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July 1, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:47
Kink For The Kiddies | Ep. 1288
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Bill Cosby goes free, a columnist pushes LGBT kink for children in the pages of the Washington Post, and President Biden is caught between a moderate rock and a radical hard place.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alright, so the big news of the day is that Bill Cosby is now free!
According to Yahoo News and Reuters, reaction to Bill Cosby being freed from prison on Wednesday after Pennsylvania's highest court overturned his sexual assault conviction ranged from outrage to cheers.
Here are some of them.
of those voices. Times Up Foundation President Tina Tchen said in a statement, today's devastating decision to overturn the conviction of a man who caused so much harm, pain and emotional trauma to so many women is a travesty and an injustice. It reminds us again of the struggle that the survivors of his predatory behavior and actions have endured to make their voices heard. The semblance of justice these women had in knowing Cosby was convicted has been completely erased with his release today. Now here is the thing.
There's a lot of outrage today about the release of Bill Cosby.
Bill Cosby was not released because he's innocent.
Bill Cosby was released because the way that the prosecutors got him is called cheating.
And what they did here, and this is what the highest court in Pennsylvania found, is they violated his due process.
And the fact that there is so much outrage over the vacation of the vacating of his conviction Demonstrates that people are just not capable of separating off the notion of due process from whether you think the person is guilty or innocent or not.
Right?
Whether you think that somebody is guilty or innocent is of very little value in determining whether or not the person had due process.
And it turns out that in Bill Cosby's case, there's some pretty significant questions about due process.
So Gabriel Mellor has a good piece over at the Washington Examiner.
Explaining all of this.
Because if you don't understand the process, you don't understand what happened here.
The way the media are covering this, it makes it seem like Bill Cosby walked because he was suddenly found innocent, and that, of course, is not true.
According to the Washington Examiner's Gabriel Meller, as a lawyer, the conclusion of Bill Cosby's long-running assault case is not so much vindication for Cosby as it is a vindication of the right to due process.
More than a decade ago, a district attorney investigating one of the many sexual assault claims against Cosby determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him.
And this is a big problem in sexual assault cases.
It's very difficult to substantiate sexual assault to the point of conviction.
Because very often it turns into a he said, she said scenario in which a woman claims that she has been Abused by a man and the man claims that it was consensual and that it was just rough.
That sort of thing happens all the time for prosecutors.
And so in this particular case, the prosecutor said we don't have the evidence to get him, but they also wanted Cosby to have to testify at a civil trial.
Now the way that this works is that you are allowed in civil trial to say, I am not going to testify about something that could get me criminally convicted.
So if you were, for example, being sued on the basis of punching somebody in the face, and it's a civil trial, not a criminal trial, you're allowed to say, I don't want to testify about whether I punched that person in the face because I could be incriminating myself and then I could be convicted based on the testimony I'm about to give.
So what the prosecutors in this case did, knowing they couldn't prosecute Cosby successfully, is they said to Cosby in this particular case, You know what?
We're not going to prosecute you on this stuff.
If relying on that promise, Bill Cosby then testifies because the Fifth Amendment no longer applies.
You can't claim Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination if there is no possibility of criminal conviction.
So, for example, if you were called upon to testify in court that you had not gone to the grocery store yesterday, you can't take the Fifth.
Taking the Fifth has no relevance in that context because you could not be prosecuted for not going to the grocery store yesterday.
What you do by removing the possibility of criminal conviction is you take away somebody's ability to use the Fifth Amendment to protect themselves against self-incrimination.
That's basically what the prosecutor in this case did, and Cosby relied upon that promise.
According to Mallor, the district attorney had an alternative to criminal prosecution in the 2005 case.
He believed that Cosby's testimony could be compelled in the accuser's civil suit if there was no chance such testimony would run afoul of Cosby's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
So he made a public announcement that the case against Cosby was closed.
Crosby's accuser then filed the lawsuit, and Crosby was forced by the court to give testimony.
After all, he had been publicly assured the criminal case was resolved.
In the course of that testimony, he confessed to having in the past provided sedative drugs to women he wanted to have sex with.
Years later, that testimony would then be used by a new district attorney, who successfully brought criminal assault charges against Crosby.
And the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania said, no, you can't do that.
Once you promise somebody that they're not going to be criminally indicted on a matter, and then you compel their testimony in a civil case, you can't then go back and reverse yourself and say, you know, by the way, so glad you testified in that civil case about your guilt.
Now we're going to take that and we're going to convict you.
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania said, we hold that when a prosecutor makes an unconditional promise of non-prosecution.
And when the defendant relies upon that guarantee to the detriment of his constitutional right not to testify, the principle of fundamental fairness that undergirds due process of law in our criminal justice system demands the promise be enforced.
And so Cosby was out of prison and he was freed the same day.
As Malar points out, this is good news for defendants in Pennsylvania who can benefit from the court's broad pronouncement.
A defendant is entitled to relying reasonably on promises a prosecutor makes, including, as here, an assurance made in a public press announcement.
Of note, there didn't have to be an agreement between the prosecutor and the defendant.
