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Jan. 4, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:22
The Exploitation Of January 6 | Ep. 1404
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Democrats obsess over January 6th in order to promote changing all the rules.
Joe Biden doesn't know whether to lock down harder or leave people alone.
And Patton Oswalt throws Dave Chappelle under the bus.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so, the Democrats, the media, they are all revved up this week in preparation for Thursday because Thursday, of course, is the one-year anniversary of the biggest event, the signal event in American history, January 6th, the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the planet.
Now, listen, you don't have to downplay the evils of January 6th in order to recognize that what January 6th was was a really bad aberration.
I mean, the imagery of January 6th was quite terrible.
You had Americans who were storming the Capitol building.
You had people beating up police officers with poles.
You had a woman who was shot to death while trying to break through a window to get to Congress.
People had people in the halls of the Capitol baying for Mike Pence.
And none of that is good.
All of that is really bad.
And a lot of those folks were acting because they were emotionally revved up by President Trump's Prevarications over the prior two months about how the election was stolen, it was all election fraud, how he was the rightful president, how Mike Pence could somehow illegally shift the votes in the election or not count votes in the election and throw the entire process into chaos and then continue Trump in the presidency.
None of that was true.
So, you don't have to downplay the evils of January 6th in order to recognize what the left is now doing with January 6th is absurd.
The left has declared that January 6th is the be-all end-all.
It is the only thing that matters in human history.
And it only matters because if there's an emergency, if there's an ongoing emergency, this means that they can take emergency power in the same way that the left used COVID in order to grab control and never relinquish it of every aspect of American life in major American cities like New York or Los Angeles or Chicago.
In exactly the same way, the left is now suggesting that January 6th is not a bad thing that happened, a horrible thing that was perpetrated by people who are now in jail.
And that was revved up by a president who's no longer president.
No.
Instead, they have to say January 6th is every day.
That was literally the name of an editorial from the New York Times yesterday.
January 6th is every day.
Every day is January 6th.
Well, no, it's not.
But the reason they have to say that is because if there's an ongoing threat to democracy each and every day, if that threat is ongoing, continuous, never ending, that means the only way to fight back against that is to seize control of all the levers of power.
Just as they did with COVID.
If there's an ongoing emergency, we must have emergency power.
If there's an ongoing electoral emergency, we must have emergency electoral power.
Now, here is the thing.
January 6th, the riot at the Capitol building, That was really not even quite unprecedented.
I know that we've all sort of memory hold what happened in 2017, but over 200 people were arrested in Washington, D.C.
when Trump was inaugurated in 2017.
I mean, there were burning cop cars, 3,000 members of local, state, federal law enforcement backed by 5,000 National Guard members and police officers from as far away as New Jersey patrolled the streets.
This is according to the NBC News report from the time.
Acting Police Chief Peter Newsham said that by around 6.30 p.m.
Eastern Time, things had calmed down, but authorities were still monitoring several groups.
At the same time, police were preparing for the Women's March on Washington.
It was expected to draw 200,000 protesters.
And people started calling themselves the Resistance, in an ode to the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, literally right away.
And you know what?
Democracy didn't end.
Democracy continued.
Some of these criminals went to jail.
Many of these criminals did not.
But 200 people were in fact arrested on inauguration day 2017.
Nobody remembers that because it got memory hold in the same way that the congressional baseball attack got memory hold because the perpetrator of that attack was a was a hardcore Democrat who supported Bernie Sanders.
In the same way that we've now memory hold the murder of a bunch of white people by a black driver in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
In the same way that we've memory hold a Black Lives Matter supporter murdering six police officers in Dallas in 2016.
Anytime there's a perpetrator who's of the left, it gets memory hold.
Anytime there's a perpetrator who is purportedly of the right, then it becomes a signal moment in American history.
And January 6th is just the latest evidence of this.
Why?
Because, well, the left can't use any of the other moments that I talked about.
The left can't use the fact that there were 200 people who were arrested in 2017, and that windows were being smashed.
The left can't use the fact that there was $5 billion in uninsured property damage, probably, that was done during summer 2020 over the George Floyd protests slash riots.
I can't use any of that, but they can use January 6th.
They can pretend that January 6th is some sort of turning point in American history, that it is a constant, ever-present threat, that the laws that have been attempted to be passed in various states around the country are a true threat to democracy.
So what they will typically do when they have this discussion is they will bring up bills that didn't even pass.
They'll bring up bills that, for example, allow for election results to be thrown out.
They never talk about the bills that do pass, like the bill in Georgia that passed and then was made the subject of Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star game from Georgia.
You remember this?
That bill loosened some of the voting restrictions on, for example, early voting.
That bill was not unprecedented in any way, but it was treated as unprecedented.
Because again, the goal here is not to prevent another January 6th.
The goal here is to prevent another election.
The goal here is to make it more difficult to run a free, fair, and honest election.
And it doesn't require you to sympathize with the cause of the January 6th rioters to say this.
All you have to have are eyes.
All you have to have are ears.
These Democrats are not hiding the ball here.
They're making very clear that they seek to exploit January 6th in order to press forward their agenda.
As always, Agenda Uber Alice.
And we'll get to more on this in just one second first.
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Okay, so.
And the Democrats, of course, are making clear that they are tying January 6th to 2022, the midterms.
The fact is, the Democrats know they're going to get skunked in the midterms unless they change the rules.
And so the rules have to be changed.
And the way that they seek to change the rules is with a couple of bills.
They originally had the For the People Act.
That completely fell apart because it had no support.
Then they started trying to push forward the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, that is Senate Bill 4, HR Bill 4.
So that particular act is designed to vastly expand federal oversight of state and local elections via use of the Voting Rights Act.
The suggestion being that without any evidence of actual racist intent, if there is quote-unquote disparate impact in redistricting, for example, the federal government will now have to oversee that.
There's not a lot of Republican support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, because there shouldn't be.
Hans von Spakovsky, who writes for Heritage Foundation, has a very good breakdown of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and exactly what it would do.
