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Jan. 17, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:50
The Battle Over Racial Reparations | Ep. 1648
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Democrats reinvigorate the debate over racial reparations for Black Americans.
Joe Biden talks up his radical agenda while being unable to sing Happy Birthday.
And we examine how to fight wokeism in the classroom.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, folks, yesterday was MLK Day, and that was an excuse for people on the left to start talking about racial reparations once again.
San Francisco, apparently, is now considering a regime of racial reparations.
San Francisco's reparations committee has now proposed a $5 million payment to each black longtime resident, as well as total debt forgiveness of, like, all debt.
Based on what?
I'm unaware that anybody who's alive today was a slave in the United States.
If so, then we should probably find out about that.
I'm unaware that the members of the San Francisco taxpaying community were slaveholders at any point in their lives or in the lives of their parents or in the lives of their grandparents.
However, that is not stopping San Francisco from talking up race reparations.
According to Fox News, San Francisco's reparations committee has proposed paying each black longtime resident $5 million, probably California was a free state when it was originally admitted to the union, and granting total debt forgiveness due to the decades of systemic repression by the local black community.
The San Francisco African-American Reparations Advisory Committee, which advises the city on developing a plan for reparations for black residents, released its draft report last month to address reparations, not for slavery, but to, quote, address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slaveries.
So presumably these would be policies of, for example, redlining, despite the fact that it has been illegal in the United States to redline since the late 1970s, despite the fact that the federal government and state government in California have subsidized Black homeownership for decades on end, despite the fact that public policy in the United States has been heavily tilted in favor of discriminatory actions on behalf of Black Americans since the affirmative action moves of the 1960s and 1970s.
Doesn't matter.
The draft says, quote, while neither San Francisco nor California formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes and judicial enforcement.
The draft plan includes a long list of financial recommendations for black San Francisco residents, including a one time lump sum payment of five million dollars to each eligible individual.
Now, you will notice, again, the vagary of the language here.
That, yeah, we didn't actually have slavery here, but there were tenets of segregation.
Now, again, there were no Jim Crow laws in California, as far as I'm aware.
That was reserved exclusively for the Southern United States.
There may have been informal regimes of racism in California.
There certainly were, no question.
That does not mean that that was legal action by the government of California in order to uphold that.
So you actually have to look at each specific law and each individual person who is impacted by that specific law.
And that's on the moral side, right?
When you're talking about reparations, you have to discuss who sinned and who was sinned against.
You actually have to show who was sinned against by what policy promulgated by whom, if you actually wish to pay reparations.
If you're seriously talking about repairing a damage that was done, you have to ask who did the damage and to whom.
And then you have to ask a secondary question, which we'll get to in just a moment, which is, is this designed to work?
What ill is this designed to remedy?
Specifically when we are talking right now about people, predominantly in San Francisco, who were born post the civil rights era.
You're talking in San Francisco, people who are born in the year 2000, right?
Those people are 23 years old right now.
In the year 2000, was vast racial discrimination the way in San Francisco?
Is that a serious problem in public policy in San Francisco in say the year 2000 or say the year 1990?
How long is this going to go on?
A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population for decades of harms they've experienced and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that black San Franciscans have endured collectively as a result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by city policy according to the draft statement.
So now they're supposed to do reparations for unintended harms.
So public policy that accidentally harmed black folks, that is now going to be redressed by a giant bag of cash, presumably according to the San Francisco committee.
Now, that's going to be kind of a problem because as it turns out, virtually every democratic policy in a major American city for the last 60 years has harmed black Americans disproportionately.
I presume accidentally.
Do we now pay reparations for all of that bad policy?
Are we going to pay reparations for all the bad policing policy that has disproportionately harmed black Americans in major American cities over the course of the last four or five years?
How is that going to work?
To be eligible for the program, the applicant has to be 18 years old and has to have identified as black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years.
They must also prove at least two of eight additional criteria choosing from a list that includes born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and has proof of residency in San Francisco for at least 13 years and or personally or the direct descendants of someone incarcerated by the failed war on drugs.
So now we are going to pay reparations to you if your parent went to jail for drug dealing.
Because every aspect of America, according to the woke left, has been impacted by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and that is up to and including your criminal violations.
So if you were selling cocaine to a minor, and then you went to jail, and you're the child of that person, now you deserve reparations because of the failed war on drugs.
The plan also calls on the city to supplement lower-income recipients' income to reflect the area median income of about $97,000 annually for at least 250 years.
annually for at least 250 years.
250 years.
Okay.
Racial disparities across all metrics have led to a significant racial wealth gap in the city of San Francisco.
It argued by elevating income to match AMI, black people can better afford housing and achieve a better quality of life.
The plan also seeks to establish a comprehensive debt forgiveness program that clears each eligible person's student and housing loans, credit card debt, etc.
We'll get to more on all this in just one second.
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So now, if you want to go to college, you got your stuff together, you did well in high school, you want to go to college, all your student loan debt is going to be relieved.
