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Feb. 7, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:34

They Don’t Care About Rogan’s Sins. They Care About Destroying Him. | Ep. 1428

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	The next round of attacks on Joe Rogan launches with a compendium video of him saying the N-word, the Olympics begins with NBC playing defense for China, and Stacey Abrams thinks masks are great for kids, but bad for her.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	All righty, so the next round of attacks have now begun on Joe Rogan because this is the way that it works, gang.
	When there's blood in the water, the sharks begin to gather.
	So never chum the waters.
	This all started a few weeks ago, of course, when the left decided that Joe Rogan was very bad.
	Now, let's be real about this.
	The left has believed that Joe Rogan is very bad ever since he said that he would vote for Donald Trump before he would vote for Joe Biden.
	He said that Biden was not alive.
	And this set off the left.
	And ever since then, the left has been looking for some sort of excuse, some sort of hook to hang their let's get rid of Rogan hat upon.
	And Rogan signed this giant deal with Spotify last year.
	It looked like he was going to be a mainstay in the so-called mainstream media for years to come, because Spotify is a major publicly traded company.
	Well, they found their excuse when he had on Dr. Robert Malone, who went on the air and talked about the shortcomings of the mRNA vaccines as he saw them.
	And this was used as evidence that Joe Rogan was a vax denier.
	And then when Joe Rogan got COVID and he was not vaxed and he used ivermectin, the entire media declared that Joe Rogan had been taking horse dewormer as opposed to, you know, the human medicine, ivermectin, which has been used for decades.
	And this started to snowball.
	And it really reached its culmination a couple of weeks ago, at least people thought, when he had on Jordan Peterson and they made a bunch of headlines.
	And right after that, there was a concerted attempt by a wide variety of voices in media to de-platform Joe Rogan from Spotify by saying that he had engaged in COVID misinformation.
	Now, here's the thing.
	The timing was odd, because Joe's been saying the same stuff about the COVID vaccines since the COVID vaccines were available.
	He's been saying for a very long time that if you're unhealthy, if you're old, you probably should get the vaccine, and if you're young and you're healthy, then you probably shouldn't get the vaccine.
	That's Joe's perspective.
	That's not my perspective.
	I believe that it is heavily age-striated, that pretty much everybody has a better shot of getting seriously ill from the disease than from the vaccine.
	This stops applying when you are younger and younger.
	And when you are more and more healthy.
	OK, but my disagreements with Joe about the vaccine aside, which we talked about on his show, because Joe has on a lot of people who disagree with him, including Sanjay Gupta from CNN, who talked about the vaccines with him.
	All of this kind of came to a head in mid to late January because the Spotify stock started to tank.
	And then people saw their opportunity, which was he had on Jordan Peterson.
	There were a few bad headlines that came out of that for Joe because people started taking him and Jordan out of context.
	And then it was like, OK, let's all pile on.
	Let's get Joe Rogan off the air.
	And so they immediately start with the Joe Rogan is disseminating misinformation.
	And this is what has caused hundreds of thousands of people to die now.
	There is a problem with this theory.
	That problem is that Joe Biden is the President of the United States.
	And the CDC is controlled by Rochelle Walensky.
	And the NIH is controlled by Dr. Fauci.
	And all of these people have enormous amounts of weight in public opinion.
	Plus, you have all of the network media, right?
	You have ABC, NBC, CBS, you have CNN, you have MSNBC, you have the New York Times, you have the Washington Post, you have the LA Times, and I don't have to go through the compendium of the entire mainstream media all repeating the same messages about COVID, which is, do whatever the CDC says, no matter how little sense it makes.
	But Joe Rogan became sort of the focal point of this.
	And so they got the blood in the water and Joe released a video where he essentially said, I don't know what you mean by misinformation, since the CDC was saying things that it later had to reject as overtly untrue later on in the pandemic.
	But with that said, I'll be more careful about my balance of guests.
	If I have somebody controversial on, then I'll try and balance that out with somebody who is less controversial on these sorts of topics.
	And this, of course, did not appease anyone because you had a few artists from Spotify who decided you need to pull my catalog or pull Joe Rogan.
	And Spotify had sunk at least $100 million into this contract with Joe.
	So Spotify was now stuck between a rock and a hard place.
	And here's the thing.
	Once the hard left grasps that a corporation is stuck in the In the bear trap created by its monetary pecuniary needs, keeping Joe Rogan and the hard left, which is now driving all sorts of rage against Spotify, up to and including artists pulling their music.
	They now have the corporation exactly where they want it.
	Now, Joe had a couple of choices there.
	Joe's choices included, tell everybody to go stuff it.
	And let me try and be a nice guy and work with Spotify in order to get them out of this situation.
	And Joe opted for the second because he wanted to try and get Spotify out of it.
	They'd made a contract with him.
	He felt they were acting in good faith.
	And so he issued his original statement, which was taken as an apology.
	It was kind of a quasi apology, but not really.
	But this was never going to be enough because the minute that Spotify started signifying that it was going to treat Joe Rogan as a sort of un-person, the minute that Spotify said, we are going to take your concerns on the left very seriously.
	We're not just going to say, listen, we as a platform, we put up all sorts of different types of podcasts ranging from Harry and Meghan all the way to Joe Rogan.
	I've got all sorts of different material and you're just going to have to deal with that.
	And if you don't like it, you can stuff it.
	If they had said that, this would have been over before it began.
	But Spotify, led by a guy named Daniel Ek, decided not to do that.
	Instead, Spotify decided that they were going to appease the crowd.
	They were going to start issuing warnings before episodes of Joe's show.
	They were going to have a talk with Joe behind the scenes.
	Okay, so once the blood was in the water, it was only a matter of time until we got to round two.
	Round two was Joe Rogan is a comedian.
	Joe Rogan has been doing comedy for 20 years.
	He's been in the public eye for three decades, Joe Rogan.
	And all the way from Fear Factor to UFC to now.
	His podcast has been going for years and years and years at this point.
	He's got thousands of episodes that are available in various media.
	And so what the left likes to do when they have a public figure who has a lot of taped material is they go through and they find bad old quotes, bad old quotes.
	And then they put a compendium together in the worst possible way.
	And they put out that compendium in an attempt to get the person to apologize.
	Because understand the goal here is not to make Joe Rogan apologize.
	The goal here is that if Joe Rogan apologizes, then he has justified their accusations in their mind.
	And now they can just browbeat these corporations into doing anything that they want.
	Alrighty, coming up.
	Leftist groups have now put out a compendium hit piece of Joe Rogan saying the N-word.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	So there's a group that puts out...
	It's one of these kind of dark money, left-wing super PAC groups.
	And their entire goal in life is to destroy voices they don't like.
	And again, the real reason that all these people don't like Joe Rogan in the end is because Joe Rogan is not an overt left-winger who mirrors all of their particular perspectives.
	He's somebody who will host people like me and people like Jordan Peterson.
	He's a person who will talk to everybody from Chappelle to me.
	Joe Rogan is a very heterodox kind of guy.
