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Aug. 19, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

48:53

What Won’t The Left Do To Stop Trump? | Ep. 1559

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	Author and commentator Sam Harris says he's all in favor of silencing stories to stop Donald Trump.
	Brian Stelter is finished at CNN, and a judge rules that part of the affidavit in the Trump-FBI raid can finally be released.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Well, it's been labeled the big lie, the idea that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election thanks to voter fraud and the attempts by the left to create an almost global conspiracy to deny him the presidency.
	The folks who suggest that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, one of the reasons they suggest that is because they say, well, the left had the motive, the means and the opportunity.
	That is the argument that I have heard and it is the strongest argument that they make because the truth is that there's no way to prove that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election based on the vote count.
	There's no way to actually show that fraudulent voters were present in the sort of numbers that would have overturned the results in many of these states.
	The best that you can say in favor of the idea that the 2020 election was rigged is that it was sort of informally and and generically rigged in the sense that the media denied people the access to the information that would have needed to change their votes in the sense that the rules were actively changed in some cases like in Pennsylvania against the constitution of the state of Pennsylvania in order to make it easier for people to vote absentee. It's possible to say that ballot harvesting creates the the massive possibility of border front right all of those things can be true.
	The actual notion that Donald Trump won based on he definitely had enough falsified ballots that he could have proved or the ballots we can show were shipped in in the middle of the night and people were in the back room punching holes in the chats.
	That sort of proof wasn't present.
	But the argument that is the most, I think, strong and convincing from the right, from those who argue this point of view, If you're trying to steal man, the argument is that the left has the motive means and the opportunity to steal elections.
	And so why wouldn't they?
	And the idea here is that they had the means, right?
	The means would be, you know, the broadening of the voting procedures and the ballot harvesting.
	They had the opportunity because people were voting for months in advance and they had the motive and the motive is really, I think the thing that people are latching onto.
	The motive is really what is driving polarization in our politics because it used to be when people say, you know, why don't people accept the results of elections anymore?
	And this is bipartisan.
	Why don't people accept the results of elections anymore?
	The answer is because it used to be in this country that you would suggest, yeah, no matter how much I hate the other guy, I don't have the motive to steal an election.
	To steal an election means that I truly believe that the country is at an end if we don't steal this election.
	If I don't subvert the democracy, then the democracy is gone.
	The argument in favor of subverting a democratic election is, if I don't do this, catastrophe occurs.
	And you can see times in human history where that argument could be made.
	The communists are about to take over in a particular place, and so the CIA has to get involved to prevent Stalin from taking over Italy.
	That argument was made in the 1950s, for example.
	I think that you could make the argument with regard to Hitler.
	Hitler is about to take over in Germany.
	You do everything you possibly can to stop Hitler from taking over in Germany.
	If you have a time machine, right?
	Any means at your disposal is useful and good because after all, he's Hitler.
	But what has separated America historically from all of this is the idea that if the guy from the other party gets elected, it's bad.
	It's unpleasant.
	It's really bad for the direction of the country.
	Politics has consequences.
	But it is not so bad that you have the motive to steal the election.
	You wouldn't have the motive to undermine an election itself, to destroy election integrity.
	Increasingly, as we have seen in recent years, the feeling on both sides of the aisle, but particularly on the left side of the aisle, is that anything necessary in order to prevent Republicans from gaining power is justified.
	Republicans are evil.
	Republicans are terrorists.
	Republicans are the worst people in the entire world.
	Donald Trump is Orange Hitler and all the rest.
	And if we have to subvert elections by suppressing information, then we will.
	And so what that leads is people on the right say, okay, well, obviously you have the motive to do this.
	So if I thought you had the means and the opportunity, I think you'd probably do it, right?
	And so this comes to a head, thanks to some comments made by somebody I'm friendly with, Sam Harris.
	So Sam Harris is a pretty interesting thinker.
	He's one of the new atheist crew.
	He's written all of these books about how atheism is morally superior and about how truth is the most important value.
	And Sam and I have had a couple of podcasts together.
	I had him on the Sunday special a few years back.
	He had me on his show.
	We debated things like God and free will.
	Really interesting sort of stuff.
	Sam is very much of the left, and he's definitely a Democrat voting person.
	And apparently he believes, and this is why this is so telltale, because Sam is not a wild leftist.
	Sam is not somebody who is a radically left person.
	Sam tends to be left of center on a lot of issues, but he's not somebody who I would characterize as like a woke radical leftist or something.
	He actually is not.
	Well, if you want the country to fall apart, definitely, definitely say the kinds of things that Sam Harris actually said yesterday.
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	So he was on a podcast called Trigonometry and he made some comments that I think totally throw gasoline on the flaming raging fire of election denial and on the raging fire that's going on in terms of polarization in the country.
	The belief that there are in fact people who are willing to create conspiracies in order to deny the proper results of an election.
	Or even willing to subvert elections entirely.
	Now, Sam tried to walk this back yesterday a little bit on Twitter.
	I don't think he did a very good job of it.
	But these comments went viral for a reason.
	Because they support the idea that so many people have about people on the left.
	And people on the left, if they had the chance, would steal an election from Donald Trump.
