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June 27, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:40
They Want You Fat, Stupid, And Lazy
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Well, folks, the federal government and our media and our society at large have decided that it is very, very important that we promote fatness and stupidity and laziness.
There's a fascinating piece out by Ryan Burge, who's a scholar on religion and marriage, over at his substack or his blog, graphsaboutreligion.com, in which he examines the fact that the kind of key identifiers of success in the world generally exist among the religious population in the United States, and they are declining among everybody else.
And this is sort of a fascinating phenomenon to look at.
There are a bunch of charts that he puts up to show this.
So, for example, he puts up a chart showing that as education increases, religious practice or religious belief also increases to a certain extent, which is sort of the reverse of what we've been told.
The reason that this is the case is because he's talking about not just people who identify as atheist or agnostic, he's talking about people who identify as none of the above.
So when you look at people who are not religious in any way, or people who just are disassociated from religion, what you find is that people with some high school education, 32% of them believe in none, right, in these polls.
28% of high school graduates are a none.
26% of people went to trade school, but by the time you get to a master's degree, only 20% of people who have a master's are nuns, right?
The nuns are people who suggest, of course, that they have no belief in religion or they're just unassociated with religion entirely.
Not just atheists and agnostics, but people who say none.
So as Ryan Burge points out, the trend is unmistakable.
Those who are most likely to attend services weekly are those with a graduate degree.
Those least likely to attend are those with a high school diploma or less.
And one of the other things that that correlates with is income.
So what you will see is that the share of people who attend weekly by education and income level, the more educated you are, the more income you have, the more likely you are to attend church.
On a regular basis, which is precisely the reverse of what society tells you, what the media tell you.
What the media tell you is that it's the most educated among us who never go to church, and it's the least educated among us who always go to church, and that actually is not true.
When you identify that with marital status, what you find is that married people go to religious services weekly at a far higher rate than people of any other marital status.
So what that means is that the people who are at your local church are probably, in your community, the best educated, the most likely to be married, and the most likely to be parents as well.
Because what you find is that the share of people who attend weekly religious services based on marital and parental status, by far, people who are married and parents attend religious services far more clearly.
So here's the thing, take religion out of the mix for a second.
The identifiers of success in American life, married, kids, high income, education, those are now correlating extremely highly with religious practice.
This is the point that Ryan Burge is making and he's right.
He says the results are hard to ignore and should sound some major alarms for any person of faith concerned about the large state of American society.
Increasingly, religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a quote-unquote proper life.
College degree, middle class income, married with children.
If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don't.
So Ryan reads that as a critique of the church.
The church needs to be more welcoming and it needs to find ways to reach out to people who are not married, people who don't have middle class income, people who are not college educated.
But there's a way to read this in reverse and that is that the rules that the elite of our society, marital elite, the parental elite, the income elite, The educational elite have applied to themselves are very different than the rules they've promulgated to the rest of society.
And you see this very clearly in the social science data.
Charles Murray wrote a phenomenal book called Coming Apart, probably a decade and a half ago, in which he examined differences among white communities because he's been ripped up and down for talking about racial disparities.
So he decided to do a book talking about sociological differences within white communities.
And he segregated out two separate white communities.
One, I believe it's called Newtown, one is called Fishtown.
Newtown was like the high-income group.
The high-income group had people generally who were married, generally people who had kids.
Generally, people who are involved in social institutions and people who are low income are the opposite.
Now, if you look at the media or if you look at the way the government treats this, it's precisely the opposite.
They pretend that the people who are most likely to be successful in our society are single female Berkeley graduates with no children who hate God and hate the church.
Those are the people who are most likely to be successful if you watch TV.
But those in real life are not the people who are actually successful.
In other words, the message that society is promulgating is precisely the opposite.
of reality.
And that has real-world consequences, because it bleeds down to the people who are aspiring to be at the top of the hierarchy in American society.
It's a point that you can see throughout American history.
There was always sort of a group of people that everyone aspired to be.
If you go back to the 1930s, for example, I've used this example before, if you look at pictures from the Great Depression of people who are waiting in line at food distribution centers, at charity services, there are people who are wearing suits.
If you look at today's billionaires, they dress like schlobs.
The aspirational has now become an aspiration to kind of be the lowest common denominator, as opposed to the aspiration is to be the highest.
Well, here's the thing.
Whenever people see people who are successful and everybody knows what success is, we can all pretend we don't know what success is.
We know what success looks like.
Successful marriage, successful raising of children, successful in your community, successful in terms of income, successful in terms of education.
We all know what that looks like.
We as a society have decided that because we don't like the results of that, we're going to pretend that the measuring stick doesn't exist.
But the measuring stick does exist, and we all know about the measuring stick.
And so innately, we look to the people who are successful by all those measures in our society.
