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Oct. 28, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:30
Merrick Garland Is A Legal Hack | Ep. 1364
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Republicans subject Attorney General Merrick Garland to a rough day in the Senate.
Joe Biden heads to an international climate summit.
And the State Department says people of no gender can now get their passports stamped X. I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressiveVPN.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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All righty. So yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland, remember, this was supposed to be a legal mind for the ages. And he wasn't just some sort of political hack who did the law.
No, he was not an Eric Holder type.
He was going to be a nonpartisan unifying figure.
That's why he was picked.
Remember, some of the alternatives that Joe Biden had been looking at were far more radical publicly facing than Merrick Garland was for attorney general.
And there'd been talk about Doug Jones from Alabama as the attorney general of the United States.
There'd been talk about bringing back some of the Obama holdovers.
Instead, Joe Biden picked Merrick Garland specifically because Merrick Garland was supposed to not be a political hack, widely respected, almost made the Supreme Court.
Instead, it turns out that pretty much every left-minded judicial appointee, if given the power of the Attorney General would turn into Merrick Garland.
This seems to be the case.
So Merrick Garland has been a very highly political Attorney General.
And he was called in front of the Senate yesterday to talk about how the DOJ was targeting parents.
Because remember, the DOJ put out an entire memo talking about how they were going to essentially sick the FBI on parents who had questions about how school boards were running.
And they did so at the behest of a National School Boards Association which had claimed that there was a massive uptick in violence against school boards without actually demonstrating that that was in fact the case.
So yesterday, Merrick Garland was called to the Hill, and he was asked questions about this.
Because when the federal government is called upon by an outside source to start investigating violence, and then, on the basis of no evidence, starts to do that, this could have a pretty significant chilling effect on people who might want to get involved in, say, the local school board.
If you found out that the FBI and DOJ were suddenly targeting your point of view and giving you a little bit of extra scrutiny because they had been told to by your political opponents, Might that not be somewhat chilling?
So Merrick Garland was specifically asked about the fact that if this really was a pressing law enforcement issue that required the intervention of the DOJ, could he name any specific act of violence that had led to this large-scale announcement from the DOJ?
Here is Merrick Garland saying, well, not so much.
Just in my recollection I said that the impetus for the letter from my memorandum was that letter and also reports of this kind of activity.
What reports?
I said again that at the time that they were news reports that had been published and I think that some of the other senators here have described some of those news reports and we've certainly seen subsequently more news reports and more statements by board members of threats to kill them.
Okay, so, threats of violence, okay?
But when Cotton asked him specifically about the memo that the DOJ put out, which included, quote, violence, threats of violence, as well as harassment and intimidation, Garland had no response, because harassment and intimidation are not quite the same thing as threats of violence.
Because it turns out that if somebody disagrees with you at a school board meeting, that could be considered, quote-unquote, harassment or intimidation.
This is something Mike Lee pointed out.
So Merrick Garland then admitted that the original letter that caused the DOJ to start looking into parents did not include acts of violence in the letter.
You didn't investigate the incidents in the letter, did you?
No, this is the first step.
This is an assessment step.
It comes before investigations.
Right.
Before you issued your memo, you didn't investigate the incidents.
The memo is intended to begin assessments.
It is intended... And in fact, most of the incidents In the letter did not involve threats of violence, did they?
I think that's correct.
Most of them did not.
And they would not be covered by either federal or state law.
I agree with that.
And they would be protected by the First Amendment.
Okay, so then the question is, if you did not have a pressing need to do this, why did you do this?
And the answer, of course, is that this served the left-leaning agenda, suggesting that school boards everywhere are doing a wonderful job and parents who have questions about school boards are doing a terrible job.
This led Tom Cotton to rip into Merrick Garland, telling him he probably should just resign his job.
Do you apologize to Scott Smith and his 15-year-old daughter, Judge?
This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful.
Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court.
entitled and protected by the First Amendment to protest to their school board about that. But he was cited by the School Board Association as a domestic terrorist which we now know that letter and those reports were the basis for your judgment. No, Senator. This is shameful. Judge, this is shameful. This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful. Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court. You should resign in disgrace, Judge.
Okay, and of course Merrick Garland was very upset because he said, well, it's not really the NSBA letter that caused It was just kind of the NSBA letter that caused us to do all this.
Josh Hawley got in on the act as well, the senator from Missouri.
He said that you guys are talking about using the language of domestic terrorism via the NSBA to apply to parents.
What are you doing here?
Several of my Democrat colleagues have today, just today in this hearing, multiple times have compared parents who show up at school board meetings, like Mr. Smith here, have compared them to criminal rioters.
You think that's right?
You think that a parent who shows up at a school board meeting who has a complaint, who wants to voice that complaint, and maybe she doesn't use exactly the right grammar, you think they're akin to criminal rioters?
