Barack Obama returns to lie about his actions on Ukraine.
Cracker Jack decides it too must go woke.
And Joe Biden's Health and Human Services Secretary says he'd like to use federal dollars for transgender surgeries on minors.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Bench Bureau Show.
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Well, Barack Obama, a couple of days ago, he came back to the White House.
As I mentioned on yesterday's program, it was extremely awkward because Barack Obama is still worshipped inside the Democratic Party and Joe Biden is just an afterthought.
But here is the thing.
Joe Biden is basically just a distant echo of Obamaism.
He was Obama's vice president.
He's what Obama's third term would look like.
Obama's first two terms were disastrous enough.
Joe Biden's First term is basically Obama's third, and it has been just a massive disaster all the way through.
The glitz and the glamour that attached to Obama, however, allowed him to get away with being a really quite terrible president.
There was a shocking contrast between Biden and Obama when Obama came to the White House.
This sort of hilarious clip was going around, very sad actually, of Joe Biden trying to get Barack Obama's attention.
Joe Biden being the leader of the free world, Barack Obama being the former president of the United States, and Obama just ignoring him.
Like he was an annoying hanger on at some cocktail party.
It's really quite incredible.
Joe Biden is trying to grab his shoulder and Obama is just, he just continues to ignore him.
The president of the United States trying to get his attention.
Here's what it looked like.
You can see Biden is shaking some hands, and there's Obama.
Obama's going in, and he's shaking some hands with some people.
He's talking.
He's right next to Kamala Harris, having a conversation.
You can see Biden looks confused.
He's not sure kind of what's going on.
And then he wants to get Obama's attention.
You can see he's talking to Obama, and Obama has no interest in talking with him at all.
Now Biden's got his hand on Obama's shoulder, and Obama just continues.
To talk to this variety of people.
Well, Biden stands there sadly.
It really is quite pathetic, but that is the situation as it stands.
Obama then went on a media tour after being at the White House, and that media tour included his lackey sycophant.
Idiot journalist boob, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic.
Jeffrey Goldberg was always a stenographer for Obama.
He famously was one of the journalists mentioned by Ben Rhodes, Obama's fiction writing national security advisor, as a journalist who really just kind of wrote whatever Obama wanted him to write.
And now Obama on his sort of I'm the best tour, because every Obama tour is an I'm the best tour, he sat again with Jeffrey Goldberg, who Just, he's Obama's fluff, right?
I can't tell you how terrible Jeffrey Goldberg is.
He really is awful.
And Jeffrey Goldberg is talking with Obama.
And Obama drops this bombshell about how he led the world when it came to Ukraine.
We are shaking off that complacency.
I will say that as somebody who grappled with the incursion into Crimea and the eastern portions of Ukraine,
I have been encouraged by the European reaction because in 2014, I often had to drag them kicking and screaming to respond in ways that we would have wanted to see from those of us who describe ourselves as Western democracies.
He is just a liar.
He is just a liar.
Now, have you ever seen him and Joe Biden?
Joe Biden is a really bad liar.
So when Joe Biden lies, at least now, he used to be a smoother liar maybe five years ago.
Today, he's really not good at lying, and so it's very transparent.
Obama is very good at lying.
And the media, more than ever, just continue to massage him.
In inappropriate, Al Gore-like ways.
And it's kind of pathetic to watch, but that is such revisionist history.
Barack Obama was horrible on Ukraine.
In 2012, he mocked Mitt Romney openly throughout the 2012 campaign.
He said that the 1980s called and they wanted their foreign policy back after Mitt Romney said that Russia was America's top geopolitical foe.
And then of course when Syria broke out into the open and you had Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons in Syria, Barack Obama promptly handed over the entire region to Vladimir Putin and the Russians.
And then when Russia invaded Crimea and Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014, not only did Barack Obama do nothing, he militantly looked away from that conflict in order to get the Russians to convince the Iranians to sign a nuclear deal very advantageous to the Iranians and really bad for the United States and its allies in the Middle East.
Barack Obama's revisionist history, it does not go down easy.
And again, the reason this is important is because this is the way the Democratic politicians, including Joe Biden, continue to act.
They take terrible action, and then later they brag about how strong they were.
And it's really, it's really gross because you have to hold them accountable in real time.
But let's just go back in time for a moment to April 2016, because he did another interview with stenographer, with court jester, Jeffrey Goldberg.
And here's what he said in 2016, talking with Jeffrey Goldberg.
Quote, this is Goldberg writing, Russia's invasion of Crimea in early 2014, and its decision to use force to buttress the rule of its client, Bashar al-Assad, have been cited by Obama's critics as proof that a post-redline world no longer fears America.
So when I talked to the president in the Oval Office in late January, I again raised this question of deterrent credibility.
The argument is made, I said, that Vladimir Putin watched you in Syria and thought he's too logical, he's too rational, he's too into retrenchment.
I'm going to push him a little bit further in Ukraine.
First of all, you can hear Jeffrey Goldberg.
I'm sure that's what Putin was thinking.
He's too logical.
He's too rational.
That's exactly what Putin was thinking, Jeffrey.
Anyway, here's what Goldberg writes.
Obama didn't like my line of inquiry.
And here's what Obama said.
This theory is so easily disposed of, I'm always puzzled by how people make the argument.
I don't think anybody thought George W. Bush was overly rational or cautious in his use of military force.
As I recall, because apparently nobody in this town does, Putin went into George on Bush's watch.
Putin acted in Ukraine in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp.
And he improvised in a way to hang on to his control there, said Obama.
He's done the exact same thing in Syria, at enormous cost to the well-being of his own country.
And the notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now in Syria or in Ukraine than they were before they invited Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally.
Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country or was a kleptocracy.
And here's what Goldberg writes.
Obama's theory here is simple.
Ukraine is a core Russian interest, but not an American one.
So Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
Here's what Obama said, quote, The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.
