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Oct. 15, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:32
The Loudoun County Sex Assault Cover-Up | Ep. 1355
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Time Text
Loudoun County Public Schools didn't report multiple alleged sexual assaults.
Joe Biden claims success in his COVID policy while ignoring the fact.
And the White House says that inflation and supply chain bottlenecks are high-class problems.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Okay, so...
The Daily Wire has been all over the situation in Loudoun County, which has national implications because obviously it's going to be very important for this Virginia gubernatorial race.
And should Terry McAuliffe lose the gubernatorial race in Virginia, basically that's the end of Joe Biden's agenda.
Because a bunch of moderate Democrats across the country are going to look at their seats and think, if Terry McAuliffe loses in Relatively blue Virginia.
That means that the American public are not happy with the agenda that we are currently pushing.
And at that point, Joe Biden's agenda is basically dead until after the midterms and probably beyond that.
The midterms don't look like they're shaping up well for him.
So everyone is focusing in on Loudoun County.
Our reporter Luke Rosiak over in Loudoun County has been doing an unbelievable job of uncovering the predations of the school board in Loudoun County and the Democratic Party infrastructure In places like Virginia and Loudoun County with regard to school boards.
By the way, the kind of work that Luke is doing, that's really expensive and difficult work that can only happen because of our Daily Wire members.
If you're already a member, thank you for making that happen because honestly, your membership helped pay for Luke.
But if you're not a member, you really should join up and help our reporters do the kind of work that Luke is doing.
It's making a huge difference out there.
Head on over to Daily Wire right now and grab a membership.
Obviously, this has become a flashpoint Because the National School Board Union came out and basically requested that the FBI and DOJ investigate people who are going to school board meetings and sounding off on how the school boards were not doing their job in terms of educating and protecting their kids.
Well, The biggest story of the last couple of months came out via Luke a little bit earlier this week.
That was the story surrounding a father who was made the face of the quote unquote domestic terror movement by the national media.
It turns out that that father was royally ticked off at one of these meetings, not because he was a domestic terrorist, but because As it turns out, there's fairly good evidence, and he alleges, that his daughter was raped in a public school bathroom by a bisexual boy wearing a skirt, and that the Loudoun County School Board refused to acknowledge that the sexual assault had even taken place, which might piss off even the best of us.
And so this became a national story.
Well, now it turns out there is even more.
According to Luke Rosiak this morning, Loudoun County Public Schools did not record multiple known incidents of alleged sexual assault in schools dating back several years, despite a law that requires statistics about school safety incidents to be reported to the public, and which includes provisions holding school superintendents personally liable for violations, a Daily Wire review of public records found.
After the Daily Wire raised the discrepancy with the Virginia Department of Education, the VDOE spokesman Charles Pyle said, VDOE is reviewing the discipline, crime and violence data submissions of Loudoun County Public Schools and is in communication with LCPS to determine whether the division's reporting is accurate and whether the division is in compliance with state and federal law. The same law could have implications for Loudoun County Superintendent or Principal in the wake of a May 28th alleged sexual assault in a bathroom, an incident first reported by the Daily Wire on Monday.
On June 22nd, Superintendent Scott Ziegler told the public, quote, Virginia law requires that reports shall be made to the division superintendent and to the principal or his designee on all incidents involving sexual assault.
The Daily Wire asked LCPS questions last week, including, quote, has Stonebridge ever reported the may allege sexual assault in any statistics or made anyone aware of it? LCPS hid behind state law with Director of Communications Joan Salgren replying, quote, any information related to student information is confidential under state and federal laws regarding student privacy. However, state law actually requires statistics on assault and other incidents in schools to be reported to the public in the form of annually updated statistics available on a public database called Safe Schools Information Resource
administered by the Virginia Department of Education.
In other words, the school board and the school does not have to report to the public the name of the people involved, the juveniles involved, but they do have to report the numbers.
LCPS reported to the state that Stonebridge had zero sexual assaults for the 2020-2021 school year, which includes May 28, 2021.
Virginia law says the division superintendent shall annually report all such incidents to the DOE for the purpose of recording the frequency of such incidents on forms that shall be provided to the department and shall make such information available to the public.
The issue with missing sex assault statistics in Loudoun is not limited to the latest case, raising the prospect that untold numbers of sexual assaults and other infractions have gone unreported.
In October 2018, in a case that was widely reported by the media at the time, three football players at Tuscarora High were arrested and charged with sexual assault.
A source told local media, it's believed a younger player was held down by teammates who inserted objects into the victim in a locker room.
As a spokesperson for LCPS said at the time, the case will be subject to disciplinary action.
The annual report for Tuscarora that year reported zero instances of sexual offenses against students.
LCPS provided no response at all to the Daily Wire's questions about the reason for the zero figures despite having two days to do so.
While the suspect in the May 28th alleged assault was not arrested until July 8th, following the conclusion of an investigation, police officers were present at the school that day, law enforcement was notified, and a police report was filed, though it was not clear who filed the report.
Pyle, the state spokesman, said that the SSSR's mandatory reporting is not contingent on the filing of charges by law enforcement or subsequent convictions.
In other words, if this was reported to the cops, that just means that it has to be reported in the stats.
But it wasn't reported in the stats.
Additionally, the safety stats for that school year were not due to the state until July 16th.
And in the case of Tuscarora, the school year did not end until months after the incident and arrest, yet the district still reported zero and has for every single year since.
On Wednesday, LCPS put out a statement.
It did not send it to the Daily Wire.
it said, quote, Loudoun County Sheriff's Office was contacted within minutes of receiving the initial report on May 28th. Once a matter has been reported to law enforcement, LCPS does not begin its investigation until law enforcement advises LCPS it has completed the criminal investigation.
Furthermore, we can't discipline any student without following Title IX grievance processes.
But an email from Stonebridge Principal Tim Flynn, which was sent to the entire community at 448 the day of the alleged rape, told students and parents that, quote, there was an incident in the main office area today that required the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office to dispatch deputies to Stonebridge. This corresponds to the story offered by Scott Smith, the victim's father, who said the police arrived because the school called them on him for making a scene about his impression it was not treating the incident seriously.
