Yet More Biden Classified Documents Found | Ep. 1652
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Another trench of classified documents is found at Joe Biden's home.
Biden's chief of staff takes the exit door and we examine the growing evil of schools hiding the new gender identities of confused teens from their parents.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Alrighty, so Joe Biden.
He's so responsible with classified documents.
He'll tell you himself.
So, you recall that just last week he said that he has no regerts whatsoever in his handling of classified material.
He's done an amazing job.
Sure, they found classified materials next to his.
As we found, uh, we found a handful of documents were failed, uh, were filed in the wrong place.
his home and of course they found some documents at the Penn Biden Center for Chinese donation.
But that was pretty much it. I mean, he did an okay job. I mean, it's not a big deal, right?
Remember Joe Biden said last week he was doing fine, guys.
It was all good. Here he was.
As we found, we found a handful of documents were failed, were filed in the wrong place.
We immediately turned them over to the archives and the Justice Department.
We're fully cooperating, looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.
I think you're going to find there's nothing there.
I have no regrets.
I'm following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do.
It's exactly what we're doing.
There's no there there.
He's reading it from a binder.
There's no there there.
There's nothing to find.
Everything is absolutely hunky dory.
At the time, this is already silly.
Once you have classified documents in your possession in multiple places, this raises the question of whether you were careful enough under the statute with classified documents.
This is not an intent crime.
Now, I understand that James Comey entirely rewrote the law with Hillary Clinton to make it an intent crime.
He suggested that basically, unless you had taken classified documents with the intent to expose them, You know what?
eyes, then there was no criminal matter at hand. It didn't matter even if you had taken the classified documents and put them in a place where foreign actors actually got a hold of them, that was still not a good enough excuse for prosecution. You remember that's exactly what happened with Hillary. She took the documents, she put them on her private server. Comey admitted that these were probably accessed by foreign powers, but he said, you know what, she didn't mean to do that, she didn't mean to hand it over to the Russians or the Chinese or the So, no prosecution.
But then, Donald Trump took home a bunch of documents, and everybody on the left immediately went back to the standard pre-Hillary Clinton.
They were like, well, clearly, clearly he did something terribly evil.
And we'll make up a motive.
Maybe he was gonna sell nuclear secrets to the Russians.
And when it turns out that that wasn't the case as well, you know, it was very irresponsible.
Remember that Joe Biden said this, right?
It was super irresponsible.
And the legal standard is irresponsibility.
If you're irresponsible with classified documents, then you must pay the price.
Well, the problem is that Joe Biden, sure, he's now, quote unquote, abiding by statute in turning over the documents once they have been found.
Although, gotta say, I'm suspicious as to why these documents were found now.
This is a very serious question.
The Vice President of the United States has been in the Senate of the United States before that, since the 1970s.
That dude has been in the U.S.
government in positions of high elected power since well before I was born.
So why now are we finding these documents?
Why were his lawyers searching the documents?
This was a real question.
Again, the suggestion was that when the Penn-Biden Center for Chinese Grift was closing down, the suggestion was that it was just basically like the interns in the closet who were going through the old papers and they found this classified stuff.
One, Isn't that a problem?
I mean, they don't have classified approval.
They don't have any sort of actual top security standard, too.
It wasn't actually interns who found it in the closet, it was lawyers, which raises the question.
When you move, do you have your lawyers search your old boxes?
Or do you typically have some schlub move your boxes, or you move them yourself, or you call your unfortunate friend on the weekend and force him to move the stuff?
So if you are cleaning out Penn Biden Center for Chinese donations, Why exactly are your lawyers going through that?
And then why are they going through your garage?
And then why are they going through your house?
The real answer here, by the way, is that Joe Biden probably had his lawyers going through these documents knowing there were about to be a bunch of Republican investigations that were going to request some sort of perusal of all of his old documents.
And they were going to find those.
So he's like, OK, I'm going to activate my lawyers now and they're going to go look through all of the documents.
OK, fine.
All of this suggests, of course, that the standard that was applied to Donald Trump, which was, if you are messy with classified documents, then you should be prosecuted, was going to be thrown away as soon as it was Joe Biden on the other end of that stick.
And that's precisely what seems to have happened here.
Just last week, Karine Jean-Pierre actually suggested that Joe Biden saying that there was no there there, which is, of course, a paraphrase of a Gertrude Stein statement, About a major American city, there's no there there.
It's so dismissive, it's so silly.
You can't simultaneously say you take classified documents very seriously and two, there's no there there.
There is a there there.
There are classified documents there.
That is literally a there, there.
I don't know what else to say about that.
He literally did the thing you're not supposed to do.
You don't then get to declare that you're very serious about that thing.
Yeah, that's exactly what Karine Jean-Pierre said.
She said, it just shows how serious Joe Biden is that he's saying it's not very serious.
Because he's also said he takes very seriously the handling of classified documents.
So I'm unclear what he means about no regrets.
So I'm not going to comment further from what the president has said yesterday.
