All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 20, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:54
What Did Biden Know And When Did He Know It? | Ep. 1323
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Joe Biden continues to maintain he had no clue Afghanistan was about to fall, but his own State Department had a report predicting just that.
The White House desperately seeks excuses, and the left continues its attacks on Ron DeSantis over blocking mask mandates.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Don't like big tech and the government spying on you?
Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
Well, first, we begin with the latest from Afghanistan, where the situation continues to be just awful.
We now have tape of toddlers being pulled over the airport wall by American forces because people are so desperate to get their kids out of Afghanistan ahead of the Taliban that they are handing their own children, like small babies, over to the American military.
Here's what that tape looks like.
It's just a disaster area.
Meanwhile, video has been taken outside the airport, apparently showing people basically being crowded into a ditch by the Taliban.
These are supposed to be people who are waiting to enter the airport.
Again, this is not an organized withdrawal, shall we say.
And of course, you can hear the gunshots, so things are going beautifully right outside the airport.
Sounds great.
Meanwhile, the Taliban spent the day yesterday celebrating, because after all, it was the anniversary of the independence of Afghanistan.
According to the New York Times, Kabul was many things on Thursday.
The chaos at the airport was matched by calm in other pockets of the city.
Some businesses resumed work.
Many people were trying to get on with their lives.
Others weren't hiding afraid for theirs.
Women were scarce.
There were some signs of Taliban restraint.
But also clear evidence its members patrolling the streets were not afraid to wield force.
In fact, there is a story from CNN.com about a photographer who was basically got the hell beat out of him by the Taliban.
And then when they realized he was a reporter, they started trying to take selfies with him.
So everything is well organized over there.
The president of the United States is supposed to address the nation on Friday, apparently.
As the United States tries to ramp up its troubled evacuation in Afghanistan, Biden is expected today to address the furor over the sluggish process, stymied by mayhem in Kabul and delays in Washington, that threatens to strand thousands of Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban takeover.
Biden is expected to speak at 1 p.m.
in Washington.
He's defended the pullout from Afghanistan while promising not to abandon the Afghans who risked their lives.
Well, I mean, he's walked back that promise pretty clearly, as we'll see in just one moment.
The United States has rushed troops and diplomatic reinforcements to Kabul in recent days to speed up visa processing for Afghans.
American commanders are negotiating daily with their Taliban counterparts to ensure the evacuees can reach the airport because we are pathetic.
We're begging the Taliban.
When we say negotiating with the Taliban, we mean begging the Taliban.
The British and the French have been sending out military patrols to go pick up their citizens and bring them to the airport.
The United States, however, is hunkered down behind the walls of Kabul Airport, fearful that if the United States walks out, the Taliban will attack them, and then Joe Biden will have to overturn his promise to get all the troops out by August 31st and insert more troops into Kabul, turning a disaster area into a full-scale conflagration, all because the man is a moron.
Thousands are waiting fearfully outside the airport gates, according to the New York Times, where Taliban soldiers have attacked people with sticks and rifle butts.
As Afghans clutching travel documents camped outside amid Taliban checkpoints and tangles of concertina wire, anxious crowds were being pressed up against blast walls, with women and children being hoisted into the arms of U.S.
soldiers on the other side.
The Taliban's unpredictability and history of brutality have set off a rush to escape, especially among Afghans who worked alongside U.S.
and NATO forces. That of course is no surprise given the fact that so many people are going to be left there murdered. I mean that is the Taliban are apparently going door to door according to Daily Wire. The Taliban are intensifying their search for Afghans who help the United States and have a list of people they intend to quote-unquote question and punish which is code for murder according to a Thursday report from the New York Times based on a document prepared by the United Nations.
The development seems to complicate assurances from the Biden administration that the Taliban are somewhat reformed from their previous iteration.
Biden seemed to hint at a changing interpretation of the Taliban's newfound commitment to freedom in his recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
Meanwhile, the Taliban are also going door-to-door seeking Christians.
They are searching through phones for Bible apps to make sure that there are no Christians in country.
According to the Daily Wire, Afghan Christians are reportedly fleeing to the mountains in a desperate attempt to escape the Taliban who are going door-to-door trying to kill them.
Things are going great, in other words.
An underground church that partners with Frontier Alliance International has reported that the Taliban are targeting Christians for death.
According to FAI, the Taliban has a hit list of known Christians they are targeting to pursue and kill.
The U.S.
Embassy is defunct.
There is no longer a safe place for believers to take refuge.
All borders to neighboring countries are closed.
All flights to and from have been halted with the exception of private planes.
People are fleeing into the mountains looking for asylum.
They are fully reliant on God, who's the only one who can and will protect them.
The Taliban are going door to door taking women and children.
The people must mark their house with an X if they have a girl over 12 years old.
So the Taliban can take them.
If they find a young girl and the house was not marked, they'll execute the entire family.
If a married woman 25 years or older has been found, the Taliban promptly kill her husband, do whatever they want to her, and then sell her as a sex slave.
This is according to, again, the Frontier Alliance International, a Christian NGO.
Meanwhile, US-allied Afghan forces are completely in hiding, according to the New York Times.
Thousands of Afghan security force members managed to make it to other countries over the past few weeks as the Taliban advanced.
Others managed to negotiate surrender and went back to their homes.
Some kept their weapons and joined the Taliban.
They were all part of the sudden atomization of the national security forces.
The United States and its allies spent tens of billions of dollars to arm, train, and stand against the Taliban.
Tens of thousands of other Afghan grunts, commandos, and spies who fought to the end, despite the talk in Washington that the Afghan forces simply gave up, have been left behind.
They're now on the run, hiding and hunted by the Taliban.
There's no way out, said Fareed, an Afghan commando, in a text message to an American soldier who fought with him.
Fareed, who agreed to be identified by first name only, said he was hiding in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, trapped after the regular army units had surrendered around him.
I am praying to be saved, he said.
Militants are threatening to arrest or punish family members if they can't find the people they are looking for, according to former Afghan officials.
Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect friends and loved ones still hiding in Afghanistan.
The Taliban is combing through records of the Ministry of Defense and Interior and the headquarters of Afghanistan's spy service, drawing up lists of operatives to search for.
There are more and more reports militants are exacting swift and fatal revenge when they are found, which of course is not exactly a shock.
So things are going beautifully.
In a second, we'll get to the latest on the evacuation efforts, which are a complete bleep show.
First, let's talk about the thing you sit on at your office.
So, let's face it, you're at your office a lot of hours every day.
You get up at the end of the day, your back kind of hurts.
It's because you're sitting on a crappy office chair.
Why would you not be sitting on the world's greatest chair?
I'm talking, of course, about the X chair.
It's like sitting on a cloud.
It's like God made a chair.
The xChair.
xChair has you covered for your office chair needs.
The xChair can give you a massage while you're sitting at your desk.
It can warm your back on cold mornings.
It can cool you off on hot days.
LMAX temperature regulation will take your seating comfort to a whole new level.
Patent pending LMAX allows you to experience cooling, heat, and massage in your low back.
Xchair's patented dynamic variable lumbar support was already best in class with incredible, responsive low back support.
Now with Elemax, your comfort is guaranteed.
You won't believe the difference until you feel it for yourself.
Imagine regulating your body temperature and getting massage therapy while you're working.
Xchair Elemax delivers cooling, heat, and massage technology directly to your core, regulating body temp, helping increase blood flow, muscle recovery, and energy.
All perks that make working from home or the office a joy.
Go to xchairshapiro.com right now.
That's the letter X.
Meanwhile, the United States' plan to get people out continues to be... not much.
or call 1-844-4XCHAIR for a hundred bucks off your order.
XChair has a 30 day guarantee of complete comfort.
You can finance your purchase for as little as 30 bucks a month.
Go to xchairshapiro.com right now.
