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Feb. 6, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:56

Getting Satanic At The Grammys | Ep. 1662

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Time	Text
	Joe Biden orders the shoot down of a Chinese spy balloon after it traverses the entire continental United States.
	Disney Plus goes woker and woker, and we examine the wildest moments from the Grammys.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	And I know that pretty much no one in my audience listened or watched the Grammys last night.
	Because we had better things to do.
	Shampooing our hair.
	Hanging ourselves.
	I mean, there are many things that would have been better than watching the Grammys last night.
	But it is important to note what happens at major cultural events.
	Largely because it exposes the minds and the souls of the people who produce these events and the people who shape your kids.
	Because while you may not be listening to the music of Harry Styles, while you may not be engaging with the absurdities of Sam Smith, there's a good shot that your kids are, or that their friends are, or that people in the culture who shape them Are.
	And that's a real problem.
	Because, you know, well, we can easily say it's performed of Pearl clutching me, worrying about what they do at the Grammys.
	They're obviously trying to be provocative.
	They're trying to be transgressive.
	You can go all the way back to David Bowie and Madonna.
	What we saw last night at the Grammys was actually something that was rather new in kind, because it wasn't just transgressivism in the sense that it was adopting symbols of religion, for example, in order to sort of shame those symbols of religion, the same way that Madonna Sort of tried to cross the virgin whore boundaries in her imagistics.
	What we saw last night was a full-scale embrace of Satanism on a major American network show.
	That's an amazing thing.
	And it's an amazing thing because what it really speaks to in a much deeper way is what Western culture now has to say about evil and the nature of good.
	Because it is one thing to say that you don't like the structures of religion.
	It is another thing to full on embrace Satanism.
	And, you know, people can can say, again, it's just it's just imagery.
	What are you making a big deal here for?
	What?
	Why?
	Why do you think this is a big?
	This is the thing the left loves to do.
	I've talked about it a lot on the show, the face tattoo syndrome.
	They do something unbelievably transgressive, something that is supposed to be shocking.
	And then when you are shocked and appalled by it, they say, why are you so shocked?
	Why are you paying attention to it?
	Why are you even noticing?
	We're noticing because you said it's important to do this.
	It was you.
	You decided this was an important thing to do.
	And now we're noticing it.
	And now we're analyzing why it's an important thing.
	And it really is an important thing because of course the imagery of Satan is nothing new.
	The imagery of Satan goes back several thousand years.
	There are references to Satan in the Hebrew Bible.
	There are references obviously throughout Christian theology to Satan.
	But it's the picture of the sort of modern Satan as a good character.
	That I think is worthy of note here.
	The reason I'm bringing this up for folks who missed the Grammys, you know, like nearly all of you, is because last night, Sam Smith and a person named Kim Petras did a number in which they full-on embraced Satanism.
	I mean, full-on embraced Satanism.
	We'll get to that in a moment.
	To sort of set the stage, you have to understand that this is a group of mainstream left-wing cultural icons.
	Those are the people who are in the room.
	So mainstream, in fact, that one of the people who actually was brought on to give the the top award was the current president of the United States, Dr. Joe Biden, the greatest doctor of all time, and also the president, because our current president is basically a meat puppet and and does not have the capacity to actually operate in the real world.
	He cannot even spew words from his face in some sort of coherent fashion.
	So, Dr. Joe Biden, this is how mainstream the Grammys is.
	It's not some sort of fringe satanic ritual.
	It's satanic rituals front and center at a major public event.
	So the event started off with Trevor Noah, who is one of the least funny people on earth, opening up with a Trump joke.
	Because why not?
	Why not?
	Why would you ever make a joke about the people who are in the room?
	You're going to make a joke about all the people that you hate, which is all the people who are not in the room, obviously.
	That album is so fire, it makes Trump want to learn Spanish.
	That's what it does.
	This is it, people!
	Welcome to the Grammys, everybody!
	Welcome to it!
	We made it!
	We're back!
	And I'm lucky enough to be back as your host tonight.
	My job is to be your eyes, your ears.
	I'll be floating around this room.
	Think of me like a Chinese spy balloon.
	That's what I'm doing right now.
	Gathering all the information you want because this is the room.
	This is the room where it all goes down.
	Just look around.
	Look at all the faces.
	We got the best musicians, the best performers, best producers in the world.
	Yeah.
	Every song on TikTok that you hear, there are people who made them.
	This is them.
	Okay, and by the way, he is correct.
	These are the cultural influencers.
	These are the people who make the culture in which your kids engage.
	And of course he went on, he praised Harry Styles because Harry Styles is of course the sexiest, androgynous person in the room.
	Here he was praising Harry Styles for wearing women's underwear.
	What can you say about this man that hasn't been said, huh?
	Incredible album, mind-blowing tour, what is it, 15-night run at MSG and the Forum, huh?
	Women throw their panties at this man!
	And then he puts them on, and he looks better in them than they do!
	Easily the world's sexiest man!
	Are you kidding?
	There's no competition!
	Sex symbol of the globe, especially now that they killed off the green M&M.
	No competition.
	In a second, we're gonna get to the satanic aspect of the Grammys, which ties into a broader sort of Intellectual rubric.
	First, if we're talking about people who should not be trusted with your kids, we're talking about these people.
	If we're talking about people who should not be trusted with your data, we're talking about big tech.
	How would it feel if you were at a coffee shop and you're sitting there and just going through your emails and then you're like, oh, you know, I need to hit the restroom.
	So you move on over to the restroom, but you leave your laptop on the table.
	Crucial mistake.
	You come back and Harry Styles is just browsing for women's underwear on your laptop.
	You'd feel real bad about yourself.
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	Alrighty, so.
	All of this was lead up to the satanic ritual that took place on stage last night.
	So, the person who performed the satanic ritual is someone we featured in Deconstructing the Culture the other night.
	And that person is Sam Smith.
	Sam Smith originally identified as a gay dude, and everybody just kind of shrugged and went, uh, okay.
	And then he identified as genderfluid, and everybody was like, I don't even know what that means, it's not a real thing.
	And now he identifies as non-binary, which is also not a real thing.
	So he is an overweight man prancing around in bizarre costumes and warbling.
	And he was joined on stage by a person named Kim Petras, who at the time that he became a she, was 16 years old.
	So excellent parenting job and excellent medical job, Britain.
	And Kim Petras had sort of been out in the wilderness until Sam Smith brought him back in.
	And they together created a song called Unholy.
	So this is two white males.
	It is a gender non-binary white male who's a male and a trans woman who is a white male celebrating as they win an award for Unholy.
	I guess they won last night Best Pop Duo and Group Performance and performed a full-on satanic ritual at the Grammys.
	I love you so much and this song has been such an incredible, incredible journey for me and Sam has been a supporter of mine for so long.
	Sam graciously wanted me to accept this award because I'm the first transgender woman to win this award.
