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May 12, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:56
Bidenflation Continues | Ep. 1493
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Inflation remains near record highs as Joe Biden fails to change course.
Democrats try and fail to pass a law enshrining abortion until birth.
And the SEC is reportedly targeting Elon Musk.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, there is good news and there is bad news.
The good news is that inflation, the inflation rate...
The rate of increase in prices, slightly down last month over the month before.
The bad news is it's still unbelievably high.
According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.
inflation edged down to an 8.3% annual rate in April, but remained close to the fastest pace in four decades as the economy continued to face upward price pressures.
The Labor Department's Consumer Price Index reading last month marked the first drop for inflation in eight months, down from an 8.5% annual rate in March.
The decline came primarily from a slight easing in April gasoline prices, which has since reached a new high.
So, um, bad news.
It went down a little bit because the prices of gas went down a little bit, but that was measured a couple of weeks ago and now the prices of gas are at nearly an all-time high.
Broadly, the report offered little evidence that inflation was cooling.
Prices rose for groceries as well as dining out, airline travel and other services that consumers are turning to.
As they shift from spending heavily on goods from earlier in the pandemic.
Airline fares surged 18.6% in April from a month earlier.
That is the fastest rise on record.
The cost of full-service restaurant dining rose 0.9% from March, the biggest gain since last October.
Inflation is no longer just contained to the supply chain.
These pressures are actually becoming more broad-based, said Anita Markowski, Chief Financial Economist at Jeffrey's LLC, referring to disruptions in goods supplies that initially drove the run-up in prices.
So it ain't the supply chain.
It ain't really Ukraine.
It is all of the bad monetary and fiscal policy of this administration.
The CPI measures what consumers pay for goods and services.
The annual rate of inflation has risen sharply since early 2021.
On a monthly basis, the CPI, that's the core price index, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.3% last month after a 1.2% increase in March.
However, the so-called core price index, which excludes the often volatile categories of food and energy, increased 0.6 on the month, a sharp pickup from March's 0.3% gain, providing a sign of broad-based inflationary pressure.
So basically, the oil prices going down masked everything else going up, which is bad because now the oil prices jumped again.
So that would presumably mean you will see another pickup in inflation in the next few weeks, at least according to the measurements.
Services prices excluding energy rose 0.7% in April for March.
That is the fastest one month increase since 1990.
The Fed has, of course, tightened on interest rates a little bit, but probably not enough to actually tamp down the inflation.
And the longer they take doing this, the worse things are going to be.
As the Wall Street Journal editorial board points out, The more important news may be that core inflation rate, sans food and energy, rose 0.6% in April, faster than both in March and February.
It has now climbed 6.2% in the last year.
Consumers don't eat or drive based on core prices in any case, and food prices are up 9.4% over the last year.
Recall that the transitory crowd said goods inflation was caused by supply chain issues related to the pandemic and would ease over time.
Rising inflation in services shows it has spread across most of the economy and is now becoming embedded in business pricing and expectations.
That makes inflation harder for the Federal Reserve to reduce, even without even tighter monetary policy.
The good news, limited though it is, is that real average hourly earnings for all workers fell only 0.1% in April, but Real hourly wages have nonetheless fallen for seven straight months.
They're down 2.6% over the last year.
So when you hear Joe Biden talk about wage increases, understand that your wages actually mean a lot less than they did a year ago.
2.6% less, to be precise.
Average weekly earnings are down even more, 3.4% thanks to a decline in the average work week.
Nominal wage gains are vanishing thanks to inflation.
The bad inflation report turned what looked like a rally in equities on Wednesday into another down day.
Investors are probably concluding that with peak inflation more durable than expected, the Fed may have to raise interest rates even higher than it has already estimated.
That increases the odds of recession unless the Fed loses its anti-inflation nerve.
As I've said before, I think that all of these polls of economists showing only 28% think that there's going to be a recession inside the next six months.
I think that is way low.
I think that is closer to 50% whether we get a recession or not over the course of the next six months.
All of this exposes the fantasy that the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer policy mix of blowout spending and easy money is good for working Americans, as the Wall Street Journal points out.
Modern monetary theory combined with new entitlements were supposed to produce record growth and security.
Instead, they produced the highest inflation in 40 years and a falling standard of living.
Americans learned this lesson the hard way in the 1970s.
A new generation is having to learn it again.
The rich will be fine.
The middle class is paying the bill.
As always.
As always.
Because if you don't have to access your cash, you can just wait the market out.
Right?
Bitcoin has taken a hit.
But if you're really rich, you're not selling your Bitcoin, so you haven't taken a hit yet.
If, however, you need to access that Bitcoin, you got a real problem on your hands.