So this is a disaster area for Loudoun County.
If it turns out that the Loudoun County schools have not been reporting these stats on sexual assault to the public, just another indicator that when you have institutions that are very powerful, they have every incentive to cover up all of the bad things happening within those institutions.
This is true across institutions.
People develop institutional loyalty when they work for those institutions.
They don't want to report the bad stuff happening inside the institutions.
And that's how you end up with children being put in danger.
Now, for the left, they don't care, apparently, if those children are put in danger by the public schools.
There are a wide variety of cases in which teachers have made prey out of their students in public schools across the country.
Those statistics are, in fact, somewhat available.
It's a national story when it's the Catholic Church.
It's not a national story when it turns out that it's the public school system, obviously, even though there are many, many more members of the public school system in the United States than there are members of the Catholic Church who are subject to priest predation.
There's certainly an ideological component here.
And meanwhile, the family of that girl who was allegedly raped in her school bathroom is now pursuing civil action against the Loudoun County Public Schools under Title IX.
So there will, in fact, be a lawsuit.
The parents of the young girl stated, quote, subsequent to the sexual assault on our daughter, Loudoun County Public Schools formalized the policy regarding restroom use that was easily exploitable by a potential sexual assailant.
Because of poor planning and misguided policies, Loudoun Schools failed to institute even minimal safeguards to protect students from sexual assault.
The lawyer for the family says the conduct of Loudoun County Schools and the Loudoun School Board directly resulted in the brutal rape of Smith's daughter at Stonebridge High.
It only takes an instant to see how Loudoun County Schools have adversely affected this family and have harmed their daughter.
So, all of this has resulted in some pretty bad...
News for Terry McAuliffe, who's running for governor of Virginia and who is completely in hock to the teachers unions in the state of Virginia.
He was asked yesterday about whether parents should be in charge of education.
And this, of course, remains a major issue right across the country.
Parents would like to be in charge of their children's education.
Public schools are delegated your kids to educate them in the ways that you see fit.
They are not delegated to the power to educate them solely as they see fit.
Because, frankly, they are not qualified to do so nor empowered to do so.
That is not the purpose of local public schools.
And the federalization of the process has made this worse.
It's created a massive disconnect between the bureaucrats who are supposed to educate your children and you.
This is why, increasingly, parents are taking their kids out of the public schools, putting them in private schools, homeschooling them, trying to find charter schools, doing anything they can to remove the monopoly on indoctrination now provided by liberal teachers' unions and the state-run schooling system.
So Terry McAuliffe was asked about all of this because he had said in open debate with Glenn Youngkin in Virginia that parents essentially have no interest in the education of their kids.
It's really the state's job to educate the kids.
Here's Terry McAuliffe erupting when asked about it.
Who do you think should be in control of education if not Virginia parents?
vaccinated yet. That's the question I want to know. Do you think you're in control of education? If not Virginia parents, I'll build education.
That's why Fox News has me leading when you'll destroy Virginia's education system. What a joke. Terry McAuliffe is.
What a joke.
So he's asked whether parents should be in control of education.
And he starts lecturing the guy about a mask.
They are standing outside.
He's literally walking to his car.
If you can't see the clip, he's literally walking to his car and just yelling at this reporter, saying that he should be wearing a mask.
And then he says, I'll take care of education.
Glenn Youngkin will destroy it.
Yeah, sure.
Sure.
So Terry McAuliffe is in real trouble in this race.
This should not be a close race.
The Virginia The political map has been turning blue for quite a while right now.
The results in Virginia in the 2020 election were heavily in favor, of course, of Hillary, in favor of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden won the state by 10 points in 2020.
Right now, Youngkin is running, who's a relative no-name, is running neck and neck with Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor.
It's the fact that this is even close.
It's a referendum on how bad people think democratic governance is, even in democratic states.
This has relegated Terry McAuliffe to basically trying to treat Glenn Youngkin as though he is Donald Trump and also Greg Abbott, which of course is not true.
Here is Terry McAuliffe trying to say that Glenn Youngkin is going to ban abortion in the state of Virginia, which of course is not going to happen.
I mean, unfortunately from my point of view, but that's not what's going to happen in the state of Virginia.
I protected women's rights.
He is going to ban abortions.
We got him on tape saying that.
Wants to ban abortions in Virginia.
And I'll tell you, Andrew, that's a real issue for everyone today.
For 50 years, we thought the Supreme Court would protect everybody with Roe v. Wade.
Trump's Supreme Court, if Glenn Youngkin is elected governor of Virginia, abortions will cease.
And I gotta tell you, it's dangerous for women, dangerous for doctors, and you can't bring businesses.
I've recruited Amazon to Virginia.
They're not coming to a state that discriminates.
He's having a really tough time, McAuliffe, putting a target on Junkin's back because McAuliffe is the issue here, not Trump and not Junkin.
And when it comes to education, Americans have very simple questions to ask, like, why are you guys doing an unbelievably crappy job?
Brand new report out says the nation's 13 year olds are less proficient in math and reading than they were almost a decade ago.
That is not because of the COVID pandemic.
That was data collected before the start of the pandemic and released on Thursday according to the National Assessment of Education Progress, this is Politico reporting.
This is the first time these scores have dropped in either subject in the 50-year history of the test.
The students who struggled the most with the exam have fallen further behind.
A worrisome result that suggests learning loss exacerbated by the pandemic could be catastrophic.
Math scores fell furthest among students whose performance ranked in the 10th and 25th percentiles, meaning test-takers with the lowest math scores in 2020 did worse than students who struggled the most when the test was last administered in 2012.
The data also shows the achievement gap between white and black test-takers widened.
Nationally, math scores for 13-year-olds fell on average by 5 points.
Reading scores declined on average 3 points.
None of these results are impressive, said the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.
They're all concerning.
The math results were particularly daunting.
So basically, your schools are failing to educate kids, particularly the kids who are at the lowest end of the spectrum.
And meanwhile, they're indoctrinating them in all the worst values and not protecting them.
And you wonder why we have a schools crisis right now?
You wonder why so many parents are interested in pulling their kids out of school?
And you wonder why so many people are looking askance at democratic administrations who seem solely concerned with pleasing teachers unions?