	He says he would vote for Bernie Sanders, but he wouldn't vote for Joe Biden, but he might vote for Donald Trump.
	That's the kind of guy that Joe is.
	By the way, also a super nice guy and full disclosure, Joe and I are friends.
	So the basic idea here.
	is that once you release a compendium and you get the guy to apologize, then you cudgel the corporation into either dumping him or into making concessions.
	And whatever concessions they make are then used as the predicate for the next round.
	So if Spotify thinks that this is the last round of attacks on Joe Rogan, they got another thing coming.
	Within 24 hours, I guarantee there'll be another compendium of bad old things Joe has said.
	Because it turns out that when people make jokes 20 years ago, it is not hard at all to find things that they have said.
	And string them together in a compendium and put it out there and we look at it and everybody kind of goes...
	Well, E is not an excuse for de-platforming somebody.
	If you didn't have a problem with anything Joe Rogan said 10 years ago, if you said nothing about it 10 years ago, shut the F up now, because we all understand what this is, which is an attempt to de-platform Rogan.
	The entire goal here is to un-person Rogan.
	We all get that.
	This is not a well-motivated attempt to change Joe Rogan's thinking.
	It's an attempt to destroy Joe Rogan because he's too powerful a voice, because he has tens of millions of listeners every week.
	That's why.
	Okay, so, what happens if this group drops a compendium of Joe Rogan saying the N-word?
	Now, it's not a compendium of Joe Rogan calling black people the N-word.
	That's not what he's doing.
	It's a compendium of Joe Rogan saying the N-word while reading things like rap lyrics.
	Now, this has been a widely debated concept in American life for quite a while.
	To pretend this has not been sort of a controversial and widely debated concept is very silly.
	So I, as an individual who's on media all the time, I never say the N-word ever.
	I will never say the N-word because I know the rules.
	And I also know the deliberate way in which the left takes people out of context.
	They've been doing this for years.
	If you use the n-word in order to condemn people using the n-word, or if you say people should not use the word bleep, but you say the n-word, they will cancel you for doing that.
	They literally did this to the science reporter at the New York Times.
	He was discussing the various ways you should and should not use the n-word in public conversation.
	And they literally canned him, the COVID reporter for the New York Times.
	Who'd been nominated for the Pulitzer, I believe.
	They canned him because he had said it, like, five years ago, in the context of condemning it.
	I remember them doing the same thing to Dr. Laura way back when.
	She said the N-word on air.
	But it was to talk about why you should not use the N-word.
	The N-word is so toxic in American life.
	There have been people who have lost their jobs or been suspended for using a completely unrelated word, which is spelled N-I-G-G-A-R-D-L-Y.
	The word means stingy.
	Niggardly means stingy and it has nothing to do with the n-word.
	Completely unrelated.
	People have lost their job for that because you should know not to use a word that sounds sort of like the n-word.
	That's how sensitive this word is, but there has been this widely fraught debate over whether if you are saying lyrics in a song, you can use the n-word if you are white.
	Now, to me, this is the stupidest thing in the world.
	If there's a lyric in a song and people are allowed to repeat it, everybody should be allowed to repeat the lyric.
	Obviously, it's not meant as a disparaging term about black people if it's being used in a lyric of a song.
	Fortunately for me, I don't listen to that type of music, nor do I like that type of music.
	In fact, I've controversially stated I don't think that rap is music at all.
	But put my views of rap aside, The question as to who gets to say the n-word while quoting rap lyrics has been sort of a fraught topic for quite a while.
	But what Joe did is he read that word while he was talking about comedy routines and while he was talking about various rap lyrics.
	They strung all this together in a compendium and then they released it.
	And it comes out on Twitter, and of course the entire left says, ah, Joe Rogan, he's a racist.
	Now this has been their pitch ever since this started.
	Because for the left, anything bad falls into the category of racist.
	So they don't like Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan doesn't like Biden.
	And therefore, Joe Rogan is bad.
	And Joe Rogan platforms people like me, or he talks to people like Eric Weinstein, or he talks to people like Dave Rubin, or he talks to Jordan Peters.
	So he's bad.
	That means that he's secretly racist.
	Nicole Hannah-Jones had said this last week.
	No evidence whatsoever provided, Joe Rogan's a racist.
	Alrighty, we'll get to Joe Rogan's apology, which came out yesterday, in just one second.
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	And so, Joe then came out and he issued an apology for using the n-word.
	And again, I think this is coming, frankly, from a good place.
	Because I think that if you haven't been through this war, which I have many, many times because I'm a conservative, and so this has been my life for the last several years, is that anything I say is picked apart six ways from Sunday and then used as an excuse to try and cudgel me online.
	So I don't care about it anymore.
	It just bounces off.
	I've been doing it for too long.
	But if you're Joe Rogan, and you have friends on all sides of the political aisle, and you're really not conservative, I mean, Joe is not a conservative guy.
	He has conservative leanings on particular issues, but he's definitely not, like, a down-the-line Republican in any way, shape, or form.
	I mean, he himself, he's like, I'm kind of a dope-smoking libertarian slash socialist anarcho-socialist capitalist.
	Like, he's all over the place, politically.
	So Joe's not used to this.
	Which I get.
	And if you're not used to it, if you've never been through it, folks, you've never been through it.
	It is brutal.
	If all of a sudden there's just a tsunami of hatred coming toward you, and people labeling you something you know that you aren't, and people labeling Joe Rogan en masse a racist, and he knows he's not, then you feel like you need to make an apology because you think that these people are coming in good faith.
	But they're not coming in good faith.
	They're coming for your neck.
	So here is what Joe Rogan had to say.
	It's a very unusual word, but it's not my word to use.
	I'm well aware of that now, but for years I used it in that manner.
	I never used it to be racist because I'm not racist, but whenever you're in a situation where you have to say, I'm not racist, you f***ed up.
	And I clearly have f***ed up.
	And that's my intention to express myself in this video.
	To say... Stop it right there.
	So first of all, I don't buy this whole thing that the word doesn't belong to me so I can't use the word.
	Either words belong to everybody or they belong to nobody.
	I really don't buy the rule that certain people get to use this word but other people don't get to use this word.
	I think that's very silly.
	Frankly, I think we should get rid of the word entirely in the English language if nobody is allowed to use it.
	It is of no value if only one group can use it and another group cannot use it.
	But put that aside.
	Again, you can see, because it's coming out of Joe's mouth, that what Joe is saying here is he is taking it as a critique of him.
	He's saying, I'm not racist, but if you think I'm racist, then I've done something wrong, which of course is not true.
	Nobody thinks he's a racist.
	The people coming after him don't think he's racist.
	They think they've got their hooks in him, and they think they have their hooks in Spotify.
	Joe's making the mistake here of acting in good faith when the people who are dealing with him hate his guts and want him to die, at least career-wise.
	And so here's the conclusion of the statement.
	They — there's nothing I can do to take that back.
	I wish I could.
	Obviously, that's not possible.