He says the stated purpose is to prevent racial discrimination, but it would force racial gerrymandering, make race the predominant factor in the election process, advance the partisan interests of one political party, and prevent common-sense election reforms like voter ID.
It would also change Section 3 from requiring a show of intentional discrimination to allow other violations of the VRA to count toward triggering pre-clearance coverage.
In other words, normally it was under the Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965.
The idea was that there were a bunch of southern states that were going to gerrymander black voters out of any ability to have any impact on elections.
And so the Voting Rights Act said that particular states have to go through a pre-clearance process with the federal government to demonstrate that they were not in fact acting in racially discriminatory ways.
Then there was a Supreme Court decision a couple of years ago that said it's now been 50 years since the Voting Rights Act, and so we don't need to do this anymore because there's not evidence that there's a dramatic attempt in Southern states particularly to quash the black vote.
Okay, well, that basically the act here would be an attempt to undo that Supreme Court decision and again make it the DOJ's prerogative to draw districts.
So if you want Merrick Garland drawing districts, then this is the bill for you.
Of course, the DOJ has a history of filing unwarranted objections under Section 5 based on its bias in favor of liberal advocacy groups.
And that bias has not changed, of course.
So, that is one of the acts that the Democrats are seeking to move forward.
There's another act that the Democrats are seeking to move forward as well that does something similar.
That is an attempt to put into place all sorts of ballot restrictions preventing voter ID from being implemented, encouraging ballot harvesting, all the rest of it.
But they don't have support for it.
So what they're trying to do is cudgel Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into killing the filibuster in order so that the support will then happen.
If they kill this filibuster, then presumably they can get it done with 50 votes plus Kamala Harris.
Now, here's the thing.
If you're Manchin or Sinema, you really have no incentive to kill the filibuster.
The reason you have no incentive to kill the filibuster is because then you're actually going to be held to account.
See, the filibuster protects Sinema and Manchin.
The filibuster, these are two Blue senators from red or purple states, right?
Arizona is a purple state and West Virginia is a bright red state.
The filibuster protects Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema because they can vote in favor of Democratic proposals on the actual floor.
And then they can not have that have any consequence because the filibuster kills it and they never have to vote for anything controversial.
If they kill the filibuster, suddenly they're held to account by their own Democratic Party base and or Republican voters who don't like how they vote.
So there's no interest for Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema in killing the filibuster.
So Democrats have tried to create selective kills of the filibuster.
What they're trying to do is encourage Manchin and Sinema to kill the filibuster only on bills where Manchin and Sinema really, really like the bill.
But Manchin and Sinema, it doesn't make a lot of sense for them to do that because once they've opened the door, then the question becomes, why don't they just do that for everything?
According to Politico, today, a group of Democrats, including Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, began meeting with Joe Manchin to design a modified version of H.R.
1 that all 50 Democrats could back.
They came up with this Freedom to Vote Act.
It is a massive reform bill addressing voting rights, election integrity, campaign finance, and gerrymandering, but it is more tailored to address problems of electoral subversion, like removing election officials without cause that became apparent after 2020.
Manchin shopped the bill to Republicans.
Nobody joined up.
So they were now talking about nuking the filibuster.
That is very, very unlikely.
It is unlikely that they're going to nuke the filibuster, especially because the Republicans do have an alternative.
The Republican alternative has been pushed by folks like Yuval Levin over at American Enterprise Institute.
The Republican alternative is basically to prevent some of the worst sort of election bill abuses that could theoretically be put forward, like simply throwing away votes, right, in favor of a reform to the Electoral Count Act.
That the Electoral Count Act was the bill that was misinterpreted by some legal advisors to President Trump in order to suggest that Mike Pence could simply throw out electoral votes and then change the certification of the election?
That's really not what the ECA says.
We talked about it at length back during December and January.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 does not allow the Vice President of the United States to simply throw out votes that have been state certified.
Yuval Levin says it could be clarified.
He says that some Republicans insist the process of counting and certifying the votes in some states was corrupt in 2020.
There's no evidence to support specific claims on this front, or greater care and transparency about post-election administration would serve us well regardless and could render such claims easier to test and refute in ways that would build public confidence.
Reforms focused on these themes would be a more productive path than what we've seen so far, which are efforts focused mostly on voting itself, on who can cast a ballot, when, and by what means.
If we take both parties' most high-minded arguments at face value, they're worried about problems that barely exist.
It's easier than ever to vote.
Registration has gotten much simpler, so Democrats complaining that there is an attempt to crack down on voting, they're just lying.
It's not true.
Voter turnout is at historic highs.
Black and white voting rates now rise and fall together.
Meanwhile, voter fraud is vanishingly rare as well.
The most thorough database of cases, maintained by one of the staunchest conservative defenders of election integrity, suggests a rate of fraud so low it could not meaningfully affect outcomes.
So what exactly could be done?
Well, theoretically, they should turn to narrowly tailored legislation, says Yuval Levin, focused on post-election administration.
Such a bill could, for example, limit the ability of state officials to remove local election administrators without cause and prohibit the harassment of election workers.
It could mandate a mechanism for post-election audits while requiring a clear standard for rendering election results final.
It could modernize and simplify the ECA.
Some of those ideas were included in the Freedom to Vote Act, which is the Democratic Joe Manchin joined bill.
But that bill also includes a bunch of other stuff, like campaign finance, redistricting, and make it unacceptable.
So they could narrow it down.
So that will probably be Mitch McConnell's return offer to the Democrats, and Democrats will turn it down because they don't care about that.
Democrats aren't interested in shoring up the Electoral Account Act.
Democrats are interested in completely revising the way we do voting in this country.
Why?
Well, because if they don't, then they're going to lose.
Representative Ted Lieu of California makes this particularly clear.
He said yesterday that the 2022 midterms are going to decide democracy.
Well, if you actually believe this, then why not change all the rules?
If you change all the rules, then presumably you won't lose as badly.
Democracy itself is on the ballot this November.
