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Oct. 22, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:48
Joe Biden Has Fallen And He Can't Get Up | Ep. 1360
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Joe Biden flails in a friendly town hall with CNN's Anderson Cooper, the Virginia gubernatorial race comes down to the wire, and the National Institutes of Health admit funding gain-of-function research.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so Virginia is now down to the wire, and Democrats are deeply upset about it.
The polls are showing it is neck and neck between Glenn Youngkin, the Republican in that race, and Terry McAuliffe, the former.
Virginia governor and head of the DNC.
McAuliffe should have been running away with this race.
Remember that Hillary Clinton won this state going away.
Joe Biden won this state going away.
And now you've got a neck and neck race between Glenn Youngkin, who's a pretty traditional Republican, and Terry McAuliffe, who's a normally traditional Democrat.
This should be a walkover, which is why James Carville, the semi-centrist Democrat analyst, he's saying he's deeply worried about what's going on in Virginia.
And they should be.
We're in a very tight race, and Democrats need to be activated.
I do think that Trump has a tug against Junkin.
I've seen a lot of research on that.
Of course, he said he wouldn't be running without Trump, and he tries to run away from him.
He's kind of slippery, but yeah, it's close.
There's no doubt about it, and I'm scared to death, and other Democrats should be.
Okay, what Carville is pointing out here is that all of the attempts to tie Youngkin to Trump have failed.
And that is why Youngkin is doing well.
Right now, all of the polls show that he is neck and neck with McAuliffe.
And the reason for that is because people are focusing on the bread and butter issues.
Suburban moms are focusing in on the failures of education in the state of Virginia.
And it's not just about the Virginia gubernatorial race.
According to Politico, the Virginia House is up for grabs as well.
Quote, Alex Askew knows firsthand how tight elections can get for Democrats in Virginia.
He barely won his seat in the State House of Delegates, defeating his Republican opponent by 802 votes in 2019.
That's why Askew is campaigning furiously ahead of the November election.
On the first Sunday of Soles to the Polls early voting over the weekend, Askew, 36, attended two church services before an afternoon of campaign events and canvassing.
He was joined by a colleague, state delegate Nancy Guy, who clinched her seat by an even closer margin of just 40 votes.
When Virginia voters cast their ballots in two weeks, they're not just weighing in on a closely watched governor's election, one that's been hyped as a bellwether ahead of the 2022 midterms and a judgment on President Joe Biden.
They're also deciding whether to keep legislative Democrats in office.
A choice that will determine how much statewide power the party will yield and reveal voter satisfaction with the crush of progressive laws enacted in the last two years.
Remember, Virginia, when it went blue, started immediately pushing very radical measures that a large percentage of Virginians didn't like.
Everything from gun control to transgender bathrooms.
Virginia might become increasingly blue at the presidential level, but Democrats only came to control both chambers of the state legislature in 2019, after nearly two decades of mostly Republican control.
And next month, they could lose control of both the governor's mansion and the House, all in one day.
It is a disaster for Democrats because they overshot the mark.
Democrats have a nasty habit of taking power and then believing that their entire radical mandate has now been approved by the voters.
That is not true.
Democrats have spent the last two years passing a long list of sweeping policies.
They implemented criminal justice reform, legalized marijuana, expanded voting rights, raised the minimum wage, enacted gun control, repealed the death penalty, and set a goal of getting Virginia electric utilities to 100% renewable generation by 2050.
State House Democrats have raised almost twice as much money as the Republicans, but they're still struggling.
And it's a real problem.
And one of the reasons it's a real problem is because the battle between parents and teachers is growing extraordinarily serious in Loudoun County, particularly.
A shocking story out of WTOP.com today.
Remember, we reported at Daily Wire, the news, that there was an alleged sexual assault in a bathroom At a Loudoun County public school.
And the parent of the daughter in that particular case then went to a school board meeting where one of the superintendents of the school board said that there had been no such assault on record in a bathroom anywhere.
Well, now it turns out that that guy was just lying.
According to an email uncovered The superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools did send a brief confidential email to school board members on May 28th, the same day a female student at Stonebridge High School said she was sexually assaulted in a bathroom.
In an email provided to WTOP by the school system, Superintendent Scott Ziegler alerted the board that the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office was investigating the incident but provided few details.
The purpose of this email is to provide you with information regarding an incident that occurred at Stonebridge High School.
This afternoon, a female student alleged that a male student sexually assaulted her in a restroom.
The LCSO is investigating the matter, according to Ziegler.
Last week, Ziegler apologized for the school system's reaction to recent sexual assaults by students and outlined steps he said would improve the system going forward.
