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June 21, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:47
The Blindness Of The Pro-Abortion Media | Ep. 1519
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Time Text
The Washington Post accidentally promotes a pro-life message in an article meant to rip Texas's anti-abortion law.
The Navy pushes alternative pronouns.
And Joe Biden gets ticked when asked about the Joe session.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Well, it is always amazing when the left just can't hear itself.
This happens a lot in politics.
It's not just a left-wing problem.
It's also a right-wing problem.
Very often people in politics will say a thing and it's as though the words that come out of their face hole does not reach their ear holes.
And when they do that, it's always very telling because you can see that if they had just an ounce of understanding, if they had an ounce of introspection, they would understand that their positions are just not correct, but they don't. And so instead, they end up accidentally promoting a cause that they actually virulently oppose. A great case in point of this is the Washington Post today. So the Washington Post is a wildly pro-abortion newspaper. This is a paper that spends its days trying to tear into any state that has
the temerity to try to ban abortion.
It suggests that pro-choice positions are pro-woman positions, that there is nothing wrong at all, There's an article in the Washington Post today that I really think is just a perfect, wonderful example of how people can't hear themselves when they talk about politics.
The article is titled, This Texas Teen Wanted an Abortion.
She now has twins.
The article is meant to be a rip on Texas's anti-abortion law, which created this kind of strange and interesting legal workaround whereby they didn't actually make abortion illegal.
They just said that you could sue anybody.
A third party could sue anybody who is participating in an abortion other than the woman's.
You could sue the doctor who is participating in an abortion.
And this didn't create a state cause of action.
So that meant that it wasn't a law that could be struck down by the Supreme Court, at least not temporarily.
This was the most effective anti-abortion law in America prior to whatever the Supreme Court is about to do with Roe versus Wade.
So again, this article is by a person named Carolyn Kitchener, and it's called, This Texas teen wanted an abortion.
She now has twins.
Now, right off the bat, right off the bat, The article is doing the reverse of what it wants to do.
It wants to suggest that this woman is somehow a victim.
But the problem is, the minute you say that she actually had the babies, the babies now exist in the mind of the reader.
And so that is going to necessarily force you to ask the question, would it have been better if those babies had been killed?
As soon as the babies exist as an object for you to actually think about, The argument is now over because the entire pro-abortion argument revolves around the idea that we have to remain ignorant.
We have to have sort of a Rawlsian veil of ignorance placed over our eyes in which we pretend that babies have no interest in life prior to when we pay attention to them.
At the minute that we take off our sunglasses, we go, oh look, a baby.
Then all of a sudden the baby has an interest in life.
But the minute that you actually note that there is a baby there, Now, all of a sudden, all of your petty concerns seem rather secondary, don't they?
So right there in the title, this Texas teen wanted an abortion.
She now has twins.
The conclusion of that statement, she now has twins, completely invalidates everything that came before that.
Because the twins exist.
And here's the thing.
They always existed from the point of conception.
These were human lives with potential.
And that's the entire theme of the article.
The entire theme of the article is supposed to be about how terrible this woman's life is.
But it cannot outweigh the simple fact that there are now living human baby girl twins Who are alive because this woman was not able to kill her babies.
So here's the article, and I think it really is telling.
Brooke Alexander turned off her breast pump at 6.04 p.m.
and brought two fresh bottles of milk over to the bed, where her three-month-old twins lay flat on their backs, red-faced and crying.
Running on four hours of sleep, the 18-year-old tried to feed both babies at once, holding Kendall in her arms while she tried to get Olivia to feed herself.
Her bottle propped up by a pillow, but the bottle kept slipping and the baby kept wailing.
And Brooke's boyfriend, Billy High, wouldn't be home for another five hours.
Please, fussy girl, Brooke whispered.
She peeked outside the room, just big enough for a full-size mattress, and realized she'd barely seen the sun all day.
The windows were covered by blankets, pinned up with thumbtacks to keep the room cool.
Brooke rarely ventured into the rest of the house.
Billy's dad had taken them in when her mom kicked them out, and she didn't want to get in his way.
The hours without Billy were always the hardest.
She knew he had to go, as they relied entirely on the $9.75 an hour he made working the line at Freebird's World Burrito.
But she tortured herself, imagining all the girls he might be meeting.
And she wished she had somewhere to go to.
Okay, so, again, this is supposed to be, she's so miserable, things are, it's so terrible.
Man, wouldn't she be living the free and happy life if she had just been able to kill these babies in the womb?
And as we'll see in this article, this perspective completely falls apart on contact with reality.
Brooke found out she was pregnant late on the night of August 29th, two days before the Texas Heartbeat Act banned abortions once an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity around six weeks of pregnancy.
It was the most restrictive abortion law to take effect in the United States in nearly 50 years.
For many Texans who have needed abortions since September, the law has been a major inconvenience, forcing them to drive hundreds of miles and pay hundreds of dollars for a legal procedure they once could have had at home.
But not everyone has been able to leave the state.
Some people couldn't take time off from work or afford gas, while others faced with a long journey decided to stay pregnant.
Nearly 10 months into the Texas law, they've started having the babies they never planned to carry to term.
Texas offers a glimpse of what much of the country would face if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer, as has been widely expected since a leaked draft opinion circulated last month.
I do love the way that the Washington Post is pitching this thing, right?
You can see they're setting this up to be an anti-life article.
It's going to be a pro-abortion article.
together, creating vast abortion deserts that will push many into parenthood.
Now, I do love the way that the Washington Post is pitching this thing, right?
You can see they're setting this up to be an anti-life article.
It's going to be a pro-abortion article.
You can see it, right?
It's going to be an abortion desert.
Now, you might say, you might call that a pro-life garden where babies are actually born.
But no, it's an abortion desert, right, where no person can obtain abortion.
People will be pushed into parenthood.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, wait a second, aren't the vast majority of people who are going to bear their babies to turn?
Yes, you would be correct.
But again, the Washington Post is setting up this article to be a rebuttal to all pro-life positions.
And as we'll see, it completely fails on all fronts.
Here we go.
Sometimes Brooke imagined her life if she hadn't got pregnant and if Texas hadn't banned abortion just days after she decided she wanted one.
She would have been in school, rushing from class to her shift at Texas Roadhouse, eyes on a real estate license that would finally get her out She pictured an apartment in Austin and enough money for a trip to Hawaii, where she would swim with dolphins in water so clear she could see her toes.
