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Jan. 18, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:26
Greta Thunberg Has Been Detained | Ep. 1649
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Time Text
The World Economic Forum at Davos is underway, and the rulers of the universe are hard at work.
The Department of Justice declines to monitor the Biden team's search for classified documents, and Greta Thunberg is detained by the police.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Benchmere O show.
Well, some protesters are true heroes.
Some protesters are the heroes of our age.
And then there's Greta Thunberg, who is one of the great heroes in human history.
Greta Thunberg, yesterday, was arrested in Germany in what was a harrowing experience with the German authorities.
According to Sky News, the Swedish environmental activist, Twenty, has been taking part in protests against the demolition of the village of Lutserath, which is due to be cleared to make way for the expansion of a nearby coal mine.
Apparently, she was arrested because she decided to obstruct this thing.
It is the second time this week that the Swedish activist has been moved on by the police in the village.
The local Aken police force said that Thunberg was part of a group of protesters who stormed toward the edge of the opencast mine, described by officers as quote, steep and extremely dangerous.
The force said the activist was not arrested, but was instead carried along with other protesters for identification.
She was released after a brief detention, according to the police.
And we have some harrowing video of what it looks like when an extraordinarily privileged Now woman, she used to be a small girl who they trotted out as the face of global warming so that no one could criticize her.
Now she is a young woman so we can make fun of her as much as we like.
This is the face of a very privileged white lady who is being quote-unquote arrested at a coal mine in Germany.
And apparently this is what it looks like when you get arrested at a coal mine in Germany while being an extraordinarily privileged environmental activist.
She's laughing with the cops.
There are two cops in full uniform who are standing next to her.
She's smiling, enjoying herself, laughing.
The police are holding her arms while posing for the cameras.
And there she is, looking somewhat happy about the situation.
And this is what it looks like.
This is a brutal arrest.
There it is.
Wow, she's being walked.
She's walking and the police are holding her arms.
All that's left there is you need AOC's pretend handcuffing.
Remember when AOC, quote unquote, got herself arrested and she held her hands behind herself as though she was being handcuffed, even though she wasn't handcuffed.
I'm sorry, the staginess of this is just, it's truly amazing and cringe.
There's a picture of Greta Thunberg.
actually smile. This is the first time I've ever seen Greta smile, which, you know, it's, which is great. I mean, I'm glad that Greta has found her happy place. Her happy place is apparently being carried in the arms of the police while posing for the camera. She's like grinning as they carry her away. Greta Thunberg. So that again, glad that she has found happiness.
My honest take on Greta being arrested actually is that I'm wondering if this is all sort of the setup for a reality TV romance in which she is arrested and put in jail. And it turns out that her cellmate is Andrew Tate. And that that that.
I'm out.
I'm out.
You remember their weirdly tension-filled exchange on Twitter in which Andrew Tate tweeted her pictures of his Bugattis and she suggested that he had quote-unquote small dick energy.
I'm wondering if this is all the setup to the prison romance that is to follow between Greta Thunberg and Andrew Tate, the unlikeliest of romances.
Proposed title of the show, Hot Takes, with Greta Thunberg and Andrew Tate in prison.
And so much of our environmental movement is about this sort of virtue signaling nonsense.
There are people in the world who have real problems.
There are people in the world who don't get to spend their days standing at an open coal mine and then posing for the cameras as they are, quote unquote, arrested.
And by arrested, we mean moved 25 feet for the sake of the cameras.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Greta Thunberg is a great environmentalist hero that she is undergoing serious risk.
And in order for you to be a true hero in any sense of the word, you have to undergo serious risk.
You have to be risking something.
What exactly is it that Greta Thunberg risks?
The answer, of course, is nothing.
Greta Thunberg risks the possibility of being even more famous, of being even more lauded by the very society that she claims is evil and terrible and victimizing her.
What a lovely job she has.
There's a whole cadre of people in our society whose job it is, essentially, to criticize the very institutions that make them famous and the people who watch them for a living, essentially.
And this is like the Prince Harry model.
The very institutions that made you rich and famous are the ones that you're going to criticize.
Greta Thunberg's like, the West, it's full of terrible people.
Terrible.
How dare you?
How dare you?
I want my pony and I want it now.
The virtue signaling of our modern radical movement is truly beyond compare.
And that brings us to Davos.
At Davos, you have people who are interested in the virtue signaling.
They're interested in taking their private jets to Davos, Switzerland, in order to talk with other very famous, powerful, and rich people about how they control the world and how much power they can wield on behalf of the world.
And that's pretty dangerous stuff.
When people get it in their head that it is their job to rule the world on behalf of others, that they are the elite and the elite have the ability because of their superior brain power, because of their superior celebrity, because of their superior wealth to run everybody else's life.