You wanna know why so many Americans are upset with maybe the FBI and the DOJ doing the bidding of the very people who are failing to educate their kids and then claiming complete plenary authority over those children?
None of this is good news for Democrats.
Obviously.
Meanwhile, as the cascade of bad headlines is just swamping the Democrats right now, the Biden administration is struggling for a narrative.
The narrative that they are now coming up with is that they have defeated COVID.
Yes, yes, it was them.
They did it.
It was the mandatory vaccine mandate.
Sure, it was that.
So yesterday, Joe Biden wandered out to a microphone and he spoke for a grand total of seven minutes and then he turned around and then he left.
Okay, so, I mean, that's all he can be expected to do.
He shows up every day, he talks for like 37 seconds, and then he sort of collapses out of the room and is dragged back to his casket where they perform some sort of resuscitory action upon him.
And then he breathes lightly until the next day when they pull him out of the casket again and wheel him out.
So, President Biden yesterday, he came out and he said, our plan is working.
Oh, interesting.
Okay, explain, Mr. President.
I want to provide a brief update on my plan that announced in early September to accelerate the path out of this pandemic.
It's working.
We're making progress.
Nationally, daily cases are down 47 percent.
Hospitalizations are down 38 percent over the past six weeks.
Over the past two weeks, most of the country has improved as well.
Case rates are declining in 39 states and hospital rates are declining in 38 states.
OK, let me point out how stupid this is.
OK, the reason that this is unbelievably stupid is because there are several reasons.
Reason number one, the states that have seen the largest scale declines are states that have completely ignored Joe Biden.
Florida never had vaccine mandates.
In fact, Ron DeSantis has been fighting vaccine mandates pretty much every step of the way and has vaccination rates that are about the same as the vaccination rates in California, for example.
They're not wildly different.
Hey, Joe Biden is suggesting that it is him yelling about vaccines that has caused the pandemic to wane, that old man shouting at clouds made the pandemic wane.
Nope!
All that happened is that the pandemic hits populations who spend lots of time indoors, and then it wanes because it passes through the population.
This is what pandemics do.
But this is Joe Biden's tried and true method, right?
There's a parade already moving.
He jumps out in front of it and claims credit for the parade.
He did this with the vaccine rollout itself.
He didn't have one iota to do with the development of the vaccine.
His vaccine rollout plan was the same as Trump's.
And then he jumped in front of the parade and he was like, well, here I am and look at how I did it.
It was me.
Success.
And now he's doing the exact same thing.
So the pandemic wanes, mostly in red states where it had spiked.
And he's like, look what I did.
Jill, look at me.
I'm great.
Amazing, amazing how he jumps in front.
This is constantly the policy of bad bureaucrats.
Is that the problem already starts to solve itself and then they jump in front of it and they go, oh, it was me.
I did it.
OK, so according to Joe Biden, Joe Biden solved the pandemic by yelling at clouds.
In reality, his plan has not worked.
It is also worthy of noting at this point that all the vaccine mandates that he supposedly used in order to get the vaccine rates up, the only one that has actually been implemented to this point is the federal contractor mandate.
There is still no rule from it's been like almost two months now.
There is still no rule from OSHA that actually mandates that employers over 100 employees have to have to vax their people.
So to credit his vaccine mandates with the uptick in vaccination rates is a stretch in and of itself.
It is quite possible that one of the reasons you saw an uptick in vaccination rates is specifically because people looked at the Delta variant.
They said, OK, I now have a choice.
I can either get Delta or not get Delta.
I prefer not to get Delta.
I prefer to get the vaccine.
And then if I get a breakthrough case, it'll be mild.
But again, Joe Biden is going to claim credit for everything.
Now, what's amazing about Joe Biden and our current authoritarians?
is that they truly believe that you are bad.
You are divisive because you refuse their authoritarian mandates.
This is an incredible statement from Joe Biden, what we're about to play.
So Joe Biden is talking about divisiveness.
Now, Joe Biden came into office on the pledge that he was going to unify.
He instead has proposed an agenda that looks very much like Bernie Sanders's economic agenda.
And he's proposed a COVID agenda that is full top-down authoritarian in many ways.
So he has completely run beyond his own political mandate.
So Joe Biden came into office with a political mandate.
It was to be dead, right?
Not alive.
Not Trump.
And moderate.
Two of those three he has fulfilled.
He is dead.
He is not Trump.
But he is certainly not moderate.
And yet, according to Joe Biden, it is you, you, who are dividing the country.
You won't listen to him, and you won't do what he wants.
You're dividing the country.
Now, I noted this literally the day of his inauguration.
In his speech, he kept talking about unity, and I said, well, there are two types of unity.
There's unity in the sense that we'll leave you alone, and then we'll try to find some higher purpose we can all pursue together.
But it's mostly gonna be us leaving you alone, right?
Unity requires us to go weapons down.
Or unity could be, you do exactly what I want at point of gun, and now we're unified, aren't we?
It's pretty obvious which way Joe Biden has moved.
So yesterday, Kerry was saying that vaccine mandates should not divide us.
I have an idea.
Don't do them then!
Let's be clear.
Vaccination requirements should not be another issue that divides us.
That's why we continue to battle the misinformation that's out there.
And companies and communities are setting up there, stepping up as well to combat the misinformation.
Southwest Airlines.
At the head of the pilot, the head of the pilot's union and its CEO, dismissed critics who claim vaccination mandates contributed to flight disruptions.
Well, who are you going to believe?
Joe Biden about the vaccine mandates contributing to flight disruptions?
Or your own lying eyes, which demonstrate that there was really no weather problem in the United States and Southwest was the only airline that had been significantly affected?
Who are you going to believe about that?
Or the Southwest employees we've been talking to here at Daily Wire, who are explaining exactly why people are sicking out?
Okay, so there is such an authoritarian streak in this guy.
He mandates that you do a thing.
If you don't do the thing, you're being divisive.
If you refuse to acquiesce to his demands, you are the divisive one.
You're a very divisive person for not doing exactly what Joe Biden is telling you to do.
That's an unbelievably authoritarian and tyrannical statement.
