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Oct. 12, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:02
The Sickest Story You’ve Heard In Recent Memory | Ep. 1352
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A Loudoun County father was made the face of the supposed domestic terrorist parents, and his story is horrifying.
Raiders coach John Gruden resigns after his old emails are leaked, and the new Superman is bisexual.
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Alrighty, so, late last night, the Daily Warrior broke what is certainly the wildest, most insane, and sickest story of the year.
The reporter, the indomitable Luke Rosiak, Excellent reporter for Daily Wire.
He's the one who broke the story.
So we've been hearing for weeks now about the supposed domestic terrorist movements in the United States.
No, we're not talking about the KKK.
No, we're not talking about Black Lives Matter rioters.
We are talking, of course, about parents who are going to school board meetings and then saying things, which is super duper scary.
And there are certain people who have been made the face of this supposed domestic terror movement.
You know, people who have been treated as though they are a deep abiding violent threat to teachers and school boards across the nation. Well, this is the story, according to Daily Wire, of one of those people. His name is Scott Smith. Here's Luke Rosiak writing. And this is a disturbing story.
And you'll see why it's so disturbing.
And what it really has to do with is the fact that the elitists in our society have cut themselves off from the rest of America and now are attempting to dictate policy to everyone else at the cost of human decency.
On June 22nd, Scott Smith was arrested at Loudoun County, Virginia's school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an unlawful assembly after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.
What people did not know is that weeks prior, on May 28th, says Smith, a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls bathroom at nearby Stonebridge High School where he sexually assaulted Smith's 9th grade daughter.
Juvenile records are sealed, but Smith's attorney, Elizabeth Lancaster, told the Daily Wire that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, one count of forcible fellatio related to an incident that day at the school.
As a result of the viral video showing his arrest, Smith became the poster child for what the National School Boards Association has since suggested could be a form of domestic terrorism, a white, blue-collar male who showed up to harangue obscure public servants on his local school board.
Lancaster, the lawyer, said if somebody would have sat and listened for 30 seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken.
Minutes before Smith's arrest, the Loudoun County Public Schools superintendent lectured the public that concerns about the transgender policy were misplaced because the school system had no record of any assault occurring in any school bathroom.
Then, a woman wearing a rainbow heart shirt, a left-wing community activist, told Smith she did not believe his daughter, he says.
His rage reached a boil, and he had a heated exchange of words with the woman.
A police officer there to keep the peace in the meeting pulled on his arm.
Smith yanked it away.
Before he knew it, Smith says, he was hit in the face, handcuffed, and dragged across the floor with his pants pulled down.
Images of the incident were splashed on TVs and newspapers across the world.
Bhuta Biberaj, the county's progressive and top-elected prosecutor, who has close ties to the school board's most liberal members, appeared in court to personally prosecute Smith for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Biberaj ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration, but she wanted to put Smith in jail for the misdemeanors.
As prosecutor, Ibarraj would have known about the case involving Smith's daughter.
The suspect, Juvenile Court Prosecutors assured Smith, was being held responsible.
He was on house arrest, confined to his mother's townhouse.
According to Lancaster, a conviction was expected on October 14th, likely in the form of a guilty plea to a lesser sexual assault charge.
But on October 6th, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office, a 15-year-old was charged with sexual battery and abduction after police said he forced a girl into an empty classroom, held her against her will, and touched her inappropriately.
Lancaster says the suspect is the same boy who allegedly attacked Smith's daughter.
What follows, based on extensive exclusive reporting from Loudoun County, is Smith's experience.
It is a story the school system and media were never going to tell.
So, the short story here, and we'll get to the details in a second, is that one of the parents, who was protesting a school board and was speaking about the threat of transgender bathroom policy, had a daughter who was allegedly raped in the bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt.
And when he started to say what he thought, people started to get angry at him, and this resulted in him being branded a quote-unquote domestic terrorist by the media and the face of this very upset movement.
Again, the father of the girl.
Here's the story.
On May 28th, Stonebridge High School called Smith to come to the school.
They told him his 15-year-old daughter had just been physically assaulted in a bathroom by a male.
When he arrived, he determined that what had happened was not a case of his daughter being beaten up.
It was far more serious.
The school said it was handling the incident in-house.
Smith was dumbfounded.
Deputies from the sheriff's office ultimately responded to the school, not to investigate the alleged rape of a child, Smith said, but because school administrators called them on him for making a scene about it.
Smith acknowledges he did make a scene.
He says any father would have done the same.
He said, I went nuts.
I called the principal a p-word.
Six cop cars showed up, like an effing SWAT team, to respond to the school's complaints about an assertive parent, he said.
Thank God I drew enough attention to it without getting arrested that we got an escort to the hospital and they administered a rape kit that night.
