 15.
Right, but then he's gonna propose a $6 trillion budget next year.
As we have seen, once the ratchet moves in one direction, it never moves back down.
The reality of the situation is that once Barack Obama created the $4 trillion budget, every single year we've had a $4 trillion budget, including under Donald Trump.
That became the new normal.
So now we're going to increase the American budget by 50% Joe Biden wants?
50%?
In the middle of an inflationary cycle?
It's insane!
It's crazy!
But after all, I'm not sure Joe Biden knows what's going on.
Numbers confuse him at this point.
They probably always did, but now he's super confused about them, because like regular household objects confuse the President of the United States at this point in his career.
According to the New York Times, President Biden will propose a $6 trillion budget on Friday that would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II, while running deficits above $1.3 trillion for the next decade.
For the next decade.
So he wants to add, make that calculation yourself, $13 trillion minimum to the national debt over the next decade.
The national debt right now in the United States is, if you included things like You know, unfunded liability is like $132 trillion.
But if you're just looking at the published national debt right now, the published national debt right now in the United States is like $28.3 trillion.
Joe Biden is proposing, he's proposing this, to add over the next decade $13 trillion to the national debt.
And you know that's way too low.
You know it's gonna be higher than that if he got what he wanted.
So he's talking about adding like 50% to the national debt.
Who the hell is going to buy an American bond?
Why in the world would you buy an American bond to fund that?
Bitcoin to the moon, gang.
As one of our producers said earlier, Bitcoin to the moon.
Documents obtained by the New York Times show that Mr. Biden's first budget request as president calls for the federal government to spend $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year and for total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2031.
And again, he ain't gonna be president in 2031.
So if he wants the total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion, you're really talking about Rising a lot more than that.
that. The growth is driven by Biden's two-part agenda to upgrade the nation's infrastructure and substantially expand the social safety net contained in his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, along with other planned increases in discretionary spending. The proposal shows the sweep of Mr. Biden's ambitions to wield government power to help more Americans attain the comforts of a middle-class life and to lift U.S.
industry to better compete globally. I love that. I love how the New York Times is just, let's just read right off of Joe Biden's press release right here.
You know, sure, we're gonna blow out the debt to an unprecedented degree.
This is not a war, okay?
We're not in the middle of wartime.
This isn't World War II.
See, during World War II, we had to spend a lot of money because, you know, we were in the middle of a world war in which we were fighting a two-front gigantic war, one against the Axis powers in Germany and in the Atlantic, and another where we were fighting another entirely separate war in the Pacific.
That's a good reason to blow out the federal spending is because you're in an existential war with fascist powers.
You know what's a bad reason to blow out the spending?
Because Joe Biden can't control his Metamucil.
That's a real bad reason to blow out the spending.
Because Joe Biden needs his legacy before he puts in for time at the nursing home.
What in the actual F?
But the New York Times is like, well, you know, but look at his ambition.
The code word, by the way, in the media.
When somebody proposes something absolutely insane, but it comports with kind of leftist priorities, then they just say it's ambitious.
It's bold.
It's ambitious.
Sure, he's not going to get any of this stuff because, frankly, he doesn't have the votes in the Senate, but he can.
I mean, I don't think that you're going to see Manchin or Sinema move along with us on the Democratic side of the aisle, let alone getting to the filibuster-proof majority.
You could use reconciliation to pass the budget, but I can't imagine he gets this through.
But if he did, That's not ambitious.
That's crazy.
But according to the New York Times, don't worry.
He's trying to help more Americans attain the comforts of a middle-class life.
First of all, the insanity of suggesting that America is a place where you can't attain a middle-class life.
That's so crazy.
Before the pandemic, the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.6%.
We had historically low unemployment.
We had historically high wage growth.
And studies demonstrate that if you wish to attain that middle class lifestyle in the United States, you need to do three things, and three things only, and all of them, if you are mentally capable, are not that hard.
One is graduating high school, which in the United States basically means you need to be able to write your name.
Not well, just like a little.
Okay, two, you need to get a job.
In a country that has more job openings than people seeking jobs, again, not super difficult, so long as you put your As you put your shoulder to the millstone, to the grindstone.
And three, don't have babies before you're married.
That's it.
Those three things.
And you will not live in poverty in the United States.
But according to Joe Biden, we need to blow out the budget to the tune of a $1.3 trillion debt for the next 10 years, every year, in order to attain a middle-class lifestyle.
Because nothing says middle-class lifestyle quite like complete redistribution of wealth by punishing entrepreneurialism.
Perfect.