147 Republicans voted to not certify the Electoral College results.
And more than a year later, not a single one of them can identify who allegedly stole the election, nor explain how it was done.
And that's because the election was not stolen.
Donald Trump got crushed in the popular vote.
He lost the Electoral College.
And what we see are Republican legislators trying to nullify the vote instead of adhering to our democracy.
Okay, so his idea is what if we completely revise the rules for how this stuff is done?
Because if we don't do that, then they're so in order for them to we have to stop them from stealing elections by stealing elections is the basic idea here.
We have to burn the Republican, like small R Republican village in order to save the small D Democratic village. If you want to save democracy, you have to end democracy. You have to kill the filibuster. You have to redo how all the voting is done. By the way, it was five seconds ago the Democrats were defending the filibuster. Here was Chuck Schumer just a few years back talking about how eliminating the filibuster would be doomsday for democracy. This is 2005. The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the founding fathers
called the cooling saucer of democracy into the rubber stamp of dictatorship.
We will not let them.
They want, because they can't get their way on every judge, to change the rules in midstream.
To wash away 200 years of history.
They want to make this country into a banana republic, where if you don't get your way, you change the rules.
Are we going to let them?
It'll be a doomsday for democracy if we do.
I mean, I wish that Chuck Schumer today met this Chuck Schumer from the past.
It would be very interesting to watch as they stare at each other, confused, because everything that he's... Chuck Schumer is just at war with his old self.
Because again, when it comes to politics, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
You're all for killing the filibuster when it favors you, and you're all for keeping the filibuster when it favors you.
And it's death for democracy whenever you don't get your way.
Okay, that's really what this January 6th stuff is about.
It was, by the way, within 24 hours of January 6th.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Alright, so again, the basic idea here is that January 6th is an excuse for everything that we want to do.
Ever.
And forever.
Because Republicans are founts of misinformation, therefore we have to have social media shutting them down.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, by the way, she says that this should become a thing.
That Twitter and Facebook should just shut down anyone who disagrees with her because, again, threat to democracy.
It's always some deep threat that requires basic freedoms to be curbed.
It's no secret that our social media companies have been part of their algorithms promoting disinformation.
And I think that these steps are important, but frankly, a little too little and a little too late.
The reality is, it's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene.
All over Twitter, social media, Facebook, all of these companies have been using algorithms that are just about clickbait, not about truth.
And so if we are going to take on the disinformation that's out there, the big lie, and everything else that goes with it, then yes, this is a part of it, but it's got to be much, much more.
We have to crack down on the First Amendment in order to save the First Amendment.
We have to crack down on your ability to vote with a certain amount of certainty in order to save voting.
It's amazing how often they use this logic.
In fact, we have to curb all of the traditional institutions of American democracy in order to save American democracy, according to Professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy, a professor of constitutional law at Columbia.
He has a piece in the New York Times called, The Republican Party is succeeding because we are not a true democracy.
Oh, so when you win, it's a democracy, and when you lose, it's not a true democracy.
I kind of see how this is working.
The January 6th attack would not have happened in a genuine democracy, says Britton-Purdy.
Really?
Because I feel like the entire summer of 2020, before Trump and January 6th, before any of that happened, attacks on federal courthouses in Portland, massive riots across the United States, like dozens if not hundreds of riots across the United States.
It wouldn't have happened in... So you explain to me, when exactly was there a genuine democracy in the United States and no violence involved ever?
What was that period exactly?
says Professor Britton Purdy.
The attack was the most acute symptom of the political crisis that Donald Trump incited by refusing to admit defeat in the 2020 election.
But the roots of the crisis run deep into the undemocratic features of our constitutional system.
At a basic level, today's Republican Party succeeds only because the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court all tilt in its favor.
That system has handed conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that only one Republican has won the presidential popular vote after 1988.
A party doesn't have to persuade majorities, it has the best vision for the country.
It only has to persuade a selective minority that the other side is a mortal threat.
Its grasp on power may be too tenuous for the party to govern effectively, but it has offered conservatives a fine perch to weaken economic and environmental regulation, appoint conservative judges, and launch attacks on the democratic system itself.
In a more democratic system, says this professor of constitutional law, the Republican Party's extreme elements would have been sent packing long before they stormed the Capitol because they couldn't muster enough votes to win a national election.
Instead, they have perfected minority rule as a path to political success.
An anti-democratic system has bred an anti-democratic party.
The remedy is to democratize our so-called democracy.
Yes, pure majoritarianism.
What the founders call mob rule will certainly make things much better.
Because when the mob rules, nothing bad ever happens.
When you have just a pure majority cramming down its opinions on the minority, without any sort of hampering mechanisms, then only good comes from that, as we know from none of world history ever.
This is the basic idea for the Democrats.
If we just go to pure majoritarianism, then it'll be good.
By the way, if they start to lose in a pure majoritarian state, like let's say that the next Republican presidential candidate in 2024 wins a popular vote, then we'll be back to, well, what systems are broken here that could have allowed this to possibly happen?
Again, January 6th is all about exploitation.
It was never about January 6th purely.
And that is the problem.
If it had been just about January 6th, we all would have agreed.
If it's about the exploitation, then we all ought to not agree because it is really, really kind of gross to use a A horrible riot on January 6th.
Not nearly as horrible in terms of property damage or loss of life as anything that happened in 2020, by the way.
But a horrible image for the United States to use that as an excuse to batter away traditional institutions like the filibuster, as well as the state control over voting rights, in order to shore up your chances in 2022.
That seems like much more of a threat to democracy than 200 droogs invading the Capitol building, getting themselves arrested and thrown in jail.
Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get into the latest on America's COVID response, which is just completely chaotic and insane.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Meanwhile, Joe Biden is trying to happy talk his way through a bunch of horrible policy decisions.
So he said yesterday that we are entering 2022 in great economic condition, which is a shock to everybody who's looking around going, hold up, aren't half the companies in America about to be hit with a vaccine mandate by you? And.
And isn't the economy slowing?
