Elon Musk pulls out of his purchase of Twitter, but Twitter wants to force him to go through with it.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh is harassed at a steakhouse with his family, and the left is ecstatic about it.
And the media have had just about enough of Joe Biden.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Well, the big news of the weekend is that Elon Musk has now announced that he is pulling out of his Twitter deal.
According to the Wall Street Journal, his showdown with Twitter has set the stage for what could become one of the most unusual courtroom battles in corporate takeover history, a spurned acquisition target that never saw to be bought, potentially trying to force the buyer who soured on the deal to see it through.
In just over three months, Musk aggressively pursued a takeover of Twitter that first Twitter resisted, and then he prevailed, and then he reneged, all the while using the very platform to ridicule Twitter and its leaders and drop hints about his shifting intentions.
With Musk's attempt to terminate his $44 billion takeover, Twitter says it plans legal action.
In a statement on Friday, it indicated it will file a lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery, arguing that Musk has to close the agreed-upon deal.
Basically, in order for Musk to show that the deal cannot close, he has to now demonstrate That there was some sort of materially adverse circumstance that prevented him from closing the deal, namely that Twitter lied to him in its materials, for example.
Friday evening, he filed papers saying he wanted out, taking aim at Twitter on several fronts, saying the company violated their merger agreement.
He accused Twitter of withholding data from him to verify facts about the business and that its statements on the amount of spam on the platform represent material misstatements to regulators.
He also argued the company was making critical changes to the ordinary running of the business without his consent, such as imposing a hiring freeze and layoffs.
So, basically, he said he was going to buy the company.
On the basis of that, they started making changes.
And then he said, I don't like the changes that you're making based on me saying I'm going to buy the company.
I'm out.
And also, you guys keep saying that there's only a certain amount of spam on the platform.
I say there's way more spam on the platform than you're letting on.
The problem is it's very difficult for Twitter to actually know how much spam is on the platform because there's some accounts that look like bots that aren't bots.
There are some accounts that are bots but are actually owned by major corporations, for example.
Corporate law experts say Twitter appears to be on sounder legal footing than Musk, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The filing didn't provide evidence to back up his assertion that the estimate was inaccurate or an alternate calculation.
This isn't even in the ballparks.
And Zohar Goshen, professor of transactional law at Columbia Law School, adding the impact on a company's value needs to be so dramatic, its value would have to be halved, for example.
Lefson hiring freezes at tech companies in recent weeks have also become commonplace.
Facebook has cut back.
Tesla is also trimming staff.
The question remains whether it's really possible to force the eccentric billionaire to buy a company he doesn't even want to own.
Goshen says, what are they going to do if there's a judgment?
And he says, well, I'm still not going to do it.
They don't have the tools to force them to go through with it.
You can't put people in jail because they don't buy something, which is true.
There have been a few examples of buyers being forced to follow through with purchases under specific performance clauses that Musk agreed to.
Most were really small deals.
Never has the concept of a court forcing a buyer to complete a deal been tested on a large scale like this.
Most legal clashes over sour deals and in settlements involving a price cut or a one-time payment.
Musk did agree to pay a $1 billion reverse termination fee to Twitter if the deal fell apart, triggered under certain scenarios, including if his debt financing falls through or if regulators try to block the deal.
Neither has occurred.
And they're bringing in all of the big legal guns.
Twitter brought in Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz, which is a massive New York-based law firm.
Musk is using Skadden Arps, another massive, I believe, New York-based law firm.
Twitter's already been working with Simpson, Thatcher, Bartlett, and Wilson-Sonsini.
Musk's team includes Quinn Emanuel, Urka Hart, and Sullivan, which is a California-based law firm.
These are major legal players, by the way.
The agreement caps at $1 billion, the amount Twitter could sue for damages.
So either they can force him to buy the whole company and sue for that, which again, can be very hard to pry $44 billion out of somebody's pocket, or $1 billion to basically make him go away.
The standoff leaves Twitter in a precarious position given that its prospects as a standalone company are daunting because of the digital advertising market in upheaval.
The biggest problem for Twitter is that Twitter is a giant.
aggregation of data machine, but it doesn't actually earn a profit.
In fact, according to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, right now, Twitter's price earnings ratio is something like 160.
To put that in perspective, what that means is that it's earnings on a yearly basis.
The price of the company, like the market cap of the company, is now 160 times the earnings of the company on a yearly basis.
The normal company on the New York Stock Exchange is somewhere between 20 and 25.
I mean, on an annualized basis, that means that Twitter is maybe earning less money on an annualized basis than my company.
Okay, my company ain't worth $44 billion.
Musk offered $54.20, a share price, originally.
Twitter shares closed down at $36.81 on Friday.
Okay, and right now, again, the Twitter price is dropping precipitously.
Over the weekend, prior to the opening of the market, it was already down 5%.
I think it's going to drop significantly further than that.
Because the simple fact of the matter is that everybody was sort of counting on Musk coming in, revamping the platform, figuring out ways to monetize the platform.
So this raises the question of what exactly Musk thought he was doing.
Now there is a going theory out there that is pretty clever if this is what Musk was actually doing.
So, Musk, obviously, is the biggest shareholder in Tesla.