This is what takes you from being an elite to an elitist.
So I sometimes, you know, I think I do it, but I think a lot of people do it even more often than I do mix up the word elite and elitist.
These are not quite the same thing.
If you are an elite, this means that maybe you are among the top 1% of people who are wealthy, or maybe you're in the top 1% of people of IQ, or you're the top 1% of people who are the most athletic.
Those are elite.
Okay.
And there's nothing wrong with being elite there.
Those are very often the people who create the most innovation.
Those are the people, the people who create enormous value for the rest of society.
There is something wrong with being elitist.
Where you believe that because you are an elite, therefore you get to rule everybody else.
And that is the essence of Davos.
This is expressed by no one better than John Kerry.
So John Kerry, the Biden administration climate envoy, because we must be ruled by octogenarian morons who have been career losers, who have never said a useful thing in their lives.
John Kerry, whose face is collapsing like a home in the Hollywood Hills during a rainstorm, and who more and more is morphing into the Easter Island head.
I mean, if they encapsulate him in stone, they can just put him right there on Easter Island and he will fit in forever.
In any case, he went to Davos.
And he kind of spilled the beans on what it is they think that it is their job to do.
He says that it's our job to fix the world.
To fix the world.
It's your job.
Because we're powerful and we're rich and we're famous and we have all the means.
And that does raise the question of how well have you guys done so far?
And over the past few years, as we'll get to, the answer is you've done quite an awful job.
And yet there you are suggesting that it is your job to fix all of the planet's problems and all you will require is utter control.
And when you stop and think about it, it's pretty extraordinary.
That we, a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives, are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.
I mean, it's so almost extraterrestrial to think about, quote, saving the planet.
And if you said that to most people, most people, they think you're just a crazy tree-hugging, lefty, liberal, you know, do-gooder, whatever.
Yes, correct.
As one online commenter noted, this is the closest that John Kerry has ever come to just admitting that they are the lizard people.
You're into online bizarre conspiracy theories.
But something touched us at one point in the past and it gave us the power.
So what touched John Kerry?
Well, it turns out that what touched John Kerry and gave him the power to do this was marrying into an extraordinarily wealthy ketchup family.
I don't know if you were able to marry into an extraordinarily wealthy ketchup family and then run unsuccessfully for president of the United States and then be given a career jet-setting around the world and complaining about global carbon emissions.
But that's what touched John Kerry.
He was not touched by the hand of God with incredible intelligence.
He's never really accomplished anything on his own.
What I mean by that is in the business world, for example, he's been in government essentially since the time that he was Back from Vietnam, where he proceeded to prey on his fellow Vietnam veterans by calling them war criminals and mutilators of prisoners, etc.
And he has parlayed that into an entire career.
That characterizes a lot of the professional class over at Davos, who believe that it is their job to restructure the world.
And right now they're worried.
They're worried because as it turns out, their own failed leadership has ushered in an era of chaos.
The Washington Post has a report on this.
Here's what they say.
A decade ago, political power brokers and corporate bigwigs gathered here in the Swiss Alps under an upbeat theme.
It was time for resilient dynamism, declared the organizers of the 2013 meeting of the World Economic Forum.
After the travails of the global financial crisis they explained, the world was now in a post-crisis stage.
It was incumbent on the elites convened at Davos to usher in further reforms in service of economic sustainability and competitiveness.
Perennial W.E.F.
watchwords that tap into the liberal dogma that long underlay its proceedings where the desire to do good need not interfere with profit margins.
Well, it's precisely the opposite.
The profit margins need not interfere with the desire to do good.
Because the reality, of course, is that the profit margins were always secondary.
See, profit margins make you answerable to an actual ruler and metric of success.
Do-gooderism has no metric of success.
It's just what's in your own head.
This is why you see so many people on the left who are fond of the idea of stakeholder capitalism.
Shareholder capitalism means that we can tell how well you are doing by looking at your share price.
Stakeholder capitalism means we can't look at debt.
We have to look deep into the cockles of your heart and decide whether you are doing a good job or not.
10 years on, says the Washington Post, there seems to be less optimism.
Instead of a post-crisis moment, it's more common to talk of a permacrisis, of a world buckling under a never-ending cascade of calamity, war, climate catastrophe, energy price chaos, inflation, epidemics of hunger and disease, political instability, and widening economic inequity.
This year's WF theme, a plaintive appeal to find cooperation in a fragmented world, seems more possessed by the ruptures that have already taken place.
In a press call with reporters last week, WF President Borges Brende said the meeting will, quote, happen against the most complex geopolitical and geoeconomic backdrop in decades.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So I have a question.
What happened over the course of the last decade?
