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Sept. 2, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:05:06

The Holy Sacrament Of Abortion | Ep. 1332

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	A holy war breaks out after Texas bans abortion after the detection of fetal heartbeat.
	The Biden administration continues to declare its own heroism while telling Americans that the Taliban might be our friends now.
	And Don Lemon says if you're unvaccinated, don't go to the hospital if you're sick.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Alrighty, so the big news of the day is, of course, that the Supreme Court has not immediately enjoined a Texas state law that effectively prevents abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
	And the reason that the Supreme Court did this is because of procedural mechanics here.
	So basically, the Supreme Court ruled, and the ruling was, it was a 5-4 ruling with, of course, Chief Justice Roberts joining the dissenters.
	It was the Republican appointees on one side, and then Roberts with the liberals on the other.
	And the basic scheme of the Texas law is why the law was not immediately taken up by the Supreme Court.
	So normally, in order for you to have a lawsuit that is taken up by an appeals court or taken up by the Supreme Court, You have to have somebody to sue, right?
	Just because you see something wrong in life does not mean that you get to sue.
	And the person that you sue has to be the right person.
	And if you're suing over a law, presumably, if you sue, for example, the person who is enforcing the law, that person has to have the power to enforce the law.
	So, for example, in Roe vs. Wade, it was an official of government who was being sued in Roe vs. Wade because it was that person's responsibility to enforce the law, so that person ends up as the defendant.
	This is usually the case when you have a case that's appealed to the Supreme Court and it has to do with a law that is being enforced by the state.
	Usually there's some official whose name you don't know who ends up as the defendant in that particular lawsuit.
	Well Texas found a way around this, at least for the moment, it's sort of a creative way around this.
	The way that they wrote the law, it is not that the Texas state government is going to be enforcing the law.
	It's not like somebody comes to your door and takes you off to jail if you participate in the abortion process at 12 weeks of pregnancy.
	Instead, what the Texas state law basically did is it created a private right of action.
	The private right of action essentially allows anyone to sue a person in court who has participated in the facilitation of an abortion.
	According to Politico, individuals found to have violated that law would have to pay $10,000 to the person who successfully brings such a lawsuit.
	It's almost sort of a private bounty, in other words.
	So, let's say that there's a woman who wants an abortion.
	I know her abortion doctor is providing her an abortion.
	I can sue the abortion doctor for providing her an abortion at 10 weeks, and then he has to pay me $10,000 for his violation of the law.
	According to Politico, anti-abortion groups in the states such as Texas Rights Life have in recent weeks set up tip lines for people to anonymously report violators ahead of the law's implementation.
	Earlier on Tuesday, a federal district court issued a temporary restraining order Barring the group from filing suits against a small group of individuals and organizations that assist patients in obtaining an abortion, but both sides of the case acknowledge the order is very narrow and the anti-abortion group said it still plans to solicit tips and bring lawsuits against abortion providers now that the courts have given a green light to the law's implementation.
	So, the Supreme Court majority does not say whether the law is constitutional.
	They just say that it is not clear whether they can take up the case because there's nobody to sue yet, right?
	Nobody has actually brought a lawsuit along these lines as of yet.
	So the Supreme Court found, To prevail in an application for a stay or an injunction, an applicant must carry the burden of making a strong showing that is likely to succeed on the merits, and that will be irrevocably injured absent a stay, and that the balance of equities favors it, and that a stay is consistent with the public interest.
	The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue, but their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden.
	So this is the Supreme Court saying, listen, we might not strike down Roe vs. Wade.
	We might, in fact, strike down this law.
	But first, you have to go through the actual procedure of somebody having been grievously harmed by a private actor in this particular way.
	Because this lawsuit was, again, directed at a person, Austin Reeve Jackson, who's a judge.
	It's directed at a person who actually does not have the power to even enforce the law, per se.
	So says the majority.
	Federal courts enjoy the power to enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves.
	It is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention.
	The state has represented that neither it nor its executive employees possess the authority to enforce the Texas law either directly or indirectly, nor is it clear whether under existing precedent this court can issue an injunction against state judges asked to decide a lawsuit under Texas law, which is the person who was sued in this particular case.
	Finally, the sole private citizen respondent before us has filed an affidavit stating he has no present intention to enforce the law.
	In light of such issues, we can't say the applicants have met their burden to prevail in an injunction or stay application.
	Okay, then there were the dissents.
	In the dissents, Justice Roberts didn't say that he would vote to uphold Roe v. Wade.
	He just said that if he put an injunction on the law pending Some sort of resolution of the underlying issues.
	There's the procedural issues, and then there's the underlying issue, which is really the one at the heart of the case, which is, is it constitutional to pass a law that bars abortion after week six?
	Now, look, from a pure constitutional perspective, the answer, of course, is it's fully constitutional.
	For the vast majority of America's history, there were abortion laws in virtually every state.
	And obviously, there is no right to an abortion in the Constitution of the United States.
	You can't point to it.
	You can't point to anything that points to it.
	It is emanations and penumbras and an idiotic Supreme Court majority in Roe vs. Wade that literally created a right to abortion out of whole cloth.
	I mean, it's just created.
	Fully.
	And just sits there.
	Like a turd at the bottom of the toilet bowl.
	That's how bad that decision is.
	It is a terrible decision.
	Even people who are advocates of abortion generally recognize that Roe vs. Wade is not a good legal decision.
	They just like the outcome.
	So, as a matter of just what's in the Constitution on the underlying issue, the answer is, of course, Texas can pass this law.
	And California can also pass a law that allows abortion up till a particular point.
	Maybe beyond, depending on what exactly California is doing and whether the 14th Amendment and the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause applies to the unborn.
	There's a strong pro-life case that the Equal Protection Clause, that everyone is entitled to equal protection of the law, so far as life, liberty, and due process, for example.
	That should include the unborn, right?
	This is the pro-life case.
	That if you are a baby in the womb, you don't get to be killed just because you're a baby in the womb.
	You're an independent human life.
	You're protected by the Constitution of the United States.
	But putting that aside, if that is not the argument that is going to be accepted by the Supreme Court, for example, which it seems would be unlikely, if that's not going to be the argument accepted by the Supreme Court, The overturning of Roe v. Wade would not lead to a vast national ban on abortion.
	It would lead to significant restrictions in places like Texas, places like Georgia, places like Florida.
	It would lead to no restrictions in places like California, because it would just get kicked back to the states.
	That was the situation before Roe v. Wade.
	There were very few restrictions on abortion in blue states, and there were lots of restrictions on abortion in red states.
	Okay, so Chief Justice Roberts says, you know, I'm not going to even tell you how I'm voting on the underlying issue here.
	By the way, the majority said the same thing here.
	Roberts just says that he would enjoin it anyway.
	So Roberts says, the statutory scheme before the court is not only unusual but unprecedented.
	The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large.
	The desired consequence appears to be to insulate the state from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.
	The state defendants argue they cannot be restrained from enforcing their rules because they're not enforcing them in the first place.