Okay, so, now you've got her priorities, right?
These would have been her alternative priorities if she hadn't actually had her children and then brought them to birth and raised them.
So, on the one hand, two living babies.
On the other, trip to Hawaii, hanging with the dolphins.
You can see that this is starting to fall apart real quickly for the Washington Post.
When both babies finally started eating, Brooke took out her phone and restarted the timer that had been running almost continuously since the day they were born.
She had two and a half hours until they'd have to eat again.
Now, I love how the Washington Post treats, like, the basics of parenthood as though this is impossible.
So, for literally tens of thousands of years, human beings have been doing this sort of stuff.
For all of my babies, we have three, With the help of God, we'll have more.
With all of our babies, we have to do this sort of stuff.
So treating everyday acts of parenting as though this is a massively undoable burden...
This can only be written by a media reporter living in one of the blue cities where abortions are more common than births.
Because for the rest of the world, this is just what we call living a normal life with small children.
This is what it's like to raise a baby.
Brooke and Billy first met at the downtown skate park with a big group of friends one clear night in May of last year.
They didn't talk that first day, but Brooke noticed how effortlessly Billy dropped into the quarter pipe the way his blonde hair flipped out from underneath his red beanie.
She followed him on Instagram.
Her stomach did a little dance when she saw that he followed her back.
Soon they were spending almost every day together, throwing themselves into the Gulf of Mexico waves on Padre Island, watching the sun set over the pier.
At the skate park, he'd help her do the tricks she'd been scared to try alone.
Pinky promised me he'll do it, he'd say, all blue eyes and dimples as she peeked over the edge of the ramp.
Once he hooked her little finger, there was no backing down.
Billie was different from the other guys Brooke knew.
He held her hand in public and introduced her to her dad.
When she took him to the mall, he grinned each time she stepped out of the dressing room, telling her how good she looked in each new crop top she tried on.
He made her feel pretty.
I wasn't used to feeling that, Brooke said.
Brooke took the pregnancy test at 11 o'clock on a hot night at the tail end of the summer.
When the two pink lines appeared, she looked over at Billy, then slid onto the bathroom floor, finally connecting the signs she'd ignored for weeks.
The nausea she'd chalk up to food poisoning.
The two missed periods.
That moment a few weeks back when Billy put a hand on her stomach and asked if she was sure she wasn't pregnant.
So the two missed periods would have been the dead giveaway.
Right there.
Leaving Billie in her bedroom with the pregnancy test, Brooke grabbed her keys and drove to her best friend's house, where they sat on the bed and examined her options.
She could always get an abortion, she told him.
Then he reminded her of something she vaguely remembered seeing on Twitter.
A new law was scheduled to take effect September 1.
Brooke had 48 hours.
The abortion clinic in South Texas, two and a half hours from Corpus Christi, had no open slots the next two days, with patients across the state racing to get into clinics before the law came down.
So first of all, there's something appropriately dystopian about the idea that there is one place where you can still kill your baby in the nearby area, and it's just swamps.
Like, people are just, we gotta kill our baby today.
Like, now's the day.
When Brooke called, the woman on the end of the line offered the names and addresses of clinics in New Mexico a 13-hour drive from Corpus Christi.
In the meantime, the woman said, Brooke could get an ultrasound somewhere nearby.
If she was under six weeks, they could still see her.
We're going to see how far along it is, Brooke texted her dad, Jeremy Alexander, later that night.
See if abortion is an option.
What's the cutoff date, he asked.
They just passed a law today, she responded in the early hours of September 1st, referring to the ban that had just taken effect.
What the effing odds?
I believe it's six weeks.
Fingers crossed, four question marks, her dad said.
But first of all, there's something deeply wrong with the, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the baby is small enough that you can still kill it.
This article is not going in the way the Washington Post wants it to go and it gets worse.
Brooke found a place that would perform an ultrasound on short notice and scheduled an appointment for 9am.
The Washington Post continues, and I'm reading this at length because again, I think that it's important to notice that when the euphemisms slip away with regard to abortion, once the babies actually come into the picture, the pro-choice position completely collapses.
It just disintegrates.
The Washington Post writes, Whenever a new client walks into the pregnancy center of the Coastal Bend, they're asked to fill out a form.
After all the usual questions of name, date of birth, marital status comes the one that most interests the staff.
If you are pregnant, what are your intentions?
From there, the team sorts each client into one of three groups.
If they're planning to have the baby, LTC, likely to carry.
If they're on the fence, AV, abortion vulnerable.
If they're planning to get an abortion, AM, abortion minded.
The pregnancy center of the Coastal Bend, which advertises itself as the number one source of abortion information in the region, is one of thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across the United States, anti-abortion organizations that are often religiously affiliated.
When Brooke showed up with her mom for her appointment, she had no idea she'd walked into a facility designed to dissuade people from getting abortions.
Oh, these are the bad guys in the piece.
As we will see, they're not the bad guys.
The entire moral narrative that the Washington Post is telling right here, it does not hold.
Brooke also didn't know how much significance her form held for the staff.
By signaling she wanted an abortion, she became their first AM of the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Brooke heard about the center from her mom's friend, who knew she needed an ultrasound.
This place offered them free.
Brooke felt a sense of calm, sitting in the waiting room lulled by its decorative throw pillows and soft watercolors of ocean scenes.
But behind the scenes lurked the lady who wants her to have her baby.
Oh no.
The advocate assigned to her case, Angie Arnholdt, had been counseling abortion-minded clients at the pregnancy center for a year.
While many of the center volunteers signed up only to talk to LTCs to have happy conversations about the babies their clients couldn't wait to have, Arnholdt, a 61-year-old who wears a gold cross around her neck, fell called to do what she could to help women make a good decision, she later told the Washington Post.
Back in the consultation room, Brooke told Arnholdt all the reasons she wanted to get an abortion.
She had just enrolled in real estate classes at community college, which would be her first time back in a classroom since she dropped out of high school three years earlier at 15.
She and Billy had been dating only three months.
OK, so again, the priorities we now have from Brooke, if she gets the abortion.
I've dropped out of high school at 15.
I'm going to go back and take a real estate class at the community college.
Also, maybe eventually I'll be able to save up enough money so I can swim with the dolphins in Hawaii.
On the other end of this, you have two innocent human babies.
I'm failing to see the moral balance here.
