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Aug. 5, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:26
Biden Burns The Constitution, But YOLO! | Ep. 1312
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Joe Biden admits that his eviction moratorium is unconstitutional, but hey, what the hell?
Plus, Biden attacks Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who absolutely clocks him.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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Okay, we're going to get to everything COVID-related in just one moment.
First, here's your Andrew Cuomo update.
There's no update.
Nothing has happened.
I just want you to recall for a second that Andrew Cuomo, it was known last year, had killed basically all the old people in New York and then covered it up.
And the reason I laugh is because you sort of have to laugh when somebody is this blatant about it and gets away with it and the entire media just continues to massage him.
And then it turns out there's this big scandal because he's been sexually harassing the help.
Whether it's on his campaign or in his campaign offices or whether it's in his gubernatorial office, he's been doing this for years on end.
And at the time that all of this was reported, there was talk about, well, maybe we should do something about it.
Well, now there's been this report from Letitia James, like 168 pages, and this 168 page report is just replete with Andrew Cuomo not being able to keep his hands off the hired help.
And it really is an incredible, incredible thing.
The report is very long.
It talks about how he's groping people and how he's touching people in an uncomfortable way and how he is then threatening their jobs if they don't sort of reciprocate his feelings and all the rest of this.
And remember, Andrew Cuomo's response to these charges after Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York, came out with all this, his response to all of this was, well, you know, I do touch a lot of people.
I'm not kidding.
Here, just so you recall, here was Andrew Cuomo's little slideshow that he did the other day trying to excuse him grabbing women by the boobs and such.
Indeed, there are hundreds, if not thousands of photos of me using the exact same gesture.
I do it with everyone.
Black and white, young and old.
Straight and LGBTQ.
Powerful people.
Friends, strangers, people who I meet on the street.
I mean, I do love that defense, which is like, look, here's a bunch of pictures of me hanging out with Robert De Niro and giving him the old double cheek grab.
And here is me with Al Gore giving him a little peck on the cheek.
That is exactly the same as that time that I stuffed my hands up a woman's blouse and tried to grab her boobs.
Exactly.
What the hell is wrong with you?
What?
Seriously?
This is like Lenny from Of Mice and Men using as his defense to strangling a woman to death that he also likes to pet bunnies.
No, these are not related things.
No, that is not a defense, dude.
I mean, the fact that you're like grabbing Charlie Rangel by the back of the neck, Al Pacino style in The Godfather 2, like that does not have anything to say about whether you are grabbing state troopers by the belly and like massaging them and such.
It's just an incredible thing.
But this guy's going to get away with it.
Understand he's going to get away with it because the Democrats are not going to impeach him.
And this does give the lie to the whole Democrats saying for years on end, well, these Republicans, they have no standards.
Let's be real about this.
No one has had standards since Bill Clinton.
The Democrats had the opportunity to get rid of Bill Clinton over this exact sort of stuff in the late 90s.
They decided that his agenda Which, by the way, would have been carried on by Al Gore.
But his agenda was more important than standing up for the principle.
And so they decided to let Bill Clinton survive.
And now every politician knows that if you just wait it out long enough, it'll be fine.
And you can see it happening in real time.
So yesterday, for example, Joe Biden called for Andrew Cuomo to resign.
Of course, if Andrew Cuomo says no, he has no actual repercussions in store.
Here is Joe Biden calling for Cuomo to resign the other day.
Back in March, you said that if the investigation confirmed the allegations against Governor Cuomo, then he should resign.
So will you now call on him to resign, given the investigator said the 11 women were credible?
I stand by that statement.
Are you now calling on him to resign?
Yes.
And if he doesn't resign, do you believe he should be impeached and removed from office?
Let's take one thing at a time, Eric.
I think he should resign.
I love that response right there.
We'll get to it when we get to it, guys.
I mean, the actual serious question as to, like, what will you do if he just doesn't leave?
He's like, well, you know, well, here's the thing.
We do know.
We do know.
Because Ralph Northam, you'll recall, was also asked to resign by nearly all the Democrats when it turned out that 35 years ago, he dressed in a medical school yearbook in either blackface or a KKK outfit.
And you'll remember that everybody said he needs to go.
And then there was talk about Justin Fairfax, his lieutenant governor, who'd been accused of sexual misconduct.
And people were like, well, maybe he has to go.
Both of them are still in office.
You can just live it out.
Everybody knows you can just live it out, right?
Jen Psaki, she makes this clear.
I do also love Jen Psaki's response here.
So she was asked specifically, you know, you said that there should be an independent commission to investigate the allegations about Andrew Cuomo.
