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June 1, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:48
When Demand For Racism Outstrips Supply | Ep. 1266
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Time Text
Actress Ellie Kemper trends on Twitter as a KKK princess, despite zero evidence of racism.
As President Biden declares it, democracy in danger.
Democrats in Texas attempt to stop it from working and seek federal intervention.
And officials worry that Democratic policy will spur a bloody summer.
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All righty, so right now, one of the things we're watching politically in the United States is this attempt to play up the idea that America is a deeply racist place.
And here's the problem.
For a lot of folks on the left, they look around and they say, okay, well, America actually is not all that racist.
Here's the reality.
If you look at other countries around the globe, America is far less racist than those countries.
If you look at countries in Asia, America is way less racist.
Countries in Europe, America is way less racist.
In fact, America is one of the least racist places on earth.
And if you say...
long chapter and verse about all of the people in the United States of minority races who have risen to unbelievable heights in the United States including the current vice president of the United States or the former president of the United States or the former Attorney General of the United States, Supreme Court justices of the United States. If you point out that black Americans have the highest household income in the United States of any black people anywhere on planet Earth in any country.
If you point this out, if you point out that income mobility does in fact exist for every American if they make simple and basic decisions about how to better their own lives, like don't have babies out of wedlock, finish high school and get a job.
If you point that out, this sort of undermines the case that is made consistently by the left that America is a deeply racist place.
See, it used to be that the left claimed that America was in the midst of a class crisis, and this required a complete redistribution of wealth.
It required the systems to be torn down.
Well, now, since that didn't work out, because it turns out that America's income mobility is amazing, that you can become middle class and your kids can become wealthy in the United States with, again, a modicum of effort and responsible decision-making as a general rule.
Not for everybody, but as a general rule.
The class-based war that has taken place in the United States on behalf of the left has shifted into a race-based war in the United States on behalf of the left.
And the argument here is that America is deeply racist today.
Now, again, the problem is that when you look at the stats, what you see is that people of all races in the United States are capable of succeeding.
So instead what we have shifted into is a different argument and that argument is that American history is replete with racism and therefore all differences in group outcome today can be chalked up to historic mistreatment.
Now, there are a couple problems with this argument.
Problem number one is that it would require some sort of quantification.
How much of today's problems are due to history, and how much of today's problems are due to decision-making in the here and now?
And I'm not asking whether the decision-making in the here and now, to which you have agency, if that is impacted by your history, because the reality of life is that everybody's decision-making is impacted by the history of their family going back since the beginning of human history.
The question is, did you have the capacity to do otherwise?
And the answer when it comes to most basic decisions in the United States is, yes, you did.
And so if you try to quantify that, the argument that history is responsible for all of group differences in the United States today is not a particularly good argument.
It is not a particularly effective argument.
And so what this has left people with is the bifurcated spectacle of, on the one hand, a Democratic Party that seeks radical change in the United States, claiming that historic racism in the United States is so deep and so all-pervasive that no matter what kind of decisions you attempt to make today, you won't succeed, which is a lie.
Or, on the other hand, that racism still is a deep part of every aspect of American life and needs to be rooted out.
That really, today's systems are in fact racist.
Now again, neither of these arguments is particularly compelling.
Because if you look in the United States at a variety of groups who have been mistreated across American history, and sure, black Americans, granted and true, have been mistreated more than any other American group in American life.
And there are explicit systems of discrimination that were embedded in law and designed in law against black Americans all the way up until the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
It's also been 60 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which in sort of generational parlance is three generations.
But that can all be true.
It's also true that discrimination has taken place against Asian Americans in American life in deep and abiding ways.
And yet Asian Americans have the highest household income of any income group in the United States.
It's true that anti-Semitism was a deep part of American life, really all the way up until the 1960s, even today.
Jews are the most discriminated against group in the United States on the basis of hate crimes.
And yet Jews have extraordinary household income in the United States.
In fact, when we're talking about black Americans who are not what we would call American descendants of slavery, right, ADOS, right, there's a term that's used in social science when we're talking about, say, West Indian blacks who have come to the United States over the course of the last 40 years, or if we're talking about Jamaican blacks who have come to the United States over the course of the last 40 years or so, those groups perform very well in the United States.
In fact, the single highest educated group in the United States right now, I believe, are Nigerian Americans, right, who are black by skin color.
So the question is why you would say that America's institutions today are racist when they are pretty clearly not racist today.
So that argument doesn't really hold a lot of scrutiny.
So what's happening right now is because race does have much more of a history in the United States in terms of being an obstacle to progress and racism being an obstacle to the American ideal than does class.
The left is still clinging to it.
And so the demand for racism is currently outstripping the supply.
The truth is, on a day-to-day level in the United States, there is just not a lot of racism.
Again, on a relative level, this is not to deny that racism occurs.
It's not to deny that there are bad people out there who are racist.
It is to point out that if you are calling for world-breaking change, if you're calling for all the systems of the United States to be overthrown and redone, You need a really big crisis in order to make that happen.
Last year, the Democrats used COVID as the crisis in order to push that forward.
And now COVID is waning, and so they're running out of steam on that one.
They've attempted to use income inequality, but most people don't actually see income inequality as a crisis.
They may see it as a problem, they don't see it as a crisis.
In fact, most Americans don't really care all that much about what their neighbor is earning.
They tend to care a lot more about what they are earning.
But the race crisis is something that the media have latched onto.
And it turns out that if that is not a crisis, if most Americans are happy to live side by side with people of other races and aren't discriminating in their day-to-day life against people of other races, the demand for racism Outstrips the supply.
The demand for a lot of racism in society so that you can tear down the systems and say the systems themselves must be extirpated in order to substitute a quote-unquote less racist system.
You need a lot of racism to make that case.
And that racism just is not all pervasive.
It just is not.
And so the media are going to play up everything.
I'll bring you today's latest ridiculous example of this in just one second.
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Okay, so again, if you want to create the case for huge change in the United States, you need to make one of two cases.
One is that historic racism is the great driver of today's discrepancies.