That's what's happening with the government of El Salvador, which had tied its own currency to Bitcoin.
It had used Bitcoin as a substitute currency inside its own country.
And that means that all of its debt is now denominated in Bitcoin.
So as the value of Bitcoin falls, that means that they're going to have to come up with money somewhere else.
There's the possibility of an entire country defaulting on its debt.
Now, I don't think that's going to happen.
I think that El Salvador probably recovers.
I think probably somebody comes in and buys El Salvador's debt and then basically invests that Bitcoin is going to go up again.
It makes a good currency play over the course of the next couple of years.
Because again, I don't think the Bitcoin is going to zero.
I think Bitcoin is likely to recover.
With that said, it's a very risky time in the markets, and the markets continue to fall.
Already coming up, the market is tumbling, stock futures are declining.
Thanks, Joe!
We'll get to more on this in a second.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, stock futures declined, pointing to a second day of turbulence in markets driven by stronger-than-expected U.S.
inflation.
Futures tied to the S&P 500 fell 0.5 percent after the index closed sharply lower on Wednesday.
NASDAQ 100 futures retreated 0.9 percent, suggesting more losses for technology stocks after the opening bell.
Bitcoin plunged to its lowest level since December 2020, as a cryptocurrency sell-off gathered steam on Thursday.
By the way, again, to speak about Bitcoin, it is well worth pointing out here that while Bitcoin's price is going down, the notion that Bitcoin is going to zero is unsubstantiated.
If you look at the five-year Bitcoin price, what you're seeing right now is that Bitcoin is still doing better than at any time before December of 2020.
And before December 2020, you had Bitcoin that was priced around, you know, anywhere from $5,000 to $9,000 for, like, years on end.
And then you saw a massive run-up during 2021, during the inflationary cycle, and now you're starting to see Bitcoin go down again.
But the notion that Bitcoin is going to be completely debased as a cryptocurrency or something, I don't think that that support is there.
I think that people bought Bitcoin basically on margin, and now they are selling in order to get access to their cash.
And that's a dumb move.
If you have Bitcoin, you should hold Bitcoin.
That is my own personal recommendation.
That's what I'm doing.
That's not financial advice to you.
You can do what you want.
That's what I'm doing.
I own some Bitcoin.
I own some Ethereum.
I have no plans on selling either one of those.
The bottom line is that for Joe Biden, this is all bad news.
Bad economic news trumps everything else that is going on.
There is not a president In memory, who has suffered from bad economic circumstances going into a midterm and hasn't gotten absolutely clocked.
And that is exacerbated by the fact that Joe Biden is not trusted by the American people, that he is doddering and dithering, that every policy that he has undertaken with the possible exception of his policy in Ukraine has been a full-scale disaster on the global stage, and that the Ukrainian invasion was at least in part caused by Russian perception of American weakness after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which again, was Joe Biden.
You know Joe Biden is in serious trouble when late night comics are finally starting to mock him.
Now, it is kind of incredible, by the way.
In the entertainment sphere, it takes a president with 40% approval ratings among Democrats, a Democratic president with 40% approval ratings, 38% approval ratings, to draw like one line of mockery from late night comics.
That's how deeply they're up the colon of whoever is the Democrat in power.
Which means that there is a wide open space for any comic to take advantage of, who's willing to actually make jokes about people from both sides.
Jimmy Fallon dipped his toe into the water last night, mocking Joe Biden over inflation.
President Biden spoke about the economy and he said that addressing inflation is his top domestic priority.
Yep, Biden knew it was time to act when milk and gas both hit $9 a gallon.
But while Biden was speaking about the economy, he really tried to express to Americans that he feels their pain when it comes to inflation.
Although I'm not sure about his choice of words.
Watch this.
Look, I know you gotta be frustrated.
I know.
I can taste it.
Laughter Oh, wow!
Americans heard and responded with a resounding, ew.
Wow, Jimmy Fallon actually mocking Joe Biden.
You know that Joe Biden is in trouble when Jimmy Fallon is mocking him.
That's how bad things have gotten for Joe Biden, is the court jesters have now become mocking, they're now mocking the king.
That's terrible.
So Joe Biden, for his part, is still out on the 2022 campaign trail, or at least they're kind of rolling him out, Bernie style, like Weekend at Bernie's.
They're like stapling him to a gurney and then they're turning it upright.
And then he's attempting to have words come out of his face hole.
And here he is trying to explain that none of this is his fault.
We inherited an economy on the brink of the Great Depression.
Now, here's the thing.
This does not hold.
It does not hold.
So Barack Obama did this in 2009, right?
He took over the economy when the economy was in a recession.
So he got to play on that for eight long years.
For eight years, he got to claim that everything bad that happened was the fault of George W. Bush because I inherited an economy in recession.