A sane, examined buccal swab, his lawyer said, came back later, favorable to the prosecution's case.
All juvie records are sealed.
The sheriff's office declined to release records relating to Smith to the Daily Wire, but in response to a public records request, confirmed that a report with offense, forcible sodomy, and sexual battery matching that date and location exists.
At 448 on the day of the incident, the principal sent out an email to the community that claimed nothing jeopardizing student safety had occurred, painting Smith as the villain, and offering counseling services for witnesses of Smith's blow-up.
The letter said, quote, Good evening, Stonebridge families.
This is Stonebridge Principal Tim Flynn.
There was an incident in the main office area today that required the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office to dispatch deputies to Stonebridge.
The incident was confined to the main office and the entrance area to the school.
There was no threat to the safety of the student body.
The incident was witnessed by a small number of students who were meeting with the staff adjacent to the main office.
Counseling services and the services of our unified mental health team are available for any student who may need to talk about today's incident.
LCPS washed their hands of this, Smith said.
It was only taken seriously because of the Sheriff's Office.
The LCPS Director of Communications said only that, quote, any information related to student information is confidential under state and federal laws regarding student privacy.
Lancaster, this is the lawyer, told the Daily Wire she accompanied Smith's daughter to meetings with prosecutors, that the suspect made self-incriminating statements in an interview, that prosecutors brought the charges, and that a conviction was expected imminently, likely in the form of a plea deal to a charge of felony aggravated sexual battery.
Smith had not opposed the downgrade, saying about the boy, what if he made one mistake?
On June 22nd, the school board held a meeting, where the focus of discussion was a proposal expanding special protections to transgender students.
Smith showed up out of practical concerns.
My wife and I are gay and lesbian friendly, Smith said.
We're not into this children transgender stuff.
The person that attacked our daughter is apparently bisexual and occasionally wears dresses because he likes them.
So this kid is technically not what the school board was fighting about.
The point is, kids are using it as an advantage to get into the bathrooms.
From the dais, school board member Beth Bars painted such concerns as paranoia and prejudice.
Our students do not need to be protected and they are not in danger, she said.
Do we have assaults in our bathrooms or locker rooms regularly?
Superintendent Scott Ziegler replied, quote, to my knowledge, we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.
Board Chair Brenda Sheridan asked, have we had any issues involving transgender students in our bathrooms or locker rooms?
Ziegler answered, Time Magazine in 2016 called that a red herring, that the data was simply not playing out that transgender students were more likely to assault cisgender students in restrooms than were other students.
Smith tried to contain himself as an activist who prioritized lived experience and believed women ignored his daughter.
Nearly 250 members of the public had signed up to speak.
Many of them were critical of the school system's racial and transgender initiatives.
Others were supporters of the transgender policy, who painted their neighbors as ignorant bigots, with one saying hate was dripping from the followers of Jesus in this room.
Opponents booed at the remark.
The board threatened to stop the meeting if participants were loud again.
After another speaker blasted the school board for suspending a teacher named Tanner Cross for speaking in opposition to a transgender proposal, the crowd cheered, and the board shut the meeting down.
Two courts later ruled Cross had to be reinstated.
Apparently, after far-left board member Bartz was elected in 2019 with 55% of the vote, she lashed out at parents who disagreed with progressives and teachers' union-backed policies so often and with such vitriol that most of her peers, who agreed with her views, censured her and stripped her of her committee assignments.
Bartz then retreated to a Facebook group officially known as the Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County, later known to critics as Chardonnay Antifa.
And she started targeting people in the parent community who were questioning the Loudoun County School Board.
Okay, but this apparently came to a sort of logical apex at this June 22nd meeting.
Apparently, one of the parents confronted Smith.
Okay, because Smith was talking about what had happened to his daughter.
A parent named Jackie Schwarm confronted him.
Schwarm was at the June 22nd school board meeting wearing a shirt with a rainbow heart on it as a Girl Scout troop leader.
Jess had mentored Schwarm's daughter.
Smith and Jess, Jess' wife, said Schwarm sought them out in the crowd, demanding to know which side they were on, then berated them, they were in the wrong.
Jess, who is this?
Smith asked his wife.
I thought she was my friend, Jess said.
Smith tried to tell her what had happened to his daughter, he said, and she looks me dead in the eyes and says, that's not what happened.
Schwarm then noticed that Smith was wearing a shirt with the name of his plumbing business on it, and she goes, oh, I'm going to ruin your business on social media.
You're a B-word, Smith told her video shows.
A police officer monitoring the tension-filled exchange pulled on Smith's arm.
He yanked it away and soon, Smith and the officer were wrestling.
Jess cried out in words lost in the chaos, my child was raped at school and this is what happens.