Use code XWHEELS for free XWHEEL blade casters as well.
xchairshapiro.com.
Alrighty, so meanwhile, the United States has planned to get people out, continues to be not much.
According to Jackie Heinrich, who is writing for Fox News, she's the White House correspondent.
She says that sources have told her the State Department is looking for non-military ways to stage and move Americans and others in Kabul as an alternative to military forces being deployed into Kabul for rescues.
So I guess we're going to, you know, just send randos into Kabul to try and bring Americans through the gauntlet that has now been created by the Taliban around the Kabul airport.
The State Department did not dispute this information.
They said, quote, Our first priority is the safety and security of the American people.
We will continue to uphold that commitment.
Oh, will you?
The State Department, above all of the other departments, is the one to blame.
The State Department is a disaster, disaster area.
Meanwhile, John Kirby over at the Pentagon, he's the spokesperson, he was asked, you know, you keep saying that we're trying to get our people out, and yet we have not deployed any military patrols to go pick up Americans who are stranded in Kabul.
Why is it that the Brits and the French can do it, but we cannot?
If the British can take their paratroopers and they can get in vehicles and go get their people and get them to the airport, why can't the U.S.
do that?
If there is a deal with the Taliban to provide safe passage, why is it left to the Americans outside of that ring to get there on their own?
Why can't we send vehicles to go get them?
We have not seen any great impediments to the safe passage that the Taliban have agreed to facilitate.
Americans are getting through those checkpoints, and they are getting onto the base on the airfield, and they are being flown out of Kabul.
Okay, that is not exactly what we are hearing from on the ground, where we are hearing that many Afghans, certainly the Afghans are stuck in Kabul, but many Americans are not willing to run the gauntlet because they're afraid of walking outside their front door.
And the Taliban's mercy lasts as long as the Taliban's mercy lasts.
I mean, let's face what's going on here.
The reality is when we say we're negotiating with the Taliban, what we mean by that is we're bribing them.
This is going to come out over the next six months, I promise you, that the United States is sending pallets of cash to the world's worst human beings because Joe Biden couldn't keep it in his pants when it came to withdrawing from Afghanistan.
I mean, that really is what's going on here.
According to Defense One, evacuation operations at Hamid Karzai International Airport are starting to normalize, but with the stark reality that U.S.
movements, including any troop extension past August 31st, now must be negotiated with the Taliban, the Pentagon acknowledged on Thursday.
John Kirby said, quote, I think it's a fundamental fact of reality of where we are, that communications and a certain measure of agreement with the Taliban on what we're trying to accomplish has to occur.
About 7000 people, a mix of Americans, Afghans and other foreign nationals have left Kabul on U.S.
military aircraft since noncombatant evacuation operations began last week.
U.S.
has flown about 12000 people out of Afghanistan since July.
However, We've still got thousands and thousands of Americans who are still stuck in Kabul and tens of thousands of Afghan allies who are stuck in Kabul.
At a State Department press conference Thursday, spokesman Ned Price acknowledged processing has been slow but was improving.
He says there are 6,000 people at the airport right now who have been fully processed by our consular team and will soon board planes.
In the meantime, however, there are planes that are leaving literally half empty.
20 planes were expected to depart overnight on Thursday.
The state will double the number of consular officers on the ground by Friday, says Ned Price.
We'll have the capacity we need to process as many individuals as we can fill the flights.
The evacuation has more of a rhythm in the last 24 hours, he said.
For example, U.S.
troops have opened and manned more gates at the airport, allowing faster processes of evacuees.
And the crowds that swarm the tarmacs have been pushed out, but there are currently more airplane seats than there are passengers, which means that the processing is not going all that well.
The U.S.
would like to move between 5,000 and 9,000 people per day.
Over the last 24 hours, they flew out 2,000, said Taylor.
There are at least 15,000 Americans still in Kabul and more than 70,000 Afghans who worked with the U.S.
government and their families.
All of those people are going to be stopped, by the way.
Even the U.S.
citizens may hesitate to move from their homes, according to Defense One.
The U.S.
government said Wednesday it cannot guarantee their safe passage.
Price said every report of someone unable for whatever reason to reach the airport is something we take seriously.
We're doing everything we can mechanically, logistically, but then, of course, there's also the diplomatic element of this as well.
So, in other words, no.
Americans are still stuck there, and this process is not, in fact, going particularly smoothly.
Meanwhile, there was this debacle over the last 24 hours where the United States State Department apparently was selling flights.
I'm not kidding you.
They were selling flights for essentially $2,000.
According to Politico, even though U.S.
officials tell NatSecDaily and others that evacuation flights from Kabul will be free, people trying to catch a plane in the Afghan capital say differently.
One person said State Department staff were seeking large payments up to $2,000 from American passengers and even more from non-U.S.
citizens.
When we relayed what this person told us to the State Department, a spokesperson didn't deny this is happening.
This spokesperson said, U.S. law requires evacuation assistance to private U.S.
citizens or third-country nationals be provided on a reimbursable basis to the maximum extent practicable.
The situation is extremely fluid.
We're working to overcome obstacles as they rise.
So now they're trying to walk this back.
They're saying, no, no, no.
Now we're going to make the flights free.
But it took the press discovering that they were trying to charge people trying to escape Afghanistan $2,000 in order to leave for that to become an issue.
All right.
So this all has international implications as well.
Apparently, the United States asked, we're not we're not the point.
We're just asking our enemies for help.
And they're all like, ha ha ha ha ha.
Here's the latest on that.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a June 16 summit meeting with President Biden, objected to any role for American forces in Central Asian countries at all, senior U.S.
and Russian officials said, undercutting the U.S.
military's efforts to act against new terrorist dangers after its Afghanistan withdrawal.
Remember.
Joe Biden said that we would still be able to carry out the over-the-horizon missions we needed to.
We'd have air bases.
We'd be able to still monitor terrorist traffic in Afghanistan.
No, we won't.
I mean, end of story, no.
We don't have any resources on the ground.
We have no bases in country.
And we have no bases anywhere nearby.
Pakistan cut a deal with the Taliban to kick us out.
And Russia is denying us the ability to build any bases or have a base anywhere nearby.
The previously unreported exchange between the U.S.
and Russian leaders has complicated the U.S.
military's options for basing drones and other counterterrorism forces in countries bordering landlocked Afghanistan.
That challenge has deepened with the collapse over the weekend of the Afghan government and armed forces.
The exchange also indicates Moscow is more determined to try to maintain Central Asia as a sphere of influence and to expand cooperation with the new American president over the turmoil in Afghanistan, former and current U.S.
official said.
Yeah, no bleep.
There's a shock.
You mean the Russians aren't interested in helping us?
Who could have foreseen this cataclysmic event?
Who could have foreseen that the Russians and the Chinese and the Taliban might not be all that helpful to us in fighting terrorism?
Without access to Central Asian nations like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, or Tajikistan, the U.S.
would need to rely on bases in Qatar, other Arab Gulf states, and U.S.
Navy aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean to fly aircraft to Afghanistan.
Flight times from the Gulf states are so long, a U.S.
drone might spend more than 60% of its mission flying to and from Afghanistan from a U.S.
base in Qatar.
That would limit the time for conducting reconnaissance or carrying out strikes over the country, because the drones basically run out of fuel.
So this is all going really, really, really well.
The good news is that Joe Biden is enamored with it.
He loves it.
He loves it.
And when he's not lying about how he got to this decision, here's how he got to the decision.
He woke up one morning, he had his can of Ensure, he watched part of an episode of Matlock, and then he farted out his decision.
That's how he came to this decision.
There's no logic to it.
He was told in advance by pretty much everyone that this was the world's worst decision.
He was told by his DOD that he needed to leave some skeletal troops there, at least until the evacuation was complete.
He was told by his State Department this was a mistake.
He was told by everyone this was a bad idea.
