All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 20, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:12
How To Defeat The Authoritarian Left | Ep. 1358
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Southwest Airline caves on its vaccine mandate, Jen Psaki mocks Americans worried over the supply chain bottleneck, and the woke left turns on Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Bench Bureau Show.
This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Don't like big tech and the government spying on you?
Well, visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben to stop all of that.
We're going to get to all the news in just one moment.
First, as you know, inflation is running extremely hot right now, and now Democrats are planning to push through trillions of more dollars in spending, which, of course, is only going to increase the problem.
So if you think that money grows on trees, apparently the way our government does, keep living in that la la land.
If however, you're a little bit freaked out about the fact that the central government of the United States is now blowing out the currency, you might want to diversify at least part of your portfolio into gold or silver.
If you haven't reached out to Birchgold to diversify part of your IRA or 401k into a precious metals IRA, go ahead and do it today.
Text Ben to 474747.
Get a free information kit on protecting your savings with gold.
I buy my gold from Birch Gold.
They have an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless five-star reviews, thousands of happy customers.
And this month, when you place an order with Birch Gold, you will get a signed copy of my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
Text Ben to 474747 to claim your free no-obligation information kit on holding gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account.
Plus, Sending this text is the only way to be eligible for that signed copy of my book when you place an order again.
Text BEN to 474747 and protect your savings today.
Alrighty, so in my latest book, The Authoritarian Moment, I talk at length about how you fight back against the fact that the institutions of the United States, pretty much every major institution, has been hijacked by the left.
How do you fight back against that?
And what I talk about is the fact that the way the left originally took control of institutions is through a process that I call renormalization.
It's not my term, it's a process that was originally termed by a physicist named Serge Gallim.
His basic idea is that with 20% of any organization, you can reorient the entire organization.
And the way you do this is you create an intransigent militant minority who is willing to take incremental steps in pursuit of a larger goal.
And then you pressure everybody who's in the middle to basically cave to you.
This is how institutions got left-wing in the first place.
And at the end of my book, I talk about the fact that we can re-renormalize, i.e.
normalize, these institutions by using precisely the same process the left did, except in reverse.
You can unionize all of your friends inside a particular company and say, I'm not going to that critical race training theory session.
We're not doing any of that.
You can organize all of your friends and neighbors and say, we are not going to abide by this particular mandate, right?
This goes back all the way to high school when you used to say to your friends, well, they can't suspend all of us, right?
If we do this, they can't suspend everybody.
Okay, well, sometimes they could, but sometimes they couldn't.
Well, the reality is that when people push back, when liberty loving people push back against predations from institutions, the institutions generally are then faced with a transactional Choice cost, right?
They have to determine whether it is worth the while, whether it is worth the time and stress and money of fighting that intransigent minority, or whether it's better to just go weapons down.
And as we are seeing in today's world, renormalization, re-renormalization can happen.
And Southwest Airlines is an excellent example of this, because basically what happened is that a huge number of the employees at Southwest Airlines said, we are not going to abide by your vaccine mandate.
And now Southwest has essentially caved.
According to CNBC, Southwest Airlines has scrapped a plan to put unvaccinated employees who have applied for, but haven't received a religious or medical exemption on unpaid leave as of a federal deadline in December.
Southwest Airlines and American Airlines are among the carriers that are federal contractors and subject to a Biden administration requirement that their employees are vaccinated against COVID-19 by December 8th unless they are exempt for medical or religious reasons.
Rules for federal contractors are stricter than those expected from the Biden administration for large companies, which allow for regular COVID testing as an alternative to vaccination.
Executives at both carriers in recent days have tried to reassure employees about job security under the mandate, urging them to apply for exemptions if they can't get vaccinated for a medical reason or for a sincerely held religious belief.
The airlines are expected to face more questions about the mandate when they report quarterly results on Thursday morning.
Pilots' labor unions have sought to block the mandates or sought alternatives, such as regular testing.
Southwest Senior VP of Operations and Hospitality, Steve Goldberg, and Julie Weber, the VP and Chief People Officer, wrote to staff that if employees' requests for an exemption have not been approved by December 8th, they could continue to work while following mask and distancing guidelines until the request has been reviewed.
So basically what happened here is that Southwest looked at his bottom line.
They said, okay, we're going to have to risk running afoul of Joe Biden and the federal vaccine mandates and maybe lose some federal contracts, or we can continue to be canceling thousands of flights.
Because, remember, the going line is that it was weather problems that were causing Southwest to cancel a ton of flights, and then it turns out that American randomly had to cancel a lot of flights.
You know who hasn't had to cancel any of their flights?
Delta.
Because Delta didn't do any of this stuff.
And so, Southwest has now essentially backed down.
Because what they've basically said is, if you don't want to get the vaccine, apply for a religious A religious exemption.
And if we don't get back to you in time, then we still have these mask mandates that we are going to impose.
But, you know, you can abide by those and we will just continue to pay you and you will continue to do your job.
Because we would rather have you on the job than have to suspend you without pay and then maybe destroy our ability to even fly these planes.
So it turns out that when you get enough of your own employees to resist what you are doing, that can have an immense effect on how these companies are run.
American Airlines CEO Doug Parker spoke with labor union leaders on Thursday to discuss vaccine exemptions.
American Airlines management indicated that unlike the approach taken by United, they were exploring accommodations that would allow employees to continue to work, said the Association of Professional Flight Attendants.
That's the union that represents all the flight attendants in the cabins.
