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Dec. 15, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:36
For Democrats, It’s January 6 Or Bust | Ep. 1396
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The White House announces that Joe Biden will commemorate January 6th, as the Congressional Commission focuses on Mark Meadows' text messages, the Biden White House blames meat companies for rising prices, and Omicron panic continues.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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We will get to all the news momentarily.
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Alrighty, so Democrats have basically decided that since they have nothing else they're going to run on January 6th.
This was perfectly obvious from nearly the beginning of the year.
January 6th has been their talking point since January 6th.
Now, a few notes.
January 6th was horrific.
It was horrific.
It followed on two months of Donald Trump saying things that were not true about election fraud and that have now been baked into a certain part of the Republican cake.
This talk that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, it wasn't.
Donald Trump lost the suburbs because Donald Trump refused to Run anything remotely like a rational campaign.
Instead, he decided that he was going to tweet his way out of the presidency.
There was no rationale for it.
The fact is that Donald Trump's actual policy was quite good.
And maybe he will return on the strength of those policies.
He will not return on the strength of the tweeting.
So between November 4th and January 6th, Donald Trump said a lot of things that were overtly untrue.
about Election 2020.
I was not shy about this at the time.
Then, on January 6th, a lot of people who went to a rally in Washington, D.C.
that was supposed to be about the quote-unquote stolen election.
Some of those people, a small percentage of those people, I know the media wants to make it out like it was everybody, it wasn't, a small percentage of those people decided that they were going to try to break into the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
And the police presence was minimal.
There were more officers who were protecting me at Berkeley A few years back.
Then we're protecting, you know, the Capitol building during the certification of an election, which is kind of crazy.
They broke into the building.
Some people were hurt.
Only one person was killed, Ashley Babbitt, killed by Capitol police.
And then the building was cleared and the Republicans certified the election.
Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump's own vice president, certified the election.
Senator Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate majority leader at the time, certified the election.
Everything that went down at the Capitol building that day was really bad.
It created some horrific imagery.
These were acts of criminality, if you're talking about walking into the Capitol building and doing violence to police officers, obviously, and people who commit acts of criminality, no matter the political side, should go to jail.
This became the rallying point for Democrats because it was their response to the fact that they had decided to allow violence to overtake the country throughout all of 2020.
It was their response to their own policy failures.
Not January 6th itself.
Their reaction to January 6th.
Because their reaction to January 6th was, democracy is in true danger.
This was a coup attempt.
It was an actual insurrection.
Now here's the thing.
In order for it to be a coup or an actual insurrection, you require institutional support.
There was no institutional support.
And here's part of the problem for the Democrats.
They want to make two simultaneous arguments.
Argument number one, is that Donald Trump is solely responsible for what happened on January 6th.
And argument number two is that the entire Republican and conservative infrastructure is responsible for what happened on January 6th.
And the truth is neither of those.
Donald Trump is responsible for his bad commentary and the lies that he told in the run-up to January 6th.
He's responsible for that.
He is not responsible for people breaking into the Capitol building.
He literally said in the middle of his speech that he wanted people to march over and then peacefully protest what was happening at the Capitol building.
And you can say people then took that too far.
People decided that they were going to move into the arena of violence.
But I'm very wary on all political sides of trying to pin violence on people who don't actively call for the violence.
Donald Trump gets blamed for heightening the rhetoric.
He gets blamed for heightening the temperature.
He gets blamed for saying things that are not true.
That does not mean that he's responsible for the violence that followed at the Capitol building.
And again, this is my bipartisan opinion.
I felt the same way about Barack Obama when a when a Dallas Black Lives Matter member movement decided to murder six police officers.
Barack Obama's rhetoric on the police had been quite terrible.
His rhetoric on race had been quite terrible.
He was not responsible for that.
Bernie Sanders was not responsible for the congressional baseball shooter.
He said some terrible, terrible things about Republicans.
He said terrible things about the American healthcare system.
He's not responsible for a person misusing those words as a rationale for trying to murder people.
And so I'm very consistent in this particular standard.
So it was not all about Donald Trump.
Some of the stuff that Donald Trump said was bad, but this is not the same thing.
We have to make these logical distinctions because otherwise we end up in a place where essentially everybody is responsible for everything everybody else does.
And there is no expectation that human beings are going to act in a rational, nonviolent way.
Okay, so that's problem with the argument number one.
Problem number two is that the Democrats have suggested, literally since the day this happened, that the entire Republican Party, the entire conservative infrastructure, stood behind January 6th and celebrated it.
And it's not true.
CNN has been saying for a long time that it was Fox News that created January 6th and cheered January 6th and made excuses for January 6th.
Well, there's one problem.
We now have the text from members of the Fox News coterie, from people like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, allies of the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
We have texts from them to Mark Meadows, who's the chief of staff, to Donald Trump.
Now the media have taken this as, again, proving an argument that they really have not made.
The argument that they are making, the big one, is that the entire conservative infrastructure is complicit in January 6th.
