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Aug. 5, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:29
The Backlash Against Woke Prosecutors Is Only Beginning | Ep. 1550
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis fires a prosecutor for refusing to enforce a state ban on sexual mutilation of children.
The White House declares monkey pox a national health emergency.
But debate remains over telling people not to have sex with randos.
And China ratchets up tensions over Taiwan.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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One of the things that is making people on the left very disquieted at the moment is the fact that there are people on the right who are now looking at Executive power and recognizing that perhaps they should not leave the so-called deep state to itself.
There's a large-scale article the other day in the New York Times by Thomas Edsel talking about the fact that if Thomas, that if Donald Trump were to win in 2024, in 2025 he would begin to clear out the so-called deep state.
He'd begin firing a bunch of people inside the executive branch using Schedule F classification, which would essentially say that a bunch of people who are career appointees were actually political policy appointees, making them subject to at-will firing by the top of the executive branch.
People on the left were fighting mad over this because, of course, they have essentially salted the entire executive branch of the federal government with people who agree with them, so that when you have somebody who becomes president, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, say, Ron DeSantis in the future, when that happens, those people will not be able to get done what they want to get done because all of these supposedly nonpartisan, nonpolitical appointees, who are not confirmed by the Senate or career bureaucrats, These people all agree with the left, and so the idea is that they will be able to stymie the worst excesses of the evil Republicans who take over.
This obviously was a major obstacle for Donald Trump during his presidency, when apparently the entire FBI, or at least large segments of it, were virulently oriented against Trump's entire agenda.
So the idea here from Thomas Edsel is this was a danger to democracy and to the Republic if Republicans were to start firing people who work for them.
Because if you're in the executive branch, everybody who works in the executive branch works for you.
Well, Ron DeSantis, who is a potential 2024 presidential nominee on the Republican side of the aisle, all the polls show him within striking distance of Donald Trump at the moment, and we still have a couple of years to go before the actual primaries begin.
Well, Ron DeSantis in Florida is demonstrating full-scale this particular idea, which is that If there are people who work for your branch and they refuse to actually abide by the laws that you are supposed to enforce, these people should be fired.
So, controversy has now broken out over the fact that Governor DeSantis has suspended a state prosecutor Thursday for pledges he made to decline prosecuting cases involving violations related to abortion and gender transition treatment.
Ron DeSantis said that he had suspended Andrew Warren, a Democrat, who served as the top prosecutor for the state's 13th Judicial Circuit in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, for neglect of duty.
The Republican governor then tapped state judge Susan Lopez to serve as state attorney during the suspension.
The state has 20 state attorneys.
Here's Ron DeSantis announcing his firing of Andrew Warren.
The Constitution of Florida has vested the veto power in the governor, not in individual state attorneys.
And so, when you flagrantly violate your oath of office, when you make yourself above the law, you have violated your duty, you have neglected your duty, and you are displaying a lack of competence to be able to perform those duties.
And so today, we are suspending state attorney Andrew Warren, effective immediately.
So, State Attorney Andrew Warren put out a statement saying it's an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition.
It spits in the face of the voters of Hillsborough County who have twice elected me to serve them, not Ron DeSantis.
Well, the problem with that, of course, is that if you have a state attorney who simply refuses to prosecute crime, he is not doing his job.
Ron DeSantis put out a statement saying that the state constitution does give him the authority to suspend state officials for reasons of malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony.
In fact, according to Robert Jarvis, a professor who teaches Florida constitutional law at Nova Southeastern University's Shepard Broad College of Law, according to the Wall Street Journal, Florida's constitution gives broad powers to the government to suspend Officers such as state attorneys or county sheriffs for almost any reason.
In fact, you'll remember that Ron DeSantis suspended former Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel in 2019 for his complete botchery of the Parkland massacre.
That authority has been challenged a lot of times.
Courts have routinely ruled in favor of the governor.
Jarvis said, quote, The Florida Supreme Court has always said the governor has tremendous leeway.
There's almost nothing that wouldn't pass muster in terms of suspension.
The governor's executive order on Thursday said prosecutors have some discretion over whether to prosecute defendants, but it said that Warren's blanket refusal to enforce criminal law amounted to a veto on state law.
And the order cited joint statements signed by Warren regarding potential crimes related to abortion and gender-affirming procedures.
Warren had signed a statement, along with a bunch of other elected prosecutors, saying that he would refuse to enforce state abortion laws, saying that he would not prosecute anybody who performed abortions.
The joint statement said, enforcing abortion bans runs counter to the obligations and interests we are sworn to uphold.
Now, this has been a large scale problem across the country where Soros backed prosecutors.
And this is obviously about the actual monetary backing of people like George Soros.
I mean, George Soros literally backed many of these prosecutors with his money because he wants to reorient criminal justice in the United States and essentially allow criminals to walk free while pushing a progressive agenda.
Those prosecutors across the United States have widely been declining to prosecute crimes from a variety of sources, whether those crimes involve actual felonies, as in places like San Francisco, where Chase Abaddon simply refused to enforce any of the laws with regard to crime, and thus crime shot up dramatically, forcing his recall.