That assault was not made public until the victim's father told the Daily Wire that the same 15-year-old charged in the daughter's attack was later charged with groping a different girl at Broad Run High School on October 6th.
Loudoun County Commonwealth Attorney's Buddha Bibiraj told WTOP the same 15-year-old has been charged in both crimes. Bibiraj said the boy was on pre-trial electronic monitoring for the May 28th sexual assault when he was charged with sexual battery and abduction for the October incident.
Remember, Ziegler had said in public that they had no record of anybody being assaulted in a bathroom.
Bill Stanley, the attorney representing the family, said in a statement, Ziegler's comments confirmed what the family already believed, that the school's board and administration failed to provide a safe environment for their child.
This has become a gubernatorial issue, of course, because the Republican candidate, Youngkin, has been accusing the county of a cover-up and noting that the school system run by the teachers' unions has been doing a poor job of protecting students and failing to indoctrinate them as well.
In a Thursday statement, LCPS said it was releasing Ziegler's email after it received a number of questions from community members regarding it and if and when the school board was made aware of the alleged sexual assault.
The school board was not provided specific details or the names of those involved and were advised by Dr. Ziegler that they would not receive updates regarding this matter as it was being investigated by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office.
So the big question is why Ziegler answered no to a school board member's question about whether he was aware of sexual assaults in school bathrooms.
Ziegler said he wrongly interpreted the question as incidents involving transgender and gender-fluid students, since the questions moments earlier had been about the county's transgender policy.
But if the entire line of questioning was about whether girls are at higher risk if boys can come into the bathroom, then that seems like a relevant consideration.
So people are going to lose their jobs over this as well they should.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to fight back, Terry McAuliffe is activating the teachers' unions.
Not only are the teachers' unions actually...
Cutting ads on behalf of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.
It turns out that the teachers' unions are now using public dollars in order to stump for Terry McAuliffe.
There's no other way to interpret what is happening in, for example, Richmond.
According to WWBT, in a Richmond public school direct update on Wednesday evening, Superintendent Jason Camras said the division will be closing school additional days the first week of November to help with employees' mental health.
Now, that sounds like it might be kind of a coincidence, right?
Because students already had off November 2nd for Election Day.
November 4th for Diwali, November 5th for virtual parent-teacher conferences.
Now, the division is going to close November 1st and November 3rd.
So namely, the day before the election, they're going to close the schools so the teachers can go out and knock doors.
That's exactly what is going on here.
There's no other way to read that.
That is not about the teachers experiencing mental stress.
Poor teachers.
It's about a pretty obvious gambit to get the teachers to get out there and canvas votes.
As National Review points out, the statement could have been designed in a laboratory to annoy parents.
It has everything.
Oh, and also the notion that COVID-19 is responsible for this.
So, Virginia is a real bellwether for the Democrats.
failed to do their jobs, an absurd safetyist rationale.
Oh, and also the notion that COVID-19 is responsible for this.
All in time for election day.
So Virginia is a real bellwether for the Democrats.
If this thing is even close, Democrats are going to be in an utter state of panic.
And this is why, and Terry McAuliffe has been doing a horrible job of this because all he's been doing is downplaying parent concerns this entire election cycle.
How long can you do this before parents rebel?
Terry McAuliffe yesterday, for example, he was asked about trans students in sports, and instead of taking the question seriously, he suggested that really nobody should worry about it because there are very few trans students in sports, which makes no difference if a competitive boy is running against girls.
We're talking about a very infinitesimal amount of students.
And why is it—why?
These children are already going through such tough challenges.
Why is it that people are trying to make their life so difficult?
I come from a place, you know, I've got big ideas.
We've got to move education forward.
And why are we picking on children?
Why are we going after children who are already dealing with so many challenges?
Why are we not helping them and trying to lift them up and trying to find an avenue path so that they can get that education and feel comfortable?
Good line of attack here by Tara McAuliffe, that if you are a parent who is concerned about a boy racing against your girl or wrestling your girl or being in a bathroom with your girl, that this means that you are somehow a bigot.
It's a strong move by him.
And the Biden administration, by the way, has taken up this message at the national level.
You'll recall that it became a national controversy when because of cases like Loudoun County, The DOJ started talking about how they were going to investigate parents as possible domestic terrorists.
So Merrick Garland, who is supposed to be, remember, this kind of nonpartisan figure.
You remember when Barack Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court and then he was denied his confirmation hearings because of Senator McConnell.
And the notion was that he was going to be just, you know, completely nonpartisan justice.
He wasn't going to be just a hack.
Well, turns out he's a hack.
Garland, in testimony yesterday, admits that he initiated that DOJ targeting of parents because of a specific letter from the National School Board Association.