I think he laid out his thoughts.
He was asked about it.
He laid out his thoughts of whatever question he was asked.
I'm not going to get into specifics or I'm not going to go beyond what the President has said, but I will reiterate from here that, and basically what he said to all of you many times at this point, that he does indeed take classified information seriously.
He does indeed take classified documents seriously.
Uh, what?
So, uh, what?
She is the world's most untalented press secretary.
Well, as it turns out, over the weekend, they found even more documents.
I know.
I know.
You're shocked.
You're shocked.
I thought that he was super careful about all of this sort of stuff, but as it turns out, he's not that careful with this sort of stuff.
According to NBC News, six additional items, including documents with classified markings, were found in President Joe Biden's Delaware home after Justice Department officials searched the residence on Friday, according to the president's personal attorney.
The search was prompted by the White House, not the Justice Department, according to a White House official and a source familiar with the matter.
The documents at the Wilmington, Delaware home appear to be related to his time as Vice President, as well as to his tenure in the United States Senate.
Wait, hold up a second.
His tenure in the United States Senate.
So he left his job in the White House in January of 2017, right?
That's when the Obama administration ended.
He left his job as Senator in the United States Senate in 2009.
It is now 2023, guys.
That means that he's had classified documents from his time in the Senate for 14 years!
Minimum!
It may be 50 years!
Because he was literally a senator for like three decades before that.
He may have classified documents from the Reagan administration.
This is a guy who says that he's really, really careful about classified documents?
I'm having a hard time with this.
So according to NBC News, the documents at those Wilmington, Delaware home, they are related to his time in government.
They were found after Biden's counsel offered full access to the premises as the department investigates his possession of classified material.
Bob Bauer, Biden's personal attorney, said in a statement.
Bauer said DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the president's service in the Senate, some of which were from his tenure as vice president.
He added the department had full access to Biden's home, including personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades.
Apparently, investigators spent about 13 hours at the president's personal residence on Friday, according to White House officials and Biden's lawyer.
It was a planned consensual search of the president's residence in Wilmington, Delaware.
This would make, again, the third tranche of documents that we have now found, minimum, that contain classified materials.
And apparently the word Iran has been mentioned in here.
Apparently some of the classified materials included materials about Iran.
By the way, it was the FBI that was actually pursuing this particular search, apparently.
It was not just Biden's personal attorneys this time.
The federal search of Biden's home well voluntary marks an escalation of the probe, according to CNN, into the president's handling of classified documents and will inevitably draw comparisons to his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, even if the FBI search of Trump's residence was conducted under different circumstances.
So now we have the former president and the current president both under FBI investigation for classified documents mishandling.
Everything is going great.
Only the finest people in positions of high power in this particular country.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, again, is announcing that they are involved in all of this, and they are considering other locations, apparently.
They're not done at this point.
So, they've checked the Penn-Biden Center, they've checked his house, they've checked his garage, but there may be more locations that they actually have to check now.
Because it turns out that Joe Biden apparently leaves classified documents like his son leaves cocaine-ridden laptops.
It's like, everywhere.
On the Acela, in like a locked bathroom on the Acela, there's just classified documents now.
Turns out that Joe Biden at the local ice cream shop, while he was eating Rocky Road, just left a classified document in the garbage bin or something.
It is incredible.
Okay, so is he going to be prosecuted?
Of course he's not going to be prosecuted.
He's a special person.
You're not a special person.
If this were you, you'd get prosecuted, but he's a special person, so he will not be prosecuted.
In fact, what is amusing is to watch the spin coming from Democrats and from the media on all of this.
At least Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, he was at least honest enough to say, yeah, Biden has lost the high ground here.
It's gonna be very difficult for Biden to claim that he is morally superior to President Trump when the dude is apparently leaving classified documents like Hansel was leaving Breadcrumbs through the forest.
It's insane.
Here we go.
It's Senator Dick Durbin.
Do you fear that because of that, the current president has kind of lost the high ground on this notion of classified information being where it shouldn't be?
Well, of course.
Let's be honest about it.
When that information is found, it diminishes the stature of any person who is in possession of it.
Because it's not supposed to happen.
Whether it was the fault of a staffer or an attorney, it makes no difference.
The elected official bears ultimate responsibility.
Well, good for Dick Durbin.
But Dick Durbin is actually being less of a partisan than CNN's Pamela Brown.
Over the weekend, CNN's Pamela Brown asked a Republican congressperson about Trump versus Biden.
She's like, well, you know the difference, don't you?
You do.
You do.
You know the difference.
Here we go.
This inequality, this hypocritical aspect, especially from President Biden having condemned Trump and then having done the same thing.
Right.
And he did.
I mean, he did condemn it.
And we have scrutinized that on this show, that he said it was really irresponsible what Trump did.
And now there have been approximately 20 classified documents found at various properties.
And certainly he has been under scrutiny.
But you know, if you're being intellectually honest with yourself, the key difference here that Trump and his team defied a subpoena.