Or whether you're talking about over here, where you're having prosecutors who are preemptively saying they're just not going to enforce the laws on the books.
This is not your job.
If you're a state attorney, you have prosecutorial discretion to determine what is a more important case or a less important case.
You have the ability to determine whether you want to plea bargain somebody out or whether you want to go to trial.
What you don't have the ability to do is simply declare an entire swath of law out of bounds.
You are not a legislature.
You are not given the power to simply say that you are not going to enforce the law.
And this has been a major problem, again, across the country, ranging from California to Florida.
Kamala Harris, when she was the Attorney General of the State of California, she single-handedly overruled the will of the people of California in Proposition 8.
The people of California voted in 2008 to enshrine traditional marriage in the Constitution of the State of California.
This was challenged.
It went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and State Attorney General Kamala Harris simply said, I'm not going to defend Proposition 8 in court.
And the Ninth Circuit said, since the state is not defending this in court, we are simply going to rule the law out of bounds.
That was not her job.
It is not the job of the Attorney General of a state or of a state's attorney.
to simply veto laws that are passed by the legislature.
So good for Ron DeSantis.
And we can only hope that Republicans across the country in positions of executive power take note.
Unelected bureaucrats or even elected bureaucrats who are not doing their jobs, who have specifically said that they will not do their jobs, ought to be fired or suspended.
This is very simple stuff.
The executive branch is not designated to simply ignore the law.
And the fact that this is even a remotely controversial proposition is kind of shocking to me.
I mean, if you imagine it in reverse, imagine in reverse that there was some sort of law on the books that, say, prosecuted people of right-wing bent.
And it was on the books.
And the Attorney General of the state simply said, I'm not going to enforce the law.
And a Democrat fired that person.
You think anybody in the media would be crying over it?
The question here is what the legislature has passed, not the enforceability of the law.
The courts get to determine whether the executive has to enforce the law, but so long as the judiciary has not struck down the law as violative of the state constitution or the federal constitution, if it goes to federal court, this means the executive actually has a duty to perform under the law.
And if you have attorneys general who have taken on the mantle of pretending that they are the governor of a state or the president of the United States, if you're talking about the federal government, well, then you got a real problem on your hands.
Warren could choose to appeal his suspension to the State Senate, which would then have six months to conduct a trial, according to Jarvis.
The Republican-controlled State Senate is unlikely to reverse DeSantis' decision.
Warren could also run again in 2024.
If he chooses to have a trial in the State Senate, the body could bar him from running again if it ruled against him.
So Ron DeSantis, again, demonstrating a new muscularity that I think a lot of Republicans so far have failed to actually understand.
And again, I think this is one of the reasons why there are so many Republicans who are warm to DeSantis, even in ways that are not warm to Trump, because there's a baseline level of competence that DeSantis displays at how to run the government.
Trump didn't know anything about how to run the government, so he came in, and he basically left everybody in place.
Presumably, if he were elected next time, he wouldn't make that same mistake.
But, DeSantis knows how to run a government, and that's pretty clear in the state of Florida.
And meanwhile, the White House has declared that monkeypox is a public health emergency.
For everyone.
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The White House has declared monkeypox a public health emergency!
Sort of like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.
The Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra basically went out to the middle of the office and shouted, I have declared a public health emergency!
Here he was yesterday.
In light of all of these developments and the evolving circumstances on the ground, I want to make an announcement today that I will be declaring a public health emergency on monkeypox.
Okay, and then Xavier Becerra said to reporters, quote, I'm not going to take monkey pox seriously.
On a personal level.
Sorry, not going to.
I don't mean like, I'm not worried about people getting monkey pox or transmitting monkey pox.
On a personal level, I have zero concern about getting monkey pox and you shouldn't either unless you are engaging in promiscuous sex with people you don't know.
That's all.
This idea that everybody is equally vulnerable to monkeypox in the same way that you were vulnerable to COVID is totally crazy, and the fact that the federal government continues to push this line is ridiculous on its face.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the declaration will provide resources and increase access to care.
She said it will also expand the CDC's ability to share data.
What it really is mostly about is the PR of saying that you have stood up in favor of people who are getting monkeypox.
There's nothing to stand up in favor of, okay?
The CDC already blew it.
You were supposed to have the vaccines ready.
You didn't have the vaccines ready.
Now you're trying to backfill that by making public declarations of angst about monkeypox.
But here's one thing that public health officials won't do.
Tell gay people to stop having promiscuous sex with each other.
That is one thing they 100% will not do because that would violate tenets of intersectionality.
I'm never going to get over the fact that our public health establishment told you in 2020 you had to shut down your business, watch your parents die at a hospital without visiting them, not throw a funeral for them, make sure that your kids did not go to school, make sure that you never went to a park, but, but, with monkey pox, which is now being transmitted, about 96% of cases are happening among gay men who are having sex with other gay men.
They won't tell you, stop doing that.
It's amazing.
The one thing, the one thing in life, apparently you are not, the one behavior you're not allowed to control is where people put their junk.
That is the one thing you can't even give them advice about.
Even if what you're talking about is not restricting them or prosecuting them, you're just saying, don't put your junk there because you might get a disease.