	I do hope that, if anything, that this can be a teachable moment.
	OK, so, of course, this is never, ever about what Rogan actually said.
	If anybody had been bothered by anything that he said 10 years ago, it's not like racism was not an issue in America 10 years ago.
	Barack Obama was president of the United States 10 years ago.
	He'd been president for several years 10 years ago.
	So these clips, I mean, it's not as though we had never thought about racism until the last five minutes.
	That's not true.
	Nobody objected at the time because nobody found it offensive at the time.
	They're retroactively finding it offensive because they wish to find it offensive because they wish to oust him.
	That's what they actually are interested in doing.
	Okay, so other artists have started because they want to see Rogan go away.
	Other artists, in order to make a name for themselves, they've started dropping out.
	Many of these artists are sort of second-rate artists or has-beens.
	It doesn't seem like Taylor Swift dumped off Spotify because she's making too much money from Spotify.
	But you have seen people like India Airey, who I've never even heard of, who said that she was going to drop off from Spotify unless they got rid of Rogan.
	And Airey said that Rogan shouldn't even be uttering the word.
	Don't even say it under any context.
	Don't say it.
	That's where I stand.
	I've always stood there.
	Eh.
	Okay, well, whatever.
	But again, this is not about anything remotely resembling an attempt to make Joe Rogan a better person or make him understand.
	It's not a teachable moment.
	They're not seeking to teach.
	They're seeking to beat the living hell out of you.
	That's what this is about.
	And we all know the rules here.
	The rules are that if you give the left what it wants, and you become part of the mob, then they leave you alone.
	And if you're anything, in any way, at odds with them, then not.
	So, Dwayne Johnson, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, this is pathetic.
	So, last week, after Joe Rogan came out and kind of quasi-apologized, not really, but kind of, with regard to COVID material, he came out and he said, this is a good statement, brother.
	Okay, and then, folks on the left started hitting The Rock with this video.
	And he immediately backtracked.
	He immediately backtracked, suggesting that he was upset that he had, and now he was more fully aware.
	He said I was not aware of his n-word use prior to my comments.
	He said it was a learning moment.
	And by the way, this is how it works in Hollywood.
	If you defend anybody, anybody, who you are quote-unquote friends with, or anybody who you're even friendly with, or even an acquaintance with, they will come after you so hard.
	I've told you this story before because it was relevant in the news a couple of years ago when Mark Duplass, who's an indie director, he came to our offices.
	And he wanted to know more about the Second Amendment.
	So I gave him sort of an education from a conservative view on the Second Amendment.
	And before he left, I said, don't bother tweeting about it or writing about it because people will attack you and then you'll feel compelled to run away.
	And he's like, no, no, no, I'll be fine.
	Two weeks later, he issued a statement online saying, I disagree with Ben Shapiro about pretty much everything, but he's a nice guy.
	He got hit with a huge wave of hatred.
	He immediately put up a statement basically calling me a racist and a transphobe.
	That's how it works in Hollywood.
	So Dwayne The Rock Johnson did this.
	Said it was a learning moment for him.
	Instead of him just saying, listen, Joe Rogan is a comedian, he's used that words in a bunch of different contexts, I know him, he's not a racist, end of story.
	Which is what you would do if you were friends with a person, if you had any level, any modicum of respect or decency with regard to other people, as opposed to saving your own skin, this is what you would do.
	Instead, he ran like a screaming little girl, did Dwayne The Rock Johnson, away from his friend, Joe Rogan.
	But here's the problem.
	Everybody who's in media has got this stuff in their past.
	I mean, here's The Rock, not all that long ago, when he was with WWE, talking about how John Cena was a quote-unquote bloated transvestite Wonder Woman.
	But you're not going to see the left come after The Rock for this.
	Because they don't care about what The Rock had to say.
	The Rock's on their side right now.
	He's busy canceling Joe Rogan.
	If you become one of the cancel culture mob, they leave you alone.
	And everybody knows the incentive structure.
	Here's The Rock, like, not that long ago, doing stuff that's as bad or worse than anything Rogan said.
	Like a bloated transvestite Wonder Woman, ready to fight crime.
	Pew pew pew!
	Pew!
	Pew!
	I mean, The Rock has been deleting stuff from, like, 2011, in which he calls transgender people trannies.
	He deleted that.
	He's cleansing his tweets because he knows what's coming for him also if he refuses to go along with the left.
	But here's the rule, always and forever, there are no rules.
	It is just power.
	This is the clearest thing.
	The left has no rules, they only have power.
	And the power is the power to destroy you and destroy your career unless you do everything they want you to do.
	Which is why it's fine that Joe Biden used to say the N-word in particular contexts.
	I mean, here's Joe Biden, the President of the United States, using the N-word.
	Just, you know, way back when.
	In a confidential portion of your staff memo, they brought to your attention the allegation that important legislators in defeating the Nunes plan in the basement said, quote, we already have an a*** mayor and we don't need any more a*** big shots.
	Okay, so he's quoting somebody saying the n-word, right?
	It's not Joe Biden calling somebody black n-word.
	Right, that's exactly, exactly what Joe Rogan is now under fire for doing.
	But Joe Biden is one of the good ones, so it's totally fine.
	So Spotify is now in a complete state of disarray.
	They've pulled more than 100 episodes of Rogan's show.
	Apparently 113 episodes of the Joe Rogan experience, many of them older and recorded well before the COVID-19 stuff, had been yanked.
	Why?
	Because now they're just trying to pull down anything that could be remotely used by the left as a cudgel.
	But it doesn't matter, guys.
	They'll find it.
	Don't worry.
	They'll find it.
	Because now the left has been empowered to destroy your company.
	You will either become a tool in their arsenal or you will be destroyed.
	And only you can cancel you in this culture.
	If you are the head of Spotify, you know what could have ended all of this?
	The first day when this stuff came out, you said, we hired Joe Rogan to be an iconoclastic heterodox voice.
	We have lots of voices on this platform.
	Many who disagree with Joe Rogan on COVID.
	We're not going to remove anyone.
	Done.
	That's the end of the story.
	Done.
	You guys want to go form your own streaming service where it's only wild lefts?
	Enjoy.
	But that's not what we do here at Spotify.
	If Daniel Ek had done that over at Spotify, this would have all been over within the first five seconds.
	You know how I know this?
	Because we do this all the time at Daily Wire.
	All the time.
	Because people are on our ass every single day about getting rid of this host or that host.
	I disagree with many of our own hosts on a lot of these topics, but guess what?
	Tough.
	Deal with it.
	It's a free country.
	People aren't allowed to disagree with me.
	They're allowed to remain on my platform, for goodness sake.
	Like, this whole thing is an absurdity, but we'll get to how Spotify is basically cutting its own wrists here in just one second, because they really are.
	Already coming up, Spotify has now removed 113 episodes of Rogan's show, plus the CEO, Daniel Ek, put out a pathetic, mewling letter to the woke employees.
	Always the worst move an employer can make.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, you know, I have a lot going on in my life.