They said they had turned over everything, and yet evidence developed through the course of the investigation that classified documents were being moved, which started this obstruction of justice investigation.
Okay, but that's not a key difference with regard to the actual mistreatment of classified information.
It may be a key difference with regard to an obstruction charge, but there are two separate charges for Trump that are apparently being considered.
One is the obstruction of justice stuff, mostly trying to cover something up, and the second is the mishandling of classified material.
And again, it's gonna be very difficult to claim obstruction of justice when the underlying claim that misclassification of material or classification of material that was mishandled, that if there's no underlying crime, the obstruction becomes a lot less sanguine.
So yeah, the media are going to try to spin Biden's way out of this.
Bottom line is all of this is going to end up being thrown overboard.
Trump is now off the hook thanks to Joe Biden and his complete inability not to apparently take classified documents home and just leave them in random places.
And the best excuse for Joe Biden is that Joe Biden doesn't know what's going on around him on a daily basis.
So it's not super shocking that he ended up with a bunch of classified documents pretty much everywhere.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who spends all day on Twitter, just retweeting as reclined basically.
He is now going to leave his job in the coming weeks, according to a person familiar with Klain's plans.
This is according to the Associated Press.
Klain's expected departure comes not long after the White House and Democrats had a better-than-expected showing in the November election, so it's a good time for him to step out because, I mean, if he sticks around for 2024, then he might be responsible for whatever comes next, but now he gets to leave on top and say he did a great job.
The personnel change is a rarity for an administration that has had minimal turnover so far.
No member of Biden's cabinet has yet stepped down, in stark contrast to Donald Trump's White House with frequent staff turmoil and other crises.
Yes, there has been a lot of stability in the Biden administration.
Stability and crappiness.
The replacement for Ron Klain, according to CNN, is likely to be Jeff Zients.
You'll recall that Jeff Zients ran Joe Biden's COVID-19 response effort.
anonymity to confirm the development, which was first reported by the New York Times.
The White House did not return calls or emails seeking comment on Klain's expected exit.
The replacement for Ron Klain, according to CNN, is likely to be Jeff Zients.
You'll recall that Jeff Zients ran Joe Biden's COVID-19 response effort.
He is a lockdown fanatic.
The notion that Zients is going to be some sort of moderating influence on the president of the United States is probably incorrect.
According to CNN, the decision to pick Zens surprised some internally, given there were differences in Biden's and Zens' management style early on in the administration.
But Biden was impressed with his job as COVID response coordinator when Zens inherited what officials described as a largely dysfunctional effort by the Trump administration.
By the way, largely dysfunctional effort by the Trump administration bearing a vaccine, a plan for rollout, and a reopening.
The Biden administration then proceeded to botch all of those things, like every single one of them.
Zeng is not viewed as a political operator, according to CNN, but his deep experience inside two administrations and his reputation for technocratic skill will likely serve as the assets at a time when both are viewed as critical for what Biden faces in the year ahead.
He handled the launch of healthcare.gov during the Obama administration.
So just stellar success for Jeff Zients, the guy who's responsible for the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov and also responsible for the disastrous rollout of Joe Biden's COVID-19 policy.
So things have been going amazing over at the Biden administration.
Prepare for a double down here.
Remember, Jeff Zients, he's the guy who suggested basically that travel bans be maintained in the middle of 2021.
It was July, 2021.
And the White House was still resisting lifting U.S.
travel bans on a broad swath of foreign countries.
And science was still claiming that we were in the middle of a pandemic and all the rest.
So, expect more radical policy coming out of the administration.
Now, meanwhile...
Joe Biden is about to run headlong into a battle largely with his own party, it sounds like.
So there's been a lot of talk about the debt ceiling fight that is looming.
Republicans, of course, have been suggesting that they want to hold firm in demanding some serious debt reduction from Joe Biden in response for in return for Increasing the debt ceiling.
Now, they should make clear exactly what their demands are.
The reality, as I've said before, is the debt ceiling is going to be raised.
We're not going to hit the debt ceiling and then leave it there indefinitely.
It's not going to happen.
The reason it's not going to happen is because it's too damaging politically to the party that is perceived as being an obstacle to raising the debt ceiling.
Republicans have tried this repeatedly.
They've always caved.
Unless They make some very specific demands, and those demands wrongfoot the administration.
That is the only way that they're going to be able to get away with not raising the debt ceiling and getting something in return.
Now, that would be a smart move.
They could do that, and it would be something, I assume, worthwhile.
Will it make any sort of real systemic change?
Probably not.
The reality is that 85% of the American budget is mandatory spending.
That'd be Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, SNAP assistance.
Military spending, all of that falls under the mandatory spending bucket.
And then you've got the discretionary spending stuff, and that's like 15% of the budget.
So you might get some minor changes around the edges here.
And sure, that'd be great.
Save a little bit of money.
Is that going to impact systemically the $31 trillion national debt?
It will not.
But can Republicans get a few wins here?
They probably can.