	And I'm so...
	So much celebration.
	So much cheering.
	Thank you.
	And I just want to thank all the incredible transgender legends before me who kicked these doors open for me so I could be here tonight.
	Okay, and this brings us to the actual performance.
	So to understand just how bad the performance was, and what the song Unholy is about, you actually have to see it.
	So here's what it looked like.
	Okay, so for those who can't see, this is Kim Petras in a cage surrounded by strippers.
	And Sam Smith shows up wearing a Satan hat and is sponsored by Pfizer.
	So, two on the nose, God.
	Sorry.
	Satan, sponsored by Pfizer.
	Wow, just well done right there.
	The actual full performance has Sam Smith gallivanting around in a devil costume, wearing like a top hat with devil horns and surrounded by strippers, both male and female is my understanding, or trans.
	It's all a lot of fun.
	The lyrics to the song are, Mommy don't know, Daddy's getting hot at the body shop doing something unholy.
	So that's great.
	So why is any of this important?
	Well, it turns out that I think that the iconography with regard to Satan actually kind of is important because it's embedded deep in the Western psyche.
	What Satan is and what Satan isn't, whether that is good or not.
	By the way, you know who agrees with this?
	is Kim Petras, who said, quote, I think a lot of people honestly have kind of labeled what I stand for and what Sam stands for as religiously not cool.
	I personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but slowly realizing it didn't want me to be a part of it.
	So it's a take on not being able to choose religion and not being able to live the way that people might want you to live, because as a trans person, I'm already not kind of wanted in religion.
	So we were doing a take on that.
	And I was kind of hell keeper Kim.
	So the whole video is flames emerging in the background and people wearing devil uniforms and prancing around in costume and all the rest.
	So normally, you would just say, OK, this is normal kind of garbage transgressivism on the Grammys, whether it's Madonna lip locking Britney Spears or Britney Spears dancing around with a snake around her, or whether you're talking about Madonna gallivanting around doing silly things in sort of a Madonna in a Virgin Mary outfit during like this sort of thing has a long record.
	But the full on embrace of Satanism is important in the sense that, again, There are certain icons in Western intellectual history that, how we view them, sort of speaks about what our culture is.
	And the fact that you have an entire side of the cultural aisle that has now embraced Satan as a symbol, I don't think is by accident.
	To sort of understand this, I think we have to take a look at how Satan has been perceived over the course of Western civilization for the past couple of centuries.
	So, way back when, John Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
	Paradise Lost is still the single best sort of articulation of the Western view of what Satan is.
	It's sort of a complex view, an interesting view of who Satan is.
	Satan is not just a malevolent monster.
	Satan has his own drive.
	Satan is somebody who has been cast down from heaven.
	And Satan has come to be seen by the progressive left, and this has been true for a couple of centuries, as a heroic figure.
	This is not how John Milton meant for Satan to be interpreted in Paradise Lost.
	Paradise Lost was written in the 17th century.
	John Milton was a religious Christian.
	The way that he wrote Satan, however, inspires many people who don't like religion and who believe that the highest possible good is your individual sense of self-satisfaction.
	Satan in Paradise Lost very famously says, in my choice to reign is worth ambition though in hell, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
	It's the big kind of tagline for Satan in Paradise Lost is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
	And the whole reason that Satan rebels against God is not because he actually thinks that God is morally wrong.
	It's because he believes that individual autonomy, that his sense of power, is more important than anything.
	He rebels against God specifically because God demands good things of him.
	Not because he thinks that God is demanding bad things of him, but because he recognizes that God stands for a higher morality, something good and true.
	He rebels against it specifically for that reason.
	But that rebellion, for large parts of the transgressive mind over the course of the last several centuries, That rebellion is heroic in this view, and that has now become the full-fledged view of so many on the left, and they don't even know that this is the case.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Okay, so.
	Talking about Satan in Paradise Lost.
	So, again, the vision of Satan in Paradise Lost, and Milton is making Satan the villain, is that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
	Namely, individual autonomy, my sense of self-satisfaction, my sense of power, is much more important than any sense of good or true.
	And one person, a romantic poet, who really bought into the idea that Satan was the good guy in Paradise Lost was Percy Shelley.
	Percy Shelley, his wife, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
	Percy Shelley, of course, is a very famous romantic poet.
	And here is what he wrote about Milton's devil.
	Quote, Milton's devil as a moral being is far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose, which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture.
	So what exactly is the purpose of Satan?
	And when you look at Paradise Lost, what exactly is Satan's purpose?
	The answer is not that Satan seeks to do something good for others.
	He explicitly acknowledges he's not doing anything good for others.
	His purpose is, I refuse to be bossed around.
	I refuse to abide by standards of good and true that I don't personally enjoy or personally like.
	I prefer to rule myself than to be ruled by something that is good and true and good for other people.
	And so in order to see Satan as a sort of hero, what you have to do is see society and its rules and religion and its strictures.
	As a, as a, a chain upon you.
	Something you have to wear.
	And this is exactly what Shelley said.
	The reason that he really saw Satan as a hero is because he hated religion.
	He saw the strictures of religion and the rules and roles that are created by religion as inherently bad.
	He said, religion and morality as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude.
	The genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God.
	Your man can read the inscription on his heart.
	How would morality dressed up in the stiff stays and finery start from her own disgusting image?
	Should she look in the mirror of nature?
	He's talking about how the only thing that you should be answerable to is your own sense of happiness.
	It sounds incredibly modern.
	Percy Shelley is writing at the beginning of the 19th century and this sounds really, really modern.
	He's talking about how the only thing that you should be answerable to is your own sense of happiness.
	And if that happiness can only be achieved by casting off all societal rules, all responsibilities to other people, all goods that actually achieve good and happy for enormous numbers of people, If the only way to achieve your own sense of happiness in the moment, your own sense of sexual joy in the moment, is to throw away everything else, you throw away everything else.
	And that's why Satan is the good guy.
	This is why, for example, Percy Shelley was a big advocate of the idea that all sexual unions between two people should end as soon as some sort of obligation that makes you feel bad about yourself attaches.
	So he said, quote, If happiness be the object of morality, if all human unions and disunion, if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, Then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits.
	There is nothing immoral in the separation.
	In other words, marriage is bad because marriage requires you to stick with a person for whom you may not have a joyous feeling at the moment.
	At the very instant when your pleasurable sensations mitigate at that very instant, You are now allowed to, and not only allowed, you should be obligated by Percy Shelley's moral system to break all the ties that bind, to throw away your morality, throw away your sense of responsibility.
	And that's what you're seeing at the Grammys.
	What you're seeing at the Grammys is the dumbed down, incredibly stupid version of what Percy Shelley is saying in the early 19th century.
	He's basically saying that morality, religion, rules, all of that stuff is bad.
	True happiness is the thing that lies within.
	And that's why Satan is the good guy.