	So here is Sam Harris a couple of days ago on Triggernometry.
	Again, this went totally viral yesterday.
	I mean, Hunter Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement.
	I would not have cared, right?
	It's like, there's nothing.
	First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right?
	It's not, it's like, it's not Joe Biden, but even if Joe, like even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right?
	Or China.
	It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.
	It's like a firefly to the sun, right?
	I mean, it doesn't even stack up against Trump University, right?
	Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view, right?
	Now that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account.
	That's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.
	Absolutely it was.
	Absolutely.
	But I think it was warranted.
	And again, it's a coin toss as to whether or not that particular piece... Sam, I'm sorry.
	I'm really sorry.
	I was the one that said we should move on, but you've just said something I really struggle with, which is...
	The kids in the basement?
	No, no.
	The kids in the basement.
	I'm interested in democracy.
	You're saying you're content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president.
	Well, no, I'm content.
	But the thing is, it's just not left-wing, right?
	So Liz Cheney is not left-wing, right?
	Liz Cheney is doing everything in her power.
	You're content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratic?
	No, but there's nothing... Conspiracy... It was a conspiracy out in the open, but it doesn't matter if it was... It doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what part's out in the open.
	I mean, I think it's like... If people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon, you know, it's like... If there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, And we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right?
	Is that a conspiracy?
	I mean, that's an amazing statement there from Sam Harris.
	So he openly says, okay, so there are people who are complaining that the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed by the media, right?
	So he's not even talking right now about election fraud.
	He's talking about what sort of information could and should be suppressed in order to effectuate an election win for Joe Biden.
	And he even says, what if on that laptop had been the stuff that a lot of right-wingers suspect about Joe Biden, which is that he was getting direct kickbacks from Hunter Biden for corrupt activities in Ukraine and China.
	Because that is the gravest accusation on the laptop.
	Forget about Hunter Biden smoking crack off hooker's asses and all the rest.
	The stuff that people really are concerned about with regard to Joe Biden is not the fact that Hunter Biden is a drug-addicted derelict and a horrible person.
	The thing that people are really concerned about in terms of the presidency is, was Hunter Biden traveling overseas to China, receiving massive amounts of money from the Chinese government, and then kicking back 10% to the big guy?
	The big guy being Joe, right?
	That would actually be really troubling because that would be significantly worse than anything that was even proved About Donald Trump, right?
	Like way worse.
	That was the actual accusation about Trump.
	The accusation about Trump was that Trump was in thrall to the Russians.
	That Trump had basically made a trade with the Russians that they would subvert the election.
	And in return, he would be really, really nice to them because if they did that, then they would also green light the Trump Hotel in Moscow.
	Or that he had a deal with Deutsche Bank, some financial deal that would allow some sort of kickback where he was being enriched personally by the Russians in order to effectuate different American policy toward Russia.
	That was the accusation about Trump.
	It was never proved.
	Nothing of that kind was ever really even alleged by the Mueller report.
	All of it ended up being bullcrap.
	But what he's saying, what Sam Harris is saying, is even if that stuff were true about Joe Biden and China, Or Joe Biden and Ukraine.
	If it turned out that Joe Biden is everything we said Donald Trump was, but could never prove, that still would not justify allowing information to flow freely to the American people.
	It would not allow people to see that information, because it's so important to stop Trump, right?
	Trump is so bad, he's an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, that it doesn't matter what you have to do to stop that asteroid.
	It doesn't matter if you call it a conspiracy or not a conspiracy.
	None of that matters.
	The idea here is that you have to mold the minds of the American people to prevent Donald Trump from being president of the United States.
	Now, Sam Harris tried to then walk this back a little bit on Twitter, and I want to be fair to Sam by reading what he actually said here.
	He says, there's a podcast clip circulating that seems to be confusing many people about my views on Trump, which is understandable because I wasn't speaking very clearly.
	So for what it's worth, here's what I was trying to say.
	I was essentially arguing for a principle of self-defense, where there's a continuum of proportionate force that is appropriate and necessary to use.
	I've always viewed Trump as a very dangerous person to elect as president of a fake university, let alone the United States.
	And when he became a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, I viewed him as more dangerous still.
	However, I've never been under any illusion that he's Orange Hitler.
	On the podcast, I was speaking narrowly about the wisdom and propriety of ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the election.
	I've always thought that this was a very hard call, ethically and journalistically.
	Now, right there, he gives away the game.
	What makes that a hard call ethically and journalistically?
	And why?
	Again, he says in the clip, and what he's saying is it doesn't matter how corrupt Joe Biden is.
	He could be any level of corrupt.
	On Hunter Biden's laptop could have been proved direct that Xi Jinping sent hookers, blow, and $10 million directly to Joe, not Hunter.
	And that would have been worthy of ignoring because that's how bad Donald Trump was and how scary Donald Trump was.
	This is a hard call ethically and journalistically, but given what happened with the Anthony Weiner laptop in the previous election, I think it was probably the right call.
	So again, that's an amazing statement because what happened, if you recall, in the last election cycle, is that there were serious questions about how Hillary Clinton had treated classified information as Secretary of State.
	And she had stored a bunch of classified information on her laptop, and then when she was subpoenaed for all this information, she bleach-bit her servers and destroyed all the information.