Supposedly, we were in post-crisis.
We were not.
2013 was not actually post-crisis.
The reality is that we're just in an era of economic stagnation in 2013, thanks to the pathetic recovery of the Obama administration after the 2007-2008 crisis.
But, assume that that's correct.
Assume for a second that 2013 was stability and joy and happiness, right?
Obama was president, everything was going great, according to the left.
The world was a stable and secure place.
Not true, but okay.
Let's pretend that was the case.
So what happened in the intervening 10 years?
The answer is, you guys.
You guys!
And so, as always, for the elitists, the answer to, we failed, is, we need more power.
We try a thing, we want control, we get control, we implement policies, the policies fail, give us more control.
And then they sort of spill the beans on what it is they wish to do with that control.
And what they wish to do is suck money out of the system.
Your money out of the system.
Not their own, they'll be fine.
Your money out of the system in order to pay for priorities that they think make them better people.
So they can sleep at night on their giant piles of money.
They will take your piles of money and then they will dedicate those piles of money to failed projects all over the world.
John Kerry says as much.
Here's John Kerry, a man who is wealthy because he married wealthy, saying that we have to fight global warming and the only way to fight global warming is money, money, and money.
Because that's the only way we keep 1.5 degrees alive.
So how do we get there?
Well, the lesson I've learned in the last years, and I learned it as secretary and I've learned it since, reinforced in spades, is money, money, money, money, money, money, money.
Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.
But not his.
Yours.
The global economic system's money.
That's the really thing.
That is the thing that is really important.
Is how much of your money they're going to spend.
How much they're going to make your life worse.
So, Davos has, of course, a bevy of speakers, but some of these speakers, say the quiet part out loud.
Nicole Keller is one of those people.
She's the managing director of a non-profit called GreenUp.
And then the nonprofit world, by the way, is just filled with people who are perfectly happy to seize the reins of control and use them against you.
After all, they're in the nonprofit world.
They're answerable to no one.
There's this bizarre.
And counterintuitive idea out there that profit is inherently bad, that there is something wrong with profit, that it makes you morally lesser to profit.
Incorrect.
Profit is simply a metric of how many people are interested in the service, good that you are providing, and whether you can run your business in a decent way so as to continue to provide that good and service.
That's what profit is.
It is a ruler.
It is a measurement.
And when you get rid of the ruler or measurement, you have nothing.
It becomes entirely subjective.
Which is why in the non-profit world, they don't like profit.
In the non-profit world, because they've gotten rid of that, their metric for success is whatever's in their own head.
And what's in their own head is pretty ugly.
Here's Nicole Keller saying that what she actually would like and what Davos should aim for is zero growth.
We have to save this planet to save our freedom and the way we are living.
And we are not good enough yet.
We have to improve.
Thank you, Nicole.
So, um, Well, I feel that you were talking about the word development.
I think, indeed, we don't need, like, growth or development.
I really think less is more.
And I'll leave it at that.
Less is more, she says, sitting in Davos, Switzerland, with a bunch of billionaires.
Less is more.
For whom, exactly?
For you?
I don't see you existing on less.
I don't see her becoming an ascetic.
Do you?
Meanwhile, Alan Zangor, Director for Climate and Health at Wellcome Trust, another one of these non-profit organizations, he suggests that we have to fight global warming and we have to use the power of the elites in order to fight global warming because climate change is making people insane.
It's going to turn into a zombie apocalypse, guys.
The other massive ecosystem-mediated pathway between climate change and health is the impact on our mental health.
And we're really only beginning to scrape the surface there.
And there is no health without mental health, as my mental health colleagues repeatedly remind me.
And we see these two... It's a two-directional pathway.
Number one, young people are petrified about the future, and that is having a substantial impact on their mental health.
Okay, why are they petrified about the future?
Why?
Could it be because you are petrifying them about the future?
Is it because we have lost all moorings in our society to anything real and true?
And instead we have substituted a bunch of alarmism that allows you guys to centralize control.
Perhaps that right there is the problem.
I love it.
You drive people insane.
They're like, hey, everybody's insane.
Maybe you should give me more power to make people stop being insane.
Pretty amazing.
And again, the elites gathered at Davos and the elitists, more importantly, gathered at Davos.
They fully admit that pretty much everything that they are about is the global warming agenda, which is really a redistributionist agenda.
The global warming agenda is really less about lowering carbon emissions, which is why they're not predominantly pushing nuclear energy or innovation.
And instead, they are pushing signing giant checks to different parts of the world.