We won't say that because that might be offensive to somebody.
We'll shut down your entire life if you're not doing that for COVID, a virus that is extraordinarily unlikely to kill young, healthy people.
And we'll shut down all of society.
We'll blast $7 trillion into the economy.
We'll create 40-year highs in inflation.
We'll destroy our future economic growth.
We'll do all those things.
Because those are things we can request of you, you see.
But the one thing we can never request is that gay men not have promiscuous sex with other gay men.
That is one thing we absolutely will not do.
I'm not saying that.
The Washington Post is saying that.
according to Finit Nerapil and Amrita Jayakumar, writing for the Washington Post, quote, As monkeypox strikes gay men, officials debate warnings to limit partners.
San Francisco, thousands of gay men clad in leather, latex, and often much less, partied along Folsom Street here last weekend during the annual Kink and Fetish Festival.
Even after the city had just declared the monkeypox outbreak striking its gay community a health emergency, one day after the WHO urged men to sleep with fewer men to reduce transmission, San Francisco public health officials made no attempt to rein in festivities or warn attendees to have less sex.
As the CDC weighs whether to recommend limiting sex partners, health officials in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and other U.S.
cities battling surges disproportionately sickening gay men are avoiding calls for sexual restraint, wary of further stigmatizing same-sex intimacy.
You see, here's the thing.
People might, what they're worried about is that you might think that widespread promiscuity among gay men is bad.
And the way that they're going to show that it's not bad is by allowing widespread promiscuity to happen spreading monkeypox.
Not sure I follow the logic here.
I'm pretty sure that the thing that makes people think that, you know, gay orgies are bad is two things.
The orgy part of that, and also the spreading of disease part of that.
And you guys are like, well, if it spreads disease and it's an orgy, it must be okay!
Public health authorities typically emphasize safer sex over abstinence to prevent the spread of diseases through intimate contact, but Monkeypox is presenting new challenges in calibrating the right message to stop the rare virus from becoming endemic, while limiting government intrusion into the bedroom.
Uh, see, normally they would just say, well, make sure that you use safe sex practices.
The problem is that monkey pox is passed skin to skin.
So even if you're using safe sex practices, there's still a decent shot that you're going to pass monkey pox.
And you wouldn't want to tell people to simply relegate their bedroom activities to one intimate partner.
You wouldn't tell people that abstinence might be a solution.
I remain bewildered by the idea in modern Western civilization that abstinence is somehow a taboo.
In virtually all human societies for most of human history, you were expected to have sex within the confines of marriage.
And yet this is somehow now considered so verboten that for you to say, not only you should have, we're not even talking like heterosexual sex within the confines of marriage here.
We're just talking about have sex with one person, right?
That's all we're saying.
And like, nope, sorry, we can't do that.
We can't do that.
Anything that suggests that you can't have sex with whomever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, anything that does that is a form of puritanism that cannot be abided even if it prevents the spread of monkey pox.
California State Senator Scott Weiner I didn't name him.
Who's involved in the city's monkey pox response, said, quote, if people want to have sex, they are going to have sex.
I know people who normally go to sex parties who will not.
People will make their own decisions about their own risk levels.
Scott Wiener.
Okay, so I have another quote from Scott Wiener that I think is worthwhile.
Scott Wiener called for a full national mask mandate.
So you and your small children should be forced to wear a piece of cloth over your face because of COVID, regardless of what the data show on the ability to pass COVID With or without a mask.
You still have to wear a mask.
It's very important.
Forever.
Wear a mask.
National mask mandate.
But you can't tell people not to have random promiscuous sex with other people they don't know.
That is a bridge too far, man.
If you tell them to take that piece of cloth and put it a little lower down, then it's a problem.
You put it on your face, that we can tell you to do.
We tell you to put it on your junk, that we definitely cannot tell you to do.
More than 6,600 cases of monkeypox have been detected in the United States, prompting the Biden administration to declare a public health emergency to galvanize awareness.
I'm pretty sure we're all aware.
In fact, I feel like I'm significantly more aware of monkeypox than I need to be, given my personal behavioral profile here.
Heterosexual married man with three kids.
I'm pretty sure that my awareness of monkeypox vastly outpaces the chances of me obtaining monkeypox.
The virus primarily spreads through the exposure of an infected person's rashes or lesions.
This is the first outbreak in which contact during sex appears to be the significant driver.
Infections are heavily concentrated among men who have sex with men.
Again, I am enjoying the media's reframing of this conversation.
So when gay men predominantly get a sexually, what seems to be a disease that is largely transmitted through sex, we won't say gay men.
We'll say men who have sex with men.
To prevent you from thinking the men who have sex with men are typically gay.
Which I thought was the definition.
Many public health officials and activists who spent decades on the front lines of the battle against HIV-AIDS say they have learned it is futile to tell people to have less sex.
You can't do it.
You can't tell people ever to have less sex.
It's futile.
Shut down your businesses?
Sure.
Never go outside again?
Absolutely.
Wrap your head three times in duct tape?
100%.
But don't screw randos?
No, we cannot do this.
