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Jan. 25, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:20
Biden’s The Stupid SOB | Ep. 1419
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Time Text
Joe Biden calls Peter Doocy a stupid son of a bitch.
The U.S.
prepares to deploy 8,500 troops to Europe.
And the Supreme Court prepares to consider whether affirmative action is still constitutional.
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 yesterday, the President of the United States, he's having a bad day, as all of his days are lately.
He was considering the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Plus, the stock market was taking an absolute rollercoaster ride yesterday.
It tumbled dramatically, and then it rose again dramatically.
But according to Bloomberg.com, the stock market has never been down this much 16 trading days into a year.
The S&P 500 has dropped 11%, heading toward what would count as a correction so far this year.
That is the most on record at this juncture.
According to Bloomberg data that goes back over nine decades, Though drawdowns have been faster in prior years before quick rebounds, most notably in 2009.
The downturn comes as traders brace for the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy, and a surge in U.S.
Treasury yields weighs on the outlook for stocks.
A host of technical signals also suggest more volatility may be coming up ahead.
Rich Roche, the technical strategist at Evercore ISI, he says, the Fed pulled the punchbowl.
Liquidity has evaporated.
The S&P and NDX broke below their 200 DMA for the first time since the COVID outbreak.
A bear market down to the 3800 level is likely for the S&P 500, Ross said, given the dramatic erosion of the technical backdrop in conjunction with the highest inflation, tightest policy and most uncertain political and geopolitical condition in years.
So we went from this is going to be a boom time to we could be looking at a bear market really, really fast.
So Joe Biden, yesterday he came out.
And he spoke to the press.
And then, of course, the press were ushered out without being able to ask any serious questions of him.
Well, on their way out, the press do what they usually do, which is they start yelling questions to the president of the United States in the hopes that he responds.
And Peter Doocy caught a fish, right?
He threw his line in the water and he caught a fish.
This time, Joe Biden did respond to him, but it was on a hot mic.
And here's what it sounded like.
What do you think of President Donald Trump?
Do you think he plays good for political?
That's a great asset.
More inflation.
What a stupid son of a bitch.
Okay, so the actual question that Ducey asked was, do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?
And Biden responded, it's a great asset.
More inflation.
What a stupid son of a bitch.
He said that about Peter Ducey.
A few things here that are kind of hilarious.
First of all, I don't care very much about presidents saying things that we all say about one another, except they happen to get caught on a mic.
As somebody who's on a mic half of the day, I'm sure that there's audio of me saying things on a hot mic that I really wouldn't want to be public, so I really don't care too much about this.
However, the hypocrisy of the media here is astonishing.
Astonishing!
Because you'll remember that Donald Trump once called a reporter A son of a bitch, right, at a rally.
This is in September of 2017.
of 2017. And Chris Hayes posted, today the president called American citizens who express their political views, sons of bitches. And then yesterday, after this happened with Peter Doocy, he tweeted, literal LOL. Or how about Brian Stelter from CNN, the watchdog of the media.
He said, calling a journalist a son of a bitch, it was wrong when Trump was just a candidate.
It's even worse now that he's president because he did it again in March of 2018.
So what did he have to say yesterday?
Quote, at the end of a Biden photo op, when reporters shouted cues hoping he'd respond, Fox's Peter Doocy asked, do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?
Biden deadpanned, it's a great asset, more inflation, what a stupid son of a bitch.
So it was totally fine with Brian Stelter this time around.
Meanwhile, you'll recall that in 2020, Donald Trump called somebody a name.
And here was Joe Biden's tweet.
Trump deflects legitimate questions with attacks.
He bullies members of the press instead of taking responsibility for his failures.
His efforts to undermine public confidence in the integrity of reporting violate our core values and threaten our very system of government.
It was all pearl clutching all the way down when it was Trump.
But when it's Biden, he's just a genial old fellow who sometimes gets a little bit codgery, you know.
NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, who, by the way, is the incoming president of the White House Correspondents Association, she said yesterday on the air about Biden, quote, Oh, so it's OK now.
Got it.
Because it was Joe Biden.
So it's OK.
Remember, Joe Biden said just a couple of months ago that he would fire anybody who is disrespectful to other reporters.
That was after one of his one of his press secretaries, T.J.
Ducklow, called up a reporter and started yelling at her.
So here is Biden just a few months back.
I'm not joking when I say this.
If you're ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone.
I promise you I will fire you on the spot.
Well, sadly, we cannot fire him on the spot.
That is too bad.
Apparently, Biden did call Peter Doocy on Monday evening.