Smith was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Swarm, this rival parent, actually did a 40-minute phone call with the Daily Wire and contended she had no relationship with the topic and she didn't have any sort of argument with Smith and didn't know he had been arrested.
After the Daily Wire offered evidence of her involvement, she said she went over to ask Jess for a playdate between their teenage daughters.
She claimed she asked Jess how she was doing, to which Jess purportedly responded, we know critical race theory isn't real, but we don't want them to know it.
Schwarm told the Daily Wire that if Smith's daughter told them she was raped by a Martian, she would believe her, but she also made repeated comments about the daughter's mental stability.
As to her comments on the Facebook group, she told the Daily Wire the group was apolitical, that she had never taken part in list-making activities, And then she started calling other parents racist.
After Schwarm repeatedly brought up that Smith was convicted of a crime, the Daily Wire asked if a restorative justice circle, a technique pushed by progressive prosecutors as an alternative to punishment, would have been a positive resolution to the arrest.
Apparently, Schwarm then said she did not know what restorative justice was and wasn't interested.
Okay, this entire thing ended up on national TV.
And the entire story ended up being a story about how Smith was a terrible person who is trying to terrify members of the school board.
And the prosecutor decided to go forward with the case and try to prosecute Smith and throw him in jail for all of this.
Smith said nothing as his likeness traveled around the world, the avatar of ignorant bigotry.
Advisors told him it would be better to let the process against his daughter's assailant play out.
He didn't want to risk interfering.
The culprit was expected to plead guilty on October 14th, but then there was a second case in which apparently the same teenager was charged with forcing a victim into an empty classroom where he held her against her will and inappropriately touched her.
The Daily Wire is withholding the name of the suspect because of his age.
Reached at home, his mother declined to comment on the allegations.
So, here is the bottom line.
Two girls allegedly sexually assaulted in school, four months apart by the same person.
So far, the only person to be convicted of a crime is the victim's father.
A school policy passed following what appeared to be false statements from the superintendent.
The superintendent said that nothing bad had happened at school.
That is not true.
The prosecutor, Bibbaraj, has not returned a request for comment.
Though the injection of politics into schools and criminal justice have led to pain where there was none before and enemies where there were once neighbors, it is possible some elected officials of Loudoun County might actually believe this story has a happy ending.
Though Smith's daughter has been allegedly raped and separately beaten at school, the teen has adopted increasingly strong progressive views over the course of her tenure at LCPS.
Where did she get these ideas?
From school, obviously, said Jess.
It's not from our home.
That's the craziest story of the day.
But unfortunately, this is part and parcel of the issues that we are told don't matter.
We are told that parents are not supposed to worry about this, that educators are going to be handling the education of your children.
That the school boards ought to be ha- I mean, it's what Terry McAuliffe says in Virginia.
And that if you have any serious questions about this, if in fact your child has suffered at the hands of this ideology, Then you're making it all up.
It's all fake.
That is what we are being told.
And in fact, perhaps, you're in league with domestic terrorists.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Now, if you're concerned about any of the stuff happening in schools, then you're the bad guy.
This is the gaslighting of the American people.
We're told that this stuff is not supposed to matter.
So, for example, one of the editors over at Axios, Margaret Taliv, she said on CNN that if you're worried about critical race theory in schools, you really shouldn't be because it's not happening.
None of this stuff is happening.
You're just imagining all of it.
Let's just say for the record, just in case anyone doesn't know, they don't teach critical race theory to kids in K-12 schools.
That's not a thing anywhere in the country, including in Virginia.
Only for Republican candidates.
Yes, but it is hotly debated, but not actually a thing.
It is actually a thing.
As it turns out, the 1619 Project, which is now Growth of Critical Race Theory, is being taught in schools all over the country.
You have the National Education Association passing resolutions talking about the importance of critical race theory.
To pretend that critical race theory is not taking place in our schools is just a very simple form of gaslighting.
It's a game that the left likes to play, where they boil down complex ideas into very simplified versions of themselves, and then they put them into indoctrination centers across the United States.
And then, if you protest, they say, well, what we're teaching there, it's not the complex form, and the complex form is what you're talking about.
They call you crazy.
And then if you go to a school board and you protest, maybe they call you a domestic terrorist.
This is a piece by a woman named Maude Marrone over at Barry Weiss's Substack.
Barry is doing better reporting than probably half of the major media in the country.
Here is what Maude Marrone writes, quote, I'm a mother of four, a criminal defense attorney, and a lifelong liberal who is deeply concerned about the direction of New York City's public schools.
I've been outspoken about my views, along with an untold number of frustrated parents.
For that, the FBI is considering using the Patriot Act against me.
Let me explain.
Late last month, the National School Boards Association, an umbrella organization representing thousands of local elected school board officials, sent a letter addressed to President Biden.
It warned that America's public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat, but not just any threat.
Quote, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.