That's the big argument.
Then there's the smaller argument, which is that members of the media have miscovered January 6th, or downplayed January 6th, or attempted to suggest that January 6th was a false flag operation.
That's a separate critique, and I think there is sometimes some accuracy to that critique, frankly.
I think the attempt to turn January 6th into some sort of heroic martyr's play is silly.
I think the attempt to turn January 6th, and by the way, morally counterproductive.
I think the attempt to suggest that January 6th Was all an FBI setup is untrue or that it was all just Antifa riling people up?
I don't think that's true.
The evidence for that is scanty, if present at all.
The evidence on the other side that the left immediately took January 6 swung into action and attempt to censor everybody.
That part's true, but that is not.
To suggest that January 6 was not an activity predominantly and I believe universally driven by people who thought they were supporting Donald Trump at the time.
But that's a separate critique from the bigger critique and the one that they want to push for 2022.
The one they want to push for 2022 is that January 6 is a natural outgrowth of Republican and conservative governance.
That is what they are attempting to push.
And the problem is the case they are currently making in the January 6th committee is precisely the opposite, which is that conservatives, Republicans generally, even the most pro-Trump supporters were not in favor of January 6th and didn't like it.
Again, you can make the argument that people are not casting enough stones at Donald Trump for his rhetoric and for his actions during that day, and not immediately deploying the Capitol Police or the National Guard.
That's a separate argument.
But the big argument that they need for 2022 is not that, because Donald Trump ain't on the ballot in 2022.
The argument they need is that the entire Republican Party and conservative infrastructure stands behind the actual activity of January 6th, and they can't prove that case, not from the text messages that have been revealed.
Yesterday, Liz Cheney announced these text messages.
They got a hold of Mark Meadows' text messages on his cell phone, and those text messages showed a bunch of members of the Republican Congress encouraging Trump to step in and do something, and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham doing the same.
Which undercuts the entire notion that the Republican Party was complicit in January 6th, or that the conservative commentariat was complicit in the activity of January 6th.
Again, that is not to alleviate responsibility for those who promulgated falsehoods about the stolen election narrative of 2020.
And again, you can believe that the election was not stolen and still have serious questions about election security, election procedures, the illegality of, for example, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court radically changing election law.
All those things can coexist.
But that is not the mainline argument.
The mainline argument of Democrats is that Republicans do not deserve to be elected to public office because they are inherently dangerous and their rule will lead to the overthrow of democracy.
Well, what do you make, then, of the fact that every major conservative was not only condemning January 6th in real time, but trying to urge the president to step in and do something about it at the time?
Which doesn't suggest complicity in January 6th, does it?
Indeed.
According to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately.
They texted Mr. Meadows, and he has turned over those texts.
Quote, Mark, the President needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home.
This is hurting all of us.
He is destroying his legacy, Laura Ingram wrote.
Please get him on TV.
Destroying everything you have accomplished, Brian Kilmeade texted.
Quote, can he make a statement?
Ask people to leave the Capitol, Sean Hannity urged.
As the violence continued, one of the president's sons texted Mr. Meadows, quote, he's got to condemn this **** ASAP.
OK, so that is Representative Liz Cheney, who is one of the sole Republicans on this committee.
And she voted for Trump's impeachment over this.
You know, here's the thing.
You can tell that the media understand that what happened yesterday did not prove their case.
It actually undercut their broad scale case.
It has disappeared.
It was leading the news.
As of yesterday morning, it is no longer leading the news at the New York Times.
Instead, they've got some generic piece about Republicans embracing particular bills.
Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post, they're covering Omicron and holding Mark Meadows in contempt, but they're really not paying too much attention.
To exactly what the underlying narrative is.
They've lost the thread a little bit.
And the reason they've lost the thread is, again, because the thread was not true.
The thread that the entire conservative movement was complicit in January 6th, therefore, is to be held blameworthy.
And therefore, 2022 will be a referendum on that.
That is not going to hold.
Not for 2022.
People can see right through that.
But this administration is banking on this narrative.
They're banking on the narrative that Republicans are too dangerous to hold power because they stood by on January 6th or didn't care about January 6th.
And January 6th is the be-all end-all.
There's only one reason why Joe Biden plans to commemorate January 6th.
January 6th did far less damage in terms of capital, in terms of human life, than the widespread riots of June 2020.
Those riots took dozens of lives.
Those riots resulted in billions and billions of dollars in damage.
Five billion dollars in insurable damage, far more in non-insurable damage.
And if you're talking about cataclysmic events in American history, like the actual riots of 2020, I would say have far more outsized impact on the political debate than January 6th.
And that's not to downplay the evils of January 6th, which I never have done and never will do.
But the fact that Democrats are commemorating January 6th as though it was Pearl Harbor or September 11th.
It just demonstrates how much they need the narrative.
This is a matter of political necessity for them at this point.
Here's Jen Psaki announcing that Joe Biden plans to commemorate January 6th.