Okay, and to do that, you would have to ignore all of the intervening factors, all of American history.
You'd have to ignore the fact that a huge reason for discrepancies in individual performance is individual decision-making.
You'd have to ignore the idea that people have agency, which they very clearly do.
And one fact that I continuously state when it comes to intergenerational poverty and differences between black and white and intergenerational poverty is the fact that single motherhood remains Perhaps, in all likelihood, the greatest indicator of intergenerational poverty in American life, and 70% of black kids are born without a father in the home.
And when people say, well, that's the effect of American racism, you then have to ask why it is that the beginning of the 20th century, black Americans were getting married at higher rates than white Americans, and in 1960, black Americans had a 20% illegitimacy rate, as opposed to today, an over 70% illegitimacy rate.
Did racism get worse between 1960 and 2021?
The answer, pretty obviously, is no.
Okay, so.
That means you need to make the case that racism is all over the place today.
And this is how you end up with Ellie Kemper trending on Twitter.
Okay, Ellie Kemper is an actress.
You saw her in The Office.
You saw her in that Amazon show, The Unbreakable.
Kimmy Schmidt, I think was the name of the show.
And now she is trending on Twitter.
Why is Ellie Kemper trending?
She is trending as a quote-unquote KKK princess.
I am not kidding you.
They're trending her as a KKK princess because some idiot blue checkmarks have declared her thus.
What did Ellie Kemper do that's so terrible?
Well, apparently, back in 1991, 1999, when she was 19 years old, she was the queen of the Veiled Prophet Ball in St.
She was 19 years old.
She was the queen of the veiled prophet ball in St. Louis.
Now you may say to yourself, I have no idea what that is.
Well, if you just read the Twitter headlines, it was a KKK ball at which a bunch of Klan clansmen got together and they honored Ellie Kemper as the queen of the KKK.
I'm not kidding.
This is how it's being treated on Twitter.
The reality is that the quote unquote veiled profit ball was created in 1878.
And it didn't have anything explicitly to do with the Klan.
In fact, the entire history of the Veiled Prophet Ball is that it was sort of like a weird pageant that was dreamed up by this guy who was attempting to generate some sort of attention for St.
Louis.
He'd gone down to New Orleans, he'd seen Mardi Gras, he wanted to create some sort of event that looked like Mardi Gras and then infuse it with some sort of strange Irish mythology based on the poetry of a guy named Thomas More.
And so this was created in 1878.
It becomes sort of a city hallmark, basically.
And then for the next 150 years, every year, there's a girl at the event who is chosen as the queen.
Now, what exactly does this have to do with Ellie Kemper being a racist?
The answer is nothing.
There's no evidence that Ellie Kemper is racist at all.
But because in the Atlantic, there's a piece in 2014 about the Vail Profit Ball and the history of the Vail Profit Ball.
And because it took place, again, starting in Missouri in 1878, when there were a lot of Confederates, of people who had served in the Confederate Army, and people who were racist, who were associated with the beginning of the ball, this means that Ellie Kemper today, in like 1999, not only in 1999, in 2021, 22 years later, is a racist.
1999 in 2021, 22 years later, is a racist.
And Ellie Kemper, what's a trend on Twitter?
So, again, what what exactly is this veiled According to this article that's being passed around in The Atlantic, in 1878, grain executive and former Confederate cavalryman Charles Slayback called a meeting of local business and civic leaders.
His intention was to form a secret society that would blend the pomp and ritual of a New Orleans Mardi Gras with the symbolism used by the Irish poet Thomas More.
From More's poetry, Slayback and the St.
Louis elite created the myth of the Veiled Prophet of Coruscant, a mystic traveler who inexplicably decided to make St.
Louis his base of operations.
A person would be chosen by a secret local board of elites to anonymously play the role of the Veiled Prophet.
The Veiled Prophet would choose a queen of love and beauty from among the elite ball attendees, with whom he would dance a royal quadrille before presenting her with an expensive keepsake, such as a tiara or pearls.
In October 1878, they had their first parade, which attracted more than 50,000 spectators.
So, why exactly did they do this?
Well, number one, St.
Louis was competing with Chicago, so they wanted some sort of big event to push back against Chicago.
And number two, they were trying to apparently respond to labor unrest in the city.
Involving cooperation between white and black workers.
Okay, so now we're going back to like labor issues in 1877 to say why Ellie Kemper today is a racist for having received an award in 1999.
By the way, worth noting that other prominent people who have been associated with the veiled prophet ceremony include Harry Truman, Okay, so this is such a stretch.
Okay, it's an unbelievable stretch that Ellie Kemper is some sort of racist.
Also, her family is very wealthy.
Okay, which apparently is very bad.
You're not allowed to have a wealthy family and be an actress.
Apparently, which is unfortunate news for probably half of Hollywood.
But again, this is a national story now because people are bored and they have to come up with incidents of racism that are going to keep generating the idea that historic racism has its fangs in American life today.
Now still, have they shown that Ellie Kemper is a racist?
Or that anyone who gave her an award in 1999 was a racist?
Or that her parents are racist?
They've shown none of these things.
Doesn't matter, she trends anyway.
A similar sort of thing happening in the LA Times today.
The LA Times has a piece called, A Fight Over Jim Crow Road Divides Rural Northern California Town.
Now you might say to yourself, well yeah, that's weird that there's a road named after Jim Crow, except for the fact that this Jim Crow is not Jim Crow, as in like, segregation Jim Crow.
This Jim Crow was a native Hawaiian Who came as a gold rush pioneer to a mountainous swath of Sierra County to strike it rich, according to the LA Times.
His name was given to a ravine, a stream, and a street off scenic Highway 49, three miles east of Downeyville, California.
Generations later, people who own property along the less-than-a-mile-long road, including a small mountain resort, say that Jim Crow has got to go.
So they're talking about renaming this road.
Not because this Jim Crow had anything to do with, like, Jim Crow, but because people could get offended because they don't know.
So instead of just explaining it, they're just going to get rid of the name of the road.