This stance puts them at odds with the WHO, a top New York epidemiologist who condemned the city's messaging and others within the gay community who say gay men deserve direct warnings before it is too late to end the outbreak.
Well, it turns out that pretty much everybody knows how to slow the spread of monkeypox.
It's don't have gay orgies.
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Dan Savage, sex columnist, who has criticized the public health response, says, quote, Again, Dan Savage is not an advocate of chastity.
not to warn gay men.
Now, here we are really on the verge of monkey pox being endemic in gay communities all over the world.
How is that for stigma?
Savage says public health officials should have advised gay men to curb their sex lives at the start of the outbreak.
Again, Dan Savage is not an advocate of chastity.
Dan Savage is a very, very, very left-wing columnist and sex advice person who has for a very long time been very much in favor of promiscuous sex.
So when Dan Savage is saying it, when Dan Savage and I are saying the same thing, I'm pretty sure it's not about the stigma anymore, guys.
It's about you guys are so crazy in your attempts to quote-unquote destigmatize particular forms of sex that you are willing to overlook the spread of disease.
I love this.
Savage is taking his own advice, limiting sex to his husband and his boyfriend.
And skipping San Francisco's Door Alley Festival this year.
Well, you know, we all have our moral limits.
A dozen Door Alley attendees interviewed by the Washington Post said they took monkeypox seriously without the government scolding them to do so.
Many revelers kept their clothes on or donned full latex outfits inside crowded bars.
One man sheathed himself in a monkeypox-inspired costume, a clear plastic rain suit over a rainbow outfit decorated with white polka dots he said he wore to make a statement about the importance of avoiding skin-to-skin contact.
Several said they plan to avoid casual sex at after parties.
Attendance was down by thousands compared with previous years.
A 30-year-old festival regular who spoke on the condition he be identified only by his nickname, Oni, citing privacy concerns, said he was being more cautious this year, especially given his day job as a massage therapist.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Sporting a black leather and chain corset, lace-up mid-calf boots, chartreuse face paint, and a small set of horns, Oni said he didn't plan to have sex, and had received the monkeypox vaccine weeks earlier.
He left as the festival became more crowded and skipped the bars entirely.
For the time being, he said, no darkroom sex parties.
No orgies.
For the time being.
Because you would never want to stigmatize this stuff in normal times.
This is also part that's hilarious, is that we're supposed to pretend that all of this activity is actually morally good, as long as you're not passing disease.
It turns out, you know what's bad for people?
Genuinely promiscuous sex parties.
These are not good for people's souls.
They're not good for people's bodies.
They are not good.
The fact that this is becoming a controversial statement demonstrates that our society has basically fallen into the maw of hell.
That's an insane, it's an insane reality.
Then if I say to you, don't have sex with a hundred people in a dark room that you don't know, that you're doing something wrong for yourself and for society, people are like, how dare you, sir?
How dare you?
My sex life is just as fulfilling and rich and filled with soulfulness as anyone else's.
Yeah, then you wonder why people are having trouble condemning the behavior.
Instead of shutting down Door Alley, San Francisco officials focused on disseminating information about how the virus spreads to help people make their own choices.
I'm glad they've become— Again, when it came to getting the vax for COVID, not your own choice.
Masks, not your own choice.
Mandates.
Here, make your own decision, gang.
At the street festival itself, warnings about monkeypox were hard to find.
Only one of the attendees interviewed said he received an informational pamphlet about the virus even as organizers checked for proof of COVID vaccinations.
Checking to make sure you didn't have COVID so you didn't spread it.
But then they were like, well, you know, there is this other thing.
We're not going to talk about that.
It's too awkward.
Public health authorities worry about placing too much emphasis on sex as a mode of transmission because monkeypox also spreads in other ways.
I mean, statistically, Not so much.
I mean, spring a little bit in other ways, but not like this.
Zanth Brian, sexual health and prevention program manager for the Washington State Health Department, said urging people to have less sex unfairly places the onus on individuals to end the outbreak and distracts from other potential sources of transmission, such as dancing in packed clubs.
Approaching it from a purely sexually transmitted infection standpoint doesn't really meet the challenge, said Brian.
No, I'm, again, you know it as another, another behavior that you don't have to engage in is dancing in crowded clubs.
Like, these are, we can't count on individuals to prevent monkeypox, but it's up to you whether COVID stops an endemic virus that is airborne.
Amazing.
In New York City, a top epidemiologist at the health department has publicly criticized agency leadership for not urging men.
Who have sex with men, who abstain from anonymous sex for several weeks.
Again, they're not even saying, like, do it forever.
Like, just for a few weeks, guys.
Can you cut out the, you know, the chains?
Like, you know, for like, I don't know, 14 days or so?
Well, we can't say that.
Amazing that this is controversial, and yet, randomly, it is.
Because sexual identity takes precedence over everything up to and including biology and or the spread of disease.
So, public health emergency declared by the White House, I know that you feel much more safe now.
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And meanwhile, speaking of feeling much more safe, China is conducting precision missile strikes in the Taiwan Strait.
So Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.