If honestly all they can run on is January 6th, which boils down to essentially three elements.
Lack of law enforcement at the Capitol, which we're still trying to get to the bottom of.
Donald Trump's actions on that day.
Did Donald Trump not respond to people in the Capitol building and instead let it go on?
And Donald Trump's fibs and untruths leading up to January 6th.
If those are the three things they're relying upon to shift the election 2022, that's going to be very difficult for them.
Because once again, 2022 ain't going to be a bad election 2020.
Donald Trump's activities on January 6th are not going to be the election campaign in 2022.
And the argument about election fraud is also not going to be, really, the main issue of contention in 2022.
Democrats have to hold on to that because they've got nothing else.
Here was Jen Psaki announcing.
What is that commemoration even going to look like?
Joe Biden saying he saved democracy?
Nobody believes that.
Nobody believes, truly, that democracy was an existential danger, unless you're Ian Millhiser or something, and you've got your head so far up your own ass, it's coming out your face again.
Here is Jen Psaki trying to push this anyway.
I don't have anything to report to you at this point in time about our plans.
I expect we will have more as we get closer to the end of the year.
But, you know, the President to the President, January 6th was one of the darkest days in our democracy.
It was a day that our capital, our nation's capital, was under attack.
And I think there's no question you'll see us commemorate that day.
Commemorate that day.
I mean, come on.
Come on.
Well, what are you going to commemorate?
That the Republicans then certified the election and made Joe Biden the President of the United States?
Because that's exactly what happened.
And now the reason that they are misdirecting to January 6th is pretty obvious.
They need January 6th because their governing strategy has been a complete, total, epic failure.
It continues to be an epic failure.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so the reason, of course, that the Democrats are focusing in on January 6th is because they suck.
Not just on a moral level, they stink at actual governing, right?
It is very bad, okay?
Right now, the Biden team is in such a state of disconnect with the American public, it's quite stunning.
So yesterday, for example, Joe Biden announced that Republicans are in for a problem in 2022.
Of course, he announced this in his own inimitable way.
He cannot speak English anymore.
I will admit that it is incredible.
You know, America is a nation of firsts.
We have the first black female vice president.
We've had the first black president already.
And now we have the first president to whom English is a second language.
Here's Joe Biden.
Now we look at 2022.
I want to tell my Republican friends, get ready, Bal.
You're going in for a problem.
And we need to stay unified.
I don't want to say get ready, but we need to stay unified.
Get ready, Bal.
Who's Bal?
Get ready, Bal.
You're going in for a bamboozle Amtrak, Joey, and two gay men kiss on a street corner in Wilmington, Delaware in 1872.
That's the best of America, Joey.
Amtrak McFoodlehead.
So this human, who is losing capacity rapidly, it's weird to watch someone lose capacity.
Have you ever seen somebody slip into unconsciousness as they're being anesthetized?
It's like watching the president, except it's a little bit slower with Joe Biden.
Usually, you know, if they do it to you, it's like, count back from 10.
You're like, 10, 9, orange.
And that's Joe Biden, except we're watching it happen over the course of, like, a few years here.
Get in the, get in the, Joey, and, and the, we're gonna, get ready, blangadoo.
Okay, so, um, meanwhile, the good news is that if you, if you love Joe Biden, you might love even more Nancy Pelosi.
You know, a country is on the downhill slide when all of its leaders are dead.
And all of our leaders are not with us any longer.
Nancy Pelosi is 800 years old.
Joe Biden is now challenging Methuselah for oldest living human.
Here is Nancy Pelosi, though, announcing that Joe Biden is perfect.
Well, it makes sense she thinks he's perfect because she might be clinically blind at this point.
Here we go.
Our country could not be more, could not be better served than with this most experienced, capable hands than yours, President Biden.
He's just perfect.
The timing couldn't be better.
And Madam Vice President, we're inspired by your work for the people as you continue to be an invaluable partner to President Biden.
You're such a valuable partner.
We've deployed you to the border of Saskatchewan.
And also, Joe Biden, he's the perfect man.
Because what I consider to be the perfect man is an actual embalmed man who's been dead for a while, but is well preserved.
Yeah, guys, things are going great.
Meanwhile, the inflation measures, wholesale prices rose 9.6% in November from one year ago.
That is the fastest pace on record.
According to the Producer Price Index, for final demand, it increased 9.6% over the previous 12 months after rising another 0.8% in November.
Economists have been looking for an annual gain of 9.2% according to FactSet.
You know, when economists keep being shocked, maybe they're not great at their job.
Maybe at a certain point they should start, you know, overestimating.
Just go over.
Just be like, okay, you know what, I think it's 9.2%.
I'm going to ballpark this thing and say it's 9.6 just because I'm always wrong.
Excluding food, energy, and trade services prices rose 0.7% for the month.
Putting core PPI at 6.9%, also the largest gain on record.
This is exciting stuff.
The Labor Department's record keeping for the headline number goes back to November 2010.
