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Aug. 1, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:12:33

Biden’s Worst Nightmare Is Now Coming True

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	So, if you are up for an election, like a presidential election, about which presidential candidate the American public consider to be more of a legal problem, well, get ready because, boy, have I got an election coming for you.
	Because that's essentially what this election is now going to be.
	It's not going to be an election about the issues.
	It may not even be an election about the economy.
	If Joe Biden is indeed the nominee, if he survives to actually be the nominee, which, you know, he's not looking great, and if Donald Trump on the other side is the nominee, it's just going to be Democrats accusing Republicans of being lawbreakers and Republicans accusing Democrats of being lawbreakers, because here is the deal.
	Joe Biden's squeaky clean, I'm above board image, whatever image existed, for those who weren't watching closely for the last 30 years of Joe Biden's political career, that image is now crumbling.
	And that is a massive problem for him, as I said yesterday.
	Whatever mud you throw at Donald Trump has no effect.
	The man is made of mud.
	When you throw mud at Joe Biden, it has a significant effect on his poll numbers.
	And so his worst nightmare is now coming true because all of the Hunter Biden stuff is now breaking wide out into the open.
	So, to understand exactly what's happening here, you have to begin with Joe Biden's claims over the past several years.
	So, here is a montage of Joe Biden explaining his relationship to Hunter Biden's businesses.
	Have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
	I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
	He knew nothing, nothing, he knew nothing.
	Here's Joe Biden explaining this, four years on end.
	Have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
	I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
	What's your understanding of what your son was doing for an extraordinary amount of money?
	I don't know what he was doing.
	I know he was on the board.
	I found out he was on the board after he was on the board.
	And that was it.
	Well, you've had a lot of time.
	Isn't this something you want to get to the bottom of?
	No, because I trust my son.
	I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.
	We learned that this president paid 50 times the tax in China, has a secret bank account with China, does business in China, and in fact is talking about me taking money?
	I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever.
	My son has not made money.
	In terms of this thing about... What are you talking about?
	China.
	I have not had... The only guy who made money from China is this guy.
	He's the only one.
	Nobody else has made money from China.
	That's a lie.
	And it turns out pretty much all of this is lies.
	In fact, when confronted about Hunter Biden's business activities, Joe Biden tends to get very, very angry.
	And that, by the way, is what they call the tell.
	When Joe Biden gets very, very angry, when he gets very in a huff about a thing, it's likely because he did the thing.
	So here's Peter Doocy asking Biden a question and Biden being a querulous old man.
	Here's what I know.
	I know Trump deserves to be investigated.
	He is violating every basic norm of a president.
	You should be asking him the question, why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader, if that's what happened.
	That appears what happened.
	You should be looking at Trump.
	Trump's doing this because he knows I'll beat him like a drum.
	And he's using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.
	Everybody looked at this and everybody's looked at it and said there's nothing there.
	Ask the right question.
	Yeah, fat.
	So whenever Joe Biden gets false angry like that and then he kind of whips himself up into actual rage, it's because he probably did the things.
	Well, Devin Archer, who was Hunter Biden's business partner for a significant period of time when tens of millions of dollars were moving through various different accounts associated with Hunter Biden, he testified in front of Congress yesterday.
	And James Comer, who is the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, put together a statement following a four-hour transcribed interview with the committee.
	And here's what he says, quote, Devon Archer's testimony today confirms Joe Biden lied to
	the American people when he said he had no knowledge about his son's business
	dealings and was not involved.
	Joe Biden was the brand his son sold around the world to enrich the Biden family.
	When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he joined Hunter Biden for dinner with
	his foreign business associates in person or by speakerphone over 20 times.
	When Burisma's owner was facing pressure from the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company for corruption, Archer testified that Burisma executives asked Hunter to call D.C.
	after a Burisma board meeting in Dubai.
	By the way, that meshes very closely with the whistleblower account to the FBI,
	the confidential human source account to the FBI that suggested that the head of Burisma had said
	that he had paid money to Joe and Hunter in order to get Viktor Shokin,
	the prosecutor in Ukraine, fired so that he would stop looking into Burisma.
	Now, by the way, it could be that the head of Burisma said that because Hunter had told him that
	and that Hunter didn't actually achieve that, but it doesn't matter because the bottom line is
	that Joe was deeply involved, at least to the extent that he knew what was going on
	with pretty much all of this.
	Commer says, why did Joe Biden lie to the American people about his family's business dealings and his involvement?
	It begs the question, what else he's hiding from the American people?
	The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability will continue to follow the Biden's money trail and interview witnesses to determine whether foreign actors targeted the Bidens.
	President Biden is compromised and corrupt.
	International security is threatened.
	So here are the key takeaways.
	1.
	Devin Archer testified that the value of adding Hunter Biden to Burisma's board was the brand and confirmed that then-Vice Presidential Biden was the brand.
	And by the way, Hunter has openly said this.
	Hunter was asked, why are we getting paid tons of money to be on Burisma's board?
	He said, because my last name is Biden.
	Archer admitted that Burisma would have gone out of business if the brand had not been attached to it.
	He believed that Hunter Biden being on the board and the Biden brand contributed to Burisma's longevity.
	People would have been intimidated to mess with Burisma legally because of the Biden brand.
	He testified.
	In December of 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of Burisma, and Vadim Porzharsky, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C.
	regarding Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
	Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption.
	Hunter, along with Zlochevsky and Porzharsky, called D.C.
	to discuss the matter.
	Biden, Zlochevsky, and Porzharsky stepped away to make the call.
	This raises concerns that Hunter was in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
	Well, I mean, clearly he was.
	I mean, let's be real about this.
	The guy was working on a foreign board on American policy to benefit a foreign company.
	This is like textbook FARA violations.
	Devin Archer testified that Hunter Biden put then-Vice President Joe Biden on the speakerphone during business meetings over 20 times.
	Apparently, Archer testified that Joe Biden was put on the phone to sell the brand.
	Those phone calls included a dinner in Paris with a French energy company and in China with Jonathan Lee, the CEO of BHR.
	Archer acknowledged then-Vice President Biden had coffee with Jonathan Lee, CEO of BHR, in Beijing.
	Then-Vice President Biden even wrote a letter of recommendation for college for Lee's daughter.
	Archer confirmed Joe Biden was referred to as my guy by Hunter Biden.
	Like, the big guy.
	In spring of 2014, then-VP Biden attended a business dinner with his son Hunter and his associates at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.
	Elena Baterina, a Russian oligarch who was the widow of the former mayor of Moscow, attended the dinner.
	Notably, the Biden administration's public sanctions list for Russian oligarchs does not contain Baterina.
	And there's more there, as we'll get to in just one moment.
	All of this is very bad news for Joe Biden because you heard the clips of him.
	I knew nothing about the businesses.
	I wasn't involved in the businesses.
	Whatever Hunter was doing, he was on the phone.
	He was on the phone for all of this sort of stuff.
	And of course, Joe openly bragged about getting Victor Shokin fired, which just happened to merge with exactly what his son was lobbying for.
	His son wanted Victor Shokin fired.
	And then Biden bragged about getting Victor Shokin fired.
	Now, he's making the case.
	That everybody wanted Victor Shokin fired because Shokin was corrupt.
	Welcome to Ukraine.
	I mean, seriously, like everyone in Ukraine is corrupt when it comes to the government.
	Everybody's known this for decades.
	But only Shokin was worthy of Joe Biden calling up and threatening to withdraw a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine unless they pulled Victor Shokin.
	Here was Biden bragging about it.
	I remember going over convincing our team or others to convincing that we should be providing for Loan guarantees.
	And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev, and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee.
	And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor, and they didn't.
	So they said they were walking out to the press conference and said, no, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
	They said, you have no authority.
	You're not the president.
	The president said, I said, call him.
	I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars.
	I said, you're not getting a billion.
	I'm going to be leaving here.
	I think it was, what, six hours.
	I look, I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
	If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.
	Oh, son of a bitch.
	Got fired.
	And they put in place someone who was solid.
	Okay, by the way, if you don't think that Joe Biden is the kind of pathological liar who would have the gall to tell a story about how he was rooting out corruption while being corrupt, you haven't been watching Joe Biden for 35 years.
	Okay, Joe Biden is exactly that kind of person.