They also want you to have your credit card debt relieved.
So if you've been spending exorbitant amounts of cash on random nonsense, that should be relieved also because of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the year 2023.
Again, calendars exist, folks.
We are not living in the year 1964.
We are living in the year 2023.
I had my 39th birthday on Sunday.
I was born in 1984, 20 years after the Civil Rights Act.
Two decades, like a full generation.
And so is pretty much everybody that we are talking about in San Francisco right now.
Black households are more likely to hold costly or riskier debt and are more likely to have outstanding student loan debt, the draft explains.
When this is combined with lower household incomes, it creates an inescapable cycle of debt.
Eliminating this debt gives black households an opportunity to build wealth.
So again, the idea is that if you have a bad credit history, we have to wipe away your credit card debt.
And then we have to give you a low interest loan.
And this is what's going to allow you to rise out of poverty.
The problem is all of these loans have largely been available to people who have established decent credit over the course of their lifetimes.
Why don't the rules apply to people who were born in San Francisco and are black and were born in the same year I was born in 1984 or well after that because apparently you have to be born like as long as you are born according to their recommendations between 1940 and 1996.
1996 okay which would make you again by my calculation 27 years old.
This means that you are now eligible for the kind of thing they're recommending.
Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin told the San Francisco Chronicle he hopes the plan is approved, quote, there are so many efforts that result in incredible reports that just end up gathering dust on a shelf.
We cannot let this be one of them.
Amazing stuff there from the San Francisco Reparations Committee.
Now, is this actually going to be effectuated?
Of course, this is not actually going to happen because the immediate result of this would be to radically increase the cost on San Francisco city government.
It would radically increase the taxes.
Businesses would flee.
San Francisco would turn into a ghost town.
You want to turn cities into Detroit?
Detroit was one of the most successful cities in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
And then racial conflict, increasing taxes, massive regulation drove a lot of people who had the means out of the city.
And you ended up with a de facto arena of racial separatism.
A largely black city where virtually everybody who is white moved out of the interior of the city, despite the fact that it had been one of the more integrated cities in the American North and one of the most successful industrialized cities in the American North, particularly for American blacks.
All of these policies have precisely the opposite of the consequences that they seek to achieve.
But we are having these conversations now because we have to achieve a quote unquote more equitable world, right?
This is the buzzword of the Biden administration.
And this has been the buzzword of Democrats going all the way back to Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s.
And it has been a complete fail.
So here yesterday was the incompetent and horrifically untalented vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, who lives in a country so racist that she's vice president of the United States specifically because she was picked by affirmative action lottery by Joe Biden to be the vice president of the United States. If she were a white lady, she would not be vice president of the United States. She would just be a less talented Amy Klobuchar. So here is Kamala Harris talking up a more equitable world.
Hey, everyone. Today, we honor the legacy of Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King was a prophet.
He saw the future as it could be.
A future of equity, justice, and opportunity for all.
Freedom is never really won.
You earn it and you win it in every generation.
So let us all commit to continue the fight for justice for our generation and for generations to come.
And what is she talking about?
She, of course, is talking about vast bevies of government spending.
Sunny Hostin on The View made it clear.
She said that on Martin Luther King Day, we should remember that the country was built on the backs of black people for free.
So we need to talk about racial reparations.
Now, if we're going to talk about the history of discrimination and people who have been victimized in the American project, that list is very, very long.
And of course, Black Americans historically are at the top of the list.
Also included in the list would be Asian Americans who were exploited to build the railroad, for example, or Latino Americans who were used for extraordinarily cheap labor in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.
There have been a lot of people who've been victimized in the history of the United States, but the amazing thing about the United States is that everybody has the chance to rise in the modern era.
This is the difference.
The difference between the United States and every place else is not the evils that existed in the United States that have existed every place else.
The difference between the United States and every place else is the good that exists in the United States that does not exist nearly any place else.
In any case, here is Sonny Hostin making the claim that we need racial reparations for people who are not slaves from people who are never slaveholders.
He was deeply invested in economic equality, and he was deeply invested in making sure that black people got reparations and that there was wealth distribution, redistribution.
And that's the one area, when we talk about diversity and we talk about inclusion and we talk about equity, people are real comfortable lately with diversity, they're real comfortable with inclusion.
But when you ask them about giving us some reparations because this country was built on the backs of black people for free, no one wants to talk about that.
And that was really a big part of his dream and his legacy.
And the liberal white ladies who watch the view are all clapping in the background because it makes them feel good to talk about this sort of stuff, never paying attention to the fact that we actually have tried massive wealth redistribution in this country.
And in terms of healing the racial wealth gap, it has been utterly insufficient.
It has not worked.
So, LBJ, back in 1965, gave a very famous speech at Howard University.
It was a commencement address at Howard University, in which he explained that negative freedom was not enough.
That basically getting rid of segregation, making it illegal, was not enough.
That creating an even playing field for people was not enough, because after all, the legacy of racial oppression meant that the government now had to play favorites and actually reverse discriminate in order to redress the problems of history.