The prosecutor just has to make an assurance to the defendant that the defendant then relies upon to his detriment.
And as the court pointed out, if you felt differently, if you feel that the defendant should then say to the prosecutor, I don't trust you, and so I'm not going to listen to you, I'm still going to invoke the Fifth Amendment, this is now encouraging people not to trust prosecutors, which is precisely the opposite of the result you wish to obtain.
Okay, so, the entire world has gone crazy about this because, once again, they have gone to, a bad man got out of jail, as opposed to, the courts are not interested in whether somebody is good or bad, the courts are interested in the process of due process.
And this does run roughshod through our system right now.
Right now in the United States, there seems to be, and it is the prevailing notion, that neutral rights can be dispensed with so long as we don't like you.
And so long as we don't like you, rights should not apply to you.
We see this in freedom of association.
We see this in freedom of speech.
We see this in due process.
If you're Brett Kavanaugh and we have decided we do not like you, then due process concerns are of no validity and we should not be worried about them at all.
A single accusation without any supporting evidence should be enough to get you tossed in terms of consideration from the Supreme Court.
If you are a person who utters a slur, and this really should not be enough to finish your career.
We still say, you know, freedom of speech really should not apply to you.
Freedom of speech shouldn't apply to you because you said bad things.
Well, again, freedom of speech is a broad individual right, and it does protect you.
It should protect you.
And I'm not just talking about legally here in terms of due process.
You are talking legally when you're talking about Cosby.
But I'm talking about the generalized perception that people deserve a due process, which is both social and legal.
That needs to be preserved, especially for people you don't like.
The same thing is true of freedom of speech and so-called cancel culture.
There does have to be a generalized attitude that you're allowed to say what you want to say.
And that doesn't mean that people can't react to you socially.
It does mean the notion that free speech is the danger, which has been used as sort of a club against social media lately.
Social media, the left says, is bad because it allows people we don't like to speak freely.
And so we should toss Donald Trump, for example, from Facebook and from Twitter.
That's really dangerous stuff.
Once you start believing that rights that adhere to you as an individual and pre-exist government no longer exist because we don't like what you're saying, now you have entered the realm of tyranny.
So, did Bill Cosby deserve, on a moral level, to go free?
Bill Cosby, on a moral level, deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life.
But on a legal level, and on a due process level, and on a societal level, Bill Cosby should not be in jail based on the prosecution of his trial.
By the way, there are serious questions about that trial with regard to allowing some 19 women to testify against him on the basis of prior experiences with him outside the statute of limitations.
Harvey Weinstein is going to make the same case.
So once again, due process does have to, you do have to have some neutral laws of neutral applicability or we can't live together as a society.
It just turns into pointing fingers and who we decide is worse and more guilty that day.
Okay, in just one second, we're gonna get to the worst column of the day from the Washington Post, which does indicate where we are going as a culture.
And it does suggest that middle ground is quickly disappearing in the United States with regard to how we view social policies.
Hey, we'll get to that in one second.
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All right, well, today marks the first day of non-Pride Month, which means that all of the corporate logos go back to normal.
All the corporations stop with their woke virtue signaling, and they're not expected to keep up with the woke virtue signaling.
So, you know, I guess that Pride is over and we're back to regular life is the way that this nonsense works.
But not before the worst column of Pride Month came out in the Washington Post.
It's by a person named Lauren Rowello, a writer who lives in the Philadelphia area.
So this person wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled, Yes, Kink Belongs at Pride, and I Want My Kids to See It.
Now, I tend to be pretty libertarian about things, right?
When I don't think the government should really be in the business of compulsion unless somebody is hurting somebody else.
And this starts to get dicey when you are talking about children.
There is a battle that is brewing about the future of our nation's kids.
And it is unavoidable.
It is not avoidable.
There is no libertarian solution to it.
The libertarian solution typically, which is let everybody do whatever it is that they want, as long as they're not hurting anybody else, that libertarian argument ceases to apply when you're talking about the impact on children who do not have the power of consent, do not have fully rational characteristics, are not capable of making decisions.
Then we as a society have to decide what the rules of the road are going to be.
And this has come up in the context of, for example, critical race theory recently, where the right has said, quite correctly, that children should not be indoctrinated with the nonsense of critical race theory, which suggests that racially essential characteristics determine your value and your perspective on matters of politics and whether you have a chance of success in the United States.
Kids should not be indoctrinated with that.
It's a violation of children's ability to thrive.
And it is in fact a form of emotional and intellectual child abuse to teach kids that they are victimizers or the victimized.
And so when it comes to kids, we all do have a fairly large say in what the societal standard should be.
Because again, there's a non-consenting party who's now part of this bargain.
And the same thing holds true when it comes to social policy.
So the left has decided, and this is again I think an unavoidable battle that is going to come to your town, it is going to come to your state, it's going to come to your household.
The unavoidable battle is you have a group of people on the left and they suggest that if you raise your child in a traditional manner, if you raise your child to believe that a traditional family structure is better, that a man and a woman raising a child is better than a man and a man or a woman and a woman.