Those numbers come with headline consumer prices running at their fastest pace in nearly 40 years.
Core inflation is at the hottest in about 30 years.
Well, the good news is that our geniuses, by the way, the prices of like actual commodities at the store are insane.
According to the Daily Wire, Ben Zeisselhoff reporting, Here are the largest consumer spikes between November 2020 and November 2021.
Gas is up 58%.
Used vehicles are up 31%.
Hotels are up 26%.
Meat, poultry, and fish, 13%.
Furniture and bedding, 12%.
New vehicles, 11%.
Domestic services, 10%.
Jewelry, 7%.
Electricity, 6.5%.
Food, 6%.
Apparel, 5%.
and fish 13% furniture and bedding 12% new vehicles 11% domestic services 10% jewelry 7% electricity 6.5% food 6% apparel 5% milk 4.6% fruit and vegetables 4% 45% of Americans according to Gallup report that recent price increases are causing their family some degree of financial hardship 10% 10% say that it is a severe hardship affecting their standard of living.
Milk, 4.6%.
Another 35% say the hardship is moderate.
71% of those living in households making less than $40,000 a year say recent price hikes have caused their family financial hardship.
Of course, because inflation always hits those with lowest income the hardest.
Those are the people who require every dollar.
When your dollar doesn't go as far, then yeah, it's going to hurt you the most.
Meanwhile, the Senate just continues to blow out the spending.
So Congress has now approved a measure that would raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion.
That's House Democrats on Wednesday.
According to the Washington Post, the early morning vote in the House came less than a week after lawmakers struck an unusual bipartisan deal that allowed Democrats to adopt the increase and Republicans to oppose it without putting the country at risk of missing a critical December 15th deadline.
The Senate adopted that proposal on Tuesday.
The bill now goes to President Biden for his signature, and Joe Biden is celebrating this.
He's very, very happy that we have increased the debt ceiling.
He says this is about being responsible.
Because again, the President of the United States is not a sane person any longer.
This bill will reassure all the economic markets at home and around the world that we're going to continue to pay our debts when they're due.
And that's what this is all about.
I swear to God, the guy slurs like somebody has pumped morphine through an IV into him.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
I think we're paying our bills, and that's what this is all about.
We're responsible simangadoos.
Responsible citizen, like a, like a citizen simshanshoos.
That's the key phrase.
Who is it?
Yeah.
Quick note on us responsibly paying our bills.
So, the other day I had a big credit card bill.
I'm a responsible person.
And so what I did is I immediately took out a second credit card to pay for my first credit card.
Just like a responsible person would do.
I love how the notion of government responsibility is.
I already took out this giant, giant loan.
And now I'm going to take out a second mortgage on my home.
I'll take out like a reverse mortgage to pay for my original mortgage or something.
What are you talking about?
This is responsible spending, according to the President of the United States, and they continue to push Build Back Better, which is going to cost $5 trillion.
CNBC, by the way, says there's no sign that the price increases are abating.
Here is CNBC yesterday.
It's not just the final demand, it's that you still have inflationary pressures in the pipeline here.
Intermediate goods, unprocessed goods, so there's no sign that the pipeline of price increases is easing.
So, yes, that is obviously true.
The good news is that this administration has a ready explanation for why prices are raging out of control.
And no, it's not their own crappy monetary policy.
No, it's not their own bad COVID regulations.
No, it's not their lockdown ideas or the supply chain shortages that they have helped foment.
It's none of those things.
It turns out it's greed!
Oh, you see, when the prices go up, it's greed.
So when your meat costs more at the market, it's because the people who slaughter the cows suddenly got greedy.
Like a year ago, they weren't greedy.
They were real altruistic then when the prices were super low.
Prices are just a reflection of greed.
Okay, this particular view of economics is so benighted and bewilderingly stupid as to boggle the mind.
Prices are not a reflection of people's greed.
Greed is a constant in human nature.
In fact, self-interest is a constant in human nature.
And self-interest can only be served by providing a product at a price people are willing to pay.
If it were just about greed, then meat producers could be charging $1 million a pound.
Because after all, they're greedy for lots of money, right?
But if the idea is that meat producers are randomly raising their prices out of greed, not reflecting underlying market conditions like labor shortages and supply chain bottlenecks, and the inflationary economy created by this administration, You're out of your mind.
And greed alone cannot explain price increases, because again, it is a constant in human nature.
But here's Gensaki trying to— Again, the real reason meat prices are going up is because of this administration's garbage policies.
But here's Gensaki saying that it's really because of greed.
It's greed!
It's greed.
The President, the Secretary of Agriculture have both spoken to what we've seen as the greed of meat conglomerates.
That is an area where people go to the grocery store and they're trying to buy a pound of meat, two pounds of meat, ten pounds of meat.
The prices are higher.
That is in his view and the view of our Secretary of Agriculture because of, you could call it corporate greed, sure.
You could call it jacking up prices during a pandemic.
It was greed.