You went to like an independent commission for, you know, like Tara Reade and Joe Biden, you know, the allegations against Joe Biden that he sexually harassed somebody back in the 1990s.
And she's like, nah, not so much.
Yeah, we know.
We know.
OK, we all know.
Should there be an independent investigation of allegations into the president as there was into Governor Cuomo?
Well, first I would say the president has been clear and outspoken about the importance of women being respected and having their voices heard and being allowed to tell their stories and people treating them with respect.
That has long been his policy, continues to be his policy.
That was heavily litigated during the campaign.
I understand you're eager to come back to it, but I don't have anything further other than to repeat that he has called for uh... that i was looking at what i'm here we're done here guys now meanwhile bill de blasio is really out there to do what one of my favorite things in politics is the absolute utter hatred between bill de blasio and andrew cuomo these two ridiculous narcissist despise one another de blasio hates cuomo cuomo hates de blasio Both have excellent reason to hate each other because they're both extremely hateable.
Bill de Blasio does not pull any punches.
He's like, not only should Cuomo resign, Cuomo should be criminally charged.
And, you know, when Andrew Cuomo says that it's a generational thing, how he talks to people and how he touches people, Bill de Blasio is like, you know, when you stick your hands up somebody's shirt, that's not really generational.
Points to Bill de Blasio, that weird old communist.
The whole thing has been so painful.
When you read this report, 11 women systematically wronged, 11 women affronted by a powerful guy who could crush their career and their reputation, and he's the kind of guy that everyone assumes would if you crossed him.
Putting your hand up a woman's shirt and touching their breast is not generational.
I know plenty of guys who are older who would never in a million years do that.
Uh, Bill de Blasio makes a good point, I know.
That is a sentence that has never left my lips before, nor will it ever again, in all likelihood, but his point is well taken.
Final point with regard to Andrew Cuomo before we move on.
It is incredible that Chris Cuomo is going to retain his job at CNN.
It is just unbelievable.
He spent all of last year talking up his brother's response to COVID, which again, New York has the second worst death per million ratio in the nation.
It goes New Jersey and then New York.
And Chris spent every waking moment talking up how wonderful his brother was.
Listen, I get he's your brother.
I do.
Really, I do.
But if you're going to pretend to be an objective journalist, you don't get to do that.
So he talked up his brother's COVID response.
He then was advising his brother.
He was writing his brother's press releases and all the sexual harassment stuff.
So last night he had the ability to cover Andrew on air.
And of course, what did he do?
He just ignored the story completely.
It was only the biggest story in the country yesterday.
He just ignored it.
I'm Chris Cuomo.
Welcome to PRIMETIME.
We're focused on COVID here, especially until we get the Delta variant under control.
And for now, as you know, it's getting worse.
Okay, so what does all this really mean in the end?
It just means that there are no norms.
When people say that norms are violated, that Republicans break norms, Democrats break norms, here is the thing.
There are no more norms.
Okay, the norms have largely been discarded.
And this is why people don't trust the institutions.
This is why the institutions are falling apart.
And when you hear people on the left claim that authoritarianism is around the corner because of President Trump who violated all the norms, let's be real about this once again.
Trump was the coroner.
He was not the murderer.
The norms were already dead.
Trump just declared them dead.
Trump just came along and he said, yes, you're right.
This body is cold.
This corpse has been here for a while.
The norms in American politics have basically been discarded.
They've been gone for quite a while.
And now it's just a matter of declaring them gone.
And the Democrats are not being too shy about any of that.
Today's case in point is Joe Biden.
So Joe Biden is engaging right now in some pretty authoritarian stuff.
Now, if Donald Trump had come along and said, listen, I'm about to do something I openly acknowledge is unconstitutional, now watch me, people would have lost their minds, right?
They would have said, that's pretty insane, is it not?
I mean, and by the way, Trump did say wild stuff while he was president.
That was authoritarian talk.
I think that when he was rejecting the results of elections, that is not the kind of talk you want out of the President of the United States.
But Joe Biden was supposed to be the restorer of norms.
He was supposed to be the return of Captain Normalcy, right?
He was the moderate guy in the room.
He was not going to violate constitutional norms.
Well, just like his predecessor in the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, He has now said that he is just going to acknowledge openly that things are unconstitutional and then do them anyway.
So you'll recall that Barack Obama said over and over and over again that he could not, from the executive office, simply declare amnesty for the so-called dreamers.
He said it dozens of times.
And then he was like, well, maybe I'll just do it anyway.