	Satan is good because Satan encourages you to worship yourself.
	Satan, he wants you to worship him, but the way that you worship him is first you worship yourself.
	You are basically the conduit for Satan.
	Worshipping your sense of sexual joy, worshipping your sense of subjective happiness at the expense of everyone else, at the expense of broader standards of morality, or true, or good, or beautiful.
	If you can do all those things, then Satan is standing right behind that.
	That's always the case, by the way, that religion is made.
	And so what's happened now is that true Satan worshipers, I don't mean people who are like going in the back room and killing chickens or something, but people who worship that idea, they've now embraced it and done so openly instead of holding satanic rituals on national television.
	And they're out there basically saying, you're right.
	You're right.
	You say that my selfishness is backed by Satan.
	You're right.
	And you know what?
	Satan is the guy I like.
	I'm into it.
	He's great.
	Now again, there are people on the left going to say, why are you making a big deal out of this?
	We're just tweaking you.
	That's the whole point.
	We know you're tweaking us.
	We're aware.
	We're aware that you're attempting to offend.
	And it's not that I'm offended as much as I think it is a very, very clear view into who you are if you think that this sort of thing is good.
	By the way, they think that this is good for children.
	If you think that this is just directed at adults, you are wrong.
	It is directly attempting to reach children.
	Because that's what pop culture does.
	Pop culture is popular culture.
	It's about reaching as many human beings as possible.
	This is not for a cadre of sort of elite post-grad doctoral dissertation aesthetes.
	That's not what this is for.
	This is for popular culture.
	They know it bleeds down to kids, and they think it's an act of good that it bleeds down to kids.
	They think that your kids should be indoctrinated in worship of the self, which is the pathway to Satan, and they're fine with that.
	They want that.
	The reason they want that is because then they feel liberated.
	Because, after all, if all the societal strictures go away, then you feel accepted.
	You feel accepted by all the other selfish people who are mostly concerned with what they feel on the inside.
	Now with their obligations to others, now with the standards of morality that create a thriving society with social fabric and a sense of belonging, Then they feel amazing about themselves, but only if they can hijack your kids into feeling the same way about themselves that they feel about themselves.
	And then we'll all have an agreement.
	You do whatever you do.
	I'll do whatever I do.
	And we won't have any sense of social solidarity, except that we all hate the religious people who keep saying this thing about how there's standards of true and right behavior that are good and worth pursuing.
	That is the goal here.
	And how mainstream is all this?
	As I mentioned before, the current president of the United States, Dr. Joe Biden, was at the Grammys.
	I mean, she's she's there.
	She is part of this cultural milieu.
	Ladies and gentlemen, the first lady of the United States, Jill Biden.
	America!
	America, America, may God thy glory shine.
	King of success.
	His politics is religion, religion is politics, and all of it is worship of the self.
	.
	There she is, the greatest of all doctors, Jill Biden.
	Not only can she heal a heart attack with an education degree, but also she is there to celebrate along with some of the most transgressive perverts in America.
	That is, who are attempting to create culture that will bleed down to your children.
	That's what she's there for.
	It's amazing.
	If the left can say, and a tribute to, you know, right-wing political figures, whatever viewpoints are held by whatever events they attend, when you have people like Joe Biden attending events where there's a full satanic performance, you have to wonder why this has become so acceptable for the first lady of the United States and Ersatz president, because again, the president of the United States is no longer sentient and she's got her hand on his hand signing bills, like Edith Wilson circa 1919.
	In just one second, we'll get to the broader attempt by our culture to indoctrinate your kids into particular ideological cults.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Okay.
	So.
	If there is a cultural movement to hijack your kids, and it exists in pop culture, it exists in education, it exists in music, it exists in children's entertainment.
	There's a tweet that went out yesterday that I found particularly kind of evocative of what it is that so many on the left wish to achieve.
	This is a tweet that went out from a person named Kat Tenbarge.
	Kat Tenbarge is a self-proclaimed journalist.
	She's good at the journalism.
	And she's a tech and culture reporter for NBC News.
	Tech and culture reporter.
	And she suggested that You should not be able to raise your own kids.
	The state should raise your kids.
	Quote, parents can teach sex ed to their kids, unquote.
	Can parents name every STD and how they're transmitted?
	Can they teach you how to identify date rape drugs?
	Can they define pelvic floor?
	And more importantly, would they?
	Parents teaching kids backward ideas about sex or not teaching them at all is how we ended up with all these problems.
	So question, what are the problems she's talking about?
	Really, which problems are we discussing here?
	Are we talking about Are we talking about problems of ignorance about pelvic floors, or are we really talking about problems of radically increased teen suicidal ideation, social contagions, and teens identifying as insane sexual and gender categories that do not even exist?
	Are we talking about a 40% out-of-wedlock birth rate in the United States?
	Are we talking about a crisis of loneliness and confusion among young people?
	Because that ain't parents.
	That is a culture dedicated to those propositions.
	But the idea from our cultural betters is that you as a parent should be removed from a position of power in your own child's life.
	You should be removed from a position of teaching morality.
	There's a reason why left-wing moral theoreticians I've always suggested that the family needs to be broken.
	Religious community needs to be broken.
	The places where you normally imbibed your morality, the places that were the traditional sources of wisdom and knowledge handed down over the course of centuries, they needed to be broken so that the individual could be liberated.
	And by liberated, we mean chained to the animalistic side of ourselves and freed of any obligation.
	That's what we actually mean when we say liberated.
	This notion that the state should be the great teacher of you because the state is going to be amazing at teaching your kids about STDs.
	That's really the important thing.
	State advocates have crippled several generations of kids with their perverse morality, suggesting, of course, that sexual pleasure lies at the top of the hierarchical pyramid of values.
	And yet this is what they dictate.
	Our cultural betters suggest this.
	Joe Biden is at the Grammys.
	You got people in the public school system saying that it is an obligation, an obligation to remove you from any level of moral standing with your kids.
	In fact, you may be a threat to your kids.
	This is what lies behind so many attempts by places like the state of California to basically suggest that if a kid goes into school and starts expressing gender confusion, kids should be socially transitioned at school and parents never told because parents are the threat.
	The state is the savior.
	They must indoctrinate your kids in their own sense of morality.
	It's the state, it's the education system in this country.
	It is pop culture.
	And it's also even kids TV.
	And it bleeds down to the view of history.
	Because remember, in order to erect a monument to the individual selfishness that the left wishes to pursue on a social level, what you have to do is you have to tear down the institutions that currently exist.
	Those institutions, as we see at the Grammys, include religion.
	As we see in that tweet, include the power of parents and family.
	And they also include a belief in your country.
	Because if all the social glues are dissolved, then we become a bunch of atomized individuals who are wandering around aimlessly and being obsessed with our own sense of personal sexual satisfaction.
	So one of the ties that binds us, one of the glues that holds us together, is a belief in American history, for example.