The Belgian prime minister said that the new trade agenda must be focused about stabilization, but also really about decarbonizing, about decarbonizing the world. Well, I mean, if you have a trade agenda that's focused on decarbonizing the world, that is how you end up with zero growth, because it turns out that carbon-based emissions are the chief physical pathway toward economic development, particularly in the developing world. The second element is
that this trade agenda, It's about stabilizing the world, but it's also about decarbonizing the world.
And there, honestly, I think the world can only be happy with the fact that the United States has moved to the right side of the table.
Well, it's so that they're happy now, right?
Because the Biden administration is filled with people who agree with with this guy who I've never heard of, DeCruz.
Now, nobody's heard of this, but the United States has now moved to the right.
And what is the right side of the table?
Confiscating the wealth of its own citizenry and using it on behalf of a global agenda of redistributionism and less growth.
And I mean, this is what the Democratic Party really stands for.
This is why you have Governor J.B.
Pritzker of Illinois, who went to Davos.
What's he doing in Davos?
He's the governor of a state.
Why are you in Davos, which is in economic form globally?
Anyway, people are still shooting each other in Chicago, but J.B.
Pritzker has got some time on his hands.
So he heads on over there and he says, you know, the important thing is that we're going to be fossil fuel free in Illinois by 2050.
Will you, though?
I have I have doubts.
You were out there saying that Illinois should be 100% based on net zero or renewables by 2050.
Was that something that was well received during your campaign?
Extremely well received.
And in fact, we passed a Climate and Equitable Jobs Act for the state of Illinois, which is significantly increasing our focus on clean energy.
We're actually going to be fossil free by 2050 in the state of Illinois.
Ursula von der Leyen, who is the head of the of the EU, she says that the next decades are going to see the greatest industrial transformation of our time.
And of course, it will be controlled by these folks.
In the next decades, we'll see the greatest industrial transformation of our times, maybe of any times.
And those who develop and manufacture the technology that will be the foundation of tomorrow's economy will have the greatest competitive edge.
That is the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
We wield outsized power and therefore we should wield outsized influence and we should determine the future of the world.
And if you think that it's just about your money, it's not.
It's also about your rights.
So, Davos had an enormous number of media members who were there to discuss the big problem of misinformation.
Misinformation.
And leading their panel on misinformation was, of course, Brian Stelter, who was booted off of CNN for low ratings, which is an amazing thing.
I wasn't even aware that you could be booted off of CNN for low ratings because CNN essentially has no ratings.
Brian Stelter, he started talking about how we need to crack down on social media.
The elitists will decide what you can see and what you can't see and what is misinformation, what is not misinformation.
Brian Stelter says, I don't even have a way of disproving that I'm alive right now, says Brian Stelter.
I leave CNN, and there's a crazy website that posts an article saying I was arrested by military police.
And then I have a fact-checking email, and I don't know whether to reply to the fact-checker and bother with this, right?
Same website, a month later, says I've been executed at Guantanamo Bay.
So the fact-checker emails me again.
And I say, well, do you want to take my pulse?
How do I disprove that I wasn't executed?
And so, to me, that is amusing and ridiculous.
To other journalists, it might be really disturbing, and it might be worrisome to them.
Worrisome.
And that is why, look, what this is really going to be about for a lot of these folks is cracking down on the dissemination of information.
By the way, Brian Stelter is increasingly looking like Stellan Skarsgård from Dune.
Yeah, Harkonnen.
That's, yeah.
It's not a great look.
Now, before the fact-checkers call, I'm not saying that his head is actually fusing into his shoulders.
He does have a cervical spine, so you don't have to fact-check that.
But in any case, this is all part of a broader agenda, which is for elitists, they get to crack down on the dissemination of information.
And this is something that the EU already does, and brags about doing.
That they crack down on hate speech, so-called hate speech, which is anything that the ruling regime disagrees with.
They crack down on misinformation, which is anything the ruling regime disagrees with, which is what we found out about during COVID.
And to promote all of that, of course, you have the owner of the New York Times, Pinch Solzberger, showing up to explain what a wonderful job the New York Times is doing.
So here is Solzberger explaining the amazing thing about the New York Times, that when they make mistakes, they acknowledge them publicly.
Oh, really?
Is that a thing that you do frequently?
I suspect you're teaching them to recognize trustworthy sources.
time that you gave back to Pulitzers that you guys won on the basis of that. The 1619 project, I noticed that you have not acknowledged publicly what a garbage heap that is. Instead, you have spent millions upon millions of dollars promoting it. So I know I noticed that, but no, these are the good guys, right? The elites are the good guys. I suspect you're teaching them to recognize trustworthy sources, whether that's, you know, an institution like the Times or the Post or the
Journal, whether that's scientists, whether that's academia, for example, an institution like mine, when we make mistakes, we acknowledge them in public and we correct them.
Oh, is that what you do?
