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Feb. 27, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:20
The Greatest Cover-Up In History | Ep. 1676
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The Energy Department and FBI finally admit COVID-19 probably started in a Chinese lab.
Joe Biden still can't answer why he won't go to East Palestine.
And the left proves that racism is just fine so long as it's against white people.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So you remember that time for like two years, you couldn't say that COVID-19 probably started in a Chinese lab.
Now, the evidence was there very early on that there was a high probability that COVID-19 started in a Chinese lab.
Number one, it was covered up by the Chinese government since the very earliest days.
And even people who are considered sort of Mainstream establishment COVID figures were saying as much if you go all the way back to 2020.
There were people who are looking at the actual genetic coding of COVID-19 and they were saying there are a lot of hallmarks here that do not look as though this is naturally changing in the bat population.
In fact, no one could actually find COVID-19 in the bat population, but the going theory was that it was some rando who ate a bat or something, and that is what generated COVID-19.
And in fact, we were supposed to believe that China was so wildly competent that it didn't happen at their lab, but they could find the one bat that one dude, Ozzy Osbourne style, had bit the head off of or he was eating bat soup or something.
And that is the reason why COVID-19 broke out among the population.
Now, the thing that we know, by the way, is that the state of China was actually Prohibiting information about the virus, which they knew about, in like October of 2019, like literally months in advance, and if China weren't a repressive totalitarian communist dictatorship, then COVID-19 probably doesn't break out of its borders, and it certainly doesn't kill millions of people.
Instead, China lied, and literally millions of people died because China lied.
And it turns out now, of course, that the most likely scenario for COVID-19 is that it was developed in the Wuhan lab and that it leaked outside.
Now, this has started to become sort of a more mainstream idea over the course of the last year and a half or so.
You had even people like Jon Stewart doing rants on late night television about how there's literally one institute of virology in the entire area.
I mean, we're talking like the global area and just happens to be in Wuhan.
And this is exactly the epicenter of this pandemic.
But you'll remember that from the very earliest days, if you mentioned this sort of thing, you were considered out of bounds.
Well, now here is the breaking news.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
Energy Department has concluded that the COVID pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic's origin.
The Energy Department now joins the FBI in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese lab.
Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge it was likely the result of a natural transmission.
Two are undecided.
The Energy Department's conclusion is the result of new intelligence.
It's significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S.
national laboratories, some of which actually conduct advanced biological research.
Now, the Energy Department did make the judgment with quote unquote, low confidence.
The FBI previously came to a conclusion the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with a moderate confidence and still holds to that view.
Now again, the other possibilities seem a lot less likely.
Because there is no train of transmission that shows that COVID-19, a version of it existed in the bat population, then it sort of gradually became human oriented and then was transmissible via humans.
The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with low confidence the virus came about through natural transmission.
Now, this was not a biological weapons program per se, but it turns out that when you are screwing around with viruses, and when you are China, And you essentially unleash a worldwide Chernobyl, that is quite a bad thing.
Now remember, at the very beginning of the pandemic, there were in fact scientists who were writing to Anthony Fauci and saying to him, this thing looks engineered.
And then, Anthony Fauci took a leading role in preventing the information from being disseminated.
Because he was of the belief, apparently, that if that information got out, that would endanger our relationship with China, that this would somehow Blow back on him, because the NIH had been providing, obviously, funding to Chinese laboratories, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for what he says was not gain-of-function research, but was clearly a form of gain-of-function research.
The Intercept reported, all the way back in January of 2022, that Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a letter painting a damning picture of U.S.
government officials wrestling with whether the coronavirus may have leaked out of a lab they were funding, acknowledging it may have, and then keeping the discussion from spilling out into public view.
There's a letter signed by James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio.
and was followed by pages of notes on emails that were first obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post, but then were heavily redacted in June 2021.
Those redacted emails included the agenda for a February 1, 2020 telephone conference between Anthony Fauci, his then-boss at the NIH, Francis Collins, and several of the world's leading virologists.
The communications contained extensive notes summarizing what was said during the call, but their substance was hidden during the time.
Apparently, on that call, virologist Michael Farzan and Robert Gehry told Fauci and Collins the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab.
It might have been genetically engineered, the transcription of Gehry's notes suggests, but this now seems unlikely.
Another possibility was that it could have been involved in the lab through a process known as serial passage.
The two methods represent two different ideas behind the so-called lab leak hypothesis.
Well, not long after that particular call, Actually, the day before the call, Scripps Research infectious disease expert Christian Anderson had warned Fauci the virus might have been engineered in a lab, and they agreed to have a call.
Well, not long after the call, Anderson then wrote a paper in Nature magazine titled, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.
And one of those possible transmission vectors was, in fact, the lab leak.
On February 2nd, Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert and director of Wellcome, sent around notes, including to Fauci and Collins, summarizing what some of the scientists had said on the call.
And apparently, again, this issue came up and Anthony Fauci was encouraged not to actually say anything about the lab leak hypothesis and in fact to downplay the lab leak hypothesis as they discussed what to present to the public.
The scientists determined questions of potential lab origin might prove more trouble than they were worth.
Ron Fauci, a virologist at the Erasmus MC Center for Viroscience in the Netherlands, said, given the evidence presented and the discussions around it, I would conclude a follow-up discussion on the possible origin of COVID-19 would be of much interest.
Years earlier, Fauci's gain-of-function research had brought the discipline under fire for a 2011 experiment in which he infected ferrets with avian influenza virus, allowing it to become airborne and infect mammals.
But Fauci wrote, Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general, and science in China in particular.
It would harm science.
The science would be harmed if people actually talked about this stuff.
China would be harmed if people actually talked about this stuff.
And then it turns out that Fauci and Collins looked like they were putting some backdoor pressure on people not to talk about this sort of stuff.
In fact, there was an email from Anthony Fauci to Peter Daszak, who was involved in EcoHealth Alliance, which was the sort of cutout by which the NIH supported the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in which Fauci said, thanks for your kind note.