If you believe that men and women exist, and that these are not malleable categories, and that a man cannot become a woman, and that if a child suffers from gender dysphoria, you should participate in, for example, watchful waiting.
Right?
You should simply wait to see how things develop.
You should not give in to the delusion that your child actually is a member of the opposite gender.
The left believes if you do that, that's a form of child abuse and CPS should arrive at your door.
Don Lemon on CNN, literally yesterday, said that he believes only the state should be involved in adoption decisions.
Presumably because he likes the state's perspective when it comes to these matters of social politics.
And he thinks that churches should be taken completely out of the business of adoption.
Not because he doesn't like quote-unquote churches per se, but because he doesn't like the perspective of churches which may adopt out to traditional father-mother families and not to male-male families, female-female families, single dads or single moms.
And so that is one perspective on the raising of children, is that the social left ought to win.
And then there's the perspective from the right, which is that children's innocence when it comes to matters of sex ought to be preserved, That you are fully, not only justified, but doing a good in teaching your child traditional sexual values.
That teaching your child, for example, that getting married to a member of the opposite sex and producing natural born children is more likely to produce happiness.
That if you teach your kid that, you're doing something good for them.
And that if you indoctrinate them into confusion, and more importantly, if you sexualize children at a very young age, you are doing grave harm, not only to their psyche, but also to their emotional state.
That perspective means that there will have to be some protections for children.
And these two wildly varying perspectives are now coming to a head, and they're indirect conflict.
And so this column from the Washington Post is indicative of that conflict, and it should awaken people who are sort of softly in the middle, the silent middle, that this battle, it is going to happen.
And the folks who claim that they just want a live and let live perspective on how people raise their kids, they're mostly lying.
It really is not true.
Because the way that identity works in the United States now is based on emotivism.
Identity is rooted in the notion that if I deny your perspective on your own identity, then I have participated in a harm against you and I must be stopped.
This is why you are seeing, for example, An attempt to... It will come to the United States, by the way.
You've already seen it in Canada.
There's an attempt now to go after parents on the basis that they are not teaching their children the state-approved messaging with regard to gender and sexual orientation.
That's going to come to the United States because the perspective of the left is you are doing grave harm to a child if you don't teach their sort of polyamorous perspective on how exactly sexual matters should work.
If you don't teach that to children.
If you don't indoctrinate kids in that.
And these two worldviews are clashing, and they're clashing when it comes to kids.
We'll get to this actual column in just one second, because it is quite indicative of where the conflict actually lies and how people on the radical left tend to view children, which is as sort of tools to be manipulated into the new sexual politics.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Alrighty, so now to this column in the Washington Post, which is astonishing.
Again, this is printed in a major, one of the two biggest American newspapers in terms of influence and impact.
Lauren Rowello writing, quote, Our family often took the train into Philadelphia.
But as we rode across the bridge to attend the city's Pride Parade five years ago, my wife's leg bounced with a nervous jitter.
She squeezed my hand, worried that she might run into a colleague or be harassed by a stranger.
My wife is trans and wasn't out at the time, so she typically only expressed her authenticity in the privacy of our home.
That morning, she wore a green skirt and light makeup, brushing her hair all to one side.
Even though we'd attended Pride marches and protests in previous years, that day was our first, celebrating openly as a family.
Okay, so what we are talking about now is a male-female couple in which the male now identifies as female.
Okay, so number one, that is highly likely to confuse children.
Okay, that in and of itself.
Okay, but beyond that, they're now taking their kid, their small children, to a pride parade in which you are celebrating sexual activity.
That's what pride is.
Okay, pride is not a mere question of family structure.
It is a celebration of particular types of sexual activity.
Because, after all, if it were just a celebration of family structure, then you could have two brothers adopting a kid, or a brother and a sister, or a single mom.
But that's not what pride parades typically are about.
As people have noted, people who have been to pride parades and who cover pride parades understand that pride parades very often, and almost entirely, the universality of pride parades include sexual components to them.
Undoubtedly.
So children should not be at these things.
Adults want to participate.
You can make a libertarian argument, obviously.
And it's a libertarian argument with which I generally agree, which is this is not a matter of compulsion.
However, if you're talking about children, now you're talking about non-consenting people being put into sexual scenarios for the pleasure of adults.
That's the only reason you're bringing kids to this thing.
So, this is what this mother writes.
When our children grew tired of marching, we plopped onto a nearby curb.
Just as we got settled, our elementary schooler pointed in the direction of oncoming floats, raising an eyebrow at a bare-chested man in dark sunglasses whose black suspenders clipped onto a leather thong.
The man paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog.
What are they doing?
my curious kid asked as our toddler cheered them on.
The pair was the first of a few dozen kinksters who danced down the street, laughing together as they twirled their hips and batons, some leading companions by leashes.
At the time, my children were too young to understand the nuance of the situation, but I told them the truth.
That these folks were members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do.
See, the conflation of who they are and what they like to do is always a very interesting identity-driven notion.
Right?
That who you are is what you like to do.
It's the same thing.