And those people used to be loud and proud about what it was that they did in their personal lives, what it was they believed.
But now they've decided that the measure of true virtue is to do precisely the opposite.
The measure of true virtue is to say, sure, I live that way.
Sure, you know, I don't send my kid to a public school.
I send my kid to a private school.
Sure, I'm married.
Sure, I got an education.
Sure, I followed all the rules that a traditional religious society would actually have me follow.
Sure, but you know what?
Because I'm an elite, I'm going to promulgate a new morality that includes you.
Now, the dirty secret about this is that what that really is is it's a form of ugly paternalism in which people at the top are saying that people at the bottom are incapable of rising, and that's not true.
It's not true.
The same things that got people at the top to the top are the things that can take anyone to the top.
But we have a society that's now dedicated to the opposite proposition, that there is some sort of injustice in the measuring stick itself.
And thus, we are no longer even going to shoot for the things that we all know to be good and true.
And here's the thing.
Once you remove the measuring stick, what you end up with is chaos.
You don't end up with equality.
You end up with just turmoil and chaos and unsuccess because you are subsidizing lack of success by removing the measuring stick for success.
All these rules are clear.
Go to church, get married, have kids, get a job, finish your education.
These rules are all very clear.
There's nothing new here.
We've known about these rules for at least a couple of hundred years.
There's nothing new in terms of a mobile American society from unsuccess to success.
But we have decided at the elite levels of American government and American media to obliterate All of those rules, and pretend that we have done somebody some good, and it's precisely the opposite.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Alrighty.
The precise opposite of the things that bring success are the things that our society promotes.
So to take a stupid example, our culture promotes people like Cardi B. Cardi B, I've ripped on her before because I think that she is a perfect example of virtually everything wrong with our society.
She is a rapper who used to be a stripper who bragged on tape about drugging and robbing men.
And she also happens to be a person who is deemed by our society as the height of sex appeal.
That sexual satisfaction is supposed to be attained by acting like Cardi B, or by imitating Cardi B. But the reality is that if Cardi B lives Cardi B's values, she ends up very unhappy.
So Cardi B is married to a person named Offset.
These were both of their given names.
They both came out of their mothers, and Cardi B's mom said, I shall call her Cardi B, and Offset's mother said, I shall call him Offset.
I don't know why not.
Onset, but Offset shall be his name.
And then these two lovebirds married one another, And they've had a rather fraught relationship.
And this is the model, by the way, for literally millions of people in the United States.
The thing that we used to model in the United States was, you know, a solid marriage that lasted for an entire lifetime in which you were dedicated to the upraising of your children.
But Cardi B's marriage has now splashed across page six.
So the latest claim within the beautiful marriage that Cardi B has presented, and again, she's the height of sex appeal.
She can't keep her husband dining in, but she's the height of sex appeal.
She took to Twitter Spaces Monday to address her husband Offset's claim that she effed another man.
So apparently, he put up an Instagram post, which is really just a delight.
By the way, they have two kids.
This is all gonna play amazing for the kids.
He put up an Instagram post that says, my wife effed a N-word on me, gang.
Y'all N-words know how I come.
Don't pay attention to that countryman, y'all.
apparently took that down, but she responded to that.
She said, first of all, let me say, you can't accuse me of all the things
you know you are guilty of.
Sing it with me, y'all.
And I see that it is easy for you to blame everything on me.
Yes, honey.
Listen, she went on, speaking directly to her listeners.
Don't pay attention to that country man, y'all.
So here is Cardi B talking in the most eloquent terms about the state of her marriage.
Don't pay attention to that country man, y'all.
Don't pay attention to the country man.
That space is the other day, that mother is spiraling and thinking, come on now.
I'm Cardi B. I think sometimes, but again, I'm Cardi B.
I was giving this to anybody.
It will be out.
I'm not just anybody.
Can't be no regular regular regular because they don't tell the world.
I don't even know how to translate that.
In any case, this is what is presented by the upper echelons of our culture as high culture.
We have to stop pretending that this is quote-unquote low culture in the United States because it's not.
This sort of stuff is promoted by every major media outlet in the United States.
It is promoted by every single major streaming service in the United States.
It is promoted as the height of American culture.
You are literally not supposed to say things like, this stuff is ugly and bad and her music sucks.
You're not allowed to say that sort of stuff without people going crazy on you.
That the message is promulgated by people like Cardi B or, for that matter, Nicki Minaj.
That this music is garbage and that it actually is promoting harmful messages.
Instead, we are supposed to pretend that it's a form of female empowerment and that people who follow its TikToks are likely to lead happier lives.
Well, here's the problem.
Cardi B is not leading a particularly happy marital life.
The people who are leading happy marital lives are boring fuddy-duddies.