The problem for Joe Biden is that that's not true.
That is not true.
He inherited an economy that was ready to boom.
Everybody knew it.
It had been put into an artificial coma at the beginning of COVID.
And in fact, the quarter right before Joe Biden took over, if you look at the GDP stats, the quarter before he took over was not a negative growth quarter.
Okay, so here is what you can see.
Here is the GDP growth.
Okay, quarter three of 2020 is what you'd be looking at because you took over in quarter one of 2021.
Look at the percent change from the preceding quarter.
So quarter one in 2020, you had a drop off.
That was because COVID started to hit in February, March.
Then you had a massive drop in quarter two when we shut down the economy.
Then you had a massive real GDP increase of like 30% in quarter three.
And then you had like a 5% increase in quarter four.
In quarter one of 2021, which includes January when he wasn't president yet, he had a 6% increase in seasonally adjusted GDP annualized rate.
So what you see here is not him taking over an economy that was in recession, but he's just going to lie about it because this is the only thing he can do.
He can't tell the truth, which is that he's been a horrifyingly bad president.
Here is the president of the United States babbling nonsensically about how it's all Donald Trump's fault.
We inherited an economy.
On the brink of a Great Depression.
Millions of people losing their jobs, losing their homes.
But even more importantly, losing hope.
Look at the economy today.
8.3 million jobs in my first 15 months in office.
A record.
Okay, we are looking at the economy today.
And what we've noticed is that things are really, really bad in terms of inflation.
And that the jobs that have come back, we basically just brought back the jobs that were lost during COVID.
And it took you like two years to get there.
If you had shut up, we would have done that probably within year one.
I am noticing something about Joe Biden's speech patterns here, aside from the fact that they are no longer in English.
He just doesn't do consonants anymore.
It's just all vowels.
So if you just take his sentences and you just pronounce the vowels, it sounds...
Shouting at clouds, the president of the United States.
Well, Joe Biden wasn't done shouting at you.
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He's not done shouting at you, by the way.
He's still shouting.
He's getting out his ear trumpet and then shouting at you.
So here's President Biden screaming about food shortages, which he's still the president.
And then something about a great MAGA king or something, which is like the great MAGA king who brought spices to baby Jesus or something.
What is he talking about now?
Remember those long lines you'd see on television?
People lining up in all kinds of vehicles just to get a box of food in their trunk.
How quickly we forget!
People were hurting.
And what did the MAGA crowd want to do?
Forget it.
Forget it.
God, this is the United States of America.
The idea That people would have to wait in line an hour, hour and a half to get a box of food!
He was president when this was happening, by the way.
It was last year.
It's just unbelievable.
What?
That happened while you were president.
Also, when the pandemic first began, there was bipartisan spending that blew it out in true Joe Biden fashion.
So I'm not sure what he is yelling about.
So then you have Joe Biden and he is and he's talking about the Great Maga Maga King.
I don't know why he would do this much branding work on behalf of Donald Trump, but apparently he now is.
So here he is talking about the Great MAGA King who came to Bethlehem with frankincense and myrrh in his Great MAGA crown.
Under my predecessor, the Great MAGA King, the deficit increased every single year he was president.
Why is he just creating branding opportunities for Trump now?
It's amazing.
Like in the last week, because he thinks, as I said before, that if you just dust a light sprinkling of Trump over everything that people go, ugh!
And then they run screaming to Joe Biden's terrible positions.
That's not the way this works.
So he's created a bunch of branding opportunities for Trump.
Trump's sitting over here like, this is amazing.
Now I can brand shirts, ultra mega, ultra super duper mega mega.
And I am great mega king.
So here's the thing.
He also is increasing the deficit just at a slightly lower rate than during the biggest spending binge we have ever seen in world history in 2020 during the pandemic.
But Great Maga King is pretty weird branding?
Again, like now, like I say, it's going to be Whoa, like Great Maga King and two other kings bringing myrrh to the baby in the manger.
Now, that's our new Christmas song under Joe Biden.
He's so bad at this.
Also, he then suggested that we are fighting on two fronts, inflation and Ukraine.
Here we go.
Right now, America's fighting on two fronts.
At home, it's inflation and rising prices.
Abroad, it's helping Ukrainians defend their democracy and feeding those who are left hungry around the world because Russian atrocities exist.
And Jeff and the American farmers understand Putin's war has cut off critical sources of food.
We're fighting inflation.
I do love it when Democrats equate domestic economic problems with foreign wars.
War on poverty.
War on drugs.
Or, alternatively, these are two very separate issues.
So, Democrats, again, they're boxed in because they have a president who is rambling about Green American King and food shamblings!
And they have to blame somebody.