	I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante before the law went into effect so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.
	Defendants argue existing doctrines preclude judicial intervention and they may be correct.
	But the consequences of approving the state action, both in this particular case and as a model for action in other areas, counsel at least preliminary judicial consideration before the program devised by the state takes effect.
	So, Roberts is fully admitting, in his own dissent here, that defendants may be right, that they are allowed to avoid culpability here because they're not the actual defendants, but Justice Roberts says, I'm gonna intervene anyway because I prefer the status quo ante, which is pure Roberts, right?
	Roberts is mostly interested in preserving what he perceives as judicial legitimacy, At the expense of actual judicial accuracy.
	This is why he'll rewrite the Obamacare law in order to ensure that Obamacare remains the law of the land despite the fact that it clearly violates constitutional provisions and separation of powers.
	Because Justice Roberts is always thinking of the legitimacy of the institution.
	By the way, because he thinks like this, he has completely undermined the legitimacy of the institution.
	It turns out the only way to uphold the legitimacy of your institution is to strictly interpret the rules under which we are all supposed to live so that there's predictability to those rules.
	You're not supposed to be thinking with your finger in the wind, how do I best uphold the legitimacy of my institution?
	That is what undercuts your legitimacy.
	At least it's true as a human being as well.
	If you're constantly vacillating because you're trying to please people, people don't like you as much.
	People think you're illegitimate.
	People don't trust you.
	And this is certainly true when it comes to institutions, which is why Justice Roberts is actually a terrible, terrible justice.
	In any case, he continues, I would accordingly preclude enforcement of SB 8 by the respondents to afford the District Court and the Court of Appeals the opportunity to consider the propriety of judicial action and preliminary relief pending consideration of the plaintiff's claims.
	Because basically, his argument is that it upsets life too much.
	If we don't intervene, it upsets life too much.
	Then, there are the actual liberals on the court, and their dissent is basically, we love abortion, and abortion's in the Constitution, and this is a bad law, and so we should strike down the law.
	Forget about the procedure, the law needs to go, because the reality is that imminent and serious harm are on their way, and we need to make sure that the quote-unquote right to abortion is preserved.
	This is the dissent.
	There's one from Justice Breyer.
	There's another one from Justice Sotomayor.
	Sotomayor, of course, is the most vocal, ardent, and screed-like.
	She writes the most screeds on the left of the court.
	She's sort of replaced Justice Ginsburg in that respect.
	She says the court's order is stunning.
	Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law, engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.
	Okay, it's not flagrantly unconstitutional.
	Roe v. Wade is flagrantly anti-constitutional.
	It is a made-up law, out of whole cloth, pulled directly from the colons of the justices in that case, particularly Harry Blackmun.
	But she says this is blatantly unconstitutional, which is a laugh since her actual care about the Constitution is basically zero.
	She says, last night, the court silently acquiesced in a state's enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents.
	Wow!
	50 years of bad federal judicial precedent has been overturned?
	Well, somebody sound the alarm because it turns out the court has routinely done that in cases where they've made bad mistakes before, namely Plessy v. Ferguson or Dred Scott.
	She says, Okay, so that is where things stand.
	explains, it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of the state's own invention. Because the court's failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortion in Texas. I dissent.
	Okay, so that is where things stand. Now, a lot of people in the media are reading this as though the Supreme Court of the United States is now going to knock down Roe v. Wade.
	I have serious doubts whether the Supreme Court of the United States is going to knock down Roe vs. Wade.
	I think what they may do is rewrite the Planned Parenthood vs. Casey standard.
	Which is a really, really bad standard.
	I'll explain what that means in just one second.
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	Alrighty.
	The actual standard that may be curbed here is the so-called undue burden standard under Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.
	So, the Roe vs. Wade decision sets up this ridiculous anti-scientific trimester system, right, where the idea is that you could have some restrictions in the last trimester, maybe a few restrictions in the second trimester, and no restrictions in the first trimester.
	And then it sets up a standard of viability, and it says, well, until the baby's viable, you can basically do what you want.
	None of this is in the Constitution, of course.
	It's absurd.
	It's just made up completely.
	Then, in the early 90s, there's a case written by Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy and that whole clan.
	And the basic idea of the case is that the woman must never be unduly burdened.
	That is the undue burden standard that a woman cannot have to face down an order that has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking the abortion of a non-viable fetus.
	And it's a mess.
	I mean, that decision is a complete, absolute mess.
	There's a plurality decision.
	A majority found that a particular law was unconstitutional.
	Four justices wrote or joined opinions saying Roe v. Wade should have been struck down.
	Two justices wrote opinions favoring the preservation of a higher standard of review for abortion restrictions.
	It's a complete mess, right?
	It's just a complete and utter just bleep show.
	No question.
	The undue burden standard is what ends up emerging from this, right?
	You can't put an undue burden on a woman's right or ability to get an abortion.
	Now the question is, that's really vague.
	What actually constitutes an undue burden?
	Where does that come from?
	So, the court has been very unclear about this.
	Sometimes they'll say that something is an undue burden, sometimes they'll say it's not an undue burden.
	Again, the notion that an abortion is a right to begin with is patently crazy.
	I mean, there's nothing in the Constitution that guarantees such a right.
	There's nothing in natural law that guarantees such a right.
	Where does this right come from?
	It basically came full-blown from the heads of a bunch of left-leaning justices on the Supreme Court.
	But it has now become a rote part of sort of leftist theology, and it really is a theology at this point, that abortion is an inerrant good.
	Abortion is itself excellent.
	And so you see people on the left consistently making this argument.
	I just want to point out that by six weeks of pregnancy, the baby is already starting to develop, like, a lot.
	Okay?
	Like, the levels of development at this point in time are pretty high.
	So you keep hearing from people, well, you know, most women don't know that they're even pregnant by week six of the pregnancy.
	Well, I mean, they've already missed a period, so there's that.
	But beyond that, there actually is some pretty significant development.
	Like, the notion that this is just a cluster of undifferentiated cells at this point is just not true.
	According to the Mayo Clinic, which is not a right-wing site, last I checked, they say, week six, the neural tube closes.
	Growth is rapid this week.
	Just four weeks after conception, the neural tube along your baby's back is closing.
	The baby's brain and spinal cord will develop from the neural tube.
	The heart and other organs are also starting to form, and the heart begins to beat.
	This is according to Mayo Clinic.
	Now, you'll hear from people on the left, well, it's not really the heart, because the entire heart hasn't been developed yet.
	It's just the, it's the poles that will become the heart that are firing electrical signals.
	Okay, and?
	Like really, so?
	Structure is necessary to the formation of the eyes and ears develop small buds appear that will soon become arms your baby's body begins To take on a c-shaped curvature in week seven the baby's head develops The baby's brain and face are growing Depressions that eventually give rise to nostrils become visible.
	The beginnings of the retinas form.
	Lower limb buds that will become legs appear.
	The arm buds that sprouted last week now take on the shape of paddles.
	Week 8, you've already got a nose for the baby.
	The fingers have begun to form.