The letter implored the White House to enlist the support of Homeland Security, the FBI and the DOJ to investigate the threat, adding the alleged crimes fall under the purview of the Patriot Acts in regards to domestic terrorism.
Says Maude Morone, I read the letter with grave concern, as would any American who cares about our public schools and the safety of teachers and students.
What was the nature of this threat?
Would my own children be at risk?
As it turns out, the threat is me.
The threat is parents showing up to dress down school boards over their dereliction of duty.
The letter has 24 footnotes.
The worst of the so-called crimes that require the FBI to investigate domestic terrorism and the DOJ to activate include prank calls.
An individual in Ohio yelling, quote, a Nazi salute in protest of masking requirements.
Another individual in Washington state whose disorderly conduct prompted the board to call a recess, spreading misinformation online and disorderly conduct arrests.
In New York, disorderly conduct is not even a criminal offense.
And yet within days of the NSBA letter, the top law enforcement official in the country, A.G.
Merrick Garland, publicly responded to the letter with a memorandum to the director of the FBI agreeing with the NSBA that, quote, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against board members without providing any evidence.
The FBI's clear message to parents is that the NSBA is on the right track.
Says Maude Maron, many of the parents who are on the receiving end of the federal government's chilling message are new to school boards, new to speaking up, and to say the absurd part out loud, clearly not domestic terrorists. The combination of extended COVID-related school closures, mask mandates, and increasingly extreme race and gender-focused curriculum, the removal of tests, honors classes, merit-based admissions, has created a bumper crop of engaged, and in many cases enraged, parents rightfully concerned about what is happening in their children's schools.
I've witnessed some of the viral videos myself and some of the meanings.
Over the last four years, I've actively participated in many raucous school board meetings where board members and even the New York City school chancellor have been shouted down by parents who refuse to be ignored.
I've never raised my voice to make a point, but I have sat next to those who have.
They are sincere parents exercising their civil liberties.
I also know what it's like to be on the other side of the table.
I was elected to two consecutive terms on Manhattan's largest school board in what is the nation's largest school system.
Ultimately, I became board chair.
As school board chair, I was harassed, bullied, smeared, subjected to online campaigns demanding my resignation.
It's not fun to listen to people call you names or falsely accuse you of racism, but when you're elected to a school board slot, you have an obligation to listen to everyone at public meetings.
So I listened.
I never would have considered their activism to be something best handled by the FBI.
You may disagree with parents like me who do not want our children indoctrinated with critical race theory masked during recess or told their biological sex is not real.
But in a free society, we don't call the feds to police our fellow Americans because we don't share their politics.
Hey, this is exactly right, but this is the war.
The war right now is between people who believe they should be in unquestioned control of your life and everybody else.
And people are fighting back.
Okay, the gap is creating a backlash.
And you're told by folks on the left that none of this matters.
But I'm not sure what matters more to parents than the fate of their children and the indoctrination to which they are subjected.
The left has lost touch with the American people.
They're setting standards on the basis of radical woke politics that no one can uphold.
Most Americans look at stories in the news and their first innate thought is, how does this apply to me?
That really is how people view the news, which is why economic issues tend to outweigh things like climate change, for example.
How does this affect me in my daily life?
Well, you know what's something that affects you in your daily life?
How your kid is treated at school.
Whether you put yourself in the shoes of a parent who's had a child abused at school and then apparently ignored by the school.
Whether you put yourself in the shoes of a parent who doesn't want their kid indoctrinated in a government center and then told to sit down and shut up and that all of their worries are mere conjecture. Parents are fighting back against this sort of stuff. They should be fighting back against this sort of stuff. When we apply the headlines that the left would like to apply to our lives, when we apply those to our lives, many of us look and we get upset and we get fearful and there isn't a good reason for that.
We should be upset and fearful of the standards the left is setting, which are not standards at all.
This is the point.
There is no consistent standard.
It is not about standards at all, in the first place.
And so when there's blowback, and the left ignores the blowback, they are cruising for a bruising, because they are setting standards that no one can hold.
They are basically saying that they get to set every moral standard in the country, and if you have any questions at all, you're crazy.
You're crazy, or you're violent, or you're a domestic terror threat, or you're a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, and you shouldn't care about the fate of your kids.
You should just put the fate of the country and your children in their expert hands.
We'll get to more on this in just one second, because this is the pervasive sense across all of American culture at this point.
The left sets standards that are not standards and only apply to a particular set of people, and everybody else, as long as you go along with their agenda, you're fine.
We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
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Okay, so we are now having the left set standards that are completely anti-parent, and the blowback is coming, but the left is going to pretend that it shouldn't or that it doesn't exist.
They are simply out of touch.
There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal today by William McGurn talking about how parents are fighting school boards Harry Jackson left the Fairfax County School Board meeting Thursday night feeling frustrated.