	This is a guy who shamelessly lied about every element of his career for the first 15 years of his career, so much so he had to drop out of a presidential race for being a plagiarist.
	And for lying about his college record and for lying about everything else.
	Joe Biden is the kind of person who lies about the circumstances of his former wife's death in a car crash by openly lying about the other person involved in the car crash, suggesting for years that the guy was driving drunk and essentially ruining his life.
	Joe Biden is a very bad person.
	Okay, Joe Biden is not an aboveboard, honest fellow.
	And so if you think that he doesn't have the gall or the temerity to do this sort of stuff while openly bragging about how he's fighting corruption, again, you ain't been watching Biden for very long.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	The level of corruption here is obviously very high.
	That coffee with the Russian oligarch in spring of 2014, Elena Baterina.
	Well, the New York Post reported way back in October of last year that a real estate company with ties to first son Hunter Biden received more than $100 million.
	From a Russian billionaire for property investments across the United States dating back a decade.
	The hefty cash injections into Rosemont Realty came from, wait for it, Alina Baterino, one of Russia's wealthiest women.
	The widow of the former mayor of Moscow and a close ally of Moscow tyrant Vladimir Putin, according to sources.
	So, Joe Biden just happens to be meeting with everybody who could possibly help out his son.
	Weird how that works.
	Super duper weird.
	So, the White House is now responding to all of these allegations, and they're saying, ah, there's nothing here, nothing to see here.
	So notice how the goalposts, they started off moving, and then as Molly Hemingway, the Federalist, points out, they've now been kicked into the ocean.
	I mean, they're like in the middle of deep sea right now.
	And they're next to that sunken Titanic.
	According to the White House, quote, it appears the House Republicans own much-hyped witness today testified he had never heard of President Biden discussing business with his son or his son's associates or doing anything wrong.
	Or doing anything wrong, okay?
	I'll explain in a second why this is so ridiculous.
	House Republicans keep promising bombshell evidence to support their ridiculous attacks against the president, but time after time, they keep failing to produce any.
	In fact, even their own witnesses appear to be debunking their allegations.
	Instead of continuing to waste time and resources on this evidence-free wild goose chase, House Republicans should drop these stunts and work with the president on the issues that actually impact- Okay, so, here is the reason this is so insanely stupid.
	The claim of the White House is that because Devin Archer testified, That Joe Biden did not openly discuss every aspect of business with the people that Hunter would get Joe on the phone with?
	That means that Joe was not involved in the business.
	That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.
	If you're influence peddling, the entire operation is based on plausible deniability.
	What, he's going to openly influence Petal?
	Then you can get Joe on the phone and she's going to be like, Oh, what does it take to get Victor's show?
	Can you give my son like, you know, an 800, like hundreds of thousands of dollars and I'll fire?
	Like, do you think he's going to say that?
	Or is the conversation going to go something like this?
	Hunter walks in the room, he says, I want 83 grand a month and I'll get daddy on the phone.
	You know, I got my dad.
	We'll have conversations.
	We won't do it over the phone because we're not totally stupid.
	He'll do it via text on WhatsApp because he's a moron, but we won't do it.
	We won't do any of that.
	We'll have conversations.
	And what you need to get done, you'll get done.
	And as proof that me and my dad are tight, let me get him on the phone right now.
	Click.
	Here's the phone.
	Joe gets on.
	Hi, how's the weather over there in Ukraine?
	That's how this stuff works, obviously.
	So believe it or not, the slim read that Democrats are relying upon here to protect Joe Biden is the idea that when Joe Biden gets on the phone during business meetings with Hunter, is that Joe actually just likes discussing weather with people randomly.
	That's actually what this is.
	That Joe randomly allows Hunter to call him with just randos on the beach.
	And then they just talk about the weather.
	It just happens like all the time.
	And sure, I mean, he does it with like Russian oligarchs who give a hundred million dollars to different firms with which Hunter Biden is an associate, and sure he does it with like Burisma, and sure he does it with wide varieties of foreign companies, including like Chinese companies, and sure he writes letters for the heads of those companies, like kids, to get into college.
	He does all of those things.
	He does all of that just because dude likes talking about the weather.
	Now, I don't know how much you like talking about the weather.
	I will tell you this.
	I don't randomly call people or take calls from people to talk about the weather.
	It's not a thing I do.
	If somebody calls me, Yeah, Hunter, it's me.
	And here I am.
	talking about, they're not talking about the weather, obviously.
	The whole point is I can get my daddy, the vice president of the United States,
	on the phone at any moment.
	Dad, is that you?
	Yeah, Hunter, it's me.
	And here I am.
	Everything.
	Click. See, I get my dad on the phone at any time.
	We'll solve the problem for you.
	That's how the and then magically it turns out that some of the problems actually get
	solved. Like Victor Shoken, the guy goes away and then Joe Biden brags about how he's
	an anti-corruption fighter.
	Well, his son is bagging hundreds of thousands of dollars, promising that that's exactly what would happen.
	Is that just a giant coincidence, by the way?
	That's really what we're being asked to believe, that it's all a coincidence.
	We're asked to believe that Hunter went on the board of Burisma, promising access to Joe Biden, and promising that the Biden last name would shield Burisma, and that he promised everybody at Burisma that he would work on getting Shokin fired, and that just coincidentally, his daddy got Shokin fired.
	That's what we're, like, no relation, Chinese wall of separation, nobody knows who's talking to whom, I mean, sure, they had phone calls and everything, but no.
	No.
	That's what we're being asked to believe.
	And Democrats are saying that if you ask questions about this, that's because you're the problem.
	You're pouncing.
	You're corrupt.
	Actually, there's nothing to see here.
	There's absolutely nothing to see here.
	Now, after five long years of stupid jabber from Democrats about how there was a smoking gun, that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were working together, and they were rigging the election on behalf of Donald Trump, and using Facebook because Donald Trump really needed Vladimir Putin to input on Facebook, that it was all corrupt, and the smoking gun was around the corner.
	It turned out all of it was lies.
	After five years of that, we're being told by the same exact people there is nothing to see here?
	No one believes this.
	No one believes this.
	Again, it is impossible to look at the juxtaposition of Hunter's business activities and now what Hunter's business... Again, this is not the first Hunter Biden business partner to say this.
	Tony Bobulinski said the exact same thing.
	Tony Bobulinski said years ago that Joe Biden was stopping by business meetings and like hanging out with people.
	He said this.
	Again, Hunter texted his own daughter saying he pays dad's bills.
	I don't know what you need other than like an actual bank account wire showing money moving from Hunter to Joe.
	But here's the thing, he doesn't even have to do that.
	Because I don't know how it works with your parents.
	If I go out to dinner with my parents, I just pay for dinner.
	I don't wire money to my parents' bank account to pay for dinner.
	If Hunter wants to pay Joe's expenses, he'll just pay Joe's expenses.
	Like, the money doesn't actually have to- That's the beauty of being a member of a family.
	This is why family corruption is so common, by the way.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second, because what you're being asked to believe is the dumbest crap imaginable.
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	Okay, so again, what you're being asked to believe is like the dumbest crap imaginable.
	And naturally, Democrats are trotting out.
	When people talk about the double standard here, it's really quite insane.
	Remember, Donald Trump was impeached the first time.
	He was impeached twice.
	He was impeached the first time by the House over a phone call with the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, telling him that he might withhold military aid if they didn't dig up dirt on Hunter Biden.
	Meanwhile, the accusation here, which appears to be fairly well founded, is that Joe Biden openly threatened Ukraine that he would withdraw $1 billion in aid unless they fired a prosecutor who just so happened to be looking into his son's company.
	That's the, it's amazing.
	And the same people who prosecuted Impeachment 1 against Trump, those exact same people are now rushing to Joe Biden's defense, which just shows you the politics is a game of, it's a game of partisanship, purely and simply.
	It's either wrong in both cases or it's wrong in either case, but this is really amazing stuff.
	So Representative Dan Goldman, again, he's one of the impeachment prosecutors.
	Watch how far these goalposts have moved.
	He now says it is a preposterous premise to say that Joe should not be talking with Hunter's business associates.
	Why is that preposterous?
	He was the vice president of the United States.
	Shouldn't he be above board and clean as the driven snow?