It is the company that he started, the major automobile company that has such a backlog that I've ordered a Tesla like a year ago and it still hasn't arrived.
That's how bad the backlog is over a Tesla.
There's a theory that's been put out there by Josh Wolf, the co-founder at Lux Capital.
His suggestion is that Musk actually wanted to liquidate a bunch of his Tesla stock.
He wanted to use that money for other things.
But the big problem is that if you own a lot of stock in a company where you are the co-founder and you sell a lot of that stock, the stock price absolutely tanks.
It's been a problem for a very long time for people who own stock in major companies.
This is why whenever people say things like Mark Zuckerberg is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, well, I mean, he is and he isn't.
He's worth that.
If you took his stock, Times the number of times the price of the stock.
If you take his stock holdings times the price of the stock, that would be what he is worth.
But that neglects the fact that if he were to sell all that stock at one time, for example, he wouldn't be able to get that price.
The same thing is true of Jeff Bezos.
The minute you start liquidating stock in your own company, the stock price of the company drops.
Just a simple fact.
In fact, when Zuckerberg liquidated like a billion dollars worth of stock, Five, six years ago, it tanked the price of the stock of Facebook in a serious way.
And he had to actually explain why he was doing it, that he wasn't losing faith in his company and all the rest.
Well, Musk apparently wanted to sell some $8.5 billion of Tesla stock, but he didn't want to tank the stock price.
So how do you do that?
If you're the co-founder of a company and you're the voice of the company and the face of the company, And you just going on Joe Rogan and smoking pot tanks the stock by a significant percentage.
How exactly do you liquidate eight and a half billion dollars worth of stock without tanking the price of the stock overall and people losing faith in the company?
One way you do that is you say, listen, guys, it's not that I'm losing faith in Tesla.
It's that I want to take some of my profits from Tesla and I want to use those to buy another company over here.
So it's not that I haven't lost faith in Tesla.
I'm just trying to save the world by buying Twitter.
And so everybody is distracted by this hand and they're neglecting the fact that you actually just liquidated $8.5 billion worth of stock over here with regard to Tesla.
And let's say that you even have to pay the $1 billion fee in order to get out of the Twitter deal.
Now, let's say you pay that fee.
Well, now you get to take that as a loss, as a capital loss on your taxes.
So really, you only lose about $600 million in order to liquidate, say, $8.5 billion of Tesla stocks.
If that's what he was doing, then that is indeed a very, it's a very clever move.
Because if you look at the price of the Tesla stock, the price of the Tesla stock has been dropping, but the Tesla stock price hasn't been dropping because he sold it.
I mean, the simple fact of the matter is, I mean, I'm looking right now at the price of Tesla over the last six months.
It basically started to tank back in May, like early May.
And it's kind of holding steady since then.
It's basically been steady.
And that's despite the fact that he's liquidated all of the stock.
So if he was trying to get out of that stock, wanted to make a profit on that stock, But he didn't want the entire stock price to tank.
He had to have an excuse.
So he just says, listen, I need the money in order to buy Tesla, in order to buy Twitter.
It's not that I have lost face here.
It's that I really, really want to buy this company over here.
And then if later he has to get out of that Twitter deal, then he can.
Josh Wolf says the entire thing was a clever ruse to sell and liquidate $8.5 billion of Tesla stock with a plausible excuse for doing it.
80% odds, Elon pays $1 billion breakup fee, walks away with $7.5 billion liquidated, 20% spends $100 million fighting litigation.
You honestly think he can land rockets but he can't fix bots?
Because that's his claim.
His claim is that the bots problem on Twitter is so bad that he can't fix it at the current price.
Now, the other reality, of course, is that Twitter's stock price has been in freefall, basically, since the moment that Elon Musk announced that he was going to buy it.
And if you look at the one-year Twitter stock price, if you go back to about June of 2021, you're looking at a Twitter stock price of $70.
And now, you see, like, after he announced that he was going to buy it, it spiked up to about $50.
But that is because he said he was going to buy it for $54.
And it stuck around in that area.
And then, as the deal started to look like it was going to collapse, Now, the Twitter stock price is down in the mid-30s.
So, he's paying almost a 50% surcharge for that piece of real estate.
That seems really dumb.
Just on a pure business level, paying $44 billion for a company that's worth maybe $28-27 billion on today's market is something that he is not going to want to do anyway.
Vijay Aghati, Musk's legal team, who is the top lawyer for Musk, accused Twitter of making false and misleading representations upon which Musk relied when entering into the merger agreement.
Musk had put the acquisition deal temporarily on hold in May so his team couldn't investigate the number of spam or bot accounts.
Twitter says that it's 5% or less of users.
Musk says his team hadn't been provided with enough information to independently analyze the data.
Twitter chairman Brett Taylor said the company is committed to closing the transaction on the price in terms agreed to with Miskra.
Of course they want that because again, he's said that he was going to pay like 50% more than the company is actually worth on the open market today.
And if Musk indeed ends up pulling out of the deal, the free fall that Twitter is in is only likely to continue because the truth is the amount of hope that people were placing in Twitter was directly related to the amount of hope they're placing in Musk to fix the Twitter mechanism that gets people like Jordan Peterson banned for saying obvious things like men exist and people who change their names used to be people with different names.