The people who are being promoted by our society as the models of marriage are people like Cardi B. Obviously, these are the things that actually matter.
It's a society that promotes stupidity.
It's a society that promotes failed marriages or not getting married at all.
I mean, I'll give it to Cardi B. At least she actually got married.
70% of kids who are born in the black community today are born out of wedlock.
40% of kids in the white community, by the way, are born out of wedlock today.
Now, as we'll discuss in a moment, none of that happens in a vacuum.
You actually have to have a supporting governmental structure to promote all of that.
But that's not the only thing that we're promoting.
So we're promoting stupidity in relationships.
And we're also promoting fatness, right?
Because we have decided that we're going to obliterate all the measuring sticks.
So here's the thing.
Again, we all know innately what success looks like.
Success, when it comes to marriage, looks like you marry a person, you love that person, you stay with them until you die, you bring up kids with that person, your relationship deepens over time.
We all know what success looks like.
It's not a big mystery.
And yes, there is an ideal.
And it's not insulting to people who don't meet the ideal to point out that the ideal exists.
Okay, but the same thing exists in the physical realm.
We have decided that it's very, very mean and very, very bad to point out that people should, for example, be in shape.
So there's an entire article by a person named Daniel Pinnock about Lizzo.
So again, we're focusing a lot on culture today, but here's the reality.
I mean, I've looked at the actual numbers in the United States.
The number of people who form their values based on sheer politics in the United States is very low.
Most people do not get their values inculcated to them by watching Fox News or by watching shows like this one.
That's just not the way that it works.
That's not what the numbers show.
Most people get their values from either the local institutions in which they participate, which would normally be a church, or if they don't get it from the church, they're getting it from their surrounding milieu, which is usually social media.
And yes, culture, like Cardi B, has many, many, many more fans and followers than I will ever have because she is in the cultural realm.
And the same thing is true of Lizzo.
And so when you have an entire media infrastructure dedicated to the proposition that being extremely overweight is actually a sign of health and beauty, What do you think you're going to get?
You're incentivizing people to participate in that sort of behavior.
We'll get to more of that momentarily.
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Okay, so...
There is a piece by Daniel Pinnock, an actress, writer, and comedian, and star of the CBS sitcom Ghosts, and the creator of the one-woman show Body Slash Courage.
Oh man, will it be more stunning or will it be more brave?
She has a piece over at the Washington Post titled, What the Fat Shamers Don't Get About Lizzo.
And, um, she says this.
I understand why Lizzo took a beat from Twitter.
Last month, the Emmy and Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate artist, a classically trained flute-playing rapper, singer-songwriter, actress, and fashion mogul was under attack again from internet trolls bombarding her with vicious messages about her weight.
This time it got so bad she locked down her Twitter account writing,
y'all don't know how close I be to giving up on everyone and quitting.
I don't think that that was phrased in sort of the Shakespearean, the sort of old English.
Y'all don't know how close I be.
I don't think that's what she's gonna, anyway.
Lizzo embraces inclusivity for everyone who has a body.
Everyone who has a body, as opposed to what, the bodiless?
Who are the people who don't have a body?
Why isn't she including them?
She chants the mantra of body positivity for all humans, not just the fat ones.
Her songs, including Good As Hell and Truth Hurts, have resonated with millions of people as anthems of empowerment and self-acceptance.
Ah, self-acceptance and empowerment.
Now here's the reality.
If you want a path to unsuccess, you should follow the pathway of empowerment and self-acceptance.
Great way to fail in life.
Empowerment and self-acceptance?
means that you say that you are fine just as you are.
No one, no one, saints should not be fine just as they are.
The best people are people who are always striving to better themselves and to better the people around them.
You should not feel empowered just being you.
You shouldn't wake up in the morning feeling, I am my best me.
You are not your best you.
There is a better you out there.
And it's just a short distance away if you strive to change yourself.
And it's, again, when it comes to the treadmill of life, the treadmill is moving underneath you.
If you're standing still, you're moving backwards.
Either you're moving forwards or you're falling off the treadmill.
But empowerment and self-acceptance.
Quote, she lives freely and unapologetically.
Ah, this sort of language makes me just want to vomit.
Freely and unapologetically, as opposed to living in chains apologetically, whether twerking on the beach with her besties or modeling stylish crop tops from her shapewear brand, Yitti.
But for years, Lizzo has faced backlash from people made uncomfortable by her unabashed acceptance of herself, who'd rather see her concealed in oversized cardigans and potato sacks.
I love that the alternatives here are potato sacks or thongs.
I feel like there's a whole wide range, a magical range of clothing that fits between potato sacks and thongs.
What about her weight?
People say she's promoting obesity.
No, she isn't.
There's a difference between endorsing obesity and practicing self-love.
Well, not when her self-love involves promoting obesity.