And then Joe Biden just scampers away.
When I say scampers, I mean he walks very slowly away because he's not capable of scampering anymore.
Those legs ain't gonna do it.
So here is Joe Biden just walking away after seven minutes in the glare of the public spotlight.
Thank you very much.
And then Joe Biden kind of, he kind of fades away.
Joe Biden, old presidents don't die.
They just walk away.
There's that president of the United States just sort of, he came out for a moment and then he went back down into his hole, which means I believe six more weeks of winter.
So here's the thing.
It is pretty obvious that whatever surge we had and waning we had had nothing to do with Joe Biden.
According to the New York Times, after a brutal summer surge driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the coronavirus is again in retreat.
The United States is recording roughly 90,000 new infections a day, down more than 40% since August.
Hospitalizations and deaths are falling, too.
The crisis is not over everywhere.
The situation in Alaska is particularly dire.
But nationally, the trend is clear, and hopes are rising that the worst is finally behind us again.
Over the past two years, the pandemic has crashed over the country in waves, inundating hospitals and then receding, only to return after Americans let their guard down.
I love how the New York Times puts that.
So it's that Americans let their guard down that causes the pandemic to spike.
Except that it's spiking in blue areas too.
It is all about, are you in proximity to other people?
When it's cold outside, people go inside and then they get infected.
When it's really hot outside, people go inside and then they get infected.
Okay, that's all.
And this baseline notion that if you get infected, it's because you have been sinful in some way is ridiculous.
A lot of the people who are getting infected are people who got vaxxed.
They're just getting breakthroughs.
The New York Times says it's difficult to tease apart the reasons the virus ebbs and flows in this way and harder still to predict the future.
No, it's actually not all that difficult to explain.
I just did it in two sentences.
As winter looms, there are real reasons for optimism.
Nearly 70% of adults are fully vaccinated.
Many children under 12 are likely to be eligible for their shots in a matter of weeks.
Federal regulators could soon authorize the first antiviral pill for COVID-19.
By the way, Joe Biden said yesterday that parents are going to sleep more solidly at night knowing that their children won't be in danger because of the vaccine.
Those of us who've been watching the stats have been sleeping solidly at night about our kids for a long time.
I wasn't sleeping solidly about my parents.
My parents are 65.
I've been sleeping very solidly about my 7, 5, and 1 year old because kids aren't dying of this in anything remotely like significant numbers.
Hey, that is not morally significant numbers.
Every kid who dies is a morally significant life.
But if you're talking about statistical significance, the grand total number of kids who have died in the United States from COVID-19 without serious pre-existing conditions, according to Dr. Martin McCary of Johns Hopkins University, is currently between 10 and 20.
Not 10 and 20,000.
10 and 20.
Hey, that is not the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night.
I am not kept awake at night by the fact that my child is in significant danger if 10 to 20 kids across a country of 330 million people have died of COVID without pre-existing conditions.
Okay, but again, you must be cudgeled into the belief that these people have solved the problem as opposed to, you know, the virus just doing what the virus does.
And my favorite thing about all of this is that we're supposed to believe all these folks, right?
You heard Joe Biden a moment ago talking about how, you know, none of this should be divisive.
We should just be listening to our authorities.
We should be listening to our institutions.
Except that our institutions have routinely lied to us.
Aside from Dr. Anthony Fauci, who shifts his opinion every 5.3 seconds, depending on whatever Joe Biden wants from him that day.
Our media are just liars.
So, honestly, one of the funniest things that I've seen in the past couple of months, Joe Rogan did a segment with Sanjay Gupta of CNN, and honestly, flowered Gupta's widow because Rogan just destroyed him.
It really is quite incredible.
He had Gupta on, and he asked him, so, Sanjay, I have a question.
I took ivermectin.
It is not a horse dewormer.
It is a medication.
Your entire network claimed that it was a horse dewormer.
Why don't you tell the members of your network it is not a horse dewormer and tell them to stop lying to people?
So then Sanjay Gupta went back on TV on CNN and he had his chance and he said nothing because he's getting paid by CNN.
So here is Don Lemon trying to explain it's fine to call Ivermectin a horse dewormer even though that is not the form of Ivermectin that Joe Rogan was taking.
I know it's in large part a tongue-in-cheek interview, you know, because it's Joe Rogan and there's lots of you jockeying back and forth, but he did say something about ivermectin that I think wasn't actually correct, about CNN and lying, okay?
Ivermectin is a drug that is commonly used as a horse dewormer.
So it is not a lie to say that the drug is used as a horse dewormer.
I think that's important and it is not Approved for COVID.
Correct?
That's right.
That's not right.
It's not approved for COVID by the FDA.
But the notion that ivermectin, which comes in a variety of forms, that Joe Rogan was like taking a tube of horse paste and then ingesting it is insane.
And Sanjay Gupta admitted that to Joe Rogan.
And then he went on CNN and then he nodded along while Don Lemon continues to lie about it.
It's unreal.
But don't worry.
These are not the divisive people.
You are divisive.
You're divisive for not listening to them.
Meanwhile, These experts, the one who are going to fix everything, this is the story of the day.
It is unreal to me.
So, these experts, the people who are going to fix all your problems, right?
They're going to hit that magic button.
All the problems are going to be fixed.
It's going to be incredible.
Pete Buttigieg is the Secretary of Transportation.
We are currently having, in the United States, the worst shipping crisis in my lifetime.
And I'm nearly 40 years old.
This is the worst shipping crisis we've had in the United States in my lifetime.
The Secretary of Transportation, you might think, might have some things to do, right?
I mean, we've had this shipping bottleneck.
It's been ongoing in the United States since the summer.
You might think that the Secretary of Transportation would be necessary.
Pete Buttigieg was on paternity leave since August.
Hey, Politico is now reporting that Pete Buttigieg was just gone.
And no one noticed.
That's how important Pete Buttigieg is.
I mean, while he was waxing philosophic about the beauty of the smells of the airport, Pete Buttigieg was actually spending the last two months, this brilliant young mind from South Bend, Indiana, who couldn't fill a damn pothole over there.
Pete Buttigieg has been home with his husband, Chasen, and their two children.