	Small swellings outline.
	Outlining the future shell-shaped parts of your baby's ears develop.
	The eyes become obvious.
	The upper lip and nose have formed.
	The trunk and neck begin to straighten.
	Again, we are 8 weeks in.
	According to the left, you should be able to abort, like, pretty much all the way up to birth.
	There are no limiting principles for the left.
	But fetal development is extraordinarily rapid and pretty well-developed, certainly by the time you hit the first trimester, for sure.
	But according to the left, this is just—Texas is evil, and Texas is terrible, and Texas is a disaster.
	And there's just article after article about this.
	Gayle Collins says Texas is trying to overturn Roe vs. Wade all by itself.
	She says Texas.
	And of course you get the obligatory... This just amuses me.
	You get the obligatory photo of the women in the Handmaid's Tale outfits.
	Okay, now, just quick note, you can get an abortion pretty much anywhere in the country that ain't Texas.
	Also, quick note, the woman in the photo is wearing a Pride Progress face mask, a transgender rights face mask with a gay Pride flag, rainbow flag, over her face in the New York Times photo that has been chosen.
	And this has become part of the broader left-wing rubric where they just create mad libs that don't make any sense when it comes to these issues.
	So what they like to say, the original left-wing argument was safe, legal, and rare.
	It's sad, but it's necessary in some cases.
	We'd like to make those cases less necessary.
	You know, where a woman is having a really tough time, we can't burden her.
	It was a bad argument, but at least had some semblance of morality attached to it.
	Then we went from safe, legal, and rare to abortion is the greatest thing that ever happened.
	And now we've moved all the way to abortion is a woke issue that affects the intersectional coalition.
	Which is like the weakest pro-abortion argument of all.
	At least the secondary argument that a woman needs to abort her baby so she can be successful in her career.
	Which is sort of the argument you'll see made routinely by pro-abortion advocates.
	At least that argument.
	acknowledges the logical consistency of, I need to kill this baby so that I can get the promotion.
	That's pretty cruel and terrible, but at least it acknowledges it.
	When it gets enmeshed in the entire intersectional woke rhetoric, it makes no sense at all.
	It just starts to be self-contradictory and very silly.
	When you're declaring that men can be women, and it's very difficult to explain how this is a woman's right issue.
	When you're calling women pregnant people, very difficult to explain why this is a quote unquote women's issue as opposed to just a broad issue that affects both women and men and all the rest.
	My favorite line of this, and this is why I point out the gay pride flag this person is wearing while wearing the Handmaid's Tale outfit, is, again, once it gets enmeshed in the left-wing mad lib, it starts to make no sense.
	So Cori Bush, this is just a great example of this, she tweets out yesterday, the congresswoman from Missouri, the Black Lives Matter congresswoman from Missouri, she says, I'm thinking About the black, brown, low-income, queer, and young folks in Texas.
	The folks this abortion healthcare ban will disproportionately harm.
	Wealthy white folks will have the means to access abortion care, our communities won't.
	Okay, so, one of the arguments that is consistently made by people on the left is that black and brown women need to have lots of abortions.
	It is incumbent upon them.
	We need to protect their right to kill babies in the womb, because, and to disproportionately kill babies in the womb.
	Now, you know who's cheering that?
	White supremacists.
	They are very happy to see black and brown babies die in the womb.
	And there are more black babies every year who are aborted in New York City than are born in New York City.
	And you can hear the white supremacists cheering.
	The notion that it is an inherent good for black and brown women to disproportionately kill their unborn babies is very weird.
	But put that one aside, I want to focus in on... This just shows what a mad... I keep saying mad lib because it really is.
	It makes no internal sense.
	Cori Bush here is saying, I'm thinking about the queer people who are disproportionately affected by an abortion ban.
	I'm going to need an explainer on this one.
	Truly, I'm gonna need an explainer on why lesbians are disproportionately affected by an abortion ban.
	Are lesbians accidentally getting pregnant at an outsized rate?
	How about, like, gay people and transgender people?
	Is that happening a lot?
	Really, is it disproportionately affecting the queer?
	I'm gonna need some sort of... I'm gonna need some sort of understanding of how that works, according to Cori Bush.
	But it doesn't matter.
	Again, everything they don't like is about inequity.
	Because they don't want to get to the root of the issue, which is that they are fine with killing the unborn, right?
	That really is what it is.
	Some people are honest enough to do it.
	Mostly it's euphemisms.
	So the new euphemisms of the day are not women's rights.
	It's not safe, legal, and rare.
	The new euphemism of the day is it's inequitable.
	Inequitable.
	And it affects all the same people that every inequitable policy affects, including people who are gay.
	Who are not getting pregnant accidentally because that's not physically possible if you are engaged in homosexual activity.
	That's not how any of this works.
	So I just I found that hilarious and self-contradictory, but.
	Again, none of this has to make any sense.
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	So again, the left is fighting mad about this because abortion has now become a sacrament and now it's become a sacrament in the higher woke catechism.
	Which is very strange.
	Okay, Hillary Clinton is tweeting out about this as well.
	She says, Under the cover of darkness, by choosing to do nothing, the Supreme Court allowed an unconstitutional abortion ban in Texas to go into effect last night.
	Their decision doesn't change the fact that reproductive rights are human rights.
	We'll fight for them.
	By the way, the euphemisms, the euphemisms.
	If you just read that out loud, but instead of reproductive rights, you just said killing the unborn in the womb, you'd realize how self-contradictory and silly this is.
	Right?
	The decision doesn't change the fact that killing unborn humans in the womb is a human right.
	I feel like that doesn't make sense.
	I feel like that contradicts itself.
	Okay, but again, the underlying issue here is one where the left is not winning.
	They know they're not winning, and so they have to euphemism it up.
	It's all euphemisms.
	It's euphemisms and equity talk.
	Here's Wendy Davis doing the same exact thing.
	So this is a law that's going to hit, as is the case so many times, women who are lower income It's amazing.
	The left is actually making its own agenda less popular by using the equity talk.
	Instead of saying that this damages women because women need the right to abortion broadly, instead they have to go to this hurts black, brown, low-income, queer women.
	What are you doing?
	I mean, you want to do it?
	Go for it.
	You really want to say that this forwards systemic racism.
	So in other words, telling everybody, white, black, brown, you can't kill your baby in the womb.
	Saying that forwards systemic racism, because if it were not for that systemic racism, more black babies would be born.
	Hot take.
	Coming in hot right there.
	Wendy Davis.
	The fact that she's still trotted out as a legit figure because she once made a long speech on the floor of the Texas state legislature while wearing pink sneakers is astonishing to me.
	The levels of accomplishment you need in order to achieve fame in this society are not particularly high.
	Speaking of which, Jeffrey Toobin, who is most famous for masturbating on camera in front of his work colleagues, he wrote, quote, Midnight in Austin.
	For the first time since 1973, a state has banned abortion.
	The great conservative legal project has succeeded.
	R.I.P.
	Hashtag Roe v. Wade.