They wrote a letter to the DOJ saying that parents were out of control and like domestic terrorists.
And the DOJ flipped and, boom, started investigating parents.
Here's Merrick Garland admitting it.
First sentence of your memo.
Very first sentence.
You said, in recent months, there's been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, threats of violence.
Yes.
When did you first review the data showing this so-called disturbing uptick?
So I read the letter, and we have been seeing over time threats... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I didn't ask you... So you read the letter, that's your source?
So, let me be clear, this is not a prosecution or an investigation... Is there some study, some effort, some investigation someone did that said there's been a disturbing uptick, or you just take the words of the National School Board Association?
The National School Board Association, which represents thousands of school boards and school board members, says that there are these kind of threats.
Unbelievable.
So basically, the National School Boards Association, because they wish to defend school boards against parents, sent a letter to the DOJ.
The DOJ just says, how high should we jump?
Pretty incredible stuff.
Well, Terry McAuliffe is flailing.
He's already called in Barack Obama in order to try and shore up his campaign.
And now, unbelievably, he's going to try and call in Joe Biden, which is a giant fail.
According to Fox News, as the polls show the Virginia gubernatorial election neck and neck between former Governor Terry McAuliffe and Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, President Biden is scheduled to appear with the Democrat on the campaign trail.
I'm sure that'll be a barn burner.
The McAuliffe campaign put out a media advisory alerting the press that Biden would campaign with McAuliffe in Arlington on Tuesday, exactly one week before the election.
McAuliffe announced the Biden event along with a slew of other events featuring politicians from Virginia and the nation at large.
They're trying to nationalize the campaign because the more local it is, the more likely McAuliffe loses.
So they're going to call in Obama.
They're going to call in Stacey Abrams.
They're calling Jamie Harrison.
And they're going to call in Joe Biden.
The big problem, of course, is that Joe Biden is not popular in the state of Virginia.
In fact, Joe Biden is not popular nearly anywhere.
The polls right now show that Joe Biden is in the low 40s to high 30s in terms of approval rating.
So Democrats are flailing, and you will see why in just a moment, because Joe Biden did a town hall presser last night, a town hall with Anderson Cooper on CNN.
It is a disaster area.
The President of the United States is not with us, but he has a prescription, and it's more cowbell.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so you have Terry McAuliffe calling in Joe Biden for backup.
That's going to go extremely poorly.
Joe Biden is not the backup that you need if you are a Terry McAuliffe.
The reason being, If you call Joe Biden for backup, he is just going to fall over.
That's all that's going to be.
He is going to pop out of the car and then he's going to immediately keel over and say a bunch of impolitic things along the way.
So he did this town hall last night with Anderson Cooper.
He is facing down a crisis in terms of inflation, a supply chain crisis.
He is facing down a border crisis.
He gave up Afghanistan, completely destroying whatever possibility of a future there was for 19 million Afghan women, as well as thousands of SIV holders who are still sitting imprisoned in Afghanistan.
He's got crises up the wazoo, the president of the United States.
And so they sent him out there to stop the bleeding.
The problem is that if you're going to send someone out there to stop the bleeding, you don't want them congenitally falling on their own knife.
Like that's a big mistake.
And that's what Joe Biden did.
I mean, this is just Joe Biden has fallen and he cannot get up.
So here is a so Joe Biden began.
We'll start with with what he said politically, and then we'll get to just the fact that the man is not with us.
He is no longer with us.
So he began by trying to defend all of his vaccine mandates.
And now, here's the thing.
With people who've already been vaccinated, they're fine with vaccine mandates because it doesn't apply to them.
It's sort of like when you poll the American public on taxing the very wealthy.
Most Americans are not very wealthy, so they're like, okay, it applies to that guy, not me, so I'm okay with it.
But that is not the question.
The question is whether it is high priority for most Americans to force their neighbors to get vaccinated and whether people who are anti the vaccine mandates are very passionate.
And they are.
The answer is they are.
And when they become an intransigent minority, which is what we have been seeing in places like Southwest Airlines or GE, they can shut down the entire economy.
They can shut down major businesses saying, we are not going to do something that you are trying to force us to do.
So Joe Biden's tack here is to say that if he forces you to get a vaccine against your will, or to vaccinate your child against your will, which is what they're trying to do with kids 12 to 19, and I guarantee you within three weeks, they're gonna be trying to do this with kids five to 11.
When Joe Biden says this, when his take on this is, stop whining about your freedom, this old authoritarian, that ain't gonna go over great.
The two things that concern me, one are those who just try to make this a political issue, freedom.
I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID.
No, I mean, come on.
Freedom.
Come on, freedom.
Come on.