Now, you could make that case, certainly, in 1965.
There's a case to be made because the people who are the direct Victims of Jim Crow were alive, well, and Jim Crow was in operation.
So sure, you can make that case in 1965.
Very difficult to make the case in 2023.
And all of that puts aside, forget the moral case for a second, the utter inefficacy and failure of the regime, the regimen of racial reparations that were put into place by the war on poverty under LBJ.
So here's what LBJ said at the time.
He said, it's not enough to just open the gates of opportunity.
All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
OK, I mean, again, that's a fair enough point, but after 60 years of extraordinary efforts by the federal and state governments of the United States to redress poverty, Largely directed toward minority communities, as LBJ openly discussed.
I mean, this was a commencement speech at Howard University.
Has it been a failure or has it been a success?
The answer is it has been a gigantic failure.
Now, the way that you can tell it's been a gigantic failure is because one thing that actually has happened is that the income gap in the United States, despite all of the talk about how income inequality is still the dominant factor in American life, that actually is not true.
Income inequality has actually become significantly better in the United States.
Why?
Because of the reparations, meaning all of the poverty reparations, all of the sort of redistributionism has actually alleviated Much of the income gap in the United States.
Whenever you see these gigantic stories about how the income inequality persists and the gap between the top and bottom households is 17 to 1, that's not actually true.
If you include taxes from the top and you include subsidies to the bottom in the form of welfare, in the form of food stamps, in the form of housing subsidies and all the rest, the 2017 income gap actually shrinks from 17 to 1 to about 4 to 1.
The government likes to play this little game where they point out that the income gap in terms of private income has not actually alleviated between black and white, and that's true.
What has happened is that all of the racial redistribution that has been happening has alleviated the income gap post-taxes and post-benefits.
But the problem is that doesn't actually heal the underlying problem.
Because the underlying problem that everybody wants to get to is the income gap without all of that, without the taxes and without the government subsidization.
Why hasn't that been healed?
And the answer there is that when you incentivize people to make bad decisions, they continue to make bad decisions.
The income that is gained through welfare, social safety net benefits, all of the stuff that's subsidized by the federal and state governments, that does not actually translate into healing the wealth gap, because all wealth is, is accrual of income over time.
Wealth happens when you save your income and when you invest your income and when you turn it into a home, for example.
And then when you take the income from your job, you pay your mortgage, you pay off your home, and then you take the extra income, you buy a second home and you rent it out.
This is how you actually achieve wealth in the United States.
Well, we've done an extraordinary amount to alleviate poverty directed at alleviating racial historical gaps.
And what we have done is we have alleviated some of the income gap, but we've done very little to alleviate the wealth gap.
The wealth gap is essentially the same as it was in 1960 before any of this starts.
The Washington Post acknowledges as much.
If you actually look at the racial wealth gap in the United States in 1960, black households and white households, it was much smaller, the wealth gap, in 1960 than it is today.
As of about 2020, White households were worth $149,000 on average in 2016.
Black households were worth $13,000 in 2016.
on average in 2016, black households were worth $13,000 in 2016.
That is a far larger gap than existed at the beginning of the so-called war on poverty.
Because it turns out that when you expend extraordinary amounts of federal money, and you do so not only in inefficient ways, but without really tackling the underlying crippling cultural problems that lead to intergenerational poverty, you don't end up alleviating anything.
You can throw $5 million at every black citizen of San Francisco, and it is not going to fix the racial wealth gap in San Francisco after about 10 years.
The reason being that people make different decisions with their money.
People make different life decisions.
And the notion that this is just a problem of Marxist redistributionism is a lie.
It's not true.
There's a good piece by Louis Andrews from 2020 over at the American Conservative talking about the failure of the sort of reparations ideal here.
He says one critical fact that is always ignored whenever the issues of reparations resurfaces, namely that any financially expressible amends the country might owe its black citizens was made long ago.
In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in America.
By 2015, it had cost the nation more than $22 trillion, $22 trillion or three times what we previously spent on all shooting wars.
In the years since President Johnson's address in 1965 at Howard University, the poverty rate for African Americans has fallen a few points in good times, risen a few points in bad, on average remained essentially unchanged.
Today, 26% of blacks aged 25 and older have a bachelor's degree, compared with the national average of 36%.
The failure of Johnson's attempt to make up for the unfair historical treatment of American blacks was not an indicator of whether sufficient money had been raised for that purpose, only of how effectively it was spent.
The villains of that time were not the taxpayers of every color who allowed themselves, as well as their children and grandchildren, to be put on the hook for reparations.
The blame properly falls on the four groups of intermediaries most involved in shaping the war on poverty.
The first of those groups was the politicians, policymakers, and bureaucrats who channeled those anti-poverty funds into a complex administrative overlay involving 100 programs which ended up benefiting themselves far more than poor black Americans.
Feeding the horses to feed the sparrows, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sarcastically described it at the time.