And yeah, that's great.
So, that's exciting stuff.
He's just been gone for two months and no one noticed.
Which means that he is a complete useless person.
I mean, I have a question for you.
If you just went MIA for two months, right?
You just went MIA.
Didn't bother to replace you.
Nobody bothered to tell anybody.
You just went MIA.
How long do you think you would keep your job?
This means that your job is more vital than people to judges.
By the way, according to internal Democratic polling, he's second only to Kamala Harris in terms of who the Democrats want to see run for president again.
A man so useless that he took two months off in the middle of a shipping crisis as the head of the Department of Transportation to be home with two babies.
That's... Again, nothing against paternity leave, although I will say I think two months is a very long time for paternity leave, especially when there's no physical recovery involved.
But with that said, If you're going to take paternity leave and you're in a real important job and you're a public servant, shouldn't somebody know about it?
According to Politico, they didn't previously announce it, but Buttigieg's office told West Wing Playbook the secretary has actually been on paid leave since mid-August to spend time with his husband, Jason, and their two newborn babies.
A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation said, quote, Amazing.
Amazing.
These are the people we need in charge.
for major agency decisions and matters that could not be delegated.
He's been ramping up activities since then.
As he does that, Buttigieg will continue to take some time over the coming weeks to support his husband and take care of his new children, the spokesperson added.
Amazing, amazing.
These are the people we need in charge.
They're going to fix everything.
They're so good at that they just went completely AWOL for two months and no one even noticed This is office space now.
It's Ron Livingston from office space.
I'm not going to quit.
I'm just not going to work anymore.
I think I'm done working.
What is it that you say you do here exactly?
But here's the thing.
Democrats are just going to continue to pretend that nothing bad is happening.
It's truly incredible.
So, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Larry Summers, who's the Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, he points out that we are now in a very serious economic position.
We have massive inflation, it is now permanent, or semi-permanent.
We have a serious shipping bottleneck that is not going to be solved anytime soon.
We have millions of workers who are quitting the workforce.
4.3 million workers left the workforce last month.
And here is Larry Summers pointing out this is all kind of serious, is it not?
In the 60s, we saw, before there were any adverse supply shocks, we saw inflation move from having a one handle in 1966 to having a six handle by 1969.
And we've got much larger budget deficits today than we did then.
We've got much more in the way of supply bottlenecks emerging much sooner than we did then.
So I think we're looking at a very serious kind of situation.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Morgan Stanley says, remember all those times they kept telling you over and over that inflation was transitory, it was going to go away soon?
Joe Biden's been saying that for months.
James Gorman, the CEO and chairman of Morgan Stanley's like, yeah, not so much.
I'm not a buyer of this story that it's all transitory, the inflation story.
It's not transitory.
I mean, wage inflation is real, and the supply chain interruptions, and you were talking about some of the natural gas and other things, have clearly been real.
Some of that is temporary, but not all of it.
So I think we're in a period where inflation is going to tick up.
Yep.
But here's the thing.
According to this administration, this isn't a big deal.
These are high class problems.
So Jason Furman, who is some sort of a reporter slash commentator.
He said, most of the economic problems we're facing, inflation, supply chains, et cetera, are high class problems.
We wouldn't have had them if the unemployment rate was still 10%.
We would instead have had a much worse problem.
And Ron Klain, who is the White House chief of staff, and he spends all day on Twitter.
Remember that time that Trump was bad because he was on Twitter all day?
So Ron Klain, who's on Twitter like all day long, like all day, he tweets this.
Meaning he agrees with this.
So he agrees that inflation and supply chain problems are quote-unquote high-class problems.
These are good problems.
It's a good problem that you're paying like a crap load of money at the store for basic goods.
It's a great problem that you can't get Christmas presents for your kids.
These are great problems to have, aren't they?
Because apparently, according to this administration, the only two alternatives are 1.
10% unemployment and 2.
Massive inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.
Or alternatively, your policy created the problems.
Your policy is creating these problems.
So Jen Psaki was asked about this, and honestly, she is just... She's the night nurse for this administration.
They crapped the bed, she tries to clean it up.
I kind of feel bad for her, except she volunteered into the job.
Here's Jen Psaki.
So Jason Furman, of course, is more than capable of speaking or tweeting for himself, obviously, and providing any additional context.
But what the point is here is that we are at this point because we've made progress in the economy.
And what would be worse, in our view, is if the unemployment rate was at 10%, people were out of work, hundreds of thousands of people were still dying of COVID, and people weren't able to lose their homes.
So that's the full context.
Oh, that's it.
Yeah, it's all good.
Full context.
I'm so glad.
I'm so glad that she's now provided the full context.
It turns out that Democrats can always claim that the alternative is complete destruction of all that is good, as opposed to, you know, the mostly destruction of all that is good that is happening right now.
In a second, I want to get to the underlying rationale for why so many Democrats seem pretty sanguine about all this.
Because for most people who are out there, it makes a difference if they're paying higher bills.
For most people who are out there, it makes a difference if they are losing in terms of real wages.
For most people out there, it matters if they can get Christmas presents for their kids.
This stuff tends to matter to people.
So why are Democrats so sanguine about it?
There's something ideological to it.
We'll get to it in just one second.
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We're going to get to more in a moment, including the real question as to why Democrats seem so sanguine about all of this.
First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Dailyware member.
Today, it's David Burnett on Instagram, who knows what it takes to excel during the long hospital work hours.
In this picture, David and his wife are in an operating room, dressed in their scrubs and proudly displaying the world's most elite tumbler.
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Look out world, you can't flee the truth forever.
True.
True dat, as the children say.
Thanks for the pic, and for being a Daily Wire member.
Also, we had a lot of exciting announcements to make at our showing of Backstage at the Ryman this past Tuesday, because the Daily Wire is fulfilling our promise of bringing you even more non-woke content you literally will not find anywhere else.
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It has been an exciting week for The Daily Wire.
This weekend's Sunday special is only making it better.
I'm joined by none other than Barry Weiss, the iconoclastic writer, journalist, and now the voice of her own excellent podcast called Honestly with Barry Weiss.
We sat down to make sense of all that is going on today.