Those people get banned.
And meanwhile, you have the Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the extermination of all Jews on the platform and apparently Twitter does nothing.
So a lot of people are placing a lot of faith in Musk to save Twitter.
In any case, the amount of damage that he's done to Twitter here is extraordinary just in terms of raising hopes and then absolutely dashing them maybe in order to liquidate some Tesla stocks.
Hats off for a clever business move if that is exactly what Musk was doing.
It's possible also that Musk was basically playing out a hand that was going to go well for him no matter what.
If the Twitter deal fell through, Twitter stock crashes, which he doesn't like the people at Twitter, so it's fine with him.
He can afford a billion dollars.
That does not cost a lot of money to him.
He's worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
He was able to liquidate some stock without tanking the stock of his home company, Tesla, without doing any damage to himself.
So, pretty clever.
And if he ended up going through with the deal, well, it's not the end of the world either, because then he's in control of Twitter.
So all of this is to say that Musk is very good at what he does.
Well, if it seems like there's a lot of economic turmoil out there, it's not just for Elon Musk and Twitter.
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Alrighty.
Meanwhile, the big controversy of the weekend is that Justice Brett Kavanaugh was eating a steak dinner over at Morton's and a bunch of people arrived outside Morton's Steakhouse in order to harass him.
According to Politico, on Wednesday night, D.C.
protesters targeted the conservative Supreme Court justices who had signed on to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
They got a tip that Brett Kavanaugh was dining at Morton's downtown D.C.
location.
Protesters showed up out front, called the manager to tell him to kick Kavanaugh out.
...and later tweeted that the justice was forced to exit through the rear of the restaurant.
Daniel Lipman looked into the incident and confirmed that account for Politico, while the court had no official comment on Kavanaugh's behalf, and a person familiar with the situation said he did not hear or see the protesters and ate a full meal but left before dessert.
Morton's was outraged about the incident.
A representative for the chain steakhouse sent Lipman this statement.
Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protesters while eating dinner at our Morton's restaurant.
Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner.
There's a time and place for everything.
Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.
Is there a quote-unquote right to congregate and eat dinner?
There's no constitutional right to congregate and eat dinner.
There is a right to be free of harassment.
If people come up and assault you while you are at dinner, assault is where they yell at you in a threatening manner.
Battery is where they hit you.
If somebody comes up to you at dinner and they are threatening you in some way, then obviously that is illegal under every local law.
Does it violate the common boundaries of decency to arrive at a restaurant and harass people out of restaurants?
Absolutely.
Of course it does.
And we all need to understand this.
There have been some pretty significant political disagreements in this country, but it's pretty rare that people just go around looking for people who are at dinner and harass them.
It's something we saw during the Black Lives Matter riots.
You'd see people who are just eating dinner normally, like at a DC restaurant, and people would walk up to them and start harassing them at dinner and drinking their drinks and bothering them.
Is that something that is good for the country?
Now the left immediately jumped on the fact that Morton's had suggested that there was a right to congregate and eat dinner to suggest what are they whining about?
After all, this is about abortion.
I mean, and when it's about abortion, that means that you can bother people.
According to the 47th Amendment to the United States Constitution, if we go to steakhouses and harass five of the nine justices, then our abortion rights come back.
That must be the math here.
Now the real math here is that you guys are all acting like a bunch of jackasses.
The Supreme Court ruled.
They've ruled a bunch of ways I don't like.
I've never once suggested in the aftermath of, for example, Obergefell, which is a wildly unconstitutional decision, I've never suggested that it was in the interest of the United States for right-wingers to go and harass Ruth Bader Ginsburg while she was having dinner at, like, the Capitol Grill.
It's a ridiculous suggestion.
And yet the entire left has now signed on because they're in the midst of a moment of impotent rage in which they've finally been asked to defend their own positions in terms of democratic voting.
They're actually going to have to explain to people why abortion until birth should be the law of the land and why people should vote for that and why they should vote for them based on that.
They're so damned angry that they're actually going to have to justify their positions.
But now they've decided that the most important thing is in a sort of radical, impotent rage, they're going to just yell at people.
And this is a good thing.
It's an actively good thing to randomly yell at people at restaurants.
This is going to magically fix everything.
Mortons, of course, started getting hit for the very suggestion that they don't want their... Forget about Kavanaugh.
They don't want their other patrons to be forced out of the restaurant because they're a bunch of crazy protesters out front.
It ruins their dinner too.
But apparently, the way that the left sees it, corporate America must always simply bow to all of their whims and do all of their work.
So, according to Politico, about a day later, when a corporation is getting grilled on social media, there's a lot at stake.
Haha, that's punny.
The best course is often to say nothing, lest you butcher the response.
Issuing a statement can often just inflame things, because let's be honest, press releases are a medium rarely well done.
Yes, it's super punny when your entire business is put at stake by a bunch of jackasses who are standing and braying outside your restaurant and bothering all the patrons who nobody wants to go.
Morton's, the steakhouse, learned that the hard way this week when it seared right into the middle of the culture wars.
Morton's didn't do anything.