The father of a Thomas Jefferson High School sophomore, he had signed up to address the board about sexually explicit material in the school library, including work he and other parents say normalizes pedophilia.
But the list of speakers ended right before his two minutes of the mic.
A student who did speak that evening defended the contested material, saying, quote, There's nothing that is inappropriate unless you go looking for it.
Mr. Jackson takes it as a backhanded admission.
I'm glad to see we agree there's pornographic material in the library, he says.
Thomas Jefferson isn't just any public school.
U.S.
News & World Report ranks it number one in the nation, and Jackson isn't just any parent.
Earlier this year, he was elected president of the school's Parent Teacher Student Association.
A graduate of the U.S.
Naval Academy, a retired naval intelligence officer, he's one of thousands of American parents taking on their school boards across the country.
Like many of those rallying outside Thursday night's meeting, Jackson wore a t-shirt saying parents are not domestic terrorists.
All this has transformed once dull school board meetings into increasingly raucous encounters between parents and officials.
On so many of the hot-button issues of the day, from mask mandates and lockdowns to critical race theory, transgender policy, and racial preferences for admissions, the public schools have become the vanguard for today's progressive agenda.
But parents such as Mr. Jackson aren't taking it anymore, and they show no signs of relenting.
And this is right.
The blowback is real, and the blowback is going to continue.
And Democrats have a problem here, because they cannot allow the blowback to continue.
The party base is owned by the most progressive radicals, and this means setting standards that no one can possibly uphold, and alienating vast swathes of the American public.
Democrats are cruising for a political bruising here, even if they refuse to see it.
Ian Ward has a piece for Politico that's quite fascinating today.
It's an interview with David Shore.
So David Shore, you'll recall, is a data analyst who was essentially ousted from his job last year because progressives got super angry at him because he wrote a piece pointing out that riots don't actually help your political cause, that riots actually are counterproductive and result in people not liking what it is that you're pushing.
And for that, because he was in the middle of the Black Lives Matter riots, he was thrown out of his job, David Shore.
Well, David Shore, who's at least an honest, he's of the left, right?
He's an honest analyst of the left.
He says that, essentially, the Democratic Party is now being held hostage by an electorate that is too radical for the rest of the American population.
At its most basic, David Shore's theory goes something like this.
Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party's infrastructure.
Those would be young people who are highly progressive in their politics.
The sorts of people who have gay pride flags on the back of their computers and list their pronouns and believe that America is deeply inequitable.
According to Schor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter.
And yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party's messaging and policy decisions.
As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals, but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.
Shor says, quote, it is descriptively true that people who work in campaigns are extremely young and much more liberal than the overall population and also much more educated.
I think this is pushing them to use overly ideological language to not show enough messaging or policy restraint and from a symbolic perspective to use words that regular voters literally don't understand. And I think that that is a real problem. This is, of course, exactly right.
And the fact is that the the motivated young liberals who are really creating policy and pressure inside the Democratic Party are pushing the Democratic Party incredibly far outside the mainstream.
And of course, Shor isn't the first one to say this.
According to Politico, in 2015, the political scientists Ryan Enos and Eitan Hirsch published a paper in the American Political Science Review analyzing the results of a survey they conducted among staffers on Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
Based on the results of their survey, Enos and Hirsch concluded that, quote, Individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign's behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood voter priorities.
This is exactly right.
And here is the thing.
The people you're most likely to hear from, not just inside the Democratic Party, but in the halls of media power, agree with the radicals.
The media is young.
It is over-represented in terms of progressivism.
It is ideologically loaded.
It is people who are college-educated white people in the main.
And those college-educated white people are coming out of college just as woke as they were when they left college and they go into the newsrooms.
And then they start covering politics in exactly the same way.
And the American people feel it.
I've been told by people on the left the culture wars don't matter.
The culture wars matter, I think, to a lot more people than even questions as far as how the government is going to spend your money.
The reason being, on a day-to-day level, how we treat one another, how we interact with the institutions of daily life, how the media cover us and our values.
That matters an awful lot to us.
There's a lot to be said for the idea that the culture wars are more important than some of the economic wars.
That the culture wars, being upstream of everything, are in fact the key to everything.
And when you watch every major institution of the country twisted toward the cultural left, and then you're told that you have to be excluded because you're a redneck, you're going to respond pretty badly to that as well you should.
And this has ramifications for nearly every major cultural story in America today.
A group of privileged elites who have basically decided that they are going to educate the American public about what is best, and they're going to use utterly unpalatable standards in order to do so.
Because they have to teach you what is right and what is wrong.
They are your moral betters.
Whether it is at school boards, or whether it is in the halls of media, they are going to teach you.
You are a dumbass, and they are the elect.