And Doocy said, after years of clips of the president and me mixing it up on the campaign trail and during the transition here at the White House, within about an hour of that exchange, he called my cell phone.
He said, it's nothing personal, pal.
We went back and forth and we were talking about just kind of moving forward.
I made sure to tell him I'm always going to try to ask something different than what everybody else is asking.
And he said, you got to.
And that's a quote from the president.
So I'll keep doing it.
And when asked if Biden actually apologized, Ducey said, he cleared the air and I appreciated it.
We had a nice call.
And that is not an apology.
So Joe Biden did not in fact call to apologize for calling Peter Ducey a son of a bitch.
He just said it's nothing personal.
By the way, it did make it into the White House transcript, which is one of the great transcripts ad in American history.
That is right there in the White House transcript.
It's like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, basically.
President Biden.
Now, again, what this comes back to is a basic perception of politics that the left has just gotten wrong, and many on the right got it wrong, too, which is that Donald Trump was the murderer of American politics, not the coroner.
I've said this a thousand times.
Donald Trump was elected president because he stumbled upon the body of American politics.
It was still warm, and there was a knife directly in its back, and then he crouched over it and looked at the knife in the back, and everybody went, he did it!
It was him!
He must have murdered politics.
Nope.
It was like this before.
It'll be like this afterward.
Again, Joe Biden is not all that different from Donald Trump.
He's just more used to Washington, D.C.
The belief that Donald Trump was a difference in kind in terms of being rude and nasty to people is ridiculous.
And Barack Obama was a pretty prickly fellow.
And Joe Biden has been routinely prickly with people for years.
You remember that on the campaign trail, he literally called one of his constituents fat.
And there's a Bernie Sanders supporter who is asking him questions.
He goes, look, fat, you're never, you're never.
Push-up contest right now, fat man.
You want to do it, fat guy?
It was just, he's a ridiculous person.
But again, it's the media's double standard here that is truly astonishing.
When Joe Biden does it, it is perfectly appropriate and totally cool.
And when it is anybody else who is Republican, then it's because they're bad and mean and it's the death of democracy and democracy is at stake and the free press is about to be trampled upon.
It's amazing how many reporters made a mint off of the period in which the free press was supposedly in existential danger.
Meanwhile, you've got Joe Biden holding a press conference once every 300 days, and then yelling at anybody who asks him a question, but the press is definitely not in danger from Joe Biden.
Okay, meanwhile...
The situation continues to deteriorate over in Eastern Europe.
According to the UK Daily Mail, President Biden said on Monday that he and European leaders had total unanimity about the situation in Ukraine, although he declined to provide more details on what they agreed upon.
Now, that is a switch in language from Joe Biden, who is a wild incompetent.
Remember that just a few days ago, he had a press conference in which he announced that the Europeans were completely split over what to do if Russia were to just walk into Eastern Ukraine.
Which is true.
The Germans are very conciliatory toward the Russians because the Russians are shipping them natural gas.
The French are very conciliatory towards the Russians because the French are the French.
So none of that is a major surprise.
However, that was sort of something you're supposed to keep under wraps.
You're not supposed to say publicly that NATO was split over Putin's action because that gives him room to operate.
So yesterday, the Pentagon announced that the United States would be alerting 8,500 U.S.
troops To be prepared to deploy, not to Ukraine, to surrounding countries.
Now, here's the thing.
Vladimir Putin isn't going to invade the surrounding countries.
He's not invading Latvia.
He's not invading Lithuania or Estonia or Bulgaria.
Any of the countries that are actual members of NATO, he's not going to invade.
All he wants to do is shift Ukraine from being an independent country into being a country in the Russian sphere of influence.
That is what he desires.
Ukraine was not about to enter NATO, by the way.
Ukraine tried to enter NATO back in 2008, 2009.
That didn't happen.
And then there was the Orange Revolution in 2014.
And that ended with the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, who was the then Ukrainian president.
He was sort of a Russian plant, and he was replaced by a more Western-friendly government, but it was never on the table that Ukraine was about to enter NATO.
So when Putin says that he wants a guarantee that Ukraine will never be able to enter NATO, what he is really saying is we want Ukraine back in our sphere of influence, and that means us occupying certain parts of Ukraine and putting such heavy pressure on Ukraine to kowtow to our demands that they just do so.
Secretary Austin has placed a range of units in the United States on a heightened preparedness to deploy, which increases our readiness to provide forces if NATO should activate the NRF, or if other situations develop.