But bad ideas have never stopped Joe Biden before.
That's kind of amusing.
When Donald Trump was president, there was all this talk about how, you know, Trump isn't really running his administration.
The people around him are running his administration.
And in reality, many of the people around Trump were constant checks on his bad ideas.
Very often, Trump would have a bad idea, militarily speaking.
Like, what if we precipitously pulled out from Syria?
And James Mattis would step in and go, you know, Mr. President, you can't do that.
It's a bad idea.
And Trump would go, okay, fine.
And then he would listen.
Joe Biden listens to no one, and so his advisors have just gone along with the worst foreign policy decision in my lifetime.
I just went right along with it and enabled it.
After advising him, it was a terrible idea.
There was no internal bucking.
There were no leaks to the press.
There was no talk in advance about how this was going to go.
They just went along with it.
They let the addled old man figure out what the policy would be.
A policy that he had locked in from 2010 and on, even though the war in Afghanistan has radically shifted since 2010, given the fact that we radically downscaled our troop commitment in Afghanistan post-2014.
The United States has not had more than 12,000-13,000 troops in the country at any time since 2014.
And at the time that we left, we had 2,500 troops officially in country to provide, again, a base from which to fight terrorism.
But Joe Biden, at least, he has sort of these moments of refreshing honesty because every so often it breaks through.
And Joe Biden did this interview with George Stephanopoulos.
Would you have withdrawn troops like this even if President Trump had not made that deal with the Taliban?
I would have tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops, yes.
Because look, George.
Qatar with the Taliban, and we had to abide by that deal.
And now Joe Biden's like, yeah, whether or not that deal was made, I was going to do it, which is the actual truth.
Would you have withdrawn troops like this even if President Trump had not made that deal with the Taliban?
I would have tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops, yes.
Because look, George, there is no good time to leave Afghanistan.
15 years ago would have been a problem, 15 years from now.
The basic choice is, am I going to send your sons and your daughters to war in Afghanistan?
In Afghanistan in perpetuity.
Okay, so when he says there's no good time to leave Afghanistan, the answer to that is right, which is probably why we should have left some skeleton troops there at a minimum.
But he was committed to this.
He's committed to this.
By the way, there's news breaking this morning that the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse.
According to Sasha Ingber, who's a national security reporter for Newsy, previously at NPR and National Geographic, a source says, situation in Afghanistan is rapidly deteriorating. We've had Americans get beaten throughout the night. One of them, an American woman, was beaten twice, even though she was carrying a U.S. passport.
There are reports of sheer chaos breaking out again in Afghanistan.
For all the talk about how this thing is starting to lock down, it continues to be chaos at the airport in Afghanistan.
It's a disaster area.
And yes, Joe Biden was warned about this.
Yes, Joe Biden was warned.
Of course he was.
Now, Joe Biden lied about that.
He went on Stephanopoulos and in the course of about 30 seconds said he wasn't warned about it.
And then realized that that was going to be outed as a lie.
And then he went to the I don't recall defense, right?
The I don't recall defense in politics is what you do.
It's the lawyerly way of avoiding any sort of actual blame.
Because if you don't recall, that can't be argued with.
And since everybody assumes that Joe Biden has some form of memory loss anyway, it's actually credible.
Here's Joe Biden going from I was never told to I don't recall in the space of about 30 seconds.
Your top military advisors warned against withdrawing on this timeline.
They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops.
No, they didn't.
It was split.
That wasn't true.
That wasn't true.
They didn't tell you that they wanted troops to stay?
No, not in terms of whether we were going to get out in a time frame.
All troops.
They didn't argue against that.
So no one told, your military advisors did not tell you, no, we should just keep 2,500 troops.
It's been a stable situation for the last several years.
We can do that.
We can continue to do that.
No, no one said that to me that I can recall.
No, okay, and you can tell he's lying right there, right?
He realizes he's trapped himself and that he's lying.
In fact, we know for a fact that he was informed by many of his advisors that this was a terrible idea.
This has been widely reported.
In fact, back in April, Jen Psaki confirmed that some advisors were telling Biden to leave troops, right?
This is publicly.
Can you explain the rationale for why President Biden went against the advice of military commanders who recommended leaving 2,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan?
Well, I think that's an overcharacterization of every military leader, and I don't think they've all provided their point of view.
No military commander wants to stay forever.
They insist that this is not some, insist this is not the time to leave, some opponents of his decision.
Oh, so I was told that there was no opposition to that by Joe Biden right then, right?
He doesn't recall anybody saying that to him.
We now have reports from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, from pretty much every major media publication saying that Joe Biden was told by everyone, up to and including, by the way, Lloyd Austin, his Secretary of Defense, as well as The wonderful Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He was told by everyone this was a bad idea.
And he went ahead and he did it anyway.
Because he's a stubborn old coot.
And he has decided that his bad foreign policy ideas need to be... As Barack Obama once said about Joe Biden, don't underestimate Joe's ability to screw things up.
Yeah, well, the American people did, and now we're gonna pay for it in a pretty serious way.
We'll get to more of this in just one second, because we now have the breaking story that the State Department overtly informed Joe Biden this was gonna be a disaster, like weeks ago.
First, let us talk about a great gift you can get for your family, you can get for your friends, for yourself.
I'm talking about the gift of a professionally painted portrait.
Get a professional hand-painted portrait created from any photo at a truly affordable price at paintyourlife.com.
In my house, we have a beautiful hand-painted portrait of me and my wife and two of my three kids on a beach in Hawaii.
We actually need to go get a new portrait because we have Squishy Baby now.
You should do the same.
You can even combine photos of people or places you love into one painting.
Choose from a team of world-class artists and work with them until every detail is perfect.
User-friendly platform makes it easy to order a custom-made hand-painted portrait in less than five minutes.
It's fast, You can receive your portrait in as little as two weeks.
Send any picture yourself, your children, your family, a special place, someone you love who may not be around anymore, a cherished pet, even an action shot of you or your kids playing your favorite sport.
You can do anything with these portraits, and they look great.
At paintyourlife.com, there's no risk.
If you don't love the final painting, your money is refunded.
Guaranteed.
And right now, it's a limited time offer.
You get 20% off your painting.
That is correct.
20% off and free shipping.
To get this special offer, text the word BEN to 64000.
That is Ben to 64,000.
Text the word Ben to 64,000.
Paint your life.
Celebrate the moments that matter most.
Terms apply available at paintyourlife.com slash terms again.
Text Ben to 64,000 to get started.
Okay, so here is the big story of the day.
The big story of the day, aside from the fact that the situation in Afghanistan continues to be just an utter Complete disaster area.
Richard Engel reporting this morning.
There's an internal State Department cable that warned that Kabul would collapse in July.
and Afghans who worked with US and NATO is rapidly becoming a chaotic humanitarian airlift.
Just complete chaos breaking out over there.
There's an internal State Department cable that warned that Kabul would collapse in July.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the US.
's August 31st troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S.
official and a person familiar with the document.
The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban's advance was imminent and Afghanistan's military may be unable to stop it.
The cable was sent via the State Department's confidential dissent channel.
and warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up evacuation.
The cable was dated July 13th.
July 13th.
Now, the reason I mentioned the significance of that date is because five days earlier, Joe Biden had gone on national television and assured the American people the Taliban would not take over the country and this would not look like the Saigon.
Five days earlier.
As of last weekend, some 18,000 Afghans who applied for the U.S.' 's special immigrant visa program, as well as their families, remained on the ground in Afghanistan.
In all, 23 U.S.
Embassy staffers, all Americans, signed the July 13th cable.
The U.S.
official said there was a rush to deliver it, given circumstances on the ground.
The cable was sent to our wonderful Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the Director of Policy Planning, Salman Ahmed.
Blinken received the cable and reviewed it, according to people familiar with the exchange, who added that contingency planning was already underway when it was received, and that Blinken welcomed their feedback.