It's truly worth the listen.
Really important conversation.
Here's a sneak peek.
There's one word that sums up how we've gotten to this insane pass, and it's cowardice.
The number one ingredient that, if it were present, would change the outcome of almost all of these stories, all of the smearing of good people for maybe at worst making a mistake, is courage.
It's a story of cowardice and courage, the moment that we're in.
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Her evolution is really, really interesting.
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Okay, so the big question here is why Democrats seem so sanguine about the current financial situation.
And maybe the reason is they're happy to transform more.
There's an article in the Wall Street Journal today talking about scarcity of labor.
It says 4.3 million workers are missing.
Where did they go?
Scarce labor is becoming a fixture of the U.S.
economy, reshaping the workforce, prodding firms to adapt by raising wages, reinventing services, and investing in automation.
More than a year and a half into the pandemic, the U.S.
is still missing around 4.3 million workers.
That's how much bigger the labor force would be if the participation rate, the share of the population 16 or older, either working or looking for work, returned to its February 2020 level of 63.3%.
In September, it was just 61.6%.
The absence comes as U.S.
employers are struggling to fill more than 10 million job openings and meet soaring consumer demand.
In another sign of how tight the labor market is, jobless claims fell to 293,000 last week, the first time since the pandemic began that they fell below 300,000, according to the Labor Department.
Workers are quitting at or near the highest rates on record in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, trade, transportation, and utilities, as well as professional and business services.
Participation has fallen broadly across demographic groups and career fields, but has dropped particularly fast among women, workers without a college degree, and those in low-paying service industries like hotels, restaurants, and childcare.
Many economists expected that people would come back to work, but some economists are concerned that worsening worker shortages reflect longer-term shifts, such as the pandemic-driven acceleration of retirements that will not reverse.
Many expect the labor shortage to last at least several more years.
Some say it's permanent.
Of the 52 economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, 22 predicted participation would never return to its pre-pandemic levels.
So where exactly are all of these people going?
Well, many of them are either going back home.
If you're married, if you're a married couple, maybe mom is going back home and dad is picking up some extra hours, which is fine.
Or maybe people are just, you know, staying out of jobs because they think the government's going to pay for them.
Goldman Sachs said in a note this month that enhanced unemployment benefits have likely contributed to the shortage.
When the pandemic began, Jesse Stromlich was a senior engineering manager at a small software firm in Portland, Oregon, supervising a couple dozen employees.
In the pandemic, there were a lot of challenges in our business I was called upon to deal with, said Stromlich.
Just tapping that button all the time is really tiring.
The birth of his son last November added to his doubts about whether the job's rewards were worth the sacrifices.
He initially looked for other opportunities.
When a friend suggested he take time off entirely, Stromlich was intrigued.
Is that even a thing you can do in capitalism, he recalls thinking?
His wife, a nurse midwife, supported the move.
The federal government has allowed borrowers like his wife to suspend student loan payments through January 2022.
The couple also refied their mortgage at a lower interest rate.
Okay, so this is all government policy now, right?
The government has prevented people from having to pay back their student loans and they're artificially lowering the mortgage rates.
Those adjustments have saved around $2,000 a month.
Stromlich's planned three months off has now stretched to five months and might last until the end of the year.
Two years ago, I was thinking I want to get as high as I can on the corporate ladder, he said.
It just interests me less now if it comes with the sacrifice to my mental health and my connection with my family.
Employers are overhauling their business models to adjust for the labor shortages.
Okay, bottom line is this.
People look at the way the Democrats are running things and they believe In their heart of hearts, apparently, that there will never be a cost to this.
They can stay out of the workforce and people will just take care of them.
There will be programs that are designed to artificially either boost wages for one of the people or that will pay them just to stay home.
Paul Krugman, for one, is celebrating this as the Keynesian he is.
He says, It's not surprising many workers are either quitting or reluctant to return to their old jobs.
The harder question is why now?
Many Americans hated their jobs two years ago, but they didn't act on those feelings as much as they are now.
What changed?
Well, it's only speculation, but it seems quite possible the pandemic, by upending many Americans' lives, also caused some of them to reconsider their life choices.
Not everyone can afford to quit a hated job, but a significant number of workers seem ready to accept the risk of trying something different.
Except that, if you look statistically, the people who are not going back to work are people who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum, not people who are middle class and upper end.
It is people who are more likely to end up on the dole.
But according to Krugman, this is a good thing.
He says, while this new choosiness by workers who feel empowered is making consumers and business owners' lives more difficult, let's be clear.
Overall, it's a good thing.
American workers are insisting on a better deal.
It's in the nation's interest they get it.
A good thing for whom?
Prices have been skyrocketing because of lack of labor.
The people who are working are getting raises, but those raises are not commensurate with the inflation rates.
Meanwhile, we have to blow out the debt to keep up with the price-adjusted increases for mandatory programs like Social Security.
And the Biden administration wants to blow out more money in order to pay for all those people who don't want to work.
Remember when AOC at one point said that we need to create a system where we pay for everybody who is either unable or unwilling to work?
She wasn't kidding.
And many Democrats feel this way.
There's a fascinating article in The Nation, which of course is a far-left source, My guy named Aaron Benavev, Ben and Av, called Making a Living, the history of what we call work.
And he really kind of spills the beans on what it is that the left would like here.
What the left would like is to change your consuming habits so you are satisfied with less and so we can redistribute everything in the way that the left would like.
What they want is economic stagnation and redistribution.
That is the goal of the left at this point.
They see work as an inherent bad.
And there's a belief in the minds of the left about human nature.
And that belief is that if you are freed from the predations of work, all work being a form of exploitation, if you are freed from the predations of work, you will become a poet and an artist.
You remember Nancy Pelosi actually said this.
Nancy Pelosi at one point said that she wanted to free people from job lock through Obamacare, right?
You wouldn't be locked to your job because you need healthcare.
And then maybe you'd be able to wander around and create art and poetry because that's exactly what people typically on welfare do.
I mean, if you've ever looked at the crowd of people creating great art, great poetry in this country, it is predominantly coming from people who are requiring government benefits.
Those are the people who are just the heart and soul of creativity and innovation in the United States.