Well, now Joe Biden is doing the exact same thing with regard to a new CDC moratorium on evictions.
All right, so Biden had been talking about the possibility of a brand new CDC eviction moratorium.
Now, recall, the CDC has no statutory power to simply determine that landlords all over the United States have to forfeit their rents.
OK, this does not exist anywhere in American law.
It is an absurdity on its face.
But the CDC has been pushing it for a year, like over a year at this point.
The Supreme Court took this up and they said, it's pretty obvious the CDC doesn't have this authority and we would strike it down, but it appears that this thing is going to be moods because in a couple of weeks it sort of just goes by the wayside, right?
It expires on July 31st.
And so at that point, Congress can take it up anew.
But if the CDC does it anew, then we are going to say that it's unconstitutional, right?
There's a 5-4 decision in which Justice Kavanaugh wrote the decision.
OK, well, now Joe Biden is saying openly, without a doubt, he's just saying it straight up.
That the CDC does not have the power to declare a new moratorium, but he is going to push them to do it anyway.
He said this yesterday.
It's an insane statement.
It is a dictatorial statement.
It is full authoritarian.
When the President of the United States openly says, I have no authority to do X, now I'm going to try and do X. That is the definition of somebody who does not give a damn about the Constitution of the United States.
Joe Biden, by the way, does this kind of stuff routinely, right?
He's constantly saying, I don't think I have the power to do that from the executive office.
And then he's pushed by his left flank and suddenly he seems to reconsider.
So on Tuesday, Biden announced that the CDC would push for a new moratorium on evictions before admitting that the order was quote unquote, not likely to pass constitutional muster.
Here is Biden fully again admitting he doesn't have the authority to do this while pushing the CDC to do it.
Whether that option will pass constitutional measure with this administration.
I can't tell you.
I don't know.
There are a few scholars who say it will and others who say it's not likely to.
But at a minimum, By the time it gets litigated, we'll probably give some additional time while we're getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don't have the money.
Okay, so what he's openly saying right now is, I'm going to do an unconstitutional thing.
I know it's going to get struck down by the courts, but because it takes the courts time to litigate that measure, that is going to give me additional time to do all these other things I need to do.
That's about as openly cynical a move as I've ever seen in American politics.
That's not democracy dying secretly.
That's not democracy dying in darkness.
That's democracy dying just right in front of you.
To the cheering of the media, by the way.
Wait until you hear some of the headlines.
I mean, Biden himself says, quote, the bulk of the constitutional scholarship says it's not likely to pass constitutional muster.
But there are several key scholars who think that it may.
Who, by the way, did he actually talk to?
Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School, who became an absolute joke over the course of the Trump administration when he just started saying crazy things over and over and over again.
By the way, all of this followed hard on Cori Bush.
So Cori Bush is the congresswoman from Missouri, a Black Lives Matter activist, she's somehow adjunct member of the squad, sleeping on the steps of the Capitol building to demonstrate what it's like to be homeless.
Wow, such heroics, such imagery.
And this apparently prompted Biden to make his move here.
The CDC statement here, by the way, is insane.
You know, there are actual fines that are associated with this.
The actual fines include, for example, up to a $100,000 fine for evicting somebody.
I don't understand where the CDC gets this authority.
I really don't.
How?
Under what auspices?
Punishing people with $100,000 fines?
How?
But apparently, those are the criminal penalties.
I'm reading from the CDC order right now.
Under 18 U.S.
Code 3559, a person violating this order may be subject to a fine of no more than $100,000 or one year in jail or both if the violation does not result in a death, or a fine of no more than $250,000 or one year in jail or both if the violation results in a death, or as otherwise provided by law.
An organization violating this order may be subject to a fine of no more than $200,000 per event if the violation does not result in a death, or a half million dollars per event if the violation results in a death.
I don't know what it means for it to result in a death.
So, what happens?
You evict somebody, and then they can't find a place that they want to rent, and then they just die?
Like, what does that actually mean?
Is the Little Match Girl out on the street?
What are we talking about here?
But bottom line here is it really doesn't matter.
The bigger story here is that the CDC is just doing openly unconstitutional things at Biden's behest.
And apparently nobody seems to give a hot damn for even a second.
And then the norms crowd is going to lecture us?
Then we're gonna get lectures from the norms crowd about Republicans?
And how Republicans violate norms?
And how Republicans are the true authoritarians?
Really?
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so Jen Psaki basically admits this.
She's like, yeah, you know, it might be unconstitutional, but here's the thing, no one cares.