Yeah, this is clearly Obama being very harsh on Russia and really mobilizing our European allies to face down Vladimir Putin and company.
Sure, sure.
Again, the pathetic nature of Barack Obama's tenure and the way that the media just continued to cover for him is reflected in the way that they cover Joe Biden, but it has real consequences because the media covering for bad Democratic presidents leads foreign actors to believe that they can get away with literally murder.
Because as we now know, Vladimir Putin didn't do anything in Ukraine when Donald Trump was president.
He did something when Obama was president.
Now, of course, he has attempted to swallow Ukraine whole while Joe Biden was president.
Largely because the media covered for the vacuous nonsense promoted by people like Barack Obama.
Well, as I've been saying, Jeffrey Goldberg is an absolute artist when it comes to just BS.
He's just a finger-painting artist in BS.
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Meanwhile in Ukraine, the situation has gotten better around Kiev, but it's getting a lot worse in the eastern regions.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ukraine urged civilians to leave the eastern Donetsk, Luhansk and parts of the Kharkiv regions as a brace for a major new Russian offensive following Moscow's withdrawal from the north of the country.
You need to evacuate now while this possibility still exists, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Occupied Territories Arina Vereshchuk said on Ukrainian TV on Wednesday.
Later, people will be under fire and under threat of death.
We won't be able to help because it will be practically impossible to cease fire.
The sense of urgency by the Ukrainian government for civilians to flee comes days after reports emerged of executions, rape, and other human rights abuses of civilians by departing Russian forces as they retreated from the suburbs of Kiev.
Russia has denied the reports, said they were staged by Russian troops, but there is satellite imagery of Russians doing exactly the sorts of things that they've been accused of doing.
And now there's new evidence that is emerging from German intercepts that Russian troops were openly talking about slaughtering civilians.
According to the Washington Post, The killings of civilians in Bucha near the Ukrainian capital are intensifying pressure on the military alliance, as its foreign ministers met for a second day.
European diplomats wait a ban on Russian coal.
The UN General Assembly will take a vote on Thursday on expelling Russia from the UN Human Rights Council.
Which, who cares?
Germany's foreign intelligence service claims to have intercepted radio communications in which Russian soldiers discuss indiscriminate killings in Ukraine.
In two separate communications, Russian soldiers described how they questioned soldiers as well as civilians and proceeded to shoot them, according to an intelligence official familiar with the findings, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.
The findings, confirmed to the Washington Post by three people briefed on the information, undermine claims by Russia that atrocities are being carried out only after its soldiers leave occupied areas.
The Washington Post saw beheaded and mutilated corpses in Bukha, bringing the scope of devastation into grim focus.
And meanwhile, the battle has heated up in terms of human rights violations.
On the other side as well, video has now emerged of Ukrainian troops literally just killing captured Russian soldiers.
Pretty brutal video.
Here's a little bit of what that looked like, unfortunately.
This is the aftermath of the Ukrainian soldiers apparently killing these Russian soldiers.
We're walking around the bodies.
You can see all the bodies implored here.
And they're posing for pictures and all the rest.
Meanwhile, it's interesting to watch as the media in real time attempts to walk back all of the problems with the so-called Azov battalion.
The Azov battalion is one of the militia groups that is technically a part of the Ukrainian military and is a white supremacist neo-Nazi infested group.
And this has been reported widely by the media for years and years and years.
And now that Ukraine is the good guy in this particular battle, there's an attempt to sort of retcon what the Azov battalion is.
But the Azov battalion is all the things that the media in the United States think Republican voters are, unfortunately.
Yeah.
None of this is to suggest that Russia is correct to invade Ukraine.
It is to suggest that there are some bad guys on the Ukrainian side as well.
And Ukraine, when all of this is over, is going to have to face up to that as well.
According to the Washington Post reporting on all of this, Quote, inside a warehouse in a bustling section of this capital, the incessant cracking sound of gunfire echoed off the walls.
Men in olive-colored camouflage were training for war.
Most wore helmets and bulletproof jackets.
Some wore high-top sneakers, all clutched AK-47 rifles.
Invisible yet palpable was the shadow cast over this new regiment, like every unit of the Azov battalion.
Alexei Suleyman knew about its ugly past, but he joined anyway.
Two friends were in the force, and he felt the Azov would best train him to defend his motherland.
Of all the Ukrainian forces fighting the invading Russian military, the most controversial is the Azov Battalion.
It is among Ukraine's most adept military units and has battled Russian forces in key sites, including the besieged city of Mariupol and near the capital of Kiev.
With Russian forces withdrawing from areas north of Kiev last week and possibly repositioning in southern and eastern Ukraine, which Moscow has declared as its new primary focus, the Azov forces could grow in significance.
But the battalion's far-right nationalist ideology has raised concerns it is attracting extremists, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis who could pose a future threat.
When Putin casts his assault on Ukraine as a quest to denazify the country, seeking to delegitimize the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian nationalism as fascist, he was partially referring to the Azov forces.
While they are now fighting for a Jewish president whose relatives were killed fighting the Nazis, the Azov Battalion continues to be fodder for Russian propaganda.
Yet interviews with Azov fighters and one of its founders provide a more nuanced picture of its current state, which is more complex than what is conventionally known.
So again, it's interesting to watch the media now try to massage the Azov Battalion into something more acceptable for Western and more liberal ears.
The battalion's own leaders and fighters concede that some extremists remain in their ranks, but it has evolved since its emergence in 2014 during the conflict in eastern Ukraine against Russian forces and Moscow-backed separatists.
Under pressure from U.S.
and Ukrainian authorities, the Azov battalion has toned down extremist elements.
The Ukrainian military has become stronger.
However, this is a battalion that is comprised, in large part, of people who are quite friendly toward white nationalism and neo-Nazism.
In an interview, the force's co-founder and top commander, Colonel Andrei Veletsky, did not dispute his far-right ultra-conservative leanings or the presence of some extremists in his units.