OK, so I love the line, I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID.
And nobody wants to kill anybody else with COVID.
OK, that's why we have the vaccine.
If you don't want to die of COVID, I have a good solution for you.
Get a vaccine.
And if you are immunocompromised, even if you take the vaccine, that's not going to be enough.
You need to protect yourself with the KN95.
You need to be in a more isolated area, period.
Beyond which, even if you're vaccinated, you can now pass the disease.
We know this for a fact.
A huge number of people who are being infected with COVID already have been vaccinated.
So this baseline, so basically what he's now arguing is that you have no right to breathe free air.
That's what he's arguing.
Because if the idea is that your mere breath creates externalities, whether you're vaccinated or non-vaccinated, we are talking now about masking up until the end of time.
That is a freedom issue.
That's a freedom issue, especially when, again, everyone around you has the freedom to protect themselves.
As I've said before, what Joe Biden is basically arguing is no longer that you must wear a seatbelt.
What he is arguing is that if somebody else doesn't wear a seatbelt, you have to put a mattress on the front of your car to catch them when they go flying through their windshield.
That is a very different argument.
And not only is it a different argument, it's a bad argument coming from the President of the United States.
Oh, you people worried about your freedom.
How anybody thinks that this guy's a good politician is absolutely beyond me.
He is thick as an unripe coconut.
It's just, it's incredible.
Okay, so moving on from his vaccine policies, which are deeply unlikely to actually bring an end to the pandemic, he then is asked about rising gas prices, because as it turns out, inflation is crippling a lot of American families right now.
The gas prices are out of control, and prices at the shelves are out of control.
We're seeing major supply shortages.
Here was Joe Biden's wonderful answer on the gas prices.
So there's there but I don't I must tell you I don't have a near term answer.
There's two things I could do.
I could go on the patrol and reserve and take out and probably reduce reduce the price of.
gas, maybe 18 cents or so a gallon, it's still going to be above three bucks.
And one of the things that I refused to have happen, because I didn't want anybody, I made a commitment if you pass the stuff I'm talking about, not one single penny in tax would go against anybody making less than 400 grand.
And so if you notice, this is these highway bills are not paid for by gas tax.
They're paid for by direct expenditures in other areas.
So the average person is going to have to pay more.
So really, he's lowering your gas price by spending a lot of money.
Get it?
No?
Because he's incoherently babbling like a crazy person?
Yeah.
That is the president of the United States right there.
Well done, everybody.
Then Joe Biden is asked about the labor shortages, because we have tremendous labor shortages in this country.
We have 10 million open jobs.
We have millions of people who aren't going to fill them.
And his answer is less than satisfying, shall we say.
People are now using this as an opportunity to say, wait a minute, do I want to go back to that $7 an hour job?
I won't name the particular restaurant chain, but they found out when they couldn't hire anybody, when they found out they started to pay 20 bucks an hour, everybody wanted to go back to work.
Not a joke.
Okay, so he's admitting the quiet part out loud, guys.
He's making my case.
He's now admitting that people are faking about being afraid of COVID in order to raise their own wages.
They are relying on government benefits to try to pry higher wages out of businesses that are then going to pass on that cost to consumers.
Because when you artificially raise the cost of labor, just like if you artificially raise the cost of any other input in a product, you artificially raise the price of the product at the end of the supply chain.
He's admitting it and he's happy about it, right?
He's happy that he's artificially increasing the wages of labor, which is resulting in the inflation that we are seeing right now.
He is creating the labor shortages and he's excited about it.
He thinks it's a good thing.
That isn't a bug, that's a feature of his plan.
So if you're worried about inflation, he's promising you more of it.
If you're concerned about supply shortages, he's saying it's good that there are supply shortages, because finally, those $7 an hour workers will be getting $25 an hour for the same work.
Now, I have a question for you.
Do you think that their labor suddenly became worth $25 an hour?
Or do you think that that price is just going to get passed on to you, the consumer?
And to those same workers, by the way.
Because right now, inflation is outpaging wage growth.
So his entire plan is a fail, but it's always more cowbell.
Always and forever, more cowbell.
And then, as we'll see in just a second, Joe Biden decided that he would talk a little bit about his economic plans.
He suggested, for example, that he would be sleeping alone if he could not get free community college done.
Which, yeah, we know Jill is really running the administration, Joe.
We get it.
The question was on community colleges, which was a big campaign promise that you made.
You talked about that along the campaign trail.
Yeah, and I'm going to get it done.
And if I don't, I'll be sleeping alone for a long time.
But here's the deal.
It's the honeymooners now.
We all have to pay for community college so that he can get some from his wife, apparently.
That's great.
Yep.