There's a fairly high crossover right there.
When most people think of obesity, says this columnist, perhaps they think of skyrocketing BMIs, or overweight people with chronic diseases, or TV shows such as My 600-lb Life, or The Biggest Loser.
Lizzo is not promoting any of that.
She is just trying to exist while lifting others up.
That's such a lie, by the way.
She says the new standard of beauty is Lizzo.
And so does the media.
The media say Lizzo is a beautiful, beautiful woman.
She's beautiful at whatever her weight is.
She's got to be at least 150 pounds overweight.
But it doesn't matter because, again, this is the new standard.
Now, I have a question.
Is it a recipe for your success to imitate Lizzo's actions?
I love that this lady tries to turn Lizzo into a sort of fitness guru.
She got me back in the gym, says this columnist, seeing someone who looks like me not ashamed or hating her body while exercising changed my entire perspective on fitness.
Did it though?
As opposed to saying to yourself, maybe we actually should not.
Look like that.
And the way to not look like that is not just to go to the gym.
It's to actually change our diets.
Caloric deficit is a real thing.
But again, our culture says, does he even say such things?
He's judgmental and very, very bad.
And then you wonder why there's a backlash that comes in the form of some of the stupidest presidential campaigning in human history and people resonating to it.
So RFK Jr.
is running for the presidency.
He's going to run about 20% in the primary polls versus Joe Biden.
And the reason for that is because Joe Biden is a doddering elderly gentleman who looks like he is going to literally keel over and die in front of us.
RFK Jr.
is a person who has expressed a number of wild theories, and then also does a campaign where he takes off his shirt at the age of 70, pretty clearly on testosterone replacement therapy, for whatever it's worth, and looks pretty ripped, and then does some push-ups, and people were like fawning over this yesterday.
And so we can laugh at it.
And it is funny.
I mean, President, can you imagine Abraham Lincoln doing this as part of a presidential campaign?
Be weird.
Be real weird.
Calvin Coolidge is buffing down.
Very strange.
But is there a reason that this is receiving some sort of a support?
The answer is yes.
Because if the alternatives are 70-year-old RFK Jr.
Okay.
Let's go.
prison yard doing workout or Lizzo twerking while fat, American society
Okay.
knows what better better shape looks like. We can pretend we don't. Here was
RFK Jr. yesterday.
Let's go. There is a seven-year-old dude doing push-ups and honestly for a
seven-year-old dude this is this is pretty impressive. Now it is his final
set so he said he had to tweet out that this was actually his last set because he
only got like eight push-ups there but it doesn't matter This went viral, and the reason this went viral is, number one, he's a seven-year-old dude in really good shape, and also because it is a backlash to a society that says that it is actively good to ignore your weight, that it is actively good to ignore standards.
Now, none of this could be promoted in any sort of scenario where the government didn't support it, because it would turn out that unsuccess would lead to, for example, lack of income.
Lack of success in these various bad decision-making would have consequences, but we've constructed an entire utopian world in which bad activities, stupid decisions actually end up being rewarded by the government because we're supposed to treat bad decisions with sympathy the same way that we would some sort of medical condition.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Okay, all of this brings us to the collapse of the institutions that were supposed to prevent this sort of thing.
And also to the building up of institutions that support the destruction of decent measures.
So I have to say that I'm a non-Catholic, but I'm a member of Western civilization, which means that I have a pretty strong stake in the papacy.
The Pope happens to have dominion over a billion people.
What he says matters an awful lot, and Pope Francis has been doing an absolutely horrendous job, actually, of guarding the values that he is supposed to be guarding as the Pope.
As a religious person, I would prefer to see Judeo-Christian religion flourish, because I think that Judeo-Christian religion has been the single greatest force undergirding a system of morality that allows for the values that create success.
Well, apparently, according to Fortune magazine, Pope Francis praised artists on Friday as true visionaries who can see, dream, and invent, as he welcomed 200 artists, filmmakers, and writers into the Sistine Chapel to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum's Contemporary Art Collection.
Francis acknowledged that some in the crowd, there was Andres Serrano of Piss Christ fame, sometimes used confrontation to make people think, but he said their aim was to find harmony and beauty.
You want to reveal reality also in its contradictions, and in those things that it is more comfortable and convenient to keep hidden, Francis said.
Like the biblical prophets, you confront things that at times are uncomfortable.
You criticize today's false myths and new idols, its empty talks, the ploys of consumerism, the schemes of power.
So, that is presumably why you invite a person who literally put a crucifix in a jar of urine and called it art.
It's hard to think of anything more self-defeating than that.
And many of our chief religious institutions have been doing sort of the same thing.
They've been mirroring the desires of the elites instead of mirroring the values that allow elites to become elites in the first place and give access to that elite status to literally everyone.