What was the kind note from Peter Daszak?
The kind note was, thanks for shutting down the discussion about whether this was a lab leak.
He said, I want to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators for publicly standing up and stating that scientific evidence supports a natural origin, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
From my perspective, your comments are brave.
Coming from your trusted voice will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus's origins.
So again, Anthony Fauci and company were working in order to shut down the lab leak hypothesis.
And as we'll talk about in a second, this attempt to quash any discussion about whether this thing came from a Chinese lab extended to the entire realm of social media, as well as to the legacy media as well.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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Okay, so how invested were members of the media in the lie that this thing had nothing to do with the Chinese lab?
Pretty damned invested.
In fact, again, Anthony Fauci was asked about this.
He laughed at the idea that he wasn't transparent.
I've always been transparent.
It turns out that was not true.
This is PBS NewsHour.
But another criticism is that you and other public health officials were not transparent enough at points along the way about what you knew and what you didn't know about COVID.
That's nonsense.
That is total nonsense that we weren't transparent about it.
What the public needed to know, and perhaps we could have done a better job, is that we were dealing with a dynamic, evolving situation.
What the public needed to know, what the public needed to know, but this is always the question for people like Anthony Fauci is what you needed to know.
And so what are the real question is, why exactly were they so focused on shutting down the lab leak hypothesis when it turns out that there's really good evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is the most probable hypothesis?
Why?
Well, there are a few different reasons.
One, again, is a cover your ass thing happening inside the federal government.
Anthony Fauci and company were in fact sending money via EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They're doing so to do gain-of-function research.
They say it's not gain-of-function research.
That is a technical battle over the definition of gain-of-function research.
This does not mean that the money was used to develop COVID-19 directly.
It does mean that money is fungible.
It also means that when you are funding laboratories that do not have proper containment facilities, you're upping the risk that something like this will happen.
So that is one reason is cover your ass.
The other reason is because every major administration Over the course of the last 30 years has essentially been doing the work of China when it comes to public relations.
And we didn't want anybody thinking badly of China, despite the fact that China unleashed this virus on the rest of the world.
We were scared of people knowing that China is in fact a nefarious and egregious force in the world responsible for millions of deaths.
We were afraid that that might undermine whatever negotiations we had going with China.
So it's imperative that the American public not be even allowed to discuss the issue.
That's the other reason that this thing was swept under the rug and purposefully swept under the rug by both our health authorities, as well as members of the federal government and the media.
And it was the entire media, by the way, because you were called a conspiracy theorist if you talked about the lab leak hypothesis.
You're also called a racist, by the way.
This is always the weirdest thing to me.
It's apparently it was more racist to suggest that China had blown it in a lab and the virus had escaped from the lab.
That apparently was more racist than saying it was a random Chinese dude eating a bat.
Which, I gotta say, the last one sounds more damaging to China, random dude eating a bat, than you guys released it from a lab by accident.
But, again, the entire media decided on this narrative and you were literally not allowed to talk about it on places like Twitter or YouTube or Facebook.
They would ban you.
They would ding you if you talked about the so-called lab leak conspiracy theory.
So, for example, PolitiFact PolitiFact fact-checked Tucker Carlson because a Tucker Carlson guest talked about the lab leak theory.
And here is what PolitiFact's headline was, quote, Tucker Carlson guest debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab.
Debunked conspiracy theory.
That was from Politico.
Or how about this one from the Washington Post?
Headline from the Washington Post, Paulina Firozzi, February 17th, 2020.
Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.
Well, scientists disputing, I mean, presumably there's lots of disputation inside scientific circles, but it was a coronavirus fringe theory, a fringe conspiracy theory back in February 2020, at the exact time, by the way, that there were people writing to Anthony Fauci and having phone calls with Anthony Fauci talking about the possibility that this was, in fact, leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Or if you don't like that one, how about this one from The New York Times?
This one again, February 17th, 2020, same exact day.
Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins.
Because you weren't supposed to talk about any of this.
Or how about Scientific American?
Scientific American has become just a parody of itself between telling you that boys can be girls and girls can be boys and suggesting that John Fetterman's brain is fine.
Scientific America has just blown out.
Scientific American has blown out any brand credibility it ever had.
They released a piece.
This one was not in 2020.
This is in March of 2022.
March of 2022.
From Steven Lewandowski, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Bristol, Peter Jacobs, Climate Scientist and Strategic Science Advisor at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Stuart Neal, Professor of Virology and Head of the Department of Infectious Disease at King's College London.
And the headline was, quote, The Lab Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.
Virus origin stories have always been prone to conspiracy theories, they say.
COVID disinformation has threatened research and lives.
Again, the idea was you are threatening the science.
You're threatening the science.
You're not allowed to talk about the things we don't want you to talk about because it threatens the science for that to happen.
By the way, Facebook had actually banned any post claiming that COVID-19 was man-made.
It actually banned it for like years on end.
Because they didn't want you to have access to the truth on any of this sort of stuff.
And then people wonder why the institutional credibility of the media and of our scientific institutions is in the dumpster.
That would be the reason.
That would be the reason.
You want to talk about leaving room for conspiracy theories?
Well, it turns out that when your conspiracy theory was true, Well, two conspiracy theories, in air quotes.
And conspiracy theory number one, it was a lab leak.
That was true, apparently.
And conspiracy theory number two, you were all silencing the talk about the first conspiracy because you had ulterior motives.
And that turns out to be true also.
And then you wonder why we don't trust you?
That would be the reason we don't trust you.
Institutional credibility in the scientific, in the scientific institutions, in the media, in our government, is at a low ebb.
And there is a reason for that.
They have destroyed themselves.
It's truly impressive how they've destroyed themselves in the course of just a few years here.
Just because they had to cling to that patina of expertise, even when their expertise did not match up to their actual performance.