According to the Washington Post, top Republicans on Sunday blasted President Biden for refusing to negotiate a deal over the debt ceiling, renewing their threats to leverage the fiscally calamitous prospect of default to secure spending cuts from the White House.
The party affirmed its political demands as Biden prepares to sit down with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the coming days, even though the president has maintained he will not haggle over the need to address one of the country's most important fiscal obligations.
The emerging and potentially catastrophic stalemate concerns the maximum amount the U.S.
government can borrow to pay its existing bills.
Congress must act to raise or suspend that cap, known as the debt limit, or risk pushing the United States into a recession with global implications, according to economists and administration officials.
The country's debt now exceeds $31 trillion.
Republicans have tried to pin the blame on Democrats as they pledged to seek steep reductions in federal spending this year.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said you can't just increase the debt limit and let President Biden keep spending like he has done.
Representative Nancy Mays, Republican of South Carolina, said Republicans had to seize on the debt ceiling because clearly the budget process is not working any longer.
It's just these giant omnibus packages.
Now, here's the thing.
They actually do have an ally in Joe Manchin.
So Manchin, obviously, is running for re-election in short order in West Virginia.
He, like Kyrsten Sinema, has been seen as a swing vote in the Senate.
Sinema, as you'll recall, recently declared herself a political independent, no longer a member of the Democratic Party.
Joe Manchin is starting to reorient himself away from Joe Biden in expectation that he's running in an extremely red state.
West Virginia went for Donald Trump in the last election cycle by some 30 points.
So Joe Manchin could be an ally to Republicans in the effort to use the debt ceiling to exact some concessions from Joe Biden.
Here is Joe Manchin saying, with regard to, for example, the classified documents scandal, that Joe Biden absolutely should have regrets.
What are we, nuts here?
I think the special counsel will do a better job than the politicians and the political circus it was going to follow.
President Biden said he had no regrets on how he handled this.
Do you have any advice for him on how he should handle this?
Oh, I think he should have a lot of regrets.
Yeah.
I would think that I said, whoever's responsible, I mean, if I hold people accountable and I use whether my chief of staff or my, you know, my, uh, my staff that we're doing this and I'm looking at, then I'm going to hold someone accountable.
But basically the buck stops with me.
Manchin, as I say, is probably looking at the possibility of starting a swing bloc with Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate of the United States.
Now, you'll recall that this would have made a lot more of a difference if Republicans had not actually done so poorly in the United States senatorial election last time around.
However, it would make a difference if Manchin and Sinema actually formed sort of their own bloc.
That would make a very large-scale difference against Joe Biden.
Manchin actually says he might not run as a Democrat next time.
If you run for office in 2024, are you going to run as a Democrat?
Chuck, I haven't made a decision what I'm going to do in 2024.
I've got two years ahead of me now to do the best I can for the state and for my country.
What's on the table?
Is re-election on the table?
Everything's on the table.
Is running for governor on the table or no?
No, I've done that.
That you've ruled out?
I've done that.
So everything on the table, there's basically only one other thing.
The presidency.
Is that something you would do outside the Democratic Party?
The only thing I can tell you is what I will do is whatever I can when I make my decision, what I think is the best that I can support and represent the people of West Virginia, but also be true to this country and the Constitution of this country.
Okay, so Manchin obviously is trying to reorient himself away from Joe Biden.
That means he may join the Republicans in trying to exert some sort of pressure on Biden with regard to the debt ceiling.
Okay, speaking of that, Senator Joe Manchin, he says that it would be a mistake for Joe Biden not to negotiate on the debt ceiling.
He says, listen, we could come to some sort of deal here.
Stop pretending that there's no deal to be cut at all, President Biden.
Let's turn to the debt ceiling.
The White House says that they want Congress to pass a clean debt ceiling increase.
No negotiations with Republicans at all.
Is that a mistake?
I think it's a mistake, because we have to negotiate.
This is a democracy that we have.
We have a two-party system, if you will.
And we should be able to talk and find out where our differences are.
And if they're irreconcilable, then you have to move on from there and let the people make their decisions.
Manchin happens to be correct about this.
It's always funny how the language becomes, you're holding somebody hostage when a negotiation takes place that you just don't like.
So the White House's Jared Bernstein, who's on the chief, I believe he's the chief economic advisor to President Biden.
He says the GOP can't hold the economy hostage over the debt.
Well, doesn't it work both ways?
Isn't Joe Biden holding the economy hostage over the debt?
He's saying he literally will not negotiate on spending at all unless he's able to just raise the debt limit.
So, which side is being intransigent?
The answer is both sides are being intransigent.
Trying to pretend that one side is being intransigent and the other side is not is ridiculous.
The difference is that Republicans are being intransigent in the interests of the future of the country by attempting to at least lower the $31 trillion debt.
Joe Biden's like, I want to spend as much money as I want.
And if you won't let me take out another credit card, well then you're holding the country hostage.
Here's Jerry Bernstein making that particular case.