It's price gouging.
Now, even price gouging the way the government usually defines it is not price gouging.
Usually price gouging means that a gas station is running out of gas, and so they have to price the gas so as to ensure that people still get gas.
When you keep the price low, it artificially stimulates demand.
That is what happens with price and supply curves.
Okay, but again, the Democrats always have a ready explanation for why things are going bad.
And it's because people are greedy.
They did this with Obamacare too, right?
You'd see companies that would increase their prices to compensate for the fact that they now had to pay for Obamacare.
And then they would put that on their bills.
And you remember the Obama administration in the media being like, how dare they?
That just demonstrates how greedy they are.
No, it demonstrates that when you artificially boost the prices of things, people have to boost the prices that they charge to the downline consumer.
There's a weird pattern, I've noticed, that crops up when it comes to the understanding of price in the democratic mindset.
That weird coincidence is that every major industry that is private is bad, but every policy Democrats push is somehow altruistic and good.
So, for example, it's not just meat consumers.
I mean, it's not just meat producers.
It is also the oil companies.
Remember when oil spiked?
Jen Psaki, this is just a couple of weeks ago, Jen Psaki suggested that the reason that the oil prices were spiking was not because of their crappy policy.
It was because of the oil executives and their greed, too.
It's always greed when it's people that the administration doesn't like.
The price at the pump usually moves alongside the price of refined gas.
But recently, as you noted, there's been a split where the price of refined gas is going down, but prices at the pump are going up.
That's exactly why the president sent the letter to the FTC last week, because that's not what we should see as the trend.
There shouldn't be price gouging across the country.
You shouldn't have oil CEOs bragging out there about the profits that they benefit from when prices are high at the gas pump.
Okay, so it's all about the greed of the oil executives.
However, when it comes to labor and the price of labor, right, which is a commodity, labor is a commodity, and the wages are going up, which means that you're going to drive prices up as well.
But when the price of labor goes up, that is not because of the greed of people who are attempting to get back in the labor market, of course.
Then it's still the greed of employers.
It's still the people who hire.
It's because those stupid employers are so greedy that they won't hire people at wages that people don't actually want to take.
And so the wages are going up.
In other words, the people who create, who demand a particular price for their goods and services are bad, except if they're good.
Here's Jen Psaki explaining.
We know we've seen labor shortages in some industries.
In some industries, that's because they need to have a more competitive package to offer to workers.
It's a worker's market right now.
We know that.
People are looking for more dependable benefits.
They're looking for wages that are higher.
And that's something that is incumbent on a lot of industries to meet the moment on.
Okay, the reason this administration is failing on economics is because they have a perspective that is not in consonance with reality.
It's heads I win, tails you lose.
If the price of oil is too high, it's because the producers are really bad.
If the price of labor is too high, it's because the laborers are really good and the employers are really bad.
No matter what, the producers are really bad.
Always.
The companies and corporations are really bad.
And the government's really good.
They're really wonderful.
And if we have to blow out the national debt in order to promote this idiotic idea?
Well, nobody's really worried about the national debt.
Here is Jen Psaki saying that the national debt is just a lie.
No one actually cares about the national debt.
Here's the thing about the national debt.
No one cares about the national debt until it bites them directly in the ass.
The national debt is all fun and games until it turns out that servicing the national debt is eating up a substantial chunk of your budget every single year.
And you have to use austerity measures like they've had to use in Europe in order to get your budget back into realignment because there ain't no one left to pay the bills and no one's buying the bonds anymore.
because there is no promise they will get paid back.
But here is Jen Psaki pretending the national debt doesn't matter, because of course, she's a devotee, as is this entire administration, of the idiotic modern monetary theory, which suggests you can just pump money into the economy at record rates and nothing will happen.
What do you say to people who say we're just going to be having the same conversation a little bit over a year from now?
I'm not sure what American person is saying that or is concerned about the debt limit, but maybe there is somebody you've met on the street.
I don't know, but I will say that, you know, our view, the president's view, is that this has been done in a bipartisan way.
The American people shouldn't be worried about whether or not elected officials are doing what they should do and raising the debt limit to make sure we're covering bills that have already been incurred.
No, nobody's worried about the debt limit.
Nobody's worried about the national debt.
Okay, so they're not worried about inflation.
And if they are, it's because they're dumb.
And they're not worried about the national debt.
And if they are, it's because they're numb.
In fact, it turns out that everybody who's unhappy with this administration is just wrong.
How convenient if you're a Democrat.
And then when you point this out to them, and well, well, January 6th, well, well, well, January 6th.
Meanwhile, by the way, in all the major cities that are governed by blue government members, The economy is stagnating.
New York City job growth is completely falling apart.
Matthew Hogg and Patrick McGeehan reporting for the New York Times.
Since the start of the year, nearly 6 million jobs have been added in the United States.
The unemployment rate has plummeted to 4.2%, close to where it stood before the pandemic.
But in New York City, the economy appears to be in a rut.