They failed to offer any specifics as to what such accommodations might look like at that time.
Choosing not to be vaccinated and not receiving an exemption may still result in termination, said American.
It's not planning voluntary leaves or early retirement packages.
For those who choose not to get vaccinated, they say, quote, we want all of our team members to be vaccinated so they can continue working at American.
We needed our entire team to run the airline in 2022 and beyond and are not looking to reduce headcount.
But when these companies are put up against it, and they have to choose between whatever amount of money they are making from the federal government and their ability to literally put crews on planes, it makes it very difficult for them to side with Joe Biden.
And you're starting to see more and more businesses do that, right?
We announced that we were not going to be complying with the Joe Biden vaccine-slash-mask mandate, the vaccine-slash-testing mandate.
This is not something that we here at Daily Wire were going to abide by because we felt this was a violation of freedom of association and basic liberty principles.
and could not come from the federal government. Well now we have a battle in San Francisco between the San Francisco Department of Public Health and In-N-Out Burger. So In-N-Out Burger, for those who don't live on the west coast, In-N-Out Burger is one of the biggest chains on the west coast. It is much beloved and the In-N-Out establishment, the business managers over at In-N-Out said, we are not going to be checking customer vaccination documents.
We're not going to check whether you have a COVID vaccine card before we serve you.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health therefore closed In-N-Out on October 14th because employees were not properly checking for customers vaccination documentation, the burger chain said in a statement.
The restaurant located in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf has now reopened, but indoor dining is unavailable.
In an outset, it properly posted signs of local VAX requirements, but refuses to strictly enforce them.
Their chief legal and business officer, Arne Wensinger, said, quote, We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government.
We fiercely disagree with any government diktat that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to patronize their business.
Now, this, of course, is a good and brave and rational decision by In-N-Out.
It is simply ridiculous to turn all these businesses into the vaccine police.
That's absurd.
Using private industry to cram down government bake-the-cake policies is insane, no matter what the bake-the-cake policies happen to be.
It's particularly insane coming from the San Francisco government, where if you are at the upper echelons, you can unmask because the spirit moves you, as Mayor London Breed once suggested.
So, businesses are starting to resist, and this is good.
This is what stops all of this.
And you're starting to see this happen at the local level with regard to police officers.
We talked about this yesterday.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of police officers across the country are saying, we would rather be kicked off the force than exceed to your demands.
And then we'll see how you like it when you're the one picking up the phone and having to respond to a 911 call.
Where are all those social workers you were talking about hiring?
Why don't you get those people out there?
Chicago Alderman Brian Hopkins, he's pointing out that Chicago could lose a thousand police officers over a vax mandate that Lori Lightfoot herself, she does not abide by any of her own mask mandates.
Again, for the people at the top of the food pyramid when it comes to the government, they just don't abide by any of their own rules.
Here is the Chicago Alderman Brian Hopkins saying, we might lose a thousand police officers over this.
We're already short police officers.
We're down, you know, probably about 20 percent from where our peak staffing levels were a few years ago.
So we're short patrol officers.
We've been unsuccessful, like jurisdictions all across the country, at recruiting young people to choose careers in law enforcement.
We have retirements happening at an accelerated pace.
We can't afford to lose a thousand police officers.
We can't afford to fire a thousand police officers over an impasse like this right now.
Now, what is amazing about all of this, of course, is that Democrats are going to continue to push forward with this.
The reason they're going to continue to push forward with this is because when they look at the polls, what they see is that most Americans mostly or strongly support vaccine or indoor mask mandates and all the rest.
OK, here is the thing.
The people who are most motivated by things like vaccine mandates are the people who are resisting them.
Not the opposite.
Remember, an intransigent minority can make a difference here.
Everybody who's already vaxxed is already vaxxed.
And so, while they may be okay with vaccine mandates because they're already vaxxed, this is not a motivating factor for them.
They're not sitting around each and every day going, yeah, man, vaccine mandates, that's what we're for.
But there are a bunch of people who are resisting the vaccine mandates, and for them, this is the number one issue.
This is something that we need to understand about when you look at political polling.
Political polling is taking your temperature on a particular issue.
But one thing that it generally does not do is ask you the fundamental question, which is where on the list of issues does this rank?
So what you'll see very often is polling support for things that are sort of broad, left-wing agenda items.
And then the left will say, everybody supports this, right?
Everybody wants universal childcare.
And then when you ask people like, on the priority list, where does this rank?
And people are like, 130th.
The people who are resisting a government mandate in this particular case, this is issue number one.
If you're a business owner and you're resisting a government vax mandate, then that is number one issue for you.
If you're somebody who is kind of like, yeah, vaccine mandates sound kind of good.
I mean, I'm already vaccinated.
Why should never?
But like that's number 10 issue for you.
So what that means is that the people who are the most passionate can move everybody else.
And that is what you are seeing in real time.
It's going to have real effects.
Like CBS Chicago reporting yesterday openly that businesses are just going to stop moving to Chicago because there's not going to be any law enforcement.
When you get rid of the cops because you're saying it is more important for the cops to be vaccinated than it is for there to be cops to actually answer 911 calls.
Why would any business locate in a city like that?
Tonight, an alert for businesses on Chicago's Prime Avenue.
Our Tara Molina is always investigating and joins us live along the famed shopping street.
Tara, this could stop some new companies from moving into vacant storefronts.
Erica, experts tell us there's already that hesitation, and it's not only because of the continued robberies and thefts here on the Mag Mile and across the downtown area, but because there's a perception right now that Chicago just isn't a safe place to be.