Why won't the White House initiate some conversations over the debt limit?
Kevin McCarthy signed an increase without any negotiations, with any conditions, three times under President Trump.
So if they want to talk about fiscal responsibility, bring it on.
If they want to hold the economy hostage and threaten a default to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare, nope.
He's not there for that.
Okay, so I'm just confused for a second.
You're telling me that the Republicans moved with Trump to raise the debt ceiling and did it in clean fashion, and you're surprised that they're putting some sort of pressure on Joe Biden?
Why?
Wouldn't Democrats presumably do the same thing if they'd been in control of Congress while President Trump was president?
Stop pretending that this is about principle.
It's not.
What this is really about is that the Democrats constantly want to increase the amount of money they are spending, no matter the consequences.
They do have the help of the press in this.
The New York Times ran a piece over the weekend titled, How the U.S.
Government Amassed $31 Trillion in Debt.
Their answer was tax cuts.
Okay, guys, it's not the tax cuts.
It's the spending.
It's the spending.
Pretending that allowing the American people to keep their own money is what contributes to the debt, as opposed to, you know, spending money you don't have.
That's ridiculous.
This is like your parents give you a $20 allowance.
You go and you spend $50.
You're like, well, it's really my parents' fault for not giving me a $40 allowance.
No, it's your fault for spending $50.
I'm sorry.
You can't pretend that your parents keeping their own money somehow alleviates your responsibility for spending within your means.
The American people are not there to subsidize your drug-like spending habit over at the federal government.
But according to the New York Times, that's exactly what they're there for.
Most money, actually, according to the New York Times, belongs fundamentally to the federal government, and they allow you to keep some every so often.
So a tax cut is really the problem.
According to the New York Times, quote, America's debt is now six times what it was at the start of the 21st century.
It is the largest it has been compared with the size of the U.S.
economy since World War II.
It's projected to grow on average about $1.3 trillion a year for the next decade.
The United States hit its $31.4 trillion legal limit on borrowing this past week, putting Washington on the brink of another fiscal showdown.
Republicans are refusing to raise that limit unless President Biden agrees to steep spending cuts, echoing a partisan standoff that has played out multiple times in the past two decades.
But America's ballooning debt is the result of choices made by both Republicans and Democrats.
Since 2000, politicians from both parties have made a habit of borrowing money to finance wars, tax cuts, expanded federal spending, care for baby boomers, and emergency measures to help the nation endure two debilitating recessions.
There have been bipartisan tax cuts and bipartisan spending increases driving that growth, said Maya McGuinness, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and perhaps the preeminent deficit hawk in Washington.
It's not the simple story of Republicans cut taxes and Democrats grow spending.
Actually, they all like to do all of it.
Well, no.
Republicans like to cut taxes and grow spending, and Democrats just like to grow the spending.
They don't like to cut the taxes.
So, again, Democrats don't want to raise the taxes to, like, Norwegian levels.
They're not interested in the sort of Scandinavian tax program that Bernie Sanders has on tap.
But pretending that this is about the tax cuts as opposed to the spending habit that both parties have engaged in for literally decades is really, really silly.
And again, puts the onus on the American people to fund all of this when the onus really should be on the federal government to cut.
Now, at a certain point, the American people are going to have to take responsibility for the fact that they keep saying that they want the spending cut, and then they refuse to name exactly what kind of spending they wish to have cut.
But a negotiation should take place, and good for Joe Manchin, and good for the Republicans for at least saying they want to do that.
The question is, what concessions can they say that they will try to exact from President Biden?
This is an opportunity to point out specific things they want Joe Biden to do, and then they should say to him, You're willing to sink the American economy because you won't cut X, Y, and Z, where X, Y, and Z are unpopular programs?
That is the way that you do all of this.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to happy talk his way through what is an economic downturn.
Joe Biden over the weekend says, our plan is working, guys.
The plan is doing great.
Well, that comes as a surprise to the 12,000 members of the Google team who were cut over the weekend.
Now, two years in, it's clearer than ever that our plan's working.
We're building the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not just the top down.
I'm sorry, he's so boring.
Everything he says is just a terrible bumper sticker.
The bottom out and the middle in and the top down and the outside in and inside out and move it all about.
Meanwhile, Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, he points out the real problem here, which is that the Federal Reserve looks as though it is slowing its rate of interest rate increases.
The idea here, presumably, is that, well, you know, those inflation rates are coming down, they're coming down fast, so they should be real careful about increasing those interest rates.
And Larry Summers is like, guys, you're going to miss the target here.
You're not going to be able to land the plane.
You're going to increase the interest rates, but you're going to do so at too low a rate to actually curb the inflation.
You're going to end up with stagflation again.
Here's Larry Summers, who's the only person who happened to be right on this over the course of the last couple of years.
Transitory factors have contributed to the declines that we have seen in inflation.
And as in many journeys, the last part of the journey is often the hardest.
And that's true with respect to a return to the inflation target.