What's the White House's message then to Americans who heard what happened yesterday, heard what was said at this podium on Monday, can't square the two and are now disappointed that the President is signaling that he doesn't respect the rule of law?
I'm not sure there are Americans evaluating it to that degree.
Maybe there are some you've talked to, I don't know.
What the president has, his message to the American people, especially those who are concerned about losing their homes, being kicked out of their homes, is that he's going to do everything in his power to make sure they can stay in their homes.
That's the whole thing.
That's the whole thing.
So long as he signals that he is willing to do something, even if the something he is doing is authoritarian and violates all the rules, that's all that matters in the end.
Because as I've been discussing the past several weeks, Americans at this point have a bias toward action.
Even if that means violating all of the rules, which is a really scary precondition to actual authoritarian dictatorship.
This is what authoritarians do.
Authoritarians say, I can't get it done using the complex system I've been given with the checks and the balances and the legislature and all this, so I'm just gonna do what you, the people, want.
The people.
Yes, that's my Bane voice from Dark Knight Rises, because that's what this is, right?
They're handing power back to you, the people.
That's all that matters.
So long as you are fine with him violating the Constitution, the Constitutional violation, poof.
It just doesn't matter.
Anymore.
At all.
And the media celebrate this kind of stuff.
Democracy dies in darkness.
The Washington Post.
Here was their headline from The Fix.
This is Aaron Blake.
Biden's novel eviction is defense.
Maybe it's illegal, but it's worth it.
Yeah, we noticed.
We noticed.
Maybe it's illegal, but it's worth it is a hell of a statement for a president of the United States to be making and for the Washington Post to be quasi-celebrating.
Early last decade, then-President Barack Obama and Congress were in a standoff.
Says Aaron Blake, Obama badly wanted Congress to pass long-failed comprehensive immigration reform, but allies called for him to do something himself.
His repeated response, I can't.
I'm not a king.
I'm not an emperor.
The old constitutional law professor wanted to force Congress to do things the old-fashioned, more robust ways.
But when Congress continued to stall, he did something himself anyway.
Twice.
The lessons of this apparently weren't learned by his VP, Joe Biden, and Biden's new administration.
Or, if they were, the lesson was apparently that it was a gambit worth repeating.
It's a heck of a way to do the country's business, and Biden arguably took it even further than Obama did.
The previous moratorium on evictions had lapsed a few days previously.
The administration wanted Congress to do something about it.
They had good reason.
It appeared Congress had to do something because the Supreme Court had already ruled on all of this.
But now, because the CDC points to the Delta variant, now they get to say that they are going to extend the moratorium.
By the way, again, it is dictatorial stuff that the CDC was able to extend moratoria in the first place.
That's nuts.
Why exactly does the CDC get to say in the middle of us blowing money out the door, like no time in human history.
Seriously, no time in human history.
You understand.
Last year, Americans ended the year on average with more savings than they had at the beginning of the year, in the middle of a pandemic.
The one group of people who got absolutely jacked were the people who own the buildings.
Now the best part of all of this, of course, is going to be the unintended consequence.
Because it turns out, when you tell developers and landowners they can't collect rent, you know what they stop doing?
Building homes.
So, when there is a housing shortage, and when the prices continue to rise, when there's an apartment shortage, and prices continue to rise, you know what the left will say?
They'll blame capitalism.
They will have created the shortage and then they will blame capitalism.
The beautiful thing about being a member of the left is being a leftist means never having to say you're sorry.
You can completely wreck all of the incentives and still blame the other guy.
It's really impressive.
By the way, CNN was doing the same thing as The Washington Post.
Stephen Collison at CNN Well, I mean, that is a very different headline, I feel, than it would have been if, for example, Donald Trump had openly said it was unconstitutional and then done it.
I have a feeling it wouldn't have been about how willing he was to help the American people.
I have a feeling you would have been a lot more upset with the violation of norms, the dictatorial violation of norms.
But again, it only counts as a dictatorial violation of norms when the press opposes your party.
If the press is in favor of your party, then it's just you being so brave.
So unbelievably brave in the face of the evil constitution of the United States.
Alrighty, in just one second, we're going to talk about the latest emergency talk surrounding COVID and the pitch battle that has broken out between Joe Biden and Governor Ron DeSantis of my home state of Florida first.
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Alrighty.
So meanwhile, The continued push for panic, it just, it never ends.
It never ends from our public health aficionados.
You have Dr. Michael Osterholm, who of course is a COVID advisor to the Biden administration, saying, you know, what we really have to be prepared for is the next variant.
So you're seeing this trending pretty much every day on Twitter.