Now, listen, you can name the road whatever you want.
It doesn't really matter.
The bottom line is that if you're getting agitated over a road named not after Jim Crow, named not after segregation, let me suggest that the big problem in your life is not the name of the road that is not named after Jim Crow.
But again, this all goes to a broader media narrative that suggests that America has to be, it must be deeply racist, because if it's not deeply racist, how are we going to push forward this unprecedented change?
How are we going to do this?
Okay, and you see this coming all the way from the White House, right?
This argument is made, and then the argument is applied to how we ought to do public policy in the United States, which is why all this stuff matters.
Otherwise, who cares that Ellie Kemper is trending on Twitter, but they want to rename a road in LA.
I get it.
No one cares.
Okay, but the reason that the media keep pushing, they keep beating this particular drum is because it is the impetus for the kind of change that they have been seeking, a racist change from the top of American government in terms of policy that is overtly pro-discrimination.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so again, the narrative is that America is deeply racist, and there are two ways that this has been applied.
To repeat, one is America's history is racist.
There's a lot of racism in American history, for sure.
And therefore, the argument goes that because America's history has a lot of racism in it, this is what explains discrepancies today.
That argument does not follow.
And the second is that America's institutions today are thoroughly poisoned and people are secretly racist.
That racism is actually worse because it's sort of under the surface today.
And again, that argument really is very hard to substantiate.
But this is the argument made by the Democratic Party.
So Joe Biden today, he's headed over to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He's going to commemorate the 100 year anniversary commemoration of the probably the worst race riot in American history, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
He has declared May 31st, 2021, a day of remembrance.
Now, it is well worth remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre.
A lot of people have only become familiar with the Tulsa Race Massacre in the recent past, and good, I'm glad that people are now more aware of it.
It is a deep and important point in American history.
It demonstrates the lengths to which white racists would go in order to damage black people.
In 1921, it is now 2021, the Tulsa Race Massacre Which is shown in the opening scenes of HBO's Watchmen.
Took place basically after there was a false accusation, and apparently false by every available metric, of a black man sexually assaulting a white woman in an elevator.
And then he was arrested.
He was put in jail.
And then a bunch of white people descended on the jail.
A bunch of black World War I veterans showed up to stop the lynching of this guy.
And it turned into a full-scale frenzy race massacre.
People were literally flying planes over the black areas of Tulsa.
And they were dropping turpentine bombs and burning down buildings.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
It's incredible.
And it is well worthy of remembrance.
But the point is not remembering Tulsa for Democrats right now.
The point, of course, is to suggest that America has not changed since 1921 in any real and fundamental way, which is kind of what Joe Biden basically says in his proclamation yesterday.
So Joe Biden put out a proclamation about the Tulsa race massacre.
He called on Americans to reflect on the deep roots of racial terror in our nation and recommit to the work of rooting out systemic racism across our country.
Notice the connection, right?
Here's something that happened in 2021 and it's super bad.
And also it's happening today because the roots of systemic racism are in all of our institutions.
This is the critical race theory argument.
Biden said the federal government must reckon with and acknowledge the role that it has played in stripping wealth and opportunity from Black communities.
Like, is playing now?
Because that's really what you want to talk about, right?
How is the federal government hurting Black people today?
What policies of the federal government are designed to hurt Black people today?
That's been federally illegal since 1964.
Okay, again, I checked my calendar.
It is not 1921, and it is 1964.
This does not mean there is not racism in the United States for the thousandth time.
Of course there are racists in the United States.
But to suggest the systems of the United States in 2021 are racist in the way that the systems of the United States were racist in 1921 is to be absolutely outside reality.
So what exactly is Joe Biden pushing on the back of this?
He says the Biden-Harris administration is committed to acknowledging the role federal policy played in Greenwood and other black communities and addressing long-standing racial inequities through historic investments in the economic security of children and families, programs to provide capital for small business in economically disadvantaged areas, including minority-owned businesses, and ensuring that infrastructure projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.
There you go.
So, bottom line is, there was a massacre, a horrifying evil race massacre in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
And therefore, we need affirmative action programs in 2021.
And therefore, we need a vast redistribution of wealth in 2021.
And therefore, we need a revolution from the inside of American government to quell the effects of racism from 100 years ago.
Hey, now, again, the reason that they are going to the well on this one, the reason why we are doing all of this is not because Joe Biden has a deep and abiding interest in American history.
It's because Joe Biden wants some rationale for doing what he is doing.
So don't buy... The case the left makes is that if you then push against what Joe Biden is doing, it's because you want to ignore American racism of the past.
No, I'm very much in favor of re-examining and exposing American racism of the past.
The question is, what policy today is best effectuated to protect the individual rights and success of all Americans?
Because the answer to racism was never racism.
The answer to racism was never discrimination.
The answer to racism was equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
But this is not the case that's being made by the Democrats.
The case that's being made by the Democrats is that we have to skew all of the individual rights systems of the United States because those individual rights systems were themselves racist.
This is the case critical race theory makes.
It's the case Biden is making.
It's the case Democrats are making.
They need the crisis in order to generate the impetus for the kind of change they are seeking.
Okay, so the case made by the Democrats, of course, is that if you disagree, Then this is because you want to ignore history, which of course is not true.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so.
And the argument made by the Democrats is that world-breaking change has to be built on the back of arguments made about things that happened 100 years ago.
So Michael Beschloss, who's effectively the official historian of the Biden administration, here he is on MSNBC saying that if you don't agree with Joe Biden's attempts to use history as a cudgel to wield against American systems today, it's because you want to ignore history.
Nope.
Perfectly happy to recognize the flaws and evils of American history.
If you are willing to recognize the good and fundamentally true principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States, I don't think the left's willing to make that trade.
Many Americans think that if something terrible happens, the best way to be patriotic is to try to forget about it as soon as possible.
And this is something I'm even worried about in a totally different category, our pandemic with COVID.
In 1920, after the influenza pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans, tens of millions of others around the world, Americans, the second the pandemic seemed to be over, they wanted to forget about it as soon as possible.