He rejected allegations of Nazism and white supremacist views.
He says, we don't identify ourselves with Nazi ideology.
We have people of conservative political views.
I see myself as such.
But as any person, I don't want my views defined by others.
I'm not a Nazi.
We completely reject it.
However, Michael Colburn, who monitors and researches the far right and wrote a book about the Azov, said he wouldn't explicitly call it a neo-Nazi movement.
He said there are clearly neo-Nazis within its ranks.
There are elements in it who are, you know, neo-fascist.
There are elements who are maybe kind of old-school Ukrainian nationalists.
At its core, it's hostile to liberal democracy.
It's hostile to everything that comes with liberal democracy, minority rights, voting rights, and things like that.
So again, conflicts like this tend to be slightly more complex than are portrayed in the media.
That does not change the non-complexity of Putin's invasion.
It does suggest that on the other side, there are some rather unpleasant forces as well who are fighting for Ukraine's National identity.
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Meanwhile, the West still seems confused about what to do in Ukraine.
Mainly because, again, once deterrence fails, and that is thanks to people like Barack Obama, When he's not busy bragging about his wonderful record in Ukraine, incentivizing Vladimir Putin to cross borders.
When deterrence fails, nothing good happens.
And so you have the spectacle of Janet Yellen trying to convince everybody that the real solution to the situation in Ukraine is for us to continue along the environmental path of reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
Well, good luck with that.
Europe tried it, and what it ended up doing instead was just importing lots and lots of fossil fuels from Russia.
Over time to deal with climate change, we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and I think our energy security also will be greatly enhanced as we transition to renewables.
Yeah, I'm sure all of this is throwing a scare into our enemies.
Meanwhile, Janet Yellen says China shouldn't doubt our resolve if they move aggressively on Taiwan.
You know, the resolve to do what, exactly?
Throw some economic sanctions at them?
Or to actually... Now is the time, by the way, when you shouldn't be making vague statements.
You should be making very exact statements about what it is you pledge to do in case of an attempt to invade Taiwan, up to and including use of the United States Navy in order to guarantee the freedom Of Taiwan, but we aren't seeing that from this administration.
So you're going to see I think China over the next couple of years sort of digest what's been happening in Ukraine and determine where they move next.
Here's Jenny Yellen trying to convince China not to do anything.
Am I to hear from you that you're open to all tools available in the event that China moves aggressively towards Taiwan?
Absolutely.
I believe we've shown that we can.
In the case of Russia, we threatened significant consequences.
We've imposed significant consequences.
And I think that you should not doubt our ability and resolve to do the same in other situations.
By the way, if those significant consequences were intended to expel Putin from Ukraine, that of course has not happened.
Right now, it looks like this battle is settling down into precisely the sort of regional conflict that you would expect it to have settled down into if Putin could not have taken Kiev outright.
And that is, again, consolidation of Russian forces in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, which is what I suggested at the beginning of the war, was actually, I thought, the real aim here anyway.
Meanwhile, again, if you're treating this as a war, what you might do at home is actually strengthen your economy.
Instead, it seems like the economy is Is weakening.
Joe Biden yesterday came out and he announced that he would again hit pause on federal student loan payments.
So the idea here is that we are just going to continue to spew money out of a faucet until things get better in the middle of an inflationary cycle.
There's no rationale for this.
Joe Biden is so attached to his ideology that the realities on the ground, when it comes to the economy, don't matter at all.
Here was Joe Biden basically pledging to help the most... You want to talk about the privilege in our society?
People who have student loans are the people who are the generalized privilege in our society.
Right?
These are the people who went to college.
These are the people who have the most upward trajectory in terms of the economy.
Here was Joe Biden.
Today, I'm announcing my administration's extending the pause on federal student loan repayments through August 31st of 2022.
I know folks were hit hard by this pandemic, and though we've come a long way in the last year, we're still recovering from the economic crisis it caused.
This continued pause will help Americans breathe a little easier as we recover and rebuild from the pandemic.
Okay, just a quick note here.
Joe Biden is the same president who has now said that Title 42 needs to be removed because the COVID pandemic is so far over that we can just start admitting illegal immigrants to the country.
At the same time, he's saying that the COVID pandemic is so bad that we need to relieve your student loan payments.
Have you noticed the inconsistency here?
Is any of this strengthening America?
Is any of this strengthening our economy?
Meanwhile, speaking of not strengthening our economy, Joe Biden is out there stumping for unionization of major American businesses.
Now, listen, when it comes to Amazon, when it comes to major American businesses who have decided to go woke, On an economic level, I'm very much in favor of the free market economics that have brought us amazing goods and services, including the fantastic goods and services provided by Amazon.
I'm one of the original Amazon Prime members.
I think Amazon is one of the great American companies in history.
It is also true that if you play footsie with the Democrats, and then the Democrats decide to, and then you get in bed with the Democrats, and then you get screwed by the Democrats, those were all choices that you guys made.
So if Jeff Bezos decides that he wants to be best friends with Biden, and then Biden decides that he's going to sic all the forces of the government on him, I'm sorry, but you made this bed, and now you get to lie in it.
And don't look to people like me to defend you from the predations of the people that you decided to side with over your own free market interests and the broad market interests of the American economy.
Here is Joe Biden suggesting that He was going to go after Amazon yesterday.
Again, this is not what you do, by the way, in a time of war.
If you're looking down the barrel of China or Russia, if you're looking down the barrel of a world economy that is now being split in spheres of influence, what you actually wish to do is unleash the power and majesty of the innovative free market economy.
Instead, Joe Biden is like, no, no, no, I got to please my union buddies.
That's what unions are about, in my view, about providing dignity and respect for people who bust their neck.
That's why I created the White House Task Force on Worker Organization Empowerment, to make sure the choice to join a union belongs to workers alone.
By the way, Amazon, here we come.
He's such a Bond villain now.
Creepy old Bond villain.