It's, you know, there's an argument to be made that immutable characteristics do not include flogging other men in public on the bare bottom.
I mean, I think there's a fair notion that, for example, if you're making the argument that gay rights are similar to race rights, I'm spotting some differences there.
Also, I love that she says, my children are too young to understand the nuance of this.
What's the nuance exactly?
Like really, explain to me the nuance of men walking down the street spanking each other on the bare bottom with flogs in front of children.
Is there a lot of nuance there that I'm missing?
I feel like not, but according to the left, this is nuanced education of children, according to the radical left.
Now, I do want to differentiate.
Again, I think there's a broad middle of the country I know a lot of gay folks who think that this is really terrible.
That you should not be exhibiting kink behavior in front of children.
But the point is this.
The radical left which has basically decided that all human behavior ought to be treated the same unless it's religious behavior.
That all human sexual behavior ought to be treated with equal levels of respect and acceptability.
And that children ought to be indoctrinated into that belief.
It's hard to argue against that principle on the basis of a sort of lack of fundamental understanding of natural law.
According to the Washington Post's columnist, the kink community has participated in Pride since its inception, risking their jobs and safety to be authentically themselves in public.
See, it's all about authentically themselves.
It's all about you.
And we have to indoctrinate children to accept your quote-unquote authentic self and to celebrate your authentic self.
So it's not about kids.
It's about you.
It's about you feeling good about yourself and indoctrinating kids in order to not focus on them leading a happy life, but in order to create a society in which you feel more welcomed and accepted.
This is the perspective of the radical left, and they can't feel welcomed and accepted unless your children, too, participate in the celebration and the acceptance.
Says this columnist in the Washington Post.
I agree that Pride should be a welcoming space for children and teens, but policing how others show up doesn't protect or uplift young children.
Instead, homogenizing self-expression at Pride will do more harm to our children than good.
When my own children caught glimpses of kink culture, they got to see that the queer community encompasses so many more non-traditional ways of being, living, and loving.
As much as I want them to spend time in queer spaces so they can be with families like their own, I also want them to know they shouldn't limit their understanding of what relationships or expressions look like to whatever's most familiar.
I want them to see they can make their own way in the world.
How else can they learn about the scope and vitality of queer life?
How delightful.
How delightful.
And this columnist continues, quote, Children who witness kink culture are reassured that alternative experiences of sexuality and expression are valid, no matter who they become as they mature, helping them recognize that their personal experiences aren't bad or wrong, and they aren't alone in their experiences. I can't think of a more relevant or important reminder for youth who often struggle with feelings of isolation and confusion as they discover more about themselves and wrestle with concerns about whether they're normal enough, including kink in pride, open space for families to have.
There are a lot of things that we don't approve of as a society that I'm sure bring a certain subset of the population joy and excitement.
disability is a reminder that any person can and should shamelessly explore what brings joy and excitement.
See, this is the problem with the radical left's argument.
There are a lot of things that we don't approve of as a society that I'm sure bring a certain subset of the population joy and excitement.
And they are forbidden by law and well they should be.
By the way, sexualizing children removes one of those barriers.
But understand the case that this person is making.
is not only that we shouldn't ban kink at pride parades, it's that it is a fundamental good for children to watch kink at pride parades.
It makes them more open-minded.
It makes them more accepting.
And of course, we're really protecting them because you never know what weird stuff they might be into.
And if those kids who are five, six, four years old, if they turn out to be into weird stuff, which of course would never be shaped by the environment in which they're raised, of course.
I mean, environment has nothing to do with this.
It's completely genetic.
Kink is just completely genetic, just like everything else, except for the fact that it's not, and there's no proof of that.
It's completely... So you don't have to worry about your kids being affected because, you know, they're just gonna be who they're gonna be sexually, of course.
All of this is designed at the indoctrination of children.
It's designed at the indoctrination of children and pushing What are behaviorally abnormal standards on children and then teaching those children that the highest form of good is celebration of this.
It is sexualizing children.
And by the way, you make it like the line from here to pedophilia is pretty straight.
I mean, it's a pretty straight line from it is good for kids to watch kink so that they can explore their own sexual feelings to why can't they consent in actually exploring their sexual feelings with people I mean, why?
I mean, children are sexual beings too.
If you can't see the line being blurred here, I'm not- I mean, they're literally talking about children watching kink parades.
I'm pretty sure that the line from their pedophilia is real thin.
Says this columnist, we don't talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment.
Is that really what we don't talk to our children enough about?
Really, that's what society is lacking, is it?
Is the pure pursuit of carnal pleasure and speaking about it to small children who are incapable either of understanding it because they haven't even hit puberty yet, or two, even if they're teenagers, making solid decisions on that basis?
They remove all moral lines and they're going to live a happier life seems to be the predominant notion.
And again, what that really is about is people want to express adults, want to express their authentic selves, and they want children to applaud them because they want everybody to applaud them.
That is not good.
OK, I never want my children to worry that exploring any aspect of consensual sex or touch is taboo.
Again.
I'm gonna read that sentence slowly for you because I don't understand how this doesn't blur over into pedophilia, seriously.