And aren't we experiencing still supply chain problems and inflation?
Here's Joe Biden trying to happy talk his way through this one.
Before we begin, I want to say a word about where our economy stands today.
We're entering 2022 in a position of a unique economic strength.
Six million new jobs, a record number for a new president been created since January last.
Unemployment is down to 4.2%.
Three years ahead of predictions.
New small business applications are up over 30% compared with before the pandemic.
And the fastest growth in America in nearly 40 years.
Um, so here is the thing.
Nobody actually believes that the economy is growing the way that it should be growing right now.
No one actually believed that, which is why that old dullard's approval ratings are down in like the low 40s.
That is why.
While he sits in a fake Oval Office with a bunch of projected snow behind him.
Very exciting stuff from the President of the United States.
By the way, he does have excuses for why all the failures, and the answer is it's everybody else's fault.
I will say, I am highly amused by the new democratic line that companies have only now discovered the possibility of economic self-interest.
So the entirety of free market economics is based on the idea that human beings are self-interested.
In fact, that is the basis of much of classical liberal thought generally.
Whether you're a conservative or a classical liberal, the basis of a lot of political thought over the course of the last several centuries has been the idea that human beings are motivated by self-interest.
But apparently, all these companies only discovered self-interest the moment that inflation began to rise.
So it's not that inflation is rising across the economy because this guy poured money on a raging fire of inflation already.
It's not because of that.
It's because meat companies suddenly got greedy.
Honestly, if you believe this, you deserve a person like Joe Biden as your president.
If you believe this, you should have a president whose neurons stopped firing a couple of decades ago.
Here is Joe Biden trying to explain why it is that meat prices are rising.
His answer is that suddenly the beef companies got greedy, as opposed to, you know, his bad economic policy.
Four big corporations control more than half the markets in beef, pork, and poultry.
These middlemen that they buy from, farmers and ranchers, and sell the processed product to grocery stores.
That's the way it works.
Without meaningful competition, farmers and ranchers don't get to choose who they sell to.
Or put another way, our farmers and ranchers have to pay whatever these four big companies say they have to pay, by and large.
But that's only half of it.
These companies can use their position as middlemen to overcharge grocery stores and ultimately families.
Okay, so it's amazing.
So every time there is a shortage, it is not the government that is to blame.
It is the meat companies.
Right?
It's the meat companies.
So until now, the meat companies were totally altruistic, and they were fine, and they were never greedy or self-interested.
And then suddenly, as inflation began to rise, it was all the meat companies.
He uses exactly the same language that Bernie Sanders uses about the banks.
Everybody just gets greedy randomly as soon as Democrats need an excuse for why their policies are failing.
It's the evil, evil meat companies, of course.
It's the evil meat companies.
It's not your centralized government top-down approach to how distribution ought to be done and how taxation and redistribution ought to be pursued.
It's pretty incredible stuff.
It's no wonder that America is currently suffering from all sorts of economic uncertainty, despite the fact that we should be booming at this point in unprecedented fashion.
Meanwhile, major companies around the United States are implementing Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Those companies are likely to get slammed with labor shortages, because if you actually fire all your workers who won't get the vax, because they have natural immunity, many of them, then you're going to end up with labor shortage.
Right now, there's a lot of talk about hospital shortages.
The reality is that the hospitals are not inundated with cases, like hospitalized cases with COVID, in the same way they were during the Delta surge.
That's because Delta is much more serious than Omicron.
But there are shortages anyway.
One of the reasons that there are shortages is because, as has been widely reported, many hospitals have been laying people off who are not vaxxed.
And the same thing is about to happen across the economy.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks is now requiring U.S.
employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to regular testing, one of the first large restaurant chains to take such a step ahead of potential federal vax mandates for large employers.
Starbucks said on Monday workers in its U.S.
cafes, offices and manufacturing plants must be vaccinated by February 9th or get tested weekly.
Workers who choose testing must have a pharmacist or doctor administer it instead of taking one at home.
Workers will need to themselves obtain and cover any cost for the test, the company said in a message to U.S.
stores.
So the company's not going to cover the test.
You're going to cover the cost of the test.
So given the fact that tests are in extraordinarily low supply right now, it could cost you hundreds, like more than you're making at Starbucks, in order to test yourself to work at Starbucks, which means unemployment.
U.S.
workers must disclose their vaccination status by January 10th, according to Starbucks.
Starbucks COO John Culver wrote in a message to employees last week.
He understands workers have a range of views on vaccination, but he said Starbucks is strongly encouraging all workers to get vaccinated, particularly as the Omicron variant spreads.
Last month, the federal appellate court reinstated the Biden administration rules that require businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers are vaccinated or tested weekly for COVID-19.
The Supreme Court is going to hear oral arguments early this month, possibly late this week.
On this particular and we have already submitted amicus briefs.
We are the first major American company to sue the Biden administration, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
We urge you to head on over to our petition over at dailywire.com slash do not comply.
Please sign our petition against the Biden vaccine mandates.
We have over a million signatures on that.
Well, as companies start to do this, it's just going to exacerbate a labor shortage that is already driving up wages, which is driving up prices, which is driving up inflation.
And here is the thing.
All of these VAX mandates were originally designed not just to protect you against the virus.
They were designed to protect you from infecting your neighbors.
But as we all know, pretty much everybody you know is getting a breakthrough case of Omicron right now.
And so the spread is not being prevented by the vaccines.
It may be mitigated to a certain extent, although we have no statistical idea what the differential is between the vaxed getting Omicron and the unvaxed getting Omicron.
What we do know is that the vaxed are responding in better fashion to Omicron than the unvaxed, although Omicron generally is less dangerous than Delta.
However, if the basic idea of the VAX mandate is we have to create a safe workplace where you're not going to get COVID, which is the idea behind the OSHA VAX mandate, well, the VAX doesn't prevent you from getting COVID.
It prevents you from dying from COVID and being hospitalized.
I'm a big VAX fan.
But that's not the idea here.