	Doesn't it contradict the president's statement saying that he never talked to any of Hunter Biden's business associates?
	Clearly he talked, whether or not the weather or whatever, but he said specifically that he's never talked to them.
	Does this contradict me?
	Yes, he did.
	I don't know what his comment is and if we're gonna...
	No.
	Well, I don't think that's what he said.
	He never said that he has never spoken to anyone.
	He said that he had nothing to do with Hunter Biden's business dealings.
	If he says hello to someone that he sees his son with, is he supposed to say...
	Hi, son.
	No, I'm not going to say hello to the other people at the table or the other people on the phone.
	It's kind of a preposterous premise to think that a father should not say hello to people that the son is at dinner with.
	And that is literally all the evidence is.
	No, that is not all the evidence is.
	The evidence is that Hunter called Daddy on the phone 20 times with different business partners.
	The evidence is that Joe wrote letters of recommendation for people with whom Hunter Biden was in business.
	The evidence is that Joe stopped by dinners and like sat down and talked to people.
	That's what influence peddling is.
	They're asking you to be a moron.
	They believe you're stupid.
	That's all.
	It's very obvious they believe that they can just gaslight you into thinking nothing untoward happened here when every indicator is that something untoward happened here.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	Again, the line from the Democrats, believe it or not, is nothing to see here, everything is fine.
	So Dan Goldman, again, one of the impeachment prosecutors, he says it's a preposterous premise to say that Joe shouldn't be talking with Hunter's business associates.
	This is after Joe has spent years saying he knew nothing about the businesses, that he never, like literally nothing, that he never heard anything.
	They keep moving the goalposts.
	And then, Dan Goldman emphasizes that sure, Hunter put Joe on speakerphone, but they were just talking about the weather.
	Again, they're asking you to be such a moron here.
	They were just talking about... He's looking real sweaty here, because it turns out that this is not a good defense.
	They were just talking about the weather.
	It is impossible to describe what a weak defense this is.
	If you were prosecuting, let's say, a RICO case against the Mafia, and a low-level hitman told you, I talk routinely with the head of the Mafia, I would get him on the phone, and I would use him.
	I'd walk into a bar, and I would say to the bartender, I need you to give me 10 grand, or I'm going to shut down your bar.
	You don't believe that I'm a connected guy?
	Listen to this.
	Picks up the phone, calls the mob boss.
	The mob boss goes, is it sunny outside or is it raining outside?
	They're talking about the weather.
	Is that a conversation about the weather or is that not a conversation?
	That is not a conversation about the weather.
	That's showing that the influence peddling is in operation.
	That's the entire purpose.
	But here's Dan Goldman.
	Well, probably they were just talking about the weather.
	Probably.
	Joe Biden really just wanted to know how the weather was over in Kiev.
	So to confirm, you're saying that the speakerphone conversations, they don't seem concerning to you because there is no specifics about business?
	And it just seemed like it was clear that it was clear that it was part of the daily conversations that Hunter Biden had with his father.
	And it was and and sounds like most of the time.
	Now President Biden didn't even know who the people he was at dinner.
	He was just asked to say hello.
	And he would, you know, talk about the way he described it several times.
	They asked over and over and over.
	He described what the weather was, how, what's going on on your end.
	The witness was very, very consistent that none of those conversations ever had to do with any business dealings or transactions.
	Of course they didn't!
	Because the minute you say the business, you are now in clear violation of federal law.
	Of course!
	Duh!
	Again, let me just ask you this.
	You have parents, right?
	You've been to a business dinner, correct?
	Your parents sometimes call you during the business dinner.
	This happens to me all the time.
	You know, I'm very close with my parents.
	Sometimes they call me on the phone.
	Sometimes I don't pick up because I'm in the middle of a business dinner.
	And sometimes, if I feel like a surgeon, I do pick up.
	And you know what I do?
	I say, excuse me, folks, and I get up and I go outside to talk to my parents because it's not relevant to the rest of the conversation that my dad's on the phone.
	This is the stupidest defense I've ever heard.
	The defense is, do you do that?
	Like, your parent calls you at a business dinner, you're like, hold on, my dad's on the phone, I'm putting him on speaker.
	He just wants to say hello and talk about the weather.
	Yeah, dad, how's the dog doing?
	Do you do that?
	Have you ever done that?
	Why would you do such a thing?
	Let me ask you that.
	Under what circumstances would you do this thing?
	There is only one reason, because you want everybody at the table to know about the relationship that you have.
	With your dad.
	Because it's relevant in some way to the generalized conversation that is happening at the table.
	It's an influence peddling operation.
	Clearly.
	Openly.
	Everyone knows it.
	They've known it since Tony Bobulinski.
	They've known it since the Hunter Biden laptop.
	And now, they're studiously trying to avoid the consequences of this.
	So, Democrats have now moved to the next step of the defense.
	Because this is not going to last.
	The next step of the defense is, there's no proof that Hunter ever did anything that benefited Joe.
	There's no proof.
	And not only that, we should stop looking, probably.
	We shouldn't, like, look at any of the IRS.
	We shouldn't look at any of the bank account records.
	We shouldn't try to pierce any corporate veils.
	We shouldn't try to figure out exactly how the money moved.
	We shouldn't even look at who paid Joe's expenses, because Joe has reported way more wealth than his income would actually suggest.
	There's like several million unexplained dollars in Joe Biden's wealth that no one knows where it came from.
	And it's kind of weird.
	So here are Democrats now claiming we don't need to know.
	We don't need to know.
	It's probably fine, guys.
	It's probably above board and totally fine.
	Here are Democrats saying there's no evidence Joe ever benefited from any of this.
	It was all a clinky dink.
	He never benefited.
	By the way, it is in fact a benefit when your children benefit from this.
	Just to point this out, Joe would not have to directly benefit in order for this to be bribery.
	If somebody said to Joe, Hunter is getting paid a lot of money.
	He's getting paid a lot of money in order to achieve X. Can you help X happen and you are a public official?
	He doesn't need to see money hit his own bank account to benefit him.
	As a parent, I care very much about my children.
	I assume that Joe cares very much about Hunter and who pays Hunter's bills for his crack.
	So presumably that money was either coming from Joe or from someone else in the family or from some outside oligarchs.
	And we know for a fact that business associates of Joe have been paying hundreds of business bills, like his legal bills, them buying his crap paintings, his garbage paintings.
	They've been paying like half a million dollars.
	So it's perfectly in line for Joe Biden to have outside sources paying his son and his son benefiting from that and that acting as a form of bribery.
	If your entire family benefits from the bribery, and you're over here, like, living your life, but you're the one who's actually brokering the thing, yeah, that's still bribery, okay?
	It doesn't actually have to hit his bank account, but that's gonna be the next offense.
	Well, you can actually show a formal dollar being moved from this Chinese CEFC fund into Joe Biden's personal bank account.
	This is the next line they're going to use.
	So far, they have been not able to prove any evidence here of wrongdoing.
	House GOP members continue to try and link Hunter's business dealings to the president, though they have yet to produce any concrete evidence.
	Now, it is important to keep in mind, while Republicans believe that there is a tie between Hunter Biden's business dealings and the president himself, they have yet to provide any hard evidence that the president himself has done anything wrong.
	House Republicans are going to accuse him.
	They are.
	They're going to make the accusation.
	They're going to accuse him of all sorts of stuff.
	Whether they have the evidence or not.
	Correct.
	Republicans have not tied the President, Joe Biden, to profiteering from them.
	They didn't have the evidence yet.
	Where's the evidence?
	There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by the President.
	There is today zero evidence, zero evidence that Joe Biden, the President of the United States, knew about what his son was doing.
	Okay, first of all, lots of evidence that he knew exactly what his son was doing.
	Literally, we have a WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to a foreign oligarch in China saying, my daddy is sitting next to me right at this moment.
	According to Dan Goldman, probably they were just sitting there talking about the weather or something, probably.
	By the way, it's worth noting, UK Daily Mail, 2022, Joe Biden agreed to pay son Hunter's legal fees for his deal with the Chinese government-controlled company, emails reveal.
	The revelation ties the president even closer to Hunter's overseas business dealings and makes his previous claims he never discussed them with his son even less plausible.
	Joe was able to pay those bills after earning millions of bucks through his and his wife's companies after he left office as VP.