Okay, well, that is correct, and that's happening in major cities all over the country.
Seattle Police Union President has now slammed Seattle's leaders.
We've lost so many people because of the political betrayal from our elected officials in this city.
Seattle is going to just lose all of its officers and then we'll see how much they like these VAX mandates.
We've lost so many people because of the political betrayal from our elected officials in this city.
Over 350 cops gone because we were once the modeled reformed agency and then after Floyd, these same politicians who invoked this mandate ran away from us as fast as they could for political reasons.
Now it's our people that are desperate to have their voice heard.
And this is strictly about the mandate.
Okay, and he's right about all of this, okay?
Resistance breeds the failure of the authoritarian state.
People who refuse to go along to get along are going to be the people who end up pushing back against the regulations in such a way that liberty is preserved.
And this is true on nearly every front.
Now, what's amazing is that practically speaking, practically speaking, there's gonna come a point here where everybody's just gonna have to let go.
And the reason I say that is because, let's say that you even have a VAX mandate in place, like Israel, right?
You have these VAX mandates in place.
How do they even determine when things are safe or not?
This is a real question.
So it used to be that Israel, when you got off the test, they would do an antibody test, right?
They would check to see if you had antibodies for COVID.
And this would be the way to determine whether you needed to quarantine or not.
And the reason they were doing this is because it is quite possible that you had two shots of the vaccine and that it had waned.
So did you need a booster or did you not need a booster?
Well now, as it turns out, that's a really bad way of determining whether or not you're immune to the virus.
We've known this for a very long time.
Some of us have been saying this for a long time.
That all these antibody tests don't do bleep.
That what you really need is to be testing T-cell and B-cell immunity.
Right?
The memory cells.
That's what you actually need to be testing.
Which is much more expensive and much more difficult.
Nobody wants to do that.
Hey, so in the end, what it's going to come down to is just how many infections there are, how many people are dying, how many people are hospitalized.
And when the numbers are low, everybody's going to be open about it.
And when the numbers are high, people are going to start taking precautions, which is called risk assessment.
And how we should have been dealing with this since basically the beginning.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about a simple fact.
You need to protect your family in case, God forbid, something should happen to you.
I mean, let's say One day you are just surveying the landscape and you look and in the distance there's a cloud of dust and you realize that you have not seen your son Simba for quite some time and you charge across the savannah and you look down and there's a herd of stampeding wildebeest bearing down on your son and you jump down you grab your son you bring him up and then that's when you see your own brother Scar who proceeds to Plunge his claws into you.
And as you tumble down toward the stampeding wilderness, you think a couple things.
One, I really should've gotten my brother a birthday gift.
And two, man, I should've gotten life insurance like Shapiro said.
Policy Genius makes it easy to compare quotes from over a dozen top insurers all in one place.
Why compare?
You could save 50% or more on life insurance by comparing quotes with Policy Genius.
You could save $1,300 or more per year on life insurance by using PolicyGenius to compare policies.
Those licensed experts at PolicyGenius work for you, not the insurance company, so you can trust them to help you navigate every step of the shopping and buying process.
That kind of service has earned PolicyGenius thousands of five-star reviews across Trustpilot and Google, and eligible applicants can get covered in as little as a week thanks to an award-winning policy option that swaps that standard medical exam requirement for a simple phone call.
Getting started is simple.
Head on over to PolicyGenius.com slash Shapiro.
In minutes, you can work out how much life insurance coverage you need, And compare personalized quotes to find your best price.
Head on over to Policygenius.com slash Shapiro.
Get started right now.
Policygenius.
When it comes to insurance, it's nice and very important to get it right.
So as I say, if we are talking about how we get back to normal, antibody tests are not going to be the way to do it, which means it's going to be difficult to determine whether people need, for example, some sort of booster shot or not.
This is according to the Washington Post.
In most cases, getting an antibody test to determine immunity is a fool's errand.
Infectious disease doctors agree that tests for antibodies, also known as serology tests, do not provide the answers most people are seeking.
Both the CDC and the FDA advise against using antibody tests to determine one's level of immunity against COVID.
So does the Infectious Disease Society of America, which represents infectious disease specialists.
While some states, including Maryland and South Carolina, are conducting targeted antibody testing for specific purposes, no state is promoting the tests used for residents to determine whether they have sufficient immunity or whether they need a booster shot.
The tests might indicate the presence or even the level of coronavirus-fighting antibodies in the bloodstream, but scientists don't yet know what number of antibodies even provide protection from COVID-19.
Also, you have other parts of your immune system that activate when you are reinfected.
This is why if you get a reinfection from COVID after having the vaccine or after having COVID previously, it tends to be much more mild because your body already knows how to fight off the disease.
What does that mean, practically speaking?
What that means, practically speaking, is that all of these passports don't mean bleep.
The passports are not going to be an effective way of ensuring that people Are immune.
It's not even going to be an effective way of ensuring people aren't spreading it because we know that people who are, we know that people who are immune can also spread the virus.
Eventually, practicality is going to catch up with folks.
This is going to become endemic.
It already is endemic.
And people are going to have to go back to normal.
Or maybe not.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it's the push toward the new normal that the left is pushing.
Right?
So we have two attempts at renormalization.
One is the re-renormalization, i.e.
people pushing back in favor of liberty, doing individual risk assessment and determining they wish to go back to regular life.
And on the other hand, you have people who really wish to renormalize the society along very basic lines.