Do you agree with that?
I do not, and I do not remember any senator here making that comparison.
Oh really?
These people are just like the folks who came here on January 6th and the riot at the Capitol?
I don't think they were referring to the picture that you're showing there.
So then, who exactly were they referring to?
Here is the thing.
When it comes to the application of law, the Attorney General's Office, when it comes to the DOJ, the DOJ has to be a somewhat Honorable institution.
Bill Barr got an enormous amount of flack when he was Attorney General because the idea from the left is that he was doing the bidding of Donald Trump routinely.
That was not true.
We know many occasions where Bill Barr was directly at odds with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, for example, wanted Bill Barr.
He wanted Jeff Sessions to investigate Hillary Clinton.
They didn't do that.
He wanted Bill Barr to start initiating investigations of the election and Bill Barr wouldn't do that.
This sort of stuff happened all the time under Donald Trump.
Can anyone name a single time where a Democratic president has gone to his AG and said, I'd like to do X and the AG said no?
See, this is the dirty little secret about the way that politics work at the presidential level.
Pretty frequently, when there's a Republican president and he says something untoward, the people around him say, you're not allowed to do that.
This happened with Trump all the time.
Half of the things that Trump suggested on Twitter were then walked back by his own administration, and people around him said, we won't implement that, and then Trump just dropped it.
But when Joe Biden says jump, the people around him say, how high?
And this has some pretty deleterious effects on Americans' lives.
And to take just another example, it is Merrick Garland who's been spending his days cracking down on police departments around the country while simultaneously the crime rate's been going up.
Murder rates have spiked in nearly every major American city, but it was Merrick Garland who decided very early on that he was going to rescind the Trump administration's policies with regard to consent decrees with regard to local police departments.
It was all the way back in April that CNBC reported that Merrick Garland had rescinded Trump-era limits on consent decrees, which the DOJ had used to enforce reforms in police departments accused of widespread misconduct.
Garland said he would return to the traditional process in place before Trump's administration imposed sharp restrictions on the tool.
Garland said in a memo, together we will continue the department's legacy of promoting the rule of law, protecting the public, working collaboratively with state and local governmental entities to meet those ends. That is not what consent decrees historically have been under democratic administrations. Consent decrees have been a way to force local police departments to tell cops not to do things.
These consent decrees have largely been based on bad evidence.
This is certainly the case with the Seattle consent decree under the Obama administration.
It's been a way to cram down particular diversity-laden viewpoints that have nothing to do with the reality of policing.
How the law is enforced matters an awful lot.
And this also happens to be the case, I mean, Merrick Garland got rigged over the coals yesterday for having greenlit a settlement with former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe.
You'll remember that Andy McCabe was fired because an inspector general found that Andy McCabe had lied in testimony, like he had lied to the FBI.
And he leaked out information that he was not cleared to leak.
And that's according to James Comey.
And now the Justice Department agreed to pay McCabe and his attorneys over $700,000.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Senator Chuck Grassley expressed outrage over the settlement, calling the move, quote, beyond incredible, noting that a DOJ inspector general review found McCabe to be lying to investigators on seven separate occasions.
Garland's answer, quote, the McCabe settlement was a recommendation of the career lawyers litigating that case based on their prospects of success in the case.
Garland said it involved a claim that he was not given the amount of time necessary to respond to allegations.
The litigators concluded they needed to settle the case because of the likelihood of loss on the merits of the claim.
Do you think that on principle, if McCabe had been a strong Democrat, that that would have been a thing that the DOJ decided to settle out?
What do you think?
And once the DOJ becomes an overtly political tool, which it is under Merrick Garland, people start to lose trust in the institutions.
And again, this didn't start with him.
Janet Reno was a tool of the Clinton administration going all the way back.
But it is worthy of note that this administration, which pledged to be a bipartisan unifying administration, is basically the soft face of authoritarianism.
They're constantly doing authoritarian things via powers delegated to them by a feckless and incompetent Congress over the course of decades.
And they're just doing what they will with it.
And it's really, really ugly.
Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden is headed overseas to a climate summit.
It's very important, according to Joe Biden, that he goes to this climate change summit.
In fact, he had built his entire we're gonna make a deal routine around going to this climate summit, as though anyone in America cared.
As though anyone in America was like, you know what?
We need a budget deal.
We need to spend trillions of dollars so Joe Biden can go to Europe, to Glasgow, and talk with the international community about climate change.
No one in America cares about that.
That was their false deadline that they had set.
Well, they didn't hit that false deadline.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so Joe Biden is headed overseas.
To this UN Global Climate Summit.
Ooh!
We should definitely formulate our policy around what Kenya thinks about climate change.
Really important to find out what the Swedes think about climate change.