	Some of the wave of cash came from their book deals and speaking engagements, but the president's financial filings reveal he declared almost $7 million more on his tax returns than he did on his government transparency reports.
	Some of that difference can be accounted for with salaries earned by the first lady, Joe Biden, and other sums not required on his reports.
	But that leaves $5.2 million earned by Joe's company not listed on his transparency reports.
	Those are missing millions.
	So where did those come from?
	So first of all, you don't actually need to prove that the money hit Joe Biden's bank account.
	All you need to prove is that the money hit Hunter Biden's bank account because that benefits Joe, quite obviously.
	But where'd that money come from?
	Does anyone even care?
	Or is the media just going to continue to run interference?
	Apparently, they're going to start by running interference because they've been doing it the whole time.
	Here with CNN yesterday saying, you know, guys, really, I'm not sure why this is a big deal.
	They never talk business.
	They were just talking about the weather.
	This is literally it's it's legitimately one of the worst excuses for corruption I've ever heard.
	They were talking about the weather is like this one's up there with Hillary Clinton saying wiped like with a cloth.
	Yes, they were talking about the weather, because I routinely get my father on the phone during my business dealings to discuss the weather.
	For no reason.
	So Goldman's sort of explaining that Archer qualified the topics of discussion on these phone calls as niceties, that Biden sometimes didn't even know who was on the other line with his son Hunter, and sources in the room telling CNN now that Archer did not point the finger directly at any sort of a connection between Joe Biden and his son's foreign business dealings, and rather said that Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of said access.
	Boris, really a stunning development, Zach, when you consider that Republicans were selling this as a breakthrough that would link Hunter's business dealings with his father.
	Instead, business was apparently never discussed, according to Devin Archer.
	See, the bombshell is that nothing happened.
	They were just talking about the weather.
	This is so insane.
	This is so insane.
	He was selling the illusion of access.
	The illusion.
	What was the illusion?
	The illusion is that he had access to the president.
	And, uh, to the Vice President.
	And he was selling that illusion by having access to the Vice President.
	That's not an illusion, that's called access.
	If I say, you know, I, here at Daily Wire, I have access to multiple Senators.
	I have access to them.
	Let me call up a Senator right now and get them on the phone.
	And then I call up a Senator and get them on the phone.
	That is not an illusion of access, that's access.
	In Illusion of Access, he calls his friend, who is pretending to be Joe Biden, and then his friend gets on the phone and goes, and then he hangs up.
	That's the illusion of access.
	Actual access is when he's your father and you call him on the phone, he's the vice president of the United States, and he is squiring you around on Air Force suits to pick up bags of cash in China, and also is in charge of Ukrainian policy, overseeing the prosecutor who is prosecuting your son's company.
	That is not the illusion of access.
	That's access, clearly.
	This is so insane.
	And the media like, well, clearly the bombshell blew up.
	Clearly something.
	You guys can happy talk yourselves and pretend that nothing is happening here.
	Something is happening here.
	And here's the reason that you know this.
	Because Joe Biden, he is really turning up the, I'm just an old family man.
	He's turning that crap up to 11.
	He's really turning that stuff up.
	Because the way that he's in the end going to defend all of this, here's going to be the final defense.
	The final defense is going to be, Yes, of course.
	I was allowing my son to sell access to me.
	Of course I knew about it.
	Of course.
	Would you expect me not to?
	He was a crack addict and I love my son and I want to make sure that he's taken care of.
	That's just what a nice family man.
	My corruption was mandated by the fact that I love my family.
	And so Joe Biden is really turning this stuff up, right?
	This is why he's now acknowledging grandchildren he never acknowledged until five seconds ago.
	This is why he's doing interviews talking about what a wonderful family man he is.
	So he did an interview yesterday.
	I have seven grandkids, four of them old, five of them old enough to talk on the phone.
	full decrepitude.
	Well, he doesn't text or call maybe Joan or her mom, but he acknowledged them over the weekend.
	A first.
	I wonder why he would do that.
	Why would he do that?
	Did maybe he do that because otherwise it looks really cynical?
	See, it turns out it looks really cynical.
	If you say, I'm a big family man.
	I love all of my kids and my grandkids, except for that one.
	That one who hurts Hunter and may hurt me politically, who I won't acknowledge.
	That one, the four-year-old.
	It looks real bad.
	It looks kind of like if you're in the club, you're in the club.
	But if you're not in the club, he's not going to let you in the club to use the Biden name again.
	I'm not I'm never going to get over the fact that the actual settlement, the actual paternity settlement with Hunter.
	Disallows Navy Joan from using the last name Biden.
	The only thing that the Biden family has traded on for decades.
	That is what is being denied to the granddaughter.
	But now Joe says, well, I know I have seven grandkids and I love them very much.
	Well, you didn't love them last week.
	I noticed.
	I noticed one you didn't love last week, but now all of a sudden you're really doing the family man routine, aren't you?
	Like really, really doing it.
	I wonder why.
	Maybe it's so that you can claim, well, yeah, you know, Hunter called me on the phone, and I picked up because I love my crack-addled son, who's screwing prostitutes.
	I love that guy.
	But it's insane, right?
	And then you talked more about, my family tapes me when they want to get to me.
	They tape messages on my mirror because we're all, oh, what an, oh.
	My family, when they want to get an important message to me, they tape it on the mirror in the bathroom.
	I'm serious.
	So you wake up in the morning and... No, it's on the mirror.
	I guess I was down early on, ten years ago, I was down or something.
	And my daughter Ashley taped on my, she's a social worker, taped on my mirror.
	Happiness is something to do, someone to love, and someone to look forward to.
	And Dad, you have all those things.
	Well, now they take messages on his mirror like memento, like, you're the president of the United States.
	But again, the reason that he's playing this stuff up is because the closer he appears, the more he's a family man, the more family corruption just appears to be an act of love.
	And that is where this is going to go.
	It's a more related to Joe Biden in just one second, because that dude is extraordinarily vulnerable in a presidential election.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	Okay, meanwhile, Okay, so all of this makes Joe Biden very, very, very vulnerable.
	Why?
	Not because it means that he is open to attack from Republicans, though he certainly is, but because the only way that Joe Biden wins is, again, with high voter turnout.
	So Joe Biden benefited from unprecedented voter turnout in 2020.
	The jump in voting numbers between 2020 and 2016 is massive.
	The total number of votes in 2016 was Something like 127 million voters.
	128 million voters.
	128 million voters.
	The total number in 2020 was something more like 155 million voters, which is a massive jump.
	129 to 155.
	You're talking about the biggest jump in voter turnout in modern American history.
	And the reason for that is because Democrats blew out the early voting.
	They changed all the rules, so everybody mailed in their ballots.
	And meanwhile, Donald Trump was out there telling his base not to do early voting for some odd reason that no one can quite comprehend.
	But that massive bump in voter turnout is what boosted Joe Biden.
	Because, of course, Donald Trump won more votes than he won in 2016 and 2020.
	But this huge expansion of the voter base meant that Joe Biden won.
	Well, what does that mean?
	It means that Joe Biden needs to replicate high voter turnout.
	If he gets low voter turnout in 2024, he's extremely vulnerable.
	And this is what the Washington Post is pointing out today.
	Democrats are currently worried that black voters are not going to turn out en masse for Joe Biden.
	They turned out en masse in 2020, in large part because the Democrats decided to make Black Lives Matter the centerpiece of the campaign.
	They decided that the Black Lives Matter George Floyd hubbub was going to be the central pitch that they made.
	Equity in all things.
	Kamala Harris as vice president.
	We will put on the court a black female justice and all of this sort of stuff.
	And now it turns out that Joe Biden is a corrupt old white politician, kind of like all the other corrupt old white politicians.
	So it's quite possible now that a lot of young black voters are just not going to turn up.
	He ain't Barack Obama.
	You don't have the charm.
	It's the same sort of thing with Hillary Clinton.
	Black voters were the margin of victory for Barack Obama in 2012.
	They were the margin of loss for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
	They were the margin of victory for Joe Biden in 2020.
	What's going to happen with them in 2024?
	It's not about whether Republicans win 15% of the black vote or something.
	The real question is, how many black people are going to vote in swing states?
	Because they vote disproportionately Democrat, you need high voter turnout.
	This is how Barack Obama won Ohio in 2012, for example.