The idea is that OSHA can prevent externalities.
There's no VAX mandate that OSHA could cram down that only protects you against death.
So, for example, Let's say that there were a vax that prevented you from dying of the flu, but did not prevent transmission of the flu.
OSHA would have really no business cramming down a vax mandate on that basis.
Because again, it's about the externalities.
It's about creating a quote-unquote safe workplace.
So if you're still passing it, and you're vaccinated, that sort of defeats the purpose of the vax mandate, does it not?
At least when it comes to transmission, which is what OSHA is involved in.
All of this is going to lead to pretty massive economic standstills.
Bunch of economic hiccups.
By the way, in Canada, they're already shutting down everything again.
I mean, it's crazy over there in Canada.
My friend Jordan Peterson has been tweeting about it.
Apparently, Ontario is now in full lockdown.
Restrictions include delaying in-person learning at schools, shutting down gyms, indoor dining, reducing capacity for retail to 50%.
And by the way, I'm just wondering at this point, why exactly are we doing this?
Like, where is the evidence that we are seeing a massive increase in COVID death?
New York State, right now, is experiencing... New York State, on average, is experiencing a seven-day rolling average of 91 deaths per day from COVID.
That is up very, very slightly from a month ago.
Despite the fact that the cases have absolutely skyrocketed.
The same thing is true in pretty much every state.
If you look at Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.' 's COVID death rate... They're running deaths in Washington, D.C.
One.
That is the seven-day rolling average of death.
You know what it was, like, several months ago?
One.
Okay, despite the fact that the case rate is extraordinary in Washington, D.C.
So they're continuing to promote these lockdown policies in places like Washington, D.C., and Joe Biden is promoting all that, and then we're supposed to wonder why exactly the economy is stalling out?
By the way, meanwhile, Joe Biden has been involving himself in seizing all of the monoclonal antibodies.
He's federalizing all monoclonal antibody distribution so that he can pass them out to his friends.
That, of course, is pretty bad policy, but not a particular shock.
It's also true, by the way, that now Omicron is spreading throughout Congress.
Congress is heavily vaccinated at this point.
The number of New Yorkers who have been hospitalized with coronavirus infections topped about 9,500 on Monday.
That surpassed the peak reached during last year's winter wave, but that's the number of New Yorkers who have hospitalized with coronavirus, not necessarily from coronavirus, as by the way, Anthony Fauci says, because there are a lot of people who are going to hospitals and then they're being diagnosed with COVID while they're in the hospital already.
The basic idea that hospitalizations And that hospitalizations with COVID and from COVID are exactly the same thing is patently untrue, given the fact that you are now being asymptomatically tested for COVID.
Beyond that, the FDA is now authorizing COVID vaccine boosters for 12 to 15-year-olds.
There's no evidence that 12 to 15-year-olds need vaccine boosters.
I mean, again, the total number of kids who have died from COVID to this point in the pandemic, people under the age of 18, is still under 700.
More kids die of drowning in a given year than have died of COVID over the course of two years.
And now they're authorizing boosters for 12 to 15 year olds?
Like everyone, let's say everyone is getting Omicron.
Every single human.
Whether they got vaxxed or whether they didn't get vaxxed.
Again, you should get vaxxed.
And the reason you should get vaxxed is because then you won't be hospitalized or die from COVID.
Omicron is not nearly as dangerous as Delta, but theoretically, you could still die from it.
You're much more likely to die from it if you're unvaxxed.
I've been talking with hospital administrators around the country.
What they say is that the hospitalizations that they are seeing are generally among the unvaxxed with Omicron.
But that does not mean that everybody isn't going to get COVID.
Everyone's going to get COVID at this point.
For example, yesterday, The View announced that Whoopi Goldberg had COVID, so they had to do the entire show remote.
Whoopi is triple vaxxed, I believe.
As you can see, we're back in boxes and doing the show remotely, hopefully for just a week.
I'm praying that it's just a week, but you never know, because this Omicron thing is all over the place, all over the place.
Why am I here instead of Whoopi?
Well, Whoopi unfortunately tested positive over the break, but she'll be back probably next week.
But since she's vaxxed and boosted, her symptoms have been very, very mild.
But we're, you know, being super cautious here at The View.
We'll be checking with her soon, so you'll see what we do.
By the way, the lockdown fanatics are not stopping any time in here.
Randi Weingarten, the worst actor in American public life, she came out yesterday and she says that she wants students five plus to be forced to vax in order for them to go back to school.
In terms of vaccines, I think what Gavin Newsom did in California is really the best model, which is that the semester after they go from emergency use to full authorization and the FDA has done everything that they need to do, that's what California has said.
That is the semester that they become mandatory.
And you support that nationally?
And I personally support that.
The union hasn't taken a position on that.
Okay, but the union will take a position on that because teachers had a great year.
OK, let's be the great heroes of our society.
There are some teachers who really wanted to teach.
This is not about the teachers, the teachers unions, the great heroes of our society.
They spent the last year being able to teach from home, telling people to print out stuff on their non-existent printers.
A lot of people don't necessarily have printers.
Teaching on Zoom, kids lost a full year of school and the teachers still got paid.
So they're happy to continue this as long as possible.
Michael Osterholm, who is an advisor to the Biden administration, he's saying schools should shut down again.
Right now we're seeing school districts all across the United States that are seeing hundreds and hundreds of teachers out sick, bus drivers, support staff.
How can you have a school run when you have this viral blizzard shutting down many of those in your educational system?
So we're going to have to be flexible for the next three to five weeks as we work through this Omicron crisis and realize that we may not be able to open schools, not because we don't want to, we want to, but you can't do it when you don't have people.
No, you don't want to.
You don't want to because you know why you don't have people?
Because you're testing the asymptomatic.
That is one reason.
Also, because you're not allowing people to go back to school after just five days.
You want people to test it.
Because you continue to maintain this pandemic is going to end society when it is not.
You could just be realistic.
Now, by the way, the left does not want to be realistic.
Okay, because here's the thing.