State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to address the cable, but told the Wall Street Journal, Blinken reads every dissent and reviews every reply.
The existence of the confidential State Department cable adds to an expanding debate involving the White House, Pentagon, and intelligence services over what U.S.
officials understood about assessments of Afghanistan's stability.
Again, it is very clear at this point that Biden was warned eight ways from Sunday.
It is very obvious to anyone who is watching that this was a disaster area unfolding.
And Biden couldn't care less.
He couldn't care less.
It is incredible how this glowing This giant glowing sun of empathy.
President Biden has no empathy whatsoever for what's going on on the ground over in Afghanistan.
For the Americans who are stuck there, for the Afghans who are stuck there, for anybody.
Because he wanted to do the things that he wanted to do and his umbrage begins when you start asking him tough questions.
This has been true, by the way, throughout his career.
There was always this picture of Biden that he was a wonderful, warm guy.
Anytime he was asked a tough question by literally anyone, Throughout his campaign, he turned into the look fat guy.
You remember that?
There was a guy, a Bernie Sanders supporter, who asked him a tough question, and he started insulting him as fat.
I mean, that's who Joe Biden is.
So in this interview with George Stephanopoulos, he was just fully delusional and in umbrage mode.
So at one point, by the way, he mentioned that he said, we don't have any troops in Syria, which is weird since we have 900 troops in Syria.
But I mean, the man can be forgiven that since he doesn't remember what he had for breakfast this morning.
But more than that, he then did this.
This is an amazing clip.
Joe Biden told George Stephanopoulos, nobody's being killed at the Kabul airport right now.
He said, everything's fine over there.
Still a lot of pandemonium outside the airport.
Well there is, but look, but no one's being killed right now.
God forgive me if I'm wrong about that, but no one's being killed right now.
No one's being killed and then he knocks on wood.
He knocks on wood.
You're the President of the United States.
He's knocking on wood that no one's been, you know what could ensure that no one gets killed over there?
If you hadn't abandoned the country without any plan whatsoever.
That would ensure that nobody got killed.
Or, if you said to the Taliban, listen, you let all of our guys in, or American air power is going to start going after you.
Maybe all fun and games for the moment, but just remember, we still have the most powerful Air Force on planet Earth, so you let all of our people through right now, or the bombs start falling on the heads of your soldiers.
But he's not doing any of that.
And by the way, he's wrong.
When he says that people aren't being killed at Knock on Wood, here is CNN yesterday.
Since the Taliban seized Kabul on Sunday, 12 people have been killed.
That, according to the Reuters news agency.
Taliban fighters toting machine guns and a soundtrack of gunfire are fueling this unease and anxiety among Afghans.
Look here, CNN photographer capturing these images.
Huddled masses outside Kabul airport's east gate.
Rows and rows of men, women, and children clustered together, waiting on a way out that for some may never materialize.
And by the way, a lot of people are pointing out people who don't want to Take in some of these Afghan refugees.
Again, if you're a translator with the American Armed Services and you have American soldiers who are vouching for you, it seems to me that your case to be brought into the United States as a refugee is pretty good.
But in any case, if you're talking about this, a lot of people have been saying, look at how many men there are in these photos.
Right, because those are the ones who worked as the translators.
There weren't a lot of women who were working as translators for the American Armed Services in Afghanistan.
In any case, Biden's just lying when he says nobody's been killed.
No, a lot of, I mean, people fell from airplanes, dude, on tape, on tape.
But remember, Captain Empathy over here, he's never been empathetic toward this sort of stuff.
I mean, if you go all the way back, like to the actual fall of Saigon, Remember that Joe Biden actually said by the actual fall of Saigon that the United States had no obligation to evacuate a single member of South Vietnam, like not a single person.
We had abandoned them to their fate.
Hundreds of thousands of people got into boats to float off the coast of Vietnam to escape the onrushing communist hordes.
And Joe Biden said this, quote, I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals.
Other than perhaps an estimated 1,800 diplomatic personnel assigned to foreign embassies in Saigon, the United States has no obligation to evacuate one or 100,000 in one South Vietnamese.
As I read the language of the bill, the evacuation of Americans in South Vietnam conceivably could be endangered because of the provisions also permitting the evacuation of untold numbers of foreign nationals.
So this goes back 40 years for this jackass.
I mean, it's amazing.
It goes back almost half a century.
Joe Biden's complete lack of care about people who are being victimized by the regimes that the Democrats have empowered.
It's pretty incredible.
Meanwhile, by the way, forget about the Afghan nationals for a second.
The Americans are still stuck there.
Now, the State Department's been trying to downplay that.
Here was Ned Price yesterday saying that the Americans being blocked from the airport, they're a small number.
It's just congestion.
It's not chaos.
This is contrary to every report we were receiving from on the ground.
We have a relatively large cadre of consular officers on the ground in Kabul right now.
They are in regular and constant contact with American citizens.
I can tell you that they have received, as of a couple hours ago, a small handful of reports from American citizens who weren't able to reach the airport for whatever reason.
We've seen the reports of congestion.
My understanding is that things are moving quite efficiently at this hour at the airport now.
Oh really?
Things are moving well now?
Clarissa Ward reporting for CNN says, quote, this is one of the most harrowing things I've experienced.
What is she talking about?
The scene at the Kabul airport.
According to the Washington Post, a chaotic and dangerous dynamic at Kabul's airport showed few signs of relenting Thursday as thousands of people attempting to board flights faced beatings by Taliban guards, the crush of heaving crowds, and interminable spells in the dust and heat while waiting to escape Afghanistan.
Several people said Thursday they'd received confusing signals from the U.S.
about how exactly they were supposed to leave, citing emails from the State Department urging them to go to the airport, only to find there was no one to receive them or to answer their questions on how to board flights.
We arrived at 6 a.m., said a 39-year-old librarian, a dual U.S.-Afghan citizen who came with his wife and two kids after receiving an email invitation from the State Department.
From 6 a.m.
until 6 p.m., the gate did not open.
There is no person to address our concerns.
And now we are learning that the Taliban is targeting journalists who report on the chaos.
The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle said a close relative of one of its journalists had been murdered by Taliban fighters.
The relative was shot as militants went house to house searching for the journalist in Western Afghanistan, according to the news organization.
And, um, you know, Clarissa Ward and her crew are now inside the airport.
But she's saying that, again, inside the airport, it is not a lot better than it is outside the airport.
The Pentagon spokesperson, by the way, Ned Price, he can't, or John Kirby, rather, he can't even say how many Americans are even in Afghanistan at this point.
How many American citizens remain in Afghanistan?
I don't know.
The State Department would be a better place to go for an estimate of how many Americans are in Afghanistan or in and around Kabul.
That is not a figure that the United States military would know.
And I think, as you also know, not every American citizen in another country... There's no obligation that they register their presence.
And that you can have a perfect, accurate count.
Okay, in order to make anybody believe that the Biden administration has any level of control, the Biden administration has now been put in the position of becoming the PR wing for the Taliban.
This is not a surprise.
You saw that the Obama administration did the exact same thing with Iran.
Obama came into office wanting Iran to be established as a sort of regional power for no reason at all.
Because again, he had perverse foreign policy ideas that made no sense in the real world.
And so what this meant is he wanted to cut a deal with the Taliban, with the Iranians.
So he lied to the American people.
And so did Ben Rhodes, his national security advisor.
They just lied.
They went out there and they said that there was a moderate wing of the Iranians, and we were emboldening the moderate wing of the Iranian government, and then we spent years defending the Iranian government.
Oh, really, they're moderate.
Oh, really, they're moderating.
Oh, really, they're getting better.
Oh, you know, they're really not so bad.
Is there anything really to worry about?
They're going to get better, guys.
I mean, they want to be legitimate players on the world stage.