They're helping the elites destroy the ladder of success that got them where they are by following the values of modernity that are a complete fail.
Meanwhile, as I say, all of that has to be subsidized by some government, and that is what Joe Biden is doing.
So Joe Biden is now trotting out a new thing.
It is called Bidenomics.
What exactly is Bidenomics?
Apparently, Bidenomics is we just spray money at pretty much everything.
Bidenomics is all about ensuring that people who make bad decisions are subsidized.
And that's true in the economics sphere.
If you get into an industry that's failing, then presumably the Biden administration is going to hold you up.
If you are a person who is on food stamps and you don't want to work, the Biden administration tries to hold you up.
These are all very important things for Bidenomics to push.
According to Politico, this is a pivot into a new campaign message censored on Bidenomics shorthand for the administration's economic strategy of, quote, boosting the middle class through government investments rather than stimulative tax cuts focusing on the wealthy.
So here's the difference, by the way, between a government investment rather than a stimulative tax cut.
A tax cut is where you pay less taxes, and then you are rewarded or punished accordingly for your good or bad decision-making.
Because what you do with your money is now your fault.
What I do with my money, if I make a bad investment, I pay the price for that.
If the government takes my money and invests it in something bad, Then, presumably, I still pay the price for it, but you don't pay the price for it in some way.
And if you are at the bottom end of the scale and you're not paying taxes, then you really don't pay the price for it.
Instead, you're just taking money out of somebody else's pocket.
This is Bidenomics.
Senior Biden advisors Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon wrote in a new memo, quote, Implementing that economic vision and plan.
Decisively turning the page on the era of trickle-down economics has been the defining project of the Biden presidency.
So they're talking about Bidenomics.
That's the thing that really matters.
So what exactly is Bidenomics?
Bidenomics, again, is redistribution of income through various governmental means and subsidization of political allies.
That's the story of the American federal government really since the FDR days, but more importantly, since the War on Poverty, which has utterly restructured American society along the lines of promoting fat, stupid, and lazy.
You now get paid by the federal government to make bad decisions.
Here is Corinne Jean-Pierre promoting the phrase Bidenomics.
This apparently is their new... Again, I'm not sure how they think that makes it more popular since Joe Biden is a very unpopular president.
Thanks, Corinne.
I wanted to ask you about this new Bidenomics messaging push.
Can you just give me a sense first of, you know, how did you guys coin that phrase or why did you decide to go with that branding going forward?
You don't like Bidenomics?
No, I'm just asking.
I'm curious.
I think it's pretty clever.
It's pretty good.
Look, it makes good sense, Bidenomics, right?
It kind of flows off the tongue really well.
But in all seriousness, look, what you're going to hear from the president, I don't want to get ahead of him.
I think we've kind of laid out a little bit of what we are thinking, what we think the president's going to lay out, what he is going to lay out.
Certainly it's a vision, right?
It's a vision about growing the economy.
No, the actual vision, it is pretty clear, is not about growing the economy.
It's about restructuring American society.
And Joe Biden's been very clear about this.
He says that equity undergirds everything that he seeks to do, including, presumably, Bidenomics.
Equity is the lie that if we simply redistribute all income, then justice will be done.
Equity is the idea.
It's different than equality.
Equity is the idea that no matter what bad decisions you make, if there is a disparity, it is a result of American discrimination and the evils of our system.
So the system itself must be restructured.
Again, we've been talking about this in terms of marital morality.
We've been talking about it in terms of weight, and it's certainly true in terms of income and education level as well.
And then you wonder why the education system is failing.
It's because of precisely this mentality.
Again, the difference between the elites of today and the elites of yesterday in the United States is the elites of yesterday used to say, here's a series of rules that we followed and that everyone should follow.
These are good rules and we should promulgate them.
The elites of today say, here are a series of rules that we followed.
You don't have to follow those rules because we are better than you are.
We are innately, More meritorious than you are.
And so we could have actually bucked those rules.
We could have ignored all of those rules, and we still would have been successful.
Which means you really don't have a shot.
Even if you follow those rules, you won't be successful.
So we're going to restructure all of American society around the assumption that the people at the bottom rungs of the ladder, they're going to stay at the bottom rungs of the ladder, no matter what decisions they make.
So they may as well make really crappy decisions that make their lives worse.
What does that do?
Well, it makes everybody's life worse.
And that is what we are watching happening in real time.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be apparently as corrupt as the day is long.
Very bizarre situation.
He was doing a White House presser with Modi from India.
And he somehow dropped a joke about selling state secrets, which is where we are now.
Now we have not just presidents who may have committed crimes, presidents who openly joke about maybe committing crimes.
Honestly, if the best crop of candidates that our country has to offer is Joe Biden on the Democratic side, Donald Trump on the Republican side, and RFK Jr.
as the independent candidate, I don't even know what to say about that.