Morton's was just a steakhouse serving steak.
And then, like, we don't like that people are bothering people who are eating steak at a restaurant.
And according to Politico, this is them steering into the culture wars.
Because according to the left, you're not engaged in culture wars when you just repeat the radical leftism of insane people.
But when you say no, that's you engaged in a culture war.
This is the common theme from the left media.
If you say that there must be abortion on demand in transing of the kids, this means that you're not engaged in a culture war.
This is just normal, everyday, rote action.
If I say no to any of that, now I'm engaged in a culture war.
So Morton's is the problem here.
Because Morton's said, we don't like that people are harassing our patrons.
After abortion rights protesters showed up in front of Morton's in downtown DC on Wednesday night to demonstrate, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh dined inside, the company issued a statement to Politico's Daniel Lippman.
And everybody in the media went nuts.
Everybody in the media went insane.
How dare Mortons say these things?
How dare Mortons suggest that there is a need for people to be able to dine without being yelled at at the restaurants?
According to Scott Crane, the SVP and COO of Morton's, he said, currently we're experiencing a massive wave of negative response to our comments yesterday, as well as being bombarded at the local level of phone calls and fake reservations on open table.
There's a good chance your restaurant will also potentially have some people reaching out for comment and or making bogus reservations over the next few days. As I stated yesterday, our comments is always no comment. We don't respond. We don't retweet. We don't post on Instagram or Facebook. Don't do anything. Please remind your teams, especially the hour employees of this policy. Again, we do not insert our political beliefs at any time, not with an employee, not with a fellow manager, not with a guest. And the fact that this is considered the controversial part is where Morton's like, we just want people to be able to eat dinner at our It demonstrates how insane the left has become.
If they think this is going to win them friends and influence people, yelling at people at restaurants, good luck to them.
But you can see that the blue checks were gleeful about that.
They love it.
They love the harassment of their political opponents.
It's their favorite thing.
Because they don't give a damn about institutions.
They don't give a damn about civic norms.
They don't give a damn about decency.
I mean, I remember when they were cheering when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was thrown out of a restaurant for the great crime of being Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
They love this sort of stuff.
Making life unlivable for people you disagree with is apparently a hallmark of the mainstream left, and I say mainstream left because it's approved all the way on up to the top of the White House.
You can look at some of the tweets from some of the geniuses, Ryan Reilly, in which a steakhouse accidentally serves up Twitter red meat.
I mean, it's an amazing- Ryan Cooper.
Next year, the Supreme Court is going to rule 6-3 that Oliver cannot have some more.
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Bradley Moss.
Sorry, under the originalist reading of the Constitution, there is no right to eat dinner.
The Founding Fathers never spoke of a right to eat dinner, and therefore the right does not exist.
Well, first of all, ya idiots, there is right to association.
And that's been part of constitutional jurisprudence since the origins of the Republic, but beyond that, you're right, there is no federal right to quote-unquote eat dinner.
That's why it's been delegated to the states, to prevent harassment of people First of all, I wasn't aware that Morton's the Steakhouse was the Supreme Court of the United States, or that what they meant was that there is a constitutional right to eat dinner in peace.
There is, however, a right to be not assaulted.
That's a thing.
That right to be not assaulted, that exists at the state level, it exists at the local level, it exists at every level.
Eli Nistel, who's legitimately the worst legal commentator in America.
He said, imagine lying to a Congress and the American people to get an unaccountable job for life.
Getting that job, using your unaccountable power to take away rights, then getting pissy the people you hurt interrupted your ice cream.
So first of all, Kavanaugh hasn't even issued a statement.
Morton's issued a statement.
But also, I love that he describes the role of a Supreme Court justice, and then he's like, but you're pissy that people are yelling at you in public.
Well, first of all, I wasn't aware that Morton's was an abortion clinic.
You all do know that for decades, anti-abortion protesters have swarmed abortion clinics, alternatively counseling them, please don't kill your baby, you're a mother already, and screaming at them, calling them murderers, baby killers, etc. Well, first of all, I wasn't aware that Morton's was an abortion clinic. I wasn't aware that anything was happening at Morton's other than people eating dinner. That seems like a difference in kind from an actual place where you believe that a baby is being killed inside.
That seems like slightly a different context.
And then, of course, we have the irrepressibly moronic Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted out on this score as well.
She tweeted about Justice Kavanaugh two things.
She said, quote, Poor guy.
He left before his souffle because he decided half the country should risk death if they have an ectopic pregnancy within the wrong state lines.
It's all very unfair to him.
The least they could let him do is eat cake.
First of all, they're such liars.
Roe versus Wade has nothing to do with ectopic pregnancy.
There's not a state in the United States that bars a DNC for an ectopic pregnancy.
That does not exist.
So they just have to make things up because if they actually talk about what most abortions look like, people realize that's pretty ugly.
Then she says, I will never understand the pearl clutching over these protests.
Republicans send people to protest me all the time, sometimes drunk and belligerent.
Really?
Do they?
I feel like that would make social media a lot more.
I feel like if you were out to dinner with your boyfriend and his bare feet and people just started harassing you at dinner on a routine basis, I feel like we'd hear about that from AOC a little more.