	Now, first of all, his mouth to God's ears.
	But, second of all, Roe vs. Wade has not yet been overheard.
	Also, Jeffrey Toobin commenting on this?
	I understand there's some people... I will say at least Jeffrey Toobin has a stake in it.
	Jeffrey Toobin famously impregnated the daughter of one of his friends and then tried to pressure her to have an abortion and then tried to avoid his paternity payment.
	So he feels like a really good source on this sort of thing.
	By the way, CNN brought him on like four or five times yesterday to talk about this because the media have no shame whatsoever.
	But they're very objective, very journalism-ing.
	So much journalism-ing.
	In fact, speaking of the journalism-ing, Chris Cuomo tweeted out a Graphic of Carlos Chapman, a law professor at Washington and Lee University from Occupy Democrats.
	Nothing says journalism-ing like tweeting out graphics from Occupy Democrats.
	This woman said, quote, if a fetus is a person at six weeks pregnant, is that when the child support starts?
	OK, so first of all, sure, I'm cool with that.
	I don't have a problem with that.
	In fact, Utah, I believe, passed a law exactly along those lines, saying that when a woman is pregnant, men have to start paying child support.
	Also, quote, is that also when you can't support the mother because she's carrying a U.S.
	citizen?
	So there are some pretty significant questions about whether birthright citizenship is even a thing.
	Can I insure a six-week fetus and collect if I miscarry?
	I mean, you might be able to.
	Why not?
	Just figuring if we're going there, we should go all in.
	So, this is one of my favorite kinds of arguments that the left makes, which is, they'll say, well, if a fetus is a person, will you do all these things?
	Okay, and if I say yes, are you now going to acknowledge a fetus is a person, or are you just being an idiot?
	Are you just playing stupid semantic word games?
	Chris Cuomo, fond of stupid semantic word games, and also covering for his lying, cheating, and horrifying brother.
	Again, so much journalism happening.
	Just hot, sticky journalism getting everywhere over at the CNN studios.
	Speaking of which, Areva Martin on CNN, she decided to link the pro-life position to not wanting to wear masks.
	Now, last I checked, if I don't wear a mask and you have the capacity to protect yourself, that is not the same thing as me putting a needle into a woman and poisoning the fetus inside and then cutting them up in the womb and sucking the baby in the sink.
	I don't really see the resemblance, I'll be honest with you.
	I'm vaccinated, and if you get a transmissible disease from me that you could have protected yourself from, I don't see exactly how there's any relationship between that and you forcibly killing a child, but Maybe she's just too sophisticated for me here.
	At this moment, it is not clear to me that women will be able to continue to make reproductive choices about their bodies because men, primarily men, but legislatures like those in Texas and other states have decided that they know better as it relates to what women should be able to do with respect to their body.
	And as Laura said, the hypocrisy is just nauseating.
	You can't wear a mask, but you can decide that a woman can't make choices about her body.
	This is a wake-up call for women and men all over this country.
	Yeah, that's a good time.
	By the way, it works in reverse as well.
	If you believe that women ought to have pure choice over their body, why are you telling them there need to be vaccine mandates and mask mandates?
	I noticed there's some inconsistency there from the left.
	And then, of course, there's the bottom line call here, which is, of course, that American conservatives are like the Taliban because they want to protect unborn life.
	You have Amy Siskind, who is a radical activist, tweeting out, sigh, hashtag Texas Taliban.
	And then a cartoon from Mike Lukovic, From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who is, of course, of the radical left, saying it's a picture of two women in full burqa, living under the Taliban, saying, pray for Texas women.
	Yes, I'm sure that's, yes, you're right.
	A woman living in Texas.
	By the way, I've noticed that there are a few ways that you don't need to get pregnant that are available to women throughout American life.
	And that abortion is actually not supposed to be a form of birth control.
	Again, this is a shift in the democratic argument.
	It used to be safe, legal, and rare because the idea was there might be some terrible circumstances where the baby has some sort of deep malformation where you don't want to live with that.
	I think that's immoral, but That is the argument Democrats were making.
	Or the Cadets Down Syndrome.
	People are literally making that argument online today.
	You know how many Down Syndrome babies will be born in Texas now?
	It's like, well, yeah, I mean, better than killing them, it turns out.
	But they moved from that argument real fast to, you're the Taliban if you wish for women to use other forms of birth control as opposed to this.
	Abortion has become a sacrament.
	It's the only thing that can explain the true abiding fervor for abortion.
	Recognize for a second that even Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is not a fan of abortion.
	She thought that abortion was a great evil, which is why she was in favor of contraception.
	Okay, so that is where things stand.
	Do I think that this is going to end with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade?
	I have significant doubts that it will.
	I think it might result in the paring back of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey and the succeeding line of cases.
	But I think that is much more likely than the complete overturning of Roe vs. Wade.
	But the panic is worth the price of admission from the left at this point.
	And second, we'll get to the latest on Afghanistan first.
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	Okay, we'll get to everything Afghanistan in just one second because it turns out that shock of shocks, Joe Biden is a damned liar.
	First, Once a month, your favorite Daily Wire hosts come together, we have some whiskey, smoke a few cigars, I don't do either of those things, but everybody else does, have a lively conversation about the state of the world, and usually everything that's wrong with it, maybe yell at each other a little bit, and we refight the Reformation between Michael Mowles and Jeremy Boring pretty much every time.
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	All righty, meanwhile, the Afghanistan situation continues to fall completely apart.
	It is a disaster area, but the good news is that the Biden administration, their arm has grown to three feet long so that they can really tap themselves on the back, pat themselves on the back, stroke themselves in every way possible, tubing all over themselves.
	They can do all of these things now, physically.
	They've pretzeled themselves in order to make all of this happen.
	Ron Klain, Was the shadow president for Joe Biden and who spends all day on Twitter retweeting things.
	I mean, he's basically like Trump on Twitter.
	He said yesterday that the Afghan pullout was handled as well as humanly possible.
	It's easy to second guess, but let's just be clear.
	America was in this war for 20 years.
	And I think any effort to unwind that, any effort to bring our troops out, any effort to end our military presence in Afghanistan was going to be filled with heartbreaking scenes and difficulties.
	And I think the Biden administration has managed that as well as it could be managed under the circumstances we were placed in.
	Um, the circumstances you placed yourselves in.
	It was handled as well as could be managed.
	And then, Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, he came out, he said, this was historic!
	We're so good at this, man!
	We are so good at this!
	So, a few things.
	One, this is not Dunkirk, okay?
	We're doing this under cover of night, with the Nazis, looking down at British troops.
	And then, a flotilla of small fishing boats being sent across the English Channel.
	This was planes going in and out of a runway, under no fire.
	That's what this was.
	And you guys failing to facilitate that and getting American troops killed.
	That's what this was.
	Here's Lloyd Austin again.
	Just keep, just keep stroking yourself, man.
	Just keep, keep doing it.
	Now we have just concluded the largest air evacuation of civilians in American history.
	It was heroic.
	It was historic.
	And I hope that all Americans will unite to thank our service members for their courage and their compassion.