Honestly, the quote-unquote elites in our society, the people who consider themselves your masters, the people who consider themselves the people who ought to tell you what to think, and tell you what to do, and ought to be able to regulate you into silence, and ought to be able to silence all the channels of dissent, all those people, they've exercised more control over the past three years than any time in my lifetime, and they've done a poorer job than at any time in my lifetime.
That is not a coincidence.
They're not competent.
And in some cases, their motivations suck as well.
And it's about the projection of their power over you.
Again, you're on a need-to-know basis about your own life.
You're on a need-to-know basis about crucial facts that you need to take into consideration when you are making personal decisions.
I'm angry that we were lied to.
You should be angry too.
Because the fact is that if you're like me and you had some level of baseline credulity about some of our institutions, that credulity is gone.
The veil is gone.
The mask is gone.
And these people have shown what they are willing to do in order to control you.
And it is really, really ugly.
Speaking of not trusting the people in control.
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Okay, meanwhile, speaking of people who have blown out their institutional credibility, The media like to claim that they are the experts when it comes to the race debate.
They're the ones who will tell you what is appropriate speech and what is not appropriate speech. So just as in the scientific context, they will tell you what you're allowed to talk about.
Ixnay on the Ab Eek Lay hypothesis.
It's now no, no talking about that. You weren't allowed to talk about the problems of transmission despite the vaccine.
You weren't allowed to talk about natural immunity.
There are like a thousand things you were not allowed to talk about when it came to COVID because they were the experts and you're not the experts.
They feel the same way about basic social interactions.
There are certain things you are just not allowed to say.
There are certain things that you are not allowed to.
And conversely, there are certain things that you are allowed to say and you are allowed to do if your skin is of a particular color.
It's really, really hideous stuff.
Now again, I'm all for one standard when it comes to racism.
Don't malign groups.
Done!
That's the end of it.
Do not malign racial groups.
Do not treat one racial group differently than you would treat another racial group.
Do not promote the idea that a group is worse or better based on skin color.
This is very basic stuff, but the left doesn't actually hold to those standards.
The left doesn't hold to those standards, not remotely.
There were a couple of big controversies about this over the weekend.
So, the first big controversy was Scott Adams.
So Scott Adams, who is the creator of Dilbert, he had an unfortunate clip that went viral because he was talking about a poll from Rasmussen.
And this poll from Rasmussen is super disturbing.
The poll from Rasmussen polled Americans on the question of, quote, it's okay to be white.
Is it okay to be white?
72% of Americans agree that it's okay to be white.
12% disagree.
69% of Democrats agree and 12% disagree.
But among Black Americans, 53% agree that it's okay to be white.
26% disagree.
21% not sure.
So only a bare majority of black Americans, according to Rasmussen, think it's, quote, OK to be white.
Now, there are a couple of reads on that poll.
One is that people are not actually listening to the poll question.
They're hearing that as a slogan.
And so they're hearing that as a responsive slogan that is sort of racist in intent.
Now, again, I think they're divining too much in the question.
It's OK to be white.
But that is a plausible read that people see here.
It's OK to be white.
What they what they are thinking is it's superior to be.
OK, fine.
That is the kind read.
Bottom line, though, is if those poll numbers are representative, at least a quarter of black Americans think it's not OK to be white.
Right.
That would be the actual converse of it's OK to be white.
Which is disturbing, because if you had 26 percent of white Americans saying it's not OK to be black, that would be incredibly disturbing and super problematic and it would spell, you know, some real problems in our public.
So Scott Adams decided to go off on it, but the way that he went off on it was in the dumbest possible way.
So here was Scott Adams talking about this.
So if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll, that's a hate group.
That's a hate group.
And I don't want to have anything to do with them.
And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.
Just get the f*** away.
Wherever you have to go, just get away.
So, that's really terrible.
That's a really terrible racist thing to say.
That based on this poll, you should just run away from all black people.
Now, here is the thing.
Here's the thing.
You can agree with that.
Also agree with that's a terrible racist thing to say.
Also, if you replaced every word that says black in that sentence with white in that sentence, the mainstream media will not only cheer you, they will give you an op-ed slot at the New York Times.
Herein lies a major problem in American society.
We'll get to that major problem momentarily.
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Okay, so, Scott Adams says something that pretty much everybody acknowledges is racist.
Right, which is, he says that that poll shows that black people are a hate group, seems to be what he is saying there.
Right, that seems to be what he is saying, that there's a poll and it shows that only 53% of black Americans think it's okay to be white, which means 47% of black Americans think it's not okay to be white.
And so there's a direct quote, quote, if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, that's a hate group.
That's a hate group.
I don't want anything to do with them.
And just to clarify, he continued along these lines and he, and he suggested That you should then avoid black people, right?
You should live as far away from them as humanly possible.
You should move in order to avoid black people.
That is what he is saying.
So now we're going to play a quick game of reverse the races.
OK, this quick game is useful because, as we'll discuss in just a moment, the left is totally fine with racism so long as it actually is coming from one particular group against another particular group.
You want to know why there are so many people in America who believe that it's OK to be racist against white people?
It's because of the media's treatment of these particular issues.
Okay, so here is, we're going to just read Scott Adams' full quote here.
And we're going to read his entire quote based on, by reversing the race.
Quote, if nearly half of all whites are not okay with black people, according to this poll, not according to me, that's a hate group.
That's a hate group and I don't want anything to do with them.
Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to black people is to get the hell away from white people.
This can't be fixed.
You just have to escape.
All I did in that quote is just reverse the races.
That's all I did in that quote.
That is a direct quote from Scott Adams.
Dilbert has been canceled from every major newspaper in the United States.
It's a really, really bad quote from him when it's about black people.
If it were about black people treating white people, if the races were reversed, the entire media would be putting this guy on the front page of the 1619 Project.
If this were a black person saying that half of white people are not okay with black people, the best thing you can do is get away from the white people, that person is now speaking on major college campuses.