Amazon, here we go.
There's this doddering fool who's never created a single job in the private sector that wasn't involved with picking up bags of cash from foreign oligarchs by his son.
This guy is telling Amazon how to... But listen, again, Jeff Bezos, you bought the ticket, you take the ride with these dolts.
You decided that you were going to jump on the back of that horse with Joe Biden?
Enjoy.
Seriously.
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Meanwhile, by the way, the SEC is now being sicked on Amazon.
According to the Wall Street Journal, federal securities regulators are now investigating how Amazon has disclosed some details of its business practices, including how it uses third-party seller data for its private label business.
According to people familiar with the matter, the SEC is probing how the technology giant handled disclosures of its employees' use of data from sellers on its e-commerce platform.
The SEC's enforcement division has asked for emails and communications from several senior Amazon executives, according to one of those people.
Apparently in April 2020, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that the company's employees routinely used individual third-party seller data to develop products for its own brand.
A company spokesperson denied that such actions were taken, echoing an Amazon lawyer's congressional testimony, saying the company, quote, does not use their individual data.
When we are making decisions to launch private brands.
In other words, the question is whether they are looking at the internal data of, for example, Nike, when it determines that Amazon is going to launch a shoe company, or whether they're just looking at the overall sales numbers on various elements of the economy when they decide to launch sort of in-house Amazon brands.
Bottom line, however, is this.
The SEC is now being used as a weapon against particular American constituencies.
The SEC is being used against Elon Musk.
The SEC is now being used against Amazon.
That is not a coincidence in any way, shape, or form.
Again, Joe Biden's priority is not the strength and health of the United States economy.
It's paying off his political constituents, which is why he gave a speech yesterday in which he announced that unions had created the American middle class, which is a very weird thing to say, considering that America was, broadly speaking, the first middle class country in human history.
Alexis de Tocqueville was writing about how America was essentially a one-class, middle-class country back in the 1830s.
The full-scale unionization movement in the United States really did not begin until the 1890s and 1900s.
Fully 120 years after the founding of the United States.
So this is just a lie, but Joe Biden, again, not a very good liar and also not a very good historian.
You're the ones who literally built this country, and that's not hyperbole.
And you heard it a thousand times when I was running for office, that we're going to build this economy, not from the top down anymore, but from the middle up and out.
That's how you build America.
Because we know that when the middle class does well, the poor have a way up and the wealthy are just fine.
That's exactly what we're doing.
And by the way, the reason there is a middle class is because of unions.
Man, every time that guy leans into the microphone, you just want to back away and run straight through a wall.
You just want to get the hell away from that guy.
That's the reason, middle class, because of unions.
I mean, I'm sorry, that's just a lie.
It's not true.
There's been a vast middle class in the United States for, at this point, centuries.
But again, it's not about growing the American economy.
It's more about his political priorities.
Meanwhile, speaking of having botched the economy utterly, Federal Reserve officials signaled they could raise rates by a half percentage point at their meeting early next month and begin reducing their $9 trillion asset portfolio as part of their most aggressive effort in more than two decades to curb price pressures.
Minutes from the Fed's March 15th and 16th meeting, released on Wednesday, showed that many officials last month were prepared to raise rates by a half point, but opted for a smaller quarter point increase because of concern over the fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Stocks fell, bond yields rose in the midst of expectations of a more aggressive Fed policy tightening process than previously anticipated.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note Which rises when the bond prices fall, climbed to 2.606.
That is a three-year high.
The NASDAQ composite dropped 2.2%.
S&P 500 fell 1%.
Dow Jones Industrial was down 0.4%.
So it is now expected that, at least by a lot of economists that we're about to tip over into recession, because the Fed too aggressively expanded the monetary supply and picked up assets in the middle of the pandemic and then continued that sort of stimulative activity, despite the fact that the economy was naturally going to come back.
So now they're having to reverse course.
So thanks for the help, all of you Keynesians out there, including the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, the crisis on the border continues to rage.
According to Fox News, over the last 24 hours, the Drug Enforcement Administration is now warning of a nationwide spike in fentanyl-related mass overdoses as it says that the drug is killing Americans at an unprecedented rate.
Deaths top Republicans are tying to the ongoing crisis at the southern border.
The DEA is seeing a nationwide spike in fentanyl-related mass overdose events involving three or more overdoses occurring close in time at the same location, according to the agency.
That is a letter to federal, state, and local law enforcement, apparently.
There have been at least seven mass overdose events involving 58 overdoses, 29 deaths.
The overdoses occurred in states including Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, and Florida.
According to DA administrator and Milgram quote fentanyl is killing Americans at an unprecedented rate already this year. Numerous mass overdose events have resulted in dozens of overdoses and deaths. Drug traffickers are driving addiction, increasing their profits, mixing fentanyl with other illicit drugs. And of course, this has something to do with the drug being trafficked primarily via the southern border. More than 10,500 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the southern border in fiscal year 2021 by border protection alone.
That is up significantly from just 4,500 pounds in fiscal year 2020 and 2,600 pounds in 2019.
Most of that amount was caught at ports of entry.
So the amount of illegal immigration between those ports of entry is, of course, going to be quite large as well.
So the southern border is now being used not only to funnel enormous number of illegal immigrants, it is also being used to funnel enormous amounts of fentanyl, which is killing large numbers of Americans.
Meanwhile, the White House's response to all of this is to end Title 42, to allow for the mass importation of illegal immigrants, plus to give cell phones to illegal immigrants.
So we went from Obama phones to Biden phones.
Biden phones are now being given straight to illegal immigrants.
Apparently, smartphones are being handed to people who cross the border.
Thank you, Jen.
First, on immigration, our team in Texas is saying that you guys are starting to give smartphones to border crossers, hoping that they'll use the phones to check in or to be tracked.
Which part of that is supposed to deter people from crossing illegally into the states?