All told, The number of forces that the Secretary has placed on heightened alert comes up to about 8,500 personnel.
So that is the response is we're going to put more personnel in the surrounding areas, but without any actual ability to stop Putin from going into Ukraine.
I know there are a lot of people on the right who have been saying that they don't care whether Putin goes into Ukraine.
Here's the point.
I don't really care about Ukraine per se either, except that Ukraine is a country that has been trending toward the West.
By every available poll, this is a country that is trending toward the West, which is a good thing.
And arresting countries away from the sphere of influence of a nefarious dictator like Vladimir Putin is definitely a good thing.
If you don't stop nefarious dictators early, they tend to get worse.
They do not tend to get better.
This belief system that you can sort of treat every foreign policy issue in isolation as opposed to part of a grand strategy is negated by the fact that our enemies don't treat it like that.
Our enemies are not like every single foreign policy decision is separate from every other foreign policy decision as part of a grand strategy.
Russia is extremely aggressive on its borders because it wishes to reestablish the USSR's sphere of interest.
Yeah, that's the goal.
And China is doing the same thing.
So, when we allow for vacuums to occur, then those vacuums are filled.
And then, all those countries that we dislike, all the countries that, for example, unleash pandemics on the globe that kill several million people, and attempt to twist American corporations in their favor, those regimes get stronger, like China.
Regimes like Russia start to exert more pressure and influence inside Europe, which makes it more difficult for us to do business with Europe to stop China, for example.
All of these issues are interlinked.
The attempt to disconnect all foreign policy issues is an exercise in silliness and failure.
In any case, Joe Biden led a meeting with leaders from the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK.
It lasted about 90 minutes.
Biden spoke from the White House's Situation Room.
It was closed to press, but the White House posted a photo of it to its social media accounts.
Apparently, the group discussed their joint efforts to deter further Russian aggression against Ukraine, including preparations to impose massive consequences and severe economic costs on Russia for such actions, as well as to reinforce security on NATO's eastern flank.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the leaders agreed there would be severe cost to Russia if Moscow invaded Ukraine.
He said, we agree any further aggression by Russia against Ukraine will have severe costs.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said, should a further Russian incursion into Ukraine happen, allies must enact swift retributive responses, including an unprecedented package of sanctions and that leaders resolve to continue coordinating closely on any such response.
She added, the leaders agreed on the importance of international unity in the face of growing Russian hostility.
The prime minister underlined the real human cost of any Russian aggression and the need to take all steps within our power to prevent that outcome.
They agreed the international community should not tolerate any action which undermines Ukrainian sovereignty.
The Prime Minister outlined the steps the UK has taken to increase Ukraine's defensive capacity.
He emphasized the need to support Ukraine's defenses against the full spectrum of malign Russian activity.
Apparently, Emmanuel Macron, the French President, will be speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in the coming days.
And apparently, President Macron expressed his deep concern over the situation and the need to work collectively to de-escalate it quickly.
The de-escalation must involve strong and credible warnings to Russia, requiring constant coordination among European partners and allies, as well as a stepped-up dialogue with Russia, which we are in the process of conducting, said the readout of the call from the Elysee Palace.
So, that is where things stand right now.
Hopefully, this is enough to deter the Russians from walking into Ukraine.
Right now, apparently, 50,000 troops are being considered for deployment into Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, all of which are NATO countries.
There are already 35,000 US troops stationed in Germany.
There are already about 12,500 troops stationed in Italy.
And of course, there are Russian troops in Belarus that are going to take part in exercises beginning February 10th.
And there are a bunch of Russian troops that are stationed in Crimea as well, about 30,000 troops stationed illegally in Crimea, as well as the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol.
So, You know, the controversy over Ukraine continues to marinate, and we will obviously keep an eye on it.
The people of Ukraine, for their part, are preparing for the possibility of a significant incursion by the Russians.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Meanwhile, over in Ukraine, the normal Ukrainian citizens are preparing their kids for the possibility of an actual open battle According to the Wall Street Journal, computer whiz Danilo Khovshin has taught his children to handle a pistol.
Confectioner Roman Nabashnyak is training colleagues to run his business so he can focus on fighting Russians.
Bar owner Vitaly Kreschenko keeps his gas tank full in case he needs to get out fast.
Ukraine has struggled to maintain a sense of stability since it's fully established itself as a sovereign country in 1991.
They've been at war since 2014.
But with 100,000 Russian troops gathering nearby, threatening Europe's biggest land war since the 1940s, people there say something different this time.
It became kind of normal to say, what, again?
Said Mr. Khovzhun, 46 years old.