Frankly, if Greta Thunberg is disappointed in me, I'm willing to pay trillions of dollars just to prevent that.
Because if this now-adult-who-I-can-make-fun-of person stares at me angrily and tells me that as an adult she's disappointed in me, I know that that sears me down to my soul.
It sears me to the point where I am perfectly willing to allow Joe Biden to spend trillions of dollars we don't have, inflate the economy, and completely dissuade people from going back to work in order so that Greta Thunberg sleeps better at night on her yacht.
It's very important to me.
So according to CBS News, we have now reached... It's funny, I'm not sure how many turning points there can be before you're just all the way around in a circle, but they keep talking about how every climate summit is going to be a turning point.
Here is the thing, gang.
Most global warming is already baked into the cake.
The reality is that any measure that dramatically harms the global economy on behalf of lowering carbon emissions is a fool's errand.
You are much better off taking some of that potential gain and using it on mitigation efforts and adaptation efforts rather than attempting to completely remake the world economy to stop carbon emissions altogether considering a huge percentage of the world's population still lives in abject poverty burning dung for fuel.
Carbon emissions are not the specific problem in the long run.
The specific problem is how human beings deal with carbon emissions.
The Earth is not going to boil.
Not all human life is going to die.
All the catastrophic nonsense about how billions of people are going to be living in basically a Mad Max universe if global warming continues.
It's silly.
It's not true.
Technology has improved.
The United States, for example, our emissions have leveled off.
China's are not going to level off.
China's going to continue to emit at high rates.
Developing countries are going to continue to emit at high rates.
And by the way, if you wanted them to stop emitting at those high rates, you'd have to pay them trillions of dollars.
They are openly saying this now.
So your choice.
Do you wish to sink the growth of the world economy?
Which, by the way, is what allows people to live longer.
It allows people to be healthy.
It allows people to care about the environment.
Because I'll tell you what you don't care about when you are living in abject poverty, burning dung for fuel.
Global warming.
That's not something that's on the top one million of your issues.
But for the very rich among us, these are the top issues.
The top issues are great systems.
How can we impact great systems of climate by also taking control of the great systems of economics?
A civilization whose primary worry is whether there is going to be global warming over the course of the next hundred years that causes some people to move from their homes and causes, if the estimates are correct and the economy continues to grow as it has done for the past century and a half, It will cause a few thousand deaths over the course of a century.
This is according to the estimates from Bjorn Lomborg over at the Copenhagen Institute.
The notion that hundreds of thousands or millions of people are going to die from global warming is just based on the fact that human beings adapt to their environment and adapt to the climate.
That's not true.
The notion that you're going to sink the world economy on that basis, that is a rich people thing.
And there's a reason that this is a rich people conference.
Everybody's taking private jets to these climate change conferences because if you don't live in a rich country, this is not a major concern to you.
Your first concern is, how do I make sure that my kids live through the next year?
Not, what is the climate going to be like in a hundred years?
And so if we, who are looking long-term, wish to protect the human species from whatever vacillations and vicissitudes of climate fall upon us, we ought to be looking at things like building seawalls, maybe geoengineering, Maybe painting the roads white.
There are things that we can do that are designed to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Human beings are really good at adaptation.
We really, really suck at completely changing entire systems of how we live in order to prevent long-off costs that we still don't know will materialize in the way that the UN keeps saying they will materialize.
But this means that every climate summit is hailed by our brilliant media as the turning point for civilization.
According to CBS News, President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, but Senate Democrats are still fighting over new climate legislation that would give Mr. Biden something to brag about as the U.S.
attempts to reassert itself as a leader at next week's Global Climate Summit.
Let me just tell you something.
I don't care whether the European CS is a leader.
We are the leaders and they're just going to have to deal with it.
And the fact is that Europe is a dying continent.
It's been a dying continent for quite a long time.
If we wish to follow Europe down the primrose path, we can.
But to pretend that we are subject to the moral whim of a continent responsible for two world wars, responsible not only for those world wars, but for a lack of growth, a spineless embrace of a of an innervated future.
What makes us subject to the Europeans?
They've been hanging on our coattails for well over a century at this point.
Why exactly would I care what the French think about our climate policy?
Considering, again, that the United States is actually reducing its climate emissions and, by the way, is the basis for all global growth in the economy.
Why would that make a difference to me?
There's a great book out right now by David Harsanyi.
It's called Eurotrash.
All about the problems in the European Union.
There's a whole group of people in the United States who sort of love Europe, but refuse to see any of the downsides of Europe.
Like, for example, the fact that a huge percentage of their population sits home and gets paid by the government to do nothing.
Like, for example, the fact that they have no growth rates.
Like, for example, as we'll get to, the fact that there are no children in Europe.
So why are we taking our cues from Europe, exactly?
But I love the assumptions in the media.