Well, I think you of all people, since you've asked me a range of questions on this topic over time, would recognize that we need to take steps to ensure that we know where individuals are and we can check in with them.
Oh, so we're giving them phones so that we know where they are.
That sounds crazy, frankly.
How about we don't just release them into the interior of the country and then rely on them to use their new iPhones to help us out?
Representative Tony Gonzalez from Texas, he's pointing out that the morale of Border Patrol is just in the toilet, as well it should be, considering this administration literally just made up a story about Border Patrol agents whipping illegal migrants Like, a year ago.
And now they are completely understaffed and underfunded in the midst of what is going to be a record wave of illegal immigration.
Here's Representative Gonzalez from the Texas border.
Just last week, there was a suicide within the Border Patrol agents.
You know, this is the sixth one of the year.
These are things that aren't getting talked about.
The morale of the Border Patrol agency is certainly under attack.
Okay, but Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, he is actually taking some rather fascinating measures.
He apparently has announced that Texas is going to take all the people who are being released into the interior of the country.
He's going to put them on charter buses and he's going to send them directly to Washington DC.
So all of the Biden administration officials can see them at their doorstep.
To help local officials whose communities are being overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants who are being dropped off by the Biden administration.
Texas is providing charter buses to send these illegal immigrants who have been dropped off by the Biden administration to Washington, D.C.
We are sending them to the United States Capitol, where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border.
Okay, so again, this is actually a good policy by Abbott, forced Democrats to apparently look directly in the face of the policies they've created.
The question arises amidst all of this.
I'm not saying the Biden administration is deliberately attempting to weaken America, but if they were, would they be doing much differently at this point?
Seriously, they've weakened the economy because they're so addicted to their ideology.
They've weakened the border because they're so addicted to their ideology.
And of course, they're attacking children now because they are so addicted to their ideology.
The HHS secretary, The despicable Xavier Becerra.
I remember him from my days in California when he was Attorney General.
He actually said yesterday that he favors using Health and Human Services federal funding for sex reassignment surgery on minors.
Sex reassignment surgery is a brutal procedure whereby false genitals are carved out of human flesh and then either attached or carved away from kids, from minors, who would not be able to consent to sex but apparently are able to consent without parental permission to having their genitals permanently scarred and mutilated.
Here is Lauren Boebert talking to the HHS secretary who freely admits that he is very much in favor of taxpayer dollars being used for this sort of stuff.
For the record, you favor HHS's funding being able for sex reassignment, for surgeries on minors.
I will do everything I can to defend any American, including children, whether or not they fit the categories you have mentioned or not, and if they talk about gender-affirming care, I am there to protect the rights of any American.
Ah, he's just there to protect the rights of any Americans, including minors who apparently have been brainwashed into the belief that their life will be happier and more fulfilled if they carve up their genitals and permanently sterilize themselves.
Makes perfect sense.
By the way, Becerra was asked about kids being removed from their parents.
So if parents disagree with their kids doing this stuff, should kids be removed from their parents?
And Becerra, he just straight up refused to answer whether he thinks kids should be removed from their parents if their parents believe that their kids should not be mutilated.
Mr. Secretary, do you think that parents who believe in two genders only should have their children removed from them?
Congresswoman, I believe in supporting and protecting transgender youth.
I believe that they, along with their parents and their caregivers, will make the best decisions.
And I would really urge that politicians like you stay out of their business.
Okay, so that wasn't the question.
The question will politicians like you stay out of the business of parents with regard to their kids?
Notice how he elides the question.
He says, kids, in coordination with their parents, will make the best... Okay, what about the parents say no?
That was Lauren Boebert's question.
Right there.
By the way, Becerra doesn't even know his own propaganda.
Or maybe he shies away from the effects of his own propaganda because he knows how awkward it is.
He was asked specifically if men can get pregnant.
Well, the entire premise of everything that he is saying about sex changes and everything that he is saying about more than two genders and about gender fluidity, all of this is premised on the idea that, yes, men can get pregnant.
But he refuses to answer that question because he knows how awkward it is.
This is the game the left likes to play.
If you ask them what a woman is, they can't define it.
But then they'll say, well, you obviously don't know.
I know what a woman is.
I'm asking you.
Can you give a definition?
And the answer for the left is no.
They can't give a definition.
It's like pornography.
They know it when they see it.
Except they don't.
So here is Xavier Becerra shying away from the consequences of his own political idiocy.
Can you define for this committee what is a man?
You're looking at one.
Great.
So you are a man.
I like that.
Can you tell me, can men get pregnant?
Unless you know something I don't, I think the answer's pretty obvious.
What is that answer, sir?
I'm asking you, is there something you know that I don't know that would say that a man... Well, I'm asking what you know.
Can men get pregnant?
I'm not aware of it.
Okay.
Well, Mr. Secretary, materials coming from your department, you've referred to mothers as birthing persons, replacing that title with... Are mothers not persons?
Mothers are persons, but it seems to be more inclusive, like you're trying to include another gender in that.
I'm all about inclusion, Congresswoman.
There you go.
Okay, so you— These people are such liars.
They're such liars.
In trying to undermine basic truth on every level, because they're so blinded by their own pathetic ideologies.
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Alrighty folks, if you haven't heard of my book club, now's your chance to sign up.
So last month I took members through my analysis of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
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This month's book is one of my favorites, The Once and Future King by T.H.
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If you haven't read the book yet, I highly recommend you do so.
It's excellent.
It really is great.
You're going to be enriching yourself.
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This administration and the media, they just push straight propaganda when it comes to hormone blockers and puberty blocking drugs and transgender surgery.
The idea being, The science is now settled that kids need this stuff.
And if you don't give kids this stuff, then they will die.
This is the lie that they keep telling over and over and over again.
Again, the research just does not back this.
There's a fascinating article from Jesse Singal, who, by the way, is rather friendly toward transgender ideology.
But Jesse Singal has a piece over at his Substack.