That person is being given op-ed slots over at the New York Times.
That person is being given a Hulu deal.
And when it comes to racism in the United States, there is, in fact, a massive double standard.
Some of us believe racism is bad across the board, and then others of us on the left, we tend to believe that racism is OK, so long as that racism is being performed by people who are not white against people who are white.
And I give you just a quick example.
So there's a video that's going around from a site called The Cut.
Hey, The Cut.
Is a website that has to do with it's an aspect of New York Magazine.
OK, so this is a major publication.
The Cut is owned by New York Magazine.
It is one of their brands.
And it very often deals with minority issues.
They put together a video.
The video asked a bunch of non-white people, what are white people superior at?
Now again, reverse the races, and this is the most racist video, according to the left, ever made.
What are black people superior at, right?
Listen to the answers that these people of color give.
And this is considered not only perfectly okay, but insightful.
Insightful and good, because white people have to challenge their own preconceived notions and biases.
They have to look inside themselves for their own flaws.
They have to do the work.
This video is just pure racism.
It is just pure, unbridled racism against white people.
That's all this video is.
It was at the cut.
Here we go.
What are white people superior at?
What exactly are white people superior at?
They're real good at violence.
Violence.
Genocide.
It's like stealing people's lives just because they feel like it.
If you are white, and you know this is happening, and you say nothing, then you're a killer too.
What exactly are white people superior at?
Insecurity.
Pretending.
Fear.
Being fearful of nothing.
Being ignorant.
Blame.
Letting their egos control their every move.
Superior.
Being.
What exactly are white people superior at?
Oppression.
Gaslighting.
Lack of empathy.
Intellectualizing oppression.
Did I say oppression?
What exactly are white people superior at?
Taking what's not there.
Taking sh**.
Taking our ideas.
Copycatting.
Gentrification.
Appropriating things that do not belong to them.
Taking over other people's cultures.
And making you believe that they invented it.
Maybe they're thinking of it as repurposing.
It's like recycle and repurpose.
As my grandma would say, them white folk, they'll take it if you don't copyright it.
Okay, so just to go through a list of those things.
It's a comedic video, guys.
This is super funny.
There's a bunch of people of color talking about white folks.
What are white people the best at?
It turns out white people are just sheer garbage.
They're just the worst people in the entire universe.
According to this group of people at The Cut, this is considered fine to be distributed by legacy media over at The Cut.
Let me just go through the list of some of the things, this isn't even the entirety of the things that were said in that video.
Again, none of those people are going to lose their job.
Those people will be given raises.
Those people are heroes of the Republic.
Scott Adams will lose his entire comic strip.
And there's a case we made he should.
And those people will be rewarded and they will be put over at New York Magazine, no problemo.
So just a few things they say that white people are better at.
Violence.
Can you imagine that you were asked a question about what are black people better at?
And you answered violence.
Your job is over.
You lose your job.
It's gone.
I mean, you're just not, you're never getting it back.
If you said that what black people are better at is insecurity, ego, that black people are dicks.
That's literally what somebody said on that video.
That they are better at oppression.
That they are better at lack of empathy.
Black people have no empathy.
If you said that sort of thing, just reverse the races.
If you said that sort of thing, no job for you.
You're toast.
If you said what black people are the best at is cultural appropriation, taking things that don't belong.
I mean, first of all, I said stealing, actual stealing.
Then they said taking things that don't belong to them and culturally appropriating them.
If you said any of that sort of stuff, you would be out of a job tomorrow.
It is that simple.
In other words, racism is totally fine with the left, but only toward one group.
I shouldn't say only toward one group.
There are certain types of racism that are totally fine from the left, depending on whether you are higher or lower on the intersectional pyramid.
So if you are a white person and you're anti-Asian, that's racism.
If you're a black person and you're anti-Asian, we don't talk about that sort of stuff.
If you are a white person, you're a white supremacist and you hate Jews, we talk about that a lot.
If you are a black person and you're beating the shit out of a Jew in Williamsburg, that does not get any media coverage whatsoever.
We don't care about that.
That is not worth discussing.
We need to stop talking about that right now.
All of which suggests that for the left, unfortunately, racism is not actually the problem.
It is a power game, which is what it is.
The left believes in a deconstructionist vision of society in which all words and all societal forces are merely guises for power.
And so when you say to yourself, wait a second, this makes no sense.
And just on a pure human level, it makes no sense that you're okay with racism against white people, but you're super anti-racism against black people.
That doesn't make any sense.
You have to understand that for the left, it isn't about the racism.
It's about the power.
And they'll say this.
They'll say that racism is only possible from the powerful toward the powerless.
So if you have people who are less powerful, who actually hold some of the most egregious views in society, if you have those people, if those people exist, it doesn't matter.
They don't have power.
It's about power.
It's about restoring a balanced power and not just a balance.
About restoring supreme power for certain groups at the expense of other groups in order to overturn the system generally.
Which means that it's all lies.
It's not actually about preserving a moral system.
It's about upending what they perceive to be a power hierarchy.
And if you catch them in an off moment, this is precisely what they will say.
It's why they add the definition of power to the definition of racism.
And most of us say racism is based on your bad feelings about another group of people based on ethnicity or race, right?
That's what racism is.
People on the left will say no.
It's that combined with power.
Which means it's really just about the power, it's not about the thought whatsoever.
Which is why, again, it doesn't excuse us from holding a standard as good human beings for what racism is and is not and holding everybody to that same standard.
It does mean that what the left is actually doing when they do this sort of stuff They're undermining whatever credibility they supposedly have on these issues in the first place.
And meanwhile, speaking of people who have been ousted from polite society, Libs of TikTok, Chaya Raychik, has now been informed by the software company Slack that it permanently suspended her from being able to use their services over a non-specified violation.
What exactly did Chaya Raychik do?
No one knows.
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, who's a top supporter of Libs of TikTok, posted a screenshot of the email the company sent explaining their decision not to do business with Libs of TikTok.