	And Anthony Weiner's laptop, in a separate investigation of Anthony Weiner, came up, and a bunch of Hillary's emails basically found their way onto Anthony Weiner's laptop, because after all, she was married to Huma Abedin, Huma Abedin was very close with Hillary Clinton, she was one of her top aides.
	And so he's saying that because the Anthony Weiner laptop story ended up effectuating a move toward Donald Trump in the last days of the 2016 election, and so Donald Trump ended up winning, it would have been better that that story were suppressed.
	This story should be suppressed.
	That story should have been suppressed.
	And note, he's saying that before Donald Trump had been president.
	So the notion that between 2016 and 2020, Trump proved himself to be so dangerous, it was about elections and aisle, that he proved himself so dangerous in July, August, September, October of 2020, that you could not allow him to remain as president of the United States.
	It's not about that.
	I mean, Sam is openly saying now that he, if he had a choice, would go back and have suppressed the Anthony Weiner laptop information.
	That's 2016, before Trump has done any of this kind of stuff.
	He says, nothing I said on the podcast was meant to suggest that Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud or to take other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency, nor do I think they did that.
	But I don't know why the principle doesn't hold.
	So according to Sam Harris, there's a continuum.
	The continuum goes from suppressing open stories by the New York Post that affect the election to openly just shoving fake ballots into boxes.
	He says, I'm not going to do the latter thing, but suppressing the former thing that I'm kind of okay with.
	I'm kind of okay with denying Trump the presidency.
	But here's the problem.
	Once you're on that continuum, that's not just a slippery slope.
	You're going to have to explain the principle.
	Why is Donald Trump so dangerous that you can shut down the ability of people to distribute true information about Joe Biden in order to prevent Joe Biden from losing?
	But he's not dangerous enough that you're actually willing to stuff ballot boxes.
	Like, explain to me how that continuum works.
	I mean, Sam says it's a continuum.
	So how does that continuum work?
	So a lot of conservatives suspect there is no continuum.
	A lot of conservatives suspect that this is completely ad hoc.
	That if, in the secret recesses of the Democratic halls of power, they had the ability to actually stuff ballot boxes, they would do it.
	And that if you're openly saying, if the part you say out loud is, I'm willing to shut down the New York Post distribution of Hunter Biden stories, the stuff that you're really saying in the back of your mind is pretty much anything that we have to do to deny Donald Trump the presidency, we are willing to do.
	So why should I believe you when you say that the election was carried out in fair and decent fashion?
	That is the thinking of a lot of people on the right side of the aisle.
	Now, again, that doesn't prove that the election was stolen.
	It proves motive.
	It doesn't prove means and opportunity.
	And it certainly doesn't prove that it actually even happened.
	Because, again, the states that we are talking about that actually certified their ballots were all run by Republicans, right?
	You had a Republican legislature in Pennsylvania, you had a Republican legislature in Arizona, and a Republican secretary of state, and a Republican secretary of state in Georgia, and a Republican governor.
	Also in Arizona, you had a Republican governor, right?
	The notion that the mere presence of the motive proves that the thing happened is not true.
	And many people have terrible, terrible motives with regard to other people.
	It doesn't prove that they committed any crime against that person.
	However, it's the motive that is really undergirding the complete separation in the United States, the complete polarization in the United States.
	And that lack of trust is tearing us apart on an institutional level.
	Tearing us apart because you believe the minute that guy gets access to the levers of power, you know what he thinks.
	You know his motive.
	So if he gains access to the sword, what you suspect is that he's going to use it.
	And that's incredibly dangerous.
	That's why people are so fired up, for example, about the FBI raid.
	Because the idea here is we know that you guys hate Donald Trump.
	We know you despise him.
	We know that you spent four years going after him for a bunch of garbage with regard to Russia.
	And now you have control of that sword again.
	So why should we believe you that you are using that in fair fashion when you've made very clear that you don't wish to use that in fair fashion?
	People have these suspicions about, for example, Big Tech.
	And they should have those suspicions about Big Tech.
	But we have massive trust problems here in the United States.
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	All right, Sam Harris said the quiet part out loud, and even his attempts to walk it back are not really strong enough.
	Because the moment that you say, information should be suppressed so my guy can win, the question becomes, okay, what else are you willing to do so that your guy can win?
	And why do you draw this line, but not that line?
	And also, why should we believe you?
	I mean, you've now openly said that you're willing to be dishonest in order to ensure that your candidate wins.
	So why should we believe that you're not being dishonest when you say stuff you won't do?
	When you say, yeah, I'm willing to cheat with regard to this thing.
	But over here, that's that's too much cheating for me.
	Why should I believe you?
	You've now said that you're willing to cheat.
	So you're talking to me, right?
	You're not talking in the in the recesses with your friends.
	So why?
	That motive question is so dangerous in America.
	One thing that I really despise in American politics, and it happens again on both sides a lot, is what we call emotivism.
	Emotivism is the idea that somebody makes an argument, and instead of you arguing with the argument, you argue with the motive of the argument.
	You attribute a motive to the person, and then you argue with the motive.
	You see this happen all the time in, for example, gender ideology.