I never want my children to worry that exploring any aspect of consensual sex or touch is too taboo.
If you have kids, you're gonna teach them a lot about what kind of touch is okay and what kind of touch is not.
But says this columnist, if we're afraid to talk about kink with our children, we prioritize the status quo.
And here's the big issue, right?
Sanitizing and censoring their access to information about appropriate and normal self-expression.
You're damaging the children.
Remember, this is not just, I want to raise my child, I want to raise my child, which again, would be objectionable because your child can't consent to how you're raising them in a perverse way.
Beyond that.
I mean, honestly, in a decent society, CPS would be on its way after reading this column.
Child Protective Services would be headed directly to this person's house after reading this column.
Exposing children to men flogging each other's bare bottoms in public?
My goodness.
But that's not the extent of this.
The extent is your child should be exposed to this too.
It's that your child is less, and you are a worse parent for not exposing your kids to this.
These are the very attitudes that made Pride necessary and life-affirming for so many of us in the first place.
We have no business imposing them on the next generation.
Kink embodies the freedom Pride stands for, reminding attendees to unapologetically take up space as an act of resistance and celebration, refusing to bend to social pressure that asks us to be presentable.
That's a value I want my children to learn.
Okay, well, this is child abuse, and the fact that we as a society have decided that this stuff is worthy of the pages of the Washington Post says an awful lot about the direction of our society, because everything that people think is too radical and far-fetched five years from now becomes the law of the land.
That seems to be the common pattern when it comes to social politics and sexual politics in the nation.
And once again, we are going to reach a point where Americans just say no, and they should have said no to a lot of this stuff.
Long... I mean, once it's reached the page of the Washington Post, it is... My goodness.
But the blowback is coming, and it's coming strong.
And the more the left embraces this stuff... Do it.
Like, really.
I'd love to see it.
I think the apathetic middle is not going to remain apathetic for long when you start telling them that their children need to watch kink parades in order to be more broad-minded, so that they will not be judge... Because we don't want them to be judgmental of others, and also, because they, the children, need to explore their own kink sides.
And the reason I'm spending a lot of time on this is because it is indicative of a consistent worldview.
There's a worldview on the left that says all sexual behavior is appropriate and decent and good.
And also that children should be taught it.
Okay, and again, if you think all sexual behavior is appropriate and decent and good, then why shouldn't children be taught it after all?
In fact, the worst thing you could do is repress children in a Freudian sense.
This is the moral battle in which parents are now engaged.
And you wonder why people are moving from blue states to red states?
You wonder why people are seeking to protect their children by taking them out of public schools and not subjecting them to the scrutiny of state authorities or more and more thinking like this parent is thinking?
And there's a phrase that my friend Eric Erickson has used in the past.
He says, whatever is allowed eventually becomes compulsory.
You will be forced to care.
Whatever is allowed becomes compulsory in the end.
And that is exactly right when it comes to the social left and its politics.
You think right now this woman is just saying, I want to take my kid to a kink parade, which is bad enough.
Eventually it will be, you must take your kid to a kink parade.
Because if you don't take your kid to a kink parade, you are performing an act of child abuse and you are undermining social norms that accept kink behavior.
That is the way it's going to go.
And Kink is just an outer edge example of how this has been a mainstream philosophy on the left for a very long time, which is we need to indoctrinate your kids in K-12 about the wonders of LGBTQ lifestyles, and LGBTQ morality, and the falsity of gender ideology, and we must indoctrinate them now.
We have to do the same thing on race.
The left is not willing to allow you to live and let live.
That middle libertarian perspective, it just doesn't exist when it comes to the education of children.
The left knows it.
The right better get onto this real fast.
I think they're starting to.
Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to Joe Biden.
It seems as though he's flailing a bit.
We'll explain why in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that you don't want to be standing in line at an auto parts store.
It's not something that you need to be doing.
I mean, why would you?
You're gonna stand in line, get to the front of the line.
Finally, you get the part that you want.
And then they're like, oh yeah, we don't have it available.
We're ordering it.
It'll come and then we're gonna, you know, charge you.
Up by like 25%.
Instead, why not just go to rockauto.com and get the part you need at the best price available.
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
They're a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
The catalog is unique, remarkably easy to navigate, quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle, and choose the brands, specifications, and prices that you prefer.
Go to rockauto.com right now See all the parts available for your car or truck?
Write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us, Box?
So they know that we sent you.
Again, the interwebs, it's a wonderful thing.
And Rock Auto allows you to avoid going to the auto parts store and get the best possible price.
Instead, head on over to rockauto.com right now and write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us, Box?
So they know that we sent you.
Okay.
In today's America, major businesses parrot the ideological chants of the left.
We saw that for an entire month, when every major business in the United States decided that football, for example, is gay.
And that everybody must be crammed down last year in the idea that diversity training, you have to put the black square on your Instagram page, or you find yourself in the HR manager's office.
Corporations have been Cramming this stuff down on you.
And it's not just corporations, it's every major institution in American society.
This is not going away anytime soon.