And this is Daily Y reporting.
The company said, quote, we are writing to let you know we have suspended your workspace for violations of our acceptable use policy.
As highlighted in Slack's acceptable use policy, Slack may exercise its right to suspend or terminate your access.
So what exactly is it that Libs of TikTok does?
Libs of TikTok, again, all that Chaya does is she literally finds clips of people talking and then she puts it on the interwebs.
That's it.
It's very short on the explanatory journalism.
It's very short on the commentary.
It's just clips of people saying things, and that's enough to get you banned from Slack.
Raycheck wrote, quote, Slack is angry that an account is working to protect childhood innocence by educating people about mutilation surgeries, porn in schools, and inappropriate adult entertainment being presented to kids.
Apparently, Dylan added an update after I tweeted that Slack had suspended libs of TikTok.
I got a reply from them saying they were looking into it.
Sounds like they might do the right thing, but instead of reinstating the account, they deleted this tweet that said that they were looking into it.
So, again, major corporations, the institutional powers that be, they are perfectly happy to shut you down based on your politics.
This is why you must have the right politics.
And they will decide what the right politics are.
There is no objective standard.
The whole thing for the left is about the changing standard, because this is the best way to maintain power.
The best way to demonstrate power over others is not to have a bright line that if people violate, they get punished.
That's actually not the best way to maintain power.
You see this in dictatorial oppressive regimes.
The best way to maintain power is to constantly move the line.
So people don't know which violation they are going to perform on a day in, day out basis.
They're walking around the street.
They don't know if they're going to be arrested.
They don't know if they violated the new regulation.
They don't know if they've actually broken the law or if they violated some sort of social scruple.
This is why the left keeps changing the line.
It's amazing to watch as American society performs the role of Charlie Brown to the left's Lucy with the football.
The left will be like, you know, guys, we have to fight homophobia.
And Americans, I'd be like, OK, all right.
And then the minute that that's they approach the football, we're going to kick it, guys.
We're going to kick it.
And then it turns out we're not fighting homophobia after all.
It turns out that you are transphobic if you say that men and women exist as separate dichotomous sexes in the human species.
Well, I mean, that wasn't the football.
You remove the football.
This is what the left does.
They do it for power because for them, again, it's not a cynical game.
It's a cynical game to anyone outside.
But for them, it's perfectly within principle.
You don't have to tell the truth.
You don't have to set standards.
The whole game is about upending the structure of power.
I mean, that is, in essence, Marxism.
Marxism suggests that the system defines the individual.
That the system has created us to be a certain way.
And thus, the only way to reshape human nature is to remake the system.
And whatever you have to do in order to remake the system, in order to give power to the powerless, in order to restructure society's hierarchies, this you must do.
And if that includes lying, if it includes double standards, if it includes saying that certain people can speak and other people cannot, that's totally fine.
You do it.
And then you wonder why institutional trust is gone.
Institutional trust in those sorts of people should be gone.
Those people should not be running institutions in the first place.
Now, speaking of people who should not be running institutions in the first place, we're going to get to the Biden administration in East Palestine first.
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All righty, meanwhile, Joe Biden is still not going to East Palestine, Ohio.
And then there's really no reason for him not to go.
The media is in full defense mode of Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg arriving there like three weeks too late.
I am amused by people whose entire job is to just do photo ops, now telling us that photo ops aren't important.
So Pete Buttigieg, who is a walking photo op, that is all he is.
He was the mayor of like the fourth largest city in Indiana.
You're talking like the fourth largest city in New York or the fourth largest city in California.
You're talking about the fourth largest city in Indiana, which means that there are like 150,000 people.
Here is Pete Buttigieg, who is a walking photo op, explaining that going, not going to East Palestine, it really is not about, in any way, shape or form, you know, the image of it.
So much information and frankly, so much misinformation thrown at this community and thrown at this situation that a lot of them are asking who they can even trust.
And it's so important to continue to make sure that they can get good, accurate information about the things they care about most, which isn't national politics or who looks good or who looks bad.
It's continuing to know that their air, water and soil are going to be safe, that their homes are going to be safe.
That's what anybody would want to know in this country.
That dude is political toast.
Smear some butter on him, he is political toast.
He is done.
He is burnt toast, man.
By the way, I was wrong.
The population of South Bend, Indiana, I was guessing 150,000 off the top of my head, 100,000.
There are 100,000 people in South Bend, Indiana, and that dude is the Secretary of Transportation.
After not filling the potholes there so much, the Domino's Pizza had to do a fundraiser to fill potholes.
In South Bend, Indiana, they're like, this one, he's gotta be our Secretary of Transportation.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden says that he can't even recall if he talked to the mayor of East Palestine.
To be fair to Joe Biden, he literally cannot recall what he ate for breakfast.
So do you plan to travel there and have you talked with the mayor?
I can't recall that.
I don't think I've talked to the mayor.
I've talked to everyone else there multiple times.
I've talked to both the senators, both governors.
I've talked to everyone there is to talk to.
And we've made it clear that everything is available.
Oh, well, I don't remember who I talked to because I'm, you know... He didn't remember who he talked to over in East Palestine.
He did remember to make some weird musical jokes that were relevant in like 1962, I think.
That was weird.
Have you ever been to East Palestine, Ohio?
Were you playing in East Palestine?
It's probably not.
I did a whole video on, you know, what the hell.
Zoom?
Zoom!
All I see every time I think of Zoom is that song in my head.
Who's Zoom and who?
Well, thank you for that reference to an Aretha Franklin song that apparently came out in 1985, the year after I was born.
Literally the year after I was born.
I will say his circle of references is rather limited, but underlying so much of the angst from the left about the treatment of East Palestine is the fact that a lot of people on the left ain't no fond of the kind of people who are in East Palestine.
So let's just take an example.
The loudmouth Joy Behar, Over at The View, who is an excellent repository of all things stupid.