	Well, according to the Washington Post, Democrats are really worried about this.
	They're worried about a potential drop next year in turnout among black voters, the party's most loyal constituency.
	Their concern stems from a 10-percentage-point decline in Black voter turnout in last year's midterms compared with 2018, a bigger drop than among almost any other racial or ethnic group, according to a Washington Post analysis of the Census Bureau's turnout survey.
	Such warning signals were initially papered over by other Democrat successes in 2022 because they picked up a seat in Pennsylvania and Warnock won re-election in Georgia, but in key states like Georgia, Turnout in last year's midterms was much lower among younger and male black voters, according to internal party analysis.
	The drop in black turnout has become a focus for Democratic leaders as the party reorients to next year's presidential contest.
	And again, remember, in Georgia, the same year that Raphael Warnock won his reelect effort, Brian Kemp won an election running away in Georgia.
	That was not a close election against Stacey Abrams.
	So it's quite possible that Donald Trump is able to benefit from low voter turnout in places like Georgia.
	Biden's election in 2020, as the Washington Post points out, hinged on narrow victories in states like Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that former President Trump won in 2016.
	Democrat activists are cautioning the party cannot afford to let support from black voters slip.
	Well, I mean, that's correct.
	And they should be worried because Joe Biden is not exactly an attractive candidate to young people of any sort, let alone young black voters who may not be all that interested in a corrupt old white man whose son was clearing a buttload of money and avoiding jail while committing obvious crimes.
	That's gonna be a problem.
	And let me tell you, Joe Biden's image is not what the media think Joe Biden's image is.
	I mean, there's a photo that emerged from Joe Biden in Delaware, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, violating the prescriptions for avoiding skin cancer in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
	And the media tried to play this as like a big W for Joe Biden.
	I'm just wondering how.
	For those who can't see the photo, this is Joe Biden shirtless in a bathing suit, staring out at somebody with a camera, wearing sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap.
	It is not a good look.
	It is nothing that you want to see.
	Is this going to draw in the young voters by the bushel over here?
	This thing?
	This is what, the ET over here?
	Um, no.
	The answer is no.
	And again, you know, physical attractiveness of candidates doesn't matter?
	Well, it didn't for Barack Obama.
	You will recall that back in 2008, there was a famous photo of Barack Obama merging shirtless from the ocean and the media going gaga over all of that.
	Did that matter?
	Yeah, I mean, that sort of stuff kind of does matter, which is why Joe Biden, being a decrepit elderly person who obviously is involved in corruption schemes with his son, is not exactly a voter turnout Jogger.
	I mean, it's not going to jog or increase voter turnout for Democrats, which is why they're freaking out at this point.
	You know who knows this is Donald Trump.
	It's also the reason why Donald Trump is at this point the most likely candidate to be the Republican nominee.
	The reason is because the man's just a battering ram.
	And so Republicans are thinking about Joe Biden, the same thing they thought about Hillary, which is, is Donald Trump going to throw the kitchen sink at Joe Biden?
	Because he has no limits.
	The fun of watching Donald Trump come in off the top rope against Joe Biden again, but this time actually directed against Joe Biden's corruption, And directed in a more meticulous way, perhaps, is quite real.
	This is what the polls are showing right now.
	So Donald Trump understands it again.
	The man has an innate understanding of the id of the Republican Party.
	And so here was yesterday going after Joe Biden.
	So in 2016, you very famously branded Hillary Clinton as Crooked Hillary.
	Yeah.
	Who's worse?
	Joe Biden?
	Hillary Clinton?
	Well, I took the name off crooked.
	We call her beautiful Hillary now because, you know, that one's over with.
	And the word crooked was very pertinent, I think.
	It was a very good word for Biden.
	No, he's crooked.
	He's a crooked.
	He's the most corrupt president we've ever had.
	And he's also the worst president we've ever had.
	You look at what happened in Afghanistan, you look at what happened with inflation, look at the economy, look what's going on.
	No, he's the worst president we've ever had.
	If Donald Trump could stick to this message, a lot of Republicans believe this could be a winning message.
	And again, there's an element of fun to Trump that doesn't exist for the other candidates.
	So right now, what the polls show is that Donald Trump is in a historically strong position to return to the White House according to CNN's Harry Enten.
	He broke down the numbers according to mediaite behind the current state of play in the GOP presidential primary.
	He said, quote, Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a non-incumbent to win the Republican nomination, he's in a better position to win the general than at any point during the 2020 cycle and at almost any point during the 2016 cycle.
	He says no one in Trump's current polling position in the modern era has lost an open presidential primary that didn't feature an incumbent.
	He's pulling in more than 50% in the national primary polls, more than all of his competitors combined.
	Three prior candidates in open primaries were pulling in more than half the vote in primary surveys in the second half of the calendar year before election.
	Al Gore and Bush in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
	Enten also notes that Trump is in pretty good shape in a general.
	He says Trump was up on Biden by one point in the Quinnipiac poll, a result within the margin of error, but nevertheless a remarkable achievement for the former president.
	He says one giant warning sign for Democrats was that poll, because that poll is from Pennsylvania.
	That's not a national poll.
	It's in Pennsylvania.
	A low voter turnout could actually stop Joe Biden from beating Donald Trump.
	Well, Republican voters are obviously trending toward Donald Trump at this point.
	There's a New York Times Siena College poll that came out yesterday, and it shows that if the only two choices in the primary were Trump or DeSantis, right now Trump would win 62 to 31.
	And you can see the breakdown here.
	It's kind of fascinating.
	So, when asked who is a strong leader, this, by the way, demonstrates that politics is now the art of affect.
	It's performance art.
	It is not actual policy, because when it comes to policy, there is no question that DeSantis is a much stronger leader than Trump, just in terms of what he's been able to get done in the state of Florida versus what Trump was able to get done nationally.
	Trump was hampered by his own executive branch.
	Clearly, in a variety of ways, ranging from the riots to Fauci to the investigations into him by his own executive branch, his own policies were thwarted at every turn.
	I mean, we know all this, right?
	This is stuff that Trump himself complains about in terms of who is a strong leader.
	Nonetheless, 69% of Republicans say that Trump is a strong leader, versus 22% of Republicans who say DeSantis is a stronger leader.
	When it comes to who is more moral, 36% say Trump, 46% say DeSantis.
	So people understand that DeSantis is a significantly more moral person than Trump, just on any sort of basic level.
	They don't care.
	Fascinatingly enough, when asked who is more likable, 45% of Republican voters actually say DeSantis, compared to 43% of Republican voters who say Trump.
	So it's not that they think that Trump is likable.
	It's not that they think that Trump is moral.
	It's that they think Trump is strong.
	They think that Trump is able to beat Joe Biden, 58 to 28, they believe that Trump is better to beat Joe Biden, which is kind of fascinating.
	When it comes to getting things done, which clearly the answer is DeSantis got a lot more things done in Florida than Trump has gotten done nationally, but it doesn't matter because it's about affect.
	Trump is winning 67 to 22 in that same poll.
	When asked who is more fun, and this is a big one, when asked who is more fun, 53% of Republicans say that Donald Trump is more fun.
	Only 16% say DeSantis.
	So again, a lot of this is affect.
	A lot of this is the imagining of a 2024 race in which Donald Trump is throwing the kitchen sink at Joe Biden.
	And so that's likely what we are going to get here.
	Trump knows this, which is why he probably is not going to participate in the debates at this point, because why would he?
	He's 30 points up in the polls right now.
	Now, again, it's an open primary.
	So, you know, it seems to me that he should debate because in an open primary, it behooves Republicans to be able to decide between candidates.
	But Trump put out on Truth Social last night, let them debate so I can see who I might consider for vice president.
	And it's sort of hard to see at this point how Trump is clawed down.
	Because this is really not about any of the other Republican candidates being able to overcome Trump.
	Trump is going to have to fall in the polls in order for any of the other Republicans to win.
	So what exactly could bring Trump down in the polls?
	Certainly not policy.
	There are other Republicans who are attacking him on policy.
	Ron DeSantis yesterday, for example, went after him about Anthony Fauci.
	He's right, but it doesn't matter.
	There are other Republicans, like Chris Christie, who have been going after Trump.
	It's not affecting his poll numbers at all.