It is only growing under the current administration.
We are experiencing what I'm calling the authoritarian moment.
Authoritarianism from the left.
They are going to cram down on you, how you should parent your kid, how you should live your life, how you should operate your church.
This is why my new book is called The Authoritarian Moment.
It is an important, important book.
It is a book about how every major institution in our society was weaponized and militarized by a small contingent on the left.
How they were able to renormalize institutions and weaponize those institutions against people who disagree.
And it's really about how you can fight back.
About how we can look at the processes, the processes that the left used in order to cram down their politics on us and reverse those processes and take back these institutions.
So, don't wait.
Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to shut the woke cult down in its tracks before it's too late.
The Authoritarian Moment is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other major bookseller.
Also, we have some excellent content coming out for you this weekend.
Too often, heroes don't receive the recognition they deserve.
For seven men who've faded into the dryness of the history books, we'd like to change that.
That's why we started a new podcast called America's Forgotten Heroes.
The first episode is available today.
This episode illuminates Union soldier Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who took his place in history at the Battle of Gettysburg by strategically charging the Confederates and narrowly dodging a bullet that grazed his cheek on the way.
His actions were pivotal to the Union winning that battle, but many Americans don't know his name.
If you've fallen into that category, it's time to remember it because men like Chamberlain are more than just men.
They are legends.
And they're the reason America is as free as it is today.
Subscribe now to America's Forgotten Heroes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you might listen because the first episode is out today, Thursday, July 1st.
One new action-packed episode drops each day through the 4th of July weekend and into next week for a total of seven episodes.
Because too many heroes never receive the recognition they deserve.
Sharing their stories with you on this Independence Day is our small tribute to their heroism.
If you like what you hear, leave a five-star review.
Help share those incredible stories.
It gives it a nice boost on the Apple rankings.
Thanks for listening.
Thank you to the heroes that made such an excellent podcast possible.
you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
♪♪ Meanwhile, Joe Biden is slipping.
There's a new poll out today from Monmouth.
It shows that Joe Biden's approval rating, which began at 54% with only 30% disapproving as of January 21st when he first took office, is now down to 48% in the job approval rating, down 6%.
And his disapproved numbers are up 13%.
So he is slightly Overwater when it comes to approval versus disapproval, but he is below 50%.
He's at 48% in the approval rankings.
His ratings have slipped pretty significantly over the course of the last couple of months.
Among Democrats, according to Monmouth, he slipped from 95% approval in April to 86% in June. 47% From independence in April to 36% now.
And actually, his numbers are slightly up with Republicans, which is kind of interesting according to Monmouth.
But that's not the only poll that shows Joe Biden in trouble.
According to Reuters, President Joe Biden has seen an erosion in support since April.
There's another national poll out, and it shows again that his support among Democrats is dropping.
A June 11th to 17th national opinion poll shows Biden is still more popular than Donald Trump.
55% of adults approving of Biden's performance.
However, the numbers that he has on specific issues suck.
There are a lot of people who are really, really concerned about rising living costs, for example, a majority of Americans.
The public is almost evenly split over how much the government should do to make things better.
48% of respondents said they approved of Biden's handling of the economy.
And again, he is finding himself sliding among Democrats.
The number of Americans who approved of Biden's stance on gun violence dropped eight points overall, 11 points among Democrats from April to June.
He is losing some members of his radical left.
And so he's kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
And the problem is that Joe Biden refuses to simply make the choice.
Now, Joe Biden could have come into office and been a highly popular president just by not doing what he is doing, namely pursuing extraordinarily radical policies that alienate half the population.
In fact, that is what he was elected on the basis of.
According to the New York Times, Nate Cohen writing, married men in veteran households were probably not the demographic groups Democrats assumed would carry the party to victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
But Joe Biden's apparent strength among traditionally moderate or even conservative constituencies, and especially men, is emerging as one of the hallmarks of his victory.
Trump won married men by just a 54 to 44 percent margin, a net 20 point decline from his 62 to 32 percent victory in 2016.
He won veteran households by a similar 55 to 43 percent margin, but he won those same households 61 to 35 in the election cycle before that.
In both cases, the size of Biden's gains among those relatively conservative groups rival Trump's publicized surge among Latino voters.
There's a new poll out, by the way, showing 38 percent of Latinos voted in favor of Trump in the last election cycle, which is the biggest number in decades for Republicans.
OK, but again, what is incredible here is that Biden is ignoring what got him into office.
Biden campaigned overtly as the not Bernie Sanders candidate in the primaries, and then he campaigned again as the guy who's going to restore normalcy.
And on that basis, he won more moderate and more conservative voters.
And now his support is eroding among Democrats and among independents.
And he's got a problem on his hands because I'm not sure how he shores that up.
And spending more money ain't gonna fix the problem.
Now, I think the way that he wanted to shore that up was with that bipartisan infrastructure deal.
But the problem there is that he's afraid he's gonna lose Bernie Sanders on his left.
Because Bernie Sanders has basically said, if you pass that infrastructure deal without passing the reconciliation bill, maybe I'll sit this one out.
