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Sept. 6, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:56
Get Ready For The Censorship
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Well, in the last election cycle, there was an awful lot of talk about disinformation and misinformation.
Remember, there was a conflation that occurred between 2016 and 2020.
First, in 2020, the story was disinformation.
This was the Russians were mainlining a bunch of foreign propaganda into America's election and thus twisting the election against the wonderful and innocent Hillary Clinton and for the evil Russian stooge, Donald Trump.
That was the narrative in 2016, 2017.
And then it kind of bled away because it turns out the data wasn't there to suggest that.
It looked like the Russians had a bunch of crappy Facebook pages that not all that many people saw.
And so instead, the media turned to their new variant of disinformation, which was misinformation.
Misinformation is just stuff the media doesn't like, because sometimes it's true and sometimes it's false.
But you can't tell the difference in the way that the media treat misinformation.
And thus, when it came to 2020, the argument was, for example, that the Hunter Biden laptop story Well, it wasn't quite disinformation because you couldn't tell if it came from the Russians, but it might be misinformation.
And by misinformation, they just meant something we don't really want you to see.
And ever since 2017, there's been all this talk in social media spheres about the stuff that you should see and the stuff that you shouldn't see.
All this talk about the vast panoply of misinformation that is going to be crammed down upon you so that you won't know right from left, you won't be able to know right from wrong, you won't be able to know what's true and what is false.
And this invariably ramps up just before a presidential election.
Because what the media really want you to believe is that they are the arbiters of truth.
They are the ones who will tell you what is misinformation and what is not misinformation.
If it doesn't come courtesy of the Washington Post or the New York Times, if it comes courtesy instead of shows like this one, it must be misinformation.
And to prove the point, the media and its various allied interest groups, they will lobby social media to shut down other outlets to reduce their reach.
They'll use the slogan, well, you know, it's not freedom of speech, it's freedom of reach.
There's no such thing as freedom of reach, so if we just downgrade the daily wire while upgrading the New York Times, well, we've fought back against misinformation.
And once again, misinformation, sort of like hate speech, remains an undefined term.
There's certain stuff that we can all agree would be misinformation.
If you say, for example, that the world is flat, that would be misinformation.
But also, that's fairly easily rebutted.
See, here's the beautiful thing about misinformation.
It's possible to rebut virtually all misinformation with actual good information.
The problem for the left, very often members of the mainstream media, is they don't want their bad information rebutted.
They don't like the community notes feature on Twitter because it might smack them once in a while.
Well, they're starting to ramp up in anticipation of 2024.
Because again, if you look outside the boundaries of traditional media, you might notice, for example, that Joe Biden is not an empathetic older character with a sterling history of wonderful honor in his office.
Instead, he might look like a career corrupt politician who has plagiarized everybody in sight.
and used his position of power in order to enrich himself and his family.
He might look like that if you look at the quote-unquote misinformation sources.
And so now the media are ramping up the calls, the hue and cry, for censorship in advance of the 2024 election.
Again, nothing new under the sun.
This is the same thing as 2020, they're just replaying it.
The latest indicator of this is a long piece from Cristiano Lima from the Washington Post titled, Why a Perfect Storm of Misinformation May Loom in 2024.
This is also, by the way, a built-in excuse for why Joe Biden loses.
So if Biden loses, the answer is going to be not that he was a bad candidate, not that you ran a geriatric, doddering fool who can't spew sentences from his face hole, a person who has a terrible economic record, a person who has all the empathy of a kumquat, That's not going to be your fault.
It's going to be the fault of all the misinformation.
It's the, the corrupt situation wouldn't allow Joe Biden to win.
They're already setting up for that narrative as well.
Here's what the piece says.
A majority of researchers expect global misinformation to worsen in 2024, with politicians and social media posing the most serious threats, according to a new survey released Tuesday.
So first of all, let me just point out, are you, are you saying that politicians lie sometimes?