He does a good job sort of debunking bad research in which he goes after a paper titled quote mental health outcomes in transgender and non-binary youths receiving gender affirming care.
It was published in the JAMA Network Open late in February.
The authors listed as Diana Tordoff, Jonathan Wanta et al are mostly based at the University of Washington, Seattle or Seattle Children's Hospital.
In their study, According to Jesse, the researchers examined a cohort of kids who came through Seattle Children's Gender Clinic.
They simply followed the kids over time, as some of them went on puberty blockers and or hormones, administering self-report surveys tracking their mental health.
There were four waves of data collection when they first arrived, three months later, six months later, and 12 months later.
The study was propelled into the national discourse by a big PR push on the part of UW-Seattle.
It was successful.
Tiana Tordoff discussed her and her colleagues' findings on Science Friday, a very popular weekly public radio science show, not long after the study was published.
All the publicity materials the university released tell a very straightforward, exciting story.
The kids in this study who accessed puberty blockers or hormones had better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at the beginning.
The headline of the emailed version of the press release, for example, reads, quote, Gender-affirming care dramatically reduces depression for transgender teens, study finds.
The first sentence reads, quote, UW medicine researchers recently found that gender-affirming care for transgender and non-binary adolescents caused rates of depression to plummet.
All of this is straightforwardly causal language, which dramatically reduces and causes rates to plummet, clearly communicating improvement over time.
And all of the press materials are driven with language like this.
Here's what Jesse Singel writes, quote, What's surprising in light of all of these quotes is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones, quote, experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study.
The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, on social media, repeatedly by one of the authors, is false.
It's hard to even figure this out from reading the study, which omits very basic stats one would expect to find.
But the non-result is pretty clear from Table 3 in the supplementary materials, which shows what percentage of study participants met the researchers' thresholds for depression, anxiety, and self-harm or suicidal thoughts during each of the four waves of the study.
Okay, for people who had the puberty blockers or the gender-suppressing hormones versus people who had none, there's effectively no statistical difference.
Like, none.
At each point, PBGAH refers to kids who reported being on puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones, while none refers to kids who reported no such treatment.
Among the kids who went on hormones, there isn't genuine statistical improvement here from baseline to the final wave of data collection.
At baseline, 59% of the treatment-naive kids experienced moderate to severe depression.
12 months later, 56% of the same kids on those hormones experienced moderate to severe depression.
At baseline, 45% of the treatment-naive kids experienced self-harm or suicidal thoughts.
12 months later, 37% of the kids on those hormones did.
These are not meaningful differences.
The kids in the study arrived with what appeared to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them one-time blockers or hormones, and they exited the studies with what appeared to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems.
Again, this is what all the research shows, including the research that is being cited by the media and by this White House, in pursuit of the idea that we have to give all kids who are confused about their gender, gender hormones.
For example, back in December 2021, there was a study that came out from the wildly motivated source, The Trevor Project, which again is directed toward transitioning teens and kids.
This is what they do.
And they funded a study that appeared in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
It's a deeply flawed study.
It's deeply flawed for a bunch of reasons, including the fact that it has a massive selection bias.
The way that they actually got subjects for the self-reporting is they went online and they asked kids, do you identify as transgender?
And would you like gender hormonal therapy?
Would you like that or not?
So they went to a self-selected group.
And then they compared people who wanted it but didn't get it with people who wanted it and got it.
And well, there's a third group of people who are not examined anywhere in the study, which would be the actual control group.
And that would be people who believed that they might have been transgender at one time, didn't take the hormones and then weren't transgender.
Because it turns out that desistance is an extraordinarily high percentage of people who are gender confused.
The vast majority of people who are gender confused over the course of their lifetimes will grow out of it by all available data.
But that control group is never in any of the studies.
And here's the thing.
Once you start giving people hormones, once you start giving people surgeries, they're now confirmed in what they become.
They're locked in, which of course is the entire purpose of places like the Trevor Project.
But even the Trevor Project has no ability, by the way, to show a statistically significant disparity between 13 to 17-year-olds who got gender-affirming hormone therapy and kids who didn't, who even wanted it and didn't receive it.
We're not even talking about kids who didn't want it and didn't receive it.
We're talking about kids who wanted it and didn't receive it.
So first of all, that is also going to be a biased sample size.
You can do this with any product, right?
Literally any product.
If I did a survey, Of people.
And I said, here is the question.
Do you want Hershey's chocolate?
And then, we give half the people who wanted Hershey's chocolate, Hershey's chocolate, and we give half the people who wanted Hershey's chocolate, no Hershey's chocolate.
Who do you think is going to be happier?
The people who wanted it and got it, or the people who wanted it and didn't get it?
You can do this with literally any product.
But they still could not prove a statistical disparity in, for example, attempted suicide.
This is according to the Trevor Project, which of course, the attempted suicide is the thing that you are mostly worried about.
And by the way, the statistics on people who seriously considered suicide aged 13 to 17 because they're gender confused, those stats are enormous.
Enormous!
The stats show, for example, that if you received gender-affirming hormone therapy, low sample size, about 274 people, 51% of them seriously considered suicide during the study period.
Over half!
And when it came to actual attempted suicide, there was no, this is according to the, again, this is the Trevor Project study, direct quote, the ALR, the Adjusted Odds Ratio, for attempted suicide among the overall sample of transgender and non-binary youth age 13 to 24 did not reach statistical significance.
Among those age 13 to 17, if you got the hormone therapy, then you reported that you were less depressed.
Okay, but, For youth under age 18, the AOR for seriously considering suicide in the past year did not reach statistical significance.
So, the data that are being cited here are just garbage data.
It's garbage in, garbage out.
Because it's all ideologically related.
And so, this is how the left makes its case.
If you say, I don't believe that you should be giving hormone therapies that permanently sterilize kids, in some cases, I don't think you should be getting surgeries.
I don't think you should be doing any of this stuff to minors without parental permission at the very, very least.