We became the PR wing for the Iranian mullahs, even as they fostered terrorism around the region, even as they murdered tens of thousands of people in places like Syria and Lebanon and Yemen.
Even as they funded Hamas, right?
It was the United States and Barack Obama's administration who were soft-peddling the evils of the Iranian regime.
Now we're doing the exact same thing with the Taliban.
Because you see, in order to make Americans believe everything is going to be okay in Afghanistan, we have to believe that the Taliban are a different sort of Taliban.
Maybe they're changing their stripes.
You know, no guarantees.
But maybe they're going to be better this time around.
Now, is there any evidence whatsoever, like at all, that they're better this time around?
They're literally just shooting people.
They're going around and hunting journalists.
They pledged the same thing in 96 when they first took over Afghanistan that they have now, which is pardon for everybody.
And then by pardon, they mean you will be dead.
I mean, that's basically what they mean.
But you've now turned the White House of the United States into a PR wing for the worst people on Earth, the same way that Obama did with the Iranians.
So here, for example, is the president of the United States, Joe Biden, saying, you know, The Taliban, they're probably going through some sort of existential crisis right now.
You know, they have to decide whether they want to be part of the international community.
Here's the thing.
They've already decided.
The answer is no, and they are not going through an existential crisis.
The West is going through an existential crisis because the West has no idea what it believes.
The West doesn't know what it stands for, aside from the evils of supposed inherent white supremacy embedded in all of our institutions and Transgenderism.
The West has basically very few principles to which it is certainly committed at this point.
We don't know what we stand for.
We don't know why we stand for the things we stand for.
We are going through an existential crisis.
The Taliban are going through a victory dance because a bunch of regressive barbaric cavemen from the 8th century just defeated the most powerful military in the history of the world.
By the way, for the second time, right?
Because they did this to the Soviets in the 80s.
So now they're proclaiming victory on the exact same thing, even though really the two instances shouldn't be comparable.
The United States was holding the line in Afghanistan with 2,500 troops.
The difference is the Taliban have a 1,000-year time horizon and we have about a 20-year time horizon in the United States.
We get bored after 20 years and we're like, oh, well, this is an endless war.
You know what an endless war means to the Taliban?
You know what an endless war means to the people in Afghanistan?
Afghanistan has essentially been in a state of war since at least 1979.
So an endless war to them does not look like an endless war to us.
And so they can declare victory after having their asses kicked all over the map for 20 years because they outlasted us.
But in any case, Joe Biden has now become the PR wing for the Taliban.
This is what he has to do now.
I think they're going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government?
I'm not sure they do.
But look, they have.
They care about their beliefs more.
Well, they do.
But they also care about whether they have food to eat, whether they have an income that can make any money.
and run an economy.
They care about whether or not they can hold together the society that they, in fact, say they care so much about.
What an absolute joke.
The president of the United... There he is.
They want legitimacy in the same way that Hamas wants legitimacy, guys.
It's all these terrorist groups.
They just want legitimacy.
The president of the United States is now running cover for the Taliban.
That's the only thing you can take away from that clip.
I'm not sure that they want legitimacy.
But, you know, they do want to make sure that they can run the economy.
They want to make sure.
I mean, wouldn't they want to be welcomed into the family of nations?
By the way, it's this exact same sort of arrogance that led to a lot of the nation building project in the first place.
They're just like us, guys.
They want to make sure that their that their country still runs.
They have the same priorities we do.
John Kirby at the Pentagon was specifically asked whether the Biden administration considers the Taliban an enemy.
Now, this should have a pretty obvious answer.
The answer is yes.
The Taliban are the worst people on the planet.
The Taliban are responsible for thousands of Americans' deaths.
The Taliban are going around murdering our allies.
Yes, they are our enemy.
They've continued to be our enemy.
But because Joe Biden just surrendered to them, he now has to say that it's not a surrender by pretending they're not our enemy.
So that's what John Kirby does here.
He just avoids the question as to whether the Taliban are our enemy.
Does the U.S.
military consider the Taliban an enemy?
Our focus right now, the thing we're working against right now, is time and space.
And we want to get as many people out of Kabul as we can in as little amount of time as we can.
That is called a not answer at all.
The question was, are the Taliban our enemy?
And the answer was, we're trying to get Americans out.
So I guess we're the PR wing for the Taliban now.
That's exciting.
In a second, we'll get to what Joe Biden's calculus here is.
Because it's pretty obvious what his calculus is.
Why he's doing all of this and what his angle here is.
Because you look at this and I look at this and we say this is the worst foreign policy disaster of the last 40 years, at least since the fall of Iran in 79.
Maybe since the end of World War II, considering it's so self-inflicted.
I mean, at least when Iran fell, we really had very little to do with it.
When it comes to this, we are the complete cause of it.
I think it's the worst foreign policy disaster for America.
Man, honestly, I'm hard-pressed to think of a worse foreign po- The end of Vietnam was not even as much of a foreign policy disaster as this is.
Truly.
But Joe Biden has a plan.
We'll get to the actual plan in one second.
First, let us talk about a simple fact.
If you have a medical problem that could be taken care of quickly and easily, why wouldn't you just go get it solved?
With Roman, you can get a free online evaluation and ongoing care for erectile dysfunction, all from the comfort and privacy of your home.
Roman Ready means confidence, the confidence you know you can rise to the occasion.
In the moment, a U.S.
licensed healthcare professional will work with you to find the best treatment plan.
If medication is appropriate, it ships to you free with two-day shipping.
The whole process is straightforward, convenient, and discreet.
Getting started is simple.
Just go to GetRoman.com slash Ben.
Complete an online visit.
Take care of your ED without leaving your home.
Complete an online visit today to connect with a U.S.
licensed healthcare professional and get it taken care of right now.
Go to GetRoman.com slash Ben today.
If you're prescribed, get 50% off your first month of ED treatment.
Make sure you're ready to have confidence and control this summer.
Roman Ready.
Go check out Roman right now.
If you've got a problem like erectile dysfunction, it can be embarrassing to talk about.
Maybe you want to ignore it.
Don't.
Just go talk about it discreetly and easily.
Get the treatment you need at GetRoman.com slash Ben Today.
If prescribed, get 50% off your first month of ED treatment.
All right, we'll get to more on the disaster in Afghanistan.
Plus, we'll get to COVID as well.
First, if you like to stay well-read and informed, the Daily Wire Reader's Pass is for you.
For just four bucks a month, our Daily Wire's Reader's Pass unlocks exclusive editorial content.
It unpacks trending political and cultural topics penned by everyone from me to Candace Owens to Dan Crenshaw.
Plus, you can catch our latest analysis pieces like my own titled, The Fight Over Identity, or take a deep dive with Reader's Pass collections, different series of articles on a given topic, Current collections include the Hunter Biden files and BLM, the organization behind a movement.
All of that for four bucks a month.
When you sign up with Reader's Pass, you also get access to the Morning Wire newsletter, a Monday through Saturday email covering the top stories you need to know, available only to Daily Wire members.
All of this can be yours for just four bucks a month.
So act fast, because right now we are offering a one-month free trial.
It's a good deal.
It's also never been a better time to take it.
So what exactly are you waiting for?
Get informed.
Get a Reader's Pass today.
Also, as you may or may not know, the Sweet Baby Gang is an exclusive club only Matt Walsh's listeners are a part of.
If you're one of the gang, I have excellent news.
The Sweet Baby Gang is in need of a Sweet Baby Anthem, and The Daily Wire is opening up for submissions.
Matt is looking for an original song that embodies exactly what the Sweet Baby Gang is.
All submissions should be in the form of YouTube video links will be judged American Idol style by me and the other Daily Wire hosts.
I think you know who Simon Cowell will be.
But you, the viewer, will be voting on which song wins.
To enter, go to dailywire.com slash s-b-g.
Submissions end on August 25th.