So according to this author in The Nation, he's writing about a book called Work!
A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by an anthropologist named James Sussman.
And the basic idea of this book is that for the vast majority of human history, human beings have lived as hunter-gatherers on diets consisting of fruits, vegetables, nuts, insects, fish, and game.
The idea behind this book is that while the myth goes that people live in scarcity when they're hunter-gatherers, that they're living in relative privation on the edge of starvation or death, that's not actually true.
According to the book, fire predigests food.
When you roast the flesh of a woolly mammoth, the process yields significantly more calories than if the food was left uncooked.
Mastering fire thus made for a radical increase in humanity's free time because early humans were able to get more out of the food that they had and therefore they had a lot of free time.
According to that author, free time subsequently shaped our species' cultural evolution.
Leisure afforded long periods of hanging around with others which led to the development of language, storytelling, and the arts.
Human beings also gained the capacity to care for those who were too old to feed for themselves, a trait we share with few other species.
So again, the idea is that we should be more like the hunter-gatherers.
We should abandon the way that we see production entirely and instead we should aim for a system in which we basically do the subsistence minimum and we can spend the rest of our time hanging out and partying and having ourselves a good time.
This is the basic idea here.
Now, the question is why that hasn't happened, right?
So one of the questions is why, if that's true, if human beings just want to basically cover their basic needs and then move on with their lives and hang out and party, why aren't more humans doing this?
The answer for the left is that you have all been corrupted by the capitalist system, which makes you want things.
And because you want things, this leads you to the chaining of yourself to the machine.
You chain yourself to the work.
According to this author for The Nation, John Kenneth Galbraith provided one plausible answer in The Affluent Society.
In it, he suggested that John Maynard Keynes had underestimated the degree to which we can manipulate it into seeing our relative wants as absolute needs, meaning stuff that's marginal to us, we can see them as absolute needs.
Now, most economists on the right will say there's no such thing, really, as a prioritization of need that is absolute.
Beyond, like, full-on basic necessities, like you have to have enough food and water to live, aside from that, we all prioritize our needs differently, and we get to make those choices subjectively.
But what the left would like to do is force you to prioritize your needs in the way that the left wants you to prioritize your needs, and then redistribute all income to create a new kind of human being, a new kind of altruistic, wondrous human being, who's more like the hunter-gatherers.
Now, never mind that hunter-gatherer societies tend to have life expectancies that are really, really low.
Like in the middle of this article, the author cites the Coon-Bushmen.
Okay, the Coon-Bushmen have an average life expectancy of somewhere between 40 and 50 years old.
Also, it turns out that prosperity comes with low infant mortality rates and being able to keep your elderly alive for longer.
But all of this doesn't matter because obviously work is the bad.
At the end of this article, in The Nation, the author comes to the conclusion.
He says, we should set the course not to Mars for vacationing with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but rather to a post-scarcity planet Earth on which their wealth has been confiscated and put to better ends.
The ends of the left, of course.
Getting there will require that we overcome the endemic insecurity that continues to plague nine-tenths of humanity, while also reducing and transforming the work we do.
Achieving those ends will in turn require that we transform the investment function, as Keynes suggested, but in ways that make investment not only public, but democratically controlled.
Freed from the constraints of scarcity economics, we will then serve the trickster god entropy.
What he's talking about there is the idea that human beings like to work, and you're gonna have extra energy, so you just go make stuff.
So instead of you going and working and innovating and making life better for other people, instead, I don't think this article in The Nation is far off the thinking of many people in the Democratic Party.
Work is inherently bad.
Not only in the hunt for efficiency gains or in making whatever hand acts as our engineers dream up next, but also in the service of a variety of other ends, such as justice and sustainability, science and culture, and throwing parties to a new, better humanity will be ushered in through the collective is the idea here.
I don't think this article in the nation is far off the thinking of many people in the Democratic Party.
Work is inherently bad.
Leisure is inherently good.
Anything that causes you to work, whether it is your, like this is the direct opposite of sort of the Randian approach to work.
The Ayn Randian approach to work is that work is an outgrowth of your creative function.
And when you do creative things, what you're actually doing is fulfilling yourself, which is true for a huge number of people who work.
Work gives people purpose.
Work is not a bad thing.
But the left sees work as a bad thing.
They believe that if you had more leisure time, what you would really be spending that doing is stuff that doesn't... You wouldn't take drugs.
You wouldn't get addicted to alcohol.
Unemployment would come with just vast benefits.
We would sit around campfires.
We'd tell each other stories.
We would think about justice and sustainability.
We'd hug the trees and all the rest.
So, that is why so many people seem pretty sanguine about the high rates of people dropping out of the economy.
It's actually creating the utopia they seek, which is some people work a lot of hours and really hard to produce for everybody else, and then we redistribute all the gains.
Now, some people see that as a violation of liberty principles.
Some people see that, as I do, as a violation of basic human nature, which is that people need to work.
It is good for people to work.
Work is not a bad thing.
And the notion that people expend extra leisure time in the most glorious of pursuits is generally untrue.
There is truth to the old saying that idle hands are the devil's workshop.
But according to the left, that's not right.
Capitalism is bad because work is bad.
And therefore, what we really need to do is grab the gains of capitalism and redistribute them across society so we should be cheering when people drop out of the workforce.
We should be happy.
And if you're feeling a little bit bad because inflation is up and because you have to pay a little bit more, understand that this is all in pursuit of a higher goal.
This is all in pursuit of a higher end.
And that higher end is a utopian system in which all of our basic needs are provided for and we can sit around the campfire and hang out with one another.
It is heaven on earth.
All it will require is for you to give up your liberty to actually choose the things you want, right?
There's that unspoken downside, which is you no longer get to prioritize your own needs.
Because after all, those needs were a false consciousness.
This does go back to Marx.
The idea that your prioritization of needs is actually just a false consciousness that has been put upon you by the economic system.
Change the economic system, change the nature of man, create a happier man through redistributive democratic control of excess production.
That's the basic idea here.
Paul Krugman is speaking that language.
The left is speaking that language.
All it's gonna cost you is a worse lifestyle in the here and now, fewer choices for your family, and a complete monopoly on how you live your life by the people who know best.