	A belief in nationalism.
	If you were to go back to, say, 1950 or 1960, or to go into any small town community in the United States that has a level of social coherence, And cohesion?
	What they'll tell you is a few things hold them together.
	Family.
	Religious community.
	A sense of patriotism for the country.
	If people can dissolve all of those things at the childhood level, they can finally erect a scaffolding that they have wanted to erect for a very long time.
	A tower of Babel to the individual self.
	Part of that, of course, is indoctrinating your kids in a perverse view of American history.
	So, there's a clip that was going around over the weekend.
	That was shocking to those who have never really watched Disney Plus or looked at much of the content that is being promoted on Disney Plus.
	And there's a reason that we here at Daily Wire are dedicating $100 million over the next couple of years to produce children's content.
	It's coming out in very short order, apparently not fast enough.
	DW Kids is going to be a thing specifically because we wish to provide your kids a space where they can believe in traditional values and just learn about the world.
	Because what the left wants to do is prey on your kids and shove into their brains terrible ideas about the country, about morality, about religion, about all the institutions, the intermediate institutions that make life both secure and worth living.
	And so one of the shows that was doing this on Disney Plus is, of course, The Proud Family.
	Here is a clip from The Proud Family that was making the rounds over the weekend.
	It is just false history and nonsense, rage against America being taught to your small kids.
	This country was built on slavery, which means slaves built this country.
	Tilt this land from sea to sea to sea.
	First there was rice, tobacco, sugarcane.
	Then Whitney did his thing and Cotton became king.
	And we were its soldiers, four million strong, fighting for America's freedoms even though we remained America's slaves.
	Built this country, the descendants of slaves continue to be.
	Slaves built this country.
	And we, the descendants of slaves in America, have earned reparations for their suffering.
	And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in the systemic prejudice, racism, and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.
	Slaves built this country.
	Not only field hands, but carpenters, mazes.
	Blacksmiths, musicians.
	Inventors built cities from Jamestown to New Orleans, Sabanaca, and Washington.
	40 acres and a mule.
	We'll take the 40 acres.
	Keith and Mill, we made your families rich!
	From the Southern Plantation heirs, to the Northern Bankers, to the New England ship owners, the Founding Fathers, former Presidents, current Senators, the Illuminati, the New World Order, slaves built this country!
	We had Tubman, Turner, Frederick D, then they slayed Lincoln, freed the slaves, but slaves were men.
	And women.
	And only we can free ourselves.
	Emancipation is not freedom.
	Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, public schools feeding private prisons, where we become slaves again.
	As we celebrate Juneteenth.
	For the umpteenth time.
	Our account is still outstanding.
	Because this country was built on slavery, which means.
	Slaves built this country.
	And we demand our 40 acres and a mule.
	Bump that.
	You can keep the mule.
	Keep the 40.
	We're taking our freedom!
	DUDE!
	Thank you!
	That is a false history of the United States.
	This is basically just 1619 Project garbage.
	It is bled down.
	This is always how it works, is that all this garbage starts at the highest level of critical race theory in our universities, then it bleeds down to the people who write your shows, and then it's your kids who are now learning this in their schools, in a dumbed-down version of the 1619 Project, or on The Proud Family on Disney Channel.
	First of all, the belief system that America was built on the back of slavery, as opposed to all other cultures ever.
	That every institution of the United States is infused with slavery.
	It's a lie.
	The belief that it's Southern wealth that generated American prosperity is also a lie.
	The South was an economic backwater compared to the North.
	Slavery is actually very bad for the economy, as it turns out, which is what the South found out during the Civil War and the North kicked the hell out of them.
	The belief system that people today are owed reparations for sins committed against their great, great, great, great, great grandparents And that every ill in American society today is attributable to slavery is an absurdity.
	And yet this is the crap that they are now mainlining into your kids' heads through TV and making your kids hate the country.
	I mean, I don't know how you emerge from that without your kid thinking our country is evil.
	That, of course, is the entire point of that little woke retelling of American history, straight from Nikole Hannah-Jones and Howard Zinn.
	The idea is America is bad.
	The Founding Fathers, they were all evil slaveholders.
	Lincoln didn't free the slaves.
	Lincoln actually wasn't responsible.
	We freed ourselves.
	That might come as a surprise to the, you know, half a million people who died in the Civil War.
	But again, this basic idea, which is that America is super bad, it's being mainlined.
	You know who actually is the executive producer for this show, by the way.
	The person who is involved in the making of this show is a person named LaToya Ravineau.
	You'll remember LaToya Ravineau.
	She's the executive producer for Disney Television Animation, and she was caught on tape just a few months ago saying, quote, in my little pocket of proud family Disney TVA, the showrunners were super welcoming to my not at all secret gay agenda.
	Maybe it was that way in the past, but I guess something must have happened.
	All the momentum that I felt, that sense of, I don't have to be afraid to have these two characters kiss in the background.
	I was just, wherever I could, adding queerness.
	No one would stop me.
	No one was trying to stop me.
	It's all part of a broader rubric, a broader agenda to indoctrinate your kids.
	This is all part, you know, pretending that these are sort of individual incidents that are sort of cropping up here and there.
	It's not right.
	It's part of a broader It's a part of a broader intellectual framework that says the American institutions are bad.
	Churches are bad.
	Family is bad.
	Worship thyself.
	That's the only thing worth worshiping.
	And maybe some tribal politics that allow you to gain power as an individual.
	That's really what everything here is all about.
	We'll get to Nicole Hannah-Jones bleeding this upward again, you know, back into the intelligentsia in just one second.
	First, with everything going on in the world right now, I'm not getting as much sleep as I should.
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	Also, folks, I've got a timely and important book to share with you today.
	New York Times best-selling author Heather MacDonald has teamed up with DW Books to bring you a powerful new book, When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, relevant to a lot of what we're talking about today.
	Do you believe in fairness and merit?
	Do you care about the future of our society and the institutions that actually shape it?
	This book is for you because there are people out there We want to destroy all of those things.
	When race trumps merit is the name of the book.
	In it, Heather exposes the dangerous consequences of prioritizing race over merit in all aspects of society.
	From science, to music, to law enforcement, our institutions are being eroded and destroyed in the name of equity.
	The book takes a hard look at the impact of the left's pursuit of equity and how it's undermining meritocracy and putting our society at risk.
	Heather provides a clear and sobering analysis on what is happening and what we can expect if we don't actually act.
	Heather's done amazing work for years, debunking many of the myths that the left tries to pervade about systemic racism in the United States.
	If you're interested in understanding the threats of Western civilization and fighting back, do not miss this essential book, When Race Trumps Merit.
	It hits shelves April 18th.
	You can pre-order your copy today at Amazon or wherever books are sold.
	Also, yesterday, I released a brand new episode of my Sunday special.
	It features a very special guest, Anna Kasparian.