Even some of the hawks are starting to become very realistic about this, right?
Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the FDA, he says, we'll be done with this in a month.
This is correct.
I think certainly the February time frame is appropriate in terms of when we're going to pass through this Omicron wave across the United States.
Now, this is a big country.
This will affect different parts of the country at different points in time.
But if the UK is any guide, London's already peaking.
If South Africa is any guide, this is about a two-month epidemic wave from start to finish.
And so parts of the country that were affected earlier, like New York, probably are going to start to peak in the next two weeks.
Other parts within the next four weeks.
So I think certainly by the end of February, we will be through this.
But no, it's panic, panic, panic, panic.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
First, let's talk about the fact you don't want to go to the auto parts store because why would you ever want to go to the auto parts store?
You stand in line, you finally get to the front of the line, you ask, what parts do I need for my car?
And then he asks you a bunch of questions you don't know the answer to.
Finally, he checks in the back, they don't have the part, we can order it and we can upcharge you 40%.
Or you could just do this on the interwebs like everything else you do.
You have computers.
They have access to rockauto.com.
Why don't you just go check it out?
Why would you choose to spend 30%, 50%, 100% more for the exact same auto parts at a chain store or a new car dealership?
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com, shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
They've got everything from engine control modules and brake parts to tail lamps, motor oil, even new carpet.
Whether it's your classic or daily driver, get everything you need in a few easy clicks, delivered directly to your door.
The rockauto.com catalog, it's unique, it's remarkably easy to navigate.
You can quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brand's specifications and prices you prefer.
Best of all, prices at rockauto.com, they are always reliably low.
They are the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
We've got amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car will ever need, rockauto.com.
Write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box?
So they know that we sent you.
Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to the complete lack of realism among the lockdown fanatics first.
I'm so excited about this.
So, you have New Year's resolutions.
One of those is you're going to read more this year, right?
Well, I'm going to help you because I want to read with you.
We have a brand new book club.
Okay, our brand new book club every month.
We're going to go through a classic and I'm going to be talking with you about it once a month.
I'm going to recommend a book.
It has cultural significance.
Not just kind of the fancy pants new books with the woke values or political books, but like actual classic literature.
This is great for adults, high school students, college students.
Become the best version of yourself by reading the books that should be on your list.
Maybe the stuff that you never read back in high school.
Read it along with me.
When you join the book club, you'll get access to my personal notes and analysis of the books.
And then, on the third Thursday of each month, I will join DailyWire members online for an in-depth lecture and discussion of each book.
Don't let this year go by without investing time in yourself.
Go to thirdthursdaybookclub.com.
That is T-H-I-R-D, thirdthursdaybookclub.com.
We'll send you this month's book recommendation, some of the materials you will need to participate in the members-only discussion on Thursday, January 20th.
That is thirdthursdaybookclub.com.
I'm super pumped about this.
Like, I've been pushing this behind the scenes for a couple of years, and I can't wait to hang out with you guys and talk books.
It's my favorite thing to do.
Thirdthursdaybookclub.com to join me.
Also, as you know, The Daily Wire led the charge to sue the Biden administration over the vaccine mandates.
Now we've taken it all the way to the Supreme Court.
This Friday, the Supreme Court is going to convene to hear arguments on the legality and constitutionality of the mandate.
That means this week is a big week in our fight against medical tyranny.
We have over a million signatures on our Do Not Comply petition currently.
You need to help us.
Before Friday, help send the message loud and clear.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash do not comply right now.
We're counting on you to help us stop the VAX mandate.
You are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
All right, so the lockdown fanatics, they continue to fail to recognize reality.
So Max Boot, who's just completely lost his mind over Trump, right?
He used to be, like, some of his books, he had a book on guerrilla warfare that's actually quite good.
Some of his military histories are really interesting.
But Max Boot, unfortunately, has lost his ever-loving mind.
He has a piece today in the Washington Post, targeting yours truly, titled, Omicron doesn't vindicate right-wingers who refuse to take the coronavirus seriously.
So first of all, let me just start here.
Who didn't take the coronavirus seriously?
Like, who?
I am one of the foremost proponents of vaccination on the American right.
I have been since literally the day the vaccines were available and long before.
Even at the beginning of the pandemic, I suggested, actually, even all the way until vaccines were available, that masking up around people who were vulnerable was not a bad idea, and that if you were vulnerable, you should be masking up.
So I was not even anti-mask until the vaccines were available, then the vaccines were available, and then I said we were done.
Okay, well, that happens to be following the data.
According to Max Boot, this makes me some sort of anti-vax person who refused to take COVID seriously.
Because, of course, taking COVID seriously, according to the left, means doing everything they say you should do when they say you should do it.
That's what it means to take COVID seriously.
So here's Max Boot today.
When it comes to dealing with COVID-19, as with most things, I've been pretty cautious.
I dined outdoors last winter, shivering in the cold because indoor dining was too dangerous.
I held off going to theaters and concerts for a year.
I got my vaccination shots, three of them so far, as soon as they were available.
I always wear a mask when in stores.
So why did I risk a family trip to France over the holidays, despite record numbers of COVID cases in both France and the United States?
Because this isn't 2020 anymore.
While Omicron is more ubiquitous than previous versions of the coronavirus, it appears to be less severe.
It penetrates the upper airways, but not the lungs.
Moreover, booster shots provide strong protection against infection and even better protection against hospitalization.
Okay, that's fine.
I agree.
But here's where he goes wrong.
So he says...
Public health recommendations change as the nature of the threat changes.
Well, this is not right, okay?
The public health apparatus has not changed its recommendations as the threat change.
They've been bouncing around like a ping pong ball depending on what the Biden administration wants for them.
Sometimes it's lockdown, sometimes it's masking, sometimes it is no masking.
Sometimes the schools should be open, sometimes they should not be open.
Sometimes we should be deeply fearful of Omicron and we should count cases.
Sometimes we should stop counting the cases.
It all depends on what is politically convenient.