If you think you've got what it takes to impress Matt Walsh, you better get started.
Voting will take place on Labor Day, so tune in to Matt Walsh's YouTube channel to watch the judging of the submissions.
The winner will be announced September 8th on The Matt Walsh Show.
will wear the crown of the creator of the most important anthem to have ever been anthemed again.
To enter your song into competition, go to dailywire.com slash sbg.
We all look forward to hearing it.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Meanwhile, the media reaction to what Joe Biden is doing is beginning to rush in.
It is not good.
So what does Biden think that he is doing here?
According to Reuters, Biden basically thinks he's going to wait it out.
Reuters says President Joe Biden is brushing off criticism of his administration's chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal because he and his aides believe the political fallout at home will be limited, according to White House allies and administration officials.
That, of course, is not a giant shock, considering that he said 10 years ago that uh F that with regard to whether there would be consequences for withdrawal Nixon and Kissinger got away with it which is an amazing thing considering that neither Nixon nor Kissinger were actually responsible for the Vietnam withdrawal.
Gerald Ford was president at the time Nixon had been gone for a while and it was the Democratic Congress that actually caused the Vietnam withdrawal in the first place but the idea here is that he's just going to be able to outlive this.
Joe Biden will just outlive this, right?
We'll all forget about it.
We'll all move on.
I am not nearly so sanguine, particularly since it seems like this administration is still trying to figure out whether or not they're going to leave people behind.
Breonna Keillor over at CNN, she actually asked directly the White House communications director, This would be Kate Bedingfield.
She asked her directly, are you prepared to leave people behind in Afghanistan?
And Kate Bedingfield said, we're doing everything we can to get as many people out who want to get out before the August 31st deadline.
Who set that deadline?
That's the Taliban setting that deadline, right?
I have a feeling that if you leave a bunch of Americans there, Kate and Joe, I have a feeling that the fallout may not be limited.
I have a feeling that people are going to be kind of pissed if you leave thousands of Americans in Kabul because you were so stupid that you left them in the hands of the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the British and the French somehow are sending their paratroopers in to get people out.
I have a feeling Americans might not take particularly kindly to all of that.
One of the things that has fascinated me about the situation in Afghanistan right now is the media coverage thereof.
Because the media coverage has been really good, like really accurate, quite good, hypercritical of President Biden, everywhere from like the European press to the American press.
And it got me wondering why?
Why are the media, and this is literally the first time in my lifetime that a Democrat has done something egregious and the media have been all over it.
The media never do this.
Even when Bill Clinton was getting caught in the Oval Office with his pants down, the media were like, oh, well, you know, boys will be boys.
Even when it was Barack Obama completely botching things in Iraq to the extent that ISIS rose, it was, well, you know, that was really the consequence of a bad Iraq war and he can't really be blamed.
And after all, it was Biden who was going to go, it was Obama who was going to go in and fix the problem.
This is the first time I've ever seen, I think in my entire adult lifetime, Where Democrats do something so egregious that even the media are forced to look at it and go, this is horrifying.
And it really is across the spectrum.
There are very few media defenders of the Biden administration at this point.
CNN's Clarissa Ward has been doing excellent work on the ground at CNN.
She, of course, is incredibly brave.
She's been on the ground in Kabul dealing with all of this.
And she is leading the charge here.
The lack of clear information.
The rumor mill is in overdrive.
There's hysteria.
You have Taliban fighters with whips, with guns.
You have US and UK soldiers who are not allowing people in.
You have mixed messaging coming through about what kind of paperwork you need and how you can get on a flight and where you can go.
I mean, it is just An absolute mess.
And we heard President Biden say yesterday in his comments to ABC News that this is not a failure.
And I think a lot of people outside that airport, particularly those taking the kinds of extreme actions we're just talking about, would like to know, if this isn't failure, what does failure look like exactly?
Okay, and you're hearing the same thing from Jay Tapper over at CNN.
You're hearing the same thing from MSNBC's Kelly O'Donnell, who says Biden is pretty obviously ducking the press at this point, which he pretty clearly is.
Does the White House have a good explanation so if the president now says chaos was inevitable?
Then, are they acknowledging that he misled us?
So was that mislead a month ago on purpose?
Because they didn't want to offend the Afghan government?
Well, they're not acknowledging that discrepancy yet.
We've had no opportunity, no briefing, no ability to get a real sense of that.
What they are saying is that they had planned for and expected that there could be a fall, but the timing has been what they've been focused on.
That it wouldn't be as precipitous as we have seen happen.
Okay, everybody acknowledging this is a mess.
The New York Times' Jonathan Martin, he says, yeah, it's pretty clear that the Biden administration is lying to us.
You have the president talking about chaos being inevitable.
Sure, the chaos was inevitable if you're talking about a Taliban takeover of Kabul, if you're talking about a dangerous situation and just the crumbling of humanitarian and human rights.
But it was not expected to be chaos when you're talking about evacuating embassy staff at the very last minute, evacuating and trying to figure out what to do with the Afghan staffers at the very last minute.
That was not predicted and that should have been handled.
He said the opposite the previous month, and I think that's the big challenge for him politically is that he has a paper trail of statements literally, as Joe Biden would say, saying the opposite than in fact what happened.
And I think there's no willingness on his part to acknowledge his previous statements here and sort of eat that.
My first time in my adult lifetime that the media are actually covering this stuff accurately.
The first time.
And, you know, it does raise the question as to why.
I think there are a couple of answers.
The first answer is that the media actually thought Afghanistan was the good war.
Many of them were embedded with American troops.
Many of them got to know Afghans on the ground.
And now they are realizing that they've been lied to by Joe Biden.
And I think they're insulted by that.
And they should be insulted by that.
All right, meanwhile, the situation with regard to COVID has continued to be the narrative that Joe Biden hoped props him up.
And so, so much right now is Joe Biden blowing things in Afghanistan and then turning and wheeling and trying to clock somebody over COVID.
Now, here's the thing.
It was Joe Biden who promised on July 4th that we were done.
And if he had set the metrics properly, we would have been done on July 4th.
Meaning, does every adult in America have the ability to get the shot?
The answer is yes.
So, what are we talking about now?
Really, what are we talking about?
The Democrats set an unrealistic standard with regard to COVID.
And the unrealistic standard was zero COVID.
They will never acknowledge this, that their goal is actually zero COVID.
But that is their goal.
And that goal is not realistic, because COVID is going to be with us until the end of time.
There are hundreds of millions of people who have COVID right now.
There are hundreds of millions of people who have already had COVID.
We already have a large majority of the adult population of the United States that has had either COVID or the jab at this point.
So there's no end point.
There's no end point for the Democrats.
And so Democrats continue to try and manufacture this idea that they know how to deal with COVID.
And the Republicans are obstructing that in the hopes that the American people will blame Republicans for, number one, Joe Biden's failure to set any sort of actual reasonable metrics with regard to COVID, number two, Democrats' broad-scale desire to lockdown and mask people for the end of time, and three, to distract from his gigantic, enormous, historic, world-historic failure in Afghanistan.
And so they're going to go right back to the COVID drawing board.
So Ron DeSantis has become their target of opportunity.
They've hated DeSantis since the beginning of the pandemic because he presides over the oldest state in the country outside of Maine, which again has seven people in a moose.
DeSantis has performed admirably.
I live in Florida.
It is a relief to see a politician who actually follows the data and recognizes that mask mandates are completely useless.
There is no actual evidence that mask mandates, not masks, mask mandates do anything.
When it comes to Delta, it is pretty clear that cloth masks are very ineffective.
OK, this is not me saying this.
This is Michael Osterholm, the former Biden advisor, saying this.
There's people like Scott Gottlieb pointing out that cloth masks are not particularly effective against Delta because the viral load on Delta is much, much higher than the viral load on the Alpha variant, B117.