	Anna is a really nice person and a fascinating person.
	She and I disagree on nearly everything from health care reform and labor unions to policies that have been a disaster for the state of California.
	But it's a fascinating conversation.
	We discuss our differences.
	Check out the preview.
	For Democrats, stop focusing on scaring people about the scary right-wing candidates and offer them real solutions that you're going to fight for.
	I think that's the only long-lasting winning strategy for Democrats.
	Are they going to do it?
	No, because they're captured by the money.
	This episode is now available to watch on Daily Wire Plus or listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Well, speaking of the indoctrination of our kids, obviously it's not just happening via The Proud Family on Disney Plus, although that is one reason why we've launched DW Kids.
	That programming will be available in shorter.
	It's just a great reason why you should subscribe at dailywireplus.com right now so that You can actually give your kids material that doesn't make them hate their country, or hate their family, or hate their religion, and all of the rest.
	But it's also happening, obviously, in our institutions of higher learning.
	It's part of a broader campaign to dissolve the societal glue that binds us together.
	One of the lead figures in that is, of course, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the wildly over-celebrated pseudo-intellectual who put together the 1619 Project, a pack of lies predicated on the idea that every institution in American society is essentially racist and white supremacist.
	Over the weekend, she was campaigning again for the 1619 Project because Hulu has gotten its institutional power behind this thing.
	Again, remember, all the arbiters of culture are on the side of the people who like satanic celebrations at the Grammys.
	I mean, that's what's happening right here.
	So here, Hulu, they've dedicated presumably tens of millions of dollars to making a lie-filled project like the 1619 Project, promoted by a huckster like Nikole Hannah-Jones.
	Here she was promoting this thing on another huckster network, MSNBC.
	This is your country.
	This is your native land.
	You built this country.
	Your ancestors built this country.
	And in some ways, it is a very patriotic book, just like the 1619 Project is unintentionally patriotic.
	Unintentionally patriotic.
	By unintentionally patriotic, what she means is her entire project is America sucks.
	But the good things about America we're responsible for.
	And by we, she means like progressive leftists on racial matters.
	You weren't doing any such thing.
	suggested that to oppose critical race theory, which again is the theory that that she essentially purveys in dumbed down fashion, that is a propaganda campaign because true American history is a story of suffering and evil.
	You weren't doing any such thing.
	You were saying, let's look at American history in a broader context.
	Absolutely.
	So, I mean, we should just call the anti-critical race theory campaign what it is.
	It's a propaganda campaign, right?
	It was a stoking division for political gain.
	Because, obviously, both critical race theory, the actual critical race theory, and the 1619 Project are not talking about individuals.
	We are talking about systems.
	Yes, that's the whole point.
	By the way, stoking hatred for political gain is the name of her autobiography.
	Nicole Hannah-Jones.
	What a joke she is.
	Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars.
	He was on Fox News debunking the 1619 Project over the weekend.
	Overall, your thought of the book and the Oprah-sponsored series?
	Well, the book is a shameless compilation of misstatements, misrepresentations of the American past.
	Like any other historian, I'm in favor of teaching African-American history, but I would like to see it taught accurately and well.
	All of this bleeds down into actual policy as well.
	We are swimming in an ocean of left-wing ideology that promotes the dissolution of all the ties that bind us together, obviously.
	And what that means is that even basic standards of societal decency have been undermined.
	One of the big projects, for example, of the Biden administration, this is in the very early days of the Biden administration, is in June of 2021, the Biden administration announced that they would like to redo how school discipline is done, to take an example.
	Why?
	Well, it turns out that a disproportionate number of kids who are subjected to school discipline, like being suspended or expelled, are black.
	The reason for that is because unfortunately a disproportionate number of kids who are misbehaving in class in ways that require them to be removed from the classroom are black.
	But the Department of Education was not willing to say that.
	They didn't even establish any sort of data baseline.
	Instead the idea was that if there's any disparity between white suspension rates and black suspension rates, well then It must be systemic racism in the mold of Nicole Hannah-Jones or Ibram X. Kendi.
	Anytime there is a discrepancy, anytime there's a disparity, that means there has been some sort of systemic discrimination.
	So all the way back in June of 2021, the agency announced that it planned to seek public comment on discipline in school climate and quote, how best to support and build schools capacity to promote positive, inclusive, safe and supportive school climates in a non-discriminatory manner.
	Again, the idea being that the only way to end discrimination in schools is to make sure that kids don't get expelled or suspended anymore.
	And what this has led to is an artificial attempt to close racial gaps in suspensions and reduce the use of suspensions in general over the course of the last couple of years.
	The result has been in many cases that you have kids who are acting horribly in class and who are ruining the educational experience for pretty much everybody else.
	And even critics of the current disparities will acknowledge that there is no data, like they've not even bothered to gather data on whether the discrepancy is due to a difference in behavior.
	Brookings Institute had a piece over the weekend talking about it, said, despite positive changes, racial disproportionality in school discipline persists.
	Why is it so hard to close such gaps? What are we missing?
	A close look at research articles and policy debates on this topic suggests researchers and policy makers have been almost exclusively focusing on the end result of discipline suspensions.
	But there's been no attention given to referral and reporting processes.
	But here's the thing.
	They say that the data don't even include, like they don't bother to include, how the kids are actually behaving before they are suspended.
	Quote, it is challenging to tease out the mechanism because researchers almost never observe the underlying student behavior of an infraction.
	Well, then how can you tell whether it's disparity or discrimination?
	How can you tell?
	The reason this has real-world consequences, of course, is because this now bleeds over into media coverage of situations in which school discipline is absolutely necessary.
	So there was a video that was going around over the weekend, and it is a shocking video that was going around over the weekend, and it showed two kids who are black, they're boys, and they're beating the living hell, I mean really beating the living hell, apparently out of a brother and a sister in Homestead, Florida.
	Here's a bit of the video, it's really disturbing.
	It's just boys pummeling.
	And for 40 seconds, 45 seconds, no adult doing anything.
	These boys just pummeling this kid.
	Now, the reason that I bring this up is because there are media headlines that came out.
	They were very reticent to talk about the race of the people who were involved.
	Whereas, obviously, if the races were reversed, then that would be a major news story.
	In fact, there was one particular news story that was making the rounds on the internet, in which they used a stock photo of a kid punching another kid, and the kid punching the other kid was white.
	According to the WSVN network in South Miami-Dade, Florida, disturbing videos of a school bus beating shows two children, who are brother and sister, being pounded by their peers, prompting the victim's mother to take action.
	In the bus riding beating, the 9-year-old girl can be seen bent down in her seat as a teen stood over her and delivered a barrage of blows.
	Another video showed her 10-year-old brother being beaten while on the same school bus.
	The girl suffered bruises on her head, back, and shoulders, leaving her parents fuming and full of questions about how this could have happened to their children.