So, Hakeem Jeffries, who, believe it or not, is the heir apparent to Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House or as Minority Leader, which she's going to be in approximately five months here, six months.
Hakeem Jeffries, he's blaming Republicans for inflation, which is weird because Republicans are not in charge of any of the elected branches of government right now.
We are going to work and focus like a laser beam on dealing with the inflationary pressures that the American people are experiencing in terms of food prices, certainly in terms of gas prices, and every other day-to-day kitchen table pocketbook issue that Democrats work on, Republicans talk about but do nothing about.
Oh, so it's the Republicans' fault.
You guys are in charge, guys.
And all you had to do was nothing.
That's the amazing thing here.
All you had to do was do the thing that Joe Biden is best at.
Be an inanimate object that can barely move.
That's all you had to do.
You just had to stand there and breathe.
And everything would have been fine.
And you couldn't do it because you had to build back better, build back bodangity.
Really, Hakeem Jeffries, by the way, is still trying to trot out the lie that wages are up.
Real wages are down.
They're down because of your inflation.
Here's Hakeem Jeffries.
8 million good paying jobs created during President Biden's first 16 months in office.
A record.
Fastest rate of economic growth in 40 years.
Unemployment down to pre-pandemic lows of 3.6%.
Wages have increased for the first time in 40 years.
No, that is not true.
Wages were increasing under President Trump.
And real wages are down.
Like 2.6% over the last year.
So that's just, that's just a lie.
That's not true.
So what's actually happening inside the Democratic Party halls?
They're panicking.
They're panicking so much that many Democratic hopefuls are apparently now jockeying to replace Joe Biden.
There's an article from NBC News.
NBC News, Jonathan Allen and Natasha Korecki reporting, quote, top Democrats jockey for 2024 presidential campaign position.
And Joe Biden's over here like, guys, I'm still basically alive.
Like I have functioning parts of my of my medical system aggie.
According to NBC News, quote, in recent months, Senator Bernie Sanders' political team has noticed a marked shift in the 80-year-old former presidential candidate.
His campaign fires are burning hot.
Yes, I'm bringing back the pudding.
The pudding is coming back.
I am 80 years old, 80 years young.
Socialism, it wears well.
You know, you can be 80 years old, and it's basically like you're a five-year-old, because you're as dumb as a five-year-old.
So you're basically like a five-year-old, because you just run forever.
We need to replace this octogenarian with that octogenarian, and I will be a better octogenarian.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, who's also 97 years old, she's also thinking about running for President of the United States.
According to NBC News, Sanders is just the most openly ambitious of an emerging field of Democratic hopefuls positioning themselves to run if Biden doesn't.
More than a dozen Democratic insiders said in interviews, this would be Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Gavin Newsom.
Ooh, a murderer's row of stupid.
But, wow, things are going well, guys.
Already coming up, Democrats, they keep talking about abortion, but they can't really stick with their abortion arguments, because the abortion arguments are really, really, really bad.
Okay, but, well, they are worried about abortion.
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In the meantime, they think that Joe Biden is doing great.
They think Joe Biden is doing just great.
Well, now they are attempting to swivel to abortion because, of course, the economy is a disaster for them.
And it's not going to work.
It's not going to work because their arguments are really, really ugly, as I keep mentioning.
Democrats have to keep shifting the abortion argument from everything but abortion.
They can't talk about abortion because it turns out the Democratic Party position is the most extreme immoral position it is possible to have.
It is more extreme than any European country.
It is more extreme than the vast majority.
Like, nearly all Americans are willing to countenance.
And that is their hardcore position that 49 Democrats in the Senate just voted for.
They can't argue on that basis.
So instead, they have to pick a bunch of ancillary arguments off the tree.
Again, when they do make arguments, the arguments are so morally hideous.
That, I mean, it's hard to describe how ugly these arguments are.
So for example, Katie Porter, much beloved of the far left, Democratic congressperson from California, she was talking about abortion.
And once again, she's basically arguing we need to kill babies in order to feed the economy, which, what?
So we need to soil and green the babies because after all, we have to make this economy run, guys.
So the fact that things like inflation can happen and it can become more expensive to feed your kids and to fuel your car is exactly why people need to be able to be in charge of how many mouths they're going to have to feed.
So I think the fact that we're seeing this jump in expenses, that we're seeing people having to pay more in the grocery store, pay more at the pump, pay more for housing, is a reason that people are saying, I need to be able to make my own decisions about when and if to start a family.
So your plan is you crap out the economy and then people need to kill their unborn babies in order so that they can avoid your crapped out economy.
This is Katie Porter's actual case.
I wonder why they're losing the support of the majority of Americans on key issues, including issues like abortion.