Sitting across from Brooke and her mom, Arnholdt opened a woman's right to know, an anti-abortion booklet distributed by the state of Texas.
Flipping to a page titled abortion risks, the first risk listed was death.
As Brooke listened to Arnholdt's warnings of depression, nausea, cramping, breast cancer, and infertility, she tried to stay calm, reminding herself women get abortions all the time.
Still, Brooke couldn't help fixating on some of the words Arnholdt used.
Vacuum suction, heavy bleeding, punctured uterus.
And then the Washington Post adds, serious complications from abortion are rare, etc, etc, etc.
They never point out that the vast majority of women in the United States who give birth and go all the way through the process of pregnancy, they have a recovery period and then they're fine.
Starting to panic, Brooke looked over at her mom.
When she found out Brooke was pregnant, Terry Thomas told her daughter to get an abortion.
While she was a devout Christian going to church a few times a week and twice on Sundays, she had her own views on this particular issue.
Well, I mean, I feel like there's some play in the joints here.
Thomas had her first kid at 20, she said, just as she was transferring out of community college with hopes of starting law school.
If the timing had been different, she said, she might have been a prosecutor.
Instead, she hopped from one retail job to another, bath and body works to Walgreens to Home Depot.
Growing up, Brooke said, she bounced back and forth between her mom's house and her dad's, depending on who was the more stable parent.
At the time, her happiest years as a kid were spent with her dad on a tree-lined street with a ping pong table in the garage and a trampoline in the backyard.
But then Brooke's dad started using cocaine.
Well, Alexander had been sober for a few years now.
Back then, he couldn't kick the habit.
Around the time he stopped paying all the rent and sewage started backing up in the toilets, Brooke moved back in with her mom.
With her mom, Brooke always felt like she was tiptoeing.
If Brooke forgot to turn off the lights or do the dishes, Thomas would start yelling.
Thomas felt she had every right to respond that way because she was a hen in her hen house.
Arnholdt, okay, so again, now we're not just making the Washington Post the case for one generation of abortion, we're making the case for two generations of abortion.
Apparently, Brooke should have not been born, because then mom might have been a prosecutor, and dad, who apparently turned into a cocaine addict, what, would not have been a cocaine addict or something?
Of course, Brooke would then not exist, and none of this would be a moral issue at all.
Arnold ushered Brooke into the ultrasound room, where Brooke undressed from the waist down and laid back on an examination table, looking up at a large flat-screen TV.
As the ultrasound technician pressed the probe into her stomach slathered with gel, Brooke willed the screen to show a fetus without a heartbeat.
The technician gasped.
It was twins, and they were 12 weeks along.
We'll get some more on this incredible Washington Post article in just one minute.
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Okay, so, this is where the article takes a wild left turn.
Or should I say a wild right turn?
Because now, the babies are real.
And once the babies are real to people, it is impossible to argue for their killing.
And now it becomes impossible to argue in favor of their killing.
So, again, the notion that all of this is a matter of moral apathy lasts precisely as long as you pretend that the baby doesn't exist.
But in the article, once the baby exists, now the Washington Post is in trouble because they can't talk their way out of this one.
And by the way, by the time you're talking about a baby that is 12 weeks old, you're talking about skin and fingernails beginning to grow, you're talking about the changes triggered by hormones to make the external sex organs appear, not sex assigned at birth, like actual biological sex, the kidneys are making urine, like this is a very mature baby at 12 weeks along.
Are you sure, Brooke said?
Oh my god, oh my god.
Thomas recalled saying as she jumped up and down, this is a miracle from the Lord!
We are having these babies!
Which is the normal human reaction to, oh my god, you have twins and they are 12 weeks old and they are healthy and they are growing inside you.
Brooke felt like she was floating above herself, watching the scene blow.
Her mom was calling the twins my babies, promising Brooke she would take care of everything as the ultrasound technician told her how much she loved being a twin.
If she really tried, Brooke thought she could make it to New Mexico.
Her older brother would probably lend her the money to get there.
But she couldn't stop staring at the pulsing yellow line on the ultrasound screen.
She wondered if her babies had heartbeats, as these women said they did, was aborting them murder?
These are the questions that become unavoidable the minute you get past the euphemisms, and the Washington Post made the mistake.
They got past the euphemisms.
It's a problem.
Eventually, Arnholdt turned to Brooke and asked whether she'd be keeping them, and Brooke heard herself saying yes.
And then it talks about the pregnancy and how she and her boyfriend formed a plan in which she would join the Air Force as soon as he graduated from high school.
Apparently this would be bad, right?
In the Washington Post view, it would be very bad if he joined the Air Force.
By the way, his actual alternative to joining the Air Force was apparently that he was going to hang out at the skate park.
I kid you not.
So, in other words, these babies didn't just get to live, they also created a plan whereby mommy marries daddy, daddy drops being a bum at the skate park and actually goes to the Air Force and becomes a responsible human being, and mommy ends up married with kids.
I fail to see how this is the horrific ending to the story that the Washington Post had sort of promised here.
This is Apparently, she drops out of real estate school.
But again, she dropped out of high school at 15.
So, I don't find that particular, like, to blame that on the babies alone, or blame that on the pregnancy, seems a little bit off.
But here is the conclusion of the article, because this is the part that really is amazing.
Okay, because it talks about what exactly she ended up doing.
It says, three weeks later, the baby stayed home while Brooke and Billy drove to the courthouse.
Billy was about to leave for a five-month stint in basic training and technical school.
For Brooke to qualify for military benefits, they had to get married.
Oh, no!
You mean forming a nuclear family in which dad is around to help take care of the babies?
No!
This is the worst of all possible worlds.
At 11 o'clock on a Monday morning, they walked into a courtroom with an American flag behind the bench.
Brooke in a flowery sundress, Billy in jeans.
She'd looked around for white dresses on Amazon but couldn't justify the 30 bucks.
She was terrified she'd run out of money while Billy was away.
The loneliness scared her, too.
She kept imagining the long nights alone in Billy's house, trying to calm two crying babies without him.
He wouldn't have his phone at basic training.
She would hear from him mostly through letters.
She knew she'd have to manage that little voice in the back of her head.
What if he changed his mind about their life together?
Standing with Billy in front of the Justice of the Peace, Brooke told herself that one day they'd have their love story moment.
She'd walk down the aisle in a wedding gown.
Their friends and family would cry and cheer as she and Billy publicly declared how much they meant to each other.