And at no point was there a suggestion by the public health establishment that maybe you should treat the virus differently based on your age or prior health condition, or that maybe you should just be left alone to make your own decisions.
Because that's all the government could do.
So anyway, here's Max Boot.
Again, he's going to blame me for the pandemic, which is good times.
He says, Host Ben Shapiro posted a lengthy Twitter thread claiming that once it became clear that COVID was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following, and went on to list various assertions such as the death rate is comparable to the flu, and we have to take into account societal needs, not just spread prevention, and we should not shut down society.
Shapiro triumphantly concluded that Omicron had vindicated those of us who, quote, have been saying all this for months, and most of it since May 2020.
We chose data and freedom.
You chose alarmism and unearned moral superiority.
Now, the reason that I said in the tweet thread that many of us have been saying this for months and most of it since May 2020 is because not all of it applied in May 2020, right?
It did not have the death rate of the flu in May 2020.
It does have the death rate of the flu once you are vaccinated.
And Omicron seems to have about the death rate of the flu generally, right?
Somewhere in that neighborhood.
But, says Max Boot, this is nonsense on stilt.
It would be more accurate to say that Shapiro and company chose populist ideology while the rest of us chose science.
It takes only minimal scientific literacy, after all, to realize that two very different versions of the same disease call for two very different responses.
Okay, so he's just building a straw man here and then burning it.
He says one of the main reasons that people haven't gotten vaccinated and worn masks regularly is so many people are listening to right-wing agitators like Ben Shapiro, who champion a misguided idea of medical freedom.
Shapiro's media company, The Daily Wire, even sued to stop President Biden's well-warranted vaccination mandate for companies with more than 100 employees.
Okay, so in other words, I'm bad because even though I recommended vaccinations, I've said that everyone who's an adult in my family has been vaxxed multiple times.
My wife's been boosted.
My parents have been boosted.
I've been vaxxed.
That doesn't matter, according to Max Boot, because after all, I'm not embracing the craziest version of his reality.
By the way, what does he actually recommend, Max Boot?
He says, our original alarm was not unwarranted.
We need more masks and vaccine mandates, including a vaccination requirement for domestic air travel.
Okay, so he says he's pro-data.
No, you're not.
You're not pro-data.
Show me, show me the necessity for vaccination requirements for domestic air travel.
One iota of data that this is either necessary or that it will be effective.
Show me that it will be effective in preventing spread and transmission.
Show me!
Show me also why you get to decide for somebody else whether they need to get vaccinated when this thing is still widely transmissible and you are not preventing the transmission by getting, you are not obliviating transmission by getting the vax.
Explain.
The bottom line is some people are wedded to the panic and they will never stop the panic because the panic makes them feel moral and better about themselves.
Now, in reality, there are those of us who continue to live in freedom.
So to my home state of Florida, Ron DeSantis continues to be a 2024 leading contender because the left cannot stop itself.
They just cannot stop themselves.
After Joe Biden fled Washington, D.C.
to Delaware, after announcing that it was up to the states to handle COVID, after spending his entire presidential campaign saying he would shut down COVID, he was like, peace out, guys.
And then he just sort of wobbled out to Delaware where he walked down the beach alone wearing a mask.
Well, he did that, and then the media didn't ask, where is Joe Biden going and why isn't he handling this?
Instead, they're like, where is Ron DeSantis?
Well, it turns out that Ron DeSantis was caring for his wife, that he was dealing with the fact that his wife had cancer and he was accompanying her to treatments.
This makes Ron DeSantis super bad.
Here was Ron DeSantis yesterday pointing out, yeah, I was going to my wife's cancer treatment.
Joe Biden was on a beach.
Why wasn't anybody asking where he was?
I think they're like, Oh my God, he's on vacation.
And I'm like, you know, and I just looked at my wife.
I'm like, you know, going to the hospital with you is not a vacation for you.
I know that.
And it's not a vacay.
I mean, this is something that as a husband, I think that I should be doing.
I've accompanied her to all her chemotherapy treatments and she's there for a long time.
I mean, you know, I'm there most of the time.
But it's a draining thing.
When she's done with it, you know, it's not something that's great to see.
And so I just think a lot of people, particularly people that have gone through breast cancer treatments, the notion that that would be considered a vacation I think is offensive to a lot of those folks.
Okay, so the media decided to target Ron DeSantis because they didn't want to target Joe Biden, of course.
And then, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, my home state, the best governor in America, He says, you know, I've noticed that a lot of you and your lockdown friends are coming down to Florida to vacation because you're a bunch of hypocritical, ridiculous people.
Here he is talking about that.
I mean, look, I think if you if I had a dollar for every lockdown politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two years, I'd be a pretty doggone wealthy man, let me tell you.
I mean, congresspeople, mayors, governors, I mean, you name it.
And it's interesting, though, the reception that some of these folks will get in Florida, because I think a lot of Floridians say, wait a minute, you're bashing us because we're not doing your draconian policies, and yet we're the first place you want to flee to, to basically to be able to enjoy life.
And so I'm not surprised to see that continue to happen.
By the way, Ron DeSantis, again, the chief of the Non-Panic Coalition.
Why don't we deal with this with treatment that saves lives and is useful?
That guy who's been pilloried by the media while Andrew Cuomo was upheld by the media.
He was killing all the olds when not grabbing ass in New York.
Ron DeSantis, again, he points out that it's Joe Biden who's now attempting to centralize all of the monoclonal antibodies.
It was Ron DeSantis who was talking up monoclonals months ago when the entire mainstream media was saying that he was a fool for doing so.
We have the ability and we will immediately turn on additional sites as soon as the federal government gives us a supply.
We will do an additional site here in Broward County.
We'll do an additional site in Miami-Dade.
We'll do an additional site in Palm Beach County.
We'll do an additional site in Central Florida.
And we also have the capacity to increase of the existing footprint, which we do have a good existing footprint.
And we have the ability to add five to ten more sites as the demand may be, but that is all contingent on the federal government sending the doses that we need.