The greatest tragedy in this moment would be if central banks were to lurch away from a focus on assuring price stability prematurely, and we were to have to fight this battle twice.
He happens to be correct about this.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is preparing to only increase those interest rates at a much lower rate.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve officials are preparing to slow interest rate increases for the second straight meeting and debate how much higher to raise them after getting more confidence that inflation will ease further this year.
I have a feeling that if they take the current trends as indicative of future trends, that is a large-scale mistake, as Larry Summers is suggesting.
and inflation they would need to see before pausing rate rises this spring. In recent public statements and interviews, Fed officials have said slowing the pace of rate increases to a more traditional quarter percentage point would give them more time to assess the impact of their increases so far as they determine where to stop. I have a feeling that if they take the current trends as indicative of future trends, that is a large scale mistake as Larry Summers is suggesting. Okay, meanwhile, it's kind of fascinating.
Nancy Pelosi over the weekend recognized that Democrats basically lost the House because of crime.
This happens to be correct.
She's not wrong about all of this.
She told the New York Times over the weekend in an interview with Maureen Dowd that one of the reasons that Democrats lost the House of Representatives is specifically because of the crime issue.
Which, again, look at the map and that's true.
Democrats lost a bunch of seats in New York they probably should not have lost.
Dowd wrote about her sit-in with Pelosi, quote, That's not wrong.
And Joe Biden's beginning to realize that also, is that moving forward, if Democrats continue to leave the crime issue on the table, they're going to pay the price.
The problem is they're sort of boxed in.
So over the weekend, Joe Biden, for example, told mayors, a group of mayors, they actually need more police, that defund the police is really, really stupid.
I'm glad he's saying it.
I just wish he actually and his party actually believed it.
And by the way, you know, when a cop turns up in a domestic violence case or someone's standing on the edge of a bridge, they don't need a cop, they need a psychologist with them.
That's why we're putting more people... No, I'm serious!
We're beginning to understand this all again.
And a lot of you are applying for the money and using it for these mental health issues as well.
You know, there are countless examples.
When it comes to public safety, when it comes to public safety, we know the answer is not to defund the police.
Now, notice that he's actually arguing in that clip.
He says don't defund the police.
But the problem is he's boxing by his own party.
So he's saying don't defund the police.
And then he's saying, actually, take all the money that you're using for the police and shift it over to mental health specialists.
And then he's also saying that the police are mistrained, that they're always shooting to kill as opposed to shooting to wound or something.
Why police are trained to shoot to kill?
Because no one on planet Earth can do the Jack Bauer thing of being 200 yards away from somebody with a handgun and shooting them in the knee to incapacitate them.
That's not real, but Joe Biden lives in fantasy land and so do many Democrats on this sort of stuff.
You know, when I was coming up as a kid, you know, cops were required to learn to shoot to kill.
Well, you ought to be able to shoot to stop.
You know, everything shouldn't be an extreme.
So the way we train police officers is changing.
We should actually train them that they should shoot people in the finger, in their trigger finger.
And that way, if they hit them right in the trigger finger, then they won't be able to shoot anymore because they won't have a trigger finger.
Or maybe they can shoot them right in the ear.
Like at the tip of the ear.
Just a warning shot.
Bam!
Right in the ear.
Guys, maybe the reason that you did poorly in the last election because of crime is because you are bad on crime.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So over the weekend, officials said that there was a gunman who killed 10 in California.
There's a mass shooting over in Torrance.
The suspect was found dead.
Not before the mass shooting, obviously.
According to the New York Times, the man saw it in the late night slaying of 10 people at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, California.
Again, this is just the latest example of serious, deadly violence in Los Angeles where they've had skyrocketing crime rates over the course of the last several years.
hunt across the Los Angeles region.
Officials offered no motive for the rampage.
They said they believe that the gunman tried to carry out a second attack nearby.
Again, this is just the latest example of serious, deadly violence in Los Angeles where they've had skyrocketing crime rates over the course of the last several years.
The good news is that the LAPD is now banning the thin blue line flag as an expression of solidarity with police officers who have been killed on the job.
I can't imagine why crime rates are spiraling out of control.
Maybe it's because you have morons at the top of the police policy who are trying to mirror the perceptions of Joe Biden, who are trying to mirror the perception that it's the police.
You know, they keep doing this stuff that alienates people, like wearing uniforms and mourning dead cops.
It's just the worst.
I can't believe that they're doing that sort of stuff.
If only they would stop mourning the dead cops, probably there would be fewer criminals.
According to Yahoo!
to others, the black and white American flag with a single blue stripe is a potent symbol of the ties between white right-wing extremism and American law enforcement.
The tension between those irreconcilable interpretations spilled over in the LAPD this month, when Chief Michael Moore ordered the flag, which was widely displayed in station lobbies around the city, to be removed from public view.
Well, I mean, listen, as long as the cops have to fly a Pride Progress flag, I think that in the American way, it's been upheld.
I mean, honestly, unless every police uniform is replaced with a YMCA logo, I think that pretty... How can we expect violence to go down?
