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Feb. 24, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:53
Pete Buttigieg Is A Train Wreck | Ep. 1675
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Time Text
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg visits East Palestine and proceeds to make a mess of things, the Alex Murdoch trial gets dramatic with the defendant taking the stand, and we deconstruct Miley Cyrus' hit song, Flowers.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, folks, there are certain jobs in the federal government that are supposed to be cush jobs.
Secretary of Transportation is one of those jobs.
You haven't really heard of past Secretaries of Transportation.
Quick, name the last three.
You can't, because no one's ever heard of that particular secretary.
There are certain secretaries you've heard of.
Secretaries of State or Secretaries of Defense.
And then there are a bunch that you really never think about, like the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of Transportation, but they actually do have real jobs.
Now, Pete Buttigieg has never treated the Transportation Department like a real job.
He's always treated it as though it's essentially a giant photo op, which is why there are Videos of him riding his bike around Washington, D.C.
after taking his bike out of the back of a car.
It's the reason why he was appearing mostly on the news for the first year of his existence as Secretary of Transportation as a new father who had taken off two months for no apparent reason and then had not come back until people noticed that he was gone.
Pete Buttigieg has never taken his job particularly seriously because, let's be real about this, the executive branch is filled with non-serious jobs.
Secretary of Transportation, it can be serious, but can also be a cush job.
And this is particularly true for Pete Buttigieg, who is a media creation, who's been protected by the media, built by the media, and guarded by the media.
And like a hothouse flower, Pete Buttigieg, when exposed to the elements, immediately wilt.
And this is exactly what we are seeing in East Palestine, Ohio.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a politician implode in as dramatic a fashion as Pete Buttigieg is currently imploding.
Now, again, he should have imploded after he took two months off for paternity leave and no one noticed.
At that point, everybody should have said, oh, oh, he's a career useless person.
Got it.
But no.
Instead, they decided that they were going to make him a hero of the Republic trademark.
They were going to make him a hero of the Republic because he was showing fathers everywhere what it meant to be a good dad with your husband at home, having pushed the baby out.
Well, no, actually, in any case, he was a hero of the Republic.
And that maintained, right?
He was a prospective presidential candidate.
People in the Democratic Party were talking about how Kamala Harris was awful at her job, true, and Pete Buttigieg was the heir apparent to the old man.
If Joe Biden fell down on the job, it would be young Pete Buttigieg, fresh-faced, directly from the cover of Mad Magazine, who's going to bring the Democratic forward into the new age.
After all, Was intersectional.
I mean, sure, he's a white dude, but he was a gay white dude.
And that meant that he would be the perfect candidate for president of the United States for a coalition that is mainly liberal, college-educated women and minorities who really are not fond of people of color.
It was a bad strategy, but it was the thing they were pursuing.
Well, now it turns out that the rubber has hit the road.
Because if you are a photo op guy, if you're in a photo op position, then the thing that you really can't screw up Is the photo op.
That is the thing more than anything else you can't screw up.
Like nobody is going to look into the ins and outs of Pete Buttigieg's performance in terms of railroad strikes, which is actually his job, right?
No one is actually going to look into that and say, is he doing a good job at that?
Because that's complicated stuff.
That's policy stuff.
What people are going to look into is whether he looks sympathetic when something really intense happens, like, you know, a giant mushroom cloud outside of an American town after a train is blown up.
Now the media have been trying to say, well, you know, Elaine Chao never visited any of these places.
Okay, a few things.
One, Elaine Chao was never a presidential candidate.
Everyone knows people who judge as a presidential candidate.
Number two, all of the train derailments during the Trump era did not involve a giant mushroom cloud of toxic waste emerging into the atmosphere and killing, at last count, 43,000 aquatic animals.
According to the Washington Post, Ohio residents with headaches and nausea around the site where a train carrying hazardous chemicals veered off the tracks are worried about the long-term impact of the derailment on human health.
The effect on animals is already becoming clear.
The derailment of East Palestine potentially killed more than 43,000 fish, amphibians, crustaceans, and other aquatic animals in nearby streams, according to state officials.
It will take time for the stream ecosystem to recover, said Mary Mertz, director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
We know it won't be quick, she said, but it's going to come back.
Now, again, how much of this is on Pete Buttigieg as opposed to on the EPA or Norfolk Southern, the railroad company?
And how much of this is just chance?
How much of this is just bad stuff happening?
All of that is a fair game.
It's a fair question.
Is it really Pete Buttigieg's fault that a train fell off the rails and then the EPA decided to blow the thing up?
Is that really Buttigieg's fault?
I think in many ways, the answer is no.
I will tell you what is Pete Buttigieg's fault.
Not doing his actual real job, which is to show up and cut ribbons.
He has a cush job and he blew the cush job.
That's the part of this that is going to come back to haunt him.
Because if you're a Democrat and you are in a photo opposition, you have but one job.
And your one job is not policy.
Your one job is to appear as though you care about the humans.
And here's the thing, Pete Buttigieg, I'm not sure he really cares about the humans.
He cares about Pete Buttigieg a lot.
I'm not sure that he really cares about the humans.
And this is why people to judge just him.
I think his political career is essentially over at this point.
So you went to East Palestine, Ohio the day after Donald Trump.
So first of all, political botry of the highest order.
The East Palestine, Ohio derailment happened almost three weeks ago.
I believe it's three weeks ago now.
And for three weeks, he did nothing.
It wasn't like he was going to Ukraine with President Biden.
It wasn't like he had a really busy job.
He was doing a bunch of confabs that the Secretary of Transportation usually goes to, and speaking in front of a step-and-repeat, or sitting on a stage and talking into a microphone.