We have to have Joe Biden, a decrepit old man, wander over to Europe in order to provide a moral example to the Europeans.
Reassert ourselves as a leader.
Come on.
The countries that adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, now nearly every country in the world except Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, are to meet every five years to update their ambitions.
The summit was delayed last year because of the pandemic.
I love that they update their ambitions.
Because remember, the Paris Accords were not binding.
The Paris Accords said, we are going to try to do X in five years.
We're going to try to lower our emissions by this percentage in 10 years.
Okay, so people get together and they make a pinky swear.
They're going to lower their emissions.
And most of the time, they don't hit any of those targets, but they all feel real good about themselves.
And then the media talk about how we have finally achieved world peace.
This year, the goal is to prove that countries take the priorities seriously and are working on issues such as methane emission reduction, enacting a global carbon market and weaning countries off coal production.
The action of the U.S.
delegation are under a microscope.
Oh, really?
What are they going to do about it?
Seriously, America is historically the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases and still the world's leading producer of fossil fuels.
However, Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats are deadlocked trying to negotiate a deal that would invest hundreds of billions in climate policies.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has opposed the price of the package, a clean electricity performance program, and a carbon tax.
Data show that without those policies, the U.S.
will fail to meet their goal of lower emissions, and therefore, global temperatures.
By the way, the United States could go to zero emissions tomorrow.
The change in the climate trajectory would be a fraction of a degree Celsius over the course of the next century.
Saying just about the United States, China is by far the world's leading emitter.
India is emitting like crazy.
Developing countries emit as they develop.
Before the Paris Agreement, the global economy was on track to, by the year 2100, warm the planet at least 3.7 degrees Celsius above 1900's pre-industrial levels.
Hey, not today.
1900, right?
Today, existing policies will lead to a 2.9 degree increase, and announced targets would lessen the increase to 2.4 degrees.
Still hotter than the Paris Agreement's objective of less than two degrees warmer.
But William Nordhaus, Nobel Prize winning economist, he says, why are we even aiming for 1.5 degrees Celsius change?
The costs of that, economically speaking, are actually higher than if we let that amount of change happen.
The agreement has three main pillars that will be in focus at the summit.
So-called nationally determined contributions are the targets countries set for lowering emissions.
The goals are not legally binding.
A second pillar is international climate financing.
Mr. Biden announced in April he would double U.S.
aid sent to help developing countries to help them adapt to a green economy and avoid climate-related devastation.
Mr. Biden doubled that commitment again last month, a promise of $11.4 billion in need of congressional approval.
By the way, those countries are saying, no, no, we don't need $11.4 billion.
We need like $70 billion a year.
We need like trillions of dollars, which of course is true.
The third pillar is born by climate envoy John Kerry.
Kerry's been traveling the world for the past 10 months, meeting with world leaders on the climate crisis, vocalizing America's commitment to the issue, pressuring others to do the same.
Domestically, Kerry has worked with the private sector to get corporations to agree to lowering their emissions, which could bolster America's reputation.
Ooh, our reputation.
Man, what will the Germans who are shipping in Russian oil at this very moment?
Man, if we don't have the moral approval of the Germans, I don't know what I'll do.
I feel like Doc Holliday in Tombstone.
Ike, if I thought you weren't my friend.
I don't know what I... Who cares?
Seriously, who cares what the Europeans think?
Who cares?
It's so irritating.
So, the UN is now also attempting to push... So the UN, which can't control anything of note around the world, the UN is a garbage organization filled with garbage countries, and the UN Which cannot stop full-scale atrocities happening across the globe, can't stop Chinese enslavement of the Uyghurs, can't stop massacres in Myanmar, can't stop anything.
But they can preach to us about climate change.
They can do so using a cartoon dinosaur.
Not Barney, which would at least be amusing.
No, they actually created a computer-generated dinosaur to lecture us about climate change.
Now, call me crazy, but I don't take my climate change advice from a cartoon extinct species.
I just don't.
And I certainly don't take my advice from something far worse, the United Nations, which is the most eyesleeve international politics, a hive of scum and villainy.
Nonetheless, here is the UN pushing the climate change agenda.
Listen up, people.
You're headed for a climate disaster.
And yet every year, governments spend hundreds of billions of public funds on fossil fuel subsidies.
Imagine if we had spent hundreds of billions per year subsidizing giant meteors.
That's what you're doing right now!
Around the world, people are living in poverty.
Don't you think helping them would make more sense than, I don't know, paying for the demise of your entire species?
Okay, I love the false binary here drawn by the UN.
Like, what idiot produced this?
The people living in poverty, you think they care deeply about the climate change policies?
Is this like their number one... As I point out, the great escape from poverty is generally based on carbon-based fuels.