The idea here was that she was going to demonstrate solidarity with Taiwan, and China immediately started conducting precision missile strikes in the waters off Taiwan's coast as part of military exercises, raising tensions in the region to their highest level in decades.
According to the Associated Press, China earlier announced that military exercises by its Navy, Air Force, and other departments were underway in six zones surrounding Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own territory to be annexed by force if necessary.
Five of the missiles fired by China landed in Japan's exclusive economic zone off Hataruma, an island far south of Japan's main islands, according to the Japanese defense minister.
He said Japan protested missile landings to China as, quote, serious threats to Japan's national security and the safety of the Japanese people.
Japan's defense ministry speculated that four missiles flew directly over Taipei, the capital city, crossing over the mainland and hitting on the other side of Taiwan.
Taiwan's defense ministry did not deny the claim, saying the flight path was, quote, outside the atmosphere, is not harmful to the vast area on the ground it flies over.
So they're saying, well, yeah, it overflew the island, but it was very high up, so you wouldn't really even have noticed it.
It would have seemed like kind of a plane, right?
I mean, it's very high.
That said, the purpose there is to demonstrate, which they need to demonstrate, because pure geography tells you that Taiwan is under the missile umbrella of China.
The drills were prompted by a visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi.
China fired long-range explosive projectiles, the Eastern Theater Command of the People's Liberation Army, the ruling Communist Party's military wing, said in a statement.
It also said it carried out multiple conventional missile launches in three different areas in the eastern waters off of Taiwan.
The Eastern Theater said, quote, all missiles hit the target accurately.
U.S.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby condemned the launches.
He said China has chosen to overreact and use the speaker's visit as a pretext to increase provocative military action in and around the Taiwan Strait.
We will not be deterred from operating in the seas and skies of the Western Pacific, consistent with international law, as we have for decades, supporting Taiwan and defending a free and open Indo-Pacific.
Meanwhile, by the way, as I mentioned yesterday, the Biden administration is actively urging Congress not to pass more aid for Taiwan, which demonstrates, I think, the lack of willingness of this administration to face up to the challenge that is happening there right now.
In other words, Nancy Pelosi went and wrote a bunch of checks with her mouth, and then the Biden administration is unwilling to actually back up those checks.
The check is bouncing.
The Biden administration is unwilling to ship $4.6 billion in military technology to Taiwan.
But we will send you an elderly woman who will tell you about solidarity.
So that is very exciting stuff.
Meanwhile, China is ratcheting up tensions.
China has got to feel like We gotta go soon.
I mean, this is one of the big problems here, is that when you ratchet up the tensions with the rhetoric, while simultaneously ratcheting down the tensions with your actions, China sees that as weakness.
It would be surprising if sometime in the next few years, China did not at least attempt an invasion of Taiwan, given the fact that if Joe Biden were to not be president, that response would go very, very differently.
Meanwhile, Massive controversy breaking out in Russia.
The WNBA's Brittany Greiner was convicted Thursday in Russia of drug possession and smuggling and sentenced to nine years behind bars in a politically charged case that could lead to a high-stakes prisoner exchange between Washington and Moscow, according to the Associated Press.
The 31-year-old Greiner, two-time U.S.
Olympic champion, eight-time All-Star with the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury, listened with a blank expression as an interpreter translated the verdict by Judge Anna Sotnikova.
Her lawyer said she was very upset.
Greiner was fined one million rubles, which is about $17,000.
Outside the court, the U.S.
Embassy's Charged Affairs Elizabeth Ruud called the outcome a miscarriage of justice.
She's been detained since February 17, after the police said they found vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage upon landing in Moscow's airport.
She was returning to Russia, where she has competed since 2014.
The nine-year sentence was close to the maximum of ten years Greiner had faced under the charges.
Most Russians possessing small quantities of drugs get at most five years in prison.
Griner apologized to her family, teammates, and the Russian city of Yakar Terenberg, where she plays in the WNBA offseason.
Here she was apologizing yesterday.
I want to apologize to my teammates, my club, Genka, the fans, and the city of D-Cat for my mistake that I made and the embarrassment that I brought on to them.
I want to also apologize to my parents, my siblings, the Phoenix American Free Organization, Back at Home, the amazing women of the WNBA, And my amazing spouse back at home.
I never meant to hurt anybody.
I never meant to put in jeopardy the rest of the population.
I never meant to break any laws here.
I made an honest mistake and I hope that in your ruling that it doesn't end my life here.
Okay, so the idea that Russia is prosecuting her for bringing a fairly small amount of drugs into the country obviously raises political questions.
Does this mean that she's a political prisoner in the same way that, let's say, many other people in Russia are political prisoners?
Seems doubtful to me.
She did, in fact, violate drug law.
She is not a person who is being put in jail because of her politics.
The idea here from the United States, presumably, is that she is being held by the Russians as a sort of bargaining chip.
But again, the reality of Brittany Griner as compared with some of the other Americans who are being detained is not quite the same thing.
So Brittany Griner is not the only person who's being held in custody over what would be minor charges.
There's another person whose name is Whelan, who has been arrested in Russia as well.
He was arrested for the crime of apparently resisting arrest after some sort of drunken brawl with the cops.