Here she was, over the course of the last few days, lashing out at East Palestine.
She's mad that Trump showed up.
She's really mad that Trump showed up and had himself a really good moment there politically.
And so her answer is, you guys deserve to be hit with a toxic wave of ash, essentially.
Because you did vote for Trump.
I mean, let's be real about this.
He is a president for all Americans, I believe that, but he needs to show that he is.
People don't know why they would ever vote for him.
For somebody who, by the way, he placed someone with deep ties to the chemical industry in charge of the EPA's chemical safety office.
That's who you voted for in that district.
Donald Trump, who reduces all safety.
He did.
By the way, that has been thoroughly debunked by the National Transportation Safety Board.
They said it had nothing to do with the Trump regulations that this thing happened.
One of the things that happens when you have such an overarching government that is supposedly in every nook and cranny of our lives is that we actually believe that the government can protect us from literally every bad thing happening.
Sometimes bad stuff just happens.
That is a reality of life.
And sometimes it wasn't about a regulatory failure.
Sometimes just bad stuff happens.
I mean, like, it happens in your life.
It happens in my, like, literally everybody has bad stuff that just happens to them.
But because we are so dependent on government fixing all of our problems, we're like, OK, well, it must have been some government failure.
It wasn't Trump.
You can say it wasn't even Biden.
OK, what you can say is that their reaction to the disaster in East Palestine has been absolutely lackluster because it was.
And maybe one of the reasons it was so, I mean, it wasn't Flint, Michigan.
In Flint, Michigan, you got the President of the United States flying over there to talk about lead in the water.
Maybe it has to do with the demographics of people who tend to support Democrats versus the people who tend to support Republicans in East Palestine, which won 72% for Donald Trump.
Okay, meanwhile...
The action continues over in Ukraine.
China is apparently now proposing some sort of peace deal in Ukraine.
Vladimir Zelensky, who is the president of Ukraine, according to Politico, cautiously welcomed Beijing's efforts toward ending the war in Ukraine, said he'd like to meet with Xi Jinping to discuss Chinese proposals.
Speaking at a press conference in Kiev on Friday to mark the first anniversary of Moscow's invasion, Zelensky said he was open to considering some aspects of the 12-point position paper published by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Both NATO and the EU have criticized the initiative, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying that China has taken side in the Ukraine conflict.
Beijing claims that it is neutral, but it also says that it has a no-limits relationship with Moscow.
Zelensky said that a meeting with Xi could be useful to both countries and for global security.
It's a smart move by Zelensky to at least take the meeting because he wants to show that he is willing to at least come to the table, perhaps in a way that Vladimir Putin is not.
With that said, the United States can't seem to make up its mind, this administration, on whether they want to go balls-to-the-wall or whether they want to pull back.
And that actually is a problem.
So instead, they've settled on kind of the same strategy that we actually used in Vietnam.
It's called graduated escalation.
Graduated escalation in Vietnam was the idea that if we gradually kept upping the amount of force that we were using in Vietnam, eventually the Viet Cong would surrender.
And then, after Nixon took office, he started obviously on a wide-scale bombing campaign against the Viet Cong, and he forced them to the table with overwhelming force.
If you actually, if the theory.
of the Ukraine war is put serious military pressure on Vladimir Putin to force him to the table, then you have to give the Ukrainians everything they want. If the strategy is stalemate until we can draw this line properly, then you actually have to make it clear that that is your strategy. The problem is the administration is not clear at all about what its strategy is.
So they're kind of half-assing it. They'll be on the one hand, they'll say things like we have to, we are here for the long haul. We will look at the Ukraine, everything, not F20, not F16s, everything except for those, those particular, no, no, not that you can't have it both ways.
Graduated escalation is kind of the worst of both worlds because it leads to prolonged conflict.
That is the nature of graduated escalation.
And so you have a couple of conflicting sentiments inside the same administration.
So over the weekend, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, he admitted that this thing is probably not going to end with just Ukraine shoving Russia off the board.
He said it'll probably end with some sort of negotiation.
I want to talk more about the weaponry in a moment, but when you look at this and you're making your assessments, do you think this ends with negotiations or does it end on the battlefield?
Most likely it will end with some sort of negotiation.
And what the Ukrainians are interested in is getting the Russians out of their sovereign territory.
And I think that's probably going to be their going in point, but I'll let the Ukrainians speak for themselves.
And so he says, you know, it'll probably end with some sort of negotiation, but the Ukrainians get to speak for themselves.
Well, no, they don't.
You're the one who's funding them.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
On the one hand, you have Austin who says it will end negotiation.
On the other hand, you have Jake Sullivan saying, well, it's really up to Ukraine to decide if recapturing Crimea means military victory or not.
Is it, though, since you're the one signing the check?
I'm unaware that this has ever been the case, like literally at any time, that the sponsor state allows the client state, right now Ukraine is the client state, the United States is the sponsor state, that the client state gets to decide the nature of the end of the war without reference at all to the sponsor state.
Again, if you want to say this, if you want to make Jake Sullivan's case, you give them every bit of support they could possibly want in order to achieve whatever their goal would be.
You give them the F-16s.
You give them what they want.
That'd be possibility number one.
Or alternatively, you actually have in your mind what you think a negotiation should look like, in which case you probably should hold back.
But they're doing both at the same time.
On the one hand, they're like Ukraine should be able to do whatever they want.
Also, we're not going to give them the weapons they need.
It's a very, very weird kind of take on this.
Here's Jake Sullivan.
I wanted you to sort of give a yes or no answer to this.
If Ukraine decided that victory means recapturing Crimea militarily, would the United States support that?
Dan, I can't give a yes or no answer to what is a hypothetical question.
Right now, what President Zelensky is focused on is getting into the best possible position on the battlefield so that he can be in the best possible position at the negotiating table.
And he spoke as recently as this week about diplomacy.
We want to help Ukraine.
Turn battlefield gains into diplomatic leverage.