You've already heard Delta Plus.
Then there's Lambda.
I'm looking forward to Omega.
I'm looking forward to, you know, all of them.
Zeta.
Let's just go through all of them.
Now, here's the thing.
There can be a very deadly variant that arises.
Also, there's no way you're stopping it.
Just pointing this out, the last Delta variant itself started in India.
Before that, there was a lot of worry about the Brazilian variant.
You now have a disease in COVID-19 that's infected hundreds of millions of people and is particularly active right now in tens of millions of people at a minimum.
Nothing you do is going to stop the development of those variants.
All you can hope is that, as in the past, variants get weaker and also that the vaccines continue to be durable, which, so far, they have been.
The talk about how we have to worry about the next variants and this requires masking endlessly is just an argument, essentially, for forever masking and forever social distancing.
That's what Dr. Michael Osterholm is doing right here.
Here he goes.
Well, basically the variants that we're concerned about in terms of their increased risk to humans have one of three characteristics, or all three.
One is they're more infectious, which we know Delta is substantially more infectious, even than Alpha, which that by itself was more infectious.
Number two, that they can cause more severe illness, just related to the question you just asked about does it cause more severe illness for the number of people who are infected?
And number three, does it have a way of evading immune protection?
Does it somehow get around the vaccines or get around the protection you get from natural infection?
And any one of those three characteristics could make another variant worse, and if you add all of them together, it could be worse.
We don't have any evidence right now we have one that's worse, but I agree with Dr. Fauci that it surely is possible that one that could be more infectious than Delta, which would be hard to imagine that being the case, could actually happen, and we have to be prepared for that.
Okay, and how exactly would you recommend that we're prepared for that?
Really?
I mean, everyone who's getting vaccinated is getting vaccinated.
Everybody who's not is not.
So what exactly is your remedy?
And the answer is there is no remedy.
It's just lockdowns and masking all the way down.
And you get praised by the media, of course, if you do this sort of stuff.
Even if it's completely ineffective.
Better for you to ruin the school years of millions of children than to take rational public health measures directed based on the evidence. This is why you have the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who has presided, by the way, over a not particularly successful COVID response, talking about a new school mask mandate.
JB Pritzker, Illinois Governor-General, speaking Because of the lower rates of vaccination among teens aged 20 to seven, sorry, 12 to 17, because the vaccine has not yet been approved for children under 12, because the vaccine, because there are many people who are reluctant across some of the districts to adopt the CDC's guidance, effective immediately, all P-12 schools and daycares
in Illinois must follow the CDC guidance of universal masking inside, regardless of vaccine status.
Again, the evidence to support these sorts of proposals are skimpy at best and nonexistent at worst.
J.B.
Pritzker will be championed now by the media as a wonderful man who is standing up to the evils of COVID.
I'm just going to point out to you that Illinois has a death rate of right now 204 per 100,000 people.
Those are the death rates from coronavirus as of August 4th, 2021.
Illinois is at 204.
The much maligned Florida is currently at 184, meaning that Florida has outperformed Illinois by leaps and bounds and is a much older state to boot.
But that's not stopping Joe Biden from going after Ron DeSantis.
So here's the thing.
Just like early on in the pandemic, everybody was very angry on the left at Sweden because Sweden wasn't doing it the way you were supposed to with the giant lockdowns and the mask mandates and everybody go in your house and stay in your house until the government tells you what to do.
Instead, Sweden was like, OK, listen, if you're vulnerable and if you're old, then we should take precautions to help you.
And if not, you should probably get back to work.
Because Sweden took that perspective.
This made them the envy of the world.
There are a lot of people out there hating on Sweden.
Even though, by the way, the Swedes, that's a democracy.
They can do exactly what they want.
Well, Florida is now the latest example, and really has been since the beginning of the pandemic.
If all you saw was the media coverage of Florida, you would think Florida easily Has the worst deaths per million ratio in the United States, right?
I mean, clearly, if you just stack up all the headlines about Ron DeSantis and the evils of Florida, next to the headlines about, say, New York or New Jersey, where the governors have been treated as though they are amazing at this.
Up to and including today, by the way, the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, who's an idiot, was out there yelling at some anti-vaxxers, and people on the left were like, whoa, what an amazing governor!
Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis is a terrible governor.
Just gonna point out, New Jersey has the number one worst death per million ratio in the United States.
Ron DeSantis' death per million ratio of COVID in Florida is approximately about 55%, 60% of what New Jersey's is.
New Jersey's at 300 and Ron DeSantis' Florida's at 184.