I'm not going to stop talking about the fact that the labor shortages we are currently seeing may be a ground shift in terms of how the economy works, like forever, and that the left is pushing this very, very hard.
The Build Back Better plans that are being pushed by this administration are driving up not only inflation, they are driving people out of the workforce.
is particularly clear right now that workers are staying out.
The New York Times is admitting this.
Ben Castleman writing, fall was meant to mark the beginning of the end of the labor shortage that has held back the nation's economic recovery.
Expanded unemployment benefits were ending.
Schools were reopening, freeing up many caregivers.
Surely, economists and business owners reasoned a flood of workers would follow.
Instead, the labor force shrank in September.
There are 5 million fewer people working than before the pandemic began.
3 million fewer even looking for work.
The slow return of workers is causing headaches for the Biden administration, which was counting on a strong economic rebound to give momentum to its political agenda.
Conservatives have blamed generous unemployment benefits for keeping people at home.
Progressives say companies could find workers if they paid more, but the shortages are not limited to low-wage industries.
Instead, economists point to a complex overlapping web of factors, many of which could be slow to reverse.
So they try to blame COVID itself.
But here's the key.
Psychology may also play a role.
Surveys suggest the pandemic led many to rethink their priorities, while the glut of open jobs may be motivating some to hold out for a better offer.
In other words, people have basically been told it is fine to stay home and the government will take care of all of your problems.
Whether it's unemployment benefits, or whether it's a child tax credit, whether you're talking about government inflation, or whether you're talking about helicopter cash via the states, people now feel secure in the notion that they actually don't have to work.
Betsy Stevenson, University of Michigan economist, who is an advisor to Obama, says, quote, it's like the whole country is in some kind of union renegotiation.
I don't know who's going to win in the bargaining that's going on right now, but right now it seems like workers have the upper hand.
Yes, but if, quote unquote, labor has the upper hand, you know who really has the upper hand?
You know who really has the lower hand is consumers because the bottom line is when you drive up the price of labor, all of that gets passed on to the consumer.
So if you are driving up the price of wages and then you're not working, you're shooting yourself in the face because you're going to be paying higher prices.
Real wages are down this year.
They are not up.
So the labor shortages are not creating widespread prosperity.
They are creating widespread shortages.
And that's being exacerbated by the crisis at the ports.
We're now seeing, for example, that food shortages are next in the supply chain crunch.
According to Brendan Case, Leslie Patton and Kim Chipman, writing for Bloomberg, quote, In Denver, public school children are facing shortages of milk.
In Chicago, a local market is running short of canned goods and boxed items.
There's plenty of food.
There just isn't always enough processing and transportation capacity to meet rising demand as the economy revs up.
More than a year and a half after the COVID pandemic upended daily life, the supply of basic goods at U.S.
grocery stores and restaurants is once again falling victim to intermittent shortages and delays.
Vivek Sankaran, Chief Executive Officer of Albertsons, says, quote, I never imagined we'd be here in October 2021 talking about supply chain problems, but it's a reality.
Any given day you're going to have something missing in our stores, and it's across categories.
In Chicago, Dill Pickle Food Co-op ran out of certain dry goods because its two main distributors haven't been sending orders in full in recent weeks.
Early in the pandemic, panic buying was the cause.
Although the food industry was able to somewhat rebound, the sustained nature of the pandemic, combined with the slow pace of vaccination globally and the recent surge, have resurfaced the problems, says General Manager Latalia McCarthy.
The shortages aren't as acute as they were, but the ability to actually put things on the shelves is declining.
According to CBS Baltimore, why are the shelves at the local grocery store always partly empty?
Why do deliveries take so much longer than they used to?
Why is everything more expensive?
The short answer is the supply chain.
The long answer is not that simple.
According to CBS Local, we've got a shortage of workers along the path that products take from the factory to a consumer's doorstep, creating multiple bottlenecks in a system that depends on timeliness to function, just as demand has drastically increased for those products.
Okay, so the simple fact that you are now seeing these shortages, and that this is being chalked up to a labor shortage, and that that labor shortage is being seen by the left as a good thing, right?
Paul Krugman is writing this, right?
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist for trade policy, who likes to throw around that title as though he knows what the hell he's talking about when it comes to, for example, government spending.
The fact of the matter is that this is that this is not a bug.
This is a feature.
This is something that people on the left very much want is fewer people working.
It's something they're interested in.
Now, there's going to be some unintended political consequences for Joe Biden.
But you can see how the Biden administration is desperately trying to downplay this and pretend it doesn't matter.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about your safety and security at home.
So I have a ring alarm security system on my house.
When we move from California to Florida, first thing, we put that ring alarm security system on the house because safety is our number one priority.
It's the thing my wife cares about most.
I agree with her.
I feel much more at ease when I'm on the road or away from home.
My ring alarm equals peace of mind.
You can protect your home with Ring Alarm.
Ring Alarm is a powerful, affordable, whole home security system you can easily install yourself.
It works seamlessly with other Ring products in one simple app.
For a special offer, go to ring.com.
It's the perfect way to start your Ring experience.
Keep an eye on every corner of your house with indoor and outdoor cams.
See what's happening direct from your phone.
I don't just use it when I'm on the road.
Sometimes, I mean, I have three kids that are constantly running around our property.
for a special offer on a Ring Alarm Security Kit today.
You can build a system that is right for your home and have it all up and running in just minutes.
It's easy to install yourself.
Ring.com slash Ben, that's Ring.com slash Ben.