	You see it happen, Matt Walsh, When he did his fantastic documentary, What is a Woman?
	He would go around and he would ask a bunch of gender theorists, what is a woman?
	And their first question back to him would be, why are you asking?
	Why are you asking?
	They don't want to engage with the question or the argument.
	And so they go immediately to, you're malicious.
	You're bad.
	Your motives are evil.
	I don't like that kind of politics.
	I think that kind of politics generally stinks.
	I think politics should be about the argument itself.
	When you make clear the motive, when you say the motive out loud, now it's about your motives.
	I mean, it's not my fault.
	You're the one who made it about your motives.
	When Sam Harris says, yeah, my motive is I am willing to suppress information to prevent Donald Trump from winning.
	And I think that's an easy moral call because Trump University is worse than if Joe Biden took cash from China.
	Like, first of all, I don't, what?
	Then at that point, it is your motive that's on the table.
	And once the motives are on the table, very difficult to put that genie back in the bottle.
	And so, yes, people are very fearful that the institutions of power in the United States have been infected with these motives, and that it has poisoned all those institutions.
	Start with big tech.
	So, there's a very good piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago from our friend Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeldt.
	of Yale talking about Alex Berenson. So Alex Berenson, he's now back on Twitter after being banned for nearly a year over COVID-19 misinformation. Last week, the former New York Times reporter settled his lawsuit against the social media company, which admitted error and then restored his account. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies like Twitter, Berenson wrote last week on Substack, but because the Biden administration brought pressure to bear on Twitter, he believes he has a case, his constitutional rights were violated. He is correct.
	So what exactly happened here? Well, Berenson went through the discovery process ensuing Twitter.
	And that discovery process confirmed that the White House has been secretly asking social media companies to shut down the contents of specific prominent critics of administration policy.
	On July 16th, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden, quote, on COVID misinformation, what's your message to platforms like Facebook?
	And Biden replied, quote, they are killing people.
	Later that day, Twitter locked Berenson's account on August 28th and banned him permanently.
	Last Friday, Berenson published conversations from an internal Twitter Slack channel, referring to an April 2021 meeting with White House officials.
	One Twitter employee noted that the meeting overall was pretty good, but added the White House had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off the platform.
	Another employee asked, any high-level takeaways from the meeting?
	Anything we should keep an eye out for?
	The first employee responded, yes.
	They really wanted to know about Alex Berenson.
	The employee wrote that Andy Slavitt, then a senior White House COVID advisor, quote, suggested they had seen data that had showed that he was the epicenter of disinformation that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.
	Barrington was not the only target.
	At a July 15, 2021 meeting, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, quote, We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
	There's about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of anti-vax misinformation on social media platforms.
	This is a reference to the so-called disinformation dozen, 12 named individuals identified in a report by the U.K.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a report that Facebook disputed even as it said it had taken action against the targets.
	Saki went on to say that 12 of them remained active on Facebook despite some being banned on other platforms, including ones that Facebook owns.
	At the same briefing...
	Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on social media companies to purge more COVID posts.
	He said we're asking them to consistently take action against misinformation super spreaders on their platform.
	And a week later, Nick Clegg, a former UK Deputy Prime Minister, now Facebook parent, met as President for Global Affairs, emailed Murthy to thank him for meeting with Facebook and to report on the steps we took just this past week to further address the disinformation dozen.
	We removed 17 additional pages, groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the disinformation dozen, resulting in every member having had at least one such entity removed.
	So you now have the White House overtly coordinating with the biggest platforms to effectuate policy changes by silencing critics, by silencing voices.
	And this didn't stop in 2020.
	Well, there aren't a lot of people out there, not a lot of institutions that you can trust.
	That's particularly true when it comes to the economy.
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	Nick Clegg has now put out a statement this week talking about what Facebook is going to do for the 2022 U.S.
	midterm elections.
	And here's what he has to say.
	He says, our approach to the 2022 midterm elections applies learnings from the 2020 election cycle and exceeds the measures we implemented during the last midterm election in 2018. This includes advanced security operations to fight foreign interference and domestic influence campaigns, our network of independent fact-checking partners.
	Those independent fact-checking partners are universally left-wing, and when they fact-check, what they actually do is the implication checks.
	So if you say something that is true, Snopes will say, mostly false.
	He'll say, yeah, what you said is true, sure, but the implication is mostly false.
	Our industry-leading transparency measures around political advertising and pages, as well as new measures to help keep poll workers safe.
	As we did in 2020, we have a dedicated team in place to combat election and voter interference, while also helping people get reliable information about when and how to vote.
	Nick Clegg says our teams fight both foreign interference and domestic influence operation and have exposed and disrupted dozens of networks that have attempted to interfere with U.S.
	elections.
	And some of this is about preventing Russia from intervening.
	But the second thing is about downgrading particular information.
	Remember, it was Facebook that, and it was Nick Clegg, who originally said, yeah, you know what we're going to have to do here is we're going to have to suppress this New York Post story.
	So all those institutions of power are perfectly willing to suppress information on behalf of a particular political cause or at the behest of the White House.
	And this is why people are deeply suspicious of the FBI search on Donald Trump's home.
	Because institutional trust is at all-time lows, as well it should be.