So what the media like to do is they like to pick on DeSantis when there's a surge in Florida.
So it is all based on timing.
They never give you the overall death stats from Florida because that debunks the argument.
Instead, they point out when Florida is having a surge.
That's a big deal.
When Florida has a surge, that's a huge deal.
And so this prompted Joe Biden yesterday to go after Ron DeSantis.
Now, again, there's another reason they're going after DeSantis, and that is that Joe Biden is very much afraid that Ron DeSantis is gonna be the Republican nominee for president in 2024 and could dismantle him in a debate, frankly.
Not only because Joe Biden is not sentient, but because DeSantis is actually fairly good at this.
So here was Joe Biden going after the governor of my state, Ron DeSantis, yesterday.
Just two states, Florida and Texas, account for one-third of all new COVID-19 cases in the entire country.
Just two states.
Look, we need leadership from everyone.
If some governors aren't willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic, then they should allow businesses and universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it.
I say to these governors, please help.
But if you aren't going to help, at least get out of the way.
The people are trying to do the right thing.
Oh, they're trying to do the right thing.
Oh, Joe Biden, what a stellar, stellar example of a man trying to do the right thing.
Well, Ron DeSantis was not taking the sitting down.
He went directly back at Biden, which, by the way, is one of the reasons he's so popular among Republicans.
He went back at him.
Just I mean, just face planted him.
So he did a press conference yesterday in which he in which he said, listen, Mr. President, you seem very intense on masking people up and locking them down.
And if you are interested in renewed lockdowns, I will stand in your way.
By the way, this is a political battle that is very bad for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden right now is sinking his own political approval rating because Americans are highly pessimistic about the future of the virus.
They're pessimistic about the ability of government to stop it.
They're pessimistic about Joe Biden's presidency now.
And Ron DeSantis knows this.
This is not a good battle for Joe Biden to pick.
He picked the wrong guy to pick on.
Here was DeSantis face planting him yesterday.
If you're coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I'm standing in your way.
I'm not going to let you get away with it.
If you're trying to deny kids a proper in-person education, I'm going to stand in your way, and I'm going to stand up for the kids in Florida.
If you're trying to restrict people, impose mandates, if you're trying to ruin their jobs and their livelihoods and their small business, if you are trying to lock people down, I am standing in your way, and I'm standing for the people of Florida.
Now the problem for the left is that they wish that DeSantis was some sort of anti-vax advocate.
DeSantis has been super pro-vaccination.
DeSantis' state trenched out the vaccinations based on age, while the CDC was telling people not to.
DeSantis has been pushing vaccinations extremely hard, but DeSantis does recognize something that the rest of us should also recognize, which is that for public policy purposes, this pandemic is no longer in the hands of the government.
Everybody who wants to be vaccinated has now been vaccinated.
If you want to get vaccinated tomorrow, that can be your lucky day because every day can be your lucky day.
We all have the ability to get the vaccine at this point, which means government no longer has a role here.
DeSantis knows this.
DeSantis doubled down on this.
He says, listen, we're not going to be Dr. Fauci's biomedical security state.
That's not how we make decisions here in the state of Florida.
And so I think the question is, is we can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state.
And I can tell you, Florida, we're a free state.
People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions about themselves, about their families, about their kids' education, and about putting food on the table.
Okay, DeSantis didn't stop there.
He pointed out that it's kind of weird that Joe Biden is singling out Florida because Florida ranks middle of the pack in terms of deaths per million and is the second oldest state in the Union after the great state of Maine, which has approximately seven old people in a moose.
Here is DeSantis saying it's weird that Joe Biden would single out Florida.
Joe Biden has taken to himself to try to single out Florida over COVID.
This is a guy who ran for president saying he was going to, quote, shut down the virus.
And what has he done?
He's imported more virus from around the world by having a wide open southern border.
You have hundreds of thousands of people pouring across every month.
And it's not just from Mexico.
In fact, it's rarely from Mexico.
You have over 100 different countries where people are pouring through Okay, and he is exactly right about that.
DeSantis continued along those lines.
He says, listen, why don't you do your job?
You're saying I'm not doing my job?
How about you do your job?
Like secure the southern border instead of shipping people with COVID into communities like McAllen, Texas.
Why don't you do your job?
Why don't you get this border secure?
And until you do that, I don't want to hear a blip about COVID from you.
Thank you.
OK, correct.
Correct.
OK, so there's a reason why Biden is running a little bit scared of Ron DeSantis at this point.
And there is, again, a reason why the Biden administration is targeting one governor above all the other governors.