Nobody cares about it unless it's a Republican in a restaurant.
Can someone please explain the obsession because I don't get it.
These people are so tiresome.
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They're making the country actively worse.
And it's the entire Democratic Party, all the way on up to the top.
So, for example, Corinne Jean-Pierre was asked by Peter Doocy about the fact that there were people arriving outside of a steakhouse to bother a Justice and his family.
But we should mention here, someone literally attempted to kill Justice Kavanaugh about five weeks ago.
Someone was arrested for arriving at Kavanaugh's house with weapons and And goods meant to harm and silence his family.
And that person was arrested.
So there was an assassination attempt on a sitting Supreme Court justice, like, five weeks ago, a little over a month ago.
And these people are like, yeah, you know, we should probably just encourage people to find Brett Kavanaugh wherever he is and bother him and the other Supreme Court justices.
Corrine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary.
Anybody who pretends these folks care about institutions, they do not.
They do not give one good damn about institutions.
These are the same people who complain ceaselessly about January 6th.
I also think January 6th was a really bad thing.
It turns out, you know what I don't like?
I don't like when people violate the law and harass lawmakers.
And I thought, by the way, forget about January 6th.
I thought it was bad when there were people who were going into bathrooms and following Kyrsten Sinema, the senator from Arizona, Democrat, into bathrooms to try to harass her into voting in favor of Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill.
I generally think that harassment of people is a bad thing.
Apparently, the left does not.
And when I say apparently, I mean clearly.
Here's Corine Jean-Pierre approving the idea that, you know, it's probably a good thing, generally speaking, if people go to justices' houses, they've already said that, or go to restaurants, follow justices around.
By the way, the purpose of a Supreme Court is to be insulated from public pressure.
And here you have the White House openly calling for it.
Peaceful protest.
People should be allowed to be able to do that.
In a restaurant.
If it's outside of a restaurant, if it's peaceful, for sure.
Really?
Peaceful protests.
Your first question to me was intimidation and violence.
So these justices, because protesters do not agree with an opinion that they signed on to, have no right to privacy, is what you're saying?
But Peter, this is, people have the right, this is what a democracy is.
People have the right to privacy?
Of course people have a right to privacy, but people also have a right to be able to protest peacefully.
So if this is the new role of the left, then you know what, turnabout is fair play.
Turnabout is fair play.
So I look forward to a much worse country in which every public official of every stripe is protested outside of their restaurant, in which everybody's house is picketed.
Because apparently the White House is in favor of it.
So what that means is that presumably, Corine Jean-Pierre, you can go outside her house and you can picket it.
After all, that's free speech.
When she's at dinner, you can go out to- I mean, she's a bad press secretary.
You can go outside her place of eating and you can yell at her outside.
That's just free speech.
And Pete Buttigieg says as much the secretary of transportation, professional, useless person.
Pete Buttigieg couldn't fill.
Potholes in South Bend, Indiana, can't do anything about the supply chain, can take a two-month paternity leave where nobody even notices that he's gone.
But, you know, important person because he's gay.
Pete Buttigieg, that guy, he literally says that it's totally fine with him if people, you know, it's not a problem.
It's not a problem.
It's all good.
Here's the thing.
The Democratic Party loves this position.
This is their favorite position because it demonstrates ire.
It demonstrates anger.
It doesn't matter that it's all performative and it gets nothing done and it's actually wildly counterproductive.
But if you are a Democrat and you want to, quote unquote, enshrine Roe in law, what you're going to need to do is convince people Not to go outside restaurants and yell at them and bother them and go outside their houses as they have with Amy Coney Barrett or Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Doing that's actually counterproductive and stupid.
No, it's a good thing.
Because it shows passion, guys.
See, this is the thing.
For the left, the people who are criminally rioting during 2020, the problem with them is really not that they're criminally rioting.
They're just too pure.
They just are.
I mean, they've just taken it a little too far.
But their basic ideology, which is disrupt, make life worse, it's good.
It's necessary.
Pete Buttigieg basically says that openly on Fox News.
This is trending on Twitter because the left loves this so much, this particular clip of Pete Buttigieg.
This is supposedly Pastor Pete.
Being a very decent and wonderful person and making fine-toothed distinctions between protests and harassment and all of this.
Somehow I feel like if the shoe were on the other foot, nobody on the left would be quite so sanguine about this.
Which means that there will be a shoe on the other foot.
So here is Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg suggesting that it's totally fine to harass people at restaurants.
What's the big deal?
Are you comfortable with protesters protesting when you and your husband go to dinner at a restaurant?
Protesting peacefully outside in a public space?
Sure.
Look, I can't even tell you the number of spaces, venues, and scenarios where I've been protested.
And the bottom line is this.
Any public figure should always, always be free from violence, intimidation, and harassment, but should never be free from criticism or people exercising their First Amendment rights.
Okay, except that whenever you say a mean word to a Democrat on Twitter, that is violence and harassment.
And whenever you go outside of Justice's house with a gun, apparently, that's just free speech.
I mean, it really is incredible how these folks are willing to degrade the public space in order to demonstrate passion so they can run to the left in their base.
That's really what this is about.
This is all part of a broader effort on the left by particular politicians to demonstrate how angry they are.