	Once the motive has been said, it cannot be unsaid.
	Once you say your motive out loud, the bell cannot be unrung.
	And so, what we are learning right now is that, and then you have, you know, the FBI trotting out disgraced former agents like Peter Strzok saying, trust us.
	We don't.
	We don't.
	So Peter Strzok, who you'll recall, was caught in a text messaging scandal with one of his subordinates.
	He was screwing her, they were both married, and they were texting one another about how much they hated Donald Trump.
	Throughout the investigation, he was leading into both Hillary Clinton and the 2016 emails, and he was also leading the investigation into Trump and the Trump-Russia collusion kind of stuff.
	Now, Peter Strzok ended up being fired unceremoniously.
	He's disgraced himself.
	But now he's back to explain that, for example, the affidavit in the FBI raid on Trump's house should not be released.
	Why?
	Well, you know, he says, well, it reveals sources and methods.
	Okay, invariably, the people who are calling for lack of transparency in these particular types of cases are the people you probably shouldn't trust.
	Here's Peter Strzok.
	Do you think any part of the affidavit should be revealed?
	No, and I'd be surprised if it was.
	You know, in any other case not involving a former president of the United States, I'd expect the judge to rule immediately at the conclusion of the presentations from both sides.
	He may in this case, because of the significant nature of the case, want to go and draft an opinion and make sure all the T's are crossed and I's dotted, but ordinarily I would not expect to have it released and I would expect to have an order or decision out of the judge during this hearing.
	And the people in the media are like, oh yeah, that's fine.
	You know, lack of transparency.
	Fine with us.
	Weird.
	Because you guys were all for massive transparency when it comes to, for example, police officers involved in controversial shootings.
	Then you want the tape yesterday.
	But when it comes to, for example, surveillance footage of the FBI going through Donald Trump's belongings, then you got Peter Strzok out there on CNN saying, yeah, no, no, no, we definitely can't.
	And I mean, that tape should not be available to the general public.
	I mean, it's only the most controversial single FBI action of the last, I don't know, 40 years or so.
	You know, my main concern is one of physical security for the agents and other personnel involved in the search.
	If these are images where people can be identified, where they can have a name identified along with their image, that obviously in the context of what we're looking at now with threats to the judge, with threats to FBI personnel and offices, that really heightens the risk to those agents and other personnel who took part in that search.
	From an optics perspective, you know, Trump and his camp are talking a big game about releasing it, but I have some question about whether an average American viewer watching FBI agents walk out with box after box after box of highly classified information, whether that in fact is an image that is going to serve Trump very well.
	Yeah, so again, it's not a big deal.
	You shouldn't worry about it.
	Just trust us.
	Garrett Graff has a piece over at the New York Times today.
	He's the author of a book called Watergate A New History.
	He has an op-ed at the New York Times today talking about how basically the right should leave the FBI alone because the FBI is congenitally conservative.
	He says, historically, the FBI has been arguably the most culturally conservative and traditionally white Christian institution in the entire U.S.
	government.
	It's an institution so culturally conservative, even by the standards of law enforcement, that Democratic presidents have never felt comfortable or politically emboldened enough to nominate a Democrat to head the Bureau.
	That's right.
	Far from being a bastion of progressive thinking, every single director of the FBI has been a Republican-aligned official going all the way back to its creation.
	Such history suggests that the issue here is Mr. Trump and not institutional bias.
	So the idea here is that, you know, all you guys are complaining about the FBI.
	What are you complaining about?
	I mean, what are you complaining about?
	After all, they're your people.
	Well, I mean, there's only one problem with that, and that is the institutional forces inside all of these institutions, including the FBI, if they are congenitally predisposed at the top levels against Donald Trump, and if that's being approved by the DOJ under Merrick Garland, I'm not sure what that says about the everyday agent sitting behind his desk.
	I mean, this is the same sort of complaint that you hear.
	So the right will say, we are very critical of the leadership of the U.S.
	military.
	A lot of the leaders of the U.S.
	military have bought into sort of the woke, progressive, equity-based agenda with regard to the United States military.
	They are woke-ifying the military, and it's really stupid, and it's undermining combat readiness.
	And the left will go, well, yeah, but you guys love the military.
	The military is filled with people who agree with you.
	Well, yes, throughout the military, but at the very top levels, the way that you become at a top level general in the military is by being political.
	The grunts on the ground know this.
	Everybody, talk to anybody in any branch of the military, and what they will tell you is once you hit the upper levels of the political echelon of the military, you're a political general.
	You got up there because you're very good at politicking.
	The same thing happens to be true with the upper levels of the FBI.
	So just because the average FBI agent may be politically conservative doesn't change whether the FBI has at its top levels a bunch of politicians who are maneuvering Because that's what happens in every bureaucracy.
	And so, again, trust us tends to go by the wayside when you have undermined your own trust.
	And I keep saying that it's true in every institution.
	This is why it feels like the country is breaking, even though the United States is still the most powerful force on planet Earth by a wide margin.
	China cannot challenge the United States.
	The United States is a massively powerful economy.
	The United States has the most powerful military in world history.
	The United States is a powerhouse.
	It is a global hegemon.