Also, he's gonna help the United States better compete globally in the economy.
What in the world?
So blowing out the spending is gonna help us compete better in the global economy?
Explain how.
Seriously, explain how.
In Sweden, they tried in the 1960s, 70s, they tried something called the third way.
The third way in Sweden was an attempt to blow out the spending in democratic socialist fashion.
It completely sunk their economy and they had to walk back their social spending and taxation rates.
Joe Biden is like, well, let's forget about all that.
Let's just do it, man.
It'll make us more competitive.
More competitive?
Again, before COVID, the United States had the most dominant economy on planet Earth by a long stretch, not close.
And Joe Biden's like, well, forget all of that.
Mr. Biden's plans to fund his agenda by raising taxes on corporations and higher earners would begin to shrink budget deficits in the 2030s, which means it's never going to shrink budget deficits.
I mean, this is literally, I'll buy a hamburger today and I will pay for it 30 years from now.
No, you won't.
It'll shrink budget deficits in the 2030s?
Now, I may be out of line here, but I checked the calendar, like, right now, and the calendar says it is now 2021.
If Joe Biden says, oh yeah, long after I'm dead, we're gonna shrink the budget deficit?
If you believe this, you are a stupid person.
If you believe that he's going to blow up, like he's admitting that he's blowing out the deficit at 1.3 trillion dollars a year for the next decade, every year.
But don't worry, guys, when you get to 2031, when, by the way, Joe Biden will be.
I counted in his late 80s, if he is still alive.
OK, Joe Biden right now is age 78.
He will be 88.
He's like, oh, well, you know, when I'm 88 years old, I'm 78 now when I'm 88 years old, then we'll start to lower the deficit.
Mm hmm.
Sure.
Administration officials say the jobs and families plan would be fully offset by tax increases over the course of 15 years.
And this budget request backs it up.
No, it's the spending is over 10.
Again, you're not even using the same length of time.
That's like saying, you know, I'm going to blow out my credit card this month.
I'm going to spend like a million dollars on my credit card this month, but probably over the course of the next 10 years, I might earn $10 million.
Yes, but the spending is happening now.
What are you even talking about?
You have to use the same time period for the spending and the taxation in order to make those numbers match.
How do you even play that game?
In the meantime, the United States would run significant deficits as it borrows money to finance his plans.
Under Mr. Biden's proposal, the federal budget deficit would hit $1.8 trillion in 2022, even as the economy rebounds from the pandemic recession to grow at what the administration predicts would be its fastest annual pace since the early 1980s.
So first of all, we shouldn't be growing at our fastest annual pace since the early 1980s.
We should, theoretically, be growing at our fastest annual pace ever.
Why?
Because we had the greatest artificial recession in American history last year.
Talk about playing with statistics.
Like, look how fast the economy is growing.
Well, yes, when you forcibly kill tens of millions of jobs by telling people they can't go to work, then when they can go back to work, the economy will grow.
Wow, that's like a shocking statistic.
This is like saying, you know, Bob today, he had his most, the transition, like his energy level, the difference between the morning and the evening in his energy level today was the highest change ever.
Now what I'm not going to tell you is that we had Bob in an artificial coma until this morning.
So the difference between an artificial coma and him just like drinking a cup of coffee, that's like a thousand percent difference.
That is such an unbelievable energy, but you just don't tell people that.
What?
It depends what you use as the baseline.
Yes, it's true that if you use as the baseline the economic statistics from the middle of a pandemic, then we have very high growth rates.
It would recede slightly in the following years before growing again to nearly $1.6 trillion by 2031.
Total debt held by the public would more than exceed the annual value of economic output, rising to 117% of the size of the economy in 2031.
By 2024, debt as a share of the economy would rise to its highest level in American history, eclipsing its World War II-era record.
For what?
For what?
What are you even talking about?
Why?
Honest to God, why?
Right now, he's saying we're predicting the greatest American economic growth since the 1980s.
You know what we should do?
What if we just spend a load of money for no reason at all?
What if we blow out the debt to the tune of the worst debt as a share of the economy ever?
Like including World War II when we were fighting world wars and had mobilized the entire male civilian population between the ages of 18 and 40 and put them in barracks.
What in the?
I mean, this is it's totally crazy.
And the media is like, well, you know, he is trying to shore up that middle class.
Oh, you mean the middle class that ended this year with more savings than it had last year, thanks to government largesse?
According to the New York Times, the levels of taxation and spending in Mr. Biden's plans would expand the federal fiscal footprint to levels rarely seen in the post-war era.
Rarely.