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	So 113 episodes of Rogan's show have now been yanked.
	According to the New York Post, among the missing shows are those featuring well-known conservatives, far-right pundits, or conspiracy theorists, including Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Michael Malice, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as comedians like Rich Voss and Little Esther and Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey.
	They're just sort of going through and they're going to remove anything that is remotely controversial, which, again, makes Rogan's show not worth listening to.
	The thing about Rogan that makes his show really interesting is that he had on controversial people, and then he allows them to talk.
	And very often they make fools of themselves.
	But he allows them to express their opinions.
	He's not there to cudgel them into the CNN box.
	This is not just about Brian Stelter having somebody on and then forcing them to repeat his nostrums.
	He actually lets them talk, which is why his show is very popular.
	I mean, he has them on for like three, four hours.
	I went on Joe's show where I had to cut because we had to have like a pee break because it had been so long since we'd actually like gone outside and seen daylight.
	That's how long Joe lets you talk on his show.
	Upon his return to the platform, Rogan slammed a 10 p.m.
	curfew which had been enacted in Montreal last month as COVID infection surged, calling the restrictions wild.
	But here is the thing again, Spotify is not going to stop.
	So Spotify then put out a statement.
	This is late last night.
	They put out a full statement.
	The full memo says this.
	This is from the CEO, Daniel Ek.
	And this is just pathetic, mewling garbage.
	Spotify team, there are no words I can say to adequately convey how deeply sorry I am for the way the Joe Rogan experience controversy continues to impact each of you.
	Not only are some of Joe Rogan's comments incredibly hurtful, I want to make clear they do not represent the values of this company.
	I know this situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated, and unheard.
	Okay, you know what would happen to my employees if they came to me and they said, you know what?
	Some of this podcast host's comments are making me feel drained, frustrated, and unheard.
	I'd say, that's nice.
	Go to work.
	Really, like, I'm sorry you feel that way.
	I can disagree or I cannot disagree.
	I don't undercut the hosts on this platform.
	Go have a cup of coffee and get back to work.
	Because your feelings are of no consequence.
	This is a workplace.
	This is not a kindergarten.
	And any employee who feels that this is this, it's a free, it's a platform for a podcast.
	The hell are you talking about?
	If you don't like Joe Rogan's podcast, I have a super easy solution for you.
	Just turn that knob.
	You're done.
	But here's the thing.
	Joe has big ratings because people want to listen to him.
	And that's what's making you angry.
	It's not what he said that's making you angry.
	It's that other people are listening to what he said that is making you angry.
	The fact that the CEO is now kowtowing to the 21-year-old woke employees means the death of his company.
	I'm never going to kowtow to my 21-year-old interns here at The Daily Wire because I'm not a moron, but apparently they are over at Spotify.
	The letter continues, I think it's important you're aware we've had conversations with Joe and his team about some of the content in his show, including his history of using some racially insensitive language.
	Following these discussions and his own reflections, he chose to remove a number of episodes from Spotify.
	He also issued his own apology over the weekend.
	Okay, but is that going to be enough for these folks?
	Of course not.
	Of course not.
	While I strongly condemn what Joe has said, says Daniel Ek, and I agree with his decision to remove past episodes from our platform, I realize some will want more.
	I want to make one point very clear.
	I do not believe silencing Joe is the answer.
	Right?
	Getting rid of all his old episodes and asking him to apologize, that's the answer.
	And it'll probably stop here.
	Probably you won't get more market.
	Probably this is where the... Or alternatively, when you keep feeding the alligator your toes, eventually it goes for a leg.
	He says we should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voice is a slippery slope.
	Looking at the issue more broadly, it's critical thinking and open debate that powers real and necessary progress.
	Another criticism I continue to hear from many of you is it's not just about the Joe Rogan experience on Spotify.
	It comes down to our direct relationship with him.
	In last week's Town Hall, I outlined to you we are not a publisher of JRE.
	But perception due to our exclusive license implies otherwise.
	So I've been wrestling with how this perception squares with our values.
	So what he's saying is we're a platform, we have a licensing deal with Joe Rogan, and we don't actually produce his show.
	Which of course is true.
	Because if we believe in having an open platform as a core value of the company, we must also believe in elevating all types of creators, including those from underrepresented communities and a diversity of backgrounds.
	We've been doing a great deal of work in this area already, but I think we can do even more.
	Ah, here's where we get the actual blackmail check.
	And to the left is like, we're coming for your neck.
	And Spotify CEO is like, if I sign you this $100 million check, will you leave me alone?
	Perhaps.
	You know, this is precisely the wrong way to address people who are after your company and trying to destroy you.
	The right way is to flip them the bird, and then use every dollar of that $100 million to destroy them.
	You turn this into ransom with Mel Gibson.
	You say, if there are groups that are out to destroy me, let's uncover them, let's find out who they are, where their money is coming from, and why they are so all-fired intent on controlling the content disseminated via this platform.
	That's what you actually do.
	That's how CEO Daniel Ek is doing.
	He says, I am committed to an incremental investment of $100 million for the licensing, development and marketing of music, artists and songwriters and audio content from historically marginalized groups.
	OK, now here's the funny part.
	This is already going to happen, right?
	I mean, he's going to spend $100 million on content.
	And a lot of that content was going to be produced by black and Hispanic artists.
	Of course, because a huge amount of art in this country comes from Black and Hispanic artists, particularly in the music realm.
	So, like, he's not actually pledging any money.
	He's pretending to pledge money.
	But let's be real about this.
	When he says, I'm going to spend $100 million licensing content from Black and Hispanic artists.
	Yeah, that's called, like, your entire R&B channel, dude.
	Like, we get it.
	It's a pretty funny attempt to bait and switch, but I think everybody with a brain is going to see it.
	He says, this will dramatically increase our efforts in these areas.
	While some might want us to pursue a different path, I believe more speech on more issues can be highly effective in improving the status quo and enhancing the conversation altogether.
	And then he gets into the I feel your feelings, the Bill Clinton I feel your feelings nonsense.
	He says, I deeply regret you are carrying so much of this burden.
	I also want to be transparent in setting the expectation that in order to achieve our goal of becoming the global audio platform, these kinds of disputes will be inevitable.
	For me, I come back to centering on our mission of unlocking the potential of human creativity and enabling more than a billion people to enjoy the work of what we think will be more than 50 million creators.
	That mission makes these clashes worth the effort.
	I've told you several times over the last week, says Daniel Ek, but I think it's critical we listen carefully to one another and consider how we can and should do better.
	Of course, better is never defined.
	Better just means whatever the left tells me to do, I will do some of it until it actually crosses my bottom line too hard.
	I've spent this time having lots of conversations with people inside and outside of Spotify.
	Some have been supportive, while others have been incredibly hard.
	All of them have made me think.
	One of the things I am thinking about is what additional steps we can take to further balance creator expression with user safety.
	Ah, user safety.
	There it is.
	And so there's always a few euphemisms.
	User safety means I got offended.