	And yet we are talking about The kind of breakup of the United States in terms of social fabric and the reason is because all the institutions that used to unify us are now falling apart because you can't trust the guy in charge because his motives seem to be wrong.
	And it's every part of the American government and the CDC is a perfect example of this.
	So yesterday Rochelle Walensky announced that they are shaking up The CDC.
	By shaking up, it doesn't mean that they've actually recognized their big mistakes.
	The big mistakes here were politicizing all of the data that was coming out, lying about it to the American public, making statements that were way beyond their capacity to make, saying that you didn't need masks, and then you did need masks, and then you might need to mask up your two-year-old, and then you need seven different vaccinations, and that if you did get vaccinated, you wouldn't transmit, or if you did transmit, well, you still probably had to quarantine, and if you did quarantine, well, you didn't quarantine long enough, and you have to shut down your, like the CDC was issuing rulings about eviction moratoria.
	The CDC had too much power.
	If you actually wanted to shake up the CDC, what you would do is use a little bit of epistemic humility, right?
	You'd actually look at their system and say, okay, what if we shrink what it is that we say that we can do?
	And we're much more cautious in our application.
	But that's not what the CDC is doing.
	Their argument is they need more power.
	Their big mistake is they weren't forceful enough during the last pandemic.
	So when they say a shakeup, what they mean is give us more power, as always.
	Here's Rochelle Walensky, the current head of the CDC.
	We learned some hard lessons over the last three years.
	And as part of that, it's my responsibility, it's the agency's responsibility to learn from those lessons and do better.
	The new findings are likely to spark a major shake-up of the CDC's sprawling bureaucracy.
	Among the plans?
	Get information to the public more rapidly.
	Create a new office to promote equity in health care.
	And develop a more nimble workforce that can quickly respond to public health crises.
	We need to have special forces, if you will, to deploy during pandemic times.
	Do you think they're up to the task of now changing their whole culture and thinking of themselves more like special forces that can be deployed wherever they're needed?
	I have no doubt that they're up to the task.
	No doubt that they're up to the task.
	By the way, notice some of the goals that they're saying.
	Equity in health care.
	Does that sound like something that has to do with the CDC?
	Equity?
	Equity, as we learned from Kamala Harris, is the basically stupid idea that everybody in the United States is equally likely to accomplish or be subjected to anything in a normal situation, and any imbalance in result is due to some sort of evil in the system.
	Did that sound something like that the CDC should be promoting?
	But apparently that is what they are promoting.
	These are the changes they want.
	The changes that they want are more power.
	That's what they're looking for.
	They want to establish an Office of Intergovernmental Affairs to smooth partnerships with other agencies and a higher level office on health equity.
	She says that she wants to be able to move with more alacrity to get out actionable data.
	And by actionable data, that presumably means telling people what to do.
	Because again, the notion that the CDC was not active enough during this pandemic is pretty insane.
	Like in the very early days, you might say that was true for like the first month.
	But for the next two years, all the CDC was giving you bad blanket advice that was scientifically erroneous.
	Lead by people like Anthony Fauci.
	And by the way, I just love that the people, it's like the Federal Reserve.
	The people who botch the response are the same people who are charged with fixing it.
	So if the Federal Reserve, and it blows out inflation to 40-year highs, and it's like, well, maybe Jerome Powell will fix it.
	I mean, isn't he the one who blew it in the first place?
	So here you have Anthony Fauci being like, you know who can fix this?
	I can.
	And Rochelle Walensky can.
	We're the people to fix it.
	You're the problem.
	I think they should be commended in the fact, particularly Dr. Walensky, realizing and recognizing the shortcomings that have been there for quite a long time, long anti-dating Dr. Walensky's tenure.
	And I think it was the stress and the challenge of a historic pandemic that brought some of those deficiencies into sharp relief.
	So I believe we should commend them for realizing that, particularly Dr. Walensky.
	I mean, we should commend them, guys.
	I mean, don't you feel like commending the CDC for all the amazing work that it has done so far?
	And don't you think that Anthony Fauci should be the one who's actually giving the commendation?
	He should be the one pinning the medals.
	That's how good he is at this.
	Again, all the institutions in American life, I keep repeating it over, they seem to be falling apart because the people in charge of these institutions have motives that are at odds with the motivations of the American people.
	That's not just true inside of actual governmental institutions.
	It's true in terms of the institutions that we should have the most trust in in America.
	Namely, like the scientific institutions.
	The institution of science has brought about more progress and prosperity than any institution over the course of the last century.
	And yet they are continuously undermining themselves with questions of motive and injecting politics and ideology into what should be a hypothesis result ordering.
	Science used to be about, here's my hypothesis, and then we get the data, and then we see what the result is.
	And now it's about, I'm not even allowed to posit a hypothesis that contradicts anything that the woke ideology says.
	So you've got the CDC and Fauci saying, they're going to fix everything.
	Well, I can tell you how they should fix everything.
	They should fire everyone and hire a new, which is why they should be using, theoretically, ZipRecruiter.com.
	You need a ZipRecruiter to find the best candidates for the jobs at your company.
	So for example, Mathis, he started off as like an intern here.
	And now Mathis runs production because Mathis is an excellent employee.