Okay, again, it's historic ignorance.
Michael Beschloss is going to lecture you about it.
Because if you don't agree with Joe Biden's agenda, it's because you want to remain historically ignorant.
Or we could point out that last year we had riots that caused $2 billion in damage in the United States.
These were largely race riots.
And that nobody wants to pay attention to that, while Democrats, including the Vice President of the United States, were openly fomenting Some of this violence.
I mean, I don't know what else you would call it when the Vice President of the United States, then Senator from California, was openly attempting to raise funds to bail people out of jail for rioting.
Okay, but we're supposed to pay attention, that apparently has less impact on today's life than 1921, the Tulsa Race Massacre.
And none of this is to say we shouldn't, again, we should pay attention to the Tulsa Race Massacre, and then we should point out that racism lurks in every human heart, and that it is our job as individual human beings to fight that, to appeal to the better angels of our nature, and also we should acknowledge that a few things have changed since 1921.
Okay, but here is Joe Biden's actual agenda.
So Biden is visiting Tulsa, Oklahoma today.
According to CNN, He's gonna deliver remarks to memorialize the hundreds of black Americans who were killed by a white mob that had attacked their neighborhood and burned dozens of city blocks to the ground.
What is the actual goal here?
He's expected to announce new steps to help minority-owned businesses grow and to address racial discrimination in the housing market.
And here's how it goes.
The president will announce he will use federal purchasing power to grow federal contracting with small, disadvantaged businesses, many of them minority-owned, by 50%, right?
He's not openly going to say that we're just going to give a bunch of money to black-owned businesses, but that's what this means.
When he says that he wants small disadvantaged businesses to be given loans, basically he's talking about a subprime mortgage, except applied not to minority homeowners, but applied instead to minority businesses sponsored by the federal taxpayer.
The White House said this will translate to an additional $100 billion over five years.
He'll also announce new specifics on the $10 billion community revitalization fund included in his infrastructure proposal.
The fund will be targeted to economically underserved and underdeveloped communities like Greenwood, where the massacre took place a century ago.
The fund will support adapting vacant buildings and storefronts to provide low-cost space for services and community entrepreneurs, including health centers, arts and cultural spaces, job training programs, business incubators, and community marketplaces.
It will also support removing toxic waste to create new parks and community gardens.
Also, he's going to declare a new interagency effort to address inequity in home appraisal and to aggressively combat housing discrimination.
The department is moving toward traditional interpretations of the Fair Housing Act.
Apparently, he's going to direct his HUD secretary, Marsha Fudge, to lead an interagency initiative to address inequity in home appraisals.
This initiative will include carrying out potential enforcement under fair housing laws, regulatory action, and the development of standards and guidance in partnership with industry and state and local governments.
Also, new tax credits.
Okay, so again, the idea here from Democrats is what if we poured a bunch of money into these downtrodden areas, which of course are downtrodden because of historic racism?
And you know who tried this?
LBJ.
LBJ poured literally trillions of dollars.
Over the course of the last 50, 60 years in the United States, we've poured over $20 trillion into war on poverty programs, disproportionately targeted minority communities.
And LBJ was quite open about the way that he saw this.
He saw it as a form of racial reparations, which again, in 1964 made a lot more sense than it does in 2021.
But Joe Biden is just LBJ part two.
He's just an LBJ on steroids.
And again, the case that he's going to make is that racism has not abated since the 1960s.
That historic racism, that the gap between 1921 and 1964, which again, was only 43 years, is kind of the same as the gap between 1921 and 2021.
This is the goal here.
And it's going to be applied to every area of American policy.
So yesterday, for example, when he was not pushing, today he'll be pushing the business loan allocation on the basis of race.
He's going to be pushing housing appraisal on the basis of race, presumably.
He's going to be promoting all of this sort of stuff, right?
That is his goal.
But it's not just that.
The Biden administration is using this as an excuse to federalize all voting law.
So yesterday, on Memorial Day, they were supposed to be paying tribute to the fallen soldiers who have given the last full measure of devotion for their country.
A fact that should leave us in awe and should remind us of the freedoms for which they fought.
Instead, Joe Biden used Memorial Day not just to pay tribute, which he did, but also to then turn and use that tribute as a way to club his political opposition.
So he said that democracy is in peril at home.
This is what he was saying on Memorial Day yesterday.
Now, let's be real about this.
Democracy is not in peril at home.
I understand.
A lot of people, including me, thought that the sites of January 6th were egregious and abhorrent and disgusting.
Also, democracy was not in peril.
It was not.
The election was certified.
All the people who did what they were supposed to do did what they were supposed to do.
They went and they voted and they certified the election.
More people voted in the last election.
I know we're supposed to forget all this.
There was greater turnout in last year's election cycle than any election in American history in absolute numbers.
And an extraordinarily high percentage turnout as well.
We had something like 155 million people vote in the United States.
That does not look like democracy in peril to me.
We're not at risk of Syrian-style democracy with 95% of people voting for one party or another.
It doesn't matter.
Here is Joe Biden suggesting that democracy is in peril here at home.
Democracy itself is in peril here at home and around the world.
What we do now, what we do now, how we honor the memory of the fallen, Okay, so what does he mean by that?
He means that Texas is passing a voting law.
Texas attempted to pass a voting law.
This voting law is not, in fact, a wildly discriminatory law, despite the fact that Joe Biden is going to portray it as such.
The goal here for Joe Biden Democracy thrives when the infrastructure of democracy is strong.
It's in danger from a bunch of white racists.
And you need me to solve all of those problems.
Give me and the federal government more power over your lives.
So you need to, in order to avoid authoritarianism, what you need to do is pass all of your power to a federal government to run every aspect of your life.
If that sounds like a bad deal to you, that's because you've been following the argument.
Here is Joe Biden ripping on the voting laws in Texas.
Democracy thrives when the infrastructure of democracy is strong.
When people have the right to vote freely and fairly and conveniently.
Peace.