I don't just use it when I'm on the road.
Sometimes, I mean, I have three kids that are constantly running around our property.
Sometimes I kind of lose one.
They're like, oh, where'd they go?
You pop up the Ring app on your phone and suddenly I know exactly where they are.
Makes me feel a lot better.
Go to ring.com slash Ben for that special offer on a Ring alarm security kit today.
So the attempts by the left to downplay what we are currently seeing in the economy is not mere political convenience.
It goes to something deeper, which is they would like the restructuring of the American economy where half the public just doesn't work.
You can hear, I mean, and by the way, what they are attempting to do in downplaying the cost of this is unbelievably elitist.
As always, the Democratic Party has a real disconnect between the people who make the policy and the people they purport to be speaking for.
So just as the leadership of the Democratic Party, in too many cases, is disconnected from the concerns of its own constituents, this is true in terms of the so-called economic overhaul.
I think if you ask most Americans, would they like the economy back from February 2020, the answer is yes.
You mean an economy with record low unemployment and record high wage growth?
Yeah, that economy, we'd like that one back.
But Biden wants to build back better.
Okay, so in much the same way that the Democratic elite insist that defund the police is a top priority, while 80% of Black people say they want to see more cops in the cities.
The same way that the Democratic superstructure says that we must use terminology like Latinx, while the entire Hispanic population is like, um, I don't know what you're talking about, that's crazy, and no one talks like that.
The same thing holds true on economics.
And so there's this vast, crazy disconnect between the White House, for example, and even the people it's purporting to speak for.
So here is just a perfect example of this.
Here's Jen Psaki yesterday, she's the White House spokeswoman, saying that, like downplaying the fact that people aren't receiving what they are ordering, right?
They're not getting food, right?
They're not being able to go to the grocery and buy what they need.
Here is Jen Psaki downplaying it because, of course, she has somebody who runs the Whole Foods for her in their Tesla.
Here is Jen Psaki.
It was clear in March of 2020 when COVID hit that the supply chains across the world have been disrupted.
Even as the sort of work to fight back against COVID proceeded, people, it was crystal clear that things were not improving on the supply chain.
People couldn't get dishwashers and furniture and treadmills delivered on time, not to mention all sorts of other things.
So why is it- The tragedy of the short, the treadmill that's delayed.
The tragedy of the treadmill that's delayed.
Yes, that is not the, I understand the reporter said the word treadmill, but the fact that you're seizing on that and you're pretending that increased prices in virtually every area of American life, even as, you know, price boosters like used cars are actually going down.
Well, like to downplay that as the crisis of the delayed treadmill, when you are talking about people who are spending an increased portion of what they earn on food and on gas, That disconnect is astonishing.
But to them, they don't care.
It's just the crisis of the treadmill.
And after all, they've got a membership in Orange Theory.
What do they care?
And she keeps saying this kind of stuff.
Here's Jen Psaki talking about how the $3.5 trillion blowout Build Back Better nonsense plan, how it costs nothing.
She just keeps lying to you.
And the American public are not up for this.
By the poll numbers, the American people are not up for this.
According to Politico, today, As inflation continues to raise prices of everyday household items, Americans are laying the blame at President Joe Biden's feet.
In a new political morning consult poll, 62% of American voters say the administration's policies are either somewhat or very responsible for increasing inflation.
That includes 41% of Democrats, 61% of independent voters, and 85% of Republicans.
Only 38% of voters and only 7 in 10 Democrats say the country is heading in the right direction.
That's bad news for Team Biden.
But they're just going to try and bull their way through this one.
Here's Jen Psaki lying to you.
Does the president still believe that Build Back Better will not add a dime to the national debt?
Correct, it won't.
Why should Americans believe that?
Because it won't.
Go ahead.
What if taxes that he says he wants to get more taxes in, what if it doesn't happen?
What if the economy goes sour?
Lots of things can happen.
You're going to tell them from up there, future generations.
Not even born yet, that they're not on the hook for this.
Is that right?
That's right, and hopefully you'll report accurate information yourself.
Hopefully you'll report accurate- So, it's not going to raise the deficit at all, despite the fact that we know this thing is actually going to cost, as they proposed it, some $5 trillion, despite the fact that they are going to have to raise taxes on people who are not at the top of the income spectrum.
You can lie to some of the people some of the time, but you cannot lie to all of the people all of the time and expect that they are going to continue to trust you.
But again, the goal here for the Democrats is once you've reoriented how Americans live, then they're not going to remember you lied to them.
Right?
Once you've reoriented the entire superstructure of American life, then people are just going to adapt.
And once they adapt, that will be the new normal.
This has been the Democratic plan basically since the 1960s.
When it comes to government spending and government blowout, the basic idea is you get people dependent.
And sure, they might resist at first, but soon enough they will stop struggling.
And once they stop struggling, they will adjust to the fact that you shove that IV line of benefits into their arm.
This is the plan.
And meanwhile, they will distract you with all sorts of other virtue signaling stupidity so that you are not paying attention to what it is that they are doing.
That is the goal.
And by the way, if you're upset about this stuff, you know, just let it go.
As Michelin Maynard writes at the Washington Post today, quote, don't rant about short staff stores and supply chain woes.
Lower your expectations.
Just lower them.
I mean, if you lower the expectations, you're fine.
Right?
Just understand that life is changing in front of you.
And stop whining about it.
Why should you expect that the grocery stores are going to be full of the foods that you've counted on them being full of your entire life?