I, Brooke Alexander, take thee, Billy High, to be my wedded husband, she repeated.
If it wasn't for the Texas law, Brooke Knutson might not be standing here.
And this is the conclusion of the Washington Post, and the fact that the Washington Post thinks that this moral balance, what they're about to do, the balancing act they're about to do...
is even remotely close to equal on both sides demonstrates the perverse morality of the pro-abortion movement.
If it weren't for the Texas law, Brooke knew she might not be standing here.
She'd probably be studying for her next exam, while Billie mastered some new tricks on the quarter pipe.
She liked to think they'd still be together, spending their money on movie tickets and Whataburger instead of diapers and baby wipes.
Yes, a life worth envying.
She would be studying for a real estate exam and Billy would be bumming it up in the skate park.
And maybe they'd still be together and maybe not.
And they'd be going to Whataburger.
She told herself that alternate life didn't matter anymore.
Because this is true.
She had two babies she loved more than anything in the world.
I do, she said, tears in her eyes.
Brooke pulled out her phone once they finished the ceremony.
One hour, 15 minutes.
Time to grab some lunch and head home.
The babies would be hungry.
Yup.
Okay, so that is the most pro-life article in recorded memory.
And it is all courtesy to a Washington Post that somehow can't understand that the minute you make babies real in people's minds, the minute you make human life real in people's minds, all of the other concerns go away and they all look petty and stupid, by the way.
They all look dumb.
I'm sorry, the life, and it's all inherent in the photo.
Okay, the photo on that article is a photo of her with both babies in front of her.
And then we're supposed to believe that her alternative life, maybe, maybe one day she gets a real estate license, maybe she's able to see her toes in the Pacific Ocean or something.
But that outweighs the two living babies that are sitting right there in front of her.
The pro-choice movement, when faced with, you know, actual non-euphemisms, it completely falls apart.
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Now, by the way, this is true for most of the principles of the hardcore social left.
When the principles of the hardcore social left meet the light of day, they are self-refuting.
This is true all over the place.
And this is true when it comes to, for example, LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, Pride Month.
All of the arguments that are made with regard to, for example, teaching this stuff to kids, they're self-refuting.
So, for example, you have a video that's been making the rounds on the internet of a teacher talking about coming out to his four- to five-year-olds.
I say his because this is a biological male.
I only use biological pronouns on this show because self-defined pronouns mean nothing.
Because self-defined words mean nothing.
You don't get to have your own English language.
That's not the way this works.
So, on TikTok, you know, courtesy of Libs of TikTok, of course, Here is a preschool teacher talking about how he came out as trans to the kids.
Because these are people seeking validation from children.
And you tell me if this is not self-refuting.
I finally decided to come out to my kids.
And my kids are older, they're four and five.
And the way that I did it is just read them a book about this teddy bear that kind of comes out as a trans girl.
And it's really nice and it's very simple.
They understood it right away.
And I think what made me cry the most was that afterwards, like, I kind of looked at them and there was just this silence in the room and I just thought like, oh my God, now they see me as a totally different person.
And before this, they loved me.
I was such a, you know, one of their favorite teachers and it felt so good to have that.
And I think that's one of the biggest fears I had is that as soon as they found out about me, they would lose all love for me.
And then one of my kids breaks the silence and she gets up and she just is like, she just hugs me.
Okay, I have a question.
Is that not self-refuting?
You have a biological male with, once again, a voice deeper than mine, talking about how he has revealed himself as a female to small children and crying over his validation at the hands of small children.
You're saying the quiet part out loud, guys, which is that this is not about the care and health of kids.
It is about you validating yourselves by going to a bunch of kids who are too ignorant to know better and confusing them about gender and sexuality.
Really, it's about you.
It's not about the kids.
And this is why one of the most Orwellian lies that we've seen when it comes to LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign ampersand tilde.
One of the great lies that we've seen is that this is about the protection of children.
It is not about the protection of children.
It's about you validating your own lifestyle in the eyes of children so that you can bring up a new generation of people who will not approvingly at whatever you decide to do.
It isn't about the kids, it's about you.
Because kids need boundaries, and they need to understand the wisdom of the ages that has been passed down about the biological difference between men and women, and about the different gender roles, yes, that are evolutionarily attendant to that biology.
Those are important things for kids to know.
And you want to obliterate all that, not because you care about the mental and physical well-being of children, but because you wish to harm those things on your own behalf.
And this is now extended all the way up into the precinct of our most cherished institutions here in the United States, which is why the Washington Free Beacon has now revealed the Navy doing full-on educational sessions in preschool style to members of the military about the use of preferred pronouns.
Now, I ask you, does this look like a military that's going to win a war?
You think the Chinese are quaking in their boots at this?
Also, what exactly is your recruitment directed at?
Seriously.
It used to be that the military recruitment efforts were directed, typically, at young militant males, who would then redirect that testosterone-laced energy into war with our enemies.
That's what most militaries are based on, not just the American military.
They're heavily male for a reason.
They're heavily young for a reason.
Young males tend to be more aggressive and violent than other forms of humanity.
And here we are trying to suggest that not only does gender not matter, we should obliterate the gender binary in favor of the military of the United States being used as a social engineering tool, which is not going to bode well for the future effectiveness of the United States military or recruitment efforts.
Let's say that you are a My name is Johnny, and I use he, him pronouns.
in patriotic young man, loves the American flag, interested in fighting for the military, which by the way has been the traditional description of recruits in the military.
You think that you're gonna go into a military that seems to prize the trans flag above the American flag?
You think that that's going to be a real priority for you?
Let's see how the recruitment efforts go over the next few years.
So here's this video from the Navy, from the Navy.
My name is Johnny and I use he, him pronouns.
Hi, and I'm Conchie and I use she, her pronouns.
And we're here to talk about pronouns.
What is a pronoun?
A pronoun is how we identify ourselves, apart from our name, and it's also how people refer to us in conversations.
Using the right pronouns is a really simple way to affirm someone's identity.
It is a signal of acceptance and respect.
If it's a signal of acceptance and respect, how do we go about creating a safe space for everybody?
I wasn't aware that the military was about creating a safe space for everybody.
I thought it was about creating an unsafe space for our enemies, mainly.
But apparently that is no longer a priority in the United States Navy.
This is madness.
I'm sorry, it's madness.