When a free and independent press pursues the truth, founded on facts, not propaganda.
When the rule of law applies equally and fairly to every citizen, regardless of where they come from or what they look like.
I mean, it's just Orwellian stuff from President Houseplant over here.
When the media operate freely and fairly, and the media are in his corner, and social media shut down stories that are unpalatable to the Biden administration.
When people can vote freely and fairly, right now he's attempting to federalize election law.
I mean, it truly is incredible stuff.
Again, remember that this is a ploy.
It's a ploy.
Cast America in the worst possible light so you can call for radical change to the United States.
That is what Joe Biden is doing right now.
Now, what does that mean in practical terms?
Well, it means, in Texas, an anti-democratic move to the same people who are complaining that democracy is under threat.
They just walked out of a session in Texas to stop a law from being passed.
This is the Texas Voter Law.
What exactly does that encompass?
According to the Wall Street Journal, as the Texas legislative session drew near its end on Sunday, lawmakers appeared set to pass a bill overhauling the state's elections until Democrats did one final maneuver.
They sneaked out of the building.
Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly, a Democratic leader in the Statehouse told his caucus in a 10.35 p.m.
text message.
The extraordinary move deprived the House of a quorum, killing the bill for now at the cost of undermining the legislative process.
Well, what do you expect after months of Democratic alarms about voter suppression?
President Biden on Saturday called the Texas plan un-American and part of an assault on democracy.
Now, he had already said that Georgia's law was like Jim Crow, which, of course, is insane.
The reality, according to the Wall Street Journal, is more prosaic.
To start with the controversial, the 67-page bill would roll back COVID-19 innovations, like Harris County's drive-through voting and 24-hour voting.
Those options were used disproportionately last year by Black and Hispanic residents.
But when did emergency procedures amid a 100-year pandemic suddenly become the new baseline?
It's hardly crazy to think polling place shenanigans might be more likely at 3 a.m.
The bill also says that on the last Sunday of early voting, polling places may not open until 1pm.
This is a political mistake, at minimum, in that it's being spun as an attack on black churches that have a souls-to-the-polls tradition.
One lawmaker supporting the bill argued those election workers want to go to church, too.
But some people take care of their religious obligations on Saturdays.
And in any event, Texas repealed most of its blue laws in 1985.
Lawmakers would be wise to drop this provision.
Texas still offers two weeks of early voting.
Delaware doesn't have any early voting until 2022, and then it'll get 10 days.
The Texas bill raises the number of minimum hours.
Mail ballots and applications would ask for a state ID number or the last four digits of a social security number.
That, of course, is just to verify that people are who they say they are.
This notion that this bill is somehow a racist return to Jim Crow or an attempt to shut down democracy is just a lie from Joe Biden, who, again, is the head of a party in which Texas Democratic lawmakers literally walked out of a chamber to deny a quorum so that democracy could not operate, and then called for the federal government to intervene in state business from the top, meanwhile declaring Republicans the authoritarians.
Pretty amazing stuff.
The bill would change the legal standard for proving fraud from a preponderance to a preponderance of the evidence from clear and convincing evidence.
If the number of illegal votes matched the margin, courts could throw out a race without showing that fraud changed the result.
Critics say this is a pattern to Trump, but Trump lost in 2020 under either standard.
Whether the new rules are too lax is a judgment call.
Imagine a race decided by 50 votes with 51 illegal ballots detected.
Did more slip through?
Perhaps the best thing for public confidence would be to redo the election.
The bottom line is that the attempt to castigate this bill as something horrifying is ridiculous, but this is exactly what Democrats are trying to do.
Here's a Democratic representative named Mark Visay over the weekend saying that this bill is like Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe.
When you say that you can overturn an election based on crazy tropes and racial stereotypes about Texas citizens, it's just absolutely insane that they're even thinking about that.
And so imagine any close race that Republicans wanted to go and overturn, they would be able to do so with that provision.
And that's not something that happens in our country.
That's something that you think about happening, you know, in Zimbabwe.
Currently, he's speaking from the federal congress where Nancy Pelosi literally held up for months the seating of an Iowa congressperson who was elected by six votes in a Republican race.
Okay, she held it up.
So this is all just power games.
And it's all masks for power games.
And the mask that is currently being adopted by the Democrats is that America is a deeply racist place.
Just look at American history.
You don't have to pay attention to what's happened in the intervening time.
You don't have to pay attention to America on the ground today.
Exacerbate racial divisions for purposes of political game.
That is the game right here.
Alrighty, in just a second.
We'll get to more, the Biden administration's push, and why this is going to result in more dead people in the United States.
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Now recognize that the same left that is pushing authoritarianism, like true authoritarianism, right?
They want a federalized voting procedure that violates all federalist properties.
They want to use discrimination as a tool of federal government policy and do so on the basis of historic grievances, a hundred years old, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act.
They want to remake all of America's institutions, call them all racist, and then run them from the top with no input by you and seize your taxpayer dollars to do so.
These same people in the media, and the media are covering for this, of course.
They're part and parcel of the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party.
They're focusing heavy in on Michael Flynn.
Now, Michael Flynn has not been a relevant political player since he was NSA for five seconds at the beginning of 2016.
They're trotting him out now because he went to some sort of crazy conspiracy conference.
And while he was there, he suggested that we need some sort of move like Myanmar to reinstate President Trump as president or something.
And the media are, of course, going bat bleep over this.
Now, why?
Why?
Is Michael Flynn a deeply important person in American life at this point?
I don't think so.
But the media will headline with this, and not the actual threats here to liberty, you know, in terms of voting laws that are being changed by the Democrats at the federal level, or in terms of the Democrats actively weaponizing the institutions of education, even even sort of critical race theory in the military, like who has institutional control?
Focus on the shiny object over here, Michael Flynn, is what the media are saying, as opposed to, you know, the actual threats to your day to day life, namely, the government, which is, in fact, curtailing your liberties. Here is Michael Flynn being an idiot.
I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can't happen here.
Thank you.
I mean, it should happen.
No reason.