Terrific, Joe.
Also, Joe says that... I wish you were telling the truth here.
He says that we have a commitment to defend Taiwan if China should militarily attack Taiwan.
This is immediately walked back by the White House.
I don't want a Cold War with China.
I just want to make China understand that we are not going to step back.
We are not going to change any of our views.
So are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan's defense if China attacked?
Yes, we have a commitment to do that.
OK, so then the White House walked that back like, oh, well, we haven't changed any status quo.
No, no, we don't want to offend the Chinese.
So even when Joe Biden says something right, he says something wrong.
OK, and all of this is ancillary to the major question here, which is whether Joe Biden is even competent to hold his office.
And the answer, of course, is that he is not.
He is now in late-stage weirdness, right?
As if you've ever had an elderly relative who's starting to lose it, there are certain tics that you see that are just strange.
And Joe Biden is not, he's non compos mentis.
He is not with us.
So during the middle of this town hall, Joe Biden was talking about the Long Beach port, and he started asking what he was doing.
I was able to go to the private port with 40% of all products coming into the United States of America on the West Coast, go through Los Angeles and and what am I doing here?
The Long Beach, Long Beach. Thank you.
Oh, my God. What am I doing here?
What am I doing here?
So, remember that time that Rick Perry ran for president, and he wanted to name three departments that he wanted to cut, and he only came up with two, and it ended his presidential campaign?
Here you have the president of the United States, not remembering the Long Beach port, and instead of finding something to cover for it, just saying, and another port in the area.
Instead he goes, what am I doing here?
And Anderson Cooper jumps in to save him, as our media members typically do.
Then we had this weird image.
Of Joe Biden clenching his hands for no reason, as though he has like a vest strapped to him and the button in his fists.
I don't know.
What is he even doing here?
Here's Anderson Cooper asking him a question.
And the visual is the president of the United States holding his arms at 90 degrees and clenching his fists with his thumbs up as though he is going to clock in on Jeopardy for the hot round of questions.
About that, just in terms of inflation, because you had told us at a town hall, I think it was in July, that it was just near-term inflation.
The Wall Street Journal recently talked to like 67 financial experts who said that they saw high inflation going all the way, or deep into 2022.
What is he, what is he doing?
What is he doing?
He's just, he's kind of staring off into the distance and clenching his fists.
So one of two things is happening.
Either the President of the United States is losing it, or he is Cornholio in search for TP for his bunghole.
Those would be the only two possible options here.
I do not know what the President of the United States is doing here.
Remember every time Trump did something weird, people would like jump on it and it was it was evidence that he was crazy and that they needed to use the Constitution to get rid of him.
And what is he doing?
What is he doing?
And then he did the weird, creepy whispering routine.
I don't know who once told Joe Biden that it is a good political tactic to creepily lean forward and whisper.
But that's what horror movie villains do.
Right?
That's where they've got the victim tied to a chair and they lean forward and they're like, tell me about your mother.
So now you have the president of the United States doing this.
Here we go.
Here's the deal, though.
You have 55 corporations, for example, in the United States of America, making over $40 billion.
Don't pay a cent.
Not a single little red cent.
Now, I don't care.
I'm a capitalist.
I hope you can be a millionaire or a billionaire.
Not a problem.
But at least pay your fair share.
Don't pay a cent.
What's going on with this guy?
Why do you?
Okay, so here's the problem for Democrats.
The only person who has the leverage to actually force through Joe Biden's crappy plans.
Joe Biden is trapped.
Okay, his plans suck.
And if they are effectuated, then it's going to be bad for the economy.
He himself is admitting he's going to create labor shortages if his plans actually work.
It is not going to create more jobs.
It's going to create fewer jobs.
He's going to be paying people to stay home.
He's going to be paying people not to enter the workforce, but instead to go to community college to major in lesbian dance theory.
This is the President of the United States' actual plan.
So if he succeeds, he fails.
And if he fails, he also fails.
And right now, he has no leverage inside his own party.
Democratic voters are getting very upset with Joe Biden because they feel like he's not able to use his leverage, but he doesn't have leverage, guys.
You elected a guy with no leverage.
Again, the only thing that Joe Biden had leverage for was the things like the bipartisan infrastructure plan.
But he has a narrow majority, and the progressives are holding up the deal on that, so he has no leverage.
He has 50 seats in the Senate, which means he has no power.
And in the House, he has a very narrow majority and a fractious coalition.
It turns out that governing is real tough.
And Joe Biden, again, he doesn't have the capacity to actually broker deals because he is not there.
He's not there.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Democrats in Washington remain divided over the scope of President Biden's expansive domestic policy agenda.