At any time, he could have taken a private jet, which is his preferred method of travel, and he could have gone to East Palestine, Ohio, for like three hours.
And he could have sat there, and he could have comforted people.
He could have done those things, and he didn't do those things.
And that was a mistake.
It was a large-scale mistake.
And then Trump really showed him up because Trump was like, hey, I can do it.
I'm not a member of the government.
I don't have an obligation to do it, but I can do it.
I can take a plane from Mar-a-Lago to Ohio.
I can buy everybody some McDonald's.
I can bring them some water.
It ain't that hard.
And meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg is still sitting there going on national television and explaining why he won't do it.
Giant fail for Pete Buttigieg.
I think he has finished as a presidential candidate for sure.
We'll get to Pete Buttigieg's actual behavior during his visit to East Palestine yesterday because it was super duper awkward.
I mean, really, really awkward.
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Okay, so Pete Buttigieg, he shows up, and the first thing that he says is, we've been here from the very first hours of this thing.
Here he was.
That's exactly why we're here.
That's why we've been here from the first hours of the incident as an administration.
And it's why our interest both in what happened here in East Palestine and in keeping our railroads safe doesn't go away when some other hot news story comes into the headlines.
We're going to be here day in, day out, year in, year out, making our railroads safer and making sure Norfolk Southern meets its responsibilities.
I love this.
He says, we've been here from the very first hours.
This is so reminiscent of when Kamala Harris said to Lester Holt on national television, we've been to the border.
And he's like, well, you haven't been to the border.
She's like, well, that's true.
I haven't been to the border.
It's that.
Pete, I assume that there are some government agencies who arrive at the site of a disaster like this.
I assume that is the case.
You are not one of those people.
You are the famous person.
You're the person who's supposed to be in charge.
Again, I think that virtually all photo ops are stupid, but that is the game.
And the only reason that you are a famous person is because you are good at the photo op.
So if you had one job, dude, one job, and you blew it.
And then he talked about how the country should wrap its arms around East Palestine.
Yeah, I do not believe you at all.
They deserve a different level of support, a human level of support.
The country should be wrapping their arms around the people of East Palestine, not as a political football, not as an ideological flashpoint, not as a gotcha moment.
But as thousands of human beings whose lives got upended through no end, through no fault of their own.
And I think that includes visits, not just big official visits from the government, but just people who've seen the news and whose hearts go out to the community here.
Wait, so this is the most galling form of politics is he totally blew it.
And he's like, well, I'm here to tell you that people really should visit.
You are the question, my friend.
It's like, what?
Can you imagine?
My wife tells me to take out the garbage.
And I don't.
I say, just don't take out the garbage for three days.
And then finally, I'm starting to take out the garbage.
She's like, I noticed that you didn't take out the garbage for three days.
I'm like, well, you know, people should take out the garbage.
In fact, everyone should take out the garbage.
In fact, it's very important that everyone wrap their arms around the garbage and take out the garbage to the curb.
Really, really.
My wife would look at me cross-eyed and say, like, what are you talking about?
You were supposed to do this and you did not.
And now you missed garbage day.
What is he talking about?
Why is he lecturing the rest of us on what we should do with East Palestine?
Your job, dude.
You.
It's he he is the guy in the job interview, as we were about to see, he is the guy in the job interview, Peabody Judge, who you ask, what is your greatest flaw?
And he says, well, I'm just I'm just too much of a perfectionist.
I'm too detail oriented.
That is my greatest flaw.
I don't think Pete Buttigieg thinks that he has flaws.
I don't think he thinks he did anything wrong here from a political point of view, which is kind of amazing.
Here's Pete Buttigieg quasi apologizing.
This is not an apology.
He says, my problem is I care too much.
That's my big problem is the caring of the about these people too much.
I had to stay away because I cared so much.
That's how much I cared is I didn't call.
I didn't write.
I didn't come.
That's how much I cared.
Wow.
Now that you've seen the wreckage and spoken to the people, was it a mistake not to come here sooner?
What I tried to do was balance two things.
My desire to be involved and engaged and on the ground, which is how I am generally wired to act, and my desire to follow the norm of transportation secretaries, allowing NTSB to really lead the initial stages of the public-facing work.
Uh, so he had to balance his deep and abiding desire to show up in East Palestine, which no one would have stopped him from doing.
And his desire to follow the.
Yes, it's because he cares too much, guys.
He just cares too much.
And then he says, you know, the big problem for me is I feel so strongly.
And yet, you know, it's hard for me because as a stoic Example of masculinity par excellence.
I, you know, I try to hold back my feelings, but I feel so strongly.
It's so disingenuous.
Everyone knows it's disingenuous.
Before you sent your first tweet expressing concern for the residents of East Palestine, a week and a half after the accident happened, in hindsight, was that waiting too long to express anything hours after you had addressed the makeup of work crews on highway construction projects just that very day?
The answer to your question is yes.
I felt strongly about this and could have expressed that sooner.
Again, I was taking pains to respect the role that I have and the role that I don't have, but that should not have stopped me from weighing in about how I felt about what was happening to this community.
I felt so strongly.
My feelings are so strong.
So, so, so strong.
Well, he's a trainwreck.
A better trainwreck.
And now his presidential hopes are a train wreck.
Unfortunately for him, he also lost his train of thought.
Unfortunate language here from the Secretary of Transportation.
And there's no question that there have been enormous amounts of both information and misinformation injected into this situation.
None of which is to the benefit of the community when it comes to that misinformation.
So I think... So I lost my train of thought.
Well, that's what I had to say about that.
Oops!
Whoops!
That presser really derailed right there.
And then Buttigieg ran away from the media.