	Joe Rogan provides no actual risk of harm to humans.
	You are not harmed by listening to Joe Rogan.
	You may not like what you hear.
	You may disagree with what you hear.
	Maybe you take his advice to your own detriment.
	But you're not harmed by listening to Joe Rogan because those are called words.
	And words are things people say, not things that people do.
	User safety.
	It's always used as the excuse for quashing speech, because of course, if speech threatens safety, speech is an action, which means it can be met with an equal and opposite reaction.
	Daniel X says, I've asked our teams to expand the number of outside experts we consult with on these efforts and look forward to sharing more details.
	Well, congratulations to Kara Swisher and company for getting an outside consulting gig for a hundred grand with Spotify, because that's what's coming next.
	It says your passion for this company and our mission has made a difference in the lives of so many listeners and creators around the world.
	I hope you won't lose sight of that.
	It's that ability to focus and improve Spotify, even on some of our toughest days, that has helped us build the platform we have.
	We have a clear opportunity to learn and grow from this challenge.
	I'm ready to meet it head on.
	I know it's difficult to have these conversations play out so publicly.
	I continue to encourage you to reach out to your leaders, HR partners, or me directly if you need support or resources for yourself or your team.
	Okay, so this means I'm willing to accept all blackmail demands.
	Okay, so here is the thing that's hilarious about all of this.
	If they think that it ends right now, they are out of their damn minds.
	You let them have you.
	You let it happen, Daniel Ek over at Spotify, and it's about to get worse.
	Because if you think there ain't going to be a compendium of Joe saying stuff about women in his jokes, you're wrong.
	It will be out within the next 24 hours, I'm sure.
	Or about gay people, or about Asian people, or about Jews, because he's a comedian.
	He says lots of stuff on his show.
	And if a simple compendium video online is enough to drive your company into the insanity of embracing the policy prescriptions of the people who want to destroy you, I don't have to tell you, you got Stockholm Syndrome, and you deserve whatever you get as a company, and Joe will survive.
	Honestly, the best thing that can happen to Joe Rogan at this point is that he stops saying sorry for things, and then Spotify decides that they have to fire him because the left is so angry about it, and they tank their stock by half.
	They have to pay Joe Rogan a bag full of cash, and he goes somewhere else and takes his entire audience with him.
	The people who end up dying on this hill, it's not going to be Rogan.
	It's going to be Spotify because they're cowards.
	Because they are deep and abiding cowards.
	The Wall Street Journal has an entire piece on the crisis at Spotify talking about Neil Young and other artists and all this.
	Chief Executive Daniel X said in an interview, we were too slow to respond.
	The company had been looking for ways to respond to the open letter before Young's demands surfaced.
	He added saying, that's on me.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, This week, Spotify reported it had 406 million monthly active users up 18% from the year before.
	Its advertising revenue was up 40%, but they're stock-tanked anyway.
	So, it's going to get worse, in all likelihood, because now, if you're a second-rate artist and you want to make Spotify pay, just threaten them.
	One Spotify executive says, part of Spotify's proposition is get all your audio in one place.
	If you have big artists who aren't available, if Drake or Taylor Swift pulls off, it's a real problem for the proposition.
	And that's right.
	That's right.
	If any one of these artists decides to get their woke bona fides in order and dumps off Spotify, then the bear trap closes completely, right?
	You got Rogan on the one hand earning you a lot of money, and then you have a big artist, not Neil Young, a has-been, but like a big artist, crunching them on the other.
	And then Spotify is in trouble.
	And this is what the media obviously want.
	The most absurd attack, the media will not stop.
	The media want Rogan gone.
	They want Rogan gone specifically because he has competition to them and he's destroying them in the ratings.
	So this is why you have Brian Stelter attacking Joe Rogan.
	Here's Brian Stelter on CNN over the weekend.
	He is now apologizing, and we're going to find out if that's enough for Spotify, the company that has an exclusive distribution deal with him.
	Jim, this is all coming to light because of the recent controversy about anti-vaccine rhetoric on Rogan's podcast.
	Some artists decided to quit the service.
	One of them, India Auri, pointed out this video, this compilation video, and pointed out that the language Rogan has used around race in the past is just as or maybe even more problematic than his rhetoric about vaccines.
	We know Rogan's show is known for its fresh and frank and unvarnished conversations.
	That's why his fans like the show.
	But this compilation, this use of the n-word so many times in the past, may be too much even for some of his defenders to bear.
	Okay, no.
	Actually, only you guys.
	Because you were never his defenders.
	His defenders know what Joe's show is, and that Joe is a comedian, that Joe says things that are edgy.
	Only you are upset.
	The kind of pearl grasping here, the pearl clutching.
	Oh, Joe Rogan says things that offend me.
	Oh, well, he must go, says Brian Stelter.
	Same thing with Jim Acosta.
	Well, here's the thing.
	The real reason that Acosta and Stelter are pissed is because their ratings are lower than dirt.
	Watching grass grow is more entertaining than watching Jim Acosta.
	At least, presumably, Jeffrey Toobin was pleasuring himself to a visual of somebody else.
	Jim Acosta, every day on air, just goes for it in the mirror.
	Here is Jim Acosta going after it again.
	You and I both know, that compilation right there, which he has admitted to is, you know, authentic.
	That would be enough to put anybody out of a job.
	I mean, to me, it seems untenable to have that kind of video surface, that kind of compilation surface, and keep one's job.
	Okay, so I just wish to note one thing.
	These are all people on CNN who are still defending Jeff Zucker, who is nailing his top executive, who is probably going to be the new head of CNN until he was ousted.
	Meanwhile, both of them were working with Andrew Cuomo to do ops for Andrew Cuomo.
	Jeff Zucker may not have launched this network, but he revived it.
	He made it relevant again.
	because he said things that offend Brian Stolter and Jim Acosta.
	Oh, oh, he said the N word while quoting Rappler.
	Oh, but here's Don Lemon defending Jeff Zucker, who is nailing his top executive while getting Andrew Cuomo on the air with his brother, Chris, and then getting Chris fired over it.
	It's unbelievable. Here's Don Lemon.
	Jeff Zucker may not have launched this network, but he revived it.
	He made it relevant again.
	He steadied it for the last decade.
	He left us with a very good blueprint going forward.
	So for all of you at home watching, you should know that I and my colleagues will continue to do exactly what he would want us to do, and that is to do what I'm going to do right now.
	Deliver the news, no matter what it is, without fear or favor.
	So thank you, Jeff Zucker, for everything you did for everyone at this network, and for what you did to the entire country, for the entire country.
	For the entire country, what Jeff Zucker did.
	Incredible.
	Incredible.
	Again, the standards only apply if you are a part of their team.
	If you are not part of their team, there are no standards.
	There's just you getting the bleep kicked out of you.
	Alrighty, coming up, Margaret Sullivan from the Washington Post.
	She has the worst piece on Joe Rogan I have seen yet.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	In just one second, I have to bring you the best piece on Rogan of the weekend.