OK, well, the federal government, Joe Biden, probably won't allow that, because if Joe Biden were to allow people to have the monoclonals, then then they might actually get treated and then we couldn't have a crisis anymore.
OK, so I want to make one final cultural note that I'd be remiss if I didn't point out.
OK, this story is just it.
It is so demonstrative of everything that the left has become.
It truly is an amazing thing.
So Patton Oswalt is a wild leftist crazy person.
He is a stand-up comic who is most famous for voicing The Rat in Ratatouille.
And he is still doing some stand-up kind of stuff.
Again, everything that he does is wildly to the left, Patton Oswalt.
So, on New Year's Eve, he was doing a comedy club and in the comedy club next door was Dave Chappelle.
And so he took a picture with Dave Chappelle.
And he put up a post on Instagram and said, finished my set at McCaw Hall and got a text from Dave Chappelle.
Come over to the arena.
He's performing it next door into a guest set.
Why not?
I waved goodbye to this hell year with a genius I started comedy with 34 years ago.
He works in arena like he's talking to one person and charming their skin off.
Anyway, I ended the year with a real friend and a deep laugh.
Can't ask for much more.
Oh, that's a nice way to end the year.
There's only one problem, of course.
Padden Oswalt is of the left, and Dave Chappelle has offended the alphabet people, as he likes to say.
He's offended the trans activists who have suggested that he's a very, very bad, evil, bad man for noting that men and women exist.
So, Patton Oswalt then had to reverse himself.
Because cowards don't get killed, they get their friends killed.
Cowards are the people who ensure that their friends are the ones thrown under the bus.
In fact, they help with throwing under the bus.
I hope that Dave Chappelle goes to war with Patton Oswalt.
I desperately hope it.
Because Patton Oswalt deserves it.
So he put up a picture that I just have to describe for you for a moment.
It is a picture of Patton Oswalt sitting in front of a yellow legal pad.
His headphones plugged into his phone, staring at himself in the mirror, or at least looking down, and then the pictures of him in a mirror because he's really, you know, he's doing some introspection.
So the utter narcissism, a picture of him with another image of him in the mirror, both of whom are staring down at the pad of paper where they're writing their forced apology, malice, I saw a friend I hadn't seen in a long time this New Year's Eve.
We've known each other since we're teens.
He's a fellow comedian, the funniest I've ever met.
I wanted to post a pic and an Instagram story about it, so I did.
The friend is Dave Chappelle.
34 years we've been friends.
He's refocused and refined ideas a lot of us took and settled about race and history and life on planet Earth and spun them around with a phrase or a punchline.
We've done bad and good gigs, open mics and TV tapings.
But we also 100% disagree about transgender rights and representation.
I support trans people's rights, anyone's rights, to live safely in the world as their fullest selves.
For all the things he's helped me evolve on, I'll always disagree with where he stands now on transgender issues.
But I also don't believe a seeker like him is done evolving, learning, You know someone that long, see the struggles and changes, it's impossible to cut them off.
Impossible not to be hopeful and open and cheer them on.
Also, I've been carrying a lot of guilt about friends I've cut off, who had views with which I couldn't agree, or changed in ways I couldn't live with.
Sometimes I wonder, did I and others cutting them off make them dig their heels in deeper, fuel their ignorance with a nitro boost of resentment and spite?
I'm an LGBTQ plus IA open bracket closed bracket tilde Little, little equals sign, ally.
I'm a loyal friend.
There's a friction in those traits that I need to reconcile myself and not let cause feels of betrayal in anyone else.
And I'm sorry, truly sorry, that I didn't consider the hurt this would cause or the depth of that hurt.
I've been messaging a lot on IG today, and the back and forth has really helped guide me in the writing of this.
I naively deleted a lot of posts in the comment thread, critical ones from LGBTQ writers and bleep posts by TERF anti-trans orcs looking for clicks and giggles.
I wanted a nice comment thread about to pick with my friend.
Oh, isn't that nice?
But he's not really talking about the growth of himself.
Most of that post is about how Dave Chappelle needs to grow and change.
And the only reason he's staying friends with Dave Chappelle is because he hopes that Dave Chappelle will one day come to embrace his own views.
So this is not him saying, I can embrace a friend who disagrees with me on this issue.
This is him saying the only reason I embrace this friend is because one day he will embrace my views on this issue, which, by the way, is the opposite of friendship.
Okay, if the idea is that you can only be friends with people who agree with you on everything, or people who you believe that you will eventually convince to agree with you on everything, that does not seem like somebody that should be friends with you.
Because what if ten years from now they look around and Dave Chappelle still feels the same way that he does today?
Because by the way, Dave Chappelle is correct.
Is Patton Oswalt then gonna cut him off?
Right now, his excuse is, I still think I can make a difference with Dave.
I can save Dave.
I can make Dave an LGBTQ+, I-A, open, carrot, British pound sign, ampersand, ally.
And because of that, I'm still gonna be friends with Dave.
But if he can't, well, then isn't he obligated to throw Dave under the bus?
And isn't that really what he's doing right now?
He's saying that the reason that he's friends with Dave is because he's superior to Dave.
This is so much of the virtue signaling, right?
It is all about, for people like Patton Oswalt, it is all about signaling to everyone that they are better than you.
He's so introspective.
He's so thoughtful.
He's so wonderful, right?
He's right on the issues, and he's broad-minded enough to know that his stupid friend doesn't believe what he believes, and that one day his stupid friend may come to believe what he believes.
And that's why he's sorry that he took a picture with that friend and didn't note in there that his friend also is a bigot, a vicious, wild bigot.
But he should still be friends with him.
Man, I hope that Dave Chappelle just wrecks him, because no one deserves it more than the rat man, Patton Oswalt.
My goodness.
Alrighty, we will be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out our newest podcast, Morning Wire.
Today's episode, they discuss U.S.
population growth reaching record lows.
Also, the reasons behind Joe Rogan joining the new social media site, Getter.
That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Make sure to tune in.
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Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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