The second group of self-serving intermediaries consisted of all the university social scientists who prospered during the 60s and 70s by producing thick reports and demonstration projects to confirm whatever their government sponsors wanted to hear.
As John F. Kogan documents in his 2017 History of Federal Entitlement Programs, the high cost of good intentions.
All the seemingly scientific studies at that time, which purported to show how expanding welfare programs would make black Americans more independent, were consistently wrong.
There was, in fact, precious little evidence to support the contention that social welfare services would prevent welfare dependency or help existing recipients achieve self-sufficiency.
The third group to siphon off America's slavery reparations were the opportunistic attorneys unintentionally empowered by the centerpiece of President Johnson's War on Poverty, the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, written to financially incentivize urban and rural minorities to form community action groups, which in turn could help local welfare recipients become social sufficient, self-sufficient, and while was soon exploited by legal services lawyers and related professionals to do the very opposite, sue the government for even more dependency creating benefits.
And this is why you saw a bunch of community activist organizations that were rent-seeking from local, state, and federal governments.
All of this created the new non-profits at the mercy of a fourth self-serving intermediary, Local Public Employee Unions, which especially in blue states could influence how much the legislature annually donated to various charities.
The result was that policies like school choice, extremely popular with black families, were rarely endorsed by any state-funded or union-subsidized group supposedly set up to look out for blacks.
At the same time, civil rights groups were expected to back union efforts to keep Washington's war on poverty money flowing through local welfare bureaucracies regardless of any negative effects.
All of this happens to be the case.
But we're supposed to pretend that none of it is the case, and that if we just shout about the injustices of life and then throw a firehose of money at it, it is going to solve all of the problems.
And that, of course, is not even remotely true.
It also is a great evil to call on people who have not sinned to pay people who have not been sinned against by those people.
And it also involves violations of liberty.
In pursuit of redressing problems, and in pursuit of a utopia to be built thereupon, there are a lot of people who are willing to run directly over individual rights.
This includes, of course, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, White supremacy is not a crime.
It's an evil.
It is not a crime.
criminalizing quote conspiracy to commit white supremacy, which would include criticism of non-white people, which influences an individual to commit a hate crime.
Now, all of that may sound well and good.
It does run directly foul of the first amendment.
White supremacy is not a crime.
It's an evil.
It is not a crime.
There's a difference between an evil and a crime.
And if we are now in the business of eviscerating particular viewpoints by the federal government to the tune of criminalizing those viewpoints, that is a far remove from the founding promise of the country and carries its own dangers.
Because the people who are in the political ascendancy today may not be in the political ascendancy tomorrow.
They're also victims to this whole new attempt at racial reparations.
Those victims obviously have been largely centralized at this point in the Asian community when it comes to colleges, which is why you've seen active discrimination against Asian Americans in our colleges and universities.
Very interesting story from the Wall Street Journal about all of that today.
Quote, Before the Supreme Court renders its decision on Harvard's and the University of North Carolina's use of race preferences in admissions, the justices might take a glance across the Potomac.
Northern Virginia Today offers a snapshot of how affirmative action intended as a benevolent effort to prevent discrimination has hardened into an ugly war on achievement.
The latest fuss was kicked off before Christmas when Asra Nomani, an India-born mom and reporter, wrote a piece for the Manhattan Institute City Journal detailing how her son's Virginia high school never informed him he'd actually been recognized by the National Merit Scholarship Program.
Other students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as TJ and regularly ranked America's number one high school, said they had the same experience.
So Virginia Attorney General Jason Mayares launched a civil rights investigation on January 4th.
Days later, principals at two more Fairfax County high schools, Westfield and Langley, admitted they too had failed to inform student award winners.
Mayares then expanded his investigation to all Fairfax County.
No sooner had he done so than neighboring Loudoun County reported that three of its high schools had delayed at notifying its students.
Officials insisted it wasn't intentional.
On Friday, four more Fairfax High Schools fessed up, followed by another on Monday.
Telling kids that they actually were finalists or semi-finalists, that stuff goes on your college resume.
Given that the program leaves notifications to the individual schools, it's possible this was bureaucratic failure, but the context offers a less generous reading.
Public education in Fairfax County has become the front line for an equity agenda that has hardened into a war on achievers who are disproportionately Asian-American, says a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
As a federal judge pointed out in 2022 in a case contesting TJ's new admissions policy, the Fairfax County School Board eliminated the merit-based entrance exam to make room for African-American and Hispanic students by reducing the number of Asian-Americans.
In that sense, it quote-unquote worked.
The class admitted before the change was 73% Asian, 3% Hispanic, 1% African-American.
After the change, the figures went to 54% Asian, 11% Hispanic, 7% Black.
The share of white students grew, actually, from 17% to 22%.
What makes Asian-American achievement so resented by our equity warriors is that it exposes as false the narrative about an irredeemably racist America where minorities cannot succeed.
This progressive disdain for Asian-Americans is amplified by a resentment of moms and dads who believe they should have a say in their kids' education.
This happens to be exactly correct as William McGurn writes over at the Wall Street Journal.