Never.
To fund investments that his administration says are crucial to keeping America competitive.
That includes money for roads.
I love that.
It's about roads.
Guys, we're spending $6 trillion for roads.
No, we're not.
Again, if you believe this, you're a stupid, stupid man!
Stupid!
It includes money for roads, water pipes, broadband internet, electric vehicle charging stations, and advanced manufacturing research.
Okay, you know what?
That's gonna comprise, like, this percent of the budget.
Like, as a percentage of that total $6 trillion budget, it was, like, that kind of stuff was, like, 5 to 10% of the infrastructure plan.
That was a $2 trillion plan.
This is a $6 trillion plan.
It also envisions funding for affordable childcare, universal pre-K, a national paid leave program, and a host of other initiatives.
Spending on national defense would also grow, though it would decline as a share of the economy.
We'll get to national defense in just a second because the Biden administration is continuing its quest to woke-ify the military.
The documents suggest Mr. Biden will not propose major additional policies in the budget, or that his budget will flesh out plans that the administration has thus far declined to detail.
For example, Biden pledged to overhaul and upgrade the nation's unemployment insurance program as part of the American Families Plan, but such efforts are not included in his budget.
Right, that's a separate plan that he's still proposing.
The budget is simply a request to Congress, which must approve federal spending.
But with Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress, Biden faces some of the best odds of any president in recent history in having much of his agenda approved, particularly if he can reach agreement with lawmakers on parts of his infrastructure agenda.
Again, this is the New York Times.
I love how they bury the lead here.
If Mr. Biden's plans were enacted, the government would spend what amounts to nearly a quarter of the nation's total economic output every year over the course of the next decade.
It would collect tax revenues equal to just under one-fifth of the total economy.
How are they going to make up that difference?
By selling your bonds, of course.
By selling bonds to China.
Or by having the Federal Reserve essentially manufacture money in order to pay for all of this.
In each year of Biden's budget, the government would spend more as a share of the economy than all but two years since World War II, 2020, and 2021, which is because we blew out the budget in order to shore up the pandemic response.
By the way, who thinks that his budget is gonna be his total spending?
Which president has the budget been the only budgetary move that's been made over the course of the year?
This is madness.
By 2028, the government would be collecting more tax revenue as a share of the economy than almost any point in modern statistical history.
The documents also show the conservative approach Biden's economic team is taking with regard to projecting the economy's growth.
Biden's aides predict that even if his full agenda were enacted, the economy would grow at just under 2% for most of the decade after accounting for inflation, which is sluggish.
I mean, at least they're being realistic about that.
He will produce sluggish growth.
Unemployment would fall to 4.1% by next year from 6.1% today and remain below 4% in the years thereafter.
6.1% today and remain below 4% in the years thereafter.
Oh, would it?
Really?
As you inflate all the prices by blowing money into the economy?
Do you think that unemployment, that people continue to hire at extraordinary rates?
Yeah, and this is ridiculous.
The Biden forecast continued to show his administration has little fear of rapid inflation breaking out across the economy, despite recent data showing a quick jump in prices.
Under the Biden team's projections, consumer prices never rise faster than 2.3% per year.
Well, weird, because year on year, according to the last available metric, The inflation was like 4.2%, like twice, almost twice that.
Biden says that now is a great time because the interest rates are low for us to basically just blow money into the economy, which is actually a terrible time to blow money into the economy because that creates bubbles.
I love this.
Interest rates are controlled by the Federal Reserve, which is independent of the White House.
Yeah, super independent.
Super independent over at that Federal Reserve.
You know who's running the Federal Reserve until five seconds ago?
Janet Yellen, who's currently the Secretary of the Treasury under, wait for it, President Houseplant.
Even if the interest rates stay low, payments on the national debt would consume an increased share of the federal budget.
Net interest payments would double as a share of the economy from 2022 to 2031.
Okay, it's just insane.
It's just insane.
Okay, so his plan is to blow out the spending in the middle of a natural economic recovery and in the middle of an inflationary spiral in order to do what?
He wants his legacy.
Here's the bottom line.
He wants his legacy.
That guy knows he's not running for re-election.
He wants to be a consequential president, and therefore he's just going to blow out the spending because who cares?
Somebody else is going to have to deal with that down the line.
Unreal.
And also, it's incredible that supposedly, if you confiscate 25% of the American GDP every year from taxpayers, which by the way is a minimum, it'll be more.
If he does that, then that's going to have no impact on GDP growth, which will continue to grow steadily at 2%, and inflation, which will continue to just be 2% a year.