And by the way, the notion that if you send foreign aid to impoverished countries, that the usual dictators and thugs who run impoverished countries, because there's a high correlation between horrible governance and impoverishment, that those people just take that foreign aid and they hand it out to the people.
Ugh, the UN.
But we need their moral imprimatur.
And we also need the moral imprimatur of the children, of course.
This is very important.
So we have climate activists who are currently sitting outside the White House starving themselves.
They are on a hunger strike.
If you can't see this, there's a bunch of people that are now sitting in wheelchairs because they've so weakened themselves in striking against the sun.
And they're holding signs that say things like, Hunger-striking for a good job.
Well, if you're hunger-striking for a good job, you could, you know, like, eat and then go get one, considering there are 10 million open jobs.
This one says, hunger-striking for my future children.
We'll get to that in a second, about how we are a civilization that is dying, because we 100% are.
Then one person has a sign that says, hunger-striking for my community.
I feel like you could do better things than not eating for your community.
Anyway, here is one of these activists talking about this.
When there's a big flood, when that finally comes, or the big hurricane, or the catastrophe that we can't totally see coming yet.
Like, where is our family going to meet up?
I don't ever want to have conversations like that.
Okay, and then it says, one activist was hospitalized because of the strike.
They are all now using wheelchairs to keep steady.
That future, where we don't ever have to have a family meeting place, where I can just live.
I can be with my future wife and my kids and have that garden.
That means everything to me.
And I'm willing to do everything for it to be real.
I have a question.
Who's preventing you from having a house and a life or anything remotely like that?
So, Jen Psaki then paid tribute to this because this administration has yet to find a radical activist that it won't support.
I have a question.
As a society, what are our priorities?
the energy of young people who are out there advocating for what they believe in.
And the changes that he agrees should be made to how society functions, to long overdue investments in our climate.
Okay, so I have a question.
As a society, what are our priorities?
Really, what are our priorities?
Because what I'm finding from this administration and from a huge percentage of the American population is that our priorities don't line up with reality.
They spit directly in the face of reality, actually.
The realities of climate change are pretty obvious.
The climate is changing.
A large part of that is human-caused.
I'm fully willing to accept the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
All of that can be said, and still, the mitigation and adaptation measures that they are recommending can be fully idiotic in every respect.
Hey, the exaggerations by the media can be fully idiotic in every respect.
But again, the reason this is a top priority for people is because it distracts them from the underlying realities, which are that you need resources in order to maintain life on this planet.
You need to actually allow civilizations to grow.
And human adaptation is a better strategy than undermining the key institutions of the society.
But perhaps that's the point.
Perhaps the point is the undermining of the key institutions of our society.
I can think of no other reason for why we seem to be pursuing, as a civilization, all these policies at once.
Policies that undermine basic institutions and the free market economy, which has produced Unprecedented prosperity in human history.
If you look at the growth of per capita GDP on planet Earth up till about 1800, it's essentially kind of flat.
For thousands of years.
And maybe it grows a little bit.
It kind of goes, it's got, it's completely flat for hundreds of thousands of years.
Then it starts to increase a little bit.
And then you hit about 1800 and suddenly it goes exponential.
That is because of free markets.
It's because of trade.
It's because of technology and innovation.
It's because of risk taking.
And now we're seeking to undermine all of those things in the name of what?
Our inability to adapt to a climate that we've been adapting to for literally the entirety of the human species?
It's the institution of free markets has to go.
And of course, the institutions of parenting have to go.
That's very important.
Because school boards need to control your kids.
And of course, institutions that are most basic to humanity.
Things like biological sex.
Those have to go too.
All the institutions associated with biological sex have to go.
We'll get to that in a second because the State Department has some very, very stringent priorities.
The priorities are abandoning women to the Taliban in Afghanistan and making sure that if you're a non-gender If you're a gender non-binary person, you can put an X on your passport.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay.
We'll get to the suicidal nature of our civilization in just one second.
You know, some lighthearted stuff.
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Okay, so the priorities of this government are very, very screwed up.
And the priorities of our civilization are very screwed up.
So we're prioritizing cracking down on parents at school boards.
We are prioritizing climate change.
Meanwhile, the GDP growth in the United States in the third quarter was a 2% annualized growth.
That was just reported this morning.
That's a garbage rate of growth.
It is a garbage rate of growth.
And it is created by bad government policy, and that's a choice.
It is a choice whether to enervate the American public.
I've been saying for months at this point that basically the Biden administration is offering the American public a choice.
Do you wish to be a risk-seeking, adventurous people, or do you wish to climb in the bathtub with a box of Cheetos and just die?
Because that seems to be the path our civilization is interested in taking.
When you concern yourself, not only with silliness, but with fundamentally undermining the keys to growth.
In order to grow in reality, you actually have to recognize that reality exists and then work within its confines.