Here is Joe Biden, a mentally defunct human being with a long history of apparent corruption.
I was just thinking, anyway, I started off without you.
And I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things that we shared.
Oh my God.
And he says, all joking aside, I sold a lot of state secrets while you were out of the room.
Can you imagine if Donald Trump joked about, you know, selling state secrets while he was president of the United States?
Joe Biden is so confident that the media will never ever actually investigate this sort of stuff, that he just says this kind of stuff.
Now, we have Hunter Biden's attorney admitting that the WhatsApp text in which Hunter claims that Joe Biden is sitting next to him while they shake down a Chinese business person, who was a front person for the Chinese government, The attorney in Hunter Biden's case admits that that text is real.
And yet apparently there are no consequences to this whatsoever.
Which is why Joe Biden is joking about it fairly openly at this time.
Now, what's truly amazing is that the lawyer's statement, according to Breitbart, came on the same day that Breitbart News reported the Biden family received $5.1 million within 10 days of Hunter Biden's message to a CCP-linked businessman who worked with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC Energy, according to a 2020 Senate report on the Biden family.
The IRS whistleblower testimony revealed on Thursday that FBI investigators wanted to obtain the location data to confirm Joe Biden was in the room, but there's no confidence the FBI actually obtained that data.
So again, Joe Biden is openly joking about the corruption scandal that is now engulfing him in the full confidence that he will be covered up for by the media.
And he's not wrong about that.
Ana Navarro, the supposed Republican on The View, is out there repeating the talking point that what this whole story is about is what an amazing parent Joe Biden is.
I can't tell you how much his life has been marked by losing not one child, but two children.
And once you've lost a child, I think you are absolutely determined, it's even more urgent, it's even a bigger issue that you will not lose another one.
The Hunter Biden story.
The scandal, the this, the that, it's also the story of a father's love.
And Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son, Hunter, and will never treat him lesser than.
And so he is a father first, take it or leave it.
That's who he is, that is part of his heart.
There was 380 people at this dinner.
It's not like Hunter was sitting at Merrick Garland's lap.
It was a bunch of people, and I think part of the reason that Hunter Biden has been able to get out of addiction is because Joe Biden embraced him entirely the entire time.
When he was vice president, when he was candidate, when he was out of office, and now as president.
I mean, of course Joe Biden thinks he can get away with it.
He's got the entire media parroting this garbage.
The real story here is not whether Hunter Biden was a cutout for his dad making money.
The real story here is that Joe Biden is an amazing, amazing parent.
Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House, he's threatening impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland if the whistleblower allegations are true that Merrick Garland shut down all indictments of Hunter Biden on felony charges in various jurisdictions.
Miranda Devine says that Joe Biden met with his business partners 12 times.
12 different times and 12 different deals, perhaps.
So it's called, you know, Rob Walker, who was in on all this stuff.
Good friend.
He's all over all over the laptop.
So will this prompt you to do a impeachment inquiry?
Well, You apparently don't follow me on Twitter, because yesterday I laid out very clearly, by July 6th, because of the allegations from the IRS, because of the whistleblowers, and the DOJ are garland, what he is saying and what David Weiss are saying privately are two different things.
And if it comes true what the IRS whistleblower is saying, we're going to start impeachment inquiries on the Attorney General.
Because as a matter of fact, it shows that.
That is, um, you know, appropriate.
But we'll see if there's any follow-up on that.
Now, meanwhile, you might be thinking to yourself, well, maybe Republicans should work on, you know, winning the presidency away from Joe Biden.
Well, I have some unfortunate news for you on that score.
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Okay, meanwhile, Republicans have an opportunity to, you know, have Joe Biden not be in the White House,
but they would have to run a candidate likely to defeat Joe Biden.
So there's a brand new poll out from a Dem pollster called GQR.
It includes leaners, you know, people who lean one way or lean another.
What it finds is Biden over Trump plus two.
In the swing states, it shows that Trump and Biden are essentially tied, 49-49.
As far as Biden versus DeSantis, it shows DeSantis up one, 49-48.
So again, very close election.
But in the swing states, it shows DeSantis up 53-42.
And if we've learned anything, it's that most states in the union, they don't really matter when it comes to the presidential election because they're going to break 60-40 or 55-45.
There are a few states that really, really matter.
Really, only a few.
You're talking Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, That's nearly a complete list.
It's a very, very small list of states that is going to decide the election.
So the real question is not how the candidates would do nationally, because by popular vote, Donald Trump lost both the elections in which he was involved.
The real question is how they are going to do on the statewide level because, of course, Donald Trump won in 2016 and then lost those states in 2020.
So the real question is that.
Well, here's the thing.