	Basically, the only thing that could theoretically take Trump down at this point is an outside indictment.
	Which, by the way, benefits Trump because that means that every time there's an indictment that comes down, there's probably going to be another one this week, he can say with plausibility, literally the only thing that can stop me at this point is Democrats indicting me.
	Now, as I've said before, two things can be true at once.
	He may be guilty, facially, of crimes like mishandling of classified documents.
	It can also be true That Democrats have a very strong interest in indicting him to stop him from beating Joe Biden, right?
	That's a plausible argument.
	Again, one of the things that I pointed out about Ron DeSantis' candidacy, and again, I think DeSantis is a better candidate than Trump.
	I think that DeSantis is a stronger governor than Trump was a president.
	I think he'd make a better president than Trump.
	I've not been shy about any of this, but the big problem for Ron DeSantis is that Trump sucks all of the air out of the room.
	And not only that, Joe Biden is running really, really poorly at this point.
	If Joe Biden were running at 49-41 against Trump, then there'd be a case for DeSantis.
	But it's very hard for Republicans to make that case in favor of DeSantis when they're basically running even against Joe Biden because Biden's just such an unbelievably weak candidate.
	So speaking of these indictments, Donald Trump came out yesterday and he suggested that he is going to be indicted soon.
	He said on Truth Social, I assume an indictment from deranged Jack Smith and his highly partisan gang of thugs pertaining to my peacefully and patriotically speech will be coming out any day now as yet another attempt to cover up all this bad news about bribes, payoffs and extortion coming from the Biden camp.
	This seems to be the way that they do it.
	And now Atlanta is bracing for possible indictments, according to the Washington Post.
	For more than two years, people here and across the country have watched and waited for clues.
	The high-profile Georgia investigation into whether former President Trump and his allies broke the law in their attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state was winding to an end.
	That speculation hit fever pitch in recent days with the installation of orange security barriers near the main entrance of the Fulton County Courthouse in downtown Atlanta.
	Simultaneous with them setting up all of that security was an appeal by Donald Trump to the court to basically rule out Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis's investigation.
	A judge, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury investigation in this particular case, basically slapped down Donald Trump's legal efforts to stop all of that, so it's very likely that that case is going to go forward in the near future.
	Meanwhile, Adam Schiff continues to be out there treated as a credible source after lying for years about the Russia-Trump stuff.
	He says there could still be more charges against Trump on January 6th.
	You've prosecuted cases.
	Do you expect that they will come out with an indictment before that, or do they need that in order to make the strongest case?
	You know, we're all a bit blind here because we haven't seen the body of evidence that the special counsel has.
	But I would imagine, you know, if the target letter went out, if they're having these, you know, last-minute conversations, that Smith is ready to indict.
	And he may just want to dot an I and cross a T by bringing Carrick in.
	He may not expect to get a lot of valuable information, but he wants to make sure at least he knows if the other side called Carrick, what would he have to say.
	So I don't think it's necessary that the investigation would wait until then.
	And as we saw in Florida, if the special counsel gets new information, there can always be a superseding indictment on these January 6 charges.
	So again, Democrats are going to go after Trump.
	And again, all of that benefits Trump in the primary.
	So what does that mean for the other candidates?
	Well, as I've said before, they're not going to win this race against Trump by actually going up directly against Trump.
	It's not possible.
	He has too much strength inside the Republican Party, which means they need to orient At the media.
	I've been encouraging Ron DeSantis' campaign.
	Again, he's the only viable competitor to Trump at this point by the polling data.
	There is no third place in this race right now.
	If you look at the New York Times, Siena College Poll.
	The same one that shows Trump up by leaps and bounds over the rest of the field.
	It's got DeSantis at 17 and everybody else at less than 3%.
	So it really is DeSantis or bust for anybody who wants DeSantis to overcome anybody to be the not-Trump candidate.
	Which means there needs to be a consolidation of the field.
	That's only going to happen if DeSantis steps into unfriendly territory.
	The DeSantis campaign is rolling out a bunch of proposals.
	They rolled out an economic policy speech.
	You know who did a lot of policy?
	Elizabeth Warren.
	You know who doesn't care about policy?
	Anyone.
	I hate to break it to everyone in political sphere, but here's the reality.
	You care about policy.
	I care about policy.
	The vast majority of voters do not care about policy.
	They care about personality, which is why Donald Trump became president of the United States.
	It's also, by the way, why Barack Obama became president of the United States without any sort of political experience in actually promoting policy before he became president.
	So, what does that mean?
	It means that DeSantis is going to have to step into unfriendly territory and he's going to have to throw a few punches.
	That's the only way he's going to regain any sort of momentum in the race at this point.
	Okay, time for a couple... a thing I like and then some things that I hate.
	So...
	Things I like today.
	So yeah, I told you last week that I saw Oppenheimer, but I didn't really review it because I had a 43-minute review of Barbie, which became like the most viral thing on the internet for a bit.
	And so here's my actual review of Oppenheimer.
	So it's a brilliant film because Christopher Nolan is just amazing.
	Christopher Nolan is the best living director.
	There is not a question about this.
	And how you turn a three-hour biopic about a nuclear physicist Into a blockbuster movie that involves essentially one big explosion.
	is kind of a masterclass.
	It really is.
	I mean, just on a filmmaking level, the thing is beautiful to watch.
	The first hour is so compelling.
	It's the best sort of biopic about science ever by a pretty long margin here.
	The performances are universally fantastic.
	There are tons of cameos by people who you're going to recognize.
	Aside from Kelly Murphy, it turns into a great performance.
	Obviously, Matt Damon is terrific in this film.
	It's a really, really, really good movie.
	What's fascinating about it from a sort of historical point of view is the way that the movie is done.
	So the movie is essentially two tracks.
	What Nolan calls fission and fusion.
	So the fission side is performed by Robert Downey Jr.
	Robert Downey Jr.
	is playing the guy who's the head of the Princeton physics program who originally got Oppenheimer to come over there.
	And who is Essentially up for a position as the head of the Department of Commerce under Dwight Eisenhower.
	At one point, actually, he was offered to be—this is a real-life story—he was actually offered to be chief of staff for Dwight Eisenhower.
	Louis Strauss.
	So Louis Strauss knew Oppenheimer.
	The movie sort of implies that he was jealous of Oppenheimer and that's the reason why he was implacably opposed to Oppenheimer.
	So the basic thrust of the Oppenheimer story, and this is true in real life, is that Oppenheimer was a communist fellow traveler in the 1930s.
	There's some good evidence that he was actively being used by the Soviets in like the early 1940s, even during the Manhattan Project.
	In order to sort of facilitate transfer of information, there's a fairly famous letter from a Soviet agent in the United States to Lorenzi Beria, who is the head of the KGB.
	It wasn't called the KGB at the time, but the KGB.
	And about Oppenheimer, implying that Oppenheimer was in fact being used to funnel information.
	to the Soviet Union or at least hooking people up.
	There's a lot of controversy about his Soviet ties.
	The man was like deeply embedded with tons of communists all around him.
	There were a bunch of people who actually were active Soviet spies who were present at Los Alamos during this period.
	So basically the story of Oppenheimer, just on a historical level, is that he was granted a security clearance in order to help produce the bomb.
	There were serious security problems with him leading up to that and everybody was worried about it.
	But they really had no choice because all the best nuclear scientists We're all in bed with communists.
	Including, by the way, Albert Einstein.
	Albert Einstein, quite famously, was kind of a fan of Lenin.
	He literally said about Lenin, quote, That is what Albert Einstein had to say about Vladimir Lenin.
	So, I mean, a lot of these people were communist fellow travelers.
	energy to the realization of social justice. I do not consider his methods practical, but
	one thing is certain, men of his type are the guardians and restorers of humanity."
	Right? That is what Albert Einstein had to say about Vladimir Lenin. So, I mean, a lot
	of these people were communist fellow travelers. One reason for that is because most of Europe
	at this point was divided between sort of fascists and communists, right? This is exactly
	what happened in pre-war Germany, is that there was a divide between the communists
	in Germany and the fascists in Germany, and the right sided with the fascists in order
	to stop the communists, right? That's the story of the early 1930s and late 1920s in
	Germany, and obviously the Nazis end up rising to power. A lot of people who oppose the Nazis
	then fall into the communist camp because the communists very often would promise sort
	of equality of man and brotherhood. So for a lot of Jewish expatriates, they were
	So, Oppenheimer is brought into Los Alamos.