And this is not a slur on anybody who's currently serving in the military or who will serve in the military, far from it.
It's saying that when you design military policy around social engineering of far-left issues, it is self-defeating and perfectly obviously self-defeating.
You have a man here who is explaining that he is he him wearing a rainbow sweatshirt and a woman who is wearing some sort of lettering with the trans flag coloring explaining to members of the United States Navy why it is important to create a safe space for everyone in use of pronouns.
Yes, it seems like our society is in the best of hands.
Meanwhile, speaking of self-defeating, Megan Rapinoe, who has made a name for herself by being one of the most privileged people on planet Earth, namely a woman who makes her living actually playing a sport that no one watches except once every four years during the World Cup when we are forced to watch by the media, which has decided to make women's soccer the most important thing in America.
Megan Rapinoe, who also sued US soccer along with her her teammates for pay discrimination despite the fact that they voluntarily signed a contract based on certain levels of pay.
And so she came out the other day and she said, quote, I am 100% supportive of trans inclusion.
People do not know very much about it.
We're missing almost everything.
Frankly, I think what a lot of people know is versions of the rights talking points because they're very loud.
They're very consistent and they're relentless, says Megan Rapinoe.
So I have a question.
If Megan Rapinoe is so much in favor of trans inclusiveness in women's sports, why don't we just obliterate the women's category altogether and you can get your asses kicked by a bunch of under 14 boys from the Dallas Football Club?
Which is precisely what happens to the U.S.
women's soccer team.
Like, they practice with junior high boys in the women's soccer team.
That is not a slur against women playing soccer.
That is to point out that if you obliterate gender distinctions between male and female and pretend they don't matter at all, but then you reap the benefit of being a female soccer player, you don't get to have it both ways.
The culture battle in the United States right now is predicated on people pretending not to see the stuff that is directly in front of their face.
Pretending not to see the fact that, for example, a human life in the womb is a human life in the womb.
Pretending not to see that males and females are different.
Pretending not to see that when adults are preying on four- and five-year-old children to validate their own feelings of sexual identity, that that is a problem.
Refusing to see that when the military makes its central core value, quote-unquote celebration and acceptance of identity, that cuts directly against what a military is supposed to be, namely a giant break things machine.
And then it turns out that when we see the actual evidence of that in front of our eyes, there's a pretty significant backlash.
And the left can't stop pushing it.
They can't.
Even the areas of unity, the left can't stop it.
So, for example, one area where there should be unity, right, where the left and the right should be able to come together, is on the celebration of Juneteenth.
I'm not against the celebration of Juneteenth.
I'm fine with Juneteenth.
I think Juneteenth is good.
I think a national holiday in the United States celebrating the end of slavery is a good thing.
And using Juneteenth, which was a holiday that predominantly was celebrated in Texas when Texas slaves found out that they were free, slavery didn't officially end until the passage The 13th Amendment.
And so there were still a couple of states, I believe it was Kansas and New Jersey, actually, where slavery was still legal until like December of 1865.
But the Juneteenth celebrations, you know, latching onto the Juneteenth celebrations that already existed in parts of America and using that as the date to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States, one of the great signal, wonderful moments in American history.
That's a that's a purely good thing.
I don't have any problem with that at all, because the United States is a country Where hundreds of thousands of white people died in order to free black slaves.
We should remember that.
That is an important thing.
Okay, but the left can't just stop there.
They can't just say, okay, we all agree, slavery was bad, wonderful thing, the United States ended it.
Instead, they've decided to make Juneteenth and its celebration a referendum on the evils of America, which is ridiculous.
It should be about the goodness of America.
It should be about the fulfillment of the promise of the 4th of July, the extension of that to all citizens, right?
That's what Frederick Douglass would have said when he spoke about why 4th of July, he didn't feel perfectly included in that before the freeing of the slaves.
What he was saying is that the promises of the 4th of July are universal, and we need to fulfill those.
But the left can't help themselves, and so everything turns into a culture war battle, and they sometimes just let it slip, and it's really ugly.
So, for example, you have Sarah Haines on ABC saying that Juneteenth is a more authentic celebration of American freedom than the 4th of July.
Now, let's be real about this.
Until five years ago, very few people in the United States, outside of the black community and in certain states that celebrated Juneteenth, had ever heard of Juneteenth.
And the reason for that is because most people believed that the Civil War innately meant that now 4th of July included black Americans.
Because once you're an American citizen, you celebrate the 4th of July.
That was the basic idea.
You are now integrated into the American bargain.
So the notion that Juneteenth overcomes the 4th of July rather than adumbrating the 4th of July is incorrect.
But the left has to posit these two in direct opposition to one another in order to maintain that the American flag is still bad.
So here is Sarah Haines on The View making this case.
Ever since I learned about Juneteenth, which wasn't as young as you probably did or anyone else, I learned a few years ago, and I was like, how did I not know about this, that we were celebrating Fourth of July, which was freedom of America, when freedom of American people didn't happen until Juneteenth.
So in some ways, the celebration feels more authentic on Juneteenth.
More authentic than the 4th of July?
Well, no.
How about as authentic as the 4th of July?
Or as an additional holiday to the 4th?
Like, Sunny Hostin goes even further because the left, again, they can't help themselves.
And she brags about her family not celebrating the 4th of July.
Which is amazing.
So what?
You didn't believe that black Americans were included in the bargain of America until Juneteenth?
I don't remember Barack Obama even mentioning Juneteenth as President of the United States.
This is something that came up in the course of the last three years on a national level.
I love what I'm hearing, because I remember years ago, even on this show, Whoopi and I were talking about it.
And I said, my family never celebrated July 4th.
And it was met with so much shock.
And it was because my father was a student of history, my mother a student of history.
And my father taught me very early on what Frederick Douglass' what I thought was a famous speech, what is the 4th of July to the slave?
Because it was not freedom to black people.
Okay, again, you don't have to posit these things as mutually exclusive or anti-unity, but the left feels the necessity to do that.
And it's ugly and it's wrong.
Okay, in just one second, we're going to get to the latest on the economy.
Joe Biden is blundering around in Delaware, making a mockery of himself.
Meanwhile, the economy is sinking into the mud.
Did anyone think like a couple of years ago that inflation would be in 8% range or that fuel prices would get into the like $6, $7, $8 range?
According to leading industry sources, grocery stores across the United States are now worried about food shortages.
As a result of this crisis, survival food is actually really, really important.