On the other hand, I tend to be panicky.
I think it's going to be a nightmare, like Syria.
That's the only thing Russians can do.
So the theory is that this turns into like a full-scale guerrilla war, that if the Russians wander across the border, and the Ukrainian army is unable to hold them back, people will basically start doing guerrilla attacks on Russian forces, and it will end up looking like Afghanistan, except right in the middle of Europe.
Which does have the possibility for serious spillover, because obviously the Ukrainian rebels would be backed by outside forces, the Russians could respond in kind, it could get really, really ugly.
All of this is because Europe has failed to stop the Russians earlier, always and forever.
Ukrainian officials have in recent days urged people to remain calm, fearing Russia could try to take advantage of panic.
Officials complain that U.S.
warnings that Russia appears ready to invade will provoke alarm.
Prominent Ukrainians are posting advice on Facebook with a hashtag in Ukrainian, meaning hashtag WeAreReady, including a child psychologist describing how to prepare kids for emergencies like bombings and fires, and how to explain war without traumatizing young ones.
So far this has been working.
There have been no bank runs.
The currency has only lost a little value against the U.S.
dollar.
However, everybody is sort of prepared for things to get much, much uglier in Ukraine in the very near future.
Meanwhile, it's just worthwhile noting here that all of this really was precipitated by the fact that Joe Biden decided to pull out of Afghanistan for no apparent reason.
When, again, when the West creates a vacuum, the West's enemies decide to move.
Jen Psaki is trying to call that Russian propaganda.
It's not Russian propaganda, it's reality.
Here's Jen Psaki.
The president ended a 20-year war in Afghanistan, something he had talked about consistently doing for some time as he was running for president and even before then.
So what I would say to that is that sounds like the old Russian propaganda playbook, something we've talked about in the past, and I'd encourage anyone to be mindful of that.
Everything I don't like is Russian propaganda, seems to be the formula from this White House.
Meanwhile, by the way, ISIS is back, so if there's anything else that the Biden administration can set on fire, they're avidly looking to do so.
According to the New York Times, fighting between a Kurdish-led militia backed by the United States and ISIS militants spread on Tuesday to neighborhoods around an embattled prison in northeastern Syria that is at the center of the biggest confrontation between the American military and ISIS in three years.
The U.S.
military joined the fight on Monday to back its allies in the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces against ISIS, days after the militant group attacked a makeshift prison in the city of Hasakah in an attempt to free ISIS fighters held there.
The U.S.
has launched airstrikes and provided intelligence, and ground troops and Bradley fighting vehicles are helping to cordon off the prison.
ISIS now controls about one-quarter of the prison and is holding hostages, including child detainees.
The U.S.-led coalition said the fight has become the biggest battle between the U.S.
and ISIS since the group lost the last piece of territory it controlled in Syria in 2019.
So that's good news.
ISIS is also on the move.
I mean, is there anything else that Joe Biden can screw up around here?
I mean, seriously, he's just looking... I mean, the answer is yes, Taiwan, right?
The answer is always yes.
There's always more things for Joe Biden to screw up.
But if you're America's enemies, at this point, why wouldn't you move?
Seriously, what is the convincing case for not moving?
You have a split America on the domestic front.
You have a president of the United States who has not taken the measures necessary to deter our enemies from acting.
You have the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians holding joint naval exercises.
Why exactly would they not move if they could?
By the way, this is having predictable impacts as well, some good, some bad.
The predictable impacts are that countries now considering whether to enter the Western sphere of influence or whether to join with China or Russia are having to seriously consider because the West is just not a reliable ally.
It's also true that you're starting to see non-aligned countries beginning to sort of come together in their own bloc, right?
That's what you're seeing with the Abraham Accords.
As countries begin to see that the United States is making overtures to Iran, all the other countries are like, well, we better ally among ourselves because otherwise there is not much that we can do in the face of Iranian aggression.
Alrighty, in just a second, we'll get to the continued panic over Omicron from the left.
It's an actual mindset.
It's an actual psychotic mindset for some people now.
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Okay, meanwhile, the left will not let go of COVID panic.
They won't let go of it.
It does not matter, by the way, that the WHO is essentially saying that we may have reached the end of this pandemic, effectively speaking.
It does not matter.
The reason it does not matter is because people have gotten invested in this thing now.
They cannot allow it to end.
They have to just, no matter what, they have to continue it.
For a perfect example, check out the reaction to Barry Weiss and Bill Maher.
So, Barry Weiss is, I would say, a centrist liberal.