After getting 350,000 jobs in the last months of 2020, employment has slowed considerably this year, with just 187,000 jobs added since March.
The city's unemployment rate is 9.4%.
9.4%!
That's more than double the national average.
Its decline in recent months was largely caused by people dropping out of the labor force.
As the city plunged into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the unemployment rate skyrocketed.
In June 2020, it was 20%.
Now it's down to about 10%.
But New York has added back a little more than half the jobs it lost, according to the State Labor Department.
Far less than the rest of the country.
The protracted pandemic has shut out tourists, scared off the crush of suburbanites who filled office towers every weekday.
Just 8% of office workers were back at work five days a week in early November.
They're wrecking their own economy.
And then, the idea is that, what, you're supposed to ignore that because Donald Trump's a bad man who does bad things who's bad?
Same thing is happening in Illinois, by the way.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Illinois is losing young people while Florida is gaining them.
There's a shock.
State Development Specialist Zach Kennedy notes the U.S.
population actually grew in the prime working age.
Young adult age cohorts 25 to 29, 30 to 34, 35 to 39.
25 to 29, 30 to 34, 35 to 39, Illinois was among the few states to see a decline in those age cohorts.
One reason is many students who leave the state for college don't come back.
Only New Jersey lost more college-aged individuals out of state who never returned.
One of the reasons for that is because Illinois has huge taxes.
Illinois and New Jersey have some of the highest residential property tax rates in the nation.
The state is losing children.
Its under-18 population has declined by 350,000 over the last decade.
Lousy schools are driving away young families.
Each Illinois household is on average on the hook for $110,000 in government worker retirement debt.
$110,000 for each Illinois household in terms of state debt burden.
This is what happens when you're in a state like garbage.
The good news is that, again, it's all misdirection.
You notice that it's all misdirection.
When they fail, it's about January 6th, or in California, it's about making California an abortion sanctuary state to deflect attention from the fact that the governance there is absolutely terrible, or that they're doing a full-on mask mandate indoors again in California based on Omicron.
In New York, they're attempting to misdirect by suggesting that they go after lawmakers, I mean, after gun makers.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, she was on The View, explaining that New York State was going to lead the nation in going after gun makers.
Yeah, that's going to fix your economy, Letitia.
Sounds great.
Gun manufacturers and gun distributors in this country are immunized.
No liability whatsoever.
They're the only industry that is protected in this country.
And given the carnage, and given the fact that this is the ninth anniversary of Sandy Hook, I am sick and tired of prayers and individuals whose hearts go out to all of those who have lost lives.
We can do something about it.
And what we need to do is hold these gun manufacturers and these gun distributors liable.
Okay, but all of that is just a distraction.
And then you can woo that up as much as you want for your audience, but Democrats are losing because they are disconnected from the everyday reality of most Americans.
Nowhere is that truer than with regard to COVID, where they continue to promulgate the lie that they can shut down COVID when they can't Come close to doing so.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
The delusions are insane.
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Alrighty, we'll get to the insane COVID policies that continue to shut down the nation in just one moment.
First, speaking of those, you may have noticed that we here at The Daily Wire have been fighting the vaccine mandates literally from day one.
And we have been asking you to help us out by heading on over to DoNotComplyPetition.
DoNotComplyPetition.com.
The reason is we need as many signatures on that thing as possible.
We need everybody to sound off on the fact that they are not going to comply with the VAX mandates pushed by this administration and pushed locally as well.
I mean, now New York City is trying to expand the VAX mandate to kids aged 5 to 11.
This is all insane.
We have a goal of reaching a million signatures.
We already have 875,000 signatures.
We need your help to cross the finish line before your end.
So please sign the petition at dailywire.com slash do not comply.
Share our petition with all of your friends and family, but send a message so loud the Biden administration cannot ignore us.
us. You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So again, Democrats have to rely on something in order to get them out of the state that they are in, but they cannot rely on their own policy because their policies are garbage.
And this is particularly true with COVID.
They've lost the thread.
They've completely lost it.
Some of them know this, by the way.
There's an entire article in Politico today about how Democratic governors are starting to realize that they've gone too far.
According to Politico, the party's defeat last month in Virginia has many Democrats searching for an off-ramp to the pandemic that allows them to sell a brighter future to voters next November.
Asked in an interview about his November close call, for example, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who almost lost to a person who no one knows.
I mean, he may have lost to an actual not human being, like to a ghost or something.
He attributed it to, quote, a lot of folks who are frustrated is my guess.
Murphy said some New Jerseyans feel like government is not connecting with them.
They're sick of masks, being told what to do in terms of vaccines, probably not thrilled with what they sense is going on in Washington.
They may have lost a job or a business that went bust or a loved one, worse yet.
Yeah, yes, that's correct.
North Carolina Roy Cooper, Governor Roy Cooper said, I think we have to recognize and acknowledge that families have had a tough time over the past two years, both health wise, whether it is or isn't from COVID, whether it's mental health and economically.