It's just nuts.
I'm sorry, this is fantasyland bullcrap.
We all get what we deserve if we decide to go forward with this, seriously.
Okay, in just a second, we'll get to Joe Biden's plans for the military, because our military unpreparedness is growing, because we continue to woke-ify the military.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to woke-ify the nation's military-industrial complex.
So the truth is that the government has been engaging in woke In woke priorities with regard to national defense for quite a while now.
The GAO, the US Government's Accountability Office, put out a report in 2017 in which they openly talk about the fact that the Department of Defense actually obligates billions of dollars every single year to buy products and services from types of businesses Okay, and a business, this is according to the GAO, a business generally must self-identify as a minority-owned business or a women-owned business as applicable in the federal government's contractor registry.
So, there's like a specific part of the budget that is basically dedicated that it has to be given to a female or minority-owned business.
Now, I don't know about you, but when I think about the military making missiles, for example, or making military hardware for jets, I don't care.
At all.
Who owns the businesses that sell that product to the Department of Defense?
I just want that stuff to work, and I want to pay the lowest price for it, because it's coming at taxpayer expense.
But the U.S.
government for a very long time has been engaged in this sort of affirmative action program for female-owned businesses and black-owned businesses designed to direct money toward specific... I mean, in violation of civil rights law.
They've picked, specifically, Minority owned businesses in order to direct dollars toward those businesses, even if it's a greater cost to taxpayers, even if it means that there's a delay in the procurement process because you have to actually demonstrate apparently that you couldn't have gotten it from a black owned or a minority or a minority or female owned business in order to actually procure certain military parts is what I'm hearing from people inside the Defense Department.
So that's been going on for quite a while.
And Joe Biden was set to ramp that into high gear.
According to governmentexecutive.com, this is back in 2020, the oncoming Biden administration is likely to increase contracting opportunities for small and minority-owned businesses.
President Biden-elect said that he wants to use equity as a guide.
Andy Howard, partner in the law from Alston and Byrd's government contracts group, says, I think we're going to see more regulation generally promoting competition and furthering the socioeconomic policies of the new administration, which is different in many respects from the current administration.
Apparently, there was speculation early on that the Biden team is now effectuating that would expand the Small Business Administration's Small Business Development Program to increase participations of small disadvantaged firms, require prime contractors to increase subcontracting opportunities for small disadvantaged businesses, and protect small business from contact bundling, because that would prevent Smaller firms, especially those owned by black and brown people, from effectively bidding on procurement contracts.
Now, contract bundling is generally a good thing because that means that you have, like, a defense, say, Lockheed Martin.
They have a subcontractor.
And now Lockheed Martin wants that subcontractor to go out and get a bunch of parts.
Well, now you're going to have regulations inside the Biden administration to prevent them from doing that.
Instead, they have to buy every part separately and show that every single part could not have been obtained from a black-owned or female-owned business before they can just go over to Walmart and pick up the part.
How that helps America's military readiness is absolutely beyond me.
It has nothing to do with America's military readiness, especially in a time of rising conflict with states like China.
But beyond that, we have now decided that it's very important that America's defense contractors get engaged with the new woke military priorities of the Biden administration.
There's a reason the Biden administration is putting out these bizarre ads in which they're recruiting for the CIA by being like, here is a cisgender, but very tolerant, Hispanic woman with generalized anxiety disorder.
You too can work for the CIA.
Or here is a military recruiting ad.
This person had two lesbian moms.
Like what in the world?
Well, again, this is about woke-ifying the American military and turning it from what is a quote-unquote de facto right-wing institution into something that is much more woke.
Well, now this is being crammed down on America's contracting companies.
Things like Lockheed Martin, for example.
So, Christopher Rufo does excellent work on this sort of stuff.
He has a piece today in City Journal.
It says, last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity training program aimed at deconstructing their white male culture and encouraging them to atone for their white male privilege.
The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity consulting firm White Men as Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males awaken together.
Which, frankly, sounds a little creepy.
Like, I wouldn't want to awaken with a bunch of other white males.
Weird.
I'm married.
The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckabee, director of global supply chain operations, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations, and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force's $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program.
At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a free association exercise asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the terms white men.
The trainers wrote down old, racist, privileged, anti-women, angry, Aryan nation, KKK, founding fathers, guns, guilty, and can't jump.
According to the participants, these perceptions have led to assumptions about white men and diversity, with many employees believing.
That white men don't care about diversity, have a classical perspective on history and colonialism, and don't want to give away our power.