Along with banning the flag from station lobbies, Moore said his order includes patches on uniforms and bumper stickers on police vehicles.
Violators could face discipline, a department spokesperson said on Thursday.
In an apartment-wide email, Moore said the flag's original meaning of support for police had been overshadowed when it began appearing at rallies for the Proud Boys and other far-right extremist groups. Well, I mean, you could say the same about the American flag, which has appeared from right to left. But apparently, as long as some bad guy flies the flag, now cops have to be stopped from flying a flag that symbolizes honor for police officers who have been slain in the line of duty.
He said, it's unfortunate that extremist groups have hijacked the use of the thin blue line flags to symbolize their undemocratic, racist, and bigoted views.
Flags serve as powerful symbols with specific meanings. So yeah, I'm sure that this is, it's a great way to fight crime.
You guys are doing an amazing job.
Just an amazing job.
Speaking of doing an amazing job in terms of fighting crime, obviously things are going incredibly well over in Atlanta.
Over the weekend, according to the New York Post, an angry crowd took to the streets of Atlanta on Saturday night, smashing windows, torching a police car in response to the death of a 26-year-old protester on Wednesday, reports said.
By the way, when they say 26-year-old protester, they mean someone who shout at police.
Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sherbaum told reporters multiple protesters were found with explosive devices on them.
One of the devices was used to set an Atlanta police car on fire.
So those would not be protesters, those would be violent rioters.
I've been to protests before, and see, the way that I can tell the difference between a protester and a violent rioter is that protesters don't have a bomb on them.
I know, it's subtle.
It's a subtle thing.
Protesters who hit the streets after calling for a night of rage by Antifa members were also seen throwing bricks at the Atlanta Police Department vehicles and smashing property, largely in black neighborhoods.
They had a bunch of spoiled white rich kids throwing bricks through the windows of black businesses, you know, in the name of social justice and all.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp condemned the protesters' actions on Saturday night.
He said violence and unlawful destruction of property are not acts of protest.
They are crimes that will not be tolerated in Georgia and will be prosecuted fully.
Apparently, the protests began peacefully marching in the city around 5 p.m., when some members then began smashing property.
The mayhem came after a person named Manuel Esteban Pérez Terán was shot and killed by Georgia State Patrol troopers who were trying to clear protesters camping near the site of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, dubbed Cop City.
So what exactly did Pérez do?
He shot and wounded a police officer.
And the media covered this as though a peaceful protester had been slain by the police, as always.
media coverage helps facilitate this sort of rioting. And then there were headlines that were coming out of Atlanta after half the city got burned, or at least after significant violence took place, suggesting that these were peaceful protests. It really is an amazing thing how the media will go out of its way to determine based on political causes whether something is a political protest or whether it is a violence act of rage.
If it's a right-wing thing, then you have to ban every symbol associated with it, up to and including totally legit symbols like the thin blue line.
But, if it's Antifa burning down a city, you have to say that it's mostly peaceful.
By the way, the footage from the Atlanta Antifa Night of Rage, pretty ugly stuff, guys.
It didn't go amazing over there.
We now understand they're marching through the streets of downtown Atlanta.
Courtney Francisco, our reporter, is there with them.
Courtney, what's going on?
Well, right now we're walking toward what we see here.
Chase Bank, the Hard Rock Cafe.
Police presence swarming downtown, but you can see fire are working to extinguish that right now.
We've also seen windows broken out.
At what I believe is a hotel.
And over here to my right, you can see officers are setting up some caution tape to rope this off.
A bunch of people, by the way, were in fact charged for their crimes.
Virtually all of them are white.
I believe all of them, actually, are white.
So, just excellent job, as always, by the Antifa dopes, as well as the media that seems tempted always to cover for Antifa's violations in the name of, presumably, their political agenda.
Okay, meanwhile, a continuation of a shocking story that was reported by Luke Rozsiak last week.
So Luke Rozsiak, the investigative reporter here at Daily Wire, last week, he reported on a shocking story of a 14-year-old who was found sexually assaulted and trafficked in Texas after she had fled her home.
She ran away from home.
She was 14 years old, claiming she was transgender.
She ran to Maryland.
She was then found with a pedophile.
We're an alleged pedophile.
And then instead of the state returning her to her parents, they said her parents, her adopted parents, her grandparents, that they apparently were not in line with her new gender identity.
They called her a her.
And so she couldn't be put back with them.
So instead they placed her in a Marilyn Foster home.
She ran away and she ended up being sex trafficked in Texas.
Well, now it turns out, where exactly did she come up with the idea that she was a boy in the first place?
At school, of course!
According to The Federalist, in August 2021, by concealing a teen's newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia's Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once but twice.
When the FBI found Sage in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her and not affirming her as a male.
Housed in the boy's quarters of a children's home away from her parents, she told her mother she was assaulted again.
The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Apparently, Sage was essentially mainlined into all of this stuff in school.