	It really is amazing.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
	First, this Thursday, February 10th, will be the world premiere of Shudden, DailyWire's first original film, 9 p.m.
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	You have to go check it out.
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	I just watched a cut of it.
	It's pretty spectacular.
	It's about a mother, young mother, trapped by her violent ex and his meth addict friend, and she has to save her kids.
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	It's a very scary, intense movie, and it does have the values that you think are important, because that's what we do here at Daily Wire.
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	The film premieres this Thursday, February 10th at 9 p.m.
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	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	And while the best piece of the day is from the Washington Post, because it really shows how far the left is all just about power.
	It is not about anything remotely resembling truth or grace or decency.
	Margaret Sullivan, who used to be the publisher of the New York Times, meaning it was her job, she's like the ombudsman over there, it was her job to ensure, she's the public editor, that they acted with moral rigor at the New York Times.
	She wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled, I'm disgusted by Joe Rogan's weak apology.
	This is before the N-word stuff.
	She says, my former colleague's death at 47 makes it worse.
	So the implication seems to be that Joe Rogan somehow killed her 47-year-old colleague.
	She says, quote, what I didn't hear from Rogan was any remorse that he might have done harm when he held forth about his own bogus belief that healthy young people don't need to get vaccinated. Or when he failed to challenge a guest who promised that the drug Ivermectin would extinguish the virus altogether. Or when he allowed another guest to spout theories on how Americans are essentially being hypnotized about the COVID by the media and comparing the situation to Nazi Germany. He didn't address the 270 medical professionals whose powerful open letter warned about one of Rogan's episodes that mass misinformation events of this scale have
	extraordinarily dangerous ramifications. Worse, I heard no apologies to the people who took to heart what they heard endangering themselves or their loved ones.
	To my ears, Rogan sounded glib, narcissistic, and clueless.
	And Spotify is even worse.
	Its failure to take any meaningful responsibility, other than adding a few disclaimers, is all too reminiscent of the way Facebook has dodged accountability.
	Remember, this is part of the left-wing playbook.
	The left-wing playbook is, any platform that allows my enemies to be on it must be destroyed, must be cuddled into submission.
	It's amazing.
	So Facebook stock dropped the other day like a lot and it dropped because TikTok has a great algorithm and because Facebook may have market saturation at this point and because Apple is screwing with the ad algorithm, right?
	So Facebook's revenue dropped and therefore their total stock price dropped.
	Kevin Roos and Brian Stelter, by the way, started tweeting out the most shared links from Facebook in their news feed, which many of them were from my Facebook page.
	The suggestion being that their revenue was dropping because people were reading articles from the Daily Wire.
	Yeah, no, you morons.
	That's not what this is about.
	But of course, it's not moronic.
	What they are attempting to do is make these companies just be CNN or The New York Times or make Spotify into The Washington Post, as edited by Margaret Sullivan.
	But here's the punchline.
	She says, Rogan's non-apology made me furious.
	Probably because I've been spending a lot of time this week thinking about Miguel Rodriguez, a former colleague of mine who died of COVID last week.
	Miggy, as everyone calls him, was only 47, a beloved and well-respected reporter at the Buffalo News where he covered high school sports.
	As one news colleague wrote this week, he was a ubiquitous community presence with a booming laugh that would fill a room, even when that room was a high school gymnasium.
	He was overweight and asthmatic.
	In other words, very much at risk.
	And he was unvaccinated.
	I don't know for sure whether getting vaccination and booster shots would have saved Miggy's life, and I have no idea whether he had ever listened to Joe Rogan's podcast.
	But I have talked to many of his co-workers and friends over the last week, and at some length to his father.
	What I've gleaned is that friends had been pushing him to get vaccinated for months, but he and his family hadn't been convinced it was wise or necessary.
	So, in other words, this random guy, who was very overweight and asthmatic, A person that Joe Rogan, by the way, would have told to get vaccinated, because Joe Rogan has been saying only young, healthy people shouldn't.
	That's Joe's take, not mine.
	Again, for the censors over at Big Tech.
	This overweight, asthmatic person who Joe Rogan would not have told not to get a vaccine, and she has no evidence to ever listen to an episode of Joe Rogan, died, according to Margaret Sullivan, because Joe Rogan exists.
	This is the point, folks.
	It is all just a tool of power.
	It is all just a tool of power.
	And it's true throughout the media.
	It's true throughout our institutions.
	When the left talks about institutional power of the right and white supremacy, the left controls the major institutions in American society, from the corporate hierarchies to government.
	This is why GoFundMe, for example, completely decided that they would not even allow donations to the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
	They did allow donations on GoFundMe for bailing out rioters during BLM.
	But if there are a bunch of truckers who are protesting vaccine mandates in Canada, that has to be stopped.
	Not only that, they originally said that they were going to shut down donations, and then they were going to refund the money to anyone who specifically asked.
	But otherwise, they were just going to donate the remainder to charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy organizers and verified by the site.
	So in other words, they were going to basically distribute all the money to charities of their liking and choosing, which is amazing.
	They're just going to seize that money.
	So eventually they reversed themselves and said, we'll send it back to your pocket.
	But it's just the fact that GoFundMe picks and chooses which types of causes that there's nothing illegal about freedom of speech.
	At least there shouldn't be.
	The fact that GoFundMe has decided they're going to crack down on this sort of stuff is just indicative of how corporate America works.
	And it really is scary sort of stuff.
	It really is.
	By the way, When we speak of the media and how the media are full-scale engaged in leftist causes, it is not that the media hate human rights violations.
	It's not that the media is really, really deeply upset about bad things happening.
	They don't care about bad things happening.
	They care about certain specified bad things happening that impede their agenda.
	How do I know this?
	Because they're perfectly willing to cover for the Chinese.
	So the Olympics launched last week, end of last week, and they have no viewership.
	Nobody is watching the Olympics.
	Not a single minute.
	The viewership fell hard from the 2018 kickoff in the early numbers.
	According to Deadline.com, only 8.7 million people tuned in on NBC and Primetime to see the pre-taped Mike Tirico and Savannah Guthrie-led coverage of the propaganda-heavy spectacle put on by the Chinese President Xi Jinping and filmmaker Zhang Yimou.
	Put in starkest terms, these early numbers are down harder and faster from four years ago in PyeongChang than Michaela Schifrin on a slalom run.
	They crashed 69% in the fast affiliates, to be specific.
	It's an all-time Olympic slope for NBC.
	That's not stopping the media from doing propaganda for China.
	Here is NBC propagandizing for China during the Olympics opening ceremony.
	It's worth remembering that while Western countries may be boycotting these Olympics over human rights issues, China styles itself as a champion of the developing world.
	And it has plenty of support in countries from Africa to Latin America, where its investments are building up local economies.
	It's always great when you have NBC News actively promoting Chinese propaganda.
	What was that, written by the Chinese ministry over there?
	By the way, it's not just NBC.
	Jay Adande, who has been, he's a very left-wing voice on ESPN, he said over the weekend that the United States can't even criticize China because we have real problems in the United States with regard to our elections.