	The victim's father said, at the same time my daughter was getting beaten, the same thing was happening to my son on the other side of the bus.
	The parents said this is not the first time their daughter and son have been targeted.
	They said they've been bullied at school since they started in January.
	The children's mother said, I've been to the school.
	I've spoken with counselors, principals, assistants, other principals.
	An assistant principal wrote us and she said, I think it's time you take your kids out of the school.
	Our kids aren't the problem, said the kid's father.
	They love to learn.
	It's sad that something they enjoy is becoming something that they are fearing now.
	Now they've pulled the kids out of the school.
	Again, the only thing that should matter is the safety of kids in school.
	But when equity concerns begin to play a role in how we actually discipline children, we got a major problem on our hands.
	And that goes to broader perceptions of society, broader ideology, ideological rubrics have an impact on real world situations.
	This is just one example of that.
	Okay.
	Meanwhile, in other news over the weekend, the Biden administration finally authorized the shoot down of that Chinese spy balloon.
	So as you'll recall, in the middle of last week, it became apparent there was a giant Chinese spy balloon that was floating over Montana.
	And many of us were like, just shoot the damn thing down.
	It's in Montana.
	There are no people in Montana.
	Have you ever been in Montana?
	There's like seven people and 100 cows in Montana.
	Just shoot it down.
	This is a perfectly obvious thing to do.
	And you'll also recall at the time, like on Friday, there are a bunch of people who emerged from the left to say, no, we can't shoot it down.
	I mean, if Joe Biden isn't shooting it down, that's because he's a very wise man.
	And as a very wise man, he wouldn't shoot down the balloon.
	So they brought out retired General Wesley Clark, for example, on Friday.
	Say, we don't want to destroy the balloon.
	Why should we?
	No, we can't destroy the balloon.
	This is a substantial payload.
	There's no telling what's in there.
	This is much bigger than what you have on a normal spy satellite, the kind that we use.
	This is this is massive stuff.
	So yes, there was some concern about the bring it down.
	But I think also, we want to make sure when we bring it down, we bring it down the right way.
	And we've got the chance to exploit what's there.
	So we don't want to just smash everything and have nothing but pieces of chips and transistors there.
	What we want is to take it down in such a way we can go out and grab it, look at what's in there.
	Maybe there's something to learn from it.
	Yeah, and the best way to do that is to drop it into the ocean, as it turns out.
	James Clapper, the pathetic former head of the CIA, he says, you know, I'm inclined to believe the Chinese when they say that this balloon just wandered.
	It was a weather balloon that wandered.
	Uh-huh.
	Uh-huh.
	This guy was the head of the, he was the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence.
	He also lied to Congress, so there's that.
	And it seems to continue to drift.
	So what kind of conversations are happening right now at the Pentagon involving U.S.
	intelligence agencies as well in the White House?
	Well, I think for sure the discussion, one item of interest to me, which I'm sure is under discussion, is exactly what is the sensor suite on this balloon?
	I'm kind of inclined to believe the Chinese that this thing, this errant, had wandered off course.
	I think they haven't been entirely forthcoming with what's on it in the way of the sensor suite.
	Oh, but he believes them that it just sort of, you know, drifted off course.
	It wasn't intended to do that.
	I love it when our intelligence officials are as dumb as James Clyde.
	Anyway, Friday, this was the story.
	Why?
	We can't shoot it down.
	I mean, and all you people, you're warmongers, people who want to shoot it down.
	So Saturday, the military shot down this thing.
	They waited for it to drift over the entire continental United States.
	It went all the way from Montana.
	All the way across, over South Carolina and out into the ocean.
	And then, we unleash an F-22 and with one shot, knock down this balloon.
	Here's what that looked like.
	Balloon shot down Saturday afternoon by a single missile from an F-22 fighter jet.
	Here we go!
	Boom!
	Oh my gosh, it's going straight through.
	America!
	Flying over several sensitive military sites, US officials tell NBC News they took action to weaken China's surveillance capabilities.
	So this obviously created a lot of opportunities for fantastic memes.
	Elon Musk tweeted out, one such meme is a, for those who can't see it, it is a graphic of the movie Up with the giant cluster of balloons in the house and then a giant explosion coming through the balloons.
	My personal favorite meme to emerge from this was a tweet from the account ChineseSpyBalloon, quote, I have information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.
	That joke's never going to get old to me.
	Anyway, the shift in time is really fascinating because again, on Friday it was like, why would you tell Joe Biden that he's a coward for not shooting down the balloon?
	We're not going to shoot down the balloon.
	We can't shoot down the balloon.
	Only a fool would want to shoot down the balloon.
	And then on Saturday, Joe Biden emerges like a groundhog from his hidey hole to explain that he actually gave the order to shoot it down on Wednesday.
	Here it was.
	Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible.
	They decided without doing damage to anyone on on the ground.
	They decided that the best time to do that was as it got over water outside within our within 12 mile limit.
	They successfully took it down and I want to compliment our aviators who did it and we'll have more to report on this a little later.
	Thank you.
	So we went from, how dare you imply that Joe Biden is a coward for not shooting it down, to dark Brandon shot down the balloon in the course of like 24 hours.
	Just swivel on a dime.
	So a few things about this.
	First, he says he gave the order on Wednesday to shoot it down.
	Why not just come out and say, I've given the order to shoot this thing down.
	We don't think it's safe right now.
	We've already jammed all of the signals.
	So don't worry about it.
	We're going to shoot it down where it's safe.
	Why don't you just do that?
	The answer is, he didn't do that.
	Are you kidding me?
	There's no way the president gave an order on Wednesday to shoot the thing down and then just sat around for five days or four days waiting for this thing to drift all the way over every sensitive military installation in the United States and then across the water.
	It's just nonsense.
	It's just garbage.
	Even former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was like, hey, you should have just shot it down.
	I'm like, well, what?
	This is stupid.
	I hope in the future we make clear to China that This kind of incident cannot happen again, and it will not happen again.
	That in the future, if we see that kind of balloon, we are going to, if they don't take action to prevent that balloon from entering our airspace, that we will indeed shoot it down much earlier than we did this time around.
	And I think if I have you straight, you're saying that you think this should have been shot down perhaps over Montana, something like that, maybe over a sparsely populated area.
	That's where I think before it crossed over the entire, almost the entire continental US.
	Yeah, that bothered me that it was allowed to transverse the entire country.
	That's amazing.
	It's amazing.
	Look at the map.
	There's Montana.
	By the way, we never would have found out about this if it had not been perfectly obvious a giant balloon was hovering over the United States, run by the Chinese Wizard of Oz or something, in Reed Point, Montana.
	And then it went all the way across the United States, like through Missouri, and then across North Carolina, and then into South Carolina, and then finally we shoot it over the water.
	And Joe Biden's like, his fans are like, man, this guy's a genius.
	He's amazing at this.