She's somebody who has a lot of liberal ideas about social policy as well as social welfare spending, for example.
She tends to be much more hawkish on foreign policy.
But when it comes to COVID, Barry has had an awakening, right?
Barry used to be, like a lot of people living in big cities, very COVID fearful.
And Barry came out over the weekend and she was like, uh, no, I'm done with this, right?
My life, I've already been vaccinated.
Everybody I know has Omicron.
I'm not doing this any longer.
And people went nuts.
According to Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, Weiss described making an all-out effort to avoid COVID early on, and then we were told you get the vaccine.
You get the vaccine, you get back to normal.
And we haven't gotten back to normal, and it's ridiculous at this point.
And the audience was cheering, right?
Because this is true.
Even folks on the left are tired of this.
They are sick of this.
Bill Maher said the same thing.
But the left cannot accept this as an answer.
And so Whoopi Goldberg yesterday, she got very angry at Bill Maher for pointing out that many people have been living normally in the United States for a year at this point.
Here's Whoopi Goldberg slapping a Bill Maher.
Nobody on the planet really wants to go through this.
This is not something we're doing because it's sexually gratifying.
This is what we're doing to protect our families.
And you don't have to do it, but stay away from everybody.
Because if you're the one who's not paying attention, and you're coughing and sneezing, then stay out of the public, man.
Nobody wants this.
I don't want it.
And I think he's forgetting that people are still at risk who cannot get vaccinated.
People who can't get it.
Little kids under the age of five.
Yeah.
Or people with health conditions.
How dare you be so flippant, man?
How dare you be so flippant?
Well, I have a question.
Do vaccines work or do they not work to prevent hospitalization and death?
OK, so do we all wear masks and stay home like forever when we are asymptomatic from the flu?
Is that is that how this works?
Typically speaking, But that is what Whoopi Goldberg is asking of everybody.
And yes, there is a perverse sense from a lot of these folks that they are enjoying this.
Yes, I'm not saying it is sexually gratifying, but it is mentally and emotionally gratifying to a lot of people to be living like this.
It makes them feel morally superior.
It makes them feel like they are part of a common cause.
Well, you're not part of a common cause because you're still going to work, Whoopi Goldberg.
You're still seeing people.
You're still going out and doing things.
Like, all of the people who are claiming that they're still walking around masked and that they're in no close contact with other people, I think the vast majority of them are lying.
And because the fact is that they don't want to live like this on a personal level, but they want everybody else to live like this and they want to be able to lecture everybody else.
They want this to be the new normal.
They want this to be the new permanent.
Some of them are even clearer than Whoopi Goldberg.
Sarah Haines, also of The View.
She literally says, she might not feel comfortable ever again without a mask.
And therefore, you must mask.
Hey, not she's got her own weird hang-ups about she's gonna wear a mask the rest of her life.
It's that you have to wear a mask the rest of your life because she has a weird hang-up.
Here we go.
I think there's a prudence we've learned with the masks, the hand sanitizing, that kind of like 9-11 with flying is always going to be here now.
There's a new normal.
In the beginning, post 9-11, people didn't want to fly.
And the security measures felt like, how do we do this?
And now it's the norm.
I think some of the things we've learned in this pandemic are going to stay the same.
I may never ride a subway again without a mask.
I may never go indoors to big crowds and ever feel comfortable without a mask.
And that's up to me to do that.
That is up to you to do that, but that's not what you want.
You want it to be up to everybody to do that.
You know, this is the natural health consequence of the entirely ridiculous worldview that your feelings get to decide everybody else's thoughts.
And this is a big thing on the left.
There's a philosophy.
That's been termed by a philosopher named Robert Bella, expressive individualism.
And the idea is that the true you is what lives inside your feelings.
It is not how you react to society or to the people around you.
The true you is your feelings.
And because the true you is your feelings, anytime your feelings are affected by anyone else, this is an attack on you.
And we see this mostly when it comes to sexual proclivities or gender proclivities, that we are all supposed to reflect your opinion of you.
You call yourself a woman and you're a man.
We're all supposed to do that so that you feel better on the inside.
Otherwise, it's an attack on you.
But now they're taking this to the next level with health.
So now you have Sarah Haines saying, I feel uncomfortable in public without wearing a mask, but you refuse to go along with me.
That's an attack on me.
Well, Sarah Haines seems to be a healthy human being, right?
She seems to have been vaccinated 97 times.
So what exactly is she worried about?
And the answer is that as long as she feels that her health might be affected, And this means that we are all supposed to act in conjunction with that.