Who, by the way, are so useless that they can go on vacation for two months and nobody even notices.
Alrighty, before we wrap up the week, you know our friends over at Birchgold.
They're some of our best sponsors and we really appreciate their advertising.
They also have some interesting perspectives on the nature of the economic situation right now.
Philip Patrick, a precious metal specialist over there, stopped by a little bit earlier this week.
Here's what that sounded like.
Well, as you all know, our show is sponsored by Birchgold.
We are very proud of that.
Joining us on the line to discuss the current financial situation is Philip Patrick.
He's a precious metals specialist.
You'll remember him from prior shows, and a lot has happened since then.
Philip, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me. So let's talk about the situation with the economy right now. The Democrats are looking to blow an enormous amount of money into the economy. They're debating over whether they want to spend, you know, five trillion or four trillion or three trillion dollars.
They've not addressed the debt ceiling. It's a precarious economic time for sure. And inflation is obviously headed the wrong way. What's going on? Yeah, lots going on in that respect.
I mean, right now, with regards to the debt ceiling, it's pretty much deadlock.
McConnell insists the Democrats right now take the hardest possible path to raising the debt ceiling, or the debt limit rather, and to do it by themselves.
Senator Schumer says no.
Last week they settled essentially on a short-term hike to keep the government limping along until December 3rd.
And then we're going to go through the whole thing again, it appears.
There's a simple explanation for the gridlock, I think.
Republicans are refusing to sign a blank check for ongoing government and essentially Democratic spending.
They're demanding some form of responsibility, and the Democrats aren't interested in collaborating on a responsible budget.
Instead, they're demanding total control, and it's the essence of a standoff.
To be clear, I don't expect the US to actually default.
That would be the financial equivalent of Chernobyl.
And I think eventually the Democrats will break down and raise the debt ceiling via budget reconciliation, essentially without a single Republican vote, which is what McConnell has been telling them to do since July.
The big issue, I think, is one that you touched upon, right?
Normally when the debt ceiling comes up, there's a negotiation, there's a balancing of fiscal responsibility and agreed upon necessary spending.
But not this time, right?
This time we're talking about raising the debt ceiling and at the same time, massive amounts of spending, which is unsustainable and ultimately fuels inflation.
The inflation that we are seeing right now is extraordinary.
The August CPI report came in at 5.3%.
Is it likely to get better or likely to get worse?
Because we keep hearing from the Fed that it's temporary and then the temporary turns into not-so-temporary.
And so they're in sort of not-so-temporary territory.
But how bad is this going to get?
Look, it's already worse than the 5.3 that they're suggesting.
We're seeing consumer price inflation today.
Milton Friedman famously said, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
At any time that there's more money without an equivalent rise in goods and services, prices go up.
It's basic economics.
The 5.3% number that the Fed throw at us, Wolf Richter calls it the lowest of global inflation measures.
And even at this 5.3 that they're suggesting, that's a 30-year high.
Most of us weren't making our own financial decisions 30 years ago.
We have no comprehension of how this affects our finances.
Remember this preferred measuring stick that the Fed use, it's the lowest of global because it gives essentially the least frightening results.
If you measure inflation in the same way that the Federal Reserve did back in the 90s, the way that John Williams at Shadow Stats does, we look at 9% inflation today.
And that's just factoring in things like food, energy, healthcare costs, things that used to be factored in.
Because the Fed are keeping rates artificially low while continuing to pump money into the system, almost nothing today is offering a positive after-inflation yield, not even junk bonds.
Investors are so desperate for some kind of safe haven for their money, so they're piling into riskier and riskier investments.
Subsequently, we're seeing colossal asset bubbles, and some of them in strange places.
Obviously, we're seeing in the stock market Uh, which is, uh, double the historic average.
We have proud house prices up 20% in the last year.
Um, even treasury bonds are trading, uh, three times their historic average.
So people are going crazy spending millions of dollars on non fungible tokens on, on, on the blockchain pictures of rocks and images of, uh, of gorillas essentially is any escape valve from, from, from the dollar and currency.
So, Philip, it doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon.
Obviously, you've got the Biden administration that is essentially paying people to stay home while telling the vaxxed that they shouldn't go to work because they should be living in fear.
And the unvaxxed, they can't go to work because if they go to work, then they'll be violating vaccine mandates.
And so you have massive supply chain bottlenecks as well that makes it really difficult to see the prices decreasing on any of this stuff just naturally anytime over the course of the next few months.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
And quite frankly, inflation, usually when it comes through a market, it's there to stay, right?
The only thing to undo inflation are deflationary periods, and they tend to be quite rare.
I think the last deflationary period was second quarter of 2008, and it lasted for months.
So usually when inflation is in the picture, it's here to stay.
And it certainly feels that way today.
So we're speaking with Philip Patrick of Birchgold.
So obviously, Philip, you've talked about some of the assets that people are putting money into, because it really is true.
I mean, you're looking at your money being worth nothing if you leave it in the bank.
And so you've got to spend it on something.
And then you've got the government on the other end promising that they are going to tax the living hell out of you.
So where should people be looking to put their cash at this point?
Look, I think it's just about, I mean, options are limited, right?
And we joke about it, but we are seeing bubbles in the strangest of places, right?
Rare whiskey indexes are all-time highs.
Luxury rocks are all-time highs.
People are looking for an escape out.
I think the key is to understand the issues in the climate and try and find an asset that's conducive for that climate and something with the ability to weather the storm.
And that's where I think precious metals really come into play, right?
They're very conducive for the problems that we have, right?
Corrections in the markets, inflation, issues with currency.
These problems, a big issue for anyone holding stocks and bonds in this climate, actually very conducive for safe haven assets like gold and silver.
Market crashes drive them up.
Inflation tends to drive them up.
So very conducive, like I said, for the issues and function as a very effective hedge in this climate.
Philip Patrick, he's a precious metal specialist over at Birchgold.
If you want to get involved with Birchgold, ask them all your questions, get your answers.
Text my name, Ben, to 474747 today and get involved with Birchgold.
Philip, thanks so much for the time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
All righty.
We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
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The show is edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
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