Hakeem Jeffries, for his part, he's now blaming the radical Supreme Court majority for, you know, allowing people to vote on the issue.
We had a very robust discussion earlier today within the caucus on Two pressing issues that need to be dealt with decisively as it relates to freedom both here in America and freedom abroad.
The freedom for a woman to make her own health care decisions, which is being threatened by a runaway, radical, right-wing Supreme Court majority that's shameful.
We need to fight for freedom abroad by repelling Vladimir Putin's invasion of a sovereign country.
And that's exactly the same as making sure that you can kill your unborn baby all the way up till the point of birth.
Exactly the same.
I think these people don't understand what freedom actually means.
Okay, so how dumb are the Democrats?
The Democrats decided that they were going to vote and force everybody to vote on a Senate bill that would have essentially allowed abortion up till point of birth.
It banned things like parental notification laws.
It got rid of all sorts of exceptions In terms of abortions.
So basically it said, our new position is not codifying Roe, right?
Roe allows for some pretty significant abortion restrictions on the state level, in particular the third trimester.
And then under Planned Parenthood versus Casey, there have actually been some pretty significant restrictions even in the second trimester.
But they wanted to, in the Senate, the Democrats did, they wanted to get everyone on record not just codifying Roe, Which would have been bad enough.
They wanted everybody on record endorsing full-fledged abortion all the way until the baby is out of the birth canal.
That is what the actual bill suggested.
And Dick Durbin was like, we need to put everybody on record.
Yeah, idiots.
You just put your entire party on record in favor of the most extreme abortion position it is possible to have.
Here's Dick Durbin.
Every member of the Senate will go on record.
Do you want to overturn Roe versus Wade?
That's what this is all about.
If you want to vote that way, be my guest.
But to put us in a situation where we're taking away a basic freedom that has been guaranteed by the Constitution in the court for 50 years is significant, historic, and Senators should be on the record.
Okay, so they voted on this thing.
There's only one problem.
The vote completely failed.
And when I say completely failed, I mean every Republican voted against it and Joe Manchin voted against it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Senate Democrats failed to advance a bill seeking to ensure women's access to abortion in a vote designed to draw a clear contrast with Republicans ahead of a potential Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, looming just months before the midterms.
The vote was 49 in favor to 51 against, falling short of the 60 votes necessary to advance the Women's Health Protection Act.
Now notice, This is not about the filibuster.
They didn't even get a majority.
It's not that they didn't get 60 votes.
They didn't get 50 votes.
They didn't get 50 plus one votes.
They got 49 votes.
Democrats held the vote despite knowing it was certain to fail in the 50-50 Senate, where abortion stances split almost entirely along party lines.
No Republican supported the measure.
Centrist Democrat Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia broke with his party and opposed the bill.
Here is Joe Manchin explaining why he did not support the bill.
The bill we have today to vote on, the Women's Health Protection Act, and I respect people who support, but make no mistake, it is not Roe v. Wade codification.
It's an expansion.
It wipes 500, 500 state laws off the books.
It expands abortion.
So Senator Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, who used to proclaim that he was a pro-life Democrat, he voted with the other Democrats.
This is how dumb they are.
This is just bad strategy.
It's bad policy, obviously, but it's really, really bad strategy.
Getting every Democrat on record, supporting the most extreme abortion position, is kind of crazy.
And Joe Biden is now attempting to blame Republicans for this, despite the fact that, again, it's your own party that put forward a bill that couldn't even get majority support.
He said, quote, once again, as fundamental rights are at risk at the Supreme Court, Senate Republicans have blocked passage of the Women's Health Practice Amendment, a bill that affirmatively protects access to reproductive health care.
And he said this is a failure to act.
It runs counter to the will.
Of the majority of Americans, even though a majority of Americans do not support abortion all the way until birth.
In fact, a vast minority of Americans support that position.
So, right, genius job here on pushing a bill that did not even have 50 votes in the Senate.
Really, really strong stuff.
Elizabeth Warren, for her part, she's always singing the same tune.
She wants to kill the filibuster.
This wasn't about the filibuster.
You didn't have majority support to move this forward.
If there were no filibuster, it still doesn't move forward on the floor.
I believe in democracy.
And I don't believe that the minority should have the ability to block things that the majority want to do.
That's not the Constitution.
What we're talking about right now are the individual rights and liberties of half the population of the United States of America.
I think that's enough to say it's time to get rid of the filibuster.
She's just, she's an incredible, incredible hypocrite.
And she, I know she's smarter than this.
I knew her when she was at Harvard Law.
She's not this dumb.
She is just, she is the great panderer in politics today.
It is amazing how she's just willing to say whatever left-wing nostrum she believes the progressive part of her base wants her to say.
She's such a liar.