Now, I don't believe Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders has never abstained from a vote in which the government spends more money.
But Biden feels like he is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
And meanwhile, His policies are having a pretty detrimental effect on the country.
According to the New York Times, Federal Reserve officials spoke with one voice throughout the pandemic downturn, promising that monetary policy would be set to full stimulus mode until the crisis was well and truly behind America.
Suddenly, they are less in sync.
Central bankers are increasingly divided over how to think about and respond to emerging risks after months of rising asset values and faster-than-expected price increases.
While their political counterparts in the White House have been more unified in maintaining that the recent jump in price gains will fade, Washington as a whole is wrestling with how to approach policy at a moment of intense uncertainty.
The Fed's top officials, including Chair Jerome Powell, acknowledge a lasting period of uncomfortably high inflation is a possibility.
They've said it's more likely recent price increases will fade as the economy reopens.
Other officials have voiced more pointed concern that the pickup in prices might persist.
They've suggested the Fed might need to stop the stimulus.
That's like James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank in St.
Louis.
So you've got conflict over inflation, which continues to rise at extraordinary rates.
You've got conflict over defunding the police to the extent that the Democrats are now trying to walk all this stuff back.
Right?
Jen Psaki has now full bore decided to dive into the lie that it's Republicans who are attempting to defund the police.
That's how unpopular the Democrats position on policing has now become among Democrats and independents.
They're now trying to blame Republicans for their own position.
Here's Jen Psaki doing this ridiculous routine yesterday.
The president ran and won the most votes of any candidate in history on a platform of boosting funding for law enforcement after Republicans spent decades trying to cut the COPS program.
There's record of that.
That doesn't require anyone having new comments.
And then also stood in the way of crucial funding needed to prevent the laying off of police officers as crimes increased.
That's a simple statement of fact.
I understand what you're saying there.
There are lots of examples of Democrats explicitly saying they want to defund the police.
I think most people would argue that actions are more important than words, wouldn't you say?
When you say, no, I wouldn't say that if you refuse to vote for a $2 trillion boondoggle, and that includes like one good thing, that you were against the good thing.
That's a very silly way of doing politics.
Everybody understands that.
The Biden administration is stuck.
If they disown their own radical policies, then the radical base gets angry at them.
If they don't disown their own radical policies, then the rest of the country gets angry at them.
And the Biden administration is delusional if they think that they ought to be relying on the radical base more than they rely on the moderates.
Again, they're stuck in Barack Obama mode, thinking that the reason that they won is because they cobbled together this minority coalition, and the minority coalition pushed them to victory.
That is not true.
The people who got Biden elected are suburban moms.
They are married men.
They're military households, right?
Those are, demographically speaking, the constituencies that shifted their vote pretty dramatically between 2016 and 2020.
The reality is that more black people, on a percentage basis, voted for Donald Trump than did in 2016.
More Hispanic people.
voted on a percentage basis for Donald Trump than they did in 2016.
So Biden is aiming at completely the wrong household, right?
He has a delusional view of what got him where he is, and now he is following that down the primrose path.
And meanwhile, I don't think even he knows what he's doing at this point.
I would say that Biden is of divided mind, but I don't even think that he has a mind left.
I mean, he's just creepy as, like, I'm sorry, he is not with us.
And everybody knows this, which poses another problem for the Democrats.
The only thing holding this rickety ship together is the fact that nobody finds Joe Biden threatening.
Because if Kamala Harris were president right now, her approval ratings would be in the low 40s.
Simple statement of fact.
Joe Biden is at 48, 50, 52 percent.
And the reason that he is at that percentage is because nobody finds him threatening because they don't think he's alive.
He seems to be a kind-hearted, doddering old man who can't string together three sentences in a row, even when reading from teleprompter.
I mean, here is Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is in a consistent battle with the teleprompter.
He's consistently fighting the teleprompter.
And the teleprompter is winning.
Here is Joe Biden versus the teleprompter.
Here we go.
This job, this jobs, the jobs that are going to be created here.
And Joe Biden is down.
He's down.
Teleprompter standing over him, dancing a victory dance.
Put the count on him.
OK, well, when he's not fighting the teleprompter, Joe Biden is whispering creepily into the microphone.
I don't know who told him this is a good political tactic.
But again, it's Cesar Romero whispering into the camera.
I think in order for us to really feel the full effect of this, the camera needs to be tilted about 35 degrees.
If it's tilted about 35 degrees, so it's just off kilter, then this starts to really make more sense.
Here's Joe Biden whispering like a crazy person into the microphone again.
People say, well, that's a giveaway.
Hey guys, I think it's time to give ordinary people a tax break.
The wealthy are doing fine.
I mean it.
How'd you like that coming at you at 4 o'clock in the morning?
My goodness.
And meanwhile, Joe Manchin is out here going like, all you have to do is kind of do what I'm telling you to do and you'll be fine.
He's saying, I don't understand why y'all want us to write checks that our kids won't be able to cash because it's very silly.
But Joe Biden isn't working with Manchin and not working across the aisle.