And that requires us to give them the military assistance they need to make those gains.
What ultimately happens with Crimea in the context of this war and a settlement of this war is something for the Ukrainians to determine.
Again, they want it both ways.
Always and forever both ways.
Then, by the way, Dana Bash did ask Jake Sullivan, you know, so are you turning down the F-16s out of fear, right?
If the idea is that you need to give the Ukrainians whatever they want, then why aren't you just giving them the F-16s they're asking for?
I know you said that Ukraine doesn't have the training and the maintenance capacity to use the jets, but is the real reason you're not giving Ukraine these jets because you're trying to balance how far to go in supporting Ukraine without antagonizing Russia too much?
The real reason, Dana, is that we are taking a very hard look at what it is that Ukraine needs for the immediate phase of the war that we're in.
And this phase of the war requires tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, artillery, tactical air defense systems, so that Ukrainian fighters can retake territory that Russia currently occupies.
F-16s are a question for a later time, and that's why President Biden said that, for now, he's not moving forward with those.
I mean, they're not a question for a later time.
Literally, Ukraine asked for them now.
So is it yes or is it no?
The answer is they don't know.
Because again, it's always leading from behind with this administration.
The idea that they're the ones who kind of mobilize the coalition is not true in the first place.
It was their failure to provide Ukraine the weapons that Ukraine actually asked for before the war began and that led Russia to invade, at least in part.
So not a shock that they still don't quite know what they're doing, which means, in all likelihood, a prolonged war.
What you saw in Vietnam and graduated escalation leads to prolonged conflict.
It does not draw conflict quicker to a close.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, you know, that Ukrainian reset didn't seem like it's really helped a whole hell of a lot.
Doesn't seem like it's helped a whole hell of a lot.
Well, if that's not helping him, the economy certainly is not going to help him right now.
Investors right now are bracing for a surge in market volatility.
Warren Buffett is warning about economic stagnation and inflation as of today.
And according to the Wall Street Journal, fear is creeping back into the stock market to protect against a potential downturn.
Traders are scooping up hedges at the fastest clip since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hedges are essentially a way of preventing yourself from losing a lot of money.
You sell a hedge to hedge against the possibility that the stock goes down.
None of this is a tremendous shock.
Inflation continues to pile up.
Even Joe Biden is saying it's understandable why people are down, economically speaking.
So I think things are a little out of whack.
And I don't blame people for being down.
You know, when you have a year or two years of the pandemic, kids out of school, the mental health problems in the country are seriously increased, especially among young people.
Some things are, for example, feeling down about employment.
They've got better jobs.
They're making more money.
Inflation is still higher than it should be.
And, you know, everything from gasoline prices to a war going on in Ukraine.
I mean, so I can't think of a time when there's been greater uncertainty.
Notwithstanding the fact we've created 800,000 manufacturing jobs.
We're better off than virtually any other major nation in the world economically.
But it's understandable why people are just down.
It's understandable why people are just down is the campaign commercial that Republicans have been waiting for for this entire presidency.
It's understandable why people are down is like that's just a ready-made campaign commercial.
And it's also why Joe Biden will be in serious trouble in 2024 if Republicans nominate somebody who doesn't alienate every independent from here until the end of time.
All right, it's time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
So, believe it or not, Michael Knowles, who is a person, he's not the thing that I like today, but Michael Knowles does have a game.
It is called Yes or No, and essentially it is intended to generate controversy at the dinner table.
He and I played a game of Yes or No.
It was very awkward and slightly terrifying.
You should check it out over at YouTube.
Here is a brief clip.
Currently, half the country has no accountability or ability to reason.
And it's just a coincidence, half of the people are women.
Ah, this is such a, this is such a trap right here.
Okay, okay.
One can make a question.
Okay, alright.
Here we go.
One, two, three.
♪ Okay, it is this game.
I know, I'm actually doing Michael a favor here.
We're selling Michael Moulse's game.
You can go check out that video over at his YouTube.
Spoiler alert, I don't think that all women are unreasonable.
So, in any case.
In any case, the game is fun.
You should go check out the video over at Michael's YouTube channel.
Okay, other things that I like.
I have to say, I'm extremely pleased at what the Florida Democratic Party has decided to do.
They have now elevated former Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Freed to be their next party chair in the state.
Yes, do it!
So, she lost to Charlie Crist.
Charlie Crist is about as dull as ditch water, and about half as tasty.
Charlie Crist, man, she lost to him.
And basically, her entire Twitter feed is just filled with insane levels of crazy.
Nikki Freed, others like her in the Florida Democratic Party, have led their party into a box canyon from which they cannot escape.
She said, you better believe we're going to take it to Ron DeSantis every damn day.
Are you, though?
Are you, though?
Because Ron DeSantis won his last gubernatorial race by almost 20 points over Charlie Kress.
That was after winning by 0.4 percentage points, thanks to people like Nikki Freed.
So we are so excited that Nikki Freed is now the He's now the head of the Florida Democratic Party.
No wonder they are just in trash shape.
So I'm pleased.
This is my home state.
So this makes me very happy.
OK, other things that I like.
So Ronna Romney McDaniel, she's doing her best here.
And I will say that she's now saying that in order for any of the Republicans to debate, they have to pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, which seems like fairly reasonable to me.
It seems like a reasonable thing to say that if you want to debate on this party stage, you have to pledge to support this party's nominee.
Otherwise, like, go about your business.
Here is Romney McDaniel saying that even that includes Donald Trump.
So if Donald Trump refuses to say that he's going to support the eventual nominee, then he doesn't get to debate.
Anybody getting on the Republican National Committee debate stage should be able to say, I will support the will of the voters and the eventual nominee of our party.
I want you to listen to what former President Donald Trump said a couple of weeks ago in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on this very topic.
If you're not the nominee, will you support whoever the GOP nominee is?
It would depend.
I would give you the same answer I gave in 2016 during the debate.
It would have to depend on who the nominee was.