Is that what you do?
So, yeah, the only answer, they do such an amazing job, and this is why we have to shut off all the other disseminators of information.
This is why Sulzberger actually compared Donald Trump saying the words fake news to Stalinist Russia and Hitler.
It's just a hell of a comparison right there.
Terms like fake news and enemies of the people have been popularized cyclically in society and in some of the most, you know, you know, repressive and dangerous moments, you know, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, right?
It's just like that.
Just like that.
And just to top off what Davos really is about, just to prove what Davos is about, again, it is about elites, people who are at the top of their industry or profession, who are elitists and believe they should be able to control you.
And the merging of the elite with the elitist is really, really dangerous stuff.
This is why you have the bizarre spectacle of people like Renee Fleming, who's an amazing artist, right?
She's a tremendous opera singer, out there talking about art and healthcare at the World Economic Forum.
But why?
You are good at singing classical music.
Why?
Explain.
I've had the privilege of performing on six continents, witnessing the power of music to move people to joy or tears, and now I've come to believe that the art should be fully embedded in our healthcare systems.
Oh, well, I don't even know what that means, that the art should be fully embedded in our healthcare system.
That doesn't even mean anything, but at least you're here being elite.
Idris Elba, same sort of thing.
So, you know, fresh off of, um, The poor of this world are not just looking for aid and handouts.
They are looking for investment.
Investment in people, in nature, in innovation, in partnership.
As Sabrina said, please invest in small farms and the small to medium businesses that support With greater access to finance, to markets, to resources, to technology, to knowledge, and to people.
Well, if Idris Elba says so, I guess we should all take it super seriously.
Everything's going great.
Okay, so here's the thing.
How did these guys do?
They've had control, so how's it been going?
I mean, you have the elitists in control in the United States, all over Europe.
How's everything going?
The answer is, not amazing.
We were lied to about virtually everything with regard to COVID by all of the most valuable sources in American and international life.
People who disseminated true information were shut down on social media.
Anybody who did not push in favor of governmental mandates was cast as the other.
And only now, at the end, are we allowed to actually hear some truth.
So only now, like years later, are we allowed to find out that Pfizer never actually researched whether the vaccines prevented transmission before going out there and claiming, pretty publicly, that vaccines prevented transmission, which was the basis for a huge number of healthy people taking the vaccines when they didn't actually need to.
Only now do we find out from CNN's Leanna Nguyen that the so-called conspiracy theory that was never a conspiracy theory, we reported on it in real time.
That COVID deaths were being overcounted.
That actually, that was true.
You were called a conspiracist if you said this two years ago.
If you said, you have to distinguish between deaths from COVID and deaths with COVID, which is, that is a fundamental distinction.
If you go into the hospital because you had a heart attack, and then it turns out that you had a mild case of COVID, like it came up positive for COVID, they attributed that to COVID death.
If you went in there with a gunshot wound, and it turns out that you had COVID when you were shot to death, they attributed that to COVID.
And so the numbers were somewhat inflated.
You weren't supposed to say that, though, because that was taking it too lightly.
You weren't allowed to do that.
You're not allowed to take it lightly.
Now you're allowed to, though.
Here's CNN's Leanna Nguyen, who is one of the biggest alarmists with regard to COVID, out there suggesting that we overcounted the COVID deaths.
Can you explain why you believe COVID deaths are being overcounted?
I think it's important for us to be intellectually honest in this case, and that includes recognizing that circumstances have changed.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we had a situation where there were many people dying from COVID pneumonia, including healthy young people were dying because of severe shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, they were hospitalized because of it.
Then, as a result of vaccines and as a result of a lot of people getting COVID and having some level of immunity to it, we're seeing far fewer cases of that kind of severe COVID Oh!
severe COVID pneumonia specifically. And yet hospitals are still routinely testing everyone who's getting admitted for COVID.
Oh, oh, you mean you mean that they're getting a lot of COVID deaths that are actually from COVID?
Fascinating.
We're allowed to find this out right now.
And you undermine all the trust in yourself.
And then you're like, why is the world so fragmented?
Why are people so angry?
Because of you.
And this holds true not just on the scientific level, not just with regard to the policies that you've undertaken economically, which have led to inflation all over the world and another recession.
Not just because of that, but culturally.
On the cultural level, the elitists in our society have decided they must cram down their version of values on pretty much everybody.
And you can see it, particularly in the United States.
The United States, believe it or not, is actually more woke on these issues than Europe is.
And this manifests in everything from diversity trainings at companies to the attempt to cram down on everybody the sort of Seinfeld-esque ribbon-wearing that is necessary in order for you to succeed in your chosen profession.
Remember, there's an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer gets the bleep kicked out of him because he refuses to wear a ribbon for a parade.