The White Men as Full Diversity Partners team, Jim Morris, Mark Havens, Michael Welp, framed the purpose of the training session as providing a benefit for white men who embrace the diversity and inclusion philosophy.
In response to a prompt about what's in it for white men, the participants listed benefits such as, I won't get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner.
I will improve.
I will improve the brand image, reputation of white men, and I will have a less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.
The firm's founders, Welp and Bill Proudman, have argued that white males must work harder to understand their white privilege, male privilege, and heterosexual privilege, which affords them unearned benefits.
This is what we are now teaching people at Lockheed Martin.
Now, why exactly is Lockheed Martin doing this?
Why are they bothering?
The reason they're doing this is because they want to be able to say to the Biden Defense Department, we have complied with all of your woke diktats.
We are on the team, guys.
Keep directing those trillion-dollar checks over here, please.
This is not the first time that White Men as Full Diversity Partners has been involved in a controversial training program.
Last year, the company's white male training program for employees at Sandia National Laboratories was performed.
Consultants such as White Men as Full Diversity Partners are peddling this sort of stuff to bloated government contractors, and the government contractors are going right along with it because, of course, they want the contract.
So, woke-ifying America's military-industrial complex.
It is a move.
It is a shocking move.
Republicans right now are warning of this.
30 House Republicans have now sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, warning him that creeping left-wing extremism and politicization is jeopardizing the U.S.' 's military status, according to Breitbart News and Christina Wong Reporting.
The letter, led by Representative Matt Rosendale, a Republican in Montana, said, We write to express our concern about the growing trend of left-wing extremism and politicization of our armed forces. The military's long history of standing above politics has made it one of the most respected institutions in America. That legacy is now in jeopardy. They listed some examples of politicization. First was the Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan for our Special Forces.
The United States Army also released a recruitment video describing marching and left-wing social protests as defending freedom and depicting two moms raising a child and featured a lesbian wedding.
Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeyer, commander of the 11th Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force, warned of radical ideology being pushed on the military and stated, quote, the diversity, inclusion, and equity industry and the trainings we are receiving in the military is rooted in critical race theory.
He was relieved of his command for this.
All of this is deeply, deeply troubling stuff.
And again, remember, Joe Biden thinks the way that you compete with China is spending $6 trillion in a budget and also wokefying the American military-industrial complex.
I think we are going to lose.
If this is the way that you tackle an authoritarian, aggressive power like China, good luck to you.
By the way, just a quick side note on the bizarre critical race theory ideology and how stupid it is.
There's this whole meme online called people posting their L's, right?
People putting up tweets describing things they've done that are really just them describing how they got their ass kicked online.
Okay, so Mark Lamont Hill posted a clip of himself talking to Chris Rufo.
Chris Rufo, again, doing excellent work over at City Journal, exposing critical race theory.
And this really demonstrates wholesale the perversity of critical race theory thinking in which Mark Lamont Hill engages routinely.
Mark Lamont Hill is just terrible.
He was interviewing He's interviewing Chris Rufo and he says, what do you like about being white?
Now, this is a trap of a question, of course, because the real answer to this is I don't understand what my race has to do with anything.
My race doesn't dictate my culture.
My race does not dictate my abilities.
My race does not dictate my priorities.
Christopher, what do you like about being white?
Chris Rufo, because if Chris Rufo says that I'm not proud of being white, then Michael Monhill goes, well, why not? Why not? What are you guilty for? And if he says, well, here's the thing I'm proud of being white about. And he said, oh, look at you, you racist.
Right. This is the trap. This is the catch 22. Chris Rufo refuses to fall for it. And Michael Monhill is proud of himself for asking this dumb question.
Christopher, what do you like about being white? What would you say?
I don't know.
Again, it's such an amorphous term.
It's like a census term or a... But can you do me a favor?
Indulge me.
Indulge me for one... We're running out of time.
Indulge me for a minute.
I understand you see it as all these things, but you surely recognize that the world sees you as white.
You know the world reads you as white.
And if you were to ask me some things I like about being black, I could talk about cultural norms, I could talk about tradition, I could talk about the kind of commonalities I feel around the diaspora.
If I were to ask you, particularly if you're saying whiteness is a thing that is being constructed as negative and shouldn't be, Name something positive that you like about being white.
Okay, and Chris Rufo rejects the premise, but Michael Mann Hill can't understand why he should reject the premise.
Okay, first of all, it is absolutely reductionist to say what I like about being black is all of these various characteristics that really don't have to do with race and really have more to do with culture and history.
You can be black and agree with none of the things that Markle and Hildreth said there.