And probably at all, because this is in 10 years time, in five years time, now it looks barbaric.
Then they say that you're killing kids.
The data aren't there for this.
They aren't.
And meanwhile, it is amazing to watch the infighting inside even the Republican Party over this sort of stuff.
So, if this is a battle that Republicans are unable to fight or win, then they don't deserve your support.
It is that simple.
So, Utah's current governor, Spencer Cox, I don't know what's going through his head.
Utah's a very conservative state.
Spencer Cox is now identifying by his pronouns.
He's buying into full-scale transgender ideology in the state of Utah.
I mean, this is the kind of republicanism we just don't need.
As conservatives, we don't believe in the idea that biological sex and gender are completely separate and arbitrary, or that there's a third sex, or that you can magically change your gender.
And you have the Utah governor doing this.
We don't need governors who do this sort of stuff.
Utah has plenty of excellent possible governors, and apparently Spencer Cox is not one of them.
Here's the governor of Utah.
What is the state's plan to fund and pass legislation for more mental health resources, specifically mental health therapists, at each school?
Well, thank you so much, Gabby, for that question.
And my preferred pronouns are he, him, and his.
So thank you for sharing yours with me.
I'm sorry, this is so pathetic.
It's so pathetic.
And there's some people in the Republican establishment wing who are like, we need to avoid these cultural conflicts.
Honest to God, if you won't stand up for kids, if you will not stand up for baseline factual truth like men and women exist, and they are separate parts of the human species because they are, because all mammals are dichotomous in terms of sex, the sexual binary is the reason that evolutionary biology exists among mammals.
If you are not willing to stand up for this, you do not belong in government.
It is that simple.
And all these folks are just intimidated by the media.
That's really what it comes down to.
And by the way, it is incredible.
When I say that the left is addicted to the ideology, they're addicted to the ideology.
According to the Daily Wire, Tim Pierce reporting, President Joe Biden once supported federal legislation banning the sexual education of K-12 grade students, long before he called a similar Florida law applying to K-3 grade students hateful.
In the summer of 1994, Biden, then a U.S.
Senator from Delaware, voted in favor of a proposed amendment to the Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The amendment modified the act to block taxpayer money from funding any activity or school material that may promote or encourage sexual activity.
None of the funds authorized under this act shall be used to develop materials or programs directed at youth that are designed to directly promote or encourage sexual activity, whether homosexual or heterosexual, according to that amendment.
An earlier draft of the amendment explicitly banned the promotion of homosexuality.
That amendment said, quote, no local educational agency that receives funds under this act shall implement or carry out a program or activity that has either the purpose or effect of encouraging or supporting homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative.
The legislation further clarified, quote, a program or activity for purposes of this section includes distribution of instructional materials, instruction, counseling or other services on school grounds or referral of a pupil to an organization that affirms a homosexual lifestyle.
And then, of course, Joe Biden has changed his view wildly.
And now we're all supposed to mirror that view.
Well, the good news is Then not all lawmakers are cowards like Spencer Cox over in Utah.
Over in Florida, one lawmaker, Randy Fine in Brevard County, tweeted on Monday he will introduce legislation in the next session to make it a crime of felony child abuse to give drugs, hormone therapy, or surgery to minors for gender assignment.
And it would be punishable by prison time and loss of medical license.
He said, quote, we should not have children making decisions they cannot undo.
My bill would not say that if you're a boy and you think you're a girl, you can't have people call you a girl or dress up like a girl or go to mental health counseling to talk about it.
It says you have to wait until you are an adult.
Fine specifically singled out a plastic surgery doctor in Miami, whom he said advertises her, quote, gender confirmation services on TikTok.
He says, I don't think if you're trying to market your services to an adult, I don't know about you.
I don't use TikTok.
My 14 year old does.
Of course, transgender health advocates, they say this isn't assigning a gender.
This is just affirming a gender.
But of course, it is.
Which is more of an assignment?
You are born, you have a biological sex, you have not been assigned anything, or a doctor is literally going to carve away parts of your body to make you look more like a member of the opposite sex.
Which one sounds more like an assignment to you?
It's amazing to watch all of the advocates of science just cast science out the window.
And again, if Republicans are not going to stand up for kids, do not elect them to office.
Do not elect them to high office.
Meanwhile, Ohio is following the Florida lead as well they should.
And the media are fighting mad about all of this.
According to The Hill, two Ohio Republicans on Monday introduced a bill strikingly similar to Florida's recently passed parental rights in education law.
The Ohio bill also borrows language from a new South Dakota law, which outlaws the promotion of divisive concepts in places like the classroom and the workplace.
Under Ohio's House Bill 616, introduced Monday by State Reps Mike Loychik and Gene Smit, public kindergarten through third grade teachers would not be permitted to teach, use, or provide any curriculum or instructional materials on sexual orientation on gender identity, and educators of grades 4 through 12 would be barred from engaging in instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity in a manner which is not quote-unquote age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
It sounds exactly like the Florida law, and that is very, very good.
I have to say I am amused by the media's take on all this.
So, the entire left has now censored in on the idea that boys can be girls, girls can be boys, that children should be provided with life-altering surgery and hormone therapy and sterilizing procedures in order to quote-unquote affirm their gender without any longitudinal research on any of this and in contravention of basic logic and in contravention of basic reason.
And if you notice, then you're bad.
This is always the game that they play.
If you notice, then you are very, very bad.
So the media have taken a couple of tacks on this.
Tack one is that there are some people on the right who have been using the word groomer to describe people who advocate for the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation to very, very small children.
Now the term groomer has a pretty specific history.
When people used to use groomer in the 1970s, this would imply that teachers were grooming children so they could then sexually abuse them.
I don't think that's what advocates of this sort of education are doing.
I don't think that they are doing this because they wish to have sex with small children.