So I was told during the Trump administration that if you didn't answer questions from the media, this may be a threat to democracy and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Pete Buttigieg has no such concerns because, of course, he's a Democrat.
Here he was, you know, basically running away from the media yesterday.
Mayor Pete, why did it take you an entire two and a half weeks to actually get here to respond to East Palestine?
Will you apologize to the residents of this city for the slow response, to the government's slow response?
Do you have any apologies?
Well, bye.
Also, that was not even the worst.
The worst is the Buttigieg press secretary actually called the reporter aggressive for asking questions.
Oh man, this is some rough and tumble stuff right here.
You're not on my camera.
Can I ask why?
Well, I'm on a camera. I would like the camera to be off and I'm happy to talk to you guys.
Well, if you're the press secretary of the Secretary of the Department of Transportation, don't you think you should be able to ask questions from the American public that you serve?
Absolutely. I would like to do it without the camera on.
Can I ask why?
I think that is a little bit aggressive. That's why.
Why is it aggressive?
I just want you to have it.
I'm happy— On behalf of the American people, I'm just asking why he has not been here until Donald Trump came.
She's asked him.
She's asked him three, several times since then.
He turned the cameras off and they will not do it.
Turn off the cameras.
Turn those off!
Just genius level stuff here from the Secretary of Transportation and his staff.
They are really, really good at this.
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Okay, so it's been a bad week for Pete Buttigieg, bad several weeks for Pete Buttigieg.
There's an entire article in Politico talking about how frustrated Pete Buttigieg is, because that, of course, is the real issue, is that he's frustrated.
Quote, publicly and privately, signs are growing.
And the Transportation Secretary's usual eagle-scout patience is giving way to frustration.
He has gotten into Twitter spats with US senators.
His current brush-off of a Daily Caller reporter who ambushed him during a walk turned into a viral video that has drawn more than 3 million views since Tuesday night.
On Wednesday, Buttigieg's allies were complaining he's taking an unfair pounding over the disaster, all because of his perceived ambitions as a one-time and future presidential hopeful.
Pete Buttigieg has taken a lot of bullets for the president on this one, senior Democrats said on Wednesday, insisting on anonymity to talk about a crisis that the president was not authorized to discuss.
Well, yeah, this is this is really the funny part is that he's mad at Biden.
And guess what?
He should be mad at Biden.
He should be mad at Biden because Biden basically avoided all blame for this thing by never answering a question.
And all the questions instead went to Buttigieg.
In fact, CNN's Jeremy Dimon actually asked Karine Jean-Pierre, why doesn't Biden visit?
And she didn't have a good answer on this thing.
I guess I'm just struggling to understand why the president wouldn't go to East Palestine.
Does it simply not meet the bar for a presidential visit?
Look, I don't, I want to be very clear here.
There's no reason to struggle, I don't think, on this question.
I think when you look at how the federal agencies have responded from day one and took this very seriously and reacted within hours of the derailment and was on the ground, this is the Environmental Protection Agency, as I was saying, they are the ones that deal with these types of chemical spills.
They are the ones that are the leaders on this.
Um, so that didn't answer the question.
That's why Biden didn't go there.
He literally just went to Ukraine and we're sending billions of dollars to Ukraine.
He didn't have to go there.
He went there because he understands the value of a photo op.
And then she was asked about whether he actually will in the future go visit East Palestine.
She's like, nah, not really.
What I want to say is that it didn't start with the Environmental Protection Agency.
Again, FEMA, CDC.
No, look, I want to be very clear here.
Again, I don't have anything to share on a presidential visit.
Not at this time or anything to announce.
But it does matter that the president put forth a multi-agency kind of reaction to this.
That's the thing that matters.
It's not that Biden has no care about going there.
The only thing that really matters is, you know, that there's a government and the government exists.
So she's blaming Buttigieg right there.
And make no mistake, she's dumping that on Buttigieg.
She's like, there are plenty of people in the government who can go to East Palestine and beat Buttigieg.
You can see exactly what she is doing right there.
Listen, Joe Biden has other priorities.
He doesn't care much about East Palestine.
The only reason he would care about East Palestine is because he doesn't like the media blowback.
He has other priorities.
His priorities were Kiev.
I mean, that was his priority.
Again, it's not an either or.
The government can walk and chew gum at the same time.
But Joe Biden doesn't really want to walk and chew gum at the same time, at least not in terms of his photo op allocation.
He wants you to focus on what's going on in Ukraine, because that's the easy photo op for him, despite all the talk about it being historic and risky.
It is not either of those things.
That's what he wants you to focus on.
It's on the same press conference where Karine Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary, is struggling to explain why Joe Biden is not going to use Palestine.
She's bragging about Biden's trip to Kiev.
The trip that President Biden took to Kiev, as many of you reported on, was historic.
It was brave.
Many of you talked about how we heard the sirens wailing in the background as the President was on the ground.
Remember, there is no military on the ground in Ukraine, U.S.
military on the ground in Ukraine.
And the President took this trip to send a very clear message, not just to the people of Ukraine, not just to Russia, but the world, how, again, we have an unwavering support for the people of Ukraine.
Hmm, well, I mean, you can see where their priorities are.
Again, they could prioritize both.
They clearly are not.
And this is an administration with priorities.
So for example, one of their big priorities is diversity.
Prudential and Pierre gave, unintentionally, one of the worst defenses of diversity ever.
She said, you know, the really important thing to notice about Joe Biden's cabinet, a cabinet filled with such luminaries as Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, this amazingly diverse cabinet filled with geniuses like Miguel Cardona and filled with just absolute wonders of the human species.
It's a very diverse cabinet.
I mean, sure, they all, the one thing that unifies them, they suck at their jobs, but so diverse.