And this is extending into the way that our kids are taught.
The attempt to use the educational system to cram down this perverse view of American life in which America is deeply evil, And the only way to fix that evil is by racial discrimination.
It has entered our classrooms.
It is being crammed down on students.
You have to target the youngest members of the American community and then indoctrinate them in the idea of intergenerational racial guilt and the necessity of violation of anti-discrimination law.
This is why, for example, the National Education Association Teachers Union has now created a race-based trauma learning course.
According to Fox News, the NEA, which is a major labor union in the educational sphere, there are two big ones, the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, led by the ex-Gribble, Randy Weingarten, has announced a race-based trauma blended learning course.
The course will, quote, explore race-based trauma, its causes and effects, and offers research-based tools to address it, according to the NEA's Twitter.
Our students are shouldering the accumulation of inherited racial trauma, such as implicit bias or racism, and can affect young people's ability to learn, make responsible decisions, or maintain healthy relationships, says the NEA.
It is imperative to recognize the effects of racial trauma in order to restore equity and well-being.
Again, that word equity again.
You're not responsible for your own decisions.
It must be intergenerational racial trauma that has caused you to make a bad decision that wrecks your life today.
The NEA, of course, has a long history of involvement in racial and sexual issues, with the organization hosting an annual conference on racial and social justice.
Again, this is one of the two big teachers' unions in the United States.
The AFT is just as far to the left.
NEA experts are frequent speakers at South by Southwest, which includes seminars like, Why Porn Literacy Belongs in Sex Education Without Roe, Impact on Education and Workforce, and White Supremacy and Antisemitism on Campus.
You can see the impact of all of this in the classroom itself.
Libs of TikTok, which Khairachick runs that account, does an excellent job of exposing the woke indoctrination in our public schools.
Yesterday, she posted a video of one teacher bragging about fostering political unrest in her classroom.
Today I would like to talk about how I am the political unrest that Cedar City needs.
So besides the fact that I dyed my hair purple last night and I have two visible tattoos, I wrote my pronouns as she any up on the board.
I was teaching 10th grade and I told this to all my classes and it wasn't until the last period where someone was like, what's the second pronoun?
And so I explained, I was like, I do she any pronouns.
I do go by any pronouns, she, he, they, it, anything, but I am, Totally okay with you just referring to me as she.
But this is fostering, of course, the most important thing, political unrest in classrooms.
You have teachers across the nation who work for the NEA and the AFT who are teaching this crap to children and creating a whole new generation of intergenerational trauma while purporting to alleviate intergenerational trauma.
This is also how you end up with a Maryland classroom that looks like this.
There's a libs of TikTok tweet.
Sent to me by a parent.
A classroom in their kid's school in Maryland.
Homeschool your kids.
And what is there?
Well, blocking the window is a giant Black Lives Matter flag, as well as a Pride Progress flag hanging from the wall.
When it comes to your kid's education, so I saw a lot of responses from people on the right to this sort of stuff.
And the right seems to think, or at least many members of the right, seem to think that the best analogy is if you put a cross or the Ten Commandments in a classroom.
The idea being, well, you know, it's a value-neutral space.
All you members on the left, you should at least acknowledge that this is the equivalent of you pushing your brand of religion, and religion is banned in the classroom.
We're not allowed to pray in a classroom.
We're not allowed to have the Ten Commandments in a classroom.
And thus, you should acknowledge that your flags, your Black Lives Matter propaganda flag, and your Pride Progress propaganda flag, they don't belong in the classroom.
There's only one problem with this.
Someone is going to win when it comes to teaching values in the classroom, and someone is going to lose.
The notion of value neutrality in public schools is nonsense.
It has been nonsense for a very long time.
There is no value neutrality in America's public school classrooms.
There just isn't.
Would that it were so, but the NEA and the AFT make sure that that is not in fact the case.
Which means that if you wish to actually have your kids taught good values, you need to get active at the school board level.
The case that you should be making against the Black Lives Matter flag and the Pride Progress flag in the classroom is not that they are the equivalent of the Ten Commandments and the cross, because frankly, they are not.
They're not.
By the way, even if you put a cross in the classroom, that is different from the Ten Commandments.
The Ten Commandments is, in fact, interdenominational.
Jews, Muslims, and Christians all take very seriously the Ten Commandments.
They are the predicate for all moral systems of government in the West.
So this notion that the Ten Commandments is somehow an indoctrination into the religious precepts of Christianity or an attempt to force you to worship in the classroom is obviously a lie.
The moral distinction is the one that matters.
And people who are conservative should stop trying to aim for the value-neutral space when it comes to the classroom.
Instead, they should be, as parents, protecting the values that they wish to see their kids learn.
If value neutrality is the best that we can come to, if the left will agree to value neutrality, fine and good.
But guess what?
It ain't gonna happen.
The left purports that secular religious practice is superior.
That's why they are doing it.
They're not doing it because they believe that secularism is the way of the world and that religion is false or any of that.