I mean, keep your expectations reasonable, guys.
And just adjust to the new normal.
Stop struggling.
That is the goal here.
And then we get to the woke distraction politics.
So the idea is that if we make your life materially worse, at least we're virtue signaling along the lines of the things that matter.
Now, again, the disconnect is that most people don't care about the woke distraction tactics.
It ain't going to work.
Democrats basically have an economic agenda that people don't like, and that is causing enormous snarls in terms of the economic solidity of the United States and the supply chains and all the rest.
And they have a woke governing ideology that appeals to a very solid, small core of people, but otherwise everybody hates.
And they have Trump.
So that's what they're running on in 2022.
Good luck to them.
Really, good luck to them.
We'll get to the woke governance of the left in just one second, because it is pretty amazing how they're attempting to distract from their own failures by simply throwing out red meat to what they hope is an intersectional coalition of people who deeply care about wokeness.
The problem, of course, is that that's a very small group of people.
By all polling data, the people who care about wokeness the most are upper-class white liberals, typically women.
It's according to David Shore, a Democratic pollster.
It's not black Americans who care about woke politics.
It's a bunch of white college-educated liberals who went to Columbia and majored in women's and gender theory.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that right now gas prices are just insane.
I mean, if you look at the pump, the price of a gallon of gas is up dramatically.
Well, I'm thrilled to introduce an incredible app that everyone who buys gas needs to know about.
It's called Get Upside.
My listeners are making up to $0.25 for every gallon of gas every time they fill up.
You just download the free Get Upside app in the App Store or Google Play right now.
And you use your promo code SHAPIRO, get a bonus $0.25 per gallon on your first fill up that is up to $0.50 cash back.
Don't pay full price of the pump anymore.
Get cash back using Get Upside.
Just download the app for free.
Use promo code Shapiro to get up to 50 cents per gallon cash back on your very first tank.
Some people who drive a lot are making as much as two to three hundred bucks a month in cash back.
There is no catch.
The cash back Get up to 50 cents a gallon cash back on your very first tank of gas.
That is Code Shapiro.
Go check them out right now.
or an e-gift card for Amazon and other brands, just download that free Get Upside app, use promo code Shapiro, get up to 50 cents a gallon cash back on your very first tank of gas.
That is code Shapiro.
Go check them out right now.
Again, free Get Upside app, and use that special promo code to get 50 cents per gallon cash back on your first tank of gas.
Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to the woke governance promoted by the left.
The woke social politics they hope will act as a distraction from their own bad economic policy first.
When it comes to the facts, The Daily Wire's newest podcast.
Morning Wire has a never-ending supply.
Not only has it been topping the Apple and Spotify charts since its release, it is the only daily podcast that values your time and the truth.
And while we are working overtime to bring you the news you need to know, we need your help to keep the facts trending toward number one.
So subscribe and start listening now to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So if the Democrats cannot buy you off with their bad economic plan, then maybe they can buy you off with a little bit of wokeness.
And so, over the course of the last 20 hours, a major magical thing happened.
The U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services has now commemorated the first female four-star officer and first female four-star admiral of the U.S.
Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
Okay, isn't that amazing?
A woman is actually now a four-star admiral of the U.S.
Public Health Service Commission Corps.
Now you think that being a four-star admiral means that the person served in the military for a long time?
That's not what we're talking about.
Since basically the late 1980s, when you name somebody the head of this particular department, the U.S.
Public Health Service Commission Corps, they're ceremonially made a four-star admiral.
So it's not like they served all the way through.
Okay, put that aside.
First female, right?
So you're thinking to yourself, wow, a woman.
Historic, historic moment.
The woman's a man.
So yeah, there's that.
So a more accurate headline would have been, man named sixth man to be a four-star admiral of the U.S.
Public Health Service Commission Corps.
That would have been the more accurate headline, because what we're talking about is a person named Rachel Levine, who used to be the Secretary of Health in Pennsylvania, when he, who is a transgender woman, and I only use biological pronouns on this show because they're the only pronouns that are objectively verifiable by reality, as opposed to whatever is in your head at the moment,
When this man, Rachel Levine, was the Secretary of Health in Pennsylvania and talking about nursing homes and forcing people with COVID back into nursing homes, simultaneously removing his mother from a nursing home and putting his mom somewhere else, that person got elevated to the federal government.
Very rare radical on policy, but the chief qualification and the thing that was in all the headlines was the person's transgender status.
So this is very important.
I know that you cared more about like health and human services, but it turns out the Biden administration is very concerned about men who say they are women being treated as though they are historically women in being named to offices like this.
So that is super exciting stuff.
Meanwhile, on a more important level, New York City has now passed a resolution directing the health department to work toward a racially just recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
They've declared that racism is a public health crisis in New York City now.
That used to be, that sort of language, used to be kind of like a throwaway piece of language.
Okay, well, everything's a public health crisis.
Poverty is a public health crisis.
Lack of education.
It used to be a term that just meant a thing that's important to me.
The left does a lot of these sorts of terms.
There are terms where it just means it's important to me so it is a public health crisis or it is a climate emergency.
They use language that is, it's not supposed to carry content, but it just means I care a lot about this thing.
So public health crisis was just a term they would throw out there to mean I care more about this thing.
This kind of fungibility in terminology is very common on the left.
It's why they will treat it as though redistribution is an element of freedom when it's actually an element of coercion.
In any case.
We now know that when you declare something a public health crisis, what you actually mean, in terms of actual content of the term, is you can take absolute control over people's lives.