That is the society that we've now become, crammed down by the elitists in our society.
So, for example, there is a player for the Philadelphia Flyers, his name is Ivan Provorov, and he did not want to wear a rainbow jersey during his pregame skate on Tuesday night.
It was LGBTQ, plus minus, divided by sign, happy face emoji, tilde, percentage sign, star, sad face emoji, pride night.
And he was supposed to wear a rainbow warm-up jersey.
And he said, I'm not going to do that.
People can do what they want, but I'm not going to do that.
And all hell broke loose on him.
I respect everybody's choices.
My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.
That's all I'm going to say.
And, um, that apparently was not enough for the media.
He said people can do what they want, but it's really, really bad.
They asked the coach about it.
Good for the coach, John Tortorella.
He said he's being true to himself and to his religion.
This has to do with his belief in his religion.
It's one thing I respect about him.
He's true to himself.
That's where we're at with that.
He said he did not contemplate scratching Provrov.
The fact that this was even a question is insanity.
The fact I mean, the NHL has decided against all business sense to go again.
This just demonstrates once again that when you have elitist in charge of institutions that used to be profit making institutions, they do unbelievably stupid things.
The crowd for hockey is disproportionately conservative.
If you look at all the major sports leagues and you look at it by political affiliation of the crowds that watch the NHL and NASCAR happen to be the two most Republican-leaning professional sports leagues.
And meanwhile, the NHL, because at the top level it has decided to go woke, is now promoting this sort of nonsense.
It doesn't wear well.
The American people don't like it.
At your business place, you've been forced to take diversity training.
It turns out that was a bunch of crap pushed by elitists.
And it accomplishes nothing.
Jesse Singel, who is a person of the left, has a piece in the New York Times today called, What if diversity trainings are doing more harm than good?
You think?
I mean, obviously that's true.
He says DEI trainings are designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups.
The American market for DEI reached an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020.
Advocates make bold promises.
Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps, and so on.
The only problem?
There's little evidence that many of these initiatives work.
The specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue, mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for DEI problems, may well have a net negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about.
Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence for diversity trainings have frequently come to discouraging conclusions.
Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects.
In fact, there are pretty significant downside effects because people are annoyed by these training approaches.
People feel off-put.
People start to become tribal.
The history of diversity training, Singles says, is, in a sense, a history of fads.
Well, that of course is true.
But these are the fads that are driven by elitists.
They don't require evidence in order to promote the overthrow of traditional institutions and ideas.
They just do it.
Because after all, they are the people who know the best.
They are the people who are the elite.
And what could be the consequences?
What would go wrong?
And the answer is, all the things around you are the consequences.
Because who's been running things up until now?
The bizarre nature of our elitist class who have been running things, turning around and saying, but why are things so chaotic?
Because you're running things.
That's the reason.
It's because of you.
Maybe you ought to buy a mirror.
You have a lot of, you have enough money.
Why don't you just shine up the side of that private jet and look into the reflection for one second.
It's you.
You are the problem.
And your substitution of your own supposed wisdom for the traditional wisdom and practice of the past has had dire side effects.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so, with the elitists ruling our society, the downsides have been pretty unbelievable to watch.
And there's a lot of talk about how the elitists are pushing globalization.
The thing that the elitists really are pushing is global control.
That's not the same thing as globalization.
Globalization is the idea that there ought to be as much widespread trade as possible without endangering national security.
I have no problem with that general idea.
However, global control is what they're really pushing.
The idea that they get to set the rules for everything in your life at the top level.
Elitists over at Davos getting together and figuring out how your life should run.
And they ought to do this on a cultural level as well.
They're going to decide the cultural hallmarks of elitism and you must obey.
You must repeat.
You must enthusiastically celebrate.
You must use the pronouns.
You must fly the pride progress flags.
You must speak the Black Lives Matter nostrums.
It's a new religion, in other words.
And it's a religion with a priesthood.
And the priesthood are the people who meet at Davos.
They are the people, as John Kerry explicitly said, who are touched by something, touched by perhaps the divine, to take power and leverage it down on you.
A problem with this is they are a really crappy priesthood, and the religion that they are preaching is real garbage.
And it is no substitute for traditional religion.
The decline of traditional religion made room for this group of false prophets to sort of take control and then claim that they were going to fill the hole left in the human heart by religion.
But that hole cannot be filled this way.
There's a fascinating new study out.
It's a working paper from Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of Ohio State University.
They looked at the relationship between religiosity and mortality from deaths of despair.
And what they found, unsurprisingly, is that as religiosity in a society decreases, deaths of despair increase.
Now, the metric that they use is really what's fascinating here.