As Paul Whelan, he's been imprisoned in Russia on an espionage conviction, which again, that one seems pretty wild.
I'm not sure what the case is for espionage.
The Biden administration, nonetheless, has been talking about actually trading active arms dealers to the Russians to get back Reiner and Whelan.
That seems like a massive mistake.
Trading away actively dangerous criminals for people who have committed minor drug crimes or resisting arrest crimes in Russia.
The question is whether that's in America's interest.
I mean, there's no question that Greiner actually committed the crime.
She said that she committed the crime.
It doesn't mean that Russia isn't discriminating against her or attempting to use her as a political pawn.
But it is to suggest that this is not quite the same thing as a pure political prisoner situation.
Griner's agent Lindsey Kawagakola said the sentence was severe by Russian legal standards and goes to prove what we have known all along, Britney is being used as a political pawn.
A conviction is usually needed before arranging a prisoner exchange and also allows Griner to apply for a pardon.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said last month the necessary judicial procedures must be completed before other steps can be taken.
The U.S.
State Department had earlier declared Griner to be wrongfully detained, a charge that Russia has sharply rejected.
She said that she pled guilty, by the way, on the charges against her.
She had no intention of breaking any Russian law.
Greiner described a confusing scene while being held at the airport, saying an interpreter provided by authorities translated only a fraction of what was being said to her, and that officials told her to sign documents without explaining what they were.
She said she was not informed of her rights.
Her lawyers introduced evidence that Greiner was using medical cannabis for chronic pain, and injuries sustained during her career included a letter from her doctor.
Greiner said she knew that cannabis oil was outlawed in Russia and had not intended to break the law or plan to smuggle anything into Russia.
But of course she did smuggle something into Russia.
Again, I mention here that the Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that Washington has offered to trade away a convicted Russian arms dealer named Victor Bout for both Whelan and Greiner.
Russian media have speculated that Greiner could be swapped for Boutnik, named the Merchant of Death.
He is serving a 25-year sentence in the United States after being convicted of conspiracy to kill American citizens and provide aid to a terrorist organization.
Russia has agitated for Bout's release for years.
That seems like a bad swap to me.
I mean, I'm sorry, that just did not seem like a good swap.
We are not talking about trading a convicted drug trafficker like Konstantin Yaroshchenko for Trevor Reed.
That was a former U.S.
Marine detained in Russia.
You're talking about trading away a guy who actually was convicted of terrorism and attempts to aid and abet terrorism for a basketball player who knew that she was bringing an illegal drug into Russia.
Joe Biden put out a statement saying, quote, Today, American citizen Brittany Griner received a prison sentence.
That is one more reminder of what the world already knew.
Russia is wrongfully detaining Brittany.
It's unacceptable.
I call on Russia to release her immediately so she can be with her wife, loved ones, friends and teammates.
My administration will work to tirelessly and pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittany and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible.
Now, here's the thing.
There are actually people who are being detained in Russia for political purposes, and you don't know their names.
You know Britney Griner's name because she's a basketball player in a league that nobody watches.
But you don't know some of the names of people like Vladimir Karamurza.
He's a Washington Post contributing columnist.
Who happens to be anti-Putin.
According to the Washington Post editorial board, he was arrested in Moscow in April on a sham charge of disobeying the police, then indicted on a charge of public dissemination of knowingly false information about the Russian military.
Now, Kara Mirza's lawyer says the authorities are preparing yet another bogus charge, this time for participating in a non-governmental organization deemed undesirable in Russia under a law first approved in 2015.
Kara Mirza still hasn't been indicted on the charge.
His lawyers said they know little more, but they know the method.
In an endless carousel of arbitrary prosecutions, the same approach has been employed to unjustly imprison Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition figure, and most recently, Ilya Yashin, an opposition leader accused of spreading false information about the military, reportedly for discussing on his YouTube channel the killing of civilians in Bukha, Ukraine by Russian troops.
On July 8th, a Moscow court sentenced local politician Alexei Gorunov to seven years in prison under the same provision.
Gornostai in court, I'm convinced this war is the fastest route to dehumanization, when the line between good and evil is blurred.
War is always violence and blood-torn bodies and severed limbs.
It's always death.
I do not accept this and reject it.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Buragan, Russian journalists who have written often in foreign affairs, say that the Federal Security Service or SSB has been turned into far more expansive arm of the increasingly ruthless state.
There have been over 16,400 detentions of people taking a stance against the war in Ukraine since it began.
But we're supposed to focus all of our ire on the detention of a basketball player who plays in Russia apparently every year and brought drugs into the country.
Two things can be true at once.
Russia is detaining this person for far too long, and also, why are we trading arms dealers for a person who commits drug crimes in Russia?
So it doesn't seem like a great negotiation tactic to trade, you know, one of the world's most notorious arms dealers for a drug-using basketball player, even if that drug-using basketball player was Being sentenced wrongly?
That just doesn't seem like a great negotiation tactic?
I'll tell you what is a great negotiation tactic.
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Well, folks, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a daily wear member.
Today, it's Rich Hardin on Twitter, who understands the right way to care for a newborn.