What they believe is that they are doing an active good.
They're doing an active good by promulgating their point of view.
The right needs to start arguing that their point of view is good because the response to Black Lives Matter flags and Pride Progress flags in the classroom is not no flags in the classroom.
It is, in fact, the Ten Commandments.
No idolatry.
Idolatry is bad.
No tribal sectarianism.
It's bad.
No notion of sexual identity as the core of human living.
It's bad.
It's not something that should be taught to kids.
Parents had better get aggressive on this or they are going to lose.
Certainly the left has been aggressive on this.
And how aggressively does the left use our public schools?
So Lori Lightfoot, the awful mayor of Chicago, she apparently attempted to recruit Chicago public school students to help with her own re-election.
She offered them extra credit.
She was asked about this the other day.
Like, how is it that you are able to go into public schools and offer extra credit to students for working for your campaign?
It's just amazing, amazing stuff.
Here's Lori Lightfoot, the terrible mayor of Chicago.
Mayor Lightfoot, I gotta get you on one controversial thing before we let you go.
Your campaign, re-election campaign, is under investigation after being accused of trying to recruit Chicago public school students to help you get re-elected.
What's your response to this story out of NBC News?
Look, in our zeal to make sure that young people had an opportunity to participate, and they are flocking to our campaign, one of our staffers reached out through publicly available information to CPS teachers and our city colleges, and that was just simply a mistake.
Oh, oops.
It was just an oopsie.
It's not an oopsie.
In the NEA and the AFT, they work with politicians like Lori Lightfoot.
It is all part of a giant machine.
The NEA and the AFT get paid by politicians like Lori Lightfoot.
And they get funded by politicians like Lori Lightfoot.
And then they all use that power to indoctrinate your kids.
Which is why, as Lance Izumi writes over at the New York Post, the critical race theory debate is turning parents into unlikely activists.
Quote, a multidisciplinary education philosophy that places race at the center of American history and culture, CRT is akin to racial Marxism, with whites viewed as oppressors and non-whites framed as the oppressed.
In the Great Parent Revolt, we profile more than a dozen parents, students, and grassroots leaders who have courageously fought up and fought, stood up and fought CRT.
One unlikely hero is Gabs Clark, a widowed, low-income African-American mother of five children who had been living in a motel in Las Vegas.
Her high school-aged son, William, was in a local charter school which required a course called Sociology of Change.
According to Clark, the course included an assignment that asked students to list your identities, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your religion.
William, who is mixed race with blonde hair and blue eyes, refused to complete the assignment and was given a failing grade for the class, which kept him from graduating.
According to Clark, because of his fair complexion, the class viewed her son as a dirty, filthy oppressor.
Clark filed a federal lawsuit charging the school with violating William's First Amendment free speech rights, 14th Amendment equal protection rights, and federal anti-discrimination rights for compelling him to complete the race-based assignment.
The case has since been settled out of court.
And this sort of stuff is going to happen more and more commonly because parents are going to stand up because if they don't, they're going to lose their kids to this perverse worldview, which is, it's not only immoral, it's wildly ineffective at achieving even its stated goals.
Now, this is the sort of stuff that should theoretically make Democrats more unpopular.
Because Democrats were not, in fact, punished for their radicalism since 2020.
Since the Black Lives Matter riots of mid-2020.
They've not been punished for the sexual indoctrination of children.
They've not been punished for any of this, right?
They avoided the guillotine in 2020.
in 2020, and then they also avoided the guillotine in 2022.
So that means that Joe Biden is going strong on this.
He's moving harshly to his left, at least in terms of his rhetoric, on a wide variety of issues.
We will see how this pays off for him.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
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Well folks, Friday was the anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Daily Wire history.
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Alrighty.
Meanwhile, while the left revivifies its radical bona fides in the aftermath of the 2022 election, Joe Biden is no exception.
He was out there giving speeches yesterday on civil rights, and he talked about being woke.
He said, I'm not woke, I'm just honest.
Well, no, you are woke and by necessity dishonest.
This is him speaking apparently at the National Action Network, which is Al Sharpton's grift group.
to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since the establishment of Dr. King's holiday.
The idea, if we can hold a second here, the idea that we're supposed to remain silent on the abuses of the past as if they didn't occur.
That's not being woke, that's being honest.
That's talking about history.
Well folks, we have a lot of unfinished work to do though.
A lot of unfinished work.
Oh, well, it's always unfinished work.
It's not being woke.
It's being honest to suggest that we need some form of additional government interventionism, more government spending, more racial reparations.
I urge the Democrats to run on this in a time of economic turmoil.
We're about to see a recession break out in the United States, like a real recession break out in the United States.
Most economists are foreseeing that.
At this point, earnings are way, way, way down at a variety of companies.
So I urge President Biden to run on redistribution of income and massive welfare payment and transfer payments.
That'll be fascinating.
And to say that's being honest, not being woke.
But he wasn't stopping there.
For some odd reason, he decided to go sort of into his litany of giant government programs, which is a strange thing to do, but it didn't stop him.