Here's Karine Jean-Pierre.
The cabinet is a majority people of color for the first time in history.
The cabinet is a majority female for the first time in history.
A majority of White House senior staff identify as female.
Forty percent of White House senior staff identify as part of the racially diverse communities.
And a record seven assistants to the president are openly LGBTQ+.
So, again, this is something that the president prides himself on, that he actually has taken action to show the diversity of this administration.
Guys, they suck at their jobs, but Marcia Fudge, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is black, and Pete Buttigieg is gay, and Jennifer Granholm identifies as a woman.
Alejandro Mayorkas does identify as a Hispanic man, as a Latinx human, at Homeland Security.
Like, this is the really important stuff that you need to keep in mind.
Priorities, priorities for this administration.
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Okay, so, what are some of the other priorities of this administration?
Well, obviously, Ukraine, right?
So, Janet Yellen, she's out there as the Secretary of the Treasury, talking about spending money on Ukraine.
Like, you're at the Treasury Department.
Your job is to tamp down the massive inflation rate and prevent economic stagnation.
And yet, there you are, traveling around the world, talking about how we need to send more money to Ukraine.
I noticed that Ukraine is not part of your remit at the Secretary of the Treasury.
Our military assistance includes key defensive weapons that Ukraine has asked for, such as the Patriot missile defense system.
And our economic assistance is making Ukraine's resistance possible by supporting the home front, funding critical public services, and helping keep the government running.
In the coming months, we expect to provide around $10 billion in additional economic support for Ukraine.
That's exciting to have the Secretary of the Treasury announcing all of that.
That's really important stuff.
Other things that we have been told by this administration, again, the world's most untalented press secretary, Corinne Jean-Pierre, a walking example of why affirmative action hiring is a bad idea.
Corinne Jean-Pierre, she says, you know, guys, you may not have noticed it, but the border is going amazing.
Now, that's a lie.
It's not true, but here we go.
On day one, the president put forward a comprehensive immigration reform proposal, and that's showing that the president was taking this very seriously.
And the way that we see this is Congress needs to act.
And what was happening currently right now is Congress is not acting.
So what you're seeing from the Department of Homeland Security is they are using the tools that is being presented to them so that we can deal with this situation and do it in a safe and orderly and humane way.
What a joke.
What an absolute joke.
But again, Joe Biden's priorities are clear.
One of his big priorities is reshaping the World Bank.
So the World Bank is essentially, it was created as a way to give loans to countries that were going to restructure their finances in more responsible ways as they emerged from the vestiges of the Cold War.
Now Joe Biden wants to use the World Bank to give giant loans, subsidized loans, Two countries on behalf of redistributionism and climate change.
According to Politico, Bank President David Malpass's abrupt announcement that he will step down from his post a year early opens the way for Joe Biden to choose someone who embraces the new goal of fundamentally overhauling the bank's work to focus more on climate and other global challenges.
Malpass is a Trump appointee.
He did not fit the administration's vision for the job.
More than a dozen close watchers of the bank who were interviewed for this story said the rift and its resolution allows the US to reshape the institution to tackle Climate change!
Yay!
So now Joe Biden is going to select somebody to preside over presumably billions and billions and billions of dollars to give subsidized loans to country on the basis of climate change.
His priorities are so in order.
It's amazing.
Now, here's the problem for the Democrats.
They're wedded to the old man.
They have to be wedded to the old man.
Pete Buttigieg just derailed.
And meanwhile, you have Kamala Harris.
And Kamala Harris is still sitting there.
And people try not to think about her because it's just, it's too painful.
If you're a Democrat to think about Kamala Harris.
Which brings us to today's episode of Deep Thoughts with Kamala Harris.
And now, Deep Thoughts with Kamala Harris.
Think of it then in the context of like, I like to think about a lot of things in the context of a Venn diagram.
I love Venn diagrams.
always ask is there a Venn diagram for this? I'm telling you it's fascinating when you do.
So Venn diagram those three circles right?
Ladies find you a man who loves you like Kamala Harris loves Venn diagrams. What the what?
It's like electric school buses and Venn diagrams for this lady.
There is not a lot bouncing around upstairs for Kamala Harris.
I gotta say.
If the height of your understanding of politics is the Venn diagram, so much so.
She's not like, you know what I really enjoy?
I enjoy a solid multifactorial regression analysis.
That's the thing I really like.
It's a multifactorial regression analysis that takes into account various factors and then tries to find correlation.
And then maybe imply causation.
She's like, you know what I like?
I like circles that overlap.
That's right.
A lot going on upstairs.
I like those circles.
Sometimes two, possibly three.
You wonder why they are wed to the old man?
You wonder why they will defibrillate that guy every morning until he is capable of running for president again?
That would be the reason.
Okay.
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Good for Matt.
The simple fact of the matter is that Daily Wire actually does extraordinary work, not just in getting out the message, but in making sure that political change actually occurs.
And Matt and the entire Daily Wire team, whether it is exposing what was happening at Vanderbilt Medical Center, or whether it is doing rallies like that, whether it is What Is A Woman, the single most transformative documentary of the last five years in American politics.
Whatever it is, Daily Wire is doing some really hard work on the ground.
I will say, the opposition to the bill in Tennessee is totally insane.
I mean, totally crazy.
I mean, there was a clip yesterday going around of Representative Gloria Johnson, Democrat of Knoxville, saying that the Daily Wire, we are all creating a vortex of evil.
Vortex of evil!
First of all, I kind of want that to be our new mantra here at Daily Wire.
To be like, Washington Post is democracy, it's Washington Post, democracy dies in darkness.
Daily Wire, vortex of evil!
It's kind of awesome.
It sounds like a Transformers team-up or something.