So...
When Ron DeSantis says there's no evidence that kids should be masked in schools, he is absolutely correct.
Now, let's be clear about what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida, by the way.
He has not said that kids cannot mask in school.
That's not what he said.
He has said that local school districts will not receive funding if they ban kids from school for not masking.
That is a difference.
The media have lied about this.
They've said that he's banned masks in schools.
That is not correct.
If you want to mask your kid in school, you are still capable of doing so.
There's no evidence you should.
There's no evidence that masking in school is particularly effective.
First of all, kids are not good at wearing masks.
Second of all, most of the kids are wearing cloth masks.
Third of all, if you want to mask your kid with an N95, I suppose you're free to do so, although there are a lot of studies suggesting that mask masking around kids is not good for their mental development, and that there may be physical consequences to kids breathing in their own carbon dioxide all day.
But, putting all of that aside, Ron DeSantis has not handled things poorly.
We are seeing upticks in virtually every state in the Union.
Florida, it looks like, by the way, already has seen its peak in terms of cases and deaths, according to Worldometers.
You can see the case numbers are already declining over the last week or so.
The death numbers have been declining pretty steeply over the last week or so in Florida, despite the media focusing incessantly on Florida.
Not Louisiana, which is an actual large-scale rolling disaster, but Florida, because Louisiana has a Democratic governor, Florida does not.
But DeSantis, Was ripping Biden and the Democrats hope to redirect toward COVID because again, they don't want anybody talking about Afghanistan.
Here is a Ron DeSantis slamming Biden.
I think Trump was right to say we needed to come home from Afghanistan.
How you do that matters.
When you're leaving thousands of Americans to fend for themselves behind enemy lines, that matters.
When you're leaving billions of dollars in military equipment for our enemies to just take, that matters.
It's going to make that area a disaster.
Obviously Americans are at risk.
And Sean, you know who's looking at this?
China.
Russia, North Korea, all of our adversaries are taking the measure of Joe Biden.
And they see that this is not somebody who's capable of leading with conviction and leading on the world stage.
Okay, everybody knows this.
So Joe Biden's idea is let's redirect toward COVID.
And let's do it with policy that is never ending.
The masking of children has become the point du jour.
This is the thing that Democrats and the left would love to talk about, is masking kids.
So, Anthony Fauci, who can always be counted on to take a series of conflicting decisions, and can also be counted on to do so with great confidence.
Like, he'll take two positions that are in complete conflict with one another over the course of a year, and then he will say each with equal confidence.
So here he is saying it's time to mask up kids again.
Can he cite a study like one study showing that mandatory masking of children has been effective?
The answer is he cannot, because those studies do not exist.
The answer is he cannot, because those studies do not exist.
There is no evidence that masking of kids is effective.
Or, by the way, necessary.
Because, thank God, the Delta variant is no more deadly for kids, as far as the data that we have seen, than was the Alpha variant, which means it is highly not deadly for kids.
Again, I'm going to say to you, the CDC statistics on age, okay?
Here are the CDC statistics on age.
I'm looking at them right now.
Okay, according to the CDC, a grand total, this is updated as of August 18th, 2021, two days ago, the grand total of people in the United States under the age of 18 who have died involving COVID-19, involving COVID-19, right?
Not just of COVID-19, involving COVID-19.
This is the CDC's language.
Zero to 17, a cohort of 73 million Americans, 361.
We are not seeing a radical uptick in death among the young.
We're not.
Okay, anybody who's telling you differently is lying to you.
It is not true.
I looked at the stats a week ago.
Since August 11th, a grand total of seven children, people under the age of 18, have died of COVID-19 in the United States, out of a cohort of 73 million.
Okay, no, we are not seeing a radical exponential spike in death rates for kids.
But if the left can convince you that your kids are in danger, they can continue to focus in on an issue where they think they have a winning hand.
Because then they get to claim that Republicans just don't care if kids die.
Here's Anthony Fauci doing this routine.
Masks are an important thing for the mitigation of the transmission and the acquisition of infection.
They are very important, particularly when you have a highly, highly transmissible virus in the form of the Delta variant.
And that's the reason why, when you talk about the extra added degree of protection, even in a school system where you may have vaccinated teachers and some of the children may be vaccinated, you want to wear a mask To protect the children so that they could continue to be in school, in person, in classes, so that we don't get the deleterious effects on the child of, again, keeping them out of school.
You want to do that, but you want to do it safely.
Okay, notice the lack of logic here.
Okay, so he says, we have to make sure that we mask all the kids because otherwise the kids might get sick.
Okay, now, number one, kids who are getting sick from COVID, as a general rule, and I'm talking statistically, do not get seriously ill from COVID.
Okay, so then he says, we have to make sure that we don't shut down schools, right?
We have to keep them in school.
I have a question.
What is your standard for keeping them in school?
Seriously, what is your standard?
If your standard, because this shows that all they care about is zero COVID.
If your kid had a cold, okay, let's just take a completely different disease, a different coronavirus.
Your kid had a cold in school.
Your kid transmitted that cold in school to the other kids.
Did they shut down the class?
Has that ever happened anytime in your entire life?
Did it happen when you were a kid or when your kids are kids?
Of course not.
That's very silly.
So, case count is not necessarily what matters here.
The question is, is anyone getting seriously ill among the children?
If the answer is no, why are you shutting down classes?
Why?
You actually have to explain what is the metric for shutting down classes.
The metric seems to be zero COVID.
If there are no cases of COVID among kids, we keep the classes open.
But what I am saying is that that is an idiotic standard.
Why should I care particularly much if a bunch of kids get colds?
I never have before.
I don't particularly now.
And if we're worried about the teachers, the teachers should all be vaccinated.
And if they don't want to get vaccinated, they can wear an N95.
That one's on them.
What we are really doing here, and everybody knows it, is we are masking up the kids to protect the teachers or to make people's faint-hearted parents feel better about themselves.
That's what we are doing here.
Hey, that is not rooted in data linked to danger for children.
Because again, the danger to children from COVID is exorbitantly low.
Extremely low.
361 kids dead over the course of the last year and a half.
Every one of those is a tragedy, but 361 kids under the age of 18 have died in the United States from COVID over the course of the last year and a half at the same exact period of time.
Same exact period of time.
The number of kids who have died from other diseases is much, much, much higher.
The number of kids who have died from, for example, pneumonia is 865 over the course of the same amount of time.
Even the flu, which basically didn't exist last year, got wiped out by COVID apparently.
Even 188 kids died of the flu in the last year and a half.
So about half the number of kids died of the flu as died of COVID.
If you're looking at the amount of deadliness, you have to look back at the Asian flu epidemic that happened in 2009, 2010.
That particular flu epidemic didn't actually It was more deadly for kids than this is.
Like, there is no metric here.
None at all.
Which, by the way, I mean, this is... This, by the way, is the reason... Sorry, not the Asian flu, the swine flu.
The swine flu from April 2009 to April 2010 resulted in about 1,282 deaths of kids under the age of 18.
Okay, so it's deadlier.
Did anybody shut down schools for it?
Of course not.
That's incredibly silly.
Okay, but they continue to argue about masking kids.
Why?
Because it allows them to do the political thing of suggesting that Republicans are the worst people in the world.
So here, for example, is Don Lemon doing just that.
Again, completely data-free, just nonsense.
How is it freedom to force children who are too young to be vaccinated into schools where they could be exposed to a deadly virus surrounded by people- Pause it for a second.
Hold on a second.
So, where they could be exposed to a deadly virus?
Not for them!
Not for them!
Where are the stats showing this is a highly deadly virus for children?
They don't exist.
They don't exist.
But this Claude is saying this sort of stuff to scare the hell out of parents.
I know this is happening because in my own community, there are a bunch of parents who are freaked out about COVID hitting their kids when the stats do not bear it out.
They do not bear it out.