	Yes, that's right.
	We can't criticize an overwhelmingly tyrannical regime.
	that keeps a billion and a half people in a form of objective servitude.
	We can't criticize them because we have voter ID in Georgia now.
	Here's J. Edande saying all the stuff Chinese propagandists would want him to say.
	J. Edande, Former U.S. Attorney General, California Who are we to criticize China's human rights records when we have ongoing attacks by the agents of the state against unarmed citizens, and we've got assaults on the voting rights of our people of color in various states in this country?
	Amazing.
	How can we say anything bad about China?
	After all, all these sports networks are making money off of China, so we can't say anything bad about China.
	I mean, bad things are happening here in the United States, too.
	Yes, our media.
	They're focused in like laser beams on the things that are truly bad in life.
	Like Joe Rogan, having said the N-word, quoting a rap lyric ten years ago.
	Nailed it.
	Nailed it.
	Okay, meanwhile, on the foreign policy front, Russia continues to be threatening toward Ukraine.
	According to General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he says that Russia, if it wanted to, could take Kiev inside of 72 hours.
	That's what he told lawmakers.
	If there was a full-scale Russian invasion.
	He said that A full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine could result in the fall of Kiev within 72 hours, could come at a cost of 15,000 Ukrainian troop deaths and 4,000 Russian troop deaths.
	This has led the United States to lead an air bridge of weapons to restore Ukraine's security.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, quote, the U.S.
	and an informal coalition of several NATO countries are operating an air bridge to ship military aid to Ukraine, flying in the weapons and ammo that Kiev has requested.
	Until Russia's current escalation, Turkey and the United States were the only countries willing to supply Ukraine with arms.
	airplanes have landed in Kiev since January 22nd, after US President Joe Biden approved $200 million in new military aid for Ukraine.
	With more scheduled in coming days, NATO members, including the UK and Baltic states, have sent plane loads of weapons with Poland and the Czech Republic slated to make deliveries soon.
	Until Russia's current escalation, Turkey and the United States were the only countries willing to supply Ukraine with arms.
	The rest of Europe was chickening out.
	Alongside the United States, British, Canadian, and Polish trainers have long been training Ukrainian armed forces in modern warfare.
	Ukraine, of course, is not a member of NATO, but this entire fight is over whether Ukraine gets to retain some sort of independent status with regard to both NATO and with regard to the Russians.
	There's a fascinating sort of foreign policy debate that is broken out on the right and the left.
	And there's this sort of bizarre horseshoe that has now formed in American politics, where there are some folks on the right Who basically suggest that Russia should just be allowed to take Ukraine.
	And then there are folks on the left who are basically suggesting that Russia be allowed to take Ukraine.
	Folks on the right are doing so because they say that we should be more interested in expending resources at home, don't worry about foreign policy, it has no impact.
	Which seems to me short-sighted on a pragmatic level, considering the fact that the cost of deterrence is typically far less than the cost of actually having to fight a war that follows when deterrence fails.
	And it turns out that when you allow Russia to take Ukraine, the next move is that China moves to take Taiwan.
	And then once they've taken Taiwan, they start shutting down all of the shipping lanes, and they start threatening Australia.
	Because this is what China intends on doing.
	And folks on the right are very unhappy with this line of thought, and then there are folks on the left who are just pacifists.
	So you sort of have isolationists and pacifists, and they're joining hands a little bit.
	There's an interesting article in the New York Times from some people who's writing I generally like, but I think are dead wrong on this.
	Sourabh Amari, Patrick Dineen, and Gladden Pippin writing in the New York Times.
	They say, a painful contradiction lies at the heart of the American right.
	Even as conservatives are breaking with some cold war orthodoxies on domestic policy, Republican politicians remain wedded to that era's violently expansionist foreign policy.
	They oppose liberal imperialism in the United States, the aggressive push to impose progressive values, often joined to corporate power, while still contriving to spread the same order to the ends of the earth.
	That, of course, is a wild misstatement.
	Suggesting that Ukraine ought to be able to retain its autonomy doesn't mean imposing liberal imperialism in Ukraine.
	Nobody is talking about us invading Saudi Arabia and creating liberal imperialism or invading Iran and creating a liberal imperialist state.
	Nobody's talking about that.
	And the question was whether we should have pulled precipitously out of Afghanistan once there was a nascent form of such a state that had already been created and just handing it back to terrorists.
	And now the question is whether you decide to uphold the sovereignty of a nation that has existed since the end of the Cold War as an independent body and has existed before the USSR as an independent area and whether or not that place ought to be allowed to decide its own fate.
	That is not liberal imperialism.
	But, say these authors, it's a contradictory vision for many members of the so-called New Right who are pushing for a political realignment of the Republican Party.
	It presents a major stumbling block.
	We do not want to see this new vision of conservative American politics co-opted by hawkish ideologues more interested in posturing abroad than in reform here at home.
	So again, I'm not sure why it's mutually exclusive to suggest that we ought to have a more conservative country at home and also that we ought to be able to uphold the rights of people against Russian predation in Ukraine if the cost to us is fairly minimal.
	They say the crisis in Ukraine illustrates the problem.
	Even Republicans sympathetic to the new right haven't been able to resist the hawkish temptation.
	Among the loudest voices calling for escalation were Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marco Rubio of Florida.
	They're not calling for escalation.
	Russia is escalating.
	And they're saying that we should not bow before the Russian escalation.
	Today's nationalist hawks, they say, often speak of an obligation to defend democratic allies dotting the peripheries of revanchist powers like Russia and China.
	But if they had their way, the real-world effects would be little different from those of their hawkish predecessors, protracted and destabilizing conflicts that would distract us from domestic reform, not to mention imperil the lives of overwhelmingly working-class young Americans in uniform.
	Okay, now, first of all, treating members of the volunteer military, the all-volunteer military of the United States, as victims of their own choices is really degrading.
	That is not right.
	If you join the military, you join the military because you wish to be in the military, not because you're just joining to get the Pell Grants or something.
	Okay, beyond that, no, no one is calling for an offensive war against China.
	No one is calling for an offensive war against Russia.
	All the people are saying is that you have to maintain borders against America's geopolitical enemies or they will grow in power and eventually get to things that we care about.
	By the way, the invasion of Taiwan would dramatically upend Americans' lives since 92% of advanced semiconductors are produced in Taiwan.
	So what these authors are doing is they are conflating a realistic, hard-headed foreign policy with any sort of interventionist, overweening neoconservatism, as described by them.
	The idea is that Woodrow Wilson and Henry Kissinger are somehow the same guy, which is a very weird take.
	To say that we should do what we can to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine is not the same thing as to say that we should invade Russia, for example, and create liberal democracy there.
	According to these authors, however, they say, Since the earliest days of our nation, a division has existed between those who argued that America should be an exemplary republic and those who called instead for a crusader nation.