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an adorable bow on her noggin, and the world's greatest beverage vessel nestled up close.
The caption says, Gotta raise him right. The newest addition to the family.
Leftist years tumbler.
World-class statting right there. Congratulations on the newest miracle in addition to your family.
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The simple fact of the matter is that Gavin Newsom is struggling, and so he has decided that he is going to choose culture war above everything else.
His state has become a place that people flee.
I know because I fled it with my company.
The taxes are too high.
The homeless population is enormous.
Quality of living has gone down.
And so now he's just trying to posture in the hopes that eventually Democrats will allow him to run for president.
So he put out a statement yesterday.
Let me tell the difference between California and Florida.
He's running ads in Florida trying to proclaim that California is the land of freedom.
Free for abortion is pretty much what he means by that.
California is the land of homelessness and abortion.
So that's exciting stuff from California Governor Gavin Newsom.
He put out a statement yesterday telling Hollywood to come home.
He's offering a massive new tax break for Hollywood.
Something like 1.6 billion dollars in tax breaks for the companies to start producing in Hollywood again.
And the fact that Hollywood stopped producing in Hollywood is a pretty good demonstration that Hollywood is horribly run in terms of like the government.
Governor Gavin Newsom put out a statement saying, Hollywood, your values, your choice.
California is the best place in America to create.
If that were true, then people wouldn't be fleeing it.
You know, hand over fist.
For a hundred years, he says, we've been the home for storytelling and storytellers.
Together, we built a creative community that includes unrivaled cast, crews, craftspeople, infrastructure, and technology, robust tax credits, and other incentives.
The best culture.
Um, together?
You didn't do anything, dude.
Like, nothing.
Most importantly, we share your values, so now it's time to choose.
Over the past several years, the legislatures of states like Georgia and Oklahoma have waged cruel assault on essential rights.
Now, in the wake of Supreme Court's abhorrent decision overturning Roe v. Wade, those same states are quickly moving to strip reproductive freedom.
As you know, their attacks are not occurring in secret.
The harm they inflict is not the result of mere carelessness.
On the contrary, they're carrying out these attacks brazenly and with the intent to cause pain in the communities they target, many of whom are essential to the success of your industry.
Again, the emotivism of the left here is so astonishing.
The idea here is that if you oppose the right-wing agenda, it's because the right wants to hurt you and is cruel and vicious.
Not that they actually have arguments on abortion that disagree with your own.
They're bad people.
That's what Gavin Newsom is saying right there.
Good luck with that.
That has not worked well in the past.
to take stock of your values and those of your employees when doing business in those states. He's trying to values shame Hollywood. Good luck with that.
That has not worked well in the past. California is a freedom state, says Gavin Newsom, who forced production to shut down in the state of California for a year.
Freedom to tell your stories.
Freedom to access the health services you need, including abortion.
Freedom to love who you love and to ensure your LGBTQ plus minus divided by signed friends, family, and colleagues can proudly be who they are.
Freedom from repressive state governments that want to tell you what to believe and threaten you with felonies if you don't toe their line.
Does the man own a mirror?
Repressive state governments that tell you what to believe?
I mean, California is putting laws on the books that force your kindergartner to learn about gender theory, so I'm pretty sure that he's talking about California.
And he says, to those in power to make decisions about where to film, where to hire, where to open new offices, we in California say, walk the walk.
Choose freedom.
Choose creativity.
Choose California.
So, ironically, Gavin Newsom is now running against Hollywood.
So the accusation was that Ron DeSantis was running against Disney when Disney decided to butt its nose into gender theory being taught to kindergartners.
And Ron DeSantis is like, well, if you're going to do that, then, you know, there are a bunch of special tax breaks that you guys get.
You don't really need to be involved in this issue.
And that's just the way it works.
Well, now Gavin Newsom is like, I'm going to cudgel you into bringing your business home, or I will attack you as insufficiently woke.
And here's the problem.
You know, Hollywood gets to Play a game here?
That they care more about their woke morality than they do about money?
But it turns out that that only applies when the economy is going gangbusters.
When they start to experience business difficulties, they too are subject to the dictates of the market.
Turns out half the American population does not agree with the wokeness of Hollywood.
Which is one reason, you would imagine, why Batgirl has now been scrapped.
So, Warner Bros.
spent $90 million to make a movie of Batgirl.
Batgirl, in the comic books, is Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Commissioner Gordon.
She's paralyzed in the comics at a certain point, and then she's unparalyzed.
In any case, she is Batgirl.
And, um, the movie was supposed to be sort of a woke bonanza, according to pretty much everybody who had seen it.
The movie was apparently so bad that they just killed it.
They were like, we're not even gonna distribute it.
We'll take the tax write-off.
You know how bad a movie has to be to spend $90 million on it, and then you don't even release it?
That has to be a pretty damned terrible movie.
Tom Leonard writing for the Daily Mail, he says Batgirl, an apparently woke big-budget film featuring a female version of the Caped Crusader, has been ignominiously scrapped, shocking the film world.
Condemned as irredeemable by studio executives at Warner Bros., it seems that not even a lengthy spell in the editing room could rescue it.