So are you prepared to block the former president?
He signed it in 2016.
He did.
Everybody signed it in 2016.
But this is about the here and the now.
He didn't commit to it.
I think they're all going to sign it.
I really do.
I think the voters are very intent on winning.
And they do not want to see a debate stage of people saying, I'm not going to support this guy.
I'm not going to support this guy.
What they need to say is, I'm going to do everything I can to defeat Joe Biden.
Well, she's right about that.
She's right about that.
And there are a lot of people I know who are very concerned that if Trump doesn't get the nomination, he'll run third party.
I don't think he will.
I don't think there's any upside in it for him if he were to do so.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So Bryan Cranston is a tremendous actor and also an idiot, which those two things go together pretty well, is the truth.
There are a lot of actors who are idiots.
They're very good at inhabiting the emotions of the characters that they play.
They're tremendous at reading lines, and also their thoughts are quite stupid.
And there's a halo effect that applies to an enormous number of people in society, where if people are famous, then we give them extra credibility that they don't actually have in particular fields.
And it's a mistake.
And we listen to celebrities about politics.
Or we listen to politicians about running a business.
Or we listen to business people about politics.
Like, just because you're good at one thing and it made you rich and famous does not mean that you're good at this other thing over here.
Well, Bryan Cranston is very good at the acting and he's very, very bad at the thinking.
It's always amusing to hear from people like Bryan Cranston about deep ideas.
Bryan Cranston, a graduate of Los Angeles Valley College.
So I used to live, like, literally across the street from LA Valley College.
Let me just tell you, it is the Harvard of the San Fernando Valley.
It is the Yale of, like, the Yale of North Hollywood.
Really just spectacular intellectual achievements happening at Valley College.
So, Bryan Cranston was on with Chris Wallace.
He, yes, he's still on TV.
Did you know that, Chris Wallace?
Kind of.
He's kind of on TV.
He's over at, he's over at CNN.
But in any case, he sat down with, with Bryan Cranston, and Cranston decided that he was going to talk about how Make America Great Again is inherently racist.
Here we go.
The Make America Great Again, my comment is, do you accept that that could possibly be construed as a racist remark?
And most people, a lot of people go, how could that be racist?
Make America great again?
I said, so just ask yourself, from an African American experience, when was it ever great in America for the African American?
When was it great?
So if you're making it great again, it's not including them.
So it's to teach us in the woke world to open up and accept the possibilities that our privilege has created blind spots for us.
And maybe I haven't seen what is really happening yet in all my year.
It's so tight.
He's doing the work.
He's doing the work, guys.
And there's so many actors and actresses, or actors as we call them now because we're not allowed to say actresses because men and women don't exist anymore, who are doing the work.
So Sally Field, she's a terrific actress.
She won a Lifetime Screen Actors Guild Award last night.
And Sally Field, in accepting her award, had to proclaim her privilege malice style.
She got up there and she talked about how she grew up in Pasadena as a white girl.
And that means that all of her challenges are as known.
All of her challenges are completely of no consequence whatsoever.
Here was Sally Field.
Honestly, I was a little white girl with a pug nose born in Pasadena, California.
And when I look around this room tonight, I know my fight, as hard as it was, was lightweight compared to some of yours.
I thank you and I applaud you.
And I know that for you, just like for me, it has not been easy.
So this is the de rigueur proclamation of nonsense that you get now.
It's an amazing thing.
By the way, it's not as though Sally Field herself did not experience some real troubles.
So, for example, she was apparently sexually abused by her stepmother.
Her parents were divorced when she was four years old.
That's not exactly, like, the world's best.
Best life for a child?
But apparently it says because she was white and she grew up in Pasadena.
And that's the thing.
It really, really matters.
And the notion that Brian Cranston puts out there that if you believe in make America great again, this means because make America great again.
When was it great for black?
Let me explain something.
As a Jew, there are times that living in the United States has not been like amazing as a Jew.
Not for me, but for my grandparents, my great grandparents.
There were no Jews allowed country clubs in the United States.
They were fairly common.
There's an entire movie called Gentleman's Agreement that actually won Best Picture at the Oscars in 1947.
It won Best Picture, starring Gregory Peck, and the entire thing was about the treatment of Jews in 1930s, 1940s America.
Was America not great during the 1940s?
America was pretty great during the 1940s.
I don't mean like it was great for every single person or for every group it was equivalently great.
But America has always been great because our founding principles were great.
And if you compare the United States to other countries, America is the most phenomenal beacon of light in human history.
Saying make America great again means make America great on the world stage, for example, or go back to America's founding ideals, for example, or go back to the notion that America's constitutional rights are good.
That's what make America great.
Everyone knows this.
Everyone knows this, of course.
If you say to somebody, what was what was like the best time of your life?
What was the best?
Somebody will name you, you know, like an age period.
That was the best time of their life.
If you said, well, you know, when the best time of your life for Bob, Bob over here, wasn't great for Bob.
You know what's happened to Bob?
He had a problem that year.
Or, do you remember that year this bad thing happened?
Yes!
I do remember that that bad thing happened.
All these things can be true simultaneously.
Life is extraordinarily complex.
History is extraordinarily complex.
Does that mean America was never great?
This is the left's response, that America was never great.
But great compared to what?
Great is a relative term, generally speaking.
It's an absolute.
If you are saying America was never great compared to the utopia that we shall create, that's messianic thinking and it ain't true.
If you're saying America was never great in relation to other countries, that's obviously untrue.
But what is this really about?
It's really about Bryan Cranston patting himself on the back.
We're all look at him.
He's a white guy, but he's not.
He's not like the rest of those white people.
He's not like the rest of white people.
He's he's a white guy who dissociates from the other white people because he understands he's doing.
Sally Field, she's doing.
Hey guys, just go, go act, make movies, make plays, like do the stuff that you're good at.
Leave the politics to the people who actually have read a book.
Alrighty folks, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
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