You have to work with the tools God gave you.
One of those tools, by the way, in terms of like, let's take the most baseline level.
In order for you to grow as a society, you have to have babies.
This seems pretty obvious.
There have to be enough kids in the next generation.
Especially if you have social welfare programs, right?
You have to have kids who are going to support grandpa and grandma.
Somebody's got to pay the bill.
Especially when you're taking out trillions of dollars in debt.
Well, we are currently, in this country, not doing that.
We are not having babies.
No one in the West is having babies, by the way.
That's not unique to the United States.
Right now, the United States has a fertility rate of about 1.7 kids per family.
That is not replacement rates.
That means the population of the United States declines unless you bring in immigrants, which is what the United States has been doing for quite a while.
And again, not rare.
Okay, the fact is that if you look at the fertility rates across a wide variety of Western countries, there's literally not a Western country, a European country outside of Georgia, like the country of Georgia, that has fertility rates above 2.
The only other quote-unquote Western country, and it's not quite Western because it's in the Middle East, Israel has fertility rates above 2.
Every other Western country, European country, America, all of them have fertility rates below 2, which means they are not reproducing at replacement rates.
When you don't reproduce, it is very difficult to see how your civilization has a future.
Just materially speaking, it's very difficult to see how that's the case.
France has a fertility rate of 1.86.
Iceland 1.74, Sweden 1.71, Ireland 1.7, Denmark 1.7.
When you get to the bottom of the list, you're looking at Italy, which has a replacement rate of 1.27.
Fertility rate of 1.27.
That means that their population is going to halve over the course of the next couple of generations.
It's true for Greece.
It's true for Finland.
It's like every country in the West is now not reproducing.
Instead, we are focused on how do we basically live out our last days as a civilization in comfort.
And one of the ways that we live out our days as a civilization in comfort is by lying to ourselves about fulfillment being found not in building.
But in being.
Right?
Fulfillment is not found in having a mission or promulgating good values.
Fulfillment is found in navel-gazing.
Which is why the State Department has now decided it's very important that we issue the first third gender passport for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming Americans.
Now, you might think to yourself, wait a second.
It is one thing for you to write on a college essay that you are non-gender conforming or that you are non-gender binary or some nonsense.
It's one thing to write that in your little Facebook profile.
It's another thing for a governmental document, which is specifically designated in order to help determine who you are, to have you put that, because that's a subjective metric, right?
It's like putting on your passport that you're a Bon Jovi fan.
There's no way to tell whether that's true or not, nor is it relevant.
Your interior feelings have no relevance to the question of how the government ought to identify you for purposes of knowing who the hell's in the country.
But the State Department now feels it's very important for you to look at your passport and feel that your passport reflects your innermost feelings.
We're a society that now treasures the inner subjectivity of feelings over the identification within reality.
According to ABC News, four months after announcing it would allow a third gender option for U.S.
citizens on their passports, the State Department said Wednesday it has issued one.
It's the first of its kind, denoted with an X for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming U.S.
citizens.
The recipient is Colorado resident Dana Zhizhim.
The reason I pronounce it that way is because the last name is spelled ZZYYM.
I have doubts that this is the original last name of this person.
Associate Director of the Intersex Campaign for Equality and a client of Lambda Legal.
I almost burst into tears when I opened the envelope, pulled out my new passport, and saw the X stamped boldly under sex.
I'm also ecstatic that other intersex and non-binary U.S.
citizens will soon be able to apply for passports with the correct gender marker.
It took six years.
But to have an accurate passport, one that doesn't force me to identify as male or female, but recognizes I am neither, is liberating, Zhijun said in a statement.
The agency is still preparing to make the option widely available for passports and other documents, such as the Consular Report of Birth Abroad.
So it's not just for Americans, by the way.
It's people who are green card holders, who hold a U.S.
passport, pretty much anybody trying to get in the country.
I want to reiterate on the occasion of this passport issuance that the State Department's commitment to promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people, including LGBTQI persons, said State Department Spokesperson Ned Price in a statement.
Just, oh, the heroism.
The heroism.
Right?
We're just going to ignore the objective reality or what ID is supposed to do so that you feel better about yourself.
The State Department, meanwhile, is saying that they are pursuing an end to gender-based discrimination with policies like this.
I mean, not gender-based discrimination in Afghanistan, where women are literally forced into bags and then into the basement, but gender discrimination, like, you know, for example, being asked to say whether you are biologically male or female on a passport.
President Biden and Secretary Blinken have made clear it is the policy of the United States to pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of gender, of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.
The Department of State is committed to promoting the freedom, the dignity, and equality of all persons, including, of course, intersex persons.
Mm.
So, very important stuff.
Now, is this, again, is this the mark of a civilization that is on the decline or the mark of a civilization that is on the mend and ready to grow?