So Democrats are starting to realize that they have gone way too far on this.
But here's the problem.
They can't back out of it.
There's no way for them to back out of it.
They made a promise and the promise was a lie.
The promise is they could shut down the virus.
Joe Biden literally promised this on Twitter.
He said he was going to shut down the virus.
That was not ever within the capacity of the government.
The government could take a particular concrete action.
They could incentivize the creation of vaccines and they could help distribute them.
That was all the things they could do.
They could not shut down the virus because the government is not God.
See, here's the thing.
As a religious person, And you look back at religious history, and you read original biblical texts, and what it sounds a lot like is that people in early religious life thought that God was kind of a gumball machine.
Right?
That if you did what God wanted, the rains would come.
That if you did what God wanted, then your crops would grow.
That if you did what God wanted, then your wife wouldn't die in childbirth.
And then, they quickly looked around, and they realized pretty quickly that that isn't true.
That you could do many of the things you think God wants, and bad things will still happen to you.
Right?
This is what the entire book of Job is about.
You can do all the things God wants, and bad stuff can still happen to you.
And so religious people change their view of God.
That's what the book of Job is about.
Religious people realize that there is, in fact, things, that there are things in the universe that you cannot control.
Because when you say that if you do X, God will respond with Y, what you're really saying is that the entire universe is within your control, not God's control.
So religious people rethought how they interacted with God and how they interacted with nature.
And they realized you could do all the good things, but there had to be some inherent value to doing the good things beyond the consequences you thought that you would receive on this earth from the divine.
Okay, now, take that to government.
The innate human instinct to control all that is around us means that that religious instinct, if you're not a religious person, and particularly not a sophisticated religious person, can be channeled in other directions.
And so, when you have people who act like pagan prophets of old, suggesting that if you do X, the government will provide you with Y, if you just wear the mask, if you just lock down long enough, if you keep your kids out of public parks and schools, If you do those things, then the government will save you from COVID?
And it turns out government cannot do that.
Instead of you doing the same thing religious people did thousands of years ago and realizing that the promise was a lie, and perhaps you should rethink your relationship with the government and what government is capable of doing.
Instead of doing that, people have doubled down.
They've decided that no, the real answer is that you were not devout enough.
If you discouraged yourself, if you whipped yourself, if you made yourself more subservient to government, if you gave up your independence of the heart, then perhaps government would finally bestow upon you all the things that you deserve for having done what government told you to do.
The most religious people in American life right now are people on the far left and apparently the moderate left who believe that if they perform acts of obeisance to the government, the government will provide them with everything they could possibly need.
And members of the government are more than happy to continue pushing that notion because it means they get to maximize their power.
It means they get to keep telling you the lie.
But here's the thing.
They know it is a lie.
They know it is a lie.
Right?
Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, she said yesterday, we probably won't shut down the virus.
There's no probably.
You're not shutting down the virus.
But that is not stopping her from promoting policies that are designed at zero COVID, that are aimed at zero COVID.
Rochelle Walensky literally said the day before, so yesterday she says we can't shut down the virus, the day before she's talking about the new Pfizer drug, which if taken within the first three days reduces hospitalization and death by 90% and if taken within the first five by 88%.
She was talking about that drug and she said, yes, but it's better if you never get it at all, COVID.
Yes, but you can't control that.
So they want it both ways.
In their more candid moments, they will admit that they've been lying to you for two years about their capacity and what they can do.
And then they buy it back.
So here she was admitting that the reality, which is the government does not have the power to do the things that governments all over the world have been promising their citizens they would do.
Here she was on CBS mornings.
We're not really going to get an all clear, are we?
We just have to face the fact that we're going to have to live with this, true?
I think that that's probably true, but what I would say is we have a lot of control and power to do that as we come together, as we get vaccinated, as we do those prevention things that work to protect one another and ourselves and our family, we can bring down the amount of disease in this country and get much faster to that place.
Okay, I don't know what she's talking about in terms of quote-unquote bringing down the amount of disease in the country.
One of the things we know about Omicron is that a lot of people who are vaccinated are getting infected.
In fact, according to Axios, everything points to a large wave.
A large wave is coming, a senior Biden official told Axios.
It will be fast.
It won't be as severe, but there will be plenty of hospitalizations.
Actually, Omicron is far less severe than Delta.
According to the South African analysis by Discovery Health, the risk of hospital admission among adults diagnosed with Omicron is 29% lower than it was during South Africa's first wave of infections in 2020.
The researchers adjusted their calculations by VAX status.
During the current Omicron wave, by the way, the two-dose regimen of vaccine was still 70% effective against severe disease requiring hospitalization.
It found that two doses of Pfizer are 33% effective against infection, but who cares about the levels of infection?
You care mostly about severe disease, right?
Okay, so, here's the bottom line.
We should all be back to normal.
We should.
Get vaccinated, get back to normal.
Or, don't get vaccinated, live your life, and then pay the consequences.