	They were operating in an immensely dangerous and dynamic environment.
	But our troops were tireless, fearless, and selfless.
	My favorite is when he says things like, this is the biggest evacuation in American history, aren't we good at this?
	There wouldn't have been an evacuation necessary if you hadn't pursued an entirely garbage policy.
	By the way, when people say things like this is unprecedented, Dunkirk involved 340,000 troops being evacuated from the French coastline.
	So actually, it's pretty well historically precedented.
	In the aftermath of the 1948 war establishing the state of Israel, some 800,000 people, their journeys from Arab lands to Israel, Jews, had been expelled.
	That was facilitated, right?
	So, no, large population... In the aftermath of the Saddam Hussein-Kuwait war, there were huge population transfers that were facilitated.
	So, no, this is not unprecedented.
	No, it's not particularly logistically impressive from the Secretary of Defense's perspective.
	And yes, our people on the ground are brave and heroic, but our leadership is just garbage all the way through.
	Meanwhile, I am amazed at the spectacle of the Biden administration saying that, you know, people should have gotten out early.
	We were telling them they needed to get out earlier and then they didn't get out earlier.
	So if they got stuck, it's really their own fault.
	There's only one problem with that, which is that Joe Biden is a damned liar.
	You'll remember in July, he said the government was not going to fall.
	Now he's like, well, we were telling people back in March they should leave.
	Really?
	In July, you were saying the government wasn't going to fall.
	Not only that, in July, the president of the United States called up the then Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, And some of the transcript has now been leaked.
	This was July 23rd.
	And he was telling Ghani to lie to everybody and say that everything was hunky-dory.
	How are you expecting people to take you seriously when you are actively encouraging the president of Afghanistan to lie about the situation being just fine?
	And there's only one reason that Joe Biden wanted that.
	The one reason that Joe Biden wanted that is to shore up his own domestic political failures.
	He didn't want people to know that things were collapsing that quickly.
	Because then everybody would have been like, whoa, maybe it was a bad idea to announce to your mortal enemy, the Taliban, what date you were going to leave, how you were going to leave, and then withdraw all air support.
	Here's what Biden said to Ghani.
	It's unbelievable.
	Remember, Donald Trump was impeached over a Ukraine phone call.
	There are some problems with that phone call.
	Nothing, to me, approaching the level of the president of the United States calling up the Afghan president and telling him to overtly lie to the world about the military situation on the ground in Afghanistan.
	Here's what Biden said, quote, you know, I'm a moment late, but I mean it sincerely.
	Hey, look, I want to make it clear.
	I'm not a military man any more than you are, but I have been meeting with our Pentagon folks and our national security people, as you have been with ours and yours.
	And as you know, and as I need not tell you, the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren't going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.
	And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.
	There's a need to project a different picture.
	I mean, like, that's amazing.
	He's telling him overtly to lie.
	By the way, he also lied to him this way.
	He said, we're going to continue to make sure your Air Force is capable of continuing to fly and provide air support.
	This is what he told Ghani in July.
	Lie.
	He did not continue to provide air support.
	He withdrew all military contractors from the country.
	He said, in addition to that, we're going to continue to fight hard diplomatically, politically, economically, make sure your government not only survives, but it's sustained and grows because it is clearly in the interest of the people of Afghanistan that you succeed and that you lead.
	I find you a brilliant and honorable man, but the perception is that things are falling apart.
	And we need that perception to change.
	It's not about the reality on the ground changing.
	Ghani replied, said, Mr. President, we're facing a full-scale invasion composed of Taliban, full Pakistani planning, logistical support, at least 10 to 15,000 international terrorists, predominantly Pakistanis, thrown into this.
	So that dimension needs to be taken account of.
	He said, what is crucial, right?
	This is Ghani speaking to Biden, right?
	This is a leaked transcript of a phone call that Biden will not be impeached over.
	What is crucial is that close air support.
	And if I could make a request, if your assistance, particularly to our air force, be front loaded, because what we need at this moment, there is a very heavy reliance on air power.
	We have prioritized that if it could be at all front loaded, we will greatly appreciate it.
	And so, and Biden didn't do any of that.
	And then he said, look, close air support works only if there is a military strategy on the ground to support.
	So he overtly, he said, we're going to give you the air support.
	And Ghani's like, okay, well, we'd like to see it.
	And he's like, well, you're not getting it.
	And then he says, well, why didn't people leave earlier?
	While I was encouraging the president of Afghanistan, what a, what a, what a dishonest piece of work the president of the United States is.
	So Jen Psaki was asked specifically about this pathetic phone call from the President of the United States urging the Afghan President to lie to the general public while withdrawing close air support.
	And she, of course, dodged the question.
	She'll circle back around.
	There's some reporting that we'd like to confirm regarding a call in July, rather, between President Biden and former Afghanistan President Ghani.
	Is that accurate?
	Can you tell us a little bit more about that call?
	Well, I'm not going to get into private diplomatic conversations or leaked transcripts of phone calls.
	Was the president in any way pushing a false narrative in that call with the Afghan president?
	I think it's pretty clear.
	Again, I'm not going to go into details of a private conversation.
	Oh, you're not going to go into details?
	It's not private anymore.
	It's right out there.
	Are you saying it's not true?
	Because we've seen it.
	So her play is this thing that was classified has now been leaked.
	The entire American public can see it.
	It's on the headline of every major newspaper in the world.
	I won't comment because it was classified and now you've all read it.
	Weird.
	I noticed that she had no problem speaking repeatedly about things like the SEAL dossier for four years.
	Meanwhile, we are learning that a majority of Afghans who had worked for the U.S.
	military and applied for special immigrant visas had not been successfully evacuated and remained in Afghanistan.
	A senior State Department official said it appeared that a majority, a majority are still there.
	According to the senior official, I don't have an estimate for you on the number of SIVs and family members who are still there.
	I would say it's the majority of them, just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support.
	State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that of about 31,000 people evacuated from Afghanistan to the United States between August 17th and August 31st, roughly 23,000 were Afghan allies and family members considered at risk by the Taliban.
	The effort was hampered by the unpredictable role of the Taliban stationed along routes into the airport, the official said.
	The Taliban cooperated in some cases, but in other cases blocked Afghan nationals from proceeding to the airport, according to the official.
	On Tuesday, based on the initial figures then available from the Pentagon, NBC News reported 8,500 Afghan allies had been evacuated.
	It was not clear if all of those 8,500 were applicants for SIVs or other expedited visas.
	On Wednesday, the Pentagon then released new figures saying that about 20,000 Afghans had arrived at eight military bases in the United States.
	He said there were also another 40,000 Afghan evacuees but did not provide a breakdown on how many of these people were actually screened, who these people were, were they SIVs, were they translators?
	Basically what happened is that at the very beginning they just loaded people on planes and took them.
	They didn't screen any of them.
	That's probably what was happening at the very beginning.
	The reason I say this is because you could literally see the Afghans swarming the runway as all of this was happening.