That's right.
Okay, so this was the headline, like the Huffington Post, right?
This is the big headline on the left, was a guy who has not been important in the national conversation and was prosecuted and then he was let off or a deal was cut or charges were dropped.
He was last relevant, again, in late 2016.
It is now 2021.
Meanwhile, you have Joe Biden actively promoting a complete remaking of American government, spending six trillion, yes, $6 trillion a year on the American budget for like the next decade.
And trying to cut international deals to crush corporations.
And don't worry, the authoritarian left is Michael Flynn.
Speaking of that global tax, so Joe Biden, according to the Washington Post, he's going to meet with the G7 and now he's going to try to get all these other countries to boost their minimum corporate tax.
Why?
Because he recognizes that his own garbage corporate policy is going to lead to businesses fleeing the United States and investing elsewhere.
So now he's attempting to build essentially an economic Berlin Wall and make sure that the only places that everyone else can go are under the umbrella of the same corporate tax rate.
According to the Washington Post, finance ministers from Group of Seven Nations meeting in London on Friday are expected to back President Biden's call for a global minimum tax on corporate profits, giving him an early win in a grueling diplomatic campaign that is just beginning.
The new minimum tax, one half of a two-pronged global reform effort, is designed to halt a cycle of corporate tax cutting that has sapped government revenue around the globe.
As part of a package deal, negotiators are also wrestling with European demands to tax American technology giants such as Google and Facebook.
Which earns substantial revenue in countries where they have little physical presence.
Biden catalyzed the global tax debate in late May by proposing a worldwide minimum tax of at least 15%.
If he can secure agreement from the world's leading democracies, it could eventually produce the most significant global tax shift in decades.
Putting a floor beneath multinationals' tax bills in other countries would help the president raise the corporate tax rate at home to 28% by reducing the incentive for corporations to continue shifting hundreds of billions of dollars in profits to low-tax venues.
So he's gonna attempt to get other countries to raise their taxes so that we can raise our taxes.
Great.
All that means is that countries... By the way, there will be countries that just don't go along with this, that are not G7 countries.
And guess what?
Those countries will reap the benefits of having done so.
Now, meanwhile, the same president who is pushing for racial equity continues to push for less policing.
He continues to put at the top of his DOJ radical anti-police activists.
And then he wonders why there are wild increases in murder over the course of the last year.
And the media are finally starting to notice.
Headline in the Washington Post today, officials worry the rise in violent crime portends a bloody summer.
It's trauma on top of trauma.
Well, who could have predicted?
The mayor of Albany never expected to spend her days attending funerals and comforting the families of those killed and injured.
In a spate of alarming gun violence, she finds hard to explain.
It shocks the conscience, said Kathy Sheehan, a Democrat.
The disregard we are seeing for human life, it's trauma on top of trauma for our city.
Eight people have been fatally shot in New York's capital city this year, including six in May.
Recently, Destiny Green, 15, was killed in a quiet neighborhood a block from the governor's mansion after a group of men opened fire during what police later said had been a meetup over a Facebook Marketplace ad.
You haven't heard Destiny Green's name until now because of course she wasn't shot by the cops, so her life apparently doesn't matter according to Black Lives Matter.
Albany's violent crime spike is not an outlier.
Last weekend, at least 12 mass shootings occurred across nine states, killing 11 people, injuring at least 70, according to a database compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks such incidents.
The carnage included a shooting outside a nightclub in Minneapolis.
Another two were killed and a dozen injured outside a house party in Fairfield Township, New Jersey.
Three were killed in a shooting outside a bar in Youngstown, Ohio.
Two people were killed and more than 20 injured in Miami area after men with assault rifles and handguns began shooting indiscriminately into a crowd at a concert early on Sunday, according to the police.
As the nation marks Memorial Day, the unofficial beginning of summer, many officials are concerned this is a preview of what they could face in cities nationwide in coming months, when the onset of warm weather almost always marks a rise in violent crime.
So you want to know why you've seen a rise in violent crime over the course of the last year?
The answer is because you decided to crack down on the police and ignore Black Lives Matter violence throughout America's major cities.
It's the same thing after Ferguson.
After Ferguson, radical increase in crime in the cities that were most targeted by the feds, you're about to see the same thing happen nationwide.
And it's hilarious to watch as the media finally catch on to this.
There's an entire article in the Seattle Times today talking about how Portland has seen a seven-fold increase in its homicide rate and more Portland residents have been killed this year than in all of 2019.
Not only that, there's an entire article in the Washington Post about how anarchists and an increase in violent crime have hijacked Portland's social justice movement.
Well, what if they didn't hijack the social justice movement?
What if they were part and parcel of it?
What if ripping on the cops and ripping on America's systems and telling Americans that their systems are garbage and racist leads to more violence and more suffering?
All of which is then used by Democrats as an impetus for further social change.
Who could have predicted such a thing except everybody who's been watching?
Everybody who's been watching.
Now, here's the good news for the Democrats.
The good news is they still have this unthreatening old man to trot out as the face of all of this.
So the unthreatening old man is, in fact, the key to this whole game for the Democrats.
Because waiting in the wings is Kamala Harris, who is certainly unable to hide the radical agenda the Democrats have been pushing here.
She is so off-putting.
There is a reason why her approval ratings are wildly underwater among independents.
I mean, she is way underwater.
She's like a 41% approval rating.
I mean, those are abysmal approval ratings for a vice president of a president who's well into the 50s.
There's a reason for it.
It's because she's terrible.
Over the weekend, Kamala Harris did an interview with Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC.
And the MSNBC crew is just, I mean, when we talk about in the tank, they are in the tank.
I mean, let me begin with this.
Joe Scarborough says that Joe Biden is returning the United States to normalcy, which is just insane.
I'm sorry, there is no way that Joe Biden has done anything to return America to normalcy.
If things, if anything, things have gotten even more wild in terms of policy.
See, the thing about Donald Trump is that his policies were actually relatively normal.
He himself, in terms of personal behavior, not super normal.
His policies, pretty normal.