So he gave his usual shtick about how he wants to ban AR-15s, and particularly how you don't need an AR-15 because he will just blow you up with an F-15, which is not, I think, the, like, if you're encouraging me to give up my gun to resist government tyranny, And your argument is I could just nuke your house.
You're not actively achieving what you seek to achieve with this particular argument.
I am going to get assault weapons banned.
I did it once.
I'm going to do it again.
There's no social redeeming value.
Deer aren't wearing Kevlar vests out there.
What the hell you need a assault?
No, I'm serious.
I mean, if you need to work about taking on the federal government, you need some F-15s.
You don't need it.
An RAR-15.
I'm serious.
Think about it.
Think about it.
Think about how you don't need it.
I could just use a Moab.
Mother of all Moabs.
Just drop it on your house and kill your children.
You don't need an AR-15 to defend against me.
I'm a nice old man who's threatening you with a nuclear arsenal.
Yes, this is the way.
By the way, Joe Biden, he could have tried to ban assault weapons.
I noticed that he had control of the Senate as well as the House about five minutes ago.
He did not achieve it.
So no, he's not going to ban assault weapons in the United States.
Not just that, Joe Biden also wants more IRS agents.
We need more IRS agents, guys.
I know that this is something that you're all enthusiastic about.
I don't know about you, I love the IRS.
The IRS is great.
And what we need is more IRS agents who are combing through your old Restaurant deductions and trying to figure out whether or not you cheated on your taxes to the tune of $12.99.
You really have to find out whether that burger was at a business lunch or whether you're just kind of jobbing the system.
Here is Joe Biden talking about how we need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to hire 87,000 new IRS members, many of whom will in fact be agents despite their lies.
You know, all these new IRS agents we have is because they fired a lot of them and a lot of retiring.
And guess what?
Who needs serious agents to know what they're doing and not doing?
The billionaires.
The multi-multi-millionaires.
Hmm.
Yeah.
He keeps saying they're just going to audit the very, very rich people.
That is not true.
One of the great lies that Democrats like to tell is that there are enough rich people in the United States to pay for all of the kind of programs that Joe Biden wants to pay for.
And the answer is no, there aren't.
There are not.
In order for you to achieve the kind of spending and the kind of utopian redistributionist schemes that Joe Biden wants, you have to have Scandinavian-style tax programs.
The only person in American politics who's actually honest about this is Bernie Sanders, which is why he's a fringe old kook from Vermont.
Because Bernie at least has the stones to say, well, if you actually want to pay for all of this, we're going to have to tax you, the person who makes $60,000 a year, at 70%.
And that's just the way it's going to go.
And you'll have one type of bread at the store.
I do need seven types of bread.
You don't need rye.
Rye is bad.
Who eats pumpernickel?
You need white bread.
Maybe a little sourdough.
Nope.
Nope.
We do not have money for sourdough.
So like, at least Bernie is honest.
But Democrats are, like Biden, are just dishonest.
We need IRS agents that they can audit the very rich people.
So the very rich people can pay for these programs.
It's a lie.
It's not going to be very rich people paying for the programs.
You will pay for the programs through higher inflation rates.
You'll pay for the programs through lower economic growth or through higher taxes.
That's just the way that this is going to go.
Joe Biden then claimed that Republicans are quote unquote fiscally demented.
I mean, if there's one person who should know dementia, it's Joe Biden.
So I suppose this makes some sense.
Here we go.
I reduced the deficit last year, $350 billion.
And this year, the federal deficit is down $1 trillion plus.
Hear me, that's a fact.
And there's going to be hundreds of billions reduced over the next decade.
But so what?
These guys are fiscally demented, I think.
They don't quite get it.
Just to make clear that I'm not just making fun of Joe Biden for being old, I'm also making fun of him for being demented.
words. I said one long, long word. It says, Ooh, every time I look at my, Ooh, it's an all the letters in my cheerios spell dementia is the thing.
Not kidding. Guys. Um, just just to make clear that I'm not just making fun of Joe Biden for being all them also making fun of him for being, um, demented here. Here's Joe Biden flubbing over and over yesterday.
Hello, hello, hello.
Hello, no, ho, okay.
Ho, ho, go, go.
Also, he forgot who he was singing happy birthday to yesterday also.
So it went amazing.
Things are going great, guys.
Well, look, my wife has a rule in our family.
When somebody's birthday, you sing happy birthday.
You ready?
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday, dear Calvin.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy Birthday dear, dear Kyle- Pat Herman.
It is, again, a bold plan.
The CDC has a world beating agenda.
It is amazing the attempt to transform this doddering old fool into one of the world's great presidents and people are actually attempting to do this.
They really are.
We'll see how that works out for them.
It is again a bold plan.
Speaking of bold plans, there was an amazing clip of Sam Harris making the rounds yesterday Sam has gone off the rails in the past several years.
He was basically driven over the edge by the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
And Sam Harris, who has been a famous advocate in favor of everything from lockdowns to mask mandates with regard to vaccines and masking regiments and all the rest.