	The exemplarist camp figured that America could best serve liberty and self-government by perfecting domestic republicanism without going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
	The crusaders sought to expand liberal democracy abroad, partly because they thought this would make America more secure, and partly because they believed it was our destiny to baptize all nations in liberal ideals.
	Okay, but this is a false distinction.
	Because the reality is that there are countries abroad that do threaten us.
	It turns out that in 1827, when John Quincy Adams was president, there were giant oceans separating us from the people who were most competitive toward us.
	And when there weren't, we did fight wars, like the War of 1812.
	It turns out borders mean a lot less these days.
	And that global supply chains actually matter a fair bit.
	Okay, so the reason that I point this out is because there's a sort of horseshoe that has now occurred.
	The same day that this came out, you have people hearkening back to Ben and Jerry saying the same thing circa 1998.
	Ben Cohen, as of like the radical left Ben and Jerry's, Ben says, I think I've got it.
	Our biggest competitor is Haagen-Dazs.
	It would be as if one day Haagen-Dazs announced that after all these years of competing with us, it had decided to go out of the ice cream business and instead would sell only hot dogs.
	And then one day Haagen-Dazs Hot Dogs comes to Ben & Jerry's and says, we'd like to be your partners with you and sell your ice cream in our hot dog shops.
	But we said to them, no, we won't let you sell our ice cream.
	We still want to drive Haagen-Dazs out of business, even though you're not in the ice cream business anymore, because we remember, you were once in the ice cream business.
	Furthermore, we're going to spend $2 billion to kill your hot dog business to make sure you'll never sell ice cream again.
	You get the point, says Thomas Friedman, who's interviewing the ice cream mavens.
	NATO expansion is about not knowing when the war is over and how to consolidate your gains.
	And Mr. Cohen is speaking intelligently about the NATO foreign policy.
	So again, going all the way back to 1998, this has been the position of the left.
	Now it is the position of the nationalist conservative right, apparently.
	The problem, of course, is that China is watching all of this with greedy eyes.
	What do you think the Olympics are about?
	China is watching to see what the West does and whether they can pervert the West into basically allowing them to do whatever it is that they would like to do.
	And they have every indicator, early indicator, that the United States is going to be rather sanguine about our enemies on the move.
	I mean, right now, the United States is so invested, the Biden administration is so invested in kowtowing to our enemies, that they've decided to waive sanctions on some of Iran's civilian nuclear activities.
	Iran has already said, we are not stopping our nuclear, our nuclear plan.
	We're just going to move forward full scale with that.
	And the Biden administration is like, what if we waive some sanctions?
	Would that make you stop?
	Of course, the answer is no.
	The broader Biden foreign policy is a complete discombobulated mess, which is why China is now looking at Taiwan and trying to figure out how to go after Taiwan.
	So it's worth pointing out the sort of bizarre new isolationist versus pacifistic alliance that is cropped up in American politics because you do not have to be a neoconservative, we're going to conquer every place on earth person on foreign policy in order to understand that China and Russia pose a threat and the power of deterrence is quite useful when it comes to preventing these people from making aggressive moves against things we actually do care.
	A lot about.
	OK, I would also be remiss if I did not comment on what was the tweet of the weekend.
	This came from Stacey Abrams.
	So Stacey Abrams is now running for governor of Georgia.
	She's losing the polls to Brian Kemp, which is why the Republican Party needs to unite behind Brian Kemp right now.
	They need to unite.
	Stacey Abrams cannot be governor of Georgia, you idiots.
	Don't make 2022 about 2020 and about Donald Trump's anger at Georgia.
	Do not let Stacey Abrams become governor because you are mad at Brian Kemp over the 2020 election.
	Donald Trump already was instrumental in losing two Senate seats and giving Democrats the ability to spend trillions of dollars because he was mad at the Georgia election of 2020.
	You're gonna make Stacey Abrams governor now over all of this?
	Stacey Abrams went and spoke in front of a class of children and a picture emerged.
	She put it out.
	It didn't emerge.
	She put it out of her sitting in front of an entirely masked group of small school children.
	She, of course, is not wearing a mask because the rules do not apply to people like Stacey Abrams.
	She then came out with a statement trying to suggest that it wasn't her fault.
	Her campaign said, it is shameful.
	Our opponents are using a Black History Month reading event for Georgia children as the impetus for a false political attack.
	Yeah, you nailed it.
	It's all about Black History Month, Stacey, always and forever.
	She says it is pitiful and predictable.
	Our opponents continue to look for opportunities to distract from their failed records when it comes to protecting public health during the pandemic.
	One of Stacey's opponents downplayed the virus while trading stock to profit off a pandemic.
	After his private coronavirus briefings as a senator, another of her opponents attacked mayors seeking to protect their citizens and has failed to expand access to Medicaid.
	Okay, so here's the reality.
	Stacey Abrams doesn't care about wearing a mask in front of kids.
	All she cares about is that the kids keep wearing masks.
	Because for the left, the masks have now become a religious totem.
	The same thing is true in Boston, by the way.
	Boston's mayor, Michelle Wu, I mean, they're preparing for permanent masking in parts of the United States.
	In Boston, Michelle Wu, she was like, yeah, we probably won't mask forever because who knows, there could be another wave sometime in the future.
	COVID will be around for a while.
	Even after we are through this surge, we know it is likely that next fall, next winter, there likely will be another surge.
	But in the meantime, as we're tracking these numbers, these protections are not permanent.
	They are to make sure that we are safe in the most urgent moments, and we will continue to take steps to balance that guarantee of safety through public health Public health policies that are responsive and clear, as well as the need to provide support to our small businesses.
	They want it forever.
	It's become a mindset now.
	They want it forever.
	It's never going to go away.
	All right, so you know what?
	If this is what you guys want to run on, more power to you.
	As Governor DeSantis down here in the beautiful free state of Florida says, you guys keep criticizing Florida, but I noticed you're vacationing here quite a lot.
	When you had over New Year's, you had AOC coming down, criticizing Florida, then comes down.
	So we decided to make kind of a little joke about it.
	So we created T-shirts that said, Escape to Florida, the Lockdown Liberal Tour.
	And instead of having concert dates on the back, we had Governor Whitmer, March of 2021, AOC, and the dates, they were all in Florida.
	And we sold more outside the state than we sold here because people realize how hypocritical these people are.
	You know, go for it.
	So this is the country that you want.
	You want the country that tries to go after Joe Rogan and get him thrown out of his job at Spotify, have his contract canceled by Spotify because you're mad that he didn't endorse Bernie Sanders completely, or that he didn't endorse Bernie Sanders, but he didn't endorse Joe Biden or whatever.
	This is the country that you want.
	The non-forgiving, masked forever, Pacifistic nonsense.
	Really, you guys are doing yeoman's work over there on the left side of the aisle.
	All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon as the Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Editing is by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina, production assistant Jessica Crand.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Production. Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
	now sorry breaking Jessica I can smell weakness from here
	Oh Oh money Oh Let me out, please!
	What good is this to me now?
	You had your way.
	I'm scared.
	Now you must pay.
	Your daughter.

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