	All of which has driven the Washington Post To correctly point out that this is a disaster area.
	They say this is, again, this is the Washington Post editorial board.
	quote, this is a moral disaster, one attributable not to the actions of military and diplomatic personnel, but to mistakes strategic and tactical by Mr.
	Biden and his administration.
	Correct.
	The Biden administration says the Washington Post says they will not be forgotten.
	Plans already are being developed, officials say, for continued efforts to extract people.
	Nearly 100 nations issued a statement, etc.
	Any assurances by the Taliban clash with statements their spokesperson made during the crisis that the United States was wrongly inducing Afghans to leave.
	So even the Washington Post is like, yeah, this is just nonsense.
	By the way, U.S.
	citizens are still stranded there.
	They said no one told them to leave.
	According to the New York Post, a terrified American citizen who was an interpreter for the U.S.
	military has said she's now stranded in Afghanistan because nobody told her the last flights were leaving on Monday.
	The interpreter was using a pseudonym for safety.
	She said, I just found out that the last U.S.
	troops left.
	I was just silent for a while.
	I can't believe no one told me this is the last flight.
	She says, they left us to whom?
	To those people who wanted to always kill us?
	It's heartbreaking.
	I still had hoped that we would leave.
	She said she repeatedly attempted to get through to Mercy Flights at Kabul, detailing how she was instructed to hold up an umbrella and shout out a code word, but nothing worked to get past the checkpoints and the thousands trying to flee.
	She says, if Americans couldn't help me when they were on the ground, what the hell do they expect to do now?
	She says that she is sheltering 37 people at her house, including 19 children, two of whom are disabled.
	So really, well done.
	It was a historic success.
	A historic success.
	Amazing.
	The State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, who is basically the Baghdad Bob of this operation, he says, you know, so he's asked, so you guys said that there'd be other ways for Americans to escape.
	Are you aware of any Americans who have left since the United States abandoned Afghanistan a couple of days ago?
	No answer.
	Do you have a number for, have any Americans gotten out since that last flight?
	I don't have, I don't have data to provide on that front.
	Okay, now this is doing some pretty severe damage to Joe Biden, as well it should, according to Civics polls, right?
	So they have polls of presidential approval in every state.
	His approval rating has dropped by 11 points in Arizona, 4 in Colorado, 11 in Florida, 13 in Georgia, 9 in Michigan, 4 in Minnesota, 4 in Nevada, 7 in New Mexico, 12 in North Carolina, 12 in Pennsylvania, 25 in Texas, 6 in Virginia, and 6 in Wisconsin.
	Those are really bad numbers for the President of the United States.
	And heading into 2022, this looks like wipeout territory for the Democrats.
	So, of course, they are banking again on January 6th and the January 6th Commission.
	I just don't think that dog is going to hunt.
	There's only one group of people in power right now.
	There is one man who made this decision.
	He sits at the head of the United States government.
	The decision is disastrous.
	The ramifications are horrific.
	And he's going to bear the brunt of the political firestorm that is to come, as well he should.
	Democrats decided, they chose decline.
	They chose this.
	It was a free, willing, unnecessary choice that was made here.
	Americans are still behind enemy lines.
	Those Americans are not going to get out.
	Now the hope is that the media will save them.
	The hope is that the media will just abandon those people behind enemy lines and they'll move on to the next news cycle.
	Maybe that's right.
	Maybe it is.
	Or, maybe, a couple weeks from now, ISIS will chop somebody's head off, he's an American citizen, and Joe Biden will be out front explaining how we're working with the Taliban in order to stop ISIS.
	We have to work with the Taliban now.
	By the way, that is, in fact, the new line from the Biden administration.
	We'll see how popular that one is.
	All right, speaking of which...
	This is, in fact, the new line from the Biden administration, is that we are going to be besties with testes, with the Taliban.
	It's gonna be amazing.
	So, General Mark Milley, who's very concerned with white rage, he's not concerned with Taliban rage so much.
	Like, they're good guys.
	He's very concerned with white rage.
	The same administration that says that you, a law-abiding American citizen, cannot have an AR-15, says we should hand over probably hundreds of thousands of M4s to the Taliban, as well as helicopters and everything else.
	So, I said on the show, A while back, that was $83 billion in U.S.
	military equipment that had been handed over to the Taliban.
	It turns out that's not right.
	There was a fact check from the media on this particular issue.
	It turns out that it is not, in fact, that amount.
	I'm sorry.
	I apologize.
	It was only tens of billions of dollars in United States military equipment.
	So that obviously makes things much, much better.
	But the good news is we handed them over to people who are just going to use them for the best purposes.
	So, for example, the Taliban has now handed over our weapons to Iran.
	So that's good.
	I mean, at least we're using a middleman now.
	When it was Obama, he was just sending direct pallets of cash to the Taliban.
	Now, they're actually just sending weapons.
	They're loading them literally onto trucks and then sending them to Iran.
	According to reporter Mara Sogham, photos and reports from Iranian and Afghan social media show the Taliban have handed U.S.
	tanks and Humvees to Iran.
	Below is a photo of Humvees being transported towards Tehran.
	Things working out real well over there.
	General Mark Milley.
	There's that picture.
	That's all the stuff that you paid for and I paid for.
	And now it's gonna be wielded by Iran.
	Well done.
	Just well done.
	General Mark Milley, he says, you know what?
	We have new friends.
	Our friends might be the Taliban.
	I can tell you from personal experience that this is a ruthless group from the past, and whether or not they change remains to be seen.
	Oh, does it?
	And as far as our dealings with them at that airfield or in the past year or so, in war, you do what you must in order to reduce risk to mission and force, not what you necessarily want to do.
	Any possibility of coordination against ISIS-K?
	It's possible.
	It's possible.
	We might be coordinating with the Taliban against ISIS-K.
	So again, this is this bizarre Democrat notion that terrorist groups never work together.
	And the Taliban and ISIS-K, the Taliban will have an interest in working with us against ISIS-K, right?
	That worked out great for the 13 service people who were murdered just last week.
	It's working out great over there.
	It's not like Al-Qaeda and ISIS are flooding into the country.
	It's not like the reason we went into Afghanistan in the first place is because the Taliban had opened its arms to terror groups.
	But, you know, maybe we'll work with them.
	Maybe it'll be good.
	Meanwhile, what is the Taliban doing?
	They're mocking the United States.
	Of course!
	Of course!
	They held a mock funeral, the Taliban did, for the United States, complete with a flag-draped American coffin.
	You can see the images here.
	There's also a French flag there as well.
	And a NATO flag, it looks like.
	And so these... I love the 7th century barbarians carrying American-made technology there.
	How many people there are holding up iPhones?
	So you got the British flag, the French flag.
	These are our new allies, guys.
	They're our best friends.
	And you know what?
	It's going to be so effective.
	Because remember that airstrike?
	The one where we sent a drone missile into a car and it may have, in fact, just shredded like seven kids?
	You know that one?
	So yeah, the Taliban is going to provide us excellent on-the-ground... We have over-the-rising capacity, right?