That they are not wholly truthful?
No, no!
Speak not of such evils I mean, honestly, this is so stupid.
The poll, which surveyed almost 300 researchers across 50 countries, found that only a small fraction, 12%, think the information environment in their countries will improve next year.
54% said it would deteriorate.
The International Panel on Information Environment, the Swiss-based non-governmental organization behind the survey, said the results demonstrate significant pessimism among the experts.
Oh, the experts, they're pessimistic.
These would be the same experts who declared that Hunter Biden's laptop was actually just a Russian plant or something.
The findings arrive as platforms including Meta and Elon Musk's ex rollback policies and scale back teams dedicated
to combating misinformation Ahead of major elections in the United States Europe and
India now it is worth noting at this point that authoritarian states like for example
Venezuela or Borderline authoritarian states like say Mexico that are
ruled by members of the left the the rule of Lula da Silva in Brazil
These people are very friendly towards shutting down quote-unquote misinformation.
Is the information environment in Brazil getting stronger or weaker over the course of the last couple years?
Ever since Lula's election, by the way.
The story, of course, was that Bolsonaro was the real authoritarian.
Well, Lula hasn't been shy about shutting down his political opposition in Brazil.
It's just the media doesn't care about that because they like Lula.
Philip Howard says, he is the professor at University of Oxford and chair of the IPIE, said, quote, this has the potential to create a perfect storm next year.
He says that staffing cuts to tech companies' moderation forces pose a huge risk.
According to the survey, two-thirds of researchers said the inability to hold social media companies accountable over botched content moderation efforts posed a significant hurdle.
55% reported poorly done automated moderation was another.
So, in other words, they want to be able to sue.
Governments want to be able to sue social media companies in order to get them to do the thing that they themselves are not allowed to do.
So, the government of the United States is not allowed to shut you down on free speech terms.
But you know what they can do?
They can pressure YouTube to do so.
They can pressure Facebook to do so.
They can pressure X to do so.
While a third of researchers globally flagged social media companies as one of the most serious threats to healthy discourse, those that specialize in regions with democratic governments said politicians themselves posed a bigger risk.
And of course, here, they just mean right-wing politicians.
These are the things that they care about.
They're worried about right-wing politicians.
Hint, hint, they mean Trump.
They're worried about people who are going to say false things.
In the meantime, they will maintain their position as the arbiters of the ultimate truth.
Of course, they lie too.
And they cover things up.
And they do so from a particular perspective.
I'll give you an amazing example.
In just one second.
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Okay, so here is a perfect example of what the media would deem to be good information.
So Philip Bump is a fact-checker for the Washington Post.
I say fact-checker with a fair bit of scorn, because he is not exactly an unbiased source, is Philip Bump of the Washington Post.
And he is a national columnist for their newspaper.
He appeared on a podcast with a person named Noam Dworman, The Comedy Cellar Podcast.
And Noam Dorman asked him a pretty simple question about Joe Biden's apparent corruption.
His suggestion was that Joe Biden has been involved in Hunter's corruption pretty obviously for the past 20 years.
Now again, hard to imagine that that's not the case.
Given what we now know, up to and including the information from Hunter Biden's laptop talking about 10% to the big guy, all of the money that was obviously flowing to Hunter because Hunter was using Daddy's name, Joe Biden phoning into meetings even if only to talk about the weather just to demonstrate Hunter's connection to Joe Biden, apparently members of the upper staff at Burisma openly talking about the kind of corruption that they were able to effectuate with Joe Biden in office.
Hey, but Noam Dorman, That's the biggest question of all, right?
This is the one I've asked as well, which is, there's an actual text from Hunter to his own daughter, Naomi, literally saying that he paid half of his dad's bills.
What's the deal?
And Philip Bump, again, Philip Bump is a columnist for the Washington Post.
He does analysis, and he literally just refuses, like, he knows what the question is, but he refuses to even allow it to compute.