But their voters, both moderates and progressives, have largely rallied around the push to increase government spending and say they worry lawmakers will fail to come to an agreement.
Several recent polls bolstered by interviews with more than 50 Democratic voters across six swing states in recent weeks indicate broad party support for legislation to expand social safety net programs and pass measures aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change.
Democratic leaders have proposed paying for well over a trillion dollars in expanded government services, in part by higher taxes.
Top Democrats acknowledge that would have been considered too liberal a few years ago.
Now they say it has broad party support, but they don't actually have the support of Manchin or Sinema.
According to Politico this morning, Neither Manchin nor Sinema are on board with the big spending, big taxation plans that Joe Biden is pushing, which is a disaster for him.
And he really has no choice.
I mean, Joe Manchin came out yesterday and he said, let's pause this thing for six months.
According to Axios, Joe Manchin said, quote, we shouldn't do it at all.
Apparently, Bernie had said, let's spend $6 trillion.
And Manchin said, how about zero?
And then Manchin said, this will contribute to inflation.
We've already passed the American Rescue Plan.
We should just pass the infrastructure bill and, you know, pause for six months.
Yep.
Joe said, I'm comfortable with nothing.
So Joe, and by the way, Joe Manchin has no incentive here.
Manchin yesterday said, I'm a centrist, deal with it.
You know, the fact of the matter is that he is from West Virginia, a state that went for Donald Trump by something like 40 points.
The fact that there's a Democrat from West Virginia in the Senate is a weirdness of history in and of itself.
Manchin knows that, and he knows the minute that he votes for this bad Biden bill, he's done as a senator.
He will not win re-election in West Virginia.
Here he is basically acknowledging that.
If anything that was ever said, that we've ever talked about, if I'm an embarrassment to my Democrat colleagues, my caucus, the president being the leader of the Democrat party, Chuck Schumer and all them, and I said, me being a moderate centrist Democrat, if that causes you a problem, let me know, and I'd switch to being an independent, but I'd still be caucusing with Democrats.
Both Cinema and Mansion have basically said that they are not in favor of massive tax increases.
Those seem to be largely off the table at this point.
But meanwhile, it's such a divide inside the Democratic Party.
And normally the president bridges those divides, right?
The president brings everybody together inside his own party.
Not so with regard to President Biden.
And this is leaving the so-called moderate senators not knowing which way to turn.
A good sort of bellwether for this is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
So he is the Senate Majority Leader.
He has been reelected to his Senate position several times by wide margins.
Now he's running so scared of the AOC wing of the party that he announced he was endorsing India Walton to be mayor of Buffalo.
Giving the winner of the Democratic primary a crucial boost only days before early voting begins in her race against Mayor Byron Brown.
Schumer's decision gave Walton backing from a centrist Democrat at a time when other figures like Governor Kathy Hochul and Representative Brian Higgins of Buffalo refused to take sides in a battle between an upstart primary winner and a four-term incumbent who's waging a write-in campaign.
That's because India Walton's like an actual honest-to-God socialist.
So Schumer endorsed her because he was afraid that he'd be outflanked by AOC and then Walton would go ahead and win the election.
So now he is feeding the alligator.
They're all feeding the progressive alligator.
Because normally the person who would be able to stand up to the alligator is the President of the United States and he is too busy sleeping and taking his early afternoon nap before watching the rerun of Matlock.
So well done everybody.
Now meanwhile, We have the amazing spectacle.
This should be the top story in the country.
It is not, however.
The NIH has now admitted to funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
Isn't that a major story?
We'll get to that in just one second.
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We'll get to more of the news in just one second.
First, big announcement.
So you saw the story this week that ESPN had basically fired Alison Williams, this super talented sideline reporter, college football, basketball.
They fired her because she was trying to get pregnant and didn't want to take a COVID-19 vaccine.
So they said, fine.
You're out of a job.
Well, she's not out of a job any longer.
We have hired her here at Daily Wire, and we are pumped about it.
She's gonna be bringing us excellent sports content.
We need your help to do this kind of stuff, to help bring people in who have been thrown out into the cold by the woke culture.
Go help us out at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code DONOTCOMPLY at checkout for 25% off.
We're basically uncanceling everybody that Hollywood and the leftist machine is canceling.
And so we need your help to do that.
Alison Williams has joined The Daily Wire.
We are super excited for her sports coverage, and we're excited to slap ESPN in the face, frankly.
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And meanwhile, the biggest story of the day that you won't see on the network news, a top NIH official admitted in a Wednesday letter that U.S.
taxpayers funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and revealed that EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S.
nonprofit that funneled NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was not transparent about the work it was doing.
Now, shouldn't this be the biggest bombshell in America?