	He's just incredible at this.
	As Tom Cotton says, China tested Joe Biden.
	He failed dramatically here.
	That happens to be correct.
	Here's the senator.
	What began as a spy balloon has become a trial balloon, testing President Biden's strength and resolve.
	And unfortunately, the president failed that test.
	And that's dangerous for the American people.
	The president was paralyzed for an entire week by a balloon.
	We should have shot this balloon down over the Aleutian Islands.
	We should never have allowed it to transit the entire continental United States.
	Uh, well, yes, obviously.
	So I mean, listen, everyone understands we should have shot down this balloon before it went across the entire continental United States.
	But what is really amazing is the attempt by, quote, unnamed defense officials to cover up the extent of this botchery.
	It's kind of an amazing thing.
	So over the weekend, unnamed defense officials on a background call, they released the entire transcript of the background call.
	I'm not sure I've ever seen a lot of stuff like this.
	Defense officials speaking on background, but the entire text of the call is read out.
	So you can't actually blame anybody.
	And here is what they said, quote, PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration, and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.
	We spoke directly with Chinese officials through multiple channels, but rather than address their intrusion into our airspace, the PRC put out an explanation that lacked any credibility.
	The PRC has claimed publicly the high altitude balloon operating above the United States is a weather balloon that was blown off course.
	This is false.
	This is a PRC surveillance balloon.
	This surveillance balloon purposefully traversed the United States and Canada.
	We are confident it was seeking to monitor sensitive military sites.
	Its route over the United States near many potential sensitive sites contradicts the PRC government's explanation that it was a weather balloon.
	So it wasn't blown off course.
	It was going around like all of the sensitive sites in the United States.
	But here's the thing.
	They dropped this quote-unquote piece of news, which is that all these weather balloons have been traversing American airspace for a long time.
	The reason they dropped that, of course, is to take the focus off of Joe Biden, because if Joe Biden is uniquely incapable of shooting down a damned balloon, then that's a problem for him.
	So instead, it's, well, you know, it happened under Trump, too.
	It happened under Trump, and this became a talking point for the media.
	It happened under Trump, too.
	It kept happening under Trump.
	And so this is nothing new.
	Joe Biden is a hero.
	He's a hero of the republic.
	Well, there's only one problem with that.
	Apparently, according to Politico, this information never even made it to Trump.
	Why?
	Because what happened is these weather balloons, or these Chinese spy satellite balloons, they basically traversed so quickly and in such small fashion that it never even made it up the chain.
	That's not the same thing as a balloon sitting and traversing the entire continental United States over the course of a week.
	That is not the same thing.
	Five senior Trump administration officials told Politico they were never told of any such incident occurring while they were in office.
	Trump said this never happened.
	It would never have happened.
	A Trump administration national security official said, I'm not aware of a single civilian national security leader from the Trump administration who even heard of this.
	So the Defense Department is trying to cover for Joe Biden by demanding that we see a similarity between incidents that were so unserious they were never reported up chain.
	And a giant Chinese spy balloon flying across the entirety of the United States.
	No, guys, no, but it just shows you the quote unquote deep state, the number of career employees and executive branch agencies who are out there defending people like Joe Biden.
	It's really astonishing.
	And this became the talking point of media.
	The representative Michael Waltz, a House Armed Services Committee member, tweeted on Sunday, the Pentagon had informed him several Chinese balloon incidents had happened in the past few years, including over Florida.
	According to several Trump administration national security officials, they were never even informed of these intrusions by the Pentagon.
	The only other similar time an airship appeared with Biden in the White House was last February near Hawaii.
	But apparently these events were not even discovered in real time.
	A senior administration official said the events went undetected.
	So this isn't the same thing at all.
	So you are trying to create a false perception that a similar thing happened under Trump.
	What actually happened under Trump?
	Apparently, the Chinese spy balloons traversed briefly into U.S.
	airspace over the United States and then went away.
	And we found about it afterward.
	How is that in any way similar to Joe Biden knows there is a giant spy balloon hovering above the United States for days at a time, does nothing and then shoots it down when it gets over the water?
	It's not the same thing at all, but it gave the media their talking point.
	That's all they need.
	They're the Praetorian Guard.
	All they care about is defending Joe Biden.
	That is their favorite thing in life.
	By the way, what exactly are these spy balloons doing?
	Well, it turns out that a few years ago, the United States military was conducting wide area surveillance tests across six Midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons.
	Apparently, what they do is they essentially provide real-time technology that shows in granular detail, like better than a space satellite, what exactly is happening on the ground.
	And so that's exactly what China was doing right here.
	Pete Buttigieg was, of course, deployed to talk about this.
	Again, I'm not sure why is Pete Buttigieg the Secretary of Transportation?
	The dude can't even get the railroads running on time.
	And yet, he is on national TV talking about a Chinese balloon.
	Shouldn't it be someone from the Defense Department?
	Like, doesn't anyone work at this administration?
	Apparently not.
	So, Pete Buttigieg is deployed.
	Presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg.
	And he says, this was handled perfectly appropriately.
	We did an amazing job.
	Is it acceptable that there were eight days that the spy balloon was over the United States, then Canada, then again over the United States, from Idaho, Montana, all the way through to the Carolinas for day after day?
	Well, as the U.S.
	has communicated, it's not acceptable at all that China sent this object into our airspace.
	But in terms of how to handle it?
	That's something that was done based on assessment of the risks, making sure that there was no risk that outweighed the risks in terms of any damage that would come.
	It was handled appropriately.
	It was handled appropriately.
	So Tapper follows up, Jake Tapper on CNN.
	He's like, so the presumption is that the Chinese got some sort of data out of this thing.
	Putin's just like, well, I'm just glad nobody was hurt.
	Well, you just said it was handled appropriately and that the risks and rewards balanced out.
	So which is it?
	I do know that when the President gave the order to have this handled, the military gauged the different risks and the different benefits of different approaches, made the decisions that they did, brought this thing down without incident.
	Right, but the presumption has got to be that the Chinese were able to gather intelligence hovering over the United States for day after day, especially over some of these sensitive sites.
	I'm sure there's a similar presumption about what spy satellites do.
	That is well outside of my lane.
	I'm just glad that nobody was hurt as this thing came down.
	Oh, well, that is the important thing.
	It's not about people getting hurt.
	It's about the president made a cowardly move to allow this thing to float all over the entire United States for like a week.
	You can try to make these tepid defenses, but it just isn't going to work.
	Now the Chinese, for their part, they're acting all offended that we shot down their dumb balloon.
	According to ABC, China has expressed its strong dissatisfaction and protest against Washington's decision to shoot down its balloon, accusing it of overreacting and seriously violating international practice.
	I didn't realize that shooting down spy balloons is now a violation of international practice.
	China keeps lying and saying that it's a civilian weather aircraft that blew off course.