And that is because DeSantis is the governor of a swing state.
He's pretty popular down here.
And he's been doing a very, very good job.
By the way, and points to DeSantis for standing strong on this stuff.
There are other governors who are not, like Asa Hutchinson, who's the Republican governor of Arkansas.
He had signed into law a bill banning mask mandates.
And now he says, I wish I hadn't signed that bill.
He's trying to backtrack that.
I don't know, for the love of the media or something, because here is the record on mask mandates.
There is no evidence that mask mandates are successful anywhere.
There's no correlative evidence that demonstrates that mask mandates cause people to mask up in vast numbers, as opposed to just virus spreading in a particular community.
There's no evidence that mask mandates have any real impact on human behavior, generally speaking, because there's no way to enforce them.
Nonetheless, here's Asa Hutchinson trying to please the Democrats, which of course is always a fool's errand.
Well, I signed it at the time because our cases were at a very low point.
I knew that it would be overridden by the legislature if I didn't sign it, and I was not supportive of... I'd already eliminated our statewide mask mandate.
And so, you know, I signed it for those reasons, that our cases were at a low point.
Everything has changed now.
And yes, in hindsight, I wish that had not become law.
But it is the law, and the only chance we have is either to amend it or for the courts to say that it has an unconstitutional foundation.
Okay, even scientists like Scott Gottlieb are saying that masks themselves, when it comes to the Delta variants, are not going to be the key method of killing the virus's spread.
The key method of killing the virus's spread is going to be Vaccination.
That's it.
By the way, we've already hit the downslope of R for Delta in states including Arkansas, apparently, as well as Missouri.
And soon we'll hit it in Florida.
And it'll be fun to watch how it just disappears from the media's radar.
How the media will have been, look at this terrible surge in Florida.
It's so terrible.
It's the end of the world.
And then we'll hit the downside of the surge and we'll move on.
And then in the winter, there will be a surge in New York because it will get cold outside and people will go indoors and the media will just kind of ignore it.
And the truth is that the lack of understanding of basic human behavior by the media is pretty astonishing.
And the willingness to believe the myth that the only people who are not vaccinating at this point are kooky Fox News watchers.
That's also really weird.
We'll get to that in just one second because there is one, it's the clip of the day.
Okay, it is from a Boston mayor.
Her name is Kim Janey.
She's the black interim mayor because she took the place of somebody who joined the Biden administration.
And this black Democratic mayor of Boston is saying things about vaccine mandates that are significantly wilder than anything Republicans are saying, but I don't see Joe Biden attacking her.
And there's a reason for that.
And it's openly political.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to the attack on vaccine mandates of the day from a black Democratic mayor.
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Now you may have noticed that Joe Biden is attacking Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and only Republican governors.
But what's weird is that there are some Democrats who are pretty darned hesitant about things like vaccine mandates and vaccine passports.
One of those people is the current mayor of Boston, a woman named Kim Jadie.
She of course took over for the former mayor, Marty Walsh, who left to become Secretary of Labor under Joe Biden.
She is currently running for a full term.
And Kim Janey, she got pretty damn spicy about all of this.
She got very, very angry, I think rightly so, about some of the vaccine mandate stuff.
But she's using language that is very, I mean, when I say spicy, I'm talking about like she took out like the full package of pepper and just tossed it right on top of this.
Here was Kim Janey, the mayor of Boston, a hardcore Democrat.
There's a long history in this country of people needing to show their papers during slavery, post slavery, as recent as, you know, what an immigrant population has to go through here.
We heard Trump with the birth certificate nonsense.
Here, we want to make sure that we are not doing anything that would further create a barrier for residents.
Okay, and this is my favorite.
She says, anything that would further create a barrier for residents of Boston or disproportionately impact BIPOC communities.
BIPOC communities are people of color.
Okay, so she's now comparing vaccine passports to slavery.
That's what she's doing.
And she's also saying that it disproportionately impacts black people.
That's kind of an amazing statement.
I don't see Joe Biden going after her.
Where is Joe Biden?
Why isn't he saying, you need to get out of the way.
Either do the right thing or get out of the way.
Weird.
He's not taking on the Democrat who's saying this, I noticed.
Also, I've noticed very little from the Biden administration about how do you convince the disproportionate number of black people who have not gotten vaccinated to get vaccinated.
And I've said before, I think it's going to be a lot of fun to watch Bill de Blasio, and now they're talking about doing this in LA by the way, watch Bill de Blasio try to ban some 70% of black people from being able to go to restaurants.
Because that's what the vaccine passport does.