If you wish to defeat Joe Biden, perhaps it would be good if your candidate was not embroiled in a bunch of ongoing legal dramas that involve him mainly doing dumb things.
Okay, so, as I've said before, two things can be true at once.
There is no way that if Donald Trump were a Democrat, he would currently be prosecuted for his classified documents treatment.
He just wouldn't.
Hillary Clinton did stuff that was very similar, as we pointed out a thousand times, and she was not, in fact, prosecuted.
Also, Donald Trump made this bed.
Donald Trump did a bunch of things that were incredibly stupid, and he did them on tape.
So just one of the charges in this documents case that is now going to be tried over in Fort Pierce, which by the way is pretty good for Trump because Fort Pierce is a pretty conservative area.
So you assume the jury pool is going to be more kind to Trump.
But one of the allegations is that Donald Trump not only had classified material after he left the White House, which is true of like a thousand different presidents and vice presidents and various officials, but that he kept it after he was told by the Department of Justice and the National Archives to turn it back over.
And then he had his lawyers go out there and attest to the FBI and the National Archives and the DOJ that he had turned over all the documents.
Meanwhile, he was hiding classified documents from his own lawyers so that he could essentially play with them for no reason.
And again, the left went nuts on this.
He had Jen Psaki suggesting that Trump's theory here was that he wanted to give documents to dictators.
Here is Jen Psaki over on MSNBC suggesting just that.
As you just alluded to, I mean, reading the itemized list of 31 documents and the clearance levels, as a former ranking member on the Intel Committee, there were five I's classifications there.
There were some of the highest level classifications.
And knowing what you know about former President Donald Trump, we know he has an affection for dictators.
Do you have concern, without us knowing at this point, of what he may have wanted to do with those documents?
No, I don't know.
But what I do know is that he seriously jeopardized our national security.
And the implication that he wanted to hand over documents to dictators or something is really, really, really stupid.
But you know what else is really stupid?
Keeping the documents.
There's no purpose to it.
And even Donald Trump kind of knows that, which is why in his interview with Brett Baier, he actually did what he very often does in these circumstances, and he fibbed.
So he said to Brett Baier, there's a tape of him.
And the transcript of that tape appeared in the indictment.
The tape was of him speaking to a group of women, some of whom are journalists apparently.
And it sounds like he's taking out classified documents and saying directly to them, these are classified documents.
I could have declassified them when I was the president, but I did not do so.
Which is kind of game set match as far as the actual legality of his actions.
If you say, I know these are classified documents, then you also know you shouldn't be holding them.
And if you say, I have no power to declassify them now, which he actually says on the tape, then you know you shouldn't have them.
So, for the thousandth time, it could be true that the prosecution is political in the sense that if he were a Democrat, it wouldn't be happening to him.
Also, why would he put a target squarely on his back this way?
In any case, here was Trump telling Bret Baier that the documents he's talking about in that tape are actually just newspapers.
When I said that I couldn't declassify it now, that's because I wasn't president.
I never made any bones about that.
When I'm not president, I can't declassify it.
And that's what you said.
You didn't declassify it.
I said that.
I said no, no.
I said I couldn't declassify it.
I could have declassified it.
But that wasn't a document.
There was no document.
That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things.
And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document.
I didn't have a document per se.
There was nothing to declassify.
These were newspaper stories.
Okay, these were newspaper stories, right?
He says that on national television, knowing the government has the tape.
Okay, the tape is now broken.
So here's the actual tape of Donald Trump talking about those documents, right?
We only had the actual text, sort of transcript.
Here's the actual tape.
It somehow got to CNN.
Of course, of course it did.
How do such leaks occur?
Who knows?
In any case, CNN gets a hold of this tape, and it turns out that he's not waving around newspapers, in all likelihood.
We have obtained what is expected to be a central piece of the government's case against Donald Trump.
The actual audio recording of the former president talking as if he's showing a highly classified document on U.S.
war plans against Iran, with people not clear to even know it exists, let alone what's in it.
Isn't that amazing?
This totally wins my case, you know.
Except it is, like, highly confidential, secret.
This is secret information.
Look at this.
You attack.
Hillary would print that out all the time.
She'd send it to Anthony Weiner.
By the way, isn't that incredible?
Yeah.
I was just saying, because we were talking about it.
And he said, he wanted to attack Iran.
You did!
This was done by the military, given to me.
I think we can probably, right?
I don't know.
We'll have to see.
Yeah, we'll have to try to figure out a...
Declassify it.
See, as president, I could have declassified it, but now I can't, you know, but this is
still a...
Yeah, now we have a problem.
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
Okay, he literally says that Hillary had papers like this and that they were probably sent
Anthony Weiner via server which means he's not talking about newspapers.
Again, should he be under the gun for this, legally speaking?
Not when Hillary isn't.
I mean, again, the injustice is clear.