Everybody should have this for any sort.
of possible disaster. We're not talking nuclear war here.
We're talking about the possibility of like if you live in the southeast like I do a hurricane or you're talking about in the west, you're talking about an earthquake or a tornado if you live in the midwest. There's always the possibility you're going to need a survival food kit so why not just go do it right now.
For patriots survival food kits are a tremendous value.
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Okay, folks, over the weekend, swimming's world governing body voted to ban biological males from competing in women's swimming competitions.
I know, it took like a long time for them to come to that conclusion, but it seems as though the pushback is finally happening.
Sanity might be making a comeback, but if it is, that is in no small part thanks to Matt Walsh's groundbreaking film, What Is A Woman, the number one documentary in America.
It is the most talked about documentary in the country.
It's now surpassed over 5,000 ratings on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 97%.
By the way, still no official ratings on Rotten Tomatoes because that's the way they roll.
What Is A Woman is also a soon-to-be best-selling book.
You can pick up now on Amazon or wherever books are sold.
Big things are happening here at The Daily Wear.
It's never been a better time to become a member.
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You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Meanwhile, as the culture wars in the United States grow more polarized, the economy continues to sink into the mud.
So Joe Biden is still hanging out in Delaware and falling off bikes and stuff and then walking along the beach and hopping on invisible pogo sticks and doing the things a normal president does, you know.
And he was walking on beach.
And a reporter made the giant mistake of asking him about the fact that his economy has slipped into recession for no reason other than his own crappy policy.
And he immediately launched into attacks on the press.
If Donald Trump had attacked the press this way, it would be an attack on our free press.
It'd be a violation of the Constitution.
Joe Biden's like, I hate you guys.
And then he just falls over like, oh my God, what a hero.
Here's the president of the United States.
Not the majority of them are saying that.
Come on, don't make things up, okay?
Now you sound like a Republican politician.
I'm joking.
That was a joke.
Put all kidding aside.
No, I don't think it is.
I was talking to Larry Summers this morning.
And there's nothing inevitable about a recession.
You're a liar and a dog pony McShow face.
It's just a joke, guys.
Just joking.
So here's the problem.
Right now, the stock market is likely to go down a significant amount more.
According to virtually all sources, Morgan Stanley is now saying that a recession would take the S&P 500 another 15 to 20% lower.
This makes sense.
As I suggested the other day, right now, the price-equity ratio was way out of line on stocks.
Basically, the price of stock was not reflecting the underlying earnings of a company.
The price-earnings ratio.
The earnings of these companies is likely to go down as the market starts to crater and that means the price is going to come down too.
According to the Wall Street Journal, another week of whipsaw stock trading has many investors wondering how much further markets will fall.
If history is any guide, the sell-off might still be in its early stages.
Investors have often blamed the Federal Reserve for market routes.
It turns out the Fed has often had a hand in market turnarounds as well.
Going back to 1950, the S&P 500 has sold off at least 15% on 17 occasions, according to research from Vicky Chang, global markets strategist at Goldman Sachs.
On 11 of those 17 occasions, the stock market managed to bottom out only around the time the Fed shifted toward loosening monetary policy again.
Right now, the Fed is not talking about loosening monetary policy until mid-2023, probably.
Getting to that point may be painful, says the Wall Street Journal.
The S&P 500 has fallen 23% in 2022, marking its worst start to a year since 1932.
The index declined 5.8% last week, and the Fed is only just getting started.
After approving its largest interest rate increase since 1994 on Wednesday, the central bank signaled it tends to raise rates several more times this year so it can tamp down inflation.
So what it looks like right now is that a bunch of companies are about to have a bad earnings quarter.
And that means that the price on the stock is going to continue to dump.
And that means you can expect the stock market to continue to decline even further.
Meanwhile, the federal government continues to try to pour money into an inflation ridden economy.
The Wall Street Journal points out, remember all that infrastructure money, that great big, great infrastructure bill that Joe Biden was pushing?
All that money is starting to come online.
The problem is we're in the middle of an inflationary cycles.
We're now shoving a trillion dollars into infrastructure at a time when we already have inflated prices on everything.
According to the Wall Street Journal, construction projects across the United States are running short on labor just as $1 trillion in federal infrastructure money starts to kick in, leading companies to get creative in their quest to attract and retain workers.
Well, what's actually going to happen is you're going to see wages increase because more money is being shoved into the system.
You have a limited supply of labor, which means higher wages, which means higher prices, which means more inflation.
Historically low U.S.
unemployment, economic rebound from COVID-19, about $600 billion in transportation-specific funding expected from the roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law have combined to exacerbate existing employee shortages in the construction industry.
Yay!
More inflation on your homework and on your roads and on everything.
Associated General Contractors of America, which represents more than 27,000 construction companies, said publicly funded transportation projects are routinely coming in at least 20% higher than government officials anticipated because of added labor costs.
Oh goody, goody gumdrops.
So again, Joe Biden's policy here just stinks.
And honestly, Joe Biden can't seem to decide whether to just roll with the punch and say this is all good, or whether to Actually notice reality and realize this is all quite bad for Americans.
So Joe Biden was asked about, for example, the skyrocketing price of gas and oil, and he then proceeded to cite his mother, which is always a good time.
Whenever he starts citing his parents, things are good.
I'll never get over the fact that one of his favorite stories that his father told him in like 1950, that two dudes making out on a street corner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, That's what loves look like, Joey.
And now he's gonna cite his mom to the proposition that your oil price is being too high.
Your gas price is being too high.
It's a good thing.
We have a chance here to make a fundamental turn toward renewable energy.
Electric vehicles.
And not just electric vehicles, but across the board.
And that's something we should be... My team is going to be sitting down with the CEOs of the major oil companies this week and try to get an explanation of how they justify making $35 billion in the first quarter.
Are you planning to sit down with oil and gas CEOs, Mr. President?
No.
Why is that, sir?
Because my team is going to do that.
Okay, but you did that with retailers and logistics companies and consumer companies.
Because I had it already done.
He's so bad.
He's so bad.
He started off that statement, by the way, by saying, my mother always said that bad things, good things come.
Well, I hope that that is true of the 2022 election.
This is a crappy administration.
I hope it's true of 2024 because what follows this has to be better.
So Joe Biden.
He's there saying that he's thinking about getting rid of the gas tax.
So I'm wondering, which is it?