By the way, the reason that everybody is getting uptight now, when they weren't all uptight about taking these measures at the beginning of the pandemic, because here's the deal.
You can go back and listen.
All the way at the beginning of the pandemic, I said masks might be necessary.
I said that social distancing is probably a good idea when we didn't know how deadly this was and who it affected.
I was with my parents all the time at the beginning of the pandemic.
My parents are 65, so that means that we were basically bubbled.
We were taking a lot of precautions as well.
And then the data became clear.
And then we got the vaccines, which made things much clearer.
And then we got Omicron, which made things even clearer than that.
If you didn't change your opinion based on the data, Then that's because you didn't care about the data, and these people don't care about the data.
So Michelle Goldberg over at the New York Times, she says, the desperate desire to get back to normal is understandable.
What's odd is seeing the absence of normality as a political betrayal instead of an epidemiological curveball.
But it is a political betrayal.
Because the political players in our society said, we will follow the data and then we will give you best guidance.
But they're not doing that.
They're doing precisely the opposite.
They're pretending that Omicron doesn't evade vaccination in terms of infection.
They're still pretending that boosters are going to stop Omicron.
Not gonna happen.
They're still pretending that masks are going to stop Omicron.
Not gonna happen.
None of that crap is happening.
But according to Michelle Goldberg, the reason things aren't normal isn't that power-mad public health officials went back on their promises.
It's because a new coronavirus variant emerged that overwhelmed hospitals and threw schools and many industries into chaos.
And because not everyone has the luxury of being insouciant about infection.
Okay, the vast majority of people who are, quote-unquote, having the luxury of being insouciant about infection, okay, that's the vast majority of the population because they all got vaccinated, had prior immunity from having gotten this thing already, or they're healthy to begin with.
But here's the real key to Michelle Goldberg's piece over at the New York Times.
This is the key.
She says, Even with Omicron around, there's a fair bit of normality available, especially if you don't have kids.
Here in New York City, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theaters are generally open, though shows are closing at the last minute when cast members fall ill.
You can have a party or go on vacation.
What you can't do is force other people, whose vulnerabilities might be greater than your own, to agree with your risk assessments and join you in moving on while the pandemic still rages.
But you've moved on, Michelle Goldberg.
You're, from what I understand, a single lady living in New York.
Normality exists for the people who are trying to cram this down.
Listen to, again, her description of what life is like in New York.
There's normality available if you don't have kids.
Because you can still go to restaurants and bars and nightclubs and theaters if you're vaccinated and you don't have... What about all those people who do have kids?
What about all those people with prior immunity?
Again, this is disconnected from the data, but they refuse to accept that they've disconnected from the data, specifically because they enjoy pushing this.
They enjoy the unearned sense of moral superiority.
Here's Mehdi Hassan doing the same thing, ripping into Barry Weiss.
We haven't gotten back to normal.
And it's ridiculous at this point.
Oh, it's ridiculous, is it?
On the same day that Weiss and Ma were complaining about our obsessive focus on COVID-19 and urging us all to move on from the pandemic, 3,506 Americans died from COVID.
That's a higher death toll than on 9-11.
In fact, that's the highest COVID death toll since last winter and one of the deadliest days of the pandemic so far.
And it isn't just deaths.
Hospitals are full.
Three out of four of them nationwide are under high or extreme stress.
In Utah, they're hospitalising unvaccinated under-5s, including babies.
And look, the people who should be complaining right now are our overworked and burned-out healthcare workers.
But no, it's never them moaning or whinging about the pandemic.
It's the Barry Weiss's and Bill Maher's and Tucker Carlson's of this world.
Does he have a solution?
Does he have any solution?
Of course he doesn't have a solution, because there's no solution!
It's hit everywhere, it's spiked, we're already on the downside of the spike, and death trails infection.
The reason that our death toll is high right now is not because Omicron is extremely deadly, it's because it's extremely infectious, and it evades all of the things that you guys are using as your mitigating factors.
We've seen massive spikes in places including New York, including Vermont, like some of the most vaccinated places on the planet.
But again, if they just try to scare you, then the idea is that if you refuse to be scared, or if you try to actually define your own risk, with reference to your own particular health scenario, then you are the bad guy.
You're the bad guy.
Because these are the experts, and they know what's best for you.
And unless things are imposed on you, you are evil.
Everything not compulsory is forbidden.
Everything Not Compulsory is Forbidden should be the theme song for these guys.
Jen Psaki did the same thing yesterday.
She said public health officials, not parents, make the best decisions for their kids.