	There are serious suspicions about his security, even at the time.
	He's given security clearance to get the bomb done.
	toward the communist camp. This is why in intellectual Jewish circles communism was
	very popular in the 1930s and 1940s as sort of an anti-racist routine despite its evils.
	Okay so Oppenheimer is brought into Los Alamos. There are serious suspicions about his security
	even at the time. He's given security clearance to get the bomb done. After the war he becomes a big
	and ardent opponent of the development of the hydrogen bomb.
	He speaks publicly about how the hydrogen bomb should not be developed because it'll lead to
	an arms race. Instead maybe we should share technology with the Russians and there'll be
	mutually assured destruction and then we'll all go weapons down. And there are two ways to
	read that. One is...
	as Oppenheimer's fans would read it, which is that he was so stunned by the power of the bomb
	that now he turns against the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear weapons
	themselves, right? I'm the destroyer of all man and the all of the quotes about him being, you
	know, death. And the other read on this is that he was perfectly fine using the bomb on Japan when
	the Soviets wanted the bomb to be used on Japan.
	But then as soon as the war was over, he didn't want the United States leaping way, way, way ahead of the Russians in terms of nuclear technology.
	And so he wanted to stop the development of the hydrogen bomb.
	And it was these suspicions that led Louis Strauss to testify, to essentially organize A removal of Oppenheimer's security clearance in the early 1950s.
	So in the movie, this is played as sort of McCarthyite scare.
	Like everybody is it's overwrought.
	It's Red Scare kind of stuff.
	But again, there's pretty good material suggesting that Oppenheimer probably should not have had security clearance in the aftermath of the war because he was given security clearance as like an emergency measure.
	But he was a serious, I mean, like literally every woman he ever slept with was a communist.
	All of his friends were communists.
	He he gave money to communist causes.
	He was cited in a letter that's now been uncovered to Laurenti Beria as a person who was used as a funnel.
	Now, maybe that's false.
	Maybe it's not true.
	But is that enough questions to remove a security clearance?
	It for sure is.
	The movie plays it as though Oppenheimer is clearly not in that camp and that the real reason that he's sort of going through this process and respecting the process is because he wants to do repentance for having created the nuclear bomb.
	The real problem with the movie is the time in which the movie is made.
	So the entire premise of the movie is that Oppenheimer has created a means for the world to destroy itself and he can't actually deal with that.
	And so that's the entire plotline of the movie.
	And all the counter-arguments to him.
	Mutually assured destruction.
	We have to bomb Japan because a million men will die on the beaches of Japan if we don't.
	The notion that we have to beat the Soviets.
	All these are treated as sort of bad concerns.
	The problem is that history proved all of Oppenheimer's critics basically right.
	The reality is that nuclear power has been one of the greatest achievements in the history of science.
	Maybe the greatest achievement in the history of science.
	Why?
	Not only because of the development of nuclear energy, which is essentially endless and clean, but also because the development of the nuclear bomb itself has made wartime death extraordinarily less of a mathematical issue.
	Meaning that, let's take a quick example.
	The number of American soldiers who were killed in World War II was 405,000.
	405,000 Americans died in World War II.
	116,000 Americans died in World War I.
	The nuclear bomb is developed.
	And here are the casualty lists, okay?
	Here are the deaths by war of the United States for every subsequent war.
	36,000 in the Korean War.
	Less than one-third of the total of World War I, and less than one-tenth the total of World War II.
	58,000 in Vietnam War.
	These are bloody long wars, by the way.
	Really bloody, really long.
	The Vietnam War is 1963 to 1975.
	It's a 12-year war.
	58,000 people dead.
	Again, less than one-seventh the number of people dead in World War II.
	The Persian Gulf War, 382.
	The Iraq operations, 4,600.
	Iraq operations 4,600. The Afghanistan operations 2,456.
	And the number of wartime deaths on planet Earth goes down dramatically in the aftermath
	of the development of the bomb.
	Why?
	Because if you're gonna fight a proxy war, those proxy wars better not escalate into anything that approaches a nuclear exchange.
	So all of the, so some of the people who are played as villains in the film, and I won't say that they're played as outright villains.
	The only person who's played sort of as an outright villain is Strauss by Robert Downey Jr.
	But all of his concerns about Oppenheimer are correct.
	Oppenheimer was a wild egotist.
	He was a womanizer.
	He was a person who was deeply involved with himself.
	And there's a pretty good argument to be made that his sort of narcissism led him to make some of the arguments that he was making.
	There's a scene that's sort of played for almost like Truman is the villain in which Oppenheimer, and this is a real story from American Prometheus, the biography upon which the film is based, There's a scene in the movie where Oppenheimer goes to visit Truman, and he is telling him he doesn't want to do the hydrogen bomb, and that he's very concerned about the casualties, and he says that he is disturbed, but that he's the person who created the bomb.
	And Truman looks at him, and he says, you didn't drop it.
	I dropped it.
	Nobody's gonna remember you for dropping it.
	They're gonna remember you for the science.
	They're gonna remember me for dropping the bomb.
	And he says, get this crybaby out of my office.
	Truman was right.
	Truman was right, okay?
	The fact is, nobody remembers Oppenheimer for being the guy who dropped the bomb because he didn't drop the bomb.
	And this is sort of the outcome of the movie that's sort of weird.
	So, the movie seems to suggest that the scientists have some sort of special viewpoint into humanity because they developed the science.
	That the politicians are sort of venal and corrupt and they have all these worldly concerns, but the scientists are operating on sort of a spiritual plane.
	The cult of scientific expertise probably went out of fashion with Oppenheimer, and it's a good thing that it did.
	Because the reality is that just because a scientist is great at science does not mean they know jack bleep about politics or about human nature.
	Again, Albert Einstein, most brilliant scientist who ever lived, was a fan of Lenin.
	Oppenheimer was a communist fellow traveler.
	The fact is that Anthony Fauci does not know about human nature.
	Anthony Fauci does not know what sort of decisions should be made to balance all the interests of human beings.
	This is why we elect politicians.
	This is why we don't have scientific god kings.
	And so there are a couple of messages that come away from the film that are sort of in conflict.
	One is that it's kind of bad that the scientists, you know, didn't get to run things because the politicians were so venal and all of this.
	But the other one is that the scientists are really kind of screwed up because they're screwed up just like all other human beings.
	They're not a class apart from all other human beings.
	They are not wiser or more brilliant, except in the fields in which they are wiser and more brilliant, which includes nuclear physics, but does not include politics.
	And so in any case, the fact that, you know, it takes on all of these issues and does so in a blockbuster fashion, a three hour long movie about issues like politics, science, about the interplay of the two, about communism versus freedom of speech and all that like the fact that you do
	that in a three-hour film and it's going to make hundreds of millions of dollars is testament to uh
	what Christopher Nolan is capable of in terms of where this ranks among Nolan's films it's it's a
	different kind of Nolan film Nolan's films that you think of are like the Dark Knight or Interstellar
	or Inception you know these vast sort of these vast visual feasts
	That's not really what Oppenheimer is.
	It's more along the lines of, say, There Will Be Blood than it is along the lines of his prior work.
	As I say, it's the best scientific biopic ever made.
	In terms of where I put it in sort of the Nolan pantheon, it's kind of strange to put it in the Nolan pantheon because, again, it's such a different type of film.
	But I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it's better than his last two films.
	So I wanted to love Dunkirk, instead I kind of liked Dunkirk.
	And I didn't like Tenet.
	I thought Tenet was a mess.
	This one is... It's such a good film.
	It's a film I will watch twice.
	And that's saying a lot because it's three hours long.
	Okay, so that's the thing that I like today.
	Time for a quick thing that I hate.
	Okay, so my friend Matt Walsh, he believes that he has now won the greatest of all arguments, the argument over UFOs.
	He thinks that not only do aliens exist, that they are here on this planet.
	And so he was very upset with me yesterday when I said that this is stupid.
	He was very mad, and he had basically two main arguments in which he quote-unquote destroyed me using facts and logic, which, dude, I've got that branded.
	I'm sorry.
	It's copyrighted over at the Library of Congress already, so I'm gonna sue Matt for copyright violation.