It is, it is incredible.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are fighting amongst themselves over whether you should protest at Supreme Court justices' homes.
So you have the White House that's basically like, well, you know, it's probably okay.
And then you have some Democrats who are like, well, it's kind of a bad look for us to go to justices' homes and try to intimidate them.
Also a violation of law.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin actually is now requesting that Fairfax police place security perimeters around the homes of Supreme Court justices.
Here's the new governor of Virginia.
Governor Glenn Youngkin of the Commonwealth of Virginia has reached out in a letter to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors saying that he is writing to request that the Fairfax County Police Department establish an expanded security perimeter around the homes of the three current justices from the Supreme Court who reside in Fairfax County.
So, you know, that is the right policy.
However, you have a bunch of Democrats out there who are like, no, no, no, this is good.
We should probably go ahead with it.
Robin Abakarian, who is just a, she's an insane radical columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
She has an entire piece today titled, Abortion Rights Activists Are Targeting Supreme Court Justices' Homes.
That's fine by me.
She says, when I hear people freaking out about Saturday's peaceful protests in front of the Chevy Chase Maryland homes of Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, or a vigil Monday evening in front of Justice Samuel Alito's home in Virginia, I can't get too worked up about it.
Sure, it's unnerving to be picketed at home, but that's life in a mostly free society.
Really, being picketed at home is life in a mostly free society?
I was unaware of this.
Truly, it seems like that's life in a mostly unfree society, is where people show up outside your front like a mob with pitchforks, shows up outside your front door.
That seems not like the freest thing.
She says, on Alito's block, protesters were lighthearted, with some trolling him by chanting, I bet he likes Nickelback.
If they'd been able to protest outside the Supreme Court itself, perhaps the protesters would not have targeted the justices' neighborhoods in the first place, but that was not an option.
That's because the court was encircled by an eight-foot, non-scalable fence.
Well, I wonder why that was necessary.
Why?
God forbid Americans should exercise their right to protest on the very site where women are being deprived of the right to control their bodies.
Man, amazing how all the standards shift when you agree with the protesters, according to the left.
Meanwhile, the DOJ, it now appears, is not even going to investigate this leak, this leak of the draft opinion.
That's kind of incredible.
So I spoke with former Attorney General William Barr the other day, and I asked him about this.
He said, no, there are various federal laws that have been violated here, including attempts to intimidate is a possibility, attempts to obstruct justice, because if you're attempting to leak draft opinions in order to craft pressure, To move the court?
That is obstruction of justice?
There are various statutory provisions that are possibly violated here by the leaker.
We don't know until we know who the leaker is.
But according to the New York Times, Merrick Garland's DOJ has no interest in investigating this.
After a leak of a draft opinion showed the Supreme Court was poised to end women's constitutional right to abortion, some Republicans and conservative commentators called for a criminal investigation.
But even as Chief Justice John Roberts condemned the disclosure by Politico as egregious, he instead directed the Supreme Court Marshal to lead an internal investigation.
The court apparently has not asked the DOJ to open a criminal investigation or to lend the Marshal support and resources.
I wasn't aware that the court had to do that.
Since when does the court have to request that?
Can't the DOJ just investigate on its own?
Do they have to have like a signed engraved invitation from Justice Roberts to investigate the leak?
A Supreme Court spokeswoman this week declined to answer questions about the status of the inquiry, including the number of people assigned to it and what the rules are.
Like whether it's up to each justice to decide whether to make themselves, clerks, or relatives available.
The Justice Department does have a cadre of agents with experience investigating leaks.
By contrast, the Supreme Court Marshal, Gail Curley, is a former national security lawyer for the Army, whose office of about 260 employees primarily provides physical security for the justices in the court building.
It's far from clear justices want agents of the executive branch grilling their clerks and relatives and going through their computers in their chambers and the cell phones of their associates.
As a matter of constitutional principle, they're a co-equal branch of government.
None can be sure whether the leaker, if identified, will turn out to be a liberal or a conservative.
Apparently, under a policy imposed by Attorney General Merrick Garland last year, prosecutors and agents are broadly prohibited from using subpoenas, warrants, or court orders to compel reporters to testify or to seize reporters' records.
The FBI might not be authorized to start using tools like grand jury subpoenas without formally opening an investigation.
So you could treat this as a theft of government property, but they're saying that they may not do this.
So again, if this were truly suspected to be a conservative, and let's say that the Supreme Court decision were going to go the other way, and it was suspected that a conservative were going to leak that, how long do you think it would take Merrick Garland to launch an investigation?
About 2.7 seconds?
But again, this is the nature of government under democratic auspices.
It is a tool of power.
And one of the great ironies of the American political scene right now is that the more we distrust the institutions, the more we think we can make them better if we control them, as opposed to just limiting their power entirely.