Really?
Name my kids, Jen.
Like seriously, do you know my kids?
You don't know my kids.
You don't know their health conditions.
You don't know how many times they've had the flu in the past couple of years.
You don't know if they've had Omicron.
You don't know any of that stuff.
But apparently she and Dr. Fauci are going to define for my kids what is best for my kids.
Insane.
Here's Jen Psaki doing this again.
Who does the president think knows best for students?
School board members or parents?
Well, the president believes that public health officials have the best guidance on what we can all do to protect ourselves.
Okay, but that's not the question.
The question is whether public health officials give their guidance and then parents get to assess for their kids what is right.
I've wanted my kids unmasked in school since the beginning of the year.
You know why?
Because a vast number of kids are not dying from this disease.
Nearly all the kids who are getting this are completely fine.
Thank God.
But again, we're supposed to listen to Dr. Fauci about all of this, and if you refuse to do this, it's because you're bad and babies are being hospitalized or something, according to Medihazon.
By the way, Dr. Fauci is still out there trying to push his own brand.
A dead giveaway as to whether someone is an asshat or not is whether, in all of their interviews, they have a great picture of themselves behind them.
And in half of Fauci's interviews, he does.
Here was Dr. Fauci yesterday being asked about the missed messaging coming from the public health establishment, whether this has undercut the credibility of the public health establishment.
Here he was yesterday.
Information and communication around boosters has been really problematic.
Even today, the pivoting of communication around what it means to be vaccinated, that is really difficult for people and it's causing people to not go get the booster.
How do you fix that?
Well, you try to be clear and concise and articulate.
Let me try.
You think that's what's happened so far?
Well, I'm not going to comment on that.
Of course he's not going to comment on that.
The one thing he won't do is walk away, right?
He is completely blown out of his own credibility by taking every available position during this pandemic, but he's definitely not going to walk away.
That's all Anthony Fauci knows.
I mean, why should he?
He's earning the best salary in the entire federal government.
This is too important.
This is the kind of thing that I've devoted my entire career, certainly over the last 40 plus years, in public health, science, and medicine, and we are in a crisis right now, and there's no chance I'm going to walk away from this.
Of course not.
Why would he?
Again, that's a big check he's taken home.
Also, it would completely undermine his entire history of claiming to be the great savior when it comes to medicine.
By the way, we still have our public health officials trying to cram down on parents what they ought to do about masking school kids, even though the data are very clear and they are in.
According to the Washington Post, seven school boards in Virginia have now sued to stop Governor Glenn Youngkin's mask optional order on the day it takes effect.
The school boards, led by the Board for Fairfax County Public Schools, the largest, most prominent district in the state, argue the Yunkins order violates the Virginia Constitution.
They filed a lawsuit asking for an immediate injunction barring enforcement of the order, which seeks to leave masking decisions to parents, contravening federal health guidance and the masking mandates most Virginia school districts have maintained throughout the COVID pandemic.
So they just will not let this go, despite the fact that they have no data, no data to back their case.
Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to the Supreme Court accepting a very controversial case on school race-based admissions.
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Alrighty, we'll get to the Supreme Court now considering whether schools can simply basically bar Asians and Jews.
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Alrighty, so meanwhile, the Supreme Court has now said that it will decide whether to prohibit the use of race conscious admissions in higher education.
According to the Wall Street Journal, it's agreeing to consider challenges to policies at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
The court, in a brief written order on Monday, said it would consider a pair of challenges by a group called Students for Fair Admissions.
It's been led by the conservative legal activist Edward Blum.
They sued both schools on the same day in 2014.
The lawsuit against Harvard alleged that the school uses quota-like racial balancing tactics that artificially raise the standards of admission for Asian-American applicants in violation of federal civil rights law.
The challengers alleged Asians were admitted at a lower rate than whites, even though their overall academic scores were better.
Harvard rejected the claims of discrimination, said it only considered race in a flexible way as one factor among many in building diverse classes of students.
Well, why is it even being considered as a factor at all?
Couldn't you just look at, for example, life challenges without looking at race?
Why is race considered a life challenge in the United States explicitly?
And why is it even a matter of inquiry for schools to determine that your race is a relevant factor in whether you ought to be admitted to a school?
I mean, it is a pretty overt racism when students get in with 200 points less on the SATs than this Asian student over here, just because this Asian student happens to be Asian.
This is what they used to do to Jews at colleges in the United States.
Now they're doing it to Asians in the United States.
It's absurd on its face.
It is wild racism from the left.