	Of course, I'd then be suing myself, but that's okay.
	In any case, Matt says he has two arguments.
	One is, I'm not even open to the possibility there are aliens on Earth.
	And two is, there is actual proof that there have been aliens on Earth.
	Let's hear Matt articulate these arguments as he does so brilliantly, being a lumberjack and all.
	Admitting the preconceived biases up front.
	Admitting that he rules out the possibility that any aliens could have visited Earth before looking at the evidence.
	What does that mean?
	It means that there's no evidence at all that could possibly convince him.
	So then, what credibility does his point of view have on this subject?
	If you are saying from the beginning, you know, if I come to you and I say, I have evidence That aliens have visited Earth.
	I have evidence.
	And you say to me, doesn't matter what your evidence is, I don't believe it.
	I already don't believe it.
	Well, okay.
	See, when I show you the evidence, and then you say, yeah, that's not convincing.
	Well, you were already committed to that response.
	You were openly committed to that response before you looked at it.
	Okay, so that's argument number one, right?
	No evidence could convince me that aliens are on Earth.
	That's not what I said.
	But the burden of proof?
	Super high.
	Super high.
	Because that's a big claim.
	That alien species are now active on Earth.
	That they're flying their little planes around on Earth.
	That they somehow conquered the distances of interstellar travel.
	And then came to Earth, and according to witness testimony, then like morons, crashed into a tree.
	Their bodies were available for us to peruse.
	Which is some pretty bad piloting, but that's the claim.
	Okay, so should I be skeptical of that claim?
	I feel like, yeah.
	The more outlandish the claim, the more evidence must be provided to support the claim.
	So if you were going to claim that a giant green monster the size of a dragon emerged from your toilet and then proceeded to burn down your local city, and I said, I'm gonna need to see some evidence of that.
	And you're like, well, one time a guy took a shadowy photo on his radar I might be like, well, that's a big claim and it is not supported by the evidence you have thus far presented.
	So could you present me with evidence that aliens have been here?
	Sure.
	In fact, I think the government sucks at pretty much everything.
	So it seems to me quite plausible that if the evidence existed, that not only would we know about it, we'd see a lot of it and it would be pretty credible, which brought us to Matt's second argument, which is there is evidence.
	How dare you?
	Because again, I'm not saying that you couldn't show me evidence to convince me that alien life is on earth and is zipping around like you could.
	But I'd need an awful lot of it, and it would need to be super credible, and there are several plausible explanations.
	I say, let's take this logically for just a moment to destroy Matt with facts and logic.
	So, if I say to Matt, there's a bunch of dirty dishes in the kitchen.
	I leave them in the sink.
	Well, I won't even tell you if I left them in the sink.
	They're just a bunch of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.
	My wife walks in in the morning, she goes, why are all these dirty dishes in the sink?
	And I say, an alien put them there.
	And she says, well, I don't believe you.
	And I say, well, look, here's a photo of an alien ship present on Earth.
	And I can't tell you whether an alien came in here.
	I can't.
	I'm just going to say that it's possible.
	Is it not?
	It's possible.
	And she's going to say, it is possible.
	Also, wash the dishes.
	You made a mess.
	Because on the list of possibilities, this one ranks rather low.
	So, when I see some of the evidence that Matt is going to talk about in a second, the possibility that this is alien life is like 10th on the list of probabilities.
	Is it possible?
	Sure, pretty much anything is possible.
	Is it probable?
	I think at best it is extraordinarily highly unlikely, but here's Matt explaining that no, no, no, it's highly likely.
	But with the UFO, blink and you miss it.
	And so most of the time, there's not enough time to even pull your phone out because the thing's traveling so fast.
	And yet, in spite of those obstacles, still we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photographs, footage that we've seen since the 50s.
	I mean, there are compelling UFO photos back in the 50s that still have not been debunked.
	People want to say that they're hoaxes, but many of them still.
	People have been, you know, experts have been looking at them for decades and haven't been able to debunk them.
	And so what do you expect?
	You expect that if UFOs have visited, you would expect that in, you know, back in the mid 20th century when there was, there's photographic technology, but not like it is today, that every once in a while you'd see a good photograph.
	And then you would expect that today there'd be a lot more.
	And that's exactly what we see.
	Okay, so, um, here is the thing.
	That's true for pretty much everything.
	So, the records, contemporaneous records have gotten more plentiful because we have better technology to document those things.
	What he's saying is that because we now have, you know, more photos or more things, things that we can't explain, that means aliens.
	So I'm saying we can't explain them.
	I don't know if they're aliens.
	In fact, I think it's quite unlikely that they're aliens.
	What he is saying is that when a magician makes a ball disappear, the ball did disappear.
	You don't see it.
	Maybe it's sleight of hand, but the high probabilities he made the ball disappear.
	Now, maybe he did.
	Maybe he violated the laws of physics, but how do I know that the magician didn't actually just violate the laws of physics?
	Because, well, number one, because I think the laws of physics are real.
	And number two, because I think it's much more likely that the magician is using sleight of hand.
	So when Matt says, you know, they see objects in the sky that seem to defy the laws of physics.
	So first of all, right away, I'm going to go skeptical.
	Why?
	Because I think the laws of physics are things that exist, and they exist here on Earth.
	And that means that if something is defying the laws of physics, it is more likely that my eyes are deceiving me than that the laws of physics are being violated.
	Right?
	Because they're laws.
	If you tell me that you saw a cup floating in the middle of the air, If I told you this, right?
	I walked in this morning, there's just a cup floating in the middle of the air in our office.
	And here are a few possibilities.
	One, somebody has rigged the thing to look like a cup is floating in the middle of the air.
	And two, it's defying the laws of physics.
	Which one do you think is more likely?
	Probably one, right?
	Because you believe in the laws of physics.
	So, when something comes into conflict with the laws of physics, one of two things has to be true.
	Either you're now claiming that not only did aliens come to Earth, they also defy the laws of physics and are stupid enough to get caught on camera.
	Or alternatively, it's an optical illusion and your eyes are playing tricks on you or the radar is malfunctioning.
	By the way, I mean, I'll take an example.
	The Independent Rampage just Earlier this year, talking about unidentified aerial phenomenon in the United States, they say some of these highly maneuverable UFOs seem to defy physics.
	Researchers, including those from the Pentagon's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, say these UFOs do not show the telltale signs that normally appear when objects moving at such speeds experience friction with air.
	The new study, which remains to be peer-reviewed, did not delve into more philosophical questions, such as proof of intelligent lifeforms on other planets, but from the UAP observations, the researchers said the friction of UAP with the surrounding air or water is expected to generate a bright optical fireball ionization shall entail implying radio signatures.
	For an object observed to be moving in such fashion at high speeds, scientists say ionization and associated radio frequency signatures are expected as they move through the atmosphere, in addition to the thermal shock and associated optical signatures.
	But in reports of such highly maneuverable UAPs, there are no signs of these signatures.
	Scientists speculate the lack of these signatures could be due to more mundane reasons, including that human instruments may not be sensitive enough to record these changes.
	The lack of these signatures could imply inaccurate distance measurements for single-site sensors without a range gate capability, say researchers.
	Typical UAP sightings are too far away to get a highly resolved image of the object, and determination of the object's motion is limited by lack of range data.
	So, this could be a sensor-induced optical illusion.
	So, those are the possibilities.
	Either there is indeed a ship violating the laws of physics, which are laws because they're, you know, real.
	Or, it could be that the sensor data is malfunctioning.
	So, if you step on your scale this morning and it says that you are 100,000 pounds, one of two things is happening.
	Either you are violating the laws of biology because you as a human being cannot actually live being 100,000 pounds, or your scale is malfunctioning.
	Which one do you think is more likely?
	Again, this is a question of likelihoods, Matt.
	It's not a question of for-sures, because I don't know for sure.
	All I'm saying is that the evidence you're presenting me is going to have to be better than a guy saw a shadowy image that appeared to defy the laws of physics.
	Probably it's aliens.
	Maybe it's demons, as Michael says.
	By the way, at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, if you wish to see me destroy Matt Walsh live to his own face, check out backstage.
	Alrighty, folks, the show continues right now.
	You're not going to miss us discussing the state of the economy, which, again, I am not so sanguine about.
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