Because we have seen over the past year and a half that public health crisis has been the rubric under which quote-unquote experts have taken control of every area of your life, from your business, to how you school your kids, to how you walk around in public, to whether you can go to a restaurant.
So now when you have an entire city declaring that quote-unquote racism is a public health crisis, and racism We'll never be solved, okay?
Because it turns out that racism can mean anything from racist policy, which again, New York City cannot name, because there are no racist policies in New York City directed on the basis of race that would be federally, state, and locally illegal.
If you're saying racism is a public health crisis, that's again like saying poverty is a public health crisis.
Conditions that are endemic to the human existence.
Things that will never go away, right?
Because there are always going to be racists among us.
And, in the leftist definition, which is that there are going to be disparities and disparities are evidence of racism, disparities will always be among us.
So long as that is the case, we need absolute control.
Racism as public health crisis is a way of saying, until everyone has an equal outcome, regardless of race, Even if the inequality is not due to race.
They must have an equal outcome by race.
Until that happens, we should take absolute control of every area of your life.
Because public health crisis no longer means we care a lot about it.
Now public health crisis means excuse for us to control everything you do.
The New York City Board of Health, according to the New York Times, has now declared racism a public health crisis, passing a resolution that directed the health department to take steps to ensure a racially just recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, as always, as soon as you add a modifier to the term justice or just, what you mean is not justice.
If I say social justice, I mean individual injustice.
I mean, we are now supposed to determine whether it is good for the group that you get individual justice treatment.
The resolution calls on the department to work with other agencies to root out systemic racism within policies, plans, and budgets on a wide range of matters that affect health, including land use, transportation, and education.
It also directed the department to improve data collection practices and examine both the health code and its own history for structural bias.
What they mean by terms like systemic racism is anything that ends with a disparity.
And what they mean by structural bias is anything that ends with a disparity.
Okay?
All of these terms mean the same thing.
Anytime there's an inequality in outcome, this must be chalked up to systemic racism or structural bias or something.
And the only way to fix that is through some sort of actual racism in policy.
That reverses the effect of the supposedly unjust system.
Dave Shokshi, the department's commissioner, is also one of the 11 medical experts who sit on the board.
At a meeting on Monday, he noted the board was founded amid epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, and smallpox in the early 1800s.
Advances in sanitation and understanding the links between environmental factors and health helped curb those diseases.
He drew a parallel to the current pandemic and its outsized toll on communities of color.
Why do some non-white populations develop severe disease and die from COVID-19 at higher rates than whites, he said?
Underlying health conditions undoubtedly play a role.
But why are there rates of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity in communities of color?
The answer does not lie in biology.
Structural and environmental factors such as disinvestment, discrimination, and disinformation underlie a greater burden of those diseases in communities of color.
So again, understand what he's saying.
He is saying that if people are not dying at the same rate, and we know why they're not dying at the same rate, because it turns out that fatter people die of COVID more.
People with hypertension die of COVID more.
People with diabetes die of COVID more.
And it turns out that not every population has those diseases in similar fashion.
Now, that means that it's not about race.
He says, even if it's not about race, it's about race because we then have to look to the underlying reason why too many people of color have hypertension or diabetes or are fat.
Then we have to look to the underlying reasons.
We can't look to how people are individually making the choice to get fat.
We can't do that.
We can't look to why so many people are eating fast food as opposed to not going and just getting some vegetables from the store.
We can't do that.
We have to look at the fact that there is inequality in outcome, in health outcomes, and we immediately have to chalk that up to the system, which means we need ultimate control to create a completely level utopia.
This doctor said the COVID-19 pandemic must render unacceptable that which has been condoned for generations.
Wait, who condoned it?
Who condoned that people are fat and have hypertension and have diabetes?
Who's condoned this?
By the way, there are wide differentials in class among white Americans on this.
So it ain't about race.
Poor white Americans tend to be fatter than richer white Americans on average.
They tend to have more health problems on average.
Is that us condoning it?
And when it comes to health problems, is that the system or is there an intervening factor?
Namely, whether you choose to diet and exercise, which it turns out is on you.
This is very similar to the argument that when you look at poverty in communities of color and then people on the conservative side say, well, one factor in the increased poverty in these areas has to be single motherhood, right?
People who are getting knocked up and then having a baby without a husband in the home or a father knocking somebody up and then running away.
And then somebody said, yes, but why are they doing that?
Well, since I don't believe that human beings are simply widgets responding to environmental and socio-economic circumstance, and that human beings actually have the ability and responsibility to make good decisions, which, by the way, is the predicate for any sort of rational politics, because otherwise you're just a social engineer.
If you believe in any sort of consent-based politics, you have to believe in the inherent ability of people to make basic life decisions.
If you believe in that, then that means that you should be looking to individual decision-making to alleviate the consequences of these decisions.
But now they're saying you can't do that.
You need the experts, who somehow are not creations of their environment and socioeconomics.
The experts have magical free will that has descended upon them, but the poor schlub who's living in Harlem, that guy has no free will, according to these geniuses.
And once you declare everything a public health crisis, like racism, this means unending control forever.
And this is both the promise and it is also the bribe that Democrats are now handing out.
As always, we will solve all of your problems and we will declare that you are not racist if you go along with us in this.
We will alleviate all responsibility from you, both personally and morally, if you go along with us on all of this.
There's a threat, right?
The threat is if you don't go along with us on all of this, then we will just outlaw you, right?