But again, this racial reductionism is now being taught in America's military settings.
I mean, this is madness.
Now, speaking of America's unreadiness to face down China, the continuing failures of the Biden administration to face down China are becoming clearer and clearer to the point where Biden is having to back down on some of them.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to the Biden administration.
In a strange shift with regard to the lab leak theory.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Okay, so meanwhile, remember that time that Joe Biden and his team were saying that this lab leak theory, like they're trusting the WHO to pursue it?
Like, remember that?
Because that was yesterday?
Literally yesterday?
Well, then news broke from CNN that the Biden administration had shut down a State Department effort launched late in the Trump administration to prove that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab over concerns about the quality of its work That's the way CNN reports it.
That's the quality of the work that's a problem, not the lab leak theory itself.
Now, the reality is that the Biden administration shut down that investigation because it was a point of faith for the left that the lab leak theory was not true.
And it was a point of faith for two reasons.
One, because it was racist.
Racist to suggest that perhaps the lab leak Was the responsibility of the Chinese government that this had been developed in a Chinese lab and then released that?
That would have been racist to point out.
And two, Trump talked about it, right?
Those are the two reasons why this had to be shut down.
Now, it's very weird that people considered it more racist, like people on the left today, consider it more racist to talk about the lab leak theory than to talk about Chinese people randomly eating bats.
Confusing, to say the least.
But, you know, they've got their ways.
But if you think I'm joking about this whole racist thing, let me point you to a New York Times COVID reporter who tweeted yesterday, quote, someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit it's racist roots.
But alas, that day is not yet here.
That is a reporter for the New York Times on COVID.
Trust your media.
Your media have your best interest at heart.
They care only about pursuing the facts.
The facts.
An apple is an apple, a banana is a banana, and a lab leak theory is racist if the New York Times says it's so.
Okay, so anyway, the Biden administration shut down Mike Pompeo's investigation into the origins of the virus.
Those involved in the previously undisclosed inquiry, which was launched last fall by allies of Pompeo, say it was an honest effort to probe what many initially dismissed, that China's biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemic's origin in Wuhan, according to two additional sources.
But then it was mired in internal politicization about whether this was cherry-picked by Trump, because everything Trump did was bad, according to the left, and therefore even investigations into baseline facts, that was bad too.
And by the way, the original investigation was fully justified.
Why?
Because everybody at the WHO, which is a deeply corrupt organization, a profoundly corrupt organization, they just took China's word for it from the beginning.
In late January, the WHO released a statement saying there was no human-to-human transition of COVID.
And there were like hundreds of people, thousands of people running around in Wuhan transmitting it to each other at the time.
If the information we have is correct, this thing was probably out of a virus in November.
I mean, the WHO lead investigator admits they took China's word for everything.
So of course Pompeo needed invest— of course the United States needed its own investigation.
And yet yesterday you had Jen Psaki and company say, well, you know, there is an international investigation led by the exact same people who just played second place in the human centipede to the Chinese government.
Here's the WHO lead investigator.
We met with them, we said, do you audit the lab?
And they said, annually?
Did you audit it after the outbreak?
Yes.
Was anything found?
No.
Do you test your staff?
Yes.
But you're just taking their word for it.
Well, what else can we do?
There's a limit to what you can do.
And we went right up to that limit.
We asked them tough questions.
They weren't vetted in advance.
And the answers they gave, we found to be believable, correct, and convincing.
Oh, really?
Because you also found it believable, correct, and convincing there was no human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, and thus it was not any sort of global threat in late January.
So yes, I don't believe you guys, and I think that you are just bags of tools.
Like, large bags of tools.
That's what you all got.
Okay, so, Joe Biden got hit with this headline yesterday, which is that his administration had shut down an American intelligence investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
And Joe Biden started to back up as quickly as he could without tripping over his feet and falling over and breaking a hip.
He immediately started to backpedal.
He put out a statement.
I've now asked the intelligence community to read a bubble, their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us, come on man, closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in nine mammogram days.
Now I'll read the rest in English.
Oh, weird.
As part of that report, I've asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China.
I've also asked that this effort include work by our national labs and other agencies of our government to augment the intelligence community's efforts.
And I've asked the intelligence community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.
Oh, weird.
So you mean the same day CNN revealed that you shut down an investigation, you asked the intelligence community to perform an investigation?
Amazing.
Amazing.
Meanwhile, literally the same day, the White House spokesperson, Corinne Jean-Pierre, she was asked about, you know, finding out the truth.
And she says, well, we'll just have to ask China to cooperate.