Do you like the gas tax because it's forcing us all toward green energy, which is what he's saying there?
Or are you gonna yell at the oil companies to produce more energy?
He has no good answer for any of that.
Then he's asked deliberately about the gas tax.
And he's like, well, I don't know, maybe I'll suspend it.
Wait a second, I thought you liked the gas tax.
Which is it?
Are you on the side of the Greens?
Or are you on the side of the people who actually need to fill up their tanks so they can get to work, Mr. President?
Mr. President, are you considering a pause on the federal gas tax?
Mr. President, we know that you're considering it, and Secretary Gellman spoke about it yesterday.
Yes, I'm considering it.
How soon can we expect a decision?
Well, I hope I have a decision based on data I'm looking for by the end of the week.
Do you think we are in a recession?
Well, for a lot of people we are.
There's no question about that.
Meanwhile, this is still a guy who refuses to acknowledge there's even a recession.
And James Clyburn isn't refusing to acknowledge that.
A Democrat from South Carolina who helped promote Joe Biden to the presidency, he says, yeah, if you can't afford to buy gas, we're in a recession already, which happens to be a fairly good description of the everyday life of most Americans right now.
Do you think we are in a recession?
Well, for a lot of people, we are.
There's no question about that.
If you can't afford to buy gasoline, you are in a recession.
The investor class in this country is not losing any money.
Individuals, yes.
But as a class, investors are still making money.
Corporate execs are making plenty of money.
Mm-hmm.
So he is right about that, but Joe Biden refuses to acknowledge it.
The good news is that Joe Biden is so with it that his family is literally dragging him away from reporters.
So that's what happened to end this little tete-a-tete on the beach with the media yesterday.
One of the things that you may recall that I initiated was the international flat tax.
We got 140-some nations to sign on to.
I'm coming.
Deploy the family to drag Grandpa away.
Oh, Grandpa, it's time to go.
out there.
We got to feed you some pudding, Grandpa.
Let's get you out of here, Grandpa.
Let's get you out of here before you blow this any further.
By the way, the actual reason why our gas prices are really high is because all the oil refineries are closing.
Why do you think they keep closing?
The answer is because you've cut off all of the investment portals for actually building new refineries or keeping them running.
The Washington Post is even reporting that today.
This is the result of the ideological policies of the left meeting the hard ground of reality.
So let's talk about that for a second.
The simple fact is that when the left has a choice between actual pragmatic policy and ideology, they're choosing ideology.
The Washington Post reports today, oil refineries are making a windfall.
Why do they keep closing?
And the answer is it explodes so many leftist myths.
So one of the leftist myths is that corporations never look down the line, that they're always concerned just about the profits today.
That is incorrect.
That is incorrect.
The reason it's incorrect is because you have to look down the line at where you're going to put your dollars for the future.
And oil refineries are a perfect example of this.
Right now, gas is at all time high prices.
Oil refineries could be making bank, but they're still shutting down.
Why?
According to the Washington Post, oil refineries across the country are being retired and converted to other uses as owners balk at making costly upgrades.
And America's pivot away from fossil fuels leaves their future uncertain.
The downsizing comes despite painfully high gas prices and as demand globally ramps up amid sanctions on gas and diesel produced in Russia, the third biggest petroleum refinery in the world behind the U.S.
and China.
Five refineries have shut down in the United States in just the past two years.
Reducing the nation's refining capacity by about 5%, eliminating more than 1 million barrels of fuel per day from the market.
Thus, the remaining facilities are straining to meet demand.
Yet even at this lucrative moment for what's left of the refining industry, a White House desperate to bring down gas prices is having little success.
Persuading owners to expand operations, more closures are imminent.
The companies are unmoved by Joe Biden's threats.
The profits follow years of heavy losses in many facilities after demand plunged during the pandemic.
Unpredictable shifts in oil markets had created a challenging business climate before that.
Even at this moment of windfall refinery earnings, when the profit margin on each barrel of oil processed Why would investors sink their money into an industry that Joe Biden is deliberately attempting to kill?
He can yell at them about why they don't ramp up production.
They fear the profits are short-lived.
The administration's environmental priorities, as well as rising public and corporate concern about climate change, would make many refineries obsolete in the not too distant future.
And there you have it.
There you have it.
Why would investors sink their money into an industry that Joe Biden is deliberately attempting to kill?
He can yell at them about why they don't ramp up production.
They're not going to ramp up production when they know that their industry is going to be dead within 18 months if Joe Biden actually has a choice about it.
As the Washington Post points out, building and upgrading the mammoth structures is a messy, expensive undertaking that can drag on for longer than a decade, strain the finances of even the biggest fossil fuel giants, and run the risk of getting abandoned before the investment is returned.
Chevron CEO Michael Wirth said in an interview in the Washington Post quote, I don't think you're ever going to see a refinery built again in America.
It's been 50 years since we built a new one.
In a country where the policy environment is trying to reduce demand for these products, you're not going to find companies to put billions and billions of dollars into this.
Correct.
This is right!
Which again, puts the lie to the entire leftist idea that you need ESG overseers sitting on the board of every company so that short-term profits don't become the enemy of long-term economic health of a company.
No, these guys know what the policy circumstances are and they are not going to spend on what the left would call dirty energy if the left is going to be in charge racking them across the coals.
Raking them across the coals?
They're not going to do that.
And again, they're not really hiding the ball here.
I mean, Eugene Robinson has an insane piece today at the Washington Post talking about regulating carbon as a toxic substance in order to reduce carbon emissions.
He says, because of human activity, there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 4 million years.
We've increased the concentration of that heat trapping gas by a full 50% since the Industrial Revolution.
Last year's carbon emissions of 36.3 billion tons set a new record.
There's your status report on the battle against climate change.
By any scientific measure, we're losing.
Yet we have to find a way to snatch an acceptable victory from the closing jaws of defeat.
What does he suggest?
He says that they should use the EPA to regulate carbon under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
Now, here's the thing.
The EPA doesn't have the power to do this.
In fact, there's a Supreme Court decision that's likely to come down that specifically talks about this.
But, Eugene Robinson wants to simply use a three-letter agency staffed by career bureaucrats to kill the energy industry in the United States by regulating carbon, which, um, last I checked is, I mean, you breathe it out, right?
I mean, like, that's what comes out of your body after you breathe in oxygen.
Carbon dioxide comes out of your body.
He wants to regulate that as a toxic substance via the EPA.