	But all of this underscores the fact that our relationship with China is very fraught, that China is incredibly aggressive, and that, honestly, they kind of made the president look like a fool here.
	I understand that everybody is celebrating that F-22 took down a balloon.
	It doesn't seem like a fair competition, to be quite honest with you.
	An F-22 should be able to take down a balloon.
	But the real question is, why was an F-22 not deployed earlier to take down the balloon?
	Before any of this happened and the answer, of course, is that Joe Biden is a weakling.
	He's a weakling and he did not make a call.
	He did not make a call on Wednesday.
	And then the Pentagon said, well, we've got to wait for this thing to cross across 83 states and get all the way across the country and then take a right in Florida and move all the way back down across the Gulf of Mexico.
	And like we need basically the Chinese need to see every single house in the United States before we shoot this thing down for safety.
	I really don't think that's how this thing went.
	Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	Things I like today.
	So if you wish to understand the relationship between China and the United States, there's a very good book by a foreign policy scholar named Elizabeth Economy.
	It is titled The Third Revolution.
	People ask me for book recommendations all the time.
	This is, I think, the best book that I've read recently on what Xi Jinping is doing in China.
	She makes the case that, essentially, Xi is pursuing a reassertion of the state in Chinese political and economic life at home and a more ambitious and expansive role for China abroad, exercising, quote, new levers of influence and power that others will have to learn to exploit and counter to protect and advance their own interests.
	And she also makes the case that China has taken advantage of the openness of the United States and other market-based liberal democracies to further its economic interests and advance its political and cultural influence.
	The threat of China is very, very real.
	The fact that they are internally weak is actually more of a threat in many ways.
	If they were internally strong, they might be able to sit there and just wait for time to take care of the problem.
	The problem is that Xi Jinping has actually weakened his country economically, and that means he's going to have to get more aggressive on the foreign front.
	And that is something that we should be watching out for.
	With China being as aggressive as they are, We need to be radically increasing our military buildup, like, right now.
	Because most of the areas that are most vulnerable happen to be geographically very, very close to China, and here I'm speaking specifically about Taiwan.
	Okay, time for some things that I hate.
	So this week, things that I hate.
	The thing that I hate the most about the presidency is the State of the Union address.
	I hate the State of the Union address.
	Despise it.
	It doesn't matter who the president is.
	I hate it.
	I think it's a monarchical garbage institution.
	It's stupid.
	I think we should go back to doing it the way that George Washington did.
	And George Washington should just send, the president should just send a letter to the Congress and be like, everything's fine.
	And then we should all move on with our lives.
	But instead we get this ridiculous Royal spectacle of the president descending amid the cheering legislators, which of course completely reverses the constitutional bargain.
	The constitutional bargain is that the legislature is supposed to be the powerful branch of government and the president is supposed to be secondary.
	That's why Article 1 of the Constitution, I'm now educating Joe Biden's judicial picks.
	Article 1 is about the legislature.
	Article 2 is about the executive branch.
	Article 3 is about the judiciary.
	But the State of the Union address, it's always nonsense.
	It's always annoying.
	We have to cover it because a bunch of people watch it and they put it simultaneously on all the networks.
	And we pretend that the basket of wishlist items that whichever the president is says that those things are going to get done.
	We try to read the tea leaves as to what the president wants.
	So Joe Biden is going to presumably make the case that he's doing an amazing job because this is what every president does.
	And he is going to he's going to list his accomplishments.
	Pete Buttigieg was being trotted out on the Sunday shows to try and discuss those accomplishments.
	Here was the failed Secretary of Transportation.
	He's got a lot of things to tell.
	Why do you think that it has not penetrated the American public?
	Well, these things don't sell themselves, and it's one of the reasons I'm really looking forward to that State of the Union address.
	I will say that there have been so many accomplishments under this administration, it can be difficult to list them in a distilled way.
	So many accomplishments.
	So many.
	Okay, so what are those accomplishments?
	Presumably, you'll see Joe Biden talking about his magical economy.
	And he's going to tout the fact that the jobs report from January came in really hot.
	About half a million jobs or over.
	Now, there's some statistical play in the numbers.
	It may be that lower revisions from the last few months kind of got redistributed up into January.
	You see this every so often.
	In fact, it's not all that common at the end of the year or the beginning of a new year.
	There's a bigger problem.
	So monthly job growth, right?
	They say it was really, really good last month, but it obviously has been slowing pretty significantly since the end of the pandemic.
	What's more important is this particular job growth chart.
	So there is a job growth chart showing where we would be if we had actually kept up with the job growth that was happening in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic.
	If you look at this chart what you see is a steady upward line in terms of adjusted employment and it's going up it's going up and then we hit the pandemic and it drops off a cliff.
	It drops from essentially 155 million people employed down to about 130 million people employed.
	And then there's a fast increase.
	It looks like what is going to be a V-shaped recovery.
	It's going to come right back up to that line.
	It doesn't even come close.
	Instead, it sort of stops short and then it trails the line by a wide gap.
	In other words, we have now finally reached the number of jobs that we had before the pandemic that are filled, but we're not even remotely close to where we would have been if we just had a natural continuation of economic growth without the pandemic.
	And the reason for that, as you can see, the trajectory absolutely changes.
	As Joe Biden takes office in 2021, you can see the trajectory move from what is a very sharp uptick to a much more gradual uptick in job creation.
	And that's what we're about to see.
	We're about to see some economic stagnation.
	The inflation problem is not yet done.
	As the Wall Street Journal observes, recent readings on wages and prices have markets increasingly optimistic that inflation can be brought down without a recession.
	The Federal Reserve would love to agree, but it can't.
	In its quarter percentage point rate increase on Wednesday, the accompanying statement and Chair Jerome Powell's press conference, the central bank made it clear its views had not changed.
	Inflation is still too high and will not return to its 2% target without higher interest rates and a weaker labor market.
	So all that sort of happy talk that you're going to see over the State of the Union, Beto Biden's doing an amazing job, and it's just great.
	Everything is going to be happy talk.
	It's all gonna be butterflies and rainbows.
	That is not what the markets are saying right now.
	And if they are, it's because, believe it or not, while there is weak market sufficiency, meaning like generalized knowledge in the markets, is gonna beat anybody who's sort of playing games.
	The reality is that right now people are trying to read tea leaves and those tea leaves are not being read properly.
	We're about to enter a period of economic stagnation.
	Put it on the record now, I said this a year and a half ago.
	is that inflation was not going to be the long-term problem for the United States.
	Economic stagnation was going to be the long-term problem for the United States.
	So take all of the happy talk you're going to get over the next couple of days with a grain of salt.
	In fact, a chunk of salt.
	In fact, maybe like an actual iceberg made of salt.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be talking with Peter Abagosian.
	You'll remember him.
	He's the professor who sent a bunch of ridiculous fake headlines to various university journals and they printed them all because the universities are nuts.
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