	He makes all the trains run on time.
	It's a pretty complicated show.
	Well, people like Mathis, you're only going to find those people through ZipRecruiter.
	This is why you should try ZipRecruiter.com slash Daily Wire.
	ZipRecruiter uses its powerful technology to find and match the right candidates up with your job.
	You can easily review these recommended candidates and invite your top choices to apply.
	Additionally, ZipRecruiter has a complete suite of tools that make it easy to filter, review, and rate your candidates.
	Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the very first day.
	That's why ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2 satisfaction ratings as of January 1st, 2022.
	So, if you want to upgrade your company better than the CDC has done at this point, you need to head on over to ZipRecruiter.com.
	Here comes the URL.
	Get ready.
	ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire.
	That's where you can try it for free and find excellent employees like Mathis.
	Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E.
	ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
	Okay, folks.
	Well, in case you missed it, last night, I did my book club.
	Ben Shapiro's book club.
	It's named after me.
	You are in luck.
	You can now watch it on DailyWirePlus.com.
	This month, we discussed one of my favorite books, East of Eden, by the great John Steinbeck.
	The book is just phenomenal.
	It's an exploration of what America means and biblical stories of Cain and Abel and Adam and Eve.
	Next month, we will be discussing All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren.
	Maybe the best political novel ever written.
	We're doing that September 22nd, so be sure to pick up your copy today.
	You have to be an All Access member to join in on the fun and read along with me.
	So, head on over to dailywireplus.com, become a member today, watch the latest episode of my book club, be sure to join us live for the next one.
	Again, all the institutions in our society are falling apart because they've been injected with ideology.
	And when you inject institutions that are supposed to be nonpartisan with ideology, when you take principles like electoral integrity and you inject them with partisan ideology, what you end up doing is breaking them down.
	And this is particularly true in the field of science.
	Science was supposed to be the most impervious to this kind of stuff.
	And instead, it seems that science is now the bleeding edge of institutional breakdown.
	It doesn't help when you have articles like this one from Science Magazine.
	You ready?
	This is in Science Magazine.
	It's in the name, science.
	Quote, how astrophysics helped me embrace my non-binary gender identity in all its complexity.
	Astrophysics helped you embrace your non-binary gender identity.
	This is so science-y, man.
	The science is just pouring out my ears.
	I'm reading this right here.
	Growing up, I asked a lot of questions.
	Many of them foretold my future in astronomy.
	Why is the sun yellow?
	Why do constellations look like that?
	Why does Jupiter have a spot?
	My parents answered what they could and bought me books to answer the rest.
	My most frequent question, starting when I was about five years old, was, why am I a girl?
	And for that, my parents had no answer.
	In fact, in the 1990s, in the foothills of the Appalachians, no one did.
	It was my first encounter with a question that has no simple answer.
	Actually, it turns out that, um, it has the simplest answer ever.
	Ever.
	So I don't know if her parents were just idiots or what.
	But, like, if my daughter asked me why I'm a girl... Okay, let's go through this.
	You have no Y chromosomes, you pee sitting down.
	Like, why don't we start with those?
	Like, this is not difficult at all.
	And you were supposed to pretend it's difficult on the basis of... They can't cite biology.
	And I love this.
	It's a science magazine.
	They're not like, well, how biology helped me embrace my non-binary gender identity.
	They can't say that because biology would not help you embrace your non-binary gender identity.
	So you have to go to astrophysics.
	You have to go to astrophysics.
	You have to learn about quantum mechanics in order to get to the idea that you are both, quote, I found the label non-binary through friends on Twitter.
	With its fluidity and disavowal of the traditional two-gender system, non-binary felt right.
	It felt like home.
	That's what science is.
	Science is a bunch of feelings, didn't you know?
	That's how Einstein came out with his theories.
	He didn't actually work through the data.
	He didn't work the math.
	He sat there, and then he felt things.
	That's how we do science.
	It felt like I had spent my whole life trying to solve a chaotic system only to realize there wasn't one answer but many.
	It was then I realized I am a photon, possessing qualities inherent to either side of the binary, but ultimately belonging to neither.
	Oh, you're a photon, are you?
	Um, I noticed more like you're a biological mammal.
	And that you're not a photon.
	That's the thing I noticed.
	Because science.
	Trust the scientific institutions.
	Except that the scientific institutions have been completely broken.
	As Julia Mason and Lior Sapir write in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, the American Academy of Pediatrics is now pushing dubious transgender science.
	Quote, a spate of headlines this month declared America's surge in transgender identification was not being caused by social contagion.
	These articles were prompted by a new study by Jack Turbin and colleagues in Pediatrics, the flagship journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
	Turbin, by the way, is a propagandist extraordinaire.
	He's a radical trans propagandist.
	Everything he puts out is basically garbage, like garbage data in, garbage data out.
	He is horrible.
	The study claimed that social influence isn't the reason that as many as 9% of America's youth now call themselves trans.
	Thus, Dr. Truman argues, efforts in conservative states to regulate on-demand puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery must be resisted.
	Dr. Turbin's study is deeply flawed and likely couldn't have survived a reasonable peer-review process.
	The swift response from the scientific community made both points clear.