And if you're worried about people getting married, having babies, a basic, basic thing that is necessary is understanding that men and women exist.
That sexual dichotomy exists in mammals.
If you refuse to even acknowledge this, it makes it a lot more difficult to convince people that it's important to get together and have kids in stable families.
But we as a civilization have decided to abandon that on behalf of higherfalutin ideals like can we make sure that no carbon ever enters the atmosphere or at least pretend to?
We have to make sure that gender fluidity is prized above the survival of civilization.
These are things that matter.
And to pretend that they're not in conflict is very silly.
A civilization that embraces fiction about the nature of biological sex is a civilization that is doomed to move away from reality.
A civilization that rejects truth on behalf of sensitivity is a civilization that cannot exist for very long in the real world.
Reality always has its revenge.
It'd take just one indicator.
Really interesting piece by Susie Weiss over at Barry Weiss's Substack.
Susie is Barry's sister.
It's called First Comes Love, Then Comes Sterilization.
Rachel Diamond looks like most of the moms at the Park Slope Cafe where we meet.
She's wearing a green t-shirt under a black corduroy jumper, sensible shoes, carries a smart leather bag.
She sips a $4 iced chai, except the 31-year-old isn't a mom.
And she never will be.
You know, Diamond says cheerily, I never expected to be the poster child of sterilization.
On the Aspiring Actress TikTok, one finds short funny videos about Diamond's job working the register at a cafe near Union Square, and updates on her rescue pitbull, Rue, who has anemia.
Mixed in are clips extolling her child-free life.
They have titles like Sterilization Attempt No.
3 and Being Child-Free, We Do Know What We're Missing.
It's been five months since she had her fallopian tubes cut, not tied, and she has 64,000 followers.
Growing up near Hershey, Pennsylvania, Diamond always assumed she'd have a family of her own.
Then came college at Arcadia University, her political awakening away from her conservative roots and toward progressivism, and a therapist, who she then found online a few months after graduation, who made her realize that being spanked as a child was deeply traumatic, and that it made her fear authority figures like her father.
She decided she never wanted to be one herself.
Never, ever, ever.
Looking back, I never pretended my American Girl dolls were children.
They were always my sister, she said.
There were little things showing that I wasn't preparing myself for motherhood.
I think for me, it's as innate as saying I've always wanted to be a mom.
Diamond is hardly an outlier, says Susie Weiss.
Americans are making fewer babies than we've made since we started keeping track in the 1930s.
Some women, like Diamond, are not just putting off pregnancy, they're eliminating the possibility of it altogether.
Last year, the number of deaths exceeded that of births in 25 states, up from five the year before.
The marriage rate is at an all-time low, 6.5 marriages per 1,000 people.
Millennials are the first generation where a majority are unmarried, about 56%.
They're also more likely to live with their parents than previous generations were in their 20s and 30s.
They also aren't having sex.
The number of young men ages 18 to 30 who admit they've had no sex in the past year tripled between 2008 and 2018.
Cities like New York, where secular young Americans flock to build their lives, are increasingly childless.
In San Francisco, there are more dogs than children.
Any of this speak of a civilization in growth mode?
It used to be, says Susie Weiss, that people wanted to make babies.
Women, especially.
But also men.
That was a healthy young person's default position.
Our existence depended on it.
We wanted to do other things, of course.
The great post-feminist challenge was how to have it all.
But for an increasing number, the question now isn't how to have it all.
It's why do it at all?
This psychological reversal didn't just happen.
It took place inside the hurricane of spiritual, cultural, environmental forces swirling around us.
But the message from this young cohort is clear.
Life is exhausting enough, and the world is broken and burning.
Who would want to bring new innocent life into a criminally unequal society situated on a planet with catastrophically rising sea levels?
According to a new poll, 39% of Gen Zers are hesitant to procreate for fear of the climate apocalypse.
Which is just insane, guys.
I'm sorry, you're crazy.
A nationally representative study of adults in Michigan found over a quarter of adults are child-free by choice.
So basically we have decided that all the hallmarks of being an adult, all the hallmarks of adjusting to reality and building a civilization, have been thrown over in favor of a false pursuit of gender identity and hedonism.
That's essentially the trade.
The trade is you get to have a good time in the moment and feel morally self-righteous as your civilization dies.
By the way, there are other civilizations out there.
So you can pretend that our civilization dying is somehow a good thing because of all of our historic excesses and all of the problems with our civilization.
Just understand, there are other people out there who are waiting to take over and they are far, far worse than our civilization in virtually every way.
But our civilization is now socially suicidal and this has massive consequences for the future.
It means that the economy slows, for example.
It means there's no one there to pay the bills.
It means that on foreign policy, more people suffer, broadly speaking.
It means that growth rates globally come to an end.