Alrighty, in just one second, we will get to the Biden administration going after Elon Musk.
There's a shock.
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All right, folks, it's the most infamous Supreme Court case in memory and the deadliest decision in history.
But even 50 years after Roe versus Wade, few know the truth behind the landmark decision, a decision that's enabled the destruction of over 64 million babies since 1971.
Well, tomorrow, May 13th, The Daily Wire will take a wrecking ball to the four big lies the abortion industry is built upon.
Tune in to the world premiere of our original documentary, Choosing Death, The Legacy of Roe, and uncover the inside story of how Roe v. Wade came to pass and why it needs to pass away now.
You'll hear the facts and stories the abortion regime has suppressed for generations.
Get a clear-eyed view at the brutal reality they desperately do not want you to see.
Some of this content is hard to take because it turns out abortion is really hard to take for everyone, but few subjects are more important.
Here's the trailer.
Many times when we did this, as we started, patients would...
Good.
I began crying and protesting.
But once we had begun dilating the cervix and passing instruments into the uterus, it was too late to stop.
I was handing hush money to women who we had left pieces of their baby.
We had put these women's lives in jeopardy.
We had put their lives at risk.
And we were literally giving them a check for $800.
for $800, and for a poor woman, $800 is a lot of money.
I mean, there have been so many moments in the last decade plus of going undercover in abortion clinics myself and seeing just heartbreaking things.
Women vomiting in the hallway of an abortion clinic, crying out in pain.
The late-term abortionists talking casually about how they would literally leave a born-alive baby to die, or if you deliver the baby in the toilet, then you pick it up and stuff it in a plastic bag and bring it to us.
Babies are being born alive and the backs of their necks are being slit.
They are being drowned.
Their necks are being snapped.
It's happening more often than people want to think about.
These abortion facilities, these abortion providers, these doctors, they don't care about these women.
And you're just, you're realizing you're watching in front of your own eyes play out America's greatest horror story, which is how we butcher children in the name of choice.
I'm watching on the map.
This is super important stuff, so please help us expose the truth.
Tell your friends and family to watch.
If you're not already, become a Daily Wire member.
Tune in Friday to our documentary on abortion, Choosing Death, The Legacy of Roe, and make sure that all of your left-leaning friends who don't want to face up to the realities of abortion see it too.
Go to dailywire.com slash choosing and join the fight today.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Meanwhile, the government under Joe Biden is targeting Elon Musk.
Again, he's been the subject of more investigations than somebody who just leaked a majority Supreme Court opinion, for sure.
Well, now, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal regulators are investigating Elon Musk's late disclosure last month of his sizable stake in Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter, a lag that allowed him to buy more stock without alerting other shareholders to his ownership.
The SEC is probing Musk's tardy submission of a public form investors must file When they buy more than 5% of a company's shares, the people said.
The disclosure functions as an early sign to shareholders and companies that a significant investor could seek to control or influence a company.
The Tesla chief executive made his filing April 4th, at least 10 days after his stake surpassed the trigger point for disclosure.
Musk hasn't publicly explained why he didn't file in a timely manner.
The SEC investigation hasn't previously been reported.
An SEC spokesman declined to comment.
An attorney for Musk didn't respond to a message on Wednesday seeking comment.
Musk likely saved more than $143 million by not reporting that his trades had crossed the 5% threshold, said Daniel Taylor, University of Pennsylvania accounting professor, since the share price could have been higher had the market known of the billionaire's growing stake.
Yes, I'm sure that Musk was looking at violating the law to save $143 million.
Reminder, Elon Musk's net worth right now is somewhere on the order of $240 billion.
$240 billion.
Okay, just to make clear what we're talking about here, $143 million is about 1,678th of Elon Musk's total wealth.
make clear what we're talking about here.
143 million is about 1,678th of Elon Musk's total wealth.
So I'm sure that's what he was thinking when this happened right here.
The case is easy, it's straightforward.
Whether they're going to pick that battle with Elon is another question, said Dr. Taylor.
Referring to the prospect of a regulatory lawsuit against the outspoken entrepreneur, the SEC could drop its investigation without bringing civil claims, as not every probe results in formal action.
An SEC lawsuit against Musk would be unlikely to derail the Twitter deal because the company's board of directors has already endorsed it, and the SEC generally lacks the power to stop mergers or take private transactions, according to Jill Fish, a securities and corporate law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Regulators could seek a court order preventing Musk from voting shares he acquired without proper disclosure, but the SEC generally hasn't pursued that remedy.
I suspect that the SEC might pursue that remedy, because again, the Biden administration is deeply afraid that Elon Musk is about to take over Twitter, and that is why every five seconds, apparently, a different agency of government is now investigating the world's richest human being.