Anyway, here is Representative Glory Johnson from Knoxville ranting and raving about how 14-year-old girls who are confused about their gender identity because they've been watching too many TikTok videos really need to be able to cut off their healthy breast tissue.
We have taken away a woman's right to determine her health care and her health outcomes.
Now, we've gone into children, but we've also gone into adults with a bill that's coming up with not allowing adults that care.
So the reality is here, we're targeting a group, again, just as we were on the last bill, and we are Determining that a certain group of folks can't have hair when a physician has an oath to take care of their patients and that's what they do.
And we know that the major health organizations agree with these treatments and understand that they are life-saving in many situations.
I just want to caution that this body should not be telling physicians what to do.
The first rule of physicians is do no harm, obviously.
And it seems pretty obvious that you are doing harm when you take gender-confused teenage girls and you pump them filled with testosterone.
Pretty obvious stuff.
So that is a big win for Daily Wire.
It is a big win for Matt Walsh in particular.
And congratulations to the Republicans in Tennessee for doing the sane and rational thing.
Meanwhile, again, social contagion is in fact a thing.
The numbers are astonishing.
For people who are suggesting that the massive outbreak of transgenderism as a species of human behavior is merely the limitations of society being exploded, now people being able to flourish the way they originally would have.
Let me just give you some statistics.
Gallup now has a poll out and it shows how people are identifying in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity.
And the generational difference?
Astonishing.
So, if you look at the silent generation, silent generation would be the generation right after World War II.
That generation, 1.7% identified as LGBT.
identified as LGBT.
That was 0.2% lesbian, 0.8% gay, 0.6% bisexual, not even measurable transgender.
For baby boomers, it was 2.7%.
So a marginal increase from 1.7% to 2.7% among the baby boomers, who were quite sexually permissive, as it turns out, the baby boomers.
And that included 0.7% lesbian, 1% gay, 0.7% bisexual, 0.2% transgender, and 0.2% other.
Generation X, right?
0.7% bisexual, 0.2% transgender, and 0.2% other.
Generation X, right, even the generation after that, only 3.3%.
Then you see an absolute explosion among millennials, 11.2%.
11.2%.
Now, what's hilarious about that is that 6.9% of that 11.2%, well more than half of that, are people who are identifying as bisexual.
So the statistics are now kind of skewing radically.
In other words, it has now been seen as a societal good for you to identify as a sexual minority in one way or another.
But even among millennials, only 1% were identifying as transgender.
Now, that is a 3-fold increase from Generation X. But then you look at Generation Z. Generation Z, 20% are identifying as LGBT.
20%, 19.7%, 2.2% are identifying as lesbian.
That is an increase of more than 20-fold from the silent generation.
are identifying as lesbian.
That is an increase of more than 20 fold from the silent generation.
3.4% identifying as gay.
That is about a fourfold increase from the silent generation.
Bisexual, you have seen, I am not kidding you, a 20 times increase, not 20%, 20 times increase in bisexual identity from the silent generation to today's generation Z.
Trans, you now have 1.9% of all people in Generation Z identifying as transgender.
1.9% compared to 0.05%.
Less than that in the silent generation.
You're talking about thousands of percentage points of increase here.
Are you telling me that this is an outgrowth of simple biological bottlenecking?
Or is this what happens when an entire society decides that identifying as a sexual minority is good for you and beneficial for you?
It should not come as a surprise, by the way, that there was a survey that came out over the course of the last 48 hours from YouGov.
And it found that an increasing number of Americans are describing their ideal relationship as something other than complete monogamy or moving away from monogamy.
This obviously is correlating highly with societal happiness.
I mean, everyone's so happy and fulfilled.
Look around you.
You can see from every pole how happy and fulfilled everyone is as they abandon all of the old institutions and the old ways like monogamous marriage and being in love while you're married with someone.
I mean, these things are old fashioned.
So now you have a lot of people who are saying that they prefer non-monogamy.
Not just that, a growing percentage of Americans are saying that they believe that polygamy will be legalized.
Two-thirds of Americans, 68%, still oppose the legalization of polygamy.
But only 52% of 18 to 29-year-olds oppose polygamy.
Which, of course, I mean, let's be real about this.
Why should you oppose polygamy?
If you believe that all traditional sexual structures should be blown up, what difference does it make if three people consent or four people consent or nine people consent?
What difference does it make to you, bigot?
This is what happens when radical individual autonomy overruns all of the intermediate institutions of society.
Greater societal unhappiness.
Greater individual unhappiness.
All in the name of the individual.
All in the name of authenticity.
In just a second, we're going to get to this insane trial out of South Carolina.
They're calling it the South's trial of the central.
We'll get to that.
Momentarily.
First, if you look at the news cycle these days, gotta tell you, it's hard to sleep.
I mean, there's so much going on all the time.
I mean, I've talked about it.
My puppy keeps me awake at all hours.
We have a baby on the way.
It's all going in my life.
It means that my sleep is precarious.
This is the reason I rely, not just on those bull and branch sheets I talked about before, but on my Helix Sleep Mattress.
Helix Sleep makes a mattress that is made just for you.
It personalizes the mattress for you.
Now, everything else in your life that you like is personalized.
When you go to the coffee shop, you don't just say, give me whatever you have on tap.
You give them your precise order, what you would like.
Well, for the thing that you spend one third of your life on, you probably should get it personalized for you.
And that's what Helix does.
Helix has a sleep quiz.
It matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress.
Because why would you buy a mattress made for somebody else?
I took that Helix quiz.
I was matched with a firm but breathable model because I tend to get back pain if it's too soft.
I tend to heat up at night, so I really need a breathable.
Helix does it for me.