And then you wonder why you're going to have a hard time getting people to actually invest in the building of new refineries, why you can't ramp up production.
That would be the reason.
And all of this is part and parcel of a broader problem in global politics right now.
And that broader problem is a failure of the false consensus.
I talked about this a little bit yesterday.
But right now, you have an elite class that lies, and they lie on a regular basis.
So, they offer you a bunch of self-contradictory notions.
They say, for example, we are in favor of free market capitalism.
Also, you have Klaus Schwab out there saying, we need to construct a market that's going to be the best for everyone.
Including our stakeholders.
And if that means great redistribution, and if it means subsidies, and if it means we control everything, that's how we do free market.
And a lot of people are looking at that and going, okay.
On the right, they're looking at that and saying, no, you don't like free markets.
You're lying.
You're using the free markets to maintain control.
And on the left, you see them saying the same thing.
They're saying, okay, well, if you want top-down centralized control, why are you allowing the free markets to even exist?
Is that just to enrich your buddies?
That false consensus is breaking down and it's exacerbated by the fact that you have companies like BlackRock that have decided to endorse this sort of stuff.
Fascinating article over at the Wall Street Journal today talking about how BlackRock is basically now using the auspices of free markets in order to cram down centralized governance.
And it's something our friend Vivek Ramaswamy has talked about.
This is why he is forming a fund deliberately mirroring BlackRock's trades, but without the ESG crap.
According to the Wall Street Journal, BlackRock casts votes on tens of thousands of proxy proposals a year.
The responsibility rests with a team of about 70.
Millions of people are invested in the stock market through BlackRock's index tracking funds.
As these passive investments have grown in popularity, so have the firm's stakes in 13,000 companies worldwide.
So has the cloud of BlackRock's investment stewardship team.
The tiny group of analysts, BlackRock has about 18,400 employees all told, looks after the interests of investors in the firm's $4.6 trillion worth of passive funds.
In other words, BlackRock is investing more money into the market?
They are managing more money in the market than the budget of the entire United States government was as of about three years ago.
That means weighing in on matters as varied as executive compensation, climate change, and abortion access.
Chief executives jockey for time on analyst calendars.
They have the power to unseat directors and upend corporate decision-making.
The team last year engaged with 2,300 companies via emails, phone calls, and meetings, and ultimately voted on 165,000 proposals at 17,000 shareholder meetings.
It can feel like a lot of power sometimes, said a former investment stewardship team analyst.
BlackRock's growth and the way it has sought to wield its influence has rankled corporate executives, particularly those in the oil and gas industry.
BlackRock's stewardship team voted in favor of 47% of environmental and social shareholder proposals last year.
Its support helped an activist investor win board seats at the oil giant ExxonMobil.
If a bunch of new emperors, they're the people who vote the shares in the index funds, said Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett's business partner.
A group of Republican senators last month introduced a bill calling for individual investors in passive funds to have the option to vote their shares, a movement to curb the power of BlackRock and its ilk.
Vanguard and State Street Corp, BlackRock's two biggest rivals, also have small stewardship teams.
Both of them are wildly to the left.
Vanguard has 60 analysts who basically control how all of this money is invested and what sort of conditions they wish to cram down on a vast variety of companies.
State Street has maybe 12.
BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink has said he wants to get to a place where all individual investors can vote their own shares.
The firm has given that option to institutional investors that control some $2.3 trillion in assets.
Investors representing about a quarter of that sum have taken the company up on the offer.
But that doesn't mean that those institutional investors are not then doing the same thing.
All of this plays an especially important role for index fund investors because they don't have the option to sell holdings in companies that aren't performing as expected.
The analysts range in seniority.
Their average tenure is 15 years.
Some are fresh out of college.
They have a bunch of woke college students who are now determining how $4 trillion of assets get invested in companies and what they wish to cram down on those companies.
Each stewardship analyst is assigned to cover a specific industry, says the Wall Street Journal.
They dissect company proxy reports and third-party research, including ESG ratings—that's environmental, social governance, left-wing ratings—from MSCI, Inc., and corporate governance transparency scores from the Nonprofit Center for Political Accountability.
Analysts also conduct their own research.
Activist investors looking to shake up a company's board sometimes pitch the stewardship team directly.
In some cases, they introduce their director candidates to members of the stewardship team in person or, since the start of the pandemic, privately.
Again, this means that basically you have a group of quasi-elites who lie to you.
They say they're in favor of free markets, and then they cut directly against the free market interests of the companies in which they invest, instead seeking to cram down their particular politics.
And when people notice, they get angry.
On the right, they get angry because this ain't the free market.
And on the left, they get angry because they say, okay, if we're going to have centralized governance, why are we making your friends rich?
That's just on economics.
On cultural affairs, the equivalent is where you have a bunch of people in positions of power who pay lip service to belief in God and Judeo-Christian values and then tell you they need to cram down woke pronoun education in the Navy.
And a lot of people on the left go, so why are you bothering to pay lip service in God?
Just cut that crap out.
And people on the right go, you obviously don't believe in God, which is why you're doing this thing in the first place.
And then you wonder why politics is polarized?
It's because basically you have a group of elites, college-educated, white, liberal elites, who have decided that they are going to have the baby.
They're going to use the auspices of free markets, which are incredibly powerful, in order to control things.
And you have a bunch of people who are also going to use the auspices of sort of populist language about morality in order to pretend that they are moderate when they are not, in fact, moderate.
And increasingly, people are seeing through this veil.
And when that breaks down, things get uglier.
This is why the Elites, as a class, need to grow a humility organ.
They need to actually grow some humility.
They need to recognize that the free markets do not exist for them to manipulate.
That Judeo-Christian values and that tradition handed down over the course of thousands of years is not theirs to pervert, simply for political gain.
And if they try to do that, what they are likely to get is an increased polarization in American politics, which is precisely what you're seeing.
I for one don't actually think that's a bad thing.
I think that people seeing through the charade is actually a wonderful thing.
Because for too long you have a bunch of people who lie about what it is that they do for a living.
Where they're activists on behalf of their own moral code, while wielding the tools that actually make civilizations powerful.
You don't get to control the levers of power that are built on certain fundamental premises while tearing away at the premises.
You don't get to do that.
I think more and more people are waking up to that day after day.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with additional content.
In the meantime, go check out one of our newest podcasts, Morning Wire.
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That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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