	That's what Joe Biden says.
	Which is more like over-the-rainbow capacity, but we have over-the-horizon capacity.
	Which is a nice way of saying we don't have anybody on ground anywhere near where we need to hit.
	So we're going back to the 1998 shoot-a-missile-into-a-camel's-ass strategy from Bill Clinton.
	That had no dire ramifications, right?
	I mean, if we just start from that 1998 strategy again and replay history with the exact same people in the exact same place, I wonder, might there be some ra- If we think historically, did anything happen after we did that?
	Like, you know, around September of 2001 or so.
	Anyway.
	And the Taliban was also parading US military hardware.
	Don't worry guys, it wasn't 83 billion dollars of military hardware.
	It was only like, probably 20, 30 billion dollars of American military hardware.
	Glad we could turn that over to them.
	So that was great.
	By the way, the media, who are just doing stenography for the Biden administration, half of them are tweeting out things like, we disabled some of our military equipment at the final bases we left.
	Oh, you mean like the last place we left, we disabled some of the military equipment?
	Because I'm noticing not a lot of disabled military equipment right there.
	And I noticed the Taliban flying around Blackhawk helicopters the other day.
	Matt Zeller, former CIA analyst who's on CNN and MSNBC, he says, yeah, you know, the Taliban are new friends.
	They're going to be So imagine if they had listened to us.
	Because in some alternate reality they did, and every single one of those Afghans is now here and alive.
	Unfortunately, they didn't.
	And so the reality is, is that the Taliban have already begun hunting these people down.
	I have video evidence of them doing it, of taking people that we were actively trying to assist, They're waiting to form a new government before they punish these people, but our fear is that you'll begin to see mass executions within the next couple of weeks.
	Yep.
	But don't worry, they'll still be our friends because Joe Biden needs them to be our friends for his PR proposal that he has actually done a masterful job throughout all of this.
	Okay.
	Meanwhile, on the COVID front, the kind of screaming and screeching is getting louder and louder and less and less consistent.
	It really is kind of a bizarre thing.
	So why don't we start with Joe Rogan.
	So Joe Rogan, Of course, it was announced that he got COVID.
	And now, that is not a particularly big story.
	You know why it's not a story?
	Because like hundreds of thousands of people have COVID right now.
	The question is how many people are getting super sick and dying from it.
	But Rogan is, of course, in the category of people who did not vaccinate and therefore are morally bereft, according to the left.
	Now, here's my view on this.
	I disagree with Joe.
	I think he should have taken the vaccine.
	I took the vaccine.
	I think the risk factors from COVID are significantly higher than the risk factors from the actual vaccine.
	But Joe disagrees.
	He's a free human being and he's capable of making those decisions.
	However, what the media have decided to do...
	Because they've decided to mock Rogan.
	This is the way that it works, right?
	If you are a Democrat and you get COVID, that's just a tragedy, an unavoidable tragedy.
	If you're a Republican or a non-Democrat, or if you didn't take the vaccine and you get COVID, then we get to mock and laugh at you, which is a really interesting standard, morally speaking, because it turns out that people get health conditions on a routine basis that they could have avoided had they made different choices.
	I wonder if we're now going to apply the same logic to people who have STDs, for example.
	Like, if you get an STD, which you could have avoided because you didn't have to put your thing there, If you're not going to get vaccinated, you don't want to social distance, you don't want to wear a mask, then maybe you don't want to go to the hospital when you get sick.
	Don Lemon says, if you're unvaccinated, we just should not have hospitals care for you.
	You shouldn't go to the hospital.
	If you're not gonna get vaccinated, you don't want a social distance, you don't want to wear a mask, then maybe you don't want to go to the hospital when you get sick.
	I know that sounds harsh, but you're taking up the space for people who are doing things the right way.
	Yes, again, as I've said before, I'm looking forward to that logic being extended to all sorts of avoidable health conditions that people don't take mitigation measures with regard to.
	So for example, if you get heart disease because you've been fat for 40 years, and your doctor has told you for 40 years that you should lose some weight and stop eating cheese every single day of your life, and then you get a heart clog, you get an arterial clog, maybe you should do what Don Lemon says, you just don't go to the hospital anymore.
	I mean, that's the way that this works now, right?
	You make a different decision than Don Lemon would make.
	And then, presumably, you have to bear the... Welcome to libertarian land, Don Lemon.
	It's really fascinating to see you here.
	I did not... I never expected that.
	I'm looking forward, as I say, to this being applied to all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases, which are completely avoidable if you just don't put that thing there.
	And yeah, we'll see how that works out for you.
	Also, the media have decided... They're doing this routine with regard to Rogan, because Rogan is very popular and he's very bad, because Joe Rogan has people like me on his show sometimes.
	So this means that he's a bad man, Joe Rogan.
	When he's a very rich bad man, who's rich and bad.
	And this means that Joe Rogan, who announced that he had been taking things like monoclonal antibodies, which by the way, are highly effective.
	And then he said that he had also been taking prednisone, which is a widely accepted steroid treatment.
	And then he also said that he had taken a vitamin drip as well as ivermectin.
	Okay, so what you've heard from the media is it is a horse deworming drug.
	Right, this is what you keep hearing.
	It's for horse, it's for animal deworming.
	Now, ivermectin could be used to deworm horses.
	Sure.
	Also, that's really an inapt and inaccurate description of what ivermectin is.
	It's really, it's sort of like when they were describing hydroxychloroquine as a fish tank cleaner.
	Remember they kept saying this?
	It's the same thing as a fish tank cleaner.
	And then some idiot went and used fish tank cleaner to try and allegedly kill her husband.
	And then we were like, this is because of Trump telling people to take fish tank cleaner.
	So now they keep calling it a horse drug and so people who are interested in the possible impact of ivermectin are listening to the media and they're actually going out and trying to get like dosages of horse drugs.
	Because the media are just idiotic and they're liars.
	Here's what ivermectin actually is.
	Okay, this is from Forbes.
	Forbes magazine in October of 2015.
	Nobel Prize winning drug ivermectin may fight malaria.
	Resurrecting old drugs for unmet medical needs, known more formally as drug repurposing, was an important message in the Nobel Prize for Medicine earlier this month.
	It came up today too, with the intriguing study showing that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, it's an antiparasitic, appears promising for disrupting malaria transmission.
	This new finding was presented today at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Annual Meeting by researchers from Colorado State University.
	Ivermectin has been used for decades, given once per year as part of the Mass Drug Administration Program to reduce the disabling worm infections onchocerciasis, which causes river blindness, and filariasis, the cause of the hugely swollen legs, elephantiasis.
	Merck has generously donated the entire supply of the drug.
	In Sub-Saharan Africa, each year, a deadly malaria parasite kills 584,000 people per year, most of them kids.
	They started using ivermectin for the kids.
	And apparently, there is a serious reduction in childhood malaria episodes in these particular villages.
	Okay, so, here is the thing.
	It can be used to deworm.
	Also, it has been used for many other purposes.