And yet, the left continues to double down on this, because obviously, Asians are a supposed model minority, according to the left, whereas black Americans are indubitably put upon.
And therefore, black Americans only need a 1300 or a 1200 to get into Harvard, whereas Asians need a 19,000 to get on, they need to get a 19,000 on their SATs in order to get into Harvard.
Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department actually supported that lawsuit.
The Biden-era department abandoned that position and offered support for Harvard in a legal brief last month, urging the Supreme Court to turn away the challenge.
The lawsuit against the University of North Carolina was similar to the Harvard allegations, though it added claims that the flagship public university in Chapel Hill violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.
So, with a private school, the challenge is going to be that it violates the Civil Rights Act.
With a public school, the challenge is going to be that it violates the 14th Amendment.
The challengers allege that the school unlawfully factored students' race into the admissions process, favoring Black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants, and even caused them harm by inviting them into classrooms for which they weren't prepared.
Which is true.
The Thernstroms Who used to write for The Atlantic, they documented very well the phenomenon of misalignment in which students are admitted to schools that they actually are not prepared for and then they tend to flunk out of those schools at a higher rate.
UNC in court papers says it has made progress on diversity but continues to face challenges in admitting underrepresented minorities.
Now the truth is that Supreme Court precedent here has been ridiculous because Supreme Court said that for some reason diversity is in and of itself a public good.
I'm not sure why.
They never really explained why diversity is a public good.
If they said that a wide range of human experiences is worthwhile to pursue in student body settings, that might be better.
But when they say racial diversity itself is some sort of public good, there's no reason why that should be.
Also, the diversity standards tend to be wildly inaccurate.
So, for example, if you have a classroom full of black students, this is considered diverse.
If you have an entire classroom filled with Asian students, it's considered not diverse enough.
Nobody can explain why.
Both are monochrome, but only one type of monochrome is diverse, according to the left.
Here is Jen Psaki, however, trying to defend the Biden administration, pushing overt racism against Asian Americans.
We strongly believe this administration in the benefits of diversity in higher education and we take very seriously our commitment to advancing equity and equal opportunity for historically underserved populations.
Okay, but they're going to have to explain why this is capable of violating constitutional precepts.
Now, the fact the Supreme Court is even considering it again is really interesting because in 2016, the court ruled that the University of Texas at Austin's process passed constitutional muster despite the fact that it took race into account.
That was an absurd ruling.
It was a 4-3 court, and Justice Anthony Kennedy was the deciding justice in that particular case.
He joined the left, of course, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, saying universities are defined by intangible qualities which make for greatness.
He said considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics.
Well, they seem pretty tangible when you're barring Asians.
Just to be fair, it seems like kind of tangible to the Asian student who scored a 1580 on his SAT then got barred because he happened to be Asian.
But this is something that the left loves to push.
This is one of their favorite things.
By the way, they don't just want it to apply at colleges because nothing that starts in college ends in college for the left.
The Washington Post editorial board has an entire piece today about how every company in America should be forced to quote-unquote diversify its boardroom.
Quote, the Securities and Exchange Commission last summer approved a proposal by NASDAQ to require that most boards of directors among the exchange's approximately 3,000 companies include at least one woman as well as at least one person of color and or one LGBTQ person.
Nasdaq's initiatives was groundbreaking for U.S.
Securities Exchange.
It's not very novel in other contexts.
California already had laws mandating the public companies headquartered in-state have women, and by 2023, members of underrepresented communities on their boards.
Many European countries require more gender diversity than the Nasdaq even envisions.
But this is good, according to the Washington Post.
It's very encouraging, because more progress is needed.
Luckily, there are plenty of incentives for firms to make such strides, and not just political and public pressure.
Okay, so here's the deal.
These companies, all they do is they find some sort of placeholder, and they just add seats to the board, and then they put that placeholder on the board to ensure that they are not sued by the government.
But the reality, of course, is that businesses are going to continue to run.
It's an absurdity on its face, and it's very, very silly.
But again, it is unearned moral superiority of the left that is the deciding factor here, even when that means active discrimination against more qualified applicants in college or against members of the board who ought to be there as opposed to being leveraged onto the board by the government.
The government has no business in this area.
And by the way, neither does NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange.
It's ridiculous.
The solution the companies are going to find is to have a useless board member that they add and pay a little bit of a salary, or never go public in the first place.
That will be the actual answer to this problem.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
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On today's episode, international tensions escalate over Ukraine, Sarah Palin faces off against the New York Times in court, and activist groups seek to unmask charitable donations.
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