We'll get to more of this in a second because this has pretty broad cultural ramifications.
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Alrighty, tonight, huge night for backstage.
Instead of our usual Daily Wire studio, we will be live streaming our conversation on stage at the famous Ryman Auditorium right here in Nashville.
We will attempt to make sense of the increasingly authoritarian world we are living in.
This will be an event and a live stream unlike any other we have done.
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It's going to be an awesome event.
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Okay, so your cultural leaders in every institution are people who believe that they are better than you and they get to cram down their values on you.
Whether we're talking about the Loudoun County School Board, which ignores an alleged assault on a 15-year-old girl in order to promote their agenda, or whether you're talking about the NFL higher-ups and the media, right, who have all decided that standards that are unreachable by any human being must be held up as these standards.
Now, let's be real about this.
The elites have one standard for themselves and they have a standard for everybody else.
And what they are very fond of doing is a distraction technique.
And that really is what it is.
It's a distraction technique where if they throw out a piece of red meat for the other elites, then you will ignore their own sins.
If you just, if you, if you make a human sacrifice every once in a while, the gods of wokeness are propitiated.
Which is exciting stuff.
Well, today's story of the... This is how it works, right?
Is that if you do something that is just woke enough, you do something that's just woke enough, then we'll ignore the fact that you have participated in all of the systems that you claim to decry.
There's a great example of this that happened over the last 48 hours, an interview with Axios from the founders of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.
So you'll remember the Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream?
Is this uh, you know, they're very very left-leaning and they decided they were essentially going to boycott Israel.
They're going to remove their stamp of approval for Ben and Jerry's in Israel because the Israeli government has promoted quote-unquote settlements activity, namely Jews being able to live in historic Judea and Samaria.
And Ben and Jerry's is a wild leftist company and so the two founders of Ben and Jerry's, who are a couple of Bernie Sanders Vermont socialists, We're not socialists at all.
They're very, very wealthy.
They were asked a very simple question by Axios.
Okay, the simple question is, it's weird, you're willing to boycott Israel, but I see that you are very, very happy to have your shops open in places like Texas and Georgia and Florida.
Why is that?
And the answer here, that they're never going to give, is because wokeness is selective.
Being a far-left elite socialist, You guys are big proponents of voting rights.
Why do you still sell ice cream in Georgia?
Texas, abortion bans.
Everybody will ignore the fact that you are a willing participant in capitalism and quote-unquote exploitation.
You guys are big proponents of voting rights. Why do you still sell ice cream in Georgia?
Texas, abortion bans. Why are you still selling there?
I don't know.
I mean, it's an interesting question.
I don't know what that would accomplish.
We're working on those issues of voting rights and... I don't know.
I think you ask a really good question and I think I'd have to sit down and think about it for a bit.
You know the answer.
The answer is because they make a lot of money, a lot more money than they're making in Israel.
They make a lot of money in Georgia and Florida and Alabama and all the rest.
They make a bunch of money over there.
But, so long as they appease the gods of selective wokeness by being the leaders of selective wokeness, then they are better than you.
And this is the way that it works.
And this is the story of the NFL today.
So, John Gruden has had to resign from his job as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.
For vulgar language and bad old emails.
These are emails from 2011 to 2014.
Now you may have checked your calendar recently and noticed that it is actually the year 2021.
And also you may think to yourself, wait a second, so these were private emails leaked apparently by somebody at the NFL to the media and John Gruden who signed a 10 year, $100 million contract.
in 2018 is about to lose $70 million in contract money because of bad old emails that were revealed by somebody inside the NFL offices.
Now, I've been reliably informed by the left that leaked emails are super bad.
We're not even talking here about Hunter Biden just leaving his laptop out there.
We're talking about like leaked emails are bad, right?
WikiLeaks is bad.
All these emails are bad.
Private emails are private, right?
I mean, I thought this was the standard.
Except when it applies to somebody that is perceived as quote-unquote right wing.
Which is what's happening to John Gruden right now.
Now, this is not to say that everything in John Gruden's emails is wonderful and good.
It isn't.
There's a bunch of stuff in there that's kind of bad.
Also, if you've never met an athlete or been in a locker room or spoken to a bunch of testosterone-ridden 21-year-old men, and you're going to pretend that what John Gruden was writing in his emails is anywhere close to the top 80% of the things that are bad that are said in a locker room, you're out of your damn mind.
But John Gruden is going to lose his job, and the NFL is going to declare that it's woke, right?
You remember that football was gay.
You remember football became gay last year, right?
They put out a commercial about how football was gay.
Now, how many football fans actually think of football is gay?
That's not a thing that is designed at marketing toward the average football fan.
That is designed at marketing toward the woke left, which is then going to give the NFL a pass on all of the rest of its insipid vanities and terrible acts.