Yesterday, he was trying to make the case that We wouldn't have any VAX skepticism if COVID had been killing more kids.
We wouldn't have had any VAX skepticism if... We wouldn't have MASK skepticism if it had been killing more kids or if the death rate were higher.
Oh, you mean if the conditions were different, we might have different viewpoints?
Why, why no?
You shock me, sir.
Here's Sam Harris, though.
Unwilling to walk back his own positions on, for example, should there be VAX mandates, based on the science.
Instead, creating Bizarre hypotheticals in which the vaccines were, in fact, doing the things they promised to do.
If kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from from COVID at a rate of whatever it was, you know, one percent, say, but it was pretty much all kids.
We we would have had a very different experience.
Let's say the vaccines really did block transmission, but then nothing else.
was, you know, all of the other mishigas about how, you know, untested they are and how dangerous they might be and the spike protein and blah, blah, blah.
The conspiracy thinking, the platforming of people who were obviously unwell and unbalanced professionally and mentally around vaccines and their skepticism, the patience for that would have been non-existent.
So, in other words, if, in fact, this disease had been something completely different and the vaccines had been something completely different, then we might have treated it differently.
Well, yes, that's sort of the point.
But the point now is that it's clear that the vaccines did not do what they had promised to do, namely stop or slow transmission in any serious way.
It is now clear, and it was very clear at the very beginning, that this thing was not killing kids, that it was predominantly killing the very elderly, which meant that you could shield and protect those people while allowing everybody else to go about their lives, which was actually the preferred policy of this show and the preferred policy throughout the pandemic of people like Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford University.
In fact, there's so many people who have to uphold the idea that they were right all along.
And if only you squint bizarrely through sort of a cracked glass, then you come up with the proper solution, which is that they were right.
Guys, maybe it is that what you promised just did not materialize because the facts were not on your side.
And so your hypotheticals are of no consequence whatsoever.
Speaking of which, by the way, brand new study out from the Wall Street Journal.
And you know what it says?
It says, I know we weren't allowed to say this during the pandemic.
If you're less fat, you died less often of COVID.
I know.
This is shocking.
It is a shocking circumstance.
Quote, people who exercise regularly had lower rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 in a study published recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Regular exercise improves overall health, and healthier people generally have fewer serious complications with COVID-19.
Earlier research has shown an association between exercise and better COVID-19 outcomes.
This latest study goes a step further and suggests that even people whose age and or health conditions make them higher risk have better outcomes if they are regular exercisers.
You don't say.
You mean healthier people died less often?
That is crazy talk.
By the way, everyone knew this.
My parents were both 64 when this thing broke out.
And my dad, he felt like he wanted to drop some pounds specifically so he would not be in a higher risk group in terms of his weight.
So he started exercising a lot more regularly.
This was a smart move by my father.
A lot of other people should have done this.
Joe Rogan was encouraging this and then people laughed at him.
How dare you say that exercise is a cure for disease?
Joe never said that exercise is a cure for disease.
He said that exercise is a great way of preventing you from getting a serious version of the disease because your body is less vulnerable.
But this was considered verboten, right?
We had to shut down all the gyms because if you go to the gym, you might get infected with COVID as opposed to if you go to the gym, you might exercise and then be less vulnerable to COVID because you're not a fatso.
By the way, it is really incredible how much of the left-wing viewpoint with regard to health policy is predicated on ignoring the fact that America is an enormously fat country.
So much of our healthcare policy is predicated on just pretending that America is not fat and that we don't have horrible eating habits.
We are fat, we have horrible eating habits here in the United States.
So for example, the entire push for nationalized healthcare along the lines of Finland or Sweden or Norway, you want to know one reason why they have better health outcomes over there?
It's because they aren't as fat as we are.
40% of America is at least in the seriously overweight to obese category.
That is why people are dying at outsized rates in the United States.
If you go into young, healthy communities, so you're comparing apples to apples with other countries that have better health outcomes, what you'll find is that America actually has excellent health outcomes.
In other words, Swedes in the United States are very healthy.
In fact, they probably have just as high lifetime expectations, maybe higher than they would in Sweden.
You cannot compare populations without recognizing that the populations may be different in their health habits, may be different in their genetics.
It is a simple fact that there are certain diseases that attack certain populations at a differential rate.
So not comparing apples to apples is a huge mistake with all of this.
But again, so much of our public policy is rooted in the idea that if you notice differences between people, this is in and of itself racist, inequitable, problematic.
And that makes for a horrible public policy, whether you're talking about health, whether you're talking about slavery reparations, whether you're talking about any of this stuff.
The differences in people's habits, the differences in what people do, the differences in the choices people make.
Those are the predominant factors in how their life goes.
And attempting to cure all of that with broad public policy mandates, redistributionist measures is bound to fail.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We are going to get to disaster breaking out in terms of the Chinese economy.
Their population is actively declining at this point.
Is that the future of the United States as well?
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