	Even those who support hormones in surgery for gender dysphoric youth noted that Dr. Turbin's shoddy science undermined their cause.
	Nevertheless, the media have promoted his work as a refutation of the claim that the wildfire spread of trans identity is an example of social contagion.
	The Turbin study rejects the social contagion theory on the grounds that more biological boys than girls identified as trans in 2017 and 2019, according to data collected from 19 states by the CDC.
	But the researchers who helped design the CDC questionnaire explicitly warned that youths who identify as trans may list their sex as their gender identity, making it impossible to discern who is a male to female or female to male.
	In this latest study, he cites three sources suggesting that respondents interpret sex as sex assigned at birth, even though none of the studies says anything of the sort.
	But the AAP keeps giving Dr. Turbin a platform.
	Over and over and over.
	The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't care about kids, they care about the ideology.
	That's all they give a crap about.
	Pediatrics published his highly flawed 2020 study alleging puberty blockers reduce suicide in teens.
	The journal even chose that article as its best of 2020, despite receiving rebuttals that pointed out that the rate of attempted suicide was twice as high among the puberty block group.
	And that Dr. Turbin had not controlled for the possibility that better mental health outcomes might be the result of factors other than hormonal intervention.
	The AAP keeps ignoring the evidence that has led Sweden, Finland, and most recently the UK to place severe restrictions on medical transition for minors.
	The AAP is a disaster area.
	But trust the science, guys.
	And not only should you trust the science, by the way, the DOJ will now try to prosecute you if you doubt the science.
	So massive controversy has now broken out over people committing the grave sin of showing clips of members of the Boston Children's Hospital trans team talking about transing the children.
	If you show the clips, this makes you a stochastic terrorist.
	I can see why they're upset about people showing the clips.
	The clips are super disturbing and make you look at the BCH and think, why are you committing active acts of child abuse and trauma against children?
	And for example, here is a BCH doctor, Boston Children's Hospital, bragging about mastectomies, double mastectomies for 15 year old girls.
	The eligibility for getting gender-affirming surgeries at Boston Children's Hospital is basically the same as it would be for most other hospitals or surgeons in the United States.
	And that's the case because we all follow the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, standards of care.
	For top surgery, you are Requested, but not required, to have been on gender-affirming hormones for at least a year.
	If you're a trans woman, it's really encouraged that you be on estrogen for at least a year because you want to maximize your natural breast growth.
	Many surgical centers require you to be 18.
	At Boston Children's Hospital for top surgeries, we'll see people as young as age 15 if they've been affirmed in their gender for a long period of time and don't really have any other life complications that make surgery inappropriate.
	And I love the happy-dappy music underneath.
	WPATH, by the way, is a propaganda organization on behalf of mutilation of children.
	That is what they are.
	Meanwhile, the Boston Children's Hospital is promoting a program called HOTT, H-O-T-T, in which adults teach minors how to tuck their penis with medical tape so it looks like a vagina.
	Really important stuff.
	Safer tucking.
	Health outreach to teens.
	It's a welcoming, non-judgmental, confidential program designed specifically to meet the health and wellness needs of LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign young adults aged 13 to 24.
	And one of those services is teaching them how to tuck And tape your genitals up underneath you if you are a boy to look more like a girl.
	So, people have pointed this out.
	And then it turns out people get agitated and they call up BCH and they're like, what the hell?
	So, you now have the DOJ stepping in.
	That's right.
	Statement from the Department of Justice regarding alleged threats made to Boston Children's Hospital.
	By the way, have they been doing anything about the mass fire bombings of pregnancy clinics?
	Pro-life clinics?
	Have they done anything?
	Or churches?
	No, not a thing.
	But, today's news about the alleged threats directed at BCH transgender health program is disturbing to say the least.
	Children deserve an opportunity to thrive and grow as their own authentic selves.
	The most authentic kind of child is the one where you slice off their breasts at 15.
	When I think authenticity, I think, take a boy, tape his penis up underneath his body and push his testicles up into his undercarriage.
	That's the most authentic type of child there is.
	Like, slow clap for these morons.
	I want to make clear that the DOJ will ensure equal protection of transgender people under the law.
	I've made, as Attorney General Merrick Garland recently said, at the Justice Department we view confronting hate crimes as both our legal and our moral obligation.
	I have made confronting hate crimes a priority of my administration, establishing a unit dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of civil rights violations.
	So the DOJ is now stepping in, just like they stepped in to fight parents who are defending their kids, high schoolers.
	Now the DOJ is stepping in with all of its institutional integrity to push this sort of stuff.
	Just amazing, amazing stuff from the people you ought to trust the most, right?
	Science.
	So many, so many institutions that we ought to trust.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
	We have to get into Brian Stelter getting fired from CNN.
	Does this mean that CNN is going to reorient Plus?
	There's a viral clip from the Disney Plus show She-Hulk, which sounded terrible from the beginning.
	The clip is even worse.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	If you're not a member, click the link in the description and join us.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Production Manager Pavel Wydowski, Associate Producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, Editor Adam Sajovic, Audio Mixer Mike Karamina, Hair and Makeup Artist in Wardrobe Fabiola Christina, Production Coordinator Jessica Kranz.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

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