Nor was it good enough to send straight to video, as used to be said of films too bad for the cinema.
It may be the most expensive film ever made that will never see the light of day.
The film had got as far as test screenings and was being slated for release in cinemas and on the U.S.
streaming service HBO Max by the end of the year, but audience feedback was so awful that Warner Bros.
has decided the reputational damage of releasing such a dud would be even worse than wasting the tens of millions of bucks it has already spent on it.
It just didn't work, said an insider.
Given the low standard of so much of the content on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services, this represents a jaw-dropping failure.
Some have alleged the film may have been scrapped rather than released for tax purposes.
Warner Brothers can now claim Batgirl as a tax write-off, helping it recoup some of its costs elsewhere.
But that doesn't really account for why the film was so bad in the first place.
There are certainly strong clues to suggest Batgirl was only the latest in a long and disastrous line of Hollywood films that have prioritized politically correct values over entertainment.
The star of the film was a little-known Afro-Latina singer-actress named Leslie Grace.
That was a risk because she never really made a big movie outside of In the Heights, which was a massive commercial flop.
Apparently Michael Keaton was going to reprise his role as Batman.
J.K.
Simmons was going to be Batgirl's father, Commissioner Gordon.
That's a pretty good cast.
The film was directed by Adil El-Arbi and Bilal Fallah, a young Moroccan Belgian best known for the TV series Miss Marvel, another sort of woke comic book.
Batgirl's screenplay was by Christina Dodds Hodson, a British writer of ultra-feminist film Birds of Prey.
Also, Batgirl featured a trans character, Barbara Gordon's flatmate, played by the trans actor Ivory Aquino.
So apparently the film just sucked.
And so they shelved it instead.
So this is why the attempt to sort of shame everybody into coming back to Hollywood based on the morality of their ridiculous Left-wing woke precept it's going to it's going to not happen because eventually the market speaks and and Gavin Newsom again drive driving production back to California by telling people that if you love abortion you have to do your production in California that's not gonna work it turns out the Warner Brothers would rather produce someplace where they don't have to pay exorbitant tax rates and deal with with the unions in quite the same way meanwhile speaking of the economy
U.S.
jobless claims rose last week to a near high for the year.
You're starting to see the effects of those interest rates creeping up.
This is a predictable effect.
So this part was expected.
When you increase the interest rates, then you're going to exacerbate recessionary forces.
Everybody knows this.
According to the Wall Street Journal, worker filings for unemployment benefits rose last week, holding close to the highest level of the year as the U.S.
labor market showed several signs of cooling.
Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, Increased slightly to a seasonally adjusted $260,000 last week from a downwardly revised $254,000 the prior week.
or may downwardly revise 254,000 the prior week.
The total is close to the 2022 peak set earlier in July of 2,261,000 and above the 2019 pre-pandemic weekly average of 218,000 when the labor market also was strong.
The modest pickup in claims that suggest turnover may be increasing in weaker firms that are struggling with slowing growth, said Jeffries economists, Thomas Simons and Anita Markowska.
They added seasonal adjustments could be playing a role in the elevated jobless claims.
Meanwhile, mortgage rates have dropped below 5% for the first time since April, which again is demonstrative of a cooling real estate market.
According to the Wall Street Journal, mortgage rates dropped to their lowest level since April, offering a reprieve to prospective homebuyers who've been hit this year with higher rates and surging prices.
The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is 4.99% this week, down from 5.30% a week earlier, according to a survey by mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
Mortgage rates and other measures of the cost of borrowing tend to rise and fall with expectations about the trajectory of the economy.
Recently, fears the U.S.' 's heading into a downturn had lowered expectations of the pace of rate rises.
Until the past year, rising mortgage rates have been a key factor driving up the cost of home buying this year, adding hundreds of dollars, or more, to buyers' monthly payments.
Sales of previously owned homes fell for a fifth straight month in June, according to the most recent data from the National Association of Realtors.
So you're starting to see a cool down in the real estate market.
So here comes the rest of the recession.
We've already gotten the inflationary portion of the recession.
We've already gotten wages being eaten up by the inflation.
Now come the other effects.
A cooling real estate market, an increase in joblessness.
None of this is particularly shocking.
Again, it was all expected.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England abroad has pursued the biggest rate increase since 1995 as inflation soars.
The rate increase to 1.75% from 1.25% was the largest since 1995.
The move mirrors recent rate hikes by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, reflecting fears the longer inflation is allowed to persist, the harder it will be to bring down.
The Bank of England offered a particularly bleak outlook for the UK, saying the economy was poised to enter a session that would last for five consecutive quarters, starting in the final three months of this year.
A downturn as long as the one that followed the financial crisis, but not as deep.
So they're now expecting Again, over a year of recession in the UK, it added that inflation will continue to rise well above its current four decade high and that household income would fall sharply.
So the UK is looking forward to a recession as well.
It turns out that you can't spend endlessly during a pandemic and then not pay the price on the other end.
And that is precisely what is happening right now.
Alrighty guys, we have more news to cover, but I'm out of time here on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and the like, so if you want to enjoy the rest of the show, become a DailyWire Plus member, head on over to dailywire.com slash Ben.
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