70% of black people in New York City are not vaccinated.
By far the highest rate of non-vaccination among any demographic group in New York City.
So what happens when suddenly black people can't go to restaurants and can't go to gyms and can't go to indoor spaces, can't go to a Yankee game?
How does he think that's going to work out for him?
The entire Democratic Party has forwarded the lie that disparate impact means that discrimination has taken place.
So I could easily say something like, well, you know what?
If it's a neutral rule, Then whether it disproportionately impacts one group of people or not really makes no difference.
It's a neutral rule, right?
But Democrats don't have that foot to stand on.
They can't say that.
If Democrats were to acknowledge that personal behavior is responsible for its own consequences, then they couldn't make the case that they are constantly making about America's evil racism.
Which they're always blaming for every disparity in American life.
From wealth and income inequality, to single motherhood, to drug abuse.
They're constantly attempting to chalk up every disparity in American life to systemic racism.
So how do they run away from this one exactly?
That's what I find so amusing here.
When Kim Janey says that any policy that disproportionately impacts BIPOC communities must of course be discriminatory.
And she's talking about vaccine passports?
Get ready, gang, because that is going to be the left's line, and it's going to be fun to watch the left eat the left.
Of course, the left could just take multiple positions at the same time.
They're fond of doing that.
In fact, that's exactly what AOC, the estimable, irrepressible, so fresh, so face, AOC has been doing.
So yesterday, she was caught on tape doing a photo op with her face mask on, and then immediately after the cameras are off, she's like, yeah, this mask is stupid, and I'm not wearing it anymore.
It was kind of funny.
She's fine.
She's not wearing a mask.
She puts on a mask just for the photo.
One, two, three.
How does it feel to be a free lady?
Woo!
Thanks guys.
Everybody.
You look like you.
Ha!
Whoops.
No mask.
Whoopsie doodle.
How does it feel to be a free lady?
Woo!
Thanks guys.
Whoopsie-doodle.
Just like she is constantly talking about income inequality, but then she parks her Tesla illegally outside the Whole Foods.
She is.
The rules never apply to the special people, as we say over and over and over again.
Okay, well I did want to bring you one piece of news that I personally found highly amusing and I wanted to give you an update on.
So, yesterday Axios reported that Politico's newsroom is now attempting to unionize with the News Guild.
Okay, so this means that Politico's staff apparently are now joining, like, the New York Times and a bunch of other left-wing publications in attempting to unionize, which is usually really bad for business.
Okay, usually it means that you are artificially increasing the labor rate.
It means that you are artificially increasing the benefits.
It means that you're costing the company more money, which generally tends to remove from the bottom line and crimp growth, right?
This is why so many private sector unions have basically dismantled at this point.
But apparently, the Politico staffers are apparently very, very into forming a union.
Here is the part that I love the most.
Okay, this is pretty spectacular.
According to Axios, organizers are currently trying to gather signatures for a statement to present to management in the coming weeks, asking for recognition of the union.
The union drive covers employees of Politico and E&E News, an energy and environment trade publication Politico acquired last year, according to a Politico staffer.
Politico added about 65 reporters and editors via that deal.
There are about 375 editorial staffers at both Politico and E&E total.
So, what drove all of this?
According to Axios, sources say several factors have pushed employees to seek union support when bartering with management, including the company's handling of internal pushback against having Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro guest host Politico's flagship newsletter product playbook earlier this year.
Remember earlier this year, they asked me to write their playbook, right?
It's like a kind of obscure insider Washington DC newsletter.
I wrote it, like Don Lemon had written it the same week.
They just had basically a rotation of various political actors writing the political playbook.
I wrote it.
200 staffers got on the phone with the bosses.
Apparently, this provided the impetus for unionization at Politico.
And let me just say, I couldn't be happier.
I couldn't be happier.
Last year, the National Labor Relations Board accused me of being too anti-union and tried to file some sort of lawsuit against me.
That ended up going away pretty quickly.
But let me just say, I'm very pro this union.
In fact, I'm happy to be the Politico employee union rep.
I'm like the Samuel Gompers of Politico.
And I take my rightful mantle here as the union leader over at Politico.
I'm amused that my very presence in Politico allowed for the development of the possibility of a union over there.
Man.
All I do is apparently just, like, accidentally destroy left-wing institutions.
All I do.
Pretty spectacular stuff.
All righty.
We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
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On today's episode, we speak to Dr. Marty Makary about whether mask and vaccine mandates are backed up by the evidence, backlash builds against Andrew Cuomo, and an Olympic athlete flees Belarus.
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