Instead, he has decided to under, I mean, the one time he worked across the aisle, he decided to immediately, within two hours, undercut his own message to the point where the White House had to walk it back.
Here is Joe Manchin repeating a message that if Joe Biden actually said might make Joe Biden slightly more popular.
You put me anywhere you want to, in the political spectrum.
But I think I'm pretty much centrist in the middle, where most people are, and pragmatic enough to figure, okay, I understand you've identified the need on this side, but we've already spent how many trillions of dollars attending to a lot of those needs.
How much more can we afford?
Do you want more debt?
I looked at this morning, we're at $28.5 trillion of debt.
How much more can we add on, Stephanie?
How much more can we pass on to your children, the next generation?
We've always said, we're writing checks our kids can't cash.
Okay, but Elizabeth Warren says we're never going to have to cash those checks because who cares?
And that is a battle inside the Democratic Party.
It is not going to end anytime soon.
It's actually getting worse, like a lot worse, which is why, for example, Representative James Clyburn is now opposing an ally of Bernie Sanders in a special election in Cleveland.
There's a major battle that has broken out inside the Democratic Party.
Here, I mean, it's astonishing.
On Tuesday, Clyburn took aim at one of Sanders' most outspoken acolytes, Nina Turner, a hero to the left who's surging in her campaign in Ohio to claim the congressional seat vacated by Marsha Fudge.
Clyburn is now endorsing Chantel Brown, Turner's leading opponent.
He said the reason is because this is the sloganeering of the party's left flank, which is dangerous.
All that is masking this is the presence of Joe Biden.
It's all that is masking this at this point.
Because again, Joe Biden's not there, and he doesn't seem super threatening, so everybody's like, oh, OK, fine.
So is he radical?
Is he moderate?
Who cares?
He's barely alive.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is waiting in the wings, and Democrats are panicking.
They're just panicking.
Because every time Kamala Harris appears on camera, you know it's going to get bad.
And so you're starting to see the opal research dumps.
It's unbelievable, actually.
Kamala Harris, you would think, is in a sort of impregnable position.
That if Joe Biden were to plot, or if he were to not run in a couple of years, You would think that Kamala Harris would be the obvious heir apparent.
I mean, he's been not only campaigning with her, he brings her out randomly at events as though she's the co-president as opposed to occupying the office that is a warm bucket of spit.
Right?
And so it's very weird.
He's giving her these big, these sort of big portfolios, like the border, like these high profile portfolios, climate change.
And then she's terrible at it.
And so what you're starting to see is rebellion against Kamala Harris inside the Democratic Party.
And pure oppo being dropped on her.
Today in Politico, there is a piece called Not a Healthy Environment.
Kamala Harris office rife with dissent.
Now, we know that Kamala Harris, her office is a bleep show.
There's an entire article in the New York Times when she first dropped out of the presidential race before Iowa, talking about how it was completely dysfunctional, she couldn't run in office, she was a terrible candidate.
And then of course, as soon as Biden picked her, she became the greatest candidate in the history of the world.
Why did we ever do that to Kamala?
Why?
And well now there's a piece in Politico, and the oppo's starting to come out.
Turns out nobody likes Kamala.
When Vice President Kamala Harris finally made the decision to visit the Mexico border last week, people inside her own office were blindsided by the news.
For days, aides and outside allies had been calling and texting with each other about the political fallout a potential trip would entail.
But when it became known that she was going to El Paso, it left many scrambling, including officials who were responsible for making travel arrangements and others outside the VP's office charged with crafting the messaging across the administration.
The handling of the border visit, writes Politico, was the latest chaotic moment for a staff that's quickly become mired in them.
Harris's team is experiencing low morale, porous lines of communication, diminished trust among aides and senior officials.
Much of the frustration internally is directed at Tina Flournoy, Harris' chief of staff, a veteran of Democratic politics who began working for her earlier this year.
In interviews, 22 current and former VP aides, administration officials, and associates of Harris and Biden described a tense and at times dour atmosphere.
Aides and allies said Flournoy, in an apparent effort to protect terrorists, has instead created an insular environment where ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out.
Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that causes.
While much of the ire is aimed at Harris's chief, two administration officials said the VP herself also bears responsibility for the way her office is run.
It all starts at the tops of one of the administration officials.
People are thrown under the bus.
From the very top.
There are short fuses.
It's an abusive environment.
It's not a healthy environment.
People often feel mistreated.
It's not a place where people feel supported.
It's a place where people feel treated like bleep.
Man, the oppo coming out on Kamala Harris this early, they are in serious trouble.
The Democrats are in trouble, they know they're in trouble, and they can't, they cannot direct that car away from the cliff.
They can't.
They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and Kamala is waiting in the wings, and they're trying preemptively to dump her, and it ain't gonna work.
If you're a Republican, I mean, just focus on talking about the Democrats.
That's it.
They're the easiest pickings.
In years.
It's truly an amazing sight to watch them implode this way.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show.
Coming up soon is The Matt Wall Show.
Airs at 1.30pm 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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The show is edited by Adam Sievitz.
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