Because so much, again, of our politics is performative.
The reality is, the Supreme Court overruled Roe vs. Wade.
Now it goes back to the state level.
And Democrats could work at the state level to get what they want enshrined in law.
They could.
Instead, what they've decided to do is yell at Joe Biden, and yell at the White House, and scream at the sky, and yell at Brett Kavanaugh, and all of this makes them better people.
It's all performative woke bullcrap.
In the same way that 21 million people getting out in the streets and yelling at the police was performative woke bullcrap, this is performative woke bullcrap.
That's all this is.
And it's approved by the highest levels.
Then they wonder about why it seems like the polarization and the temperature is really high.
I'll say it right now.
We all play by the same rules.
If this is the rule, then fine.
Every time Pete and Chasen go out to dinner, there should be people outside the restaurant protesting Pete and Chasen for being pro-abortion on demand.
Every single time.
If this is the game you want, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
One set of rules for everybody.
By the way, I don't believe him at all.
If he thinks that there are I'd like to see the evidence.
Let's put it that way.
I'd love to see the evidence that there have been widespread protests outside of Pete Buttigieg's house or outside the restaurants where he eats dinner with his husband.
I'd love to see that evidence.
I promise you, if this happened on an even semi-regular basis, even singularly to a Democrat, it would be a national news story for months.
Meanwhile, somebody tries to assassinate a Supreme Court justice five weeks ago.
It's not even national news story for three days.
And then you have the entire Democratic Party saying, it's good to follow these folks around.
It's good to follow these folks around until one of you nutcases decides to pick up a gun and try to shoot one of the justices, at which point I'll be like, wow, this is completely unforeseeable.
How could this have happened?
Meanwhile, Shutdown DC, the group responsible for the mob that protested Kavanaugh at dinner the other night, they're now offering cash bounties to service workers in Washington, D.C., who DM them tips on any sightings of Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett, or Roberts out and about.
They said, while the bad asses, R. Wright's D.C.
and his own neighbors are gathered outside Kavanaugh's home, the justice seems to have snuck out for a swanky D.C.
dinner.
We got a tip from someone who spotted him around 7.40.
DM us if you want to join him.
We're sure he can pull up a seat.
Making life worse, one piece of jackassery at a time.
And again, the White House continues to push all of this stuff.
Because it's all about the anger.
It's never about truth.
It's never about reality.
It's all about the anger.
Amazing, amazing stuff.
And that anger materializes, particularly at Joe Biden now.
So they're really, really mad at Joe Biden.
Now, I'm not a Joe Biden defender, as you may know.
I think Joe Biden is the worst president of the modern era, and it ain't close.
I think that he inherited pretty much everything good and proceeded to turn it into everything bad.
But Joe Biden is now basically being shoved out the door for the great crime of not being performative enough.
This is what they are suggesting.
So the reason I say this is because the New York Times has a piece today titled, quote, at 79, Biden is testing the boundaries of age and the presidency.
So they're noticing over the New York Times that he's old.
This follows stories in Politico and CNN and Huffington Post and every other left-wing media outlet about how the Democratic Party base is upset with Joe Biden.
And the reason they're upset at Joe Biden is because Joe Biden isn't performative enough in his anger.
He just seems kind of grumpy and peeved.
And then he goes to bed at 4.30 p.m.
and watches Matlock and eats some oatmeal and then wakes up the next morning and somebody tells him he's present and he's super happy.
So the New York Times is noticing that he's super old.
Now, there are some of us who have been noticing this since he was running for president, because he's old.
At least in political terms, that dude is old, and he is declining quite fast.
In fact, on Friday, there was a clip that was going around, went viral, of Joe Biden giving a speech in which he is clearly reading the instructions from the teleprompter.
Like, he gets to the teleprompter instructions, and then he reads them out loud.
One of the most extraordinary parts of the decision, in my view, is the majority rights, and I quote, it's a quote now, from the majority.
Women are not without electoral or political power.
It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so.
End of quote.
Repeat the line.
Women are not without electoral and or political... Sarah starts laughing.
As you can see, you're not supposed to say, repeat the lines.
He says, repeat the line.
This went viral.
The entire media originally came out and said, he didn't say, repeat the line.
He said, let me repeat the line.
He didn't.
He said, repeat the line.
He's clearly reading, I mean, oatmeal for brains over here.
He's gone.
He's been gone for quite a while.
The light is on, but ain't nobody home.
That attic is empty.
The hamster wheel is spinning, but the hamster is dead.
There's just not much happening upstairs for that guy.
A lot of cobwebs.
A lot of random balls bouncing around.
It's a game of pong, but one of the paddles is missing.
So, now the New York Times is noticing.
Is that a coincidence?
It's not a coincidence.
They're noticing because they're mad that he doesn't seem mad enough.
This is the big critique of Joe Biden.
You have to be as mad as Pete Buttigieg saying that you should go outside restaurants and harass people.
You have to be as mad as Corina Jean-Pierre saying that you should go outside people's homes and you should harass them.
And if you're not, then presumably we should say that you're really, really old and we need to shove you off the back of the train, as we talked about last week.