It's an amazing spectacle.
Here we go.
What do you take from the text message to his adult daughter, Hunter's text message, that I have to give 50% of my income to Pop?
I have no idea what that means.
I don't.
I have no idea what that means.
I know, it's circumstantial evidence and you prefer that.
What could it mean?
I have no idea.
I don't know.
Has anybody asked her?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Don't you think somebody should ask her?
Okay.
I just said I don't know, and I don't know what to make of it, so I have nothing else to say about it.
What do you want me to say?
Yeah, but you say there's no evidence, but then there's a text message where he says, I give Pop 50% of my money.
That's evidence!
Okay, fine.
It's evidence.
I appreciate you having me on.
Okay, and then he tries to walk off the show.
Then he tries to walk off the show.
Now, listen.
I've walked off of shows before where somebody was being personally offensive to me.
It was a bad move, I shouldn't have done it.
But I've never walked off a show because I was asked about a piece of evidence that contravened my argument.
That is a wild thing right there.
So Philip Bump just prefers not to see the corruption involving Joe and Hunter.
And thus it does not exist.
I don't know what to make of that.
What do you mean you don't know what to make of that?
We all know what to make of that.
The honest answer there would be, well, you're right, that's suspicious.
It's weird that Hunter would text his daughter that he's paying half of his dad's bills.
There could be various explanations, ranging from he was paying literally half his dad's bills, to he was exaggerating to his daughter for a fact, to he was high as a kite.
We'd have to await more evidence from actual bank records to prove whether that's true or not.
But yeah, that's a weird thing for Hunter to say.
Like, that'd be an honest take that still leaves the door open to Joe not being guilty.
But he's not even willing to humor that.
I don't know.
I literally don't know.
I don't know if you've ever seen the HBO show Westworld.
First season is really good.
Second season's a mess.
In that show, it's basically about these very sophisticated robots in a made-up world that is a Western land, right?
This is why it's Westworld.
The robots are programmed so that they can't actually compute data that is not within their data set.
So if they see something that's completely out of place, it just doesn't compute for them.
They don't see it.
And so the catchphrase of the robots is, it doesn't look like anything to me.
Every time they see a piece of data that doesn't match the world around them, so if they're in Westworld, and suddenly they see a car driving through, and somebody says, didn't you see that car?
They'll say, it doesn't look like anything to me.
That's Philip Bump.
He's the robot.
He's the left-wing robot.
That text message doesn't look like anything to him.
He can't see it.
It's right here, and he can't see it.
It looks like nothing to him.
Thanks for having me on.
And these are the people who are policing misinformation.
These are the people who we have tasked with policing the flow of information in our society.
Which says to me that they're not that worried all about misinformation.
What instead they are worried deeply about is information that they don't like getting out there in the public sphere.
By the way, Philip Bump writes routinely about quote-unquote misinformation.
He wrote a column just Last week, titled, Why Do Republicans Disproportionately Believe Health Misinformation?
A month and a half before that, he wrote another one, a deeply ironic reinforcement of right-wing misinformation.
He's constantly writing about misinformation.
Like, it's his favorite thing to write about.
And yet, there he is, not even bothering to make any sort of legitimate argument about why the thing that is right in front of him is fake.
He just pretends it doesn't exist.
It is in this world that misinformation truly does flourish, because it used to be, that at the very least, we could have arguments over what was true and what was false, and then we'd bring evidence, and we'd marshal that evidence, and then we'd agree, once, you know, the evidence had been marshaled, that something was true and something was false.
But in a world where you just ignore the opposing argument utterly, where it just, it doesn't even compute, it just recedes into the wallpaper, how the hell am I supposed to believe anything you say?
And this brings us to COVID.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
Meanwhile, we are heading into an election cycle where Joe Biden is not virile.
Joe Biden barely makes it out of his bed each morning or out of his crypt.