I mean, that's worked in the past, hasn't it?
China's super cooperative when they're stealing our technology and invading Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan and unleashing a virus on the world that kills two million people.
But other than that, they're super cooperative.
Why do we think that China would cooperate?
You know, this is this is something that you have to ask the Chinese government, right?
This is something that should be important.
It should should matter to them.
But this is a question for them.
How is that a question for them?
Specifically asked or made this ask of President Xi of China for their cooperation in this effort.
I'm not I'm not going to go into details of private conversation that the president may have may have had with with President Xi.
She can't even commit that Biden's going to ask the Chinese to cooperate.
By the way, that's not a question for the Chinese.
We know they're not going to cooperate.
The question is, what sort of leverage are you going to bring to bear to get China to cooperate?
That's not a question for the Chinese.
Why would an American media member go ask the Chinese government if they're going to cooperate in an internal investigation as to whether they unleashed a virus that killed two million people?
Why?
Unbelievable.
Okay.
And meanwhile, this White House spokesperson, then she was asked, you know, if it turns out that China actually, this did emerge from a Chinese lab, and not only that, that they lied about it all the way from November to the end of January, a three month period in which the world could have been developing a COVID vaccine and shutting down travel.
If that happens, what sort of penalties will there be?
And she's like, well, maybe none.
Guys, don't worry.
Joe Biden really wants to compete with China by blowing out our spending and sinking our economy, by woke-ifying the military, and by never holding China's feet to the fire on a single damned thing.
Here we go.
In terms of, you know, cooperating with the W.H.O.
investigations, does that mean the White House is encouraging China or penalties for China if it does not cooperate with investigations going forward?
I'm not going to prejudge or, you know, make any pre-announcements at this time.
We're going to go with the 90-day investigation and see where it takes us from there.
OK, but again, the 90-day investigation is going to be reliant on people talking to the Chinese.
This is like, it's unreal.
So they're not even going to be penalties for them not cooperating with the investigation.
Yeah, there's a hard coordinate they want to find.
They want to get to the bottom of this thing.
They're deeply invested in getting to the bottom of this thing.
The truth is, the Democrats want to put COVID behind us in terms of its origins, so they don't have to face up to a couple of things.
One, their complete botchery of the actual lockdowns in the United States and their masking policies and all of the idiocies that they have pushed over the course of the last year.
And also, they don't want to face up to the fact that they might actually have to get confrontational with an authoritarian communist state.
You gave them money and you said, don't do gain-of-function research.
Correct.
And they said, we won't.
happening this week. So Anthony Fauci was asked by Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana about American money going toward Chinese gain-of-function research. And Fauci admits, oh yeah, by the way, the Chinese could have, like that could have been funded by us maybe.
You gave them money and you said don't do gain-of-function research.
Correct.
And they said we won't.
Correct.
And you have no way of knowing whether they did or not except you trust them.
Is that right?
Well, we generally always trust the grantee to do what they say and you look at the results.
Have you ever had a grantee lie to you?
I cannot guarantee that a grantee has not lied to us because you never know.
Um, well then why would you give money to the Chinese government?
For a communist state!
What are you doing?
And there's no such thing as trust, but verify for these folks.
They just want to work with China.
And that means that you're just going to have to trust them in the same way that we're just going to have to trust the Iranian government with money.
They won't use it for terror.
No, they promised.
They said right to us.
They're not.
Oh, wait, hold on.
They're building ballistic missiles now.
Sure.
I mean, we have to give money to Gaza in order to rebuild.
And for sure.
Listen, we have promises that this is not going to be used for more rockets.
Oh, wait, they did what with the money?
You mean that if we give money to a Chinese laboratory, which is a black box, because we have no idea what they're doing there, that that might be used in ways we... Hmm.
Shocking!
Money is fungible?
No!
No!
Okay, but the media have a comeback to all of this.
They spent a year on social media literally shutting people down who talked about the lab leak theory.
Facebook shut it down.
Fact-checkers called it absolutely false.
It just shows you how corrupt the media are, how corrupt the fact-checkers are.
They're not fact-checkers.
They're conservative censors.
That's all they are.
They're just anti-conservative censors, these fact-checkers, like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, garbage organizations, all the way through.
Meanwhile, your mainstream media tell you That they're dereliction of duty and never investigating any of this.
They're like, well, you know what?
Of course we couldn't investigate this because Trump said it.
So if Trump said it, it was totally false, obviously.
So here is, unbelievably, Andrew Cuomo talking about how the big problem here is Trumpers, they keep playing up the Wuhan lab leak theory.