So the New York Times says, quote, When President Biden leaves Tuesday night for a four-day swing through the Middle East, he will presumably be more rested than he would have been had he followed the original plan.
The trip was initially tacked on to another journey last month to Europe, which would have made for an arduous 10-day overseas trek until it became clear to Biden's team such extended travel might be unnecessarily taxing for a 79-year-old president, or crazy, as one official puts it.
AIDS also cited political and diplomatic reasons to reorganize the extra stops as a separate trip later.
But the reality is that managing the schedule of the oldest president in American history presents distinct challenges.
And as Biden insists he plans to run for a second term, his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team, and his party.
If only somebody had noted when he was running at the ripe old age of 77 that people naturally get older as each day passes.
If only somebody had noted, wait a second, in two years, he's going to be 79.
I love how they act as though it's like a shock, a crept up on them.
You mean the aging process crept up on you?
The passage of time?
I mean, we were told by the Vice President of the United States that there's great significance to the passage of time.
She's really smart, and she told us that.
So much significance to the passage of time that it's significant that time passes, which is significant.
That's how significant it is.
But we were told that we can't pay attention to the fact that Joe Biden's face holes seem to be spewing nonsense for like a year on end, because after all, Guys, it was a stammer.
Now, he hadn't had a stammer for, like, 40 intervening years because he conquered it, but we're supposed to believe that all of his problems now are... Now, it turns out that the... Wait, he's really old.
He's old.
Now, the reason, again, they're mad that he's old is because he's not doing the things he wants.
He's not popular.
He's bad at this.
He doesn't seem to be passionate enough.
According to the New York Times, it is unsurprisingly a sensitive topic in the West Wing.
In interviews, some sanctioned by the White House, some not, more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisors uniformly reported Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meeting, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking out that weak point on page 14 of a memo, rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up until the last minute.
I love that we now have to have testimony.
This is the way that I talk about my daughter if she didn't do her homework.
The teacher calls me like, yeah, but she was staying up really late last night and she was working really hard.
You know, a bunch of these days, like, the old man's fine.
He's doing fine, guys.
He's fine.
But they acknowledge Biden looks older than just a few years ago.
I mean, I do love that line.
You mean he looks old?
You mean like every human?
Name a human who doesn't look older than a few years ago.
Name one.
They don't exist.
Except for Tom Cruise, who's ageless.
Every other human looks older than a few years ago.
His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was.
Some aides quietly watch out for him.
He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire.
He stumbles over words during public events.
They hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end, without a gaffe.
All this is going on now.
These sorts of articles were widely available.
You could have made these stories.
It's a long story.
You could have made this kind of story available before.
But the reason that they're doing it now is because, again, he's not performatively mad enough.
The Washington Post has a really long piece by Ashley Parker, Yasmeen Aputaleb, and Tyler Pager over the weekend about this.
It's called Two Long Weeks Inside Biden's Struggle to Respond to the Abortion Ruling.
And the entire article is about how he's not angry enough.
For many Democrats, it was too little and too late.
Just one more example over the two weeks in which Biden and his team struggled to come up with a muscular plan of action on abortion rights, even though the Supreme Court ruling had been presaged two months earlier with the leak of a draft opinion.
Biden and his team were caught off guard by the timing of the decision, and they failed to channel the raw and visceral anger felt by many Americans over the decision, according to The Washington Post.
To many increasingly frustrated Democrats, Biden's slow-footed response on abortion was just the latest example of a failure to meet the moment on a wave of conservative rollbacks from gun control to environmental protections to voting rights.
Leadership right now is coming from the streets.
We'd love to be met in that effort by the White House and the Democrats more broadly, said Rachel Carmona, executive director of the Women's March.
Meanwhile, the White House officials, they're defending the urgency of Biden's response.
Kate Bedingfield said, Joe Biden's goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
It's to help deliver help to women who are in danger, etc, etc.
So she's trying to slap down the activist base.
But the activist base is the media.
So they've decided that Joe Biden is finished.
And to that end, they've decided that they are now going to push alternatives.
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So they've decided in the media that because Joe Biden isn't mad enough about abortion and that the way you show anger is by being a complete and utter moron, by yelling at people and by going outside restaurants and bothering them, etc.
And because Joe Biden hasn't really been doing enough of that, mainly because he's tired.
They assume that it's because he's tired, not because he is actually congenitally a moderate.
And here's the thing.
Joe Biden could actually win some political points by just saying to people, no, you should not protest people outside restaurants.
We can make an argument.
We can win the argument.
You don't need to bother people outside of restaurants in order to make your point.
He could say that kind of stuff.
He could say, don't go outside Justice's house.
But the problem for Joe Biden is that always and forever, he is just a mirror for the center of the Democratic Party.
The center of the Democratic Party has moved left.
The center of the Democratic Party has decided that harassment of public officials is actually an act of good.
Meanwhile, January 6th is really bad, but harassment of public officials is really, really good.
They've decided this, and Joe Biden ain't along for the ride.
They think it's because he's tired, which may very well be.
And thus, they want to throw him off the side of the bus.
And so they've decided in the media that it's time to supplant him with somebody else.
Which is why, for example, they're now pushing Governor J.B.
Pritzker of Illinois.