Sage is a slight pretty 15 year old girl with elfin features and an edgy style.
Recently reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom, quote, So, basically, her school apparently started socially transitioning her.
person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it. I just wanted to have friends." So basically, her school apparently started socially transitioning her.
They started calling her by a male name. School records indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents.
Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during her first week of school that since she identified as a male, she could use the boys' bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they don't capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom.
Boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with a knife, violence and rape, and even shoving her up against a hallway wall.
On August 23rd, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boy's bathroom and encountered hostile boys there.
The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurse's bathroom for safety reasons.
Again, they never actually contacted the parents.
By the time they did contact the parents, Sage was basically gone.
When you have educational institutions that are outright participating in the sexual indoctrination and destruction of children, our society has gone irredeemably awry.
How bad is this particular situation?
The situation is so bad that even the New York Times is beginning to notice this.
I know that here's how it works in the world of transgender coverage.
First, the transgender movement comes out with a statement that is just not true.
A statement like, boys can be girls.
Then, somebody argues with it.
Somebody says, that's not true.
And then, the media immediately label that person a bigot, and a transphobe, and a terrible person.
And they say it's absolutely untrue.
And, if you oppose the original argument, then this must mean you want trans people to die, or some such nonsense.
Right?
J.K.
Rowling is a murderer, is the argument.
Then, about two years later, the New York Times reports the counter-argument that was always correct.
So now the New York Times, shockingly enough, is actually reporting that maybe schools should not be socially transitioning kids without making parents aware.
Quote, Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.
When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that at his request, teenage teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy's bathroom and calling him by male pronouns.
Mrs. Bradshaw was confused.
Didn't the school need her permission?
Or at least need a teller?
It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know.
District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.
His.
It's a girl.
There was never any word from anyone to let us know that on paper and in the classroom our daughter was our son, Mrs. Bradshaw said.
The Bradshaws have been startled to find themselves at odds with the school over their right to know about and weigh in on such major developments in their child's life, a dispute that illustrates how school districts, which have long been a battleground in cultural conflicts over gender and sexuality, are now facing wrenching new tensions over how to accommodate transgender children.
The Bradshaws accepted their teenager's new gender identity, but not without trepidation, especially after he asked for hormones and surgery to remove his breasts.
Doctors had previously diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum.
The reason I read it that way is because one of the things that they found at the Tavistock Children's Clinic in Britain, which was just shut down, is that there's a wildly disproportionate number of autistic kids who had been mainlined into transgender ideology and then mutilated.
Doctors had previously diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum, as well as with ADD, PTSD, and anxiety.
He had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic, and to his parents, seemed not to know exactly who he was, because he had repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation.
Given those complexities, Mrs. Bradshaw said she resented the fact the school had made her feel like a bad parent, for wondering whether educators had put her teenager or minor on a path the school wasn't qualified to oversee.
It felt like a parenting stab in the back from the school system, she said.
It should have been a decision we made as a family.
The student, now 16, told the New York Times his school had provided him with a space to be himself he otherwise lacked.
He had tried to come out to his parents before, he said, but they didn't take it seriously, which is why he asked his school for support.
This is absurd.
Schools have pointed to research that shows that inclusive policies benefit all students, which is why some education experts advise schools to use students' preferred names and pronouns.
Educators have also said they feel bound by their own morality to affirm students' gender identities, especially in cases where students don't feel safe coming out at home.
Wait, so why are educators' sense of personal identity and morality the issue here?
Who hired them to do this?
Who allowed them to pervert children this way?
There's no other arena of American life where you would allow a teacher to pervert a child this way.
Seriously, a child comes to school and says, I'm a sex addict.
A child comes to school and says, I'm engaged in sex with an older person.
That's immediately reported to police and or to parents.
A child says, I want an aspirin, and that gets reported to parents.
A child comes to school and says, I am a member of the opposite sex.
And the teacher's like, well, my moral scruples say that it's my job to help socially transition the kid.
The key line in this article from the New York Times, by the way, is this one.
Many advocates for LGBTQ youth counter that parents should stop scapegoating schools and instead ask themselves why they don't believe their children.
There's no legitimate room for debate, according to these advocates for LGBTQ youth.
They are your surrogate parents.
They're stealing your kids.
And then they are pretending that they are the advocates of good.
They said ensuring schools provide enough support for trans students is more crucial than ever, given the rise of legislation that blocks their access to bathrooms, sports, and gender-affirming care.
Every state in the union needs to immediately pursue legislation that forces educators to let parents know what the hell is going on at these schools.
This is perversion.
It is a form of ideological grooming, at the very least.
It is the destruction of children in the name of a perverse ideology.
It is godless nonsense, and logicless nonsense, and reasonless nonsense.
And it has serious, real consequences.
From every kid who's being indoctrinated into this crap, to specific kids who end up sex-trafficked in Texas because schools decided to lie to their parents in the first place.
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 the notion from the media that Israel is turning into a fascist country.
It's absurd.
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