	And the Nobel Prize was awarded to researchers in ivermectin, some of whom have suggested that this thing might be effective against COVID.
	So, I have no view on ivermectin because I've seen no studies on the efficacy of ivermectin for use against COVID.
	I can tell you, it is deeply inaccurate for the media to continue just saying that Joe Rogan and company are taking horse deworming drugs for no apparent reason and no scientists... Guys, you did the same thing with hydroxychloroquine.
	It turned out that that might've had an impact, especially if taken early on.
	It's amazing to watch the media shift in real time on what works and what doesn't, based completely on politics.
	Like, completely on politics.
	Remember, monoclonal antibodies became bad the moment that Ron DeSantis mentioned them.
	Hydroxychloroquine became bad the moment Trump mentioned it.
	Nivromectin became bad the moment that Joe Rogan started taking it.
	And that is the way all of this works.
	Meanwhile, they'll continue to idiotically scare the hell out of people who are already vaccinated.
	Again, the goal here is just do what the government wants.
	Just do what they want, even if it's completely conflicting.
	So you have an entire piece in the Washington Post talking about how a breakthrough case of COVID can still really be bad.
	It can be really bad.
	Now, the reality, breakthrough cases of COVID are extremely rare in terms of having significant symptoms.
	You can get a breakthrough case of COVID, it usually manifests as a flu or like a very mild flu or a cold.
	But there's an entire long piece in the Washington Post about a person named Andrew Kinsey who was vaccinated.
	For nearly a week after getting a breakthrough case, Kinsey felt like he'd been run over by a truck.
	He struggled to walk a few steps and to stay awake through episodes of the TV show Doomsday Preppers.
	He returned to work last Monday as a corporate litigator but needs midday naps.
	He says it's important for people to know that what they picture in their head of a bad cold isn't necessarily what will happen even if they get a mild course.
	Kinsey and other vaccinated people who develop breakthrough cases of COVID-19 are learning a mild case may not seem so mild to the person enduring the infection.
	Those cases can be modest as a few days of sniffles, but in other circumstances can spawn debilitating headaches and fatigue.
	Symptoms can persist longer than the usual cold.
	Now, um, I perused this entire article and what I noticed is that there is literally no data with regard to how many people are reporting, like, super serious symptoms.
	Also, if you get a really bad flu, there are no articles about that.
	Instead, it's just a bunch of anecdotal stuff about how people have gotten sick and they're feeling sick and stuff, which is true of the flu every single year and it is not a public health issue.
	The media's main narrative seems to be, do whatever you are told.
	And we're not going to present data to tell you why you should do what you're told.
	You just need to do what you're told.
	And then we'll just cherry pick data to push a particular regimen, a course of action.
	So for example, there's a big Bangladesh study that was touted yesterday.
	This big Bangladesh study, touted yesterday was, they followed like 360 people in Bangladesh.
	They had different villages that were assigned masks and not assigned masks.
	And what the study found is that where there were mask mandates, there tended to be social distancing.
	Where there was social distancing, there tended to be a drop in the virus.
	They said that surgical masks seem to make more of a difference than cloth masks, although there was some pretty, yeah, like some difference.
	Not a huge difference, but some difference.
	Okay, then they said that there was a pretty significant decrease in terms of the effect on symptomatic seroprevalence by age group, meaning symptomatic COVID by age group.
	If you're above the age of 60, there's about a 35% decrease in your symptomatic COVID attainment if you were in a village that had a surgical mask mandate.
	And if you're 50 to 60, same thing, right?
	There's a serious decrease, like 23% decrease.
	What's weird about this particular study is it shows no statistically significant decrease in the attainment of symptomatic COVID if you were below the age of 50.
	None.
	And now people are going to be using this study to say that children need to mask.
	No evidence from this study.
	Children need to mask.
	They're going to be saying from this study that mask mandates generally work, which of course ignores the fact that countrywide mask mandates really don't.
	We've not seen any significant evidence that countrywide mask mandates are particularly effective.
	So they're going to cherry pick the data, meaning that the upper age brackets here We're helped by a mask mandate.
	That is not particularly shocking.
	Those are the people most vulnerable.
	Now, what do you do in a country like the United States where the vast majority of people 60 and up are vaccinated?
	Okay, that's a way better protection than masking.
	We know this for a fact.
	So what the hell are we talking about?
	And yet this is gonna be big news.
	Masking works.
	Tell people to mask.
	Mask mandates, mask mandates.
	Or, alternatively, if you can get vaccinated, masks are now not relevant.
	Why are we talking about masking?
	And the answer is, it's just endless.
	It's endless.
	We're in the endless pandemic, and because we're in the endless pandemic, we have to continue talking about measures like masking that are way less effective than vaccines.
	And in order to push that, we have to have articles in the Washington Post about how even if you're vaccinated, you might get a bad, mean case of COVID, and it might feel like the flu, and you might feel yucky afterward for a while.
	And by the way, that happens with diseases all the time.
	When I was younger, I had a case of salmonella.
	I felt crappy for like a year.
	That is not rare.
	But the idea here, again, is that they're gonna offer you all sorts of conflicting information, then out from the clouds will step Anthony Fauci, and you must listen to Anthony Fauci or you're anti-the science.
	Meanwhile, we will tell you that ivermectin is only used for horse deworming.
	We will tell you that even if you're vaccinated, You might get a really bad case of COVID.
	We won't give you any stats to back that up.
	We'll tell you without any evidence whatsoever that it is mandatory that you vaccinate, that you mask your three-year-old child with a cloth mask in the middle of Delta.
	By the way, this study here was not done with regard to Delta.
	The study was done with regard to the original variant.
	Delta has 300 times the viral load.
	We'd love to see the stats on how effective surgical masks are with regard to a virus that has 300 times the viral load that the original virus had.
	You're not going to see any of that.
	You're just going to see the headlines.
	And so you end up with people acting irrationally, and people acting in great fear for their lives when this is not necessary.
	I mean, I know lots of people who are like this.
	What you end up with is a complete breakdown between two groups.
	One, people who are utterly paranoid about every single little thing, and people who think all of it's bullcrap and they're just going to take their chances.
	That's what you're seeing society break down into, right?
	People who are like, I'm triple vaxxed, right?
	I'm double vaxxed, I'm getting a booster, and I still will not go to a place where somebody could have a virus, including a child, because who knows?
	I could die.
	It could be me.
	I could be the one.
	We're turning into a society of those people versus the people who are like, all these people are crazy.
	I'm not taking anything.
	I'm taking my chances even though I'm 65 and fat.
	It's like, well, you know, what would have been great is if the institutions of our society had not completely destroyed their own credibility by declaring themselves so elite that they didn't have to actually, by telling platonic lies that were designed to protect the people from themselves.
	Because all you end up with is people who believe they are part of the platonic lying group, and therefore have to mask up as a model to everybody else, and people who say, you lied to me, why would I possibly trust you ever, ever again?
	Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show, but we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	Coming up soon is The Matt Wall Show, airing at 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
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	The show is edited by Adam Sajovic.
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