So, what they noticed is not just that there was a massive decline in people who say they are religious in the United States.
What they found is that the actual association between increases in death of despair and decline in religion, decline of religion in their view is defined by lack of religious practice.
Not how often you say you pray.
Not religious thought.
Not spiritual, but not religious.
The thing that actually defines whether you are more likely to die a death of despair is whether you have dropped out of religious practice.
Which again, demonstrates that religion is a way of life.
And when you lose religion, you lose your way of life.
Religion is praxis.
It is not merely theoretical.
Secular society basically says that religion, if you are a believer, ought to be relegated to the realm of your mind.
That is not how religion has worked historically.
It's not how religion works practically.
Religion has a very Aristotelian cast.
Aristotle, of course, suggested that if you wish to be virtuous, you must practice virtue.
That if you wish to be a good person, you must practice doing good things.
If you want to be generous, you have to do generous things over and over and over until you get in the habit of doing generous things.
Religion says exactly the same thing.
In my own religion, we are We are hemmed in by literally thousands of arcane details of how you ought to live your life.
The point of those arcane details is to train you to think about something higher.
It's to train you to think about doing the good and right thing in the most minute everyday activities.
And when you drop out of religious practice, the idea of sort of broad speck from religious ideas is not a substitute for that.
What the secular world basically contended is that you could practice a secular life while having religious thoughts, and that is not the way this works.
And that's what this study finds.
And it finds that when you drop out of religious practice, you are more likely to drop into despair and into nihilism and into confusion and into chaos.
And you're also more likely to make yourself subject to false prophets like the people over at Davos.
There's a reason why secularists buy into all of the garbage that you're hearing spewed by the elitists over in Davos.
The authors of this study noted that many measures of religious adherence began to decline actually in the late 1980s.
They found that the large decline in religious practice was driven by the group experiencing subsequent increases in mortality.
White middle-aged Americans without a college degree.
States that experienced larger declines in religious participation in the last 15 years of the 20th century saw larger increases in deaths of despair.
The researchers looked at the repeal of blue laws in particular.
Blue laws limited commerce, typically on Sunday mornings.
These laws have been shown to be strongly related to religious practice, creating discrete changes in incentives to attend religious services that are plausibly unrelated to other drivers of religiosity, they said.
The repeal of blue laws had a 5 to 10 percentage point impact on weekly attendance of religious services and increased the rate of deaths of despair by two deaths per 100,000 people they found, which is a reasonably large share of the initial rise in the deaths of despair.
As the study found, it's about formal religious participation.
It's not belief or personal activities like prayer that people dropped out of that actually impacted their lives.
It is formal religious participation.
It makes you a member of a community.
It binds you to a system.
People require systems.
There are radical individualistic libertarians who believe that systems are all impositions on you.
That is incorrect.
People are embedded in systems of one sort or another.
You get to choose the system in which you are embedded.
You should choose to embed yourself in the system that is the most durable, embodies the most traditional wisdom, and is the best for you and your family.
These results underscored the importance of cultural institutions like religious establishments in promoting well-being, they said.
They further added they didn't know of any cultural phenomenon that matches the mortality patterns, which are seen for both men and women, but not in other countries, and in both rural and urban settings, but mostly middle-aged, less-educated white individuals.
The decline in religiosity matches mortality trends in all these characteristics, they wrote.
They pushed back on the opioid theory.
They said OxyContin was first introduced as a prescription drug in 1996, but by then, deaths of despair for middle-aged white Americans were already well above trend.
By the way, one thing that is worthy of note is that no-fault divorce really became a national law in the 1980s.
So if you're talking about what exactly shifted, no-fault divorce in the United States is essentially the thing that shifted.
And with that came family breakdown, came the rise of Individualistic, subjective autonomy, the belief that you were to be disconnected from institutions, and that bled all the way down the chain.
One of the great ironies, by the way, when it comes to the elitists is that they don't actually live like they preach.
If you look at the elitists, many of them are married.
Many of them have kids.
Many of them went to college.
Most of them made pretty good life decisions, which is how they got to be successful.
But the stuff that they preach is precisely the opposite of that.
And it's ingested by pop culture and then spewed out there.
And people who are sort of lower down on the economic scale, those are the people who tend to embody that.
And then those are the ones who suffer.
The elitists who, if you believe, like John Kerry does, that the elitists were given the power to rule, which is not something that I traditionally believe.
I believe that God was given the power to lead and that it was your job to follow God, right?
But they believe that they are the new gods.
If they believe that, then shouldn't they get the blame when things fall apart?
And the answer, of course, is they won't get the blame when things fall apart because they are the special people and they get to also control the dissemination of punishment.
So, of course, it's everybody else's fault, but their own.