We'll just go directly against you.
We'll try to... We will attempt to destroy you and destroy your life.
The New York City Health Department said its resolution was one of the first that was tied to specific directives.
Those include making recommendations to the Mayor's Racial Justice Commission and establishing a data for equity working group designed to ensure the department applies an equity lens to public health data and educates other agencies on how to do the same.
Again, equity lens just means anytime there's inequality, we are going to chalk that up to the system.
Guess who's in control of the system?
Us.
We get to fix it.
Okay, and if you don't go along with any of our agenda, we will just cudgel the living crap out of you.
We will just cudgel you.
Which is why, I will say, the most enjoyable story of the day is the targeting of Margaret Atwood.
So Margaret Atwood, of course, wrote the wildly overrated sci-fi dystopian novel Handmaid's Tale.
She was used as the sort of icon of the Trump era because, of course, Trump era was all about sexism.
Okay, so, Margaret Atwood made a mistake.
What was her mistake?
She tweeted out a piece called, Why Can't We Say Woman Anymore?
Because all sorts of people on the left have decided that wokeness must take into account the fact that men give birth.
Now, if you're a rational person, you're like, nope, that is not a thing.
If men gave birth, that would be very difficult as it turns out to press a baby through a urethra.
Or through a butthole.
It turns out that's very difficult to eject a baby through either of those orifices.
You actually need a female vagina in order to make that happen.
But if you point that out, then people on the left go nuts.
Margaret Atwood pointed that out.
And so the left came after her.
Which is quite enjoyable.
She was a feminist icon until she assumed that women existed.
Whoops!
No, you're a woman.
Amanda Jette Knox tweeted, I'm disappointed you shared this because it's factually untrue.
We can still say woman and we can also say people when it makes sense to use more inclusive language.
I'm non-binary.
I also menstruate and gave birth to three kids.
Saying people with periods includes women and me.
No, you're a woman.
You're not non-binary.
I'm sorry to tell you this, that non-binary is not a category.
Unless you are actually intersex.
You're not non-binary.
You are... That's in your head.
You're a person who menstruated and gave birth to children.
You're a woman.
Done.
Tanya Tagak tweeted out, I didn't know Margaret Atwood sucked.
Transphobia sucks.
The people commenting on her post should be enough proof.
You're the one on the wrong side of history.
Please glob, don't let me become a harmful crone.
Everyone call me out when I get crusty.
These are delightful, delightful human beings.
So it's exciting stuff to watch them just erase Margaret Atwood now.
She's crossed the cancel culture and the cancel culture will come after her.
By the way, at Netflix, the Netflix co-CEO is already starting to walk back his support for Dave Chappelle.
He said he screwed up in his efforts to communicate with employees who were over set over Dave Chappelle's new special.
He said in an interview, quote, what I should have done is led in those emails with humanity.
I should have recognized a group of our employees was really hurting.
To be clear, storytelling has an impact in the real world, sometimes quite negative.
We have articulated to our employees there are going to be things you don't like.
There are going to be things you might feel are harmful.
But we're trying to entertain a world with varying tastes and varying sensibilities and various beliefs.
And I think the special is consistent with that.
So he's already backing up.
And so the alternative to bad economics from the left is bad social policy from the left.
And here's the thing.
Nobody likes this stuff.
This stuff is not particularly popular.
The only people it is popular with are people who wish to delude themselves into believing that they are victims in American life.
And if you wish to delude yourself into believing that you're a victim in American life, you can do it.
I mean, a huge number of people... Listen, the incentive structure in human thinking is always to believe that you're a victim of outside circumstance and that whatever hardships you experience in life have nothing to do with you and nothing to do with reality.
They simply have to do with other people discriminating against you.
And there's a new Gallup poll that kind of demonstrates this.
It says that women's satisfaction with the treatment of their gender in the United States is now at a record low.
Apparently, only 44% of women say they are satisfied with the treatment of women in society. 44%.
And now, I just am going to point out here that women in American society are treated better than women in any society anywhere on earth for all of human history.
Just as an example, right now, here are doctoral degrees by field and gender in 2020.
Okay, in education, women outnumber men 68% to 32%.
Overall, in all fields, doctoral degrees, women outnumber men 53% to 47%.
In master's degrees, women outnumber men 6 to 4.
Okay, they outnumber them 60% to 40%.
Women outnumber men in total graduate school enrollment 59.7% to 40.3%.
And yet women are saying that they are wildly mistreated in American society.
So again, the left is trying to say that we've got this economic plan.
Don't pay attention while we restructure everything.
Also, we have this woke plan to take control of your life, but we will give you a perception of victimhood.
Okay, well, if you choose to buy into that, then I suppose you can.
I just don't think it's gonna make for a very happy life.
I think, in fact, it's going to make for a very unhappy life, but maybe that's the point.
You can be happy in your unhappiness.
Maybe that's what the left is finally betting on here.
You can be happy with the bread lines, as Bernie Sanders suggested.
You can be happy with the belief that you're a victim in a society where you clearly are not one.
Or, you can be an empowered human being making individual decisions that make your own life better and the people in your community make their lives better as well.
Those are your choices.
There's no third choice.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Molls Show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld. Existing viewers are not allowed to view the show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
Post Producer Justin Barber.
The show is edited by Adam 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.
A man without any military experience becomes the nation's first female four-star general.
The CDC accidentally admits that abortion is infanticide.
And the Washington Post tells you to stop complaining about the supply chain crisis.
▲
Export Selection