Go to helixsleep.com.
Take their two-minute sleep quiz.
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Plus, Helix has a 10-year warranty.
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They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it, but you will for a limited time.
Helix is offering up to 20% off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners.
That's their best offer?
I haven't seen a better one.
Hurry on over to HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
With Helix, better sleep starts right now.
Also, my friend Jordan Peterson has a brand new five-part series on DailyWirePlus called Vision and Destiny.
It's a series designed to help you find clarity and direction.
In a world where we are more interested in coddling and affirming stupidity, Jordan is unafraid to tell you some really hard truths.
Here, he's discussing the damage we are doing by affirming someone's gender.
The trans activists would come up to me and say, well, you know, you're really hurting me if you don't accept my indeterminacy of identity.
And I thought, well, that's what you think.
But as a trained clinician, I think that I'm going to do you a lot more damage in the medium to long run by going along with your claim that you can just be anything you want moment to moment.
You think that's freeing because you regard all social constraints as inhibitions on the Wonderful manifestation of your true self.
But I know that in order to be healthy in the long run, you have to be integrated at multiple levels of social community.
And when you introduce indeterminacy as to your status at the sex level, no one has any idea what to do with you.
And so how are they going to play with you?
They don't know what you are in some sense that even enables the ballgame to get off the ground.
And so that's no recipe for long-term well-being, because that's always bandied about, that notion of well-being and harm.
It's like, no, you have to negotiate an identity.
Jordan's material is wonderful.
The first two episodes are out right now.
New episodes come online every single week.
It's all exclusive for DailyWirePlus members.
Listen, when you become a DailyWirePlus member, you're not just getting all of Jordan's great content, all my extra content, all of Matt's content and Candace's content, all the rest of that stuff.
You're also helping us fight the fight.
I mean, we talked earlier about what's happening in Tennessee, talking about the vast movement across the nation to ban the mutilation of children on the basis of trans ideology.
That's all stuff that's made possible by our subscribers.
Join the fight and get all this great content at dailywire.com slash subscribe to watch Vision and Destiny.
Meanwhile, yesterday featured the testimony of a defendant in a double murder trial.
His name is Alex Murdoch.
If you haven't been actually following this story, it is one of the craziest stories ever.
It's just an insane crime story.
It's been featured.
There's like a documentary on Netflix about it, and there was a podcast series about it.
So let's start with the basics.
If you haven't been following this case.
So actually, Vox did a good rundown on this.
So the Murdochs have wielded power over South Carolina's Lowcountry, the wedge at the bottom of the state, for over 100 years, ever since Randolph Murdoch Sr.
founded his law office in Hampton County in 1910.
The firm eventually grew into a large, powerful practice, continued by his son, Randolph Jr., and his grandson, Randolph III.
From 1920 to 2006, all three men successfully held the post of solicitor, that's prosecutor, for South Carolina's 14th Circuit Court.
So this is a big legal family.
The 86-year stretch serving as circuit solicitors is the longest such family legacy in American history.
Randolph IV and Alex, two of Randolph III's sons, followed in their father's footsteps and became lawyers.
Because South Carolina eventually prohibited lawyers from serving in those conflicting roles as a public prosecutor and a private attorney, eventually they just started a law firm.
Alex, it's pronounced Alec, I guess, was a golden child who sired golden children, born in 1967.
He followed in the family footsteps.
He studied law at University of South Carolina, and then he got married, and then he had a couple of sons.
Buster, born in 1996, and Paul, born in 1999.
And they lived in opulence.
They had a beach house, a couple of private islands, a 1,772-acre estate known as Mizzell.
But apparently, everything was wild, up to and including Alec embezzling a crap load of money from his business partners, from his clients as well.
And a weird amount of death seemed to follow around Alec Murdoch.
Like, a weird amount of death.
So in 2015, there was a 19-year-old Hampton student named Stephen Smith.
He phoned his mom to tell her he'd run out of gas.
Later that night, he was found lying in the middle of the road, miles away from his truck.
He'd apparently died of blunt force trauma.
His body had been laid out in the middle of the road.
Initially, the South Carolina Highway Patrol assumed that Stephen was the victim of a hit-and-run.
And they closed the case.
But police noted that the scene looked staged.
Town gossip began to swirl that Smith was actually dating Buster Murdoch and that the Murdoch brothers had done something about all this.
That was all rumor stuff.
Then in 2018, there's another death.
Gloria Satterfeld.
Gloria Satterfield was Murdoch's longtime housekeeper.
Apparently, she had a severe head injury February 2nd, 2018, and then died on February 26th of complications including a stroke.
It's not clear exactly what caused her death.
The coroner was never notified.
Satterfield's body was never autopsied.
So it wouldn't have been suspicious, except for the fact that apparently, Alec Murdoch and two other men, a banker and a fellow attorney, conspired to steal Satterfield's $4.3 million insurance policy by misleading Satterfield's sons and diverting all the funds to Alec himself through a phony business that Alec created.
Which, I mean, talk about audacious.
So, the maid dies and your first move is to steal the life insurance money?
That is a wild scheme.
Okay then, 2019, another death.
On February 24th, 2019, 19-year-old Paul, the other son, and a group of his friends were returning to the Murdoch State by boat.
Apparently, Paul was really, really drunk, maybe high, and he was navigating the twisting waterways.
Apparently, he crashed the boat into a bridge, and a bunch of passengers fell from the boat, including Mallory Beach, and she died.
The authorities didn't record his intoxication levels at the scene, but everybody confirmed that the guy was drunk off his ass.
This apparently led to a flurry of lawsuits and a criminal investigation focused on Paul Murdoch.