That your dollars were funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
Now remember, the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory.
It was labeled such by all of the elitists in our society.
It was labeled as such by social media.
You weren't supposed to discuss it.
It was very bad.
It was anti-Chinese racism to even mention it.
And if you mentioned that the NIH, under the auspices of people like Dr. Fauci, was funding gain-of-function research, if you did that, this meant that you were some sort of crazy conspiracy theorist.
Well, now the NIH is admitting it.
And now gain-of-function research, for those who don't know, is where you take a virus that is not transmittable to humans and you make it transmissible to humans.
This is in sort of the colloquial sense.
The very technical sense is where you make a virus that is transmissible more transmissible.
So what Fauci had been arguing for a while here is that it is not gain-of-function research to take a bat coronavirus and make it applicable to humans.
And that is a distinction without a difference.
That is idiotic.
You gave them money and you said, don't do gain-of-function research.
Correct.
And they said, we won't.
Correct.
And you have no way of knowing whether they did or not, except you trust them.
money or gain-of-function research.
Have you ever had a grantee lie to you?
I cannot guarantee that a grantee has not lied to us because you never know.
You never know.
Well, I mean, I think it's a pretty good indicator that you shouldn't be giving money to the Chinese government.
In a letter to Representative James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, Lawrence Tabak of the NIH cites a, quote, limited experiment that was conducted to test if, quote, spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.
Lab mice infected with the modified bat virus became sicker than those infected with the unmodified bat virus.
That revelation vindicates Rand Paul, who got into heated exchanges with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci during his May and July testimonials before Congress over that gain-of-function question.
At the second hearing, Paul accused Fauci of misleading Congress by denying the United States had funded gain-of-function projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In keeping with Fauci's refusal to use gain-of-function terminology, Tabak also avoids the term, though the work he describes matches its commonplace definition precisely.
A previously unpublished EcoHealth grant proposal filed with the NIAID obtained by The Intercept had already exposed that almost $600,000 of the total grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was for research designed to make viruses more dangerous and or infectious.
Richard Ebright, biosafety expert, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, had previously rebutted Fauci's claim that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology as, quote, demonstrably false.
Ebright told National Review, the NIH-financed work at the WIV epitomizes the definition of gain-of-function research, which deals with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens, or those pathogens resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and or virulence of a pathogen.
Apparently Tabak also revealed that EcoHealth failed to comply with its reporting requirements under the grant.
EcoHealth was required to submit to a secondary review in the event of certain developments that might increase the danger associated with the research.
So, when Wuhan researchers successfully bound a natural bat coronavirus to a human ACE2 receptor in mice, they were supposed to inform the NIH.
And then they didn't.
Hey, that is a full-scale disaster area for the NIH and for Anthony Fauci, because now you have to ask, okay, so they took a bat coronavirus, they bound it to a human ACE2 receptor.
We're supposed to believe that this then naturally occurred in the wild, that it wasn't a lab leak, and that that sort of research that we were funding had nothing to do with the death of millions of people around the world?
Should give us a different perspective on whether we ought to be doing business with China.
Should certainly give us a different perspective on whether the experts ought to be trusted on this stuff when they have been lying to us consistently.
You want to talk about the blowout of institutional trust?
You have Dr. Anthony Fauci presiding over an agency that was, in fact, funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology now, according to these new communications, lying to the American people about it, and then proceeding to take every possible position on every possible issue throughout the pandemic, and then, when people have doubts, they're like, well, I don't know why you don't trust us.
You need to trust us.
Okay, so, Fauci's new push, and the push of this administration, is to get kids vaccinated.
Now, if you think for one solitary second that the push to get kids vaccinated ends with your kids unmasking in school, you're out of your mind.
It ain't gonna happen.
The reason it ain't gonna happen is because, as we already know, the virus is still infectious.
Even if you are a vaccinated person, the CDC has been urging you to continue to mask up, and Rochelle Walensky said over the weekend that if your kid gets a vaccine, then your kid should continue to mask up, in perpetuity, forever.
So what exactly is the strong case for kids getting vaccinated?
Well, Fauci says we have to stop kids from getting the disease at all.
Zero COVID is not a thing, guys.
Zero COVID is not a thing.
The reason that you get vaccinated is so you don't get hospitalized or die.
The chances of being hospitalized or dying as a child are lower than your chances of being hospitalized or dying if you are a vaccinated adult in the vast majority of cases.
Here is Dr. Anthony Fauci trying to promote kids getting vaccinated.
Again, I'm not saying kids shouldn't get vaccinated.
I'm saying that the governmental mandates that are sure to follow this, and they will come, are utterly out of line with both the science and with basic human decency.