They keep playing it up.
And that's the problem here.
An Intel report determined several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized for an unknown illness in November 2019, the month before China reported its first COVID case.
Suspicious.
So why is it politically charged?
Because Trumpers who were complicit in playing down the pandemic reality in America are now seeing more interest in the China lab theory as some kind of vindication enough to play I told you so with Fauci.
Well, I mean, what if Fauci was not telling the truth?
Why is it that the underlying story... This is always the way the media treat this stuff, right?
It is not that the underlying... When it's a good story for Republicans, or bad for the Democrats, then the story is Republicans pounce on the story.
When it's a bad story for Republicans, the story is the story.
When it's a bad story for Democrats, the story is Republicans pounce.
When anti-Semitism in the streets of New York is emanating from the radical left and their allies in the pro-Palestinian movement, then the story is Republicans pounce on anti-Semitism, according to Michelle Goldberg.
And meanwhile, Sarah Haynes on ABC's The View, she says that the real problem here is that the lab leak theory is racist.
Again, this is insane.
This is insane.
Why can't we have a... By poll data, Americans understand China's a problem.
Why can't we have bipartisan agreement that China should pay for the unleashing of a virus that killed 2 million people?
Honest to God, I don't understand why this is remotely controversial.
I know many Democrats in legislative positions who full-on agree with this.
But because Trump said a thing, you have to oppose the thing.
So here's Sarah Haynes on ABC News suggesting that Trump's racism is what buried the Wuhan lab leak message.
I think the messenger matters.
I think during that time when that theory started to be told, it was buried in an administration and a former president who often kind of troped in kind of racist terms and dog whistles and so it buried the message that could have been actually reasonable but no one was going to hear it because it came from under Trump's administration and the media at that time was used to what he doled out and they were going to push back on that.
Unreal.
So they had to push back on Trump, and that was the most important thing.
Because what our media became, as arms of the Democratic Party, was an anti-Trump machine during the Trump era, not an investigative-reportorial regime.
An amazing, amazing thing.
Meanwhile, by the way, how corrupt are our media?
Well, it turns out that China's state media paid $1.6 million for advertising from American media outlets, including Time Magazine, the LA Times, and the Financial Times.
According to Mediaite, the cash China Daily forked over included $272,000 to the LA Times, $291,000 to Foreign Policy, $371,000 to the British Financial Times, $330,000 to the Canadian Globe and Mail, and $700,000 to Time Magazine.
$371,000 to the British Financial Times, $330,000 to the Canadian Globe and Mail, and $700,000 to Time Magazine.
That figures, those figures come after several large publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post ended advertising agreements with the newspaper last year.
By the way, is it any coincidence that the vast majority of this money, as far as I'm aware, was going toward left-wing media outlets?
I find that utterly unsurprising in the extreme.
Meanwhile, speaking of America being weakened from within, so the Department of Homeland Security head, Alejandro Mayorkas, he is now admitting that too many illegal immigrants are being admitted into the country for us even to track them.
If things are going really well, swell under the Biden administration, what if we spend some more money?
Would that solve it?
Maybe.
You know, let's try it.
Here's Alejandro Mayorkas admitting we have too many illegal immigrants in the country for us even to track them.
I am not aware of the fact that we have the tools, resources, and capabilities to track with the more than 11 million unlawfully present individuals in the United States, which speaks to the fundamental broken system and the need for immigration reform.
Oh, so, I mean, you know what?
We're not doing our jobs, so that means that we need you to pass legislation that allows us to not do our jobs.
Excellent, excellent Biden administration policy right here.
By the way, Alejandro Mayorkas also said that diminishing the ability of ICE to do its job is better for public safety.
So, yeah, things are going just fabulously well.
Is that the intended outcome of the various orders and directives, a near stop of all immigration violation arrests, sir?
Law enforcement effectiveness is not a quantitative issue.
It is a qualitative one.
The question is, as to whom are we dedicating our resources?
What will deliver the greatest public safety results for the American public?
Man, I love that.
I love when he's like, quantitative numbers.
We can't measure law enforcement in numbers.
We can measure it in feelings.
In feelings!
If the feelings meter goes up, that means law enforcement is doing a great job.
If the feelings meter goes down, That means that law enforcement's doing a bad job.
We can't gauge whether law enforcement's doing a good job by, you know, how many criminals it arrests.
No.
Only the feelings-o-meter can tell us whether we are doing a good job or not.
You elected this.
You bought the ticket.
We all take the ride, gang.
All right, 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.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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