Meanwhile, and speaking of people attempting to crack down on Twitter, According to the Wall Street Journal, other countries are now taking more steps to compel social media platforms to shield users from material they deem harmful through standards that could affect Twitter.
Regulators from Australia to the EU, India, Canada, and the UK have recently introduced or are considering new rules for policing online content.
Which isn't scary at all, having these governments determine what can and cannot be on Twitter.
They include a coming EU requirement for major platforms to conduct annual risk assessments And a new obligation in Australia to swiftly remove content, whether illegal or not, upon notice from the country's e-safety commissioner.
Now, Australia is not a free country.
I mean, when Australia decides that they are going to have their e-safety commissioner tell Twitter to just pull down material, and if Twitter doesn't, they just dump legal liability on them, that's an amazing violation of basic Western free speech principles.
Musk signaled Monday his plans for the platform would be compatible with the new EU rules because basically they're just requiring you to conduct an annual risk assessment.
He says, I think we're very much of the same mind.
Anything my companies can do that would be beneficial to Europe, we want to do that.
But the fact that all of these governments are now deeply concerned about Twitter, this is a far cry from the days when liberals ruled the roost in sort of world politics.
When Democrats are perceived to be in solid control of the levers of power, then it's like, well, aren't these social media companies great?
When Barack Obama was president, you remember, social media was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Facebook was wonderful.
After all, Barack Obama had been so clever in manipulating it in 2012.
Twitter was incredible.
It was leading to the Arab Spring.
And then, all over the world, the left started to lose power, and suddenly it was, well, the only way we can maintain power is to shut off all this misinformation and disinformation.
And that is the way that an enormous amount of content dissemination works in the United States.
So, according to the Daily Wire, for example, Tim Peirce reporting, an economist who formerly worked with the fact-checking site PolitiFact as one of the company's go-to sources for fact-finding says he quit over the company's left-wing bias.
Brian Riedel, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said he worked with PolitiFact over a decade ago when the fact-checking site had first launched.
He said the PolitiFact journalists consulted him on dozens of articles and ratings before he stopped working with them because they were clearly looking for him to give them material to nail Republicans, which of course is not a shock at all.
All of our fact-checking institutions are dedicated to the proposition that everything that the right ever says is false.
I mean, there's an entire fact check today on Twitter that was disseminated by PolitiFact that was basically just rebutting any sort of Right-wing narrative that they could because this is all that PolitiFact does on a daily basis.
The fact that they're now extending that logic to places like Twitter should not be much of a shock.
And it shouldn't be much of a shock that you're seeing the Biden administration pursue similar sorts of restrictions.
So Joe Biden's new disinformations are the weirdo theater kid.
She says that verified people on Twitter should be able to add context to other people's tweets. So if there is a tweet from the Daily Wire, if you are a verified user, a blue check, you should be able to go in and add context to the tweet, which is amazing, amazing stuff here from the people who are supposedly pro-free speech.
So verified people can essentially start to edit Twitter the same sort of way that Wikipedia is, so they can add context to certain tweets.
If President Trump were still on Twitter and tweeted a claim about voter fraud, someone could add context from one of the 60 lawsuits that went through the court or something that an election official in one of the states said perhaps Your own Secretary of State and his news conferences, something like that.
Oh, look at that.
That's Biden's misinformation, Zara.
That's gonna go well.
By the way, that story I was referring to in PolitiFact is an actual headline from PolitiFact today.
Quote, And they said this is not grooming because, quote, I don't know.
says about gender and sexuality in schools.
So what do they do?
And when they quote a bunch of left-wing experts to suggest there's nothing wrong with indoctrinating small children about gender identity and sexual orientation.
And they said, this is not grooming because quote, it is done without intent to sexually abuse a child.
I don't know, telling a little boy that he could be a little girl sounds like a pretty significant sexual abuse of a child to me.
The notion that, this is my favorite part, quote, experts in psychology and child development said they are not aware of any evidence that shows that increased exposure to LGBTQ people or topics makes children more likely to join the LGBTQ community.
Instead, they said, it is likely an environment of increased acceptance that allows people to more openly consider whether they might be part of the LGBTQ community.
So in other words, the stats show that the more you teach kids about this, the more they identify with this community.
And their argument is, it's not because of the teaching, it's because just the world is more open and broad and wonderful.
So then why do you insist on teaching it to kids?
Why not just be open and accepting?
No, you have to indoctrinate kids with it.
That's the important part.
PolitiFact.
All of these fact-checking institutions dedicated to the proposition that the left is always correct and the right is always wrong.
I definitely want them policing Twitter and policing Elon Musk.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is the Matt Walsh Show, airing 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.
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