All righty, meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be in serious trouble over these classified documents found at his home.
They were found at his home.
They were found in his garage.
It turns out that his son, Hunter, who is a derelict, was in the home, maybe renting the home, at the same time that he was picking up bags of cash all over the world.
Well, there is something weird about this situation.
According to the Department of Justice, they actually declined to search with Joe Biden's legal team in Wilmington, Delaware, for classified documents.
According to dailywire.com, DOJ and the Wall Street Journal, DOJ officials considered sending FBI agents to monitor the search conducted by Biden's personal attorneys, but decided against the oversight to avoid complicating the investigation.
And because Biden's legal team had been cooperative, according to the Wall Street Journal.
After 10 classified documents were found in Biden's office at a think tank in D.C., Biden's attorneys prepared to search the president's other properties for sensitive government papers.
DOJ officials met with the Biden attorney ahead of the search.
The two sides agreed to allow Biden's team to conduct the search without immediate oversight from the FBI.
Why?
Simple question.
Why?
If you say that you have classified documents that you have found in the guy's office and now you're going to go search his garage.
Number one, how do you know that?
I mean, these lawyers do not have classified clearance is my understanding.
Shouldn't you have people on scene with classified clearance to be able to determine what is classified and what is not in the documents so they can actually see it?
Because presumably they will have to use the power of sight in order to identify the classified documents.
And yet the DOJ was like, no, they're doing a great job.
It'll be fine.
Hands off.
It'll be totally fine.
You think they would have given that sort of benefit of the doubt to Donald Trump, even if he had not been obstructionist about the documents?
I have doubts.
Classified documents connected with Biden were first found in his private office at Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
on November 2nd, less than a week before the 2022 midterm elections.
Since then, Biden's attorneys have located more classified documents at Biden's home in Wilmington on three separate occasions.
An unspecified number found in the garage on December 20th, one document found in Biden's study on January 11th, and five more found in the study on January 12th.
Very strange that the DOJ decided that the lawyers did not need any oversight, like any help at all in order to do all of this.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying out all of its friends to make excuses.
Ben Rhodes, the bizarre and ridiculous national security advisor to Barack Obama and a failed novelist.
Who has no knowledge about foreign policy and yet was given a position of high power in the administration.
He says, really what this was, something went wrong in the boxing process.
Oh, is that what happened?
Something went wrong in the boxing process.
That's what we're calling this now?
Putting classified documents in the box.
I guess that's a way to say it.
That's like saying that a man cheats on his wife and he says something went wrong in the hotel reservation process.
You might say that, sure.
Here's Ben Rhodes.
Could you give us some insights into how these things can get mixed in with other pieces of paper?
I think it's trickier for a president or vice president, who obviously have far more documents in their offices, in their residences, than I did as a White House official.
And so clearly what happened here is something went wrong in the process of packing up those documents.
Documents got co-located.
And they could have been co-located, by the way, at any time.
It might have happened months before things were packed up.
A memo gets put in the wrong place here.
Oh, it's just a collation problem.
I guess that's what we'll call it now.
Meanwhile, Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, she was grilled on why she didn't tell people in the press corps that more documents had been found when the timeline suggests that she kind of knew that more documents had been found.
And she's like, oh, no, I've been completely honest.
And I'll just keep saying that until you believe me.
On Friday, you stood here, though, and were asked about the documents issued by our account some 18 times.
At that point, the president's lawyers had found these five additional pages of classified documents.
So did you not know on Friday that those documents had been found when you were at the podium?
Or are you being directed by someone to not be forthcoming on this issue?
I have been forthcoming from this podium.
What I said yes to was what the statement at the time that we all had, right?
You all had the statement, and I was repeating what the council was sharing at that time.
Oh, so you weren't transparent then.
Or you were lied to by Biden's people, and they sent you out there with false information.
Great job.
She got very mad when she was asked more about this, by the way.
Here was Kareen Jean-Pierre getting angry when asked about this.
But the White House Counsel was the one to go and facilitate the documents, to look for the documents.
Again, they have been working very closely with the Department of Justice.
I would refer you to them.
If you want to know specifically about their actions, specifically about what they're doing, I would point you to the White House Counsel's Office.
Guys, you guys can ask me this a hundred times, two hundred times if you wish.
I'm going to keep saying the same thing.
I hear your question.
It's been asked.
It's been answered.
It's been noted.
And we're just going to try to move on here.
Oh, I'm sure that you're going to try to move on here.
I noticed that.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into how Republicans are staffing the House Oversight Committee.
It is fascinating.
They're going to get very aggressive very quickly.
Plus, we'll be getting to a suburban LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign pedophile ring that has now been actually uncovered.
Pretty horrifying stuff.
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