The Biden administration, Joe Biden is wandering about, wandering into household objects and knocking them over.
He's chasing his dog and breaking his foot.
By trying to grab its tail or something.
But he's pushing a radical policy.
Joe Scarborough is in favor of the radical policy so long as it comes along with this veneer of normalcy of Grandpa Joe wandering around shouting at the clouds.
It's not good for this country to be talking about politics 24 hours a day.
That's not who we are.
We're fighting about it.
Or even talking about politics, obsessing about politics.
People looking at MSNBC or Fox 24 hours a day or CNN 24 hours a day.
I feel like, you know, then to Ferris Bueller, what are you still doing?
Go out, like do something, get out, you know.
And Donald Trump, I had people talking about Donald Trump, including us, 24 hours a day.
I think this return to normalcy cannot be overstated.
There is no return to normalcy.
That's the point.
There's no return to normalcy.
But Joe Biden is an effective face for the false return to normalcy.
Because the minute he is gone and Kamala Harris is president, all of this bursts right back out into the open because she is just terrible at this.
Here she was with Mika.
Now, she's been using this line, and it is an obnoxious line.
I eat no for breakfast.
I don't even know what that means.
I eat no for breakfast.
But here she was, she was trotting out the feminist shtick, I am woman, hear me roar, or some such.
And she says this line again to Mika Brzezinski, and then she laughs hysterically at her own joke.
I mean, oh my God.
Democrats are so lucky that Joe Biden is president and that she is not, my goodness.
I eat no for breakfast.
She waits for the laugh.
No laugh.
So have I been told many times during my career things from, oh, you're too young.
It's not your turn.
They're not ready for you.
No one like you has done it before.
I've heard all of those things many times over the course of my career, but I didn't listen.
And I would encourage anyone who's been told that, whatever their gender, to not listen.
Because again, don't be encumbered by the inability of others to see the potential of who you are.
I eat no for breakfast.
I didn't listen.
This sounds very male and successful.
You'll recall that this is not the first time she's used this line.
She used it with Jane Polly with CBS this morning.
This is a couple of months ago.
The media, my goodness.
You can't... Stop trying to make Fetcher a thing.
Stop trying to make Kamala Harris a thing.
She's not a thing.
Okay, no one is interested in Kamala Harris' presidency.
The only reason she was picked is because Joe Biden felt that in order to shore up the black vote, he needed a black VP candidate.
He did not hide the ball on this.
He said it quite openly.
And so now you're stuck with this.
I mean, they're going to have to.
It's going to be like El Cid.
They're going to staple Joe Biden to a horse and ride his corpse around to prevent Kamala Harris from becoming president.
She's just as bad at this.
I was raised to understand many people will tell you it is impossible but don't listen.
I mentor a lot of people and I tell them that there will be people who will say it's not your turn, it's not your time, no one like you has done it and I'll tell them and don't you listen and then I will go on to tell them I eat no for breakfast.
Oh no!
And she's laughing at her own joke and Jane Polly is going Okay, you're not gonna make Kamala Harris a thing.
So they're deeply reliant on this old codger, Joe Biden, right?
We all know this.
And here is the thing.
The more the media do this stuff, the more the media refuse to cover the issues that are actually at play.
The more they just repeat the narratives that are pushed by Democrats, the more they're opening the door for, wait for it, wait for it, Donald Trump.
I know.
I haven't mentioned Trump's name for a while.
You know why?
Because he hasn't been relevant since he left the presidency.
But there is very little doubt at this point that there is a very good shot that Donald Trump runs for the presidency again.
And the case that he is going to make is not going to be a case based on the rigging of the vote in 2020.
The case he's going to be making is that the entire media are a propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party, and they've been covering for radical policy, and you have been paying the price.
And honestly, he's going to have a pretty good case.
He's gonna say that Animus for him meshed with Animus for the American people.
That the media cared less about the American people suffering.
They cared less about the truth than they did about going after Donald Trump.
And he has plenty of grounds to do that.
Between the Democratic Party and the media combining to push a radical racial agenda that does not comport with reality.
Blowing up stories that are non-stories into major national stories in order to press forward the narrative that America requires deep systemic change.
Or whether it is the media actively covering up the malfeasance of China in the spread of coronavirus.
Trump is gonna say, listen, they hated, this was his case before, and it's twice as good now.
He's gonna say, they hated me, not because they hated me, but because they hated you.
Or at the very least, they hated me so much that they didn't care about you.
And you paid the price.
The media for a year covered up the fact that there is a very good shot that coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab.
I mean, absolutely covered up.
Social media would ban you and suspend you if you so much as suggested that this lab leak theory was reality.
And now the media are admitting it.
Now that Trump is gone, they're admitting it.
So what changed?
The answer is nothing.
Trump is gone.
So now they can admit the agenda.
Here's Jonathan Karl on ABC News admitting as much.
He says, yeah, you know what?
Probably we shouldn't have ignored that because some things might've been true even if Trump said them.
But here's the point.
They did not give a damn about the truth.
They only cared about how much they hated Trump.
And now that Biden's in there, they still don't care about the truth.
All they care about is covering their ass.
So now they can come out the other side and say, well, at least we were honest when the time came, we were honest.
Yeah, bull crap.
Yes, I think a lot of people have egg on their face.
This was an idea that was first put forward by Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, Donald Trump.
And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.
And because Trump was saying so much else, it was just out of control.
And because he was making a frankly racist appeal talking about Kung Flu and the China virus, his notion put forward that this may have Although he said flatly that this came from that lab, was widely dismissed.
But actually, there's some real reason.
We don't know, by the way.
We still don't know.
I mean, notice all the hedging there.
Even now, members of the media can't just say it was a reasonable theory.
It's all about Trump.
Why is it all about Trump?
Because it was never about the truth.
It was always about oppositional politics.
Here's the New York Times' David Leonhardt saying the same thing.
We never should have killed the lab leak theory.
Yeah, you shouldn't have.
That's correct.