What recommends J.B.
Pritzker?
Seriously, I'm just wondering.
What exactly says that J.B.
Pritzker is a massively powerful and useful governor?
I'm wondering.
Because right now, I'm looking at the state unemployment rates, And what I'm seeing is that Illinois is not doing great, guys.
Illinois, like, is trailing most other states in terms of its unemployment rate.
I'm looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics right now.
Illinois is, let me count this, one, two, three, four, five, sixth from the bottom in terms of its unemployment rate in the United States.
It has the sixth lowest unemployment rate in the United States, if you include Washington, D.C.
And yet they're talking about him for President of the United States, J.B.
Pritzker, in his massively successful state.
Where people are fleeing, including major corporations down to Florida, like Citadel.
And where there's gun violence that claims the lives of a dozen people every weekend in Chicago.
They're talking about J.B.
Pritzker.
That's how desperate they are.
Why?
Well, because J.B.
Pritzker is a big, thumping, angry man.
And because he's a big, thumping, angry man, this means that he's the guy.
So they had J.B.
Pritzker on the Sunday shows to talk about a wide variety of topics.
He said he's going to support Biden if he runs for re-election, but then they start asking him questions about abortion because the idea is that he's some sort of... I don't know what makes them think that J.B.
Pritzker is anything remotely close to a national political candidate, but go for it, guys, if this is what you want.
President Biden runs for re-election, which he says he is expected to do.
Will you support him?
I will.
All right.
Governor Pritzker, thank you so much.
I will.
And they all have to say that.
What are they going to say?
They're going to primary Biden?
But they're all setting themselves up to replace Biden because the question is, can you force Biden out before the primaries even begin?
And so his case is I love that the case for Democrats is this.
We have created here in Illinois an abortion mecca.
It's great.
It's like abortion.
So you got Gavin Newsom out in California.
He's like, we've got abortion Disneyland out here.
And J.B.
Pritzker's like, no, no, no, no.
You've got abortion Disneyland.
We have an abortion oasis.
It's like the Mecca of abortion.
Like we will have a competition to see how many babies we can abort.
We'll have like a running billboard in the middle of Chicago.
How many kids have been killed in Illinois today?
And we'll defeat California on its own terms because, man, this is a great place to be.
So great.
You can kill your baby here.
That's a hell of a state slogan.
Here's J.B.
Pritzker pushing it.
Illinois is now an island, an oasis in the nation, protecting women's reproductive rights, and we're going to continue to do that.
There's more that we need to do.
But I must say that the federal government should be doing more.
I've talked to the president about this, and he took some action in that regard with some executive orders the other day.
But Democrats need to be pushing for a national law that protects reproductive rights across the nation.
Mm.
Well, yeah, J.B.
Pritzker, I mean, look at that.
Can you sense that animal charisma from J.B.
Pritzker right there?
My goodness.
I mean, he's just blowing everybody off the screen right there.
Well, if it's not J.B.
Pritzker, it's got to be somebody else.
They've tried Gavin Newsom.
Fail.
They're trying J.B.
Pritzker, and it ain't going great.
They're also now trying Governor Gretchen Whitmer, whose performance in Michigan was just abysmal during the pandemic.
She was opening up specific sort of Niceties for her husband so he could avoid all of the COVID rules and vacationing down in Miami.
She's a wonder, Gretchen Whitmer.
She's done an amazing, amazing job.
Now, massive piece in the Washington Post titled, Gretchen Whitmer's abortion fight from the porch with her daughters.
Wow, just stunning.
Stunning stuff.
And then they have a romantic picture of her with her two daughters in their house because abortion.
Sherry was asleep.
She was home from college for the summer.
It was barely 10 a.m.
Her door swung open and light filled up the bedroom.
Then she saw her mother bounding in.
She groaned, are you kidding me right now?
Roe versus Wade was overturned, her mother said.
Then she rushed out.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer, she's the hero America needs because abortion!
Abortion!
Now here's the thing.
If Democrats run on abortion in 2022, let alone 2024, they're going to get clocked.
It turns out the vast majority of Americans are in favor of some restrictions on abortion.
And when this resolves at the state issue, which it will, abortions will be widely available in places like Chicago and in New York and in LA, and they'll be widely not available in places like Alabama.
But the media, they've decided Joe Biden is not passionate enough.
He's not, he's not mad enough.
And because he's not passionate and he's not mad enough, he has to go.
And the way you're going to show passion and anger is by making the country an actively worse place by harassing people.
So who are, it's amazing.
They are going to try to nominate in place of Joe Biden, because Joe Biden is too, their conclusion is not that Joe Biden is too old, by the way.
Their conclusion, by the way, is that Joe Biden is too moderate.
They need to replace Joe Biden with somebody more radical.
This is a recipe for presidential candidate AOC in 2024.
So prepare thyselves.
All right, we'll be back here later today with additional content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Moll's show.
Today, he discusses Hunter Biden's leaked cell phone files.
You can hear more about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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A celebrity lasts four days questioning the transgender agenda Before issuing a groveling apology, Joe Biden spreads fake news about a 10-year-old trying to get an abortion, and Hunter Biden's leaked cell phone files make his laptop look wholesome.