And this opened a lot of boxes for Alec because there's a lot of wondering about his fraudulent activities and his finances.
And then, in 2021, there was more public interest that was going around Paul Murdoch's trial.
They decided to put him on trial.
Meanwhile, Alec, his wife was estranged from him.
And apparently, he was living at the beach house and looking into divorce.
And Alec was neck deep in these fraud schemes.
He apparently said that he was having a 20 year opioid addiction.
Okay.
On June 7th, 2021.
Alec allegedly lured Maggie to Mizzell, right?
That's the 1772 Acre Estate.
And prompted her to text a friend that Alec was acting fishy.
She wrote to her friend, he's up to something.
Upon arriving at the state, Maggie met her son Paul at the family's dog kennels.
While they were there, both the mom and the son were murdered with two different weapons.
Maggie was shot with an assault, what they call an assault rifle, rifle.
Paul was shot with a shotgun.
Alec appeared on the scene shortly afterward and then called 911 to report the deaths.
The double homicide caused the whole thing to collapse.
So he immediately fell under suspicion of murder because that's really, really, really suspicious.
People getting killed on your property who are your family members.
Very often the first suspect is the family member.
And in this particular case where Alec is a disaster area with apparently a trail of death behind the family, it seems pretty obvious what the police were doing.
And this was made worse because on September 3rd, 2021, Murdoch resigned from the family's law firm over embezzlement.
The firm later sued him The very next day, Alec called 911 to report a strange roadside incident in which he claimed to have blown a tire.
When a stranger stopped to help him, Alec reported, they shot him in the head instead.
The shot grazed him, but it turns out that he later admitted that he intended to have a friend shoot and kill him so that Buster could receive Alec's $10 million life insurance payout.
So he was arrested for that.
He posted bond, he checked himself into drug rehab, and then he was arrested for felony fraud charges in the Satterfield case.
Then his bail was denied, his assets were frozen.
And finally, he's now been put on trial for the double homicide of his wife and son.
And it's fairly obvious that he killed his wife and son.
I mean, like, all the evidence stacks up in favor of him having killed his wife and son.
His testimony yesterday was kind of a shocker because the first rule of lawyering is never put the defendant on the stand.
And putting the defendant on the stand is a super risky move.
Because again, the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
All you have to do is establish some level of reasonable doubt in order to get your client off.
Now, there are only two reasons to put your client on the stand.
One, the person's actually, like, dead innocent.
The person didn't do anything.
The person is going to be a good witness.
Two, you have no other choice.
In this particular case, it appeared that the jaws of justice were closing in on Alec Murdoch.
And so they put him on the stand.
And so here he was yesterday saying he did not kill his wife and son.
On June 7th, 2021, did you take this gun or any gun like it?
And shoot your son, Paul, in the chest in the feed room at your property off Moselle Road?
No, I did not.
Mr. Murdy, did you take this gun or any gun like it and blow your son's brains out on June 7th or any day or any time?
No, I did not.
Mr. Murd, did you take a .300 blackout such as this and fire it into your wife Maggie's leg, torso, or any part of her body?
No, I did not.
Did you shoot a .300 Blackout into her head, causing her death?
Mr. Griffin, I didn't shoot my wife or my son any time.
Ever.
Well, there are a few problems for him.
One is that he claimed that he was not anywhere near the scene of the crime.
And it turns out he was totally lying because his son was taking a Snapchat and in the background of the Snapchat, minutes before the murder, his dad's voice can be heard.
And so that forced Murdoch to admit that he had lied to the cops and then continued to lie about the cops about his whereabouts the night of the murder.
He blamed that on his opioid addiction, which does not explain why you're lying to the cops about you being like right there when somebody gets killed.
And in the interview of August 11th, Did you tell Agent Owen and Agent Croft, did you lie to them by telling them that you were not down at the kennels on that night?
Yes.
Alec, why did you lie to Agent Owen, Agent Croft and Deputy Rutland about the last time you saw Maggie and Paul?
As my addiction evolved over time, I would get in these situations and circumstances where I would get paranoid thinking.
And it could be anything that triggered it.
It might be a look somebody gave me.
It might be a reaction somebody had to something I did.
It might be a policeman following me in a car.
Did you see them on the ground when you're pulling up in your Suburban?
I did.
And what'd you do when you came to a stop, Alec?
that he's really looking for.
The moment he was looking for is where he's gonna break down on the stand.
Right, you see this a lot in the courtroom, unfortunately.
This seems like dramatics, obviously.
Did you see them on the ground when you're pulling up in your Suburban?
I did.
And what'd you do when you came to a stop, Alec?
I think I jumped out of my car.
I'm not exactly sure what I did, but no, I got out of my car.
you I know I ran back to my car, called 911.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know why I tried to turn him over.
Me and my boys laying face down.
He's done the way he's done.
Ed was the way Ed was.
I could see his brain laying on the sidewalk.
I didn't know what to do.
I mean, I tried to turn him over to a granny by the belt loop.
I tried to turn him over.
Well, listen, there's no other suspects in this case, as far as I'm aware.
And I will say this guy's been in the courtroom a long time, so that appears to be fairly good acting.
That is my belief about the situation.
We'll keep an eye on that case because obviously it's making national headlines.
OK, it's time for some deconstructing of the culture.
I haven't done it in a while.
It is time.
Alrighty, so the top song in the country is a new Miley Cyrus song.
It is called Flowers.
And the entire premise of the song is that loneliness is good.
And that your relationships falling apart is actually good because the only person you need is you, which is one of the great lies ever told.
Here is Miley Cyrus singing Flowers.