He spends most of his days wandering around alone on Rehoboth Beach with his shirt off, horrifying the natives?
And so they're already setting up the predicate for what his campaign is going to look like.
And it's going to be, he's too old and he's too scared of COVID to go out of the basement again.
We're setting up for that again.
In order to maintain that narrative, however, we must make everybody feel very scared of COVID.
Because if, as it turns out, COVID is not killing massive, massive numbers of people in the United States, if it turns out the risk factors that first attended to COVID at the very beginning aren't even the risk factors that attend to the latest bout of COVID that people are experiencing, if it turns out that a huge percentage of the population either has natural immunity or vaccine immunity, Or that our standards of care are way better and so the death rates are significantly lower than the original variant?
Then people are going to look at Joe Biden wearing a mask around and be like, what's he doing?
Isn't this just an excuse for him not to be in the public eye?
Okay, well yesterday, Jill Biden tested positive for COVID.
According to Axios, she's experiencing only mild symptoms.
She's going to remain at home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
President Biden tested negative for the virus.
He's going to test at a regular cadence this week and monitor for symptoms.
He's supposed to leave Thursday for a G20 summit in India.
The First Lady's positive test results, says Axios, come amid a surge in COVID infections across the United States after the emergence of new variants over the summer.
Now, I mean, we're also getting back into fall territory.
Kids are going back to school.
You're going to see a surge in a lot of virus, like an awful lot of virus over the course of the summer and also the fall.
Like, for example, my kid recently, because I have kids and my kids are constantly sick, basically it's just a juggling act as to which one of them is going to be sick at any given time.
One of my kids came down with strep last week, went into the doctor's, like, yeah, it's a huge percentage this year.
Is that because of the evils of COVID or is it just because kids are associating with one another freely again?
The immunity is a little down because they spent the last couple of years bubbled, depending on where you live and all that.
In any case, they're already setting up the predicate for Joe Biden to hide in the basement.
So here's Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, explaining that Joe Biden is now going to mask up indoors because you should mask up indoors because it's so dangerous, guys.
President Biden tested negative last night for COVID-19 and tested negative again today.
He's not experiencing any symptoms.
As far as the steps he is taking, since the President was with the First Lady yesterday, he will be masking while indoors and around people in alignment with CDC guidance.
And as has been the practice in the past, the President will remove his mask when sufficiently distanced from others indoors and while outside as well.
So much sciencing happening right here.
Insane levels of sciencing happening.
Joe Biden is going to, he'll be socially distancing and he'll be wearing his mask on occasion, a surgical mask, I assume, not an N95, which would be the thing to actually protect him, a man his age, or any of the rest.
All of this is part and parcel of a broader COVID alarmism that is about to spring onto the scene so we can have this culture, this stupid culture war all over again, thanks to a left that continues to maintain that they did all the right things during the COVID pandemic.
According to NPR, the U.S.
is seeing a late-summer spike in COVID cases, prompting some schools, hospitals, and businesses to encourage or even require people to start masking up again.
The most recent CDC data from earlier this month shows nationwide COVID hospitalizations increased by nearly 19% in a single week and deaths by more than 21%.
Now, this is what we call fun with base rates.
This is where you have a pretty low rate, it increases slightly, and that looks like a 21% increase.
If I make $1 a day and then suddenly I make $1.21 a day, it doesn't mean I got rich.
That's a 21% increase.
It's a 21%?
That's like, depending on what your base rate is, that might mean a lot or it might not mean very much at all.
According to CDC Director Mandy Cohen, she said up to 10,000 people a week have been hospitalized with COVID, but that is far fewer than the 40,000 such hospitalizations a week the United States had at its highest point last August.
She said we're at a much different, better place this August of 2023, but she says COVID remains risky for people who are unvaccinated, so now they're going to start pushing the vaxes again.
Apparently, the latest version, which is nicknamed Eris, right, it was Omicron, but Omicron has now been dispensed with, so now it's Eris!