And the reality is that the NFL is rife with alleged criminality, as well as serious internal racial problems.
And the way that you distract the woke left, the beautiful thing, if you're a wonderful left-wing capitalist at the top of the elite structure, You can just distract the woke left by throwing out one of these human sacrifices every so often.
So here's the story from the New York Times.
Quote, John Gruden stepped down Monday as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders football team, hours after the New York Times detailed emails in which he had made homophobic and misogynistic remarks following an early report of racist statements about a union leader.
His resignation was a striking departure from the football league for a coach who had won a Super Bowl, been a marquee analyst on ESPN, and returned to the NFL in 2018 to lead the resurgent Raiders, which he had coached years before.
I've resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, he said on Twitter.
In a statement issued by the team, I love the Raiders and don't want to be a distraction.
Thank you to all the players, coaches, staff, and fans of Raider Nation.
I'm sorry I never meant to hurt anyone.
Mark Davis, owner of the Raiders, said in a statement he had accepted the resignation.
Rich Bisaccia, the Raiders' special team's coordinator, was elevated to interim head coach, according to the team.
Gruden's departure came after the New York Times reported that NFL officials, as part of a separate workplace misconduct investigation that did not directly involve him, found that Gruden had casually and frequently unleashed misogynistic and homophobic language over several years to denigrate people around the game and to mock some of the league's momentous changes.
Hey, so in other words, this entire report by the NFL was done because there were allegations of sexual harassment inside the Washington Redskins, now the Washington football team, structure.
They called some 650,000 emails, including private emails, from Gruden to people who are inside the Washington Redskins, now Washington football team, structure.
Then the NFL decided that they were going to leak these emails to basically destroy Gruden.
Now, I have a question for you.
Put aside what Gruden says in the emails.
Do you want to live in a world where all of your old emails, hacked at any time, could be the reason for your downfall?
Is that the world you want to live in?
First of all, ExpressVPN.com, go check it out right now and protect your data.
But, beyond that, are you really interested in now being in a situation where there is no distinction between public and private?
Private emails are just out there for everyone to see, and we can unleash our selective outrage on anyone we choose, at a moment's notice, for pure convenience.
Because let's be real about this.
John Gruden's old emails are like problem number 193 on the list of NFL problems.
Okay, here are just a few of the people who are currently playing in the NFL and their alleged crimes.
Like, actual criminal activity, not bad old emails in which you use the F-word for gay people.
Which, by the way, apparently Matt Damon is allowed to do, so that's exciting.
Right?
Matt Damon is so important that he's allowed to use that word up till, like, last year, and everybody just goes, well, you know, we do like him as an actor.
But John Gruden used it in 2011, in an old email, and he has to be fired.
Okay, so here are the people in the NFL who are currently playing.
Bradley Chubb was injured for the Denver Broncos.
He failed to appear for a court date on misdemeanor traffic charges near Denver.
Deontay Harris is injured but is still active with the New Orleans Saints.
He is suspected of drunk driving, reckless driving, and speeding.
Richard Sherman was recently signed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
He apparently has been accused of domestic assault because he was accused of crashing his car in a construction site and trying to break into his wife's parents' home.
Zayvin Collins, of the Arizona Cardinals, is active.
He's been accused of excessive speeding and reckless driving.
Frank Clark, of the Kansas City Chiefs, is still active.
He's accused of having a concealed submachine gun in his car.
Josh Jacobs, of the Las Vegas Raiders, of that very team, is currently active.
He's accused of driving drunk after a car crash.
But, at least they didn't send old emails in 2011, referring to Michael Sam in denigrating language.
That's super important.
And by the way, the NFL itself, right, is now experiencing major lawsuits from black players because it turns out that the NFL had used race norming, assuming black players start out with a lower cognitive function, in trying to determine whether players had suffered from CTE and brain injuries.
See, an entire sport that is based on people bashing their head into things and people getting concussions, And then people getting brain injury from that.
And the NFL was assessing black players differently from white players.
Roger Goodell still has a job, I've noticed.
But at least they didn't send any bad old emails from like 2011, 2014.
Gruden's departure came as after that New York Times report that NFL officials, as part of a separate workplace misconduct investigation, found that Gruden had casually and frequently unleashed misogynistic and homophobic language.
He denounced the emergence of women as referees.
Okay, so this wasn't even when he was working for the Raiders.
This is when he was working for ESPN.
Okay, well, there's only one problem.
Roger Goodell isn't gay, right?
The messages were sent to Bruce Allen, the former president of the Washington football team, and others while he was working for ESPN as a color analyst during Monday Night Football.
Okay, so this wasn't even when he was working for the Raiders.
This is when he was working for ESPN.
In the emails, Gruden called the league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, the F word. Okay, well, there's only one problem. Roger Goodell isn't gay, right? So we now have a standard whereby using the word day.