Also, this is, I'm sorry, this is stupid.
It's unbelievably stupid.
Apparently he knew he was being taped in this tape recording.
I assume that, in fact, is the case.
I believe that Florida is a two-party consent state, which means that, with very few exceptions, virtually all conversations that take place that are taped in the state of Florida, and he was at Mar-a-Lago at the time, have to have the consent of both parties to the taping.
So he knew a tape recorder was on, and he is so arrogant that he thought that he could say into the tape recorder, here are a bunch of classified documents that I have right here.
And I could have declassified them, but I didn't.
And then he went on national TV and said that he was waving around newspapers, which pretty obviously is not in that recording.
Put aside everything else.
Is this a smart thing to do?
Is this a thing that is likely to win you elections?
Because here's my deal with Trump.
If he's going to be the nominee, I want to see him win.
I want Joe Biden not to be president anymore.
That is my top political priority come 2024, is I do not want Joe Biden to be president of the United States come January 2025.
He's a terrible president who is doing terrible things routinely, which means that if Trump is going to be the nominee, I would like to see Trump win.
Is this the sort of behavior that leads one to believe that victory is insight, that victory is inevitability?
Does it heighten your chances or lower your chances when you do this sort of stuff and you do it routinely?
He could still win.
I'm not saying that it's impossible for Trump to win.
I learned in 2016 you never say never because never sometimes happens.
With that said, is this the kind of activity?
that is likely to lead to excellent performance in a national election, particularly in swing states that he lost last time?
I have some doubts.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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There are literal fights taking place in public schools right now so that school boards can make sure that your child is indoctrinated with pornography, essentially.
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Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
There is a very good series on MGM+.
It is called The Spy Among Friends, and it is about the British spy, Kim Philby, and the ferreting out of the so-called Cambridge Five, which is a series of communist spies in the British government who were essentially getting hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-Soviet dissidents murdered in Eastern Europe and inside Russia from the 30s to the 60s.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
Why do you let the most dangerous Soviet penetration agent this country's ever known lead it?
On your watch?
It's quite a good series.
It is totally worth the watch.
First of all, I love the cast.
It's Damian Lewis, who's great.
You remember him from Band of Brothers.
And Guy Pearce, who's also terrific.
A really, really good cast.
Beautifully photographed, beautifully shot.
Great sound engineering.
It's really worthwhile.
And again, it's one of the few... It's kind of weird.
Over the past 10 years, Hollywood has suddenly recognized the Soviets were bad.
So it took them until 20 years after the end of the Cold War to recognize that the Soviets were actually bad now.
There was a movie that came out fairly recently that was all about Soviet atrocities in Ukraine.
And it took them only like, I don't know, 90 years to say that it was okay to make that movie.
The death of Stalin came out, I believe, 2017, 2016.
So now we're allowed to say the Soviets were bad after the Soviet Union fell, like, a generation after that.
We can point that out.
The reason it took so long, by the way, is because all of Hollywood was deeply enthralled to the Soviet Union for a lot of the Cold War.
For, like, a lot of the Cold War.
The Nazis were real bad, but the Soviets were kind of okay.
Not only okay, they were just misguided.
You see the same sort of mentality that now abounds about China in some quarters.
And this series puts to bed, once again, the theory that the Soviets had anything of value to give to the world.
They were one of the most nefarious forces, maybe the most nefarious force in the history of the world.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So I'm not a big fan of media outlets pretending that aspects of poverty and suffering are actually kind of cool things to do.
So CNN International is now featuring, I kid you not, a phenomenon that are called stir-fried stones.
And they're saying that this is China's latest street food fad.
That's not a euphemism when they say stir-fried stones.
They mean literally rocks that have spices on them.
Like, here's the video.
This Chinese stir-fry features rocks as the main ingredient, and social media calls it, quote, the world's hardest dish.
People are supposed to suck off the flavors, then spit out the rocks.
Hence the dish's name, soudio, meaning suck and dispose.
The dish originated in Hubei province and is said to date back hundreds of years.
It was reportedly passed down for generations by boatmen through their oral history.
Street vendors cook the pebbles with spices, chili oil, and garlic on a sizzling grill.
Each portion costs about 16 yuan, which is around $2.37.
Excited guys?
Would you like to suck a rock?
Okay, so things aren't going amazing in China, I think would be the takeaway here.
It's just a different culture where you are sucking rocks for nutritional value.
Or maybe things are not great in China.
Maybe it turns out that communist countries suck.
By the way, try marketing that in America, seriously.
You know it's a thing that nobody will eat in America, rocks?
America's got a lot of problems.
People aren't sucking on the rocks over here.
All right, you guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not gonna wanna miss it.
We'll be joined by Aaron Ginn, co-founder and CEO of Hydra Host.
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