Here is Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Talking about kids ages 5 to 11 and that's something that will be considered very soon and perhaps given an emergency use authorization very soon.
How concerned are you that parents are going to stand in the way of children getting these vaccines?
Well, I hope not.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why we want to make sure that we outreach to the parents with trusted messengers, particularly some of the most trusted messengers are the family pediatrician, who most parents have a good deal of confidence in.
And we're trying to get people to realize it is for the benefit of the children as well as for the entire family unit to get the child vaccinated.
The vaccinations and the vaccines in question are highly, highly effective Okay, I mean, a few reasons not to are that the kids are basically safe from hospitalization and death from COVID without the vaccine.
We have no longitudinal data.
The entire study sample size was about 2,300 kids.
Myocarditis only appears in 1 in 9,000 kids, so the sample size isn't even big enough for you to determine what the alternative Symptoms are.
We don't, again, it's one thing to risk the possible cost of the vaccine downstream for people who have a higher level of risk of hospitalization or death.
When you're talking about kids, most of whom are asymptomatic, you have to make a pretty strong case as to why kids should get vaccinated.
And the case that they might infect adults, I'm sorry, this is endemic.
This is endemic now.
It is, in fact, probably more likely that adults are going to infect kids.
Most of the outbreaks that we've seen in schools are coming from teachers to the kids, not the other way around.
But Anthony Fauci has to push this.
And so he's also been pushing the notion that, for example, the spike that we are seeing in Britain right now is due to kids.
So he said this, quote, What they are seeing is spread among children, which for the most part, at least 50% is without symptoms.
But children are then spreading it to members of the family.
So they're seeing people get infected.
So right now they're re-examining what their policy is going to be about vaccinating children, right?
So he's blaming a current UK spike on the unvaccinated kids.
Except for the fact that the people who are being hospitalized and dying are unvaccinated adults and or vaccinated adults who had the vaccines a long time ago and happen to be old.
That's where the real danger lies.
But instead of focusing on the adults, we're going to go after the kids.
Why you would trust these people, I just don't understand.
I really don't understand what they have done to earn your trust.
So if you talk to your family pediatrician, and your family pediatrician recommends the shots, listen to your family pediatrician.
But why you would trust Anthony Fauci on a blanket level here is beyond me.
And why you would trust political actors is really beyond me.
So you have Jerry Nadler, for example, yesterday in the House, they were having some sort of committee meeting. And Jerry Nadler starts calling out the Republicans who are not masking on the committee. I would remind all members that guidance from the Office of Attending Physicians states that face coverings are required for all meetings in an enclosed space, such as committee hearings, except when you are recognized to speak. And that means you, Jim and Marjorie and Matt and
a lot of other people I can't recognize because of distance, etc. So please, everyone, observe that rule. Okay, my favorite part of this is that literally half of the room is unmasked.
Literally half the room.
Also, I don't know why the rule is that you get to unmask when you speak.
If we're going to be scientifically proper about this, when you're speaking is when you should wear the mask.
That's when you're expelling spit.
It's when you're aerosolizing the virus.
But this is all political.
It's all political and it drives me up a damned wall.
There is no consistency coming from the CDC.
There's no consistency coming from the FDA.
There's no consistency in what they hope is the pathway forward from the pandemic because we all know at this point it's endemic.
The only thing you can do if you're concerned is vaccinate yourself.
If you're concerned for your child, go ahead and vaccinate your kid.
And if you're not, don't.
And that's the end of this.
We are done, but not according to our public officials, who maintain control in their sclerotic, pathetic hands.
The more control you choose to give to moron politicians, the more control you choose to give to overarching authoritarian bureaucrats, the more you deserve to be controlled.
And if you believe that they can save you from disease, or save you from poverty, or save you from the vicissitudes of life, you are out of your damned mind.
You're crazy.
The only thing that can save you from these things is good individual decision making, which is why I've encouraged individuals to get vaccines if they're in any way vulnerable.
And it's also why I say that you need to perform individual risk assessment, because when you allow everybody else to control your life, it is worse for you and it is worse for everybody else.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you can't forget to end your week by checking out the Andrew Klavan Show.
Bruce's show is every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
As always, head on over to dailywire.com, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central.
Tune in.
Also, a quick reminder, we are very excited that Allison Williams is joining the Daily Wire.
I'm very pumped about that.
I think that it's a good move for us.
I think it's a good move for her.
And more importantly, I think it's a slap in the face to the Vaccine authoritarianism you're seeing at places like Disney where they are forcing people to lose their jobs if they don't do what Disney wants.
So if you want to support that, head on over to DailyWire.com.
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