The F-word, that is a slur applied to gay people, to using that against non-gay people is now apparently about targeting gay people.
He also called Roger Goodell a clueless anti-football P-word, and then said that Goodell should not have pressured Jeff Fisher, then the coach of the Rams, to draft queers, a reference to Michael Sam, a gay player chosen by the team in 2014.
That's ugly stuff.
That's vulgar stuff.
That ain't in the top 99% of what's been happening in locker rooms around the NFL like today.
And anybody who thinks that it has is out of their mind.
But I guess it's worth $70 million.
Again, the reason this is a story is because everybody in America sees this kind of story and they think, what's in my emails?
What's in my texts?
I mean, it is now safer in the NFL to be a repeat alleged sexual offender than it is to have bad old emails, is the way that this works.
And then everybody will overlook the fact that the NFL continues to be a rather exploitative place.
This push by the elites in our society to basically control everything that you do and then gaslight you about all of it, to set standards that are utterly unreachable by anybody.
Because again, to me, and to I think most people, this isn't about the bad things that John Gruden said in his emails.
The problem is the standard you're now holding people to, which is that if you said anything bad in private ever, ever, and it is ever substantiated, and it is adjudicated to be bad ten years after the fact, You could lose your entire career and you can be destroyed.
And that's what's going on with Jon Gruden right now.
Because if you're Matt Damon and you just come out and apologize for it because you said it yesterday, you're fine.
But if you're Jon Gruden and the NFL needs a distraction from the... Where are the other 650,000 emails, by the way?
I've noticed that the only emails that have leaked are about Jon Gruden.
What about the NFL?
Can we see Roger Goodell's private old emails?
Can we see the old emails from the executives at ESPN?
By the way, if you want to look for bad behavior at ESPN, I mean, there are still historic figures at ESPN who have been described as engaging in rather reckless behavior, who are still commenting on the NFL like day in and day out.
But this is the idea, right?
Is that your culture has been the way that your kids are taught, the way that we are all subjected to a group of people who get to determine, like Coddy's sitting under a palm tree, whether you ought to exist in the society or not.
It's pretty incredible.
And if you protest any of it, or if you notice any of it, this means that you're crazy.
The hijacking of institutions to push this sort of stuff out is amazing.
So for example, you're seeing this right now with DC Comics.
So DC Comics is now attempting to essentially gain some attention for their comic books.
And they've been doing this for a while by increasingly relying on wokeness.
Now the reality is that the comic book audience is a bunch of teenage to young male readers.
Predominantly straight and the DC Comics gang over there is interested in hijacking iconic American figures and then using them for social justice purposes.
That is the goal here.
They're not building new characters with new personalities who are woke.
Instead they're taking iconic characters and they are just Retrofitting them in order to push wokeness and then if you notice that then it's because you're bad, right?
You're not supposed to notice any of this so it is cultural elites attempting to tell you what morality looks like and to shape the minds of young teenage boys and Then tell you they're not doing that or if you notice that they're doing that.
Why do you even care?
That is the silly game that we play stupid games win stupid prizes.
That is why Superman is now coming out as bisexual Which is very exciting stuff.
The New York Times says, up, up, and out of the closet, the new Superman, Jonathan Kent, who is the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, will soon begin a romantic relationship with a male friend, DC Comics announced on Monday.
That same-sex relationship is just one of the ways that Jonathan Kent, who goes by John, is proving to be a different Superman than his famous father.
Since his new series, Superman, son of Carl L., began in July, John has combated wildfires caused by climate change, thwarted a high school shooting, and protested the deportation of refugees in Metropolis.
Don't worry guys, the cultural arbiters, they're not attempting to affect your kids in any way.
They're definitely not attempting to cram down a particular set of values on you.
And if you notice that they are, it's because you're bad.
It's because you're bad.
So make sure you don't say anything about it.
And for sure don't say anything about it.
Because if you say something about it, they'll come after your career and destroy you.
If you notice that they are attempting to control how people think, if you notice that they are attempting to hijack mainstream cultural figures and then twist them into social justice warriors, well then that's because you're intolerant and bad and bigoted.
These are the best people.
By the way, it doesn't matter whether Warner Brothers and DC Comics, it doesn't matter what any of these people do in their business.
It doesn't matter how they treat people.
It doesn't matter that they do business with China.
The key is they're pushing the cultural factors that make them the elites and you not the elites, which is why you need to shut up and pretend that none of this matters to you.
And you have to just wave your hand and say, well, you know, that's just the way the culture goes now.
The left fights culture wars because the left's culture wars are the ways that they change how people think.
It is the threat they use to cudgel people into silence.
It is the standards they use to take control.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is The Matt Wall Show.
It airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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