Right?
These are...
This is the reality.
And by the way, Omicron is not killing people.
Okay, Omicron, on a broad level, has killed, as far as we know, so far, on planet Earth, on the entire planet, filled with trillions, with billions and billions of human beings, on this entire planet, the grand total number of people who have died of Omicron, documentedly, one.
One.
Okay, that is, according to the UK, one person has now died of Omicron.
Okay, which means, once again, Ted Kennedy has killed as many people as Omicron.
And yet, everybody's shutting down because they have to maintain the religious illusion that if you do what they say, they can fix all of your problems.
And so, for example, and they're lying to you, by the way, the White House cancelled a lavish Christmas party because of Omicron.
According to the UK Daily Mail, Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will host holiday open houses instead of cocktail parties for the holiday season so visitors can see the decorations in the White House in a COVID-friendly way.
Joe Biden's spokesman Michael Arosa said, anyone who knows the Bidens knows how much they enjoy hosting and celebrating the holidays. In the coming days, we'll host a limited number of holiday open houses, inviting guests to see the Christmas decorations in person.
It is disappointing. We cannot host as many people as the Bidens would like to.
But as we have done since day one of the Biden administration, we will continue to implement strong COVID protocols developed in consultation with our public health advisors. By the way, Joe Biden went to a big holiday party yesterday, literally yesterday.
So, yeah, it only applies to you.
Meanwhile, in Cornell, Cornell is even more insane.
So over at Cornell, Cornell does have a vaccine mandate.
In order to attend campus, you have to be vaccinated.
They are shutting down the entire campus and declaring code red.
This is crazy.
They're declaring code red over a virus that is not killing young people on a campus that is entirely vaccinated.
Because the religious illusion must be maintained.
If only, if only you performed animal sacrifices, then perhaps COVID would leave you alone.
By the way, a lot of this is tied to how the media began to cover COVID last year, which was that it was some sort of global scourge as a response to Trump.
That it was Trump's fault.
Trump created it.
Trump was, it was the Trump virus, according to people on the left.
And so now they can't disconnect from that narrative.
Because the narrative last year was it was Trump's fault if anybody died from COVID.
Well, they can't allow that it's Biden's fault if anybody died from COVID, so that means that COVID is actually a moral virus.
It only strikes you if you are evil.
If you're a Black Lives Matter protester spitting on other people twerking in the streets for George Floyd, you're fine.
If, however, you're a person who bucks the conventional wisdom and you decide to take your kid to a public park and then you get COVID, it's because you're bad.
Even if you're entirely vaccinated, if you oppose vax mandates and you get COVID, it's because COVID was punishing you.
COVID is a pagan god at this point.
According to the Ithaca Voice, the Tompkins County Health Department reported four more deaths reported on Monday, December 13th, bringing the local death toll from COVID-19 to 45 people.
But the four deaths were all of older adults.
None of them were from Cornell.
Three of the deaths occurred in local nursing homes.
But that doesn't matter.
Cornell has now closed many of its campus buildings to students after finding evidence of Omicron.
Faculty and staff are still allowed to enter offices and work locations, but the school moved its alert level to red, signaling a high risk of spread among the school community.
They've completely lost the thread.
The NFL, by the way, is now mandating boosters for coaches and staff after a record number of players tested positive for COVID.
Okay, those boosters, again, we're talking about for 25-year-old, really, really in-shape dudes.
That's what we're talking about right now.
And the data show that the original two-dose is good enough to protect you against hospitalization and death.
But now the NFL is mandating boosters.
The good news is that the head of the NIH, who is all about the science, he sings songs about it. This is exciting.
Somewhere past the pandemic, masks will come off.
No more need for a nose swab every time we cough.
That's the head of your NIH gang.
All science.
All the time.
All the time.
Got religious rituals.
We have hymns now.
We have saints like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
He's sainted and glorious.
Boat of Candle, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
If you worship hard enough, then the skies will open and the rain will fall.
If you draw a circle around yourself, like Honey the Circle Maker in the Talmud, and you just stand there, praying to the gods of COVID, COVID will be alleviated.
But if you step outside that circle, COVID will smack you so hard, it'll make your head spin.
This sort of mentality is not going to lead to any sort of recovery in the United States.
It is just going to lead to continued downturns.
And that's what you've seen in blue areas.
And when you cut yourself off at the knees because you are disconnected from reality economically, in terms of pandemics, in terms of anything.
Reality is going to hit you.
Reality will clock you across the face.
And so the only excuse you are left with is just yelling about how bad your opponents are.
And that's what Democrats have been left with, which is why Joe Biden is going to be doing some sort of commemoration of January 6th.
When in reality, I thought we elected him to, you know, be the president of the United States, not to be the guy who just spends all day eating oatmeal, watching Matlock, and then talking about a thing that happened a year ago, in part caused by a president Who is no longer in office.
Alrighty.
We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out dailywire.com slash do not comply.
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We are approaching 1 million signatures.
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