But because Tom Cotton said it, you decided to kill the lab leak theory because all you care about is whatever the Democratic agenda is today.
That's it.
I think people made this mistake.
I think a lot of people on the political left and a lot of people in the media made this mistake.
They said, wow, if Tom Cotton is saying something, it can't be true.
Or they assumed that.
And that's not right.
Tom Cotton does deal in misinformation about things like election fraud.
He said some things that are just wrong.
But that doesn't mean that everything he says is wrong.
And it seems like a lot of people, including a lot of people in the media, leaped to dismiss the lab leak theory because of where it was coming from.
And the reality is, we don't yet know how COVID started.
Yeah, no bleep!
And it's not just that.
Okay, here's a headline from the New York Times, July 29th, 2020, from Nicholas Kristof, the opinion columnist.
Help me find Trump's anarchists in Portland.
The president has his politically driven narrative, and then there's reality.
Help me find the anarchists.
Right, this was the line.
I remember.
There were journalists who literally went to Portland, and they sat in the park, and they're like, I don't see any anarchists here.
I don't see anything bad happening here.
And because Trump was focusing in on the fact that Black Lives Matter was involved in violence, and because he was focusing in on the fact that the Black Lives Matter leadership was, in fact, anti-Semitic, and he was focusing in on the fact they were Marxist, and he was focusing in on the fact that the anarchists in Portland were, in fact, committing acts of anarchy, the entire media decided not to cover it.
And only now are they coming out, and they're like, oh, you know what?
I guess probably we should cover it now.
Article today, Washington Post, anarchists and an increase in violent crime hijacked Portland social justice movement.
Quote, the church on the edge of the city was built to hold thousands.
And on this drizzly day, the pews of Mana House were filled with hundreds of mourners scattered throughout the broad high ceiling chamber to comply with pandemic rules.
Nearly all of them were black.
They had gathered to memorialize Jalen Yoakum, 33, whose body lay in a clear casket at the front of the stage.
The wounds on his face had been brushed over.
A blue suit and white open collar shirt hid the rest of his scars from the daylight shots that killed him in a pizza restaurant parking lot this month.
Portland is a white city, overwhelmingly so.
African-Americans account for just 6% of the population.
But it is black people, such as Yoakum, an aspiring union electrician, who are dying at near historic rates and filling churches with grief.
On May 12th, Yoakum, a father of two young boys, became the city's 30th homicide victim this year.
That is five times the number recorded during the same period in 2020, a frightening pace that could see more slayings here by the end of the year than in the past four decades.
After months of social justice activism that made Portland a vivid, sometimes violent focal point for a nation debating the same issues around police accountability and reform, the movement here has splintered into bickering groups at odds over tactics, goals, and an overall direction for how to make the city safer, with the police force still at the debate's bitter center.
The sharpening conflict between rising violent crime and efforts to reduce the size of police departments has played out across the American West throughout this pandemic year.
Now cities such as Portland have retrenched.
So have Oakland, Berkeley, LA, and several other influential cities on the issue.
The nightly confrontations with police and federal agents deployed here by President Donald Trump have been replaced by a kind of generational hopelessness, a tenuous sense of security across an under-policed city, and a return to an old-school style of gun violence reminiscent of a tit-for-tat cycle of deadly reprisals almost always among young men of color.
Oh, weird.
But you didn't report on this.
At all.
For a year.
Because to report on it would have been to acknowledge that Trump was right.
The same thing is happening with regard to BLM.
There's an entire article in the New York Times today about how the support for Black Lives Matter has dropped precipitously.
Who do they blame?
Well, first of all, views of BLM dropped across every single racial group in America.
Why?
Because it turns out that BLM protests all too often turn into riots.
But the Times instead blames the GOP.
The article in the New York Times by Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson, they say the precipitous decline in support mirrors the increased politicization of the issue by elites.
In the days and weeks following Floyd's death, Republican politicians quickly turned attention away from the actions of a murderous police officer to those individuals protesting the injustice.
Or, um, no.
Actually, BLM rioters injured police officers in 72% of cities that held BLM protests across the U.S.
and Canada, according to the major cities' chiefs' association.
The property damage cost up to $2 billion, and the riots left at least 25 people dead, including retired policeman David Dorn.
Maybe that had something to do with the drop in popularity.
As The Daily Wire points out.
But no, according to the media, only now are we allowed to mention that BLM is not all that popular.
Only now are we allowed to mention that Antifa is in fact a violent group.
Only now are we allowed to mention that there was chaos in Portland.
And only now are we allowed to mention that perhaps this lab leak started in Wuhan and was covered up by the Chinese government.
Because Trump's gone now.
If you think that Trump can't ride that hobby horse back to the White House, let me suggest that you've got this sucker all wrong.
And that when you spend years covering for the Democratic agenda by just referring to it as sort of the new normal or return to normalcy, you have made a category error.
Joe Biden was elected by the American people in order to restore a sense of normalcy.
He was not elected in order to effectuate radical change.
And yet he took that as a mandate to effectuate radical change, increasing the budget by a full 50%, blowing out the spending to levels we have not seen since World War II.
He has pushed a racially polarizing brand of politics that has been unseen in the country, seriously, for decades.
And the media have covered for all of that.
There is a burgeoning backlash, and it is going to hurt the Democrats.
It is coming for them, and it should come for them.
Because what they've done here is incredibly, incredibly ugly.
They've castigated the systems of the United States as racist without reference to what in the systems is actually racist.
They've castigated Americans as racist.
They've made up stories about Americans being racist without actually making sure that there's any underlying fact to it.
And when the image that is being pushed by the media is so disconnected from the actual reality, all on the basis of we have to make hay while the sun shines, all on the basis of we have to prop this old coot up until he can get done what he needs to get done, and waiting in the wings is Kamala Harris?
I gotta say, I am not optimistic for the future of the Democratic Party here over the course of the next couple of years, and neither should they be.
Which might be the reason why they're pushing so hard so fast right now.
But the backlash is coming.
And it is well-deserved.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
The Matt Wall Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at DailyWire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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