It means that all the nice things that you think are natural to life, start to collapse.
Because when institutions that created those things collapse, so do the things.
Virtually every westernized, every western country is now experiencing massive drops in births.
It's happening pretty much everywhere, according to Pew Research.
In Italy, Japan, France, Belgium, they're among the nations that have reported sudden drops in births about nine months after the start of the pandemic, compared with the previous year.
Some worry that a baby bust will create societal age imbalances and strain healthcare and retirement systems, while also eventually stripping the economy of young workers who tend to drive innovation and growth.
Meanwhile, you can tell, by the way, that these have been dying civilizations for a while, considering how many kids are now being born out of wedlock.
One of the fundamental institutions of society is marriage.
Why?
Because it civilizes men.
Marriage was designed to civilize men.
It was designed to allow women to grow up in intact, to allow children to grow up in intact homes and therefore have healthy lives and then become productive members of civilization themselves.
Marriage was a civilizing institution.
We dumped it.
We decided that personal self-fulfillment was much more important than giving a kid an actual life with two parents who care about them.
Yes, opposite sexes, because a child does need a mother and a child does need a father.
Right now, the share of live births outside marriage in the United States, it's 70% in the black community.
It's 40% in the white community.
It's true abroad.
In France, 60.4% of kids are born outside marriage.
This is as of 2018.
In Sweden, it's 54.5%.
In Denmark, it's 54%.
If you think that has no relationship with the number of people who are on social assistance, you're out of your mind.
If you think this is a healthy way for society to grow, you're crazy, but maybe this is a society with a death wish.
Maybe this is a society that has decided to sacrifice truth, logic, and decency in favor of the notion that we are bad, and we deserve to go this way.
After all, we are a scourge on the earth.
I think there is a strong reason why, when you look at the actual reproduction rates in the United States, they are heavily associated with religion.
They are striated by religion.
Right now, the only people reproducing above replacement rates in the United States are people who are religious.
Period.
End of story.
I mean, I'm looking at the rates right now.
The fertility rates in the United States by religion.
Among Catholics, 2.3.
Among Mormons, 3.4.
These are above replacement rates.
Among Jews, 2.0.
And among Orthodox Jews, like 4.
Among Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, it's 2.3.
And then among Atheists, 1.6.
Agnostics, 1.3.
As a society becomes more secular, as a society decides that the future doesn't matter, and starts to undermine its own institutions, and starts to embrace fictional nonsense, on behalf of the subjective feelings of a few, the society begins to crumble.
It also leads to absurdities like this story from BBC News.
Quote, I've had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler, says 24-year-old Jenny.
They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler.
That was so bizarrely violent just because I won't have sex with trans women.
Jenny is a lesbian woman.
She says she is only attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas.
She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.
Jenny doesn't think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees.
She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert, and a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
Jenny, who lives in London, says there's a common argument they try and use that goes, what if you met a woman in a bar and she's really beautiful, and you got on really well, and you went home and you discovered she had a penis?
Would you just not be interested?
Yes, because if someone seems sexually attractive at first, you can go off them.
I just don't possess the capacity to be sexually attracted to people who are biologically male, regardless of how they identify.
According to Carolyn at Lowbridge, over at BBC News, I became aware of this particular issue after I wrote an article about sex, lies, and legal consent.
Several people got in touch with me to say there was a huge problem for lesbians who are being pressured to accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ.
I knew this would be a hugely divisive subject, but I wanted to find out how widespread the issue was.
Ultimately, it has been difficult to determine the true scale of the problem because there's been little research on the topic.
Only one survey, to my knowledge, however, those effective have told me the pressure comes from a minority of trans women as well as activists who are not necessarily trans themselves.
So apparently, this is now a major issue among lesbians, is that because of the stupidity of suggesting gender fluidity, lesbians are being told that they must have sex with biological men.
Because if they don't have sex with biological men, this means that they are apparently straight, because some biological men are women.
And the illogic has no bounds.
There are no limits to it.
None.
And so, as a civilization, would we like to die?
Or are we as a civilization going to embrace basic truths that undergird institutions that allow for growth?
Those are the choices before us.
It's pretty obvious there's a whole group of people in politics who are opting for the former rather than the latter.
That they are opting for a civilization in decline.
Because at least we'll have a good time on our way out.
Because at least we will feel justified morally in overturning the structural oppressions of reality.
Because reality is full of structural oppressions.
Reality is full of inequality.
Reality is full of difficulties.
So if we just ignore those difficulties, if we restructure society around the idea that we can get rid entirely of reality, Then we can put off the nightmares.
We can put off having to adjust to civilization.
And then, you know, later if the civilization falls apart, you know, I'm pretty sure, well, you know, we did our best.
At least we did the moral thing.
At least we did the moral thing.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
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