I think they are doing this because they wish to politically groom, meaning they wish to bring up and indoctrinate in a lifestyle that they advocate, these kids, so that they can feel more affirmed about their own lifestyles.
I think they are politically grooming these kids.
I don't think they're sexually grooming these kids.
There may be some odd criminals who are doing this.
But I think that for the most part, what they are attempting to do is cudgel an entire generation of kids into gender confusion and mental instability in order to make themselves feel better.
And they believe they're doing something ideologically good because, of course, they believe that true happiness is to be found in sexual hedonism and the sense of sexual authenticity that can only be affirmed by a society of very tolerant and indoctrinated children.
That's what they're doing here.
I will notice also that the left, which has been suggesting that if you oppose the hormone replacement therapy for children or transgender surgery, this means that you are killing trans kids, is the language they use.
That you're killing trans kids if you don't want kindergartners indoctrinating the idea they can be a member of the opposite sex.
Suddenly, they're very sensitive about the use of language.
So, number one, if you have been using that sort of language, I have no use for you complaining about the use of language like rumor.
Number two, If people are saying that you are grooming children politically, you are grooming children politically.
And it's not the same thing as grooming children sexually.
But the baseline notion that you're talking to kids apart from their parents because the parents are the enemy and you are the source of their sexual knowledge is creepy and weird, at the very least.
And it is politically motivated, which is to say that it is perverse.
So that's angle number one is the left is trying to say, well, that now that now that it may be true, the vast majority of parents and Americans agree that we shouldn't be sexually indoctrinating small children.
But if you use the word groomer, then you're the real problem.
No, you're still the real problem, even if the use of the word groomer with regard to, for example, sexual.
Abuse of children is over the top and misstated.
Political grooming is indeed happening.
Okay, so that's number one.
The second thing they've been doing is they've been saying, you know, the right is declaring these culture wars on corporate America for no reason.
So Brian Stelter is doing this routine.
He said, oh, the right has decided that Disney is the top issue.
No, you guys did.
You guys did.
Here is the timeline.
The timeline is Florida passed a bill.
The bill is very obvious.
The bill says something very clear.
You're not allowed to sexually indoctrinate small children.
You guys went to Disney and you know that Disney is the biggest employer in the state of Florida.
And so you yelled at them and you said, if you don't say something, we are going to just keep reporting that you're not saying anything.
And so you cuddled them into making a statement.
And then you cuddled Disney into going further than that and holding an all hands town hall meeting in which members of the upper echelons of Disney overtly said that they wish to mainline gay propaganda, their words into children's programming.
And then we noticed.
So if anybody brought Disney into this fight, it's you, you jackasses.
So here's Brian Stelter blaming the right for the left, cudgeling corporations into going low.
The talking point on the right is about protecting kids from the dangers of the Walt Disney Company.
Really.
But Disney is just a stand-in.
It's just a symbol for something bigger.
A conservative backlash to growing acceptance of gay and transgender people.
A conservative fear that traditional beliefs are being trampled on.
And there are entire networks that program to this fear, and many politicians that react to it.
That's the story here.
The story is that they are so tolerant, and that they are so good, and they are so wonderful, and that's why people are angry at Disney.
No.
You guys forced Disney to go completely radical on this subject, and then talk about indoctrinating kids in their programming with this stuff, and then we reacted.
So no, this is on you.
All the woe is me.
Why am I being attacked?
Why is this all happening?
Because you started the fight, gang.
And the more corporations do this, the more stupid they are.
This is true on every woke front.
So the dumbest example of this.
So every day there's a new corporation doing something unbelievably dumb in terms of social politics.
So the other day we had Oreo, a cookie company, pushing coming out content.
Now we have Cracker Jack, which is a company that is nationally famous for being in a song about baseball, calling itself Cracker Jill to promote feminism.
Now, let me just point out, Cracker Jill is not going to sell you a lot of Cracker Jack.
It really is not.
This is incredibly stupid.
Cracker Jack is going to get sold to ballgames because it's literally part of the song that we sing during the seventh inning stretch.
Turning Cracker Jack into Cracker Jill is bad marketing.
It is stupid marketing.
It provides you with no win.
But they all feel like, all these companies feel like they have to do this because they know, number one, that they'll get attention, and number two, that the left will cheer them for their progressivism.
So now we have Cracker Jill, which frankly just sounds like a racist lady from the 1950s who's yelling at a black kid, Cracker Jill.
It's weird, isn't it?
You're like, Cracker Jill?
Okay, anyway.
Here is a song about Cracker Jill.
The woman singing, by the way, is black, so this has nothing to do with the race.
Is he ballooning baseball here?
Wait, that's tennis.
That's the wrong sport.
That's hockey.
That's also the wrong sport.
I can stop you if you have the will to live.
Roo roo for a girl.
Wait, that's tennis.
That's the wrong sport.
That's hockey.
That's also the wrong sport.
That's basketball.
We've never heard that before.
Are any of the people playing here going to be girls?
Yeah I guess there are a bunch of women in the background who are throwing around a baseball.
That's the only baseball... Cracker Jill.
Cracker Jill.
No one can stop you unless it's a man pretending to be a woman who will stop you in every available sport and defeat you with alacrity.
Cracker Jill.
Oh my lord.
Oh my lord.
Who's gonna buy this?
Seriously.
Yeah, continue down these lines.
Siri, just continue.
Clarity before agreement, as my friend Dennis Prager says.
So if you guys want to do this, if this is the path you want to go down, just understand you're alienating at least half the people who buy your product.
Not because I'm not in favor of women playing sport.
I have two daughters.
They both play sports.
Oh, the little one is a little too young.
The bigger one plays tennis.
But, you know, I have no problem with women playing sports, but hijacking classic American brands to turn them into feminist icons is a weird move.
It's a weird move.
And then after the left does this, they're like, why aren't these corporations?
Why are Americans reacting badly?
Yeah, because of you guys.
Because of you.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is The Matt Wall Show.
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