At all.
And by the way, there's no evidence that even if you mask your kids, it's gonna do a damn good thing.
There's no evidence of this.
Anyway, here's Don Lemon.
Again, this is all political.
This is not data-driven.
It is not science-driven.
Putting politics ahead of life-saving science, like those governors are encouraging people to do, it is just depraved.
People are dying all across this country.
People with loved ones who are grieving tonight.
These are people who didn't have to die.
Okay, stop it right here.
Okay, he's such a liar.
These are people who didn't have to die.
If only we had mask mandates.
Mask mandates have not worked anywhere on Earth.
There is no evidence that mask mandates, not masks, mask mandates.
Because here's the thing, when people are scared of the virus, they mask up.
You don't need a mandate.
When people aren't scared of the virus, it doesn't matter if you have a mandate, they don't mask up.
And when it comes to COVID, when it comes to the Delta variant, cloth masks ain't doing the job.
You need an N95 or a KN95, according to best available data.
By the way, in Sweden, they never masked kids.
According to Martin Koldorf, who's a professor at Harvard Medical School, quote, with open schools and no masks for ages 1 through 15 in Sweden, there were zero COVID deaths among its 1.8 million children during the first wave.
Teachers had a lower risk than average of other professions.
So we knew early on that schools are safe without masks.
And we also know that the UK didn't really mask.
According to Fortune.com, as Delta infections spiked, COVID cases in schools actually fell.
For parents wary of sending their kids off to school, here's a rare bit of comforting data.
Fewer than 1 in 100 school students and staff in England tested positive for COVID-19 in June.
The capper.
There was no mask mandate in the schools at the time.
This came as Delta variant cases were peaking across not just England, but the whole of the UK.
And again, Other countries are not super crazy the way that we are apparently.
Here's the head of the UK Department of Education or an advisor named Dr. Susan Hopkins talking about why kids don't need masks.
In looking at it, we've talked to educationalists, public health and clinical specialists, and the consensus view is very strongly to not advise school children at primary school age to wear face coverings.
This is for two reasons.
One is that they can have difficulties wearing them and keeping them on all day, and the second part of that is that it's really important that they can see facial expressions in order to develop their communications and language skills.
Okay, yes, correct.
Okay, so the UK has it.
What about us?
We're doing so much crap that is superstitious pagan nonsense.
Okay, another element of the superstitious pagan nonsense.
Remember all of these plastic barriers that people have put up?
Yeah, so all last year in my kid's classroom, for example, they had these plexiglass barriers in front of them, right?
This is supposed to block COVID.
For some odd reason.
My kid, sitting behind a plastic barrier.
Not on all four sides, right?
Not like it was a box made of plastic.
Like, just a screen in front of them.
This was supposed to block COVID.
Now, according to the New York Times, it turns out that's crap.
Tara Parker Pope says COVID precautions have turned many parts of our world into a giant salad bar with plastic barriers separating sales clerks from shoppers, dividing shoppers in nail salons, and shielding students from their classmates. Intuition tells us a plastic shield would be protective against germs.
But scientists who study aerosols, airflow, and ventilation say much of the time the barriers don't help, and probably give people a false sense of security.
Sometimes the barriers can make things worse.
Research suggests that in some instances, a barrier protecting a clerk behind a checkout counter may redirect the germs to another worker or customer.
Rows of clear plastic shields, like you might find in a nail salon or a classroom, can also impede normal airflow and ventilation.
Under normal conditions in stores, classrooms, and offices, exhaled breath particles disperse, carried by air currents, and, depending on the ventilation system, are replaced by fresh air roughly every 15 to 30 minutes.
But, if you erect plastic barriers, that can change airflow in a room, disrupt normal ventilation, and create dead zones where viral aerosol particles can build up and become highly concentrated.
Says Lindsay Marr, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, and one of the world's leading experts on viral transmission, quote, If you have a forest of barriers in a classroom, it's going to interfere with proper ventilation of that room.
Everybody's aerosols are going to be trapped and stuck there in building up, and they will end up spreading beyond your own desk.
OK, so just to get this straight, over the course of the pandemic, we went from masks are bad, according to Fauci, to masks are not only good, but the best.
Two, we need plastic barriers, super important, too.
Plastic barriers may, in fact, make things worse.
Two, we have to have six feet of distancing, but also six feet of distancing comes from absolutely nowhere.
Like if you ask the CDC where six feet of social distancing comes from, they have no idea.
It's a standard that comes from nowhere.
But it's all the science, guys.
It's the science because Don Lemon says it's the science.
And by the way, anybody who is worried about getting a vaccine, a Moderna vaccine, if they're young, right?
If anybody who actually looks at their own risk factors and says, listen, I think I'm young and I'm healthy, I'm probably not going to get super sick from COVID-19 because just the odds are in my favor.
And, you know, I'm not super comfortable with, like, the Moderna vaccine.
Those people are apparently anti-vax crazies, according to everybody.
Quote from the Washington Post today.
today, federal health officials are investigating emerging reports that the Moderna coronavirus vaccine may be associated with a higher risk of a heart condition called myocarditis in younger adults than previously believed, according to two people familiar with the review.
The investigation, which involves the FDA and Center for Disease Control, is focused on Canadian data that suggests the Moderna vaccine may carry a higher risk for young people than the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, especially for males below the age of 30 or so.
you The two people who described the investigation spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
Moderna did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, the CDC said its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has and continues to review reports of myocarditis and pericarditis following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination.
CDC, FDA, our vaccine safety partners are actively monitoring these reports.
One individual said the Canadian data indicates there might be a 2.5 times higher incidence of myocarditis in those who get Moderna compared with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
It's still extremely rare.
So again, this is not an anti-vaccine point.
I still think that all factors being taken into consideration for nearly everyone, the vaccine is a good idea.
At least for people who are not children.
But people who are looking around and saying, I feel like I'm not being told all the risks, I mean, that's not totally irrational, especially, again, if you are very young and if your risk factors are very low.
Again, to go back to those CDC death data by age, it's not just that this thing is very not deadly for kids.
This thing is not particularly deadly for adults who are under the age of 30.
If you look at the actual statistics from the CDC across the course of this entire pandemic, The entire pandemic.
More people in the United States aged 18 to 29 have died of pneumonia than have died of COVID in the same period.
Right?
So, it's much more deadly than the flu for people who are 18 to 29.
Like, a lot more deadly than the flu for people who are aged 18 to 29.
But it's not more deadly than pneumonia.
And also, again, like, you are a rational human being.
You get to take your risk factors into account.
But the idea here is that if you take risk factors into account, this means that you're very bad.
Here's the bottom line.
Everybody gets to make their own decision now.
We are all rational human beings.
We all get to make our own decision about our own health.
When it comes to whether to take a vaccine or not, I have my ideas of whether you should take it.
I think, generally, you should.
Unless you have some really compelling reason not to, I think you should take the vaccine if you're an adult.
With that said, We all have our free choice.
It's been available for a while.
We're now done.
But the left has to keep this alive, and they must keep this alive explicitly for political purposes.
And now, more than ever, they have to keep it alive for political purposes, because as we exit the summer and we enter the winter, and the Delta spike shifts from the seasonally hot states like Florida and Texas, and shifts into the Midwest and maybe into the Northeast, you're gonna start seeing all the COVID talk start to fade just a little.
It can't be quite as political as it's been.
And right now is the time to make hay for the Democrats.
They have to make hay right now because their president is completely destroying America's foreign policy.
And it turns out that their push for tyranny at home is not all that popular either.
Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's show is every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
Head on over to dailywire.com at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central.
Tune in.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliott Felt.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Production manager, Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate producer, Bradford Carrington.
Post producer, Justin Barber.
The show is edited by Adam Sievitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Christina.
Production assistant, Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright, Daily Wire 2021.
Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
▲
Export Selection