We were right, till we weren't Built a home and watched it burn I didn't wanna leave you, I didn't wanna lie Started to cry but then remembered I I can buy myself flowers Write my name in the sand Talk to myself for hours
Say things you don't understand I can take myself dancing And I can hold my head Yeah, I can love me better than you can Can love me better, oh, can love me better Okay, so...
Then, you know, it's her stripping down in various states of undress as she walks around her house by herself.
Okay, so.
Here's the thing.
You can't.
You can't.
I'm sorry to break it to you.
Listen, there are a lot of breakup songs.
Breakup songs are a staple of the music industry.
They've been, you know, a solid gold winner for 60, 70, 80, 90 years.
But the breakup song used to be about how the relationship wasn't working anymore, and so I'm leaving.
It wasn't a broad statement, as this one is, about how, just generally speaking, the best person for you is you.
The best person for you is you, right?
I can love me better than you can.
If that's the case, if you can hold your own hand, if you can write your own name in the sand, if you can talk to yourself, first of all, if you talk to yourself for hours, you're a crazy person.
Say things you don't understand, take yourself dancing, then this does raise the question as to why have a relationship in the first place.
See, here's the thing about relationships.
They require you to get outside yourself.
They require you not to be self-absorbed and self-obsessed.
They require you to try to get to the point where if your partner doesn't understand you, you actually have to express yourself to your partner.
And maybe you have to think about whether your feelings are justified.
And maybe you have to negotiate a solution.
Because love is built in the space between two people.
And we tend to think of love as an internal feeling that exists inside one person, but that's not the way this works.
Love is something that is between two people and it exists between the two people in a negotiated space.
You know, I'm making more of this than I think most people are going to make when they listen to the song, which you'll think of as just sort of another breakup song.
But the general underlying tenor of the song, which is that I love myself the most.
And I am, I mean, first of all, it's the, the, the.
Honestly, the corollary joke of this is the old Woody Allen joke that he's in favor of masturbation because it's sex with somebody that he loves.
But that's essentially what the song is.
I mean, essentially what the song is saying is that you are better off without anybody else.
Or at least, if there is going to be somebody else, they have to accept every single thing about you.
And they can never question anything about you.
There can't be any negotiated space.
That is not the basis for a successful relationship.
And so obviously, the preemptive strike is, I don't need a relationship.
I can be by myself.
Well, we have an entire society now of people who are by themselves.
60% of men say that they are no longer in a relationship.
Some 40% of women say they're not in a relationship.
People are not getting married.
People are not having kids.
People are not building family foundations.
And the question is, do they seem real happy to you?
And, um, I gotta say, I don't think Miley Cyrus looks like a particularly happy person.
I don't think that her life story is a particularly happy one.
And so, our cultural betters, you know, push this sort of stuff, but it is certainly not good for the human spirit or the human psyche.
Alrighty, I don't have things I like today.
I only have some things that I hate, unfortunately.
So, first thing that I hate, so we have some economic news.
According to the Associated Press, a key U.S.
inflation measure is now surging at the fastest rate since June.
The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge rose last month at its fastest pace since June.
That's an alarming sign that price pressures remain entrenched in the U.S.
economy, could lead the Fed to keep raising interest rates well into this year.
Remember just like five seconds ago?
When the entirety of the Democratic press was claiming that we were going to have a soft landing, everything was going to be fine, and all of this was overblown, the economy was doing just fine, inflation would come under control.
Yeah, not so much.
Friday's report from the Commerce Department showed consumer prices rose 0.6% from December to January.
That is up sharply from a 0.2% increase from November to December.
On a year-over-year basis, prices rose 5.4%.
That is actually up from a 5.3% annual increase in December.
Excluding food and energy prices, core inflation rose 0.6% from December.
That is up from a 0.4% increase the previous month.
Compared with one year earlier, core inflation was up 4.7% in January.
That's actually an increase.
So, all the talk about how we were having a slowing rate of inflation, that's no longer true.
Apparently, it's re-accelerating.
And that is a direct result of the fact that, again, we keep blowing money into the American economy.
We blew too much money in the American economy in the first place.
And yet, Joe Biden wants to spend more money.
Okay, one more thing that I hate.
So, apparently, this Saturday, there are a bunch of white supremacist groups and they are planning a national day of hate.
Now, I gotta be honest, I somehow, I sort of hesitate to bring attention to these folks because they're obviously trolls and they're obviously dolts.
The reason that I bring attention to this is just to demonstrate That there are those of us who are Jewish, live in the United States, who are just going to not allow this sort of thing to go forward without pointing out how idiotic you people are.
The thing about white supremacists is they're literally some of the stupidest people on earth.
It's one of the great ironies of life is that people who declare themselves supreme based on their race typically are some of the dumbest people who walk the planet.
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, information about the anti-Semitic campaign was first provided by the Chicago Police Department.
A situational awareness alert with NYPD insignia circulating online advises local Jewish communities to be on the lookout for suspicious activity.
You don't see a lot of these sorts of days of hate that are directed at other communities.
Jews tend to be the ones that these are directed at, unfortunately.
Law enforcement and security agencies in the Chicago and New York areas say as of Thursday afternoon, there are no known concrete threats to Jewish institutions.
Presumably, all of these groups are more than happy to get the publicity of doing this sort of stuff.
The police are ramping up their presence around synagogues.
It is worth noting that this has now become a regular feature of life in American synagogues.
My synagogue has heavy security.
We bring additional security because I go to my synagogue.
And so, you know, it's sufficient to repel any threat.
The fact that that is even necessary demonstrates the malice of this particular group of people.
And so, just one more message in response to people who have declared a day of hate For Jews, I would like to declare an official day of kiss my ass, you pathetic losers.
My day, just for you.
It's the day of kiss my ass.
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 mailbag as per usual arrangement.
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