It has become dominant in the United States.
Apparently, it's more transmissible, but it doesn't cause more severe disease.
So, for the vast majority of people, it looks like a cold.
For, like, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people, it looks like a cold.
Doesn't matter.
We're still gonna talk about how everybody needs to mask up again.
Speaking of health misinformation, this is pretty amazing stuff.
So, Anthony Fauci was finally asked about masking.
And he was asked by someone on CNN, believe it or not.
This is Michael Smirconish, who's like, uh, you noticed that those giant mask mandates didn't do anything to lower the rates of transmission?
And Fauci just tries to futz his way— This is not misinformation when Fauci says it, because he is, of course, the science.
It is also not misinformation when he overtly says to his colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic that this might have been produced in a Chinese lab, and then immediately reverses field and tries to get them to attest to the idea that it was natural-made.
In any case, here was Anthony Fauci distributing misinformation.
If in fact we get to the point where the volume of cases is such and organizations like the CDC recommend, CDC doesn't mandate anything, I mean recommends that people wear masks, I would hope that they abide by the recommendation and take into account the risk to themselves And to their families.
And again, we're not talking about forcing anybody to do anything.
Okay, they always say they're not talking about forcing anybody to do anything, and then the next thing that happens is an attempt at force.
I also love that he was asked, actually, by Michael Smirconish, so the mask mandates didn't actually do anything.
He's like, well, but for individuals, they might.
Ugh, this is so tiresome.
That's not the only piece of bad science going out the door.
You have Dr. Vin Gupta on MSNBC doing the same routine.
He's now claiming that if you're above the age of six months, you should get a COVID vax.
These things are untested on infants.
They are not.
So all of us need boosters.
So at six months of age and up, we're going to have boosters by the end of this month, hopefully.
And those will protect, we believe, very strongly against these new versions of the virus.
Oh, so tiresome.
So, so tiresome.
Again, remember, trust the experts.
Trust the experts.
If we've learned one thing over the past few years where the experts have screwed the pooch in every available way, from economics to health policy to electoral policy, it's trust the experts.
Obviously.
And don't believe any of the misinformation.
In just one second, we'll get to the latest in the 2024 campaign.
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Okay, meanwhile, speaking of misinformation, I can't believe that we are still being subjected
to the idiotic idea that secretaries of state across the land are going to be able to simply
delist Donald Trump from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Based on what?
Seriously, based on what?
The idea that he violated the Insurrection Act?
You've got to be kidding me.
You know there is a crime in American law.
It's called insurrection.
You know what they're not charging Donald Trump with?
Insurrection.
Jack Smith isn't doing it.
Fannie Willis isn't doing it.
Nobody is doing it.
It doesn't matter.
The left has decided, again, because they are our moral arbiters and the arbiters of our truth, that you can simply ban Donald Trump from the ballot and magically he will just go away.
And what's really driving that is, of course, how much they hate Trump.
I mean, the idea here is that if we ban Trump from the ballot, we never have to think about him again.
What does it matter what the actual law says?
That, at least, is the perspective of Sunny Hostin of The View.
Again, one of our resident geniuses over there.
Here's what she had to say.
I think the larger question is, he's going to be convicted of something, right?
I've said it all the time.
Federal defendants get convicted like 97% of the time.
In the Georgia case, he's on tape for one of the charges.
So he's going to get convicted.
The larger question is, why is he even allowed to run?
And I've said it over and over again.
Now, there are these legal, and Alyssa and I were talking about it earlier, there are conservative legal minds and experts that are saying that under the 14th Amendment, he is not even allowed to run, even though he hasn't been convicted yet.
Because the 14th Amendment says if you've participated in public office after taking an oath to this country in an insurrection, you're ineligible to run.
Oh my god.
Don't worry guys, that's not misinformation.
She's just, she's just being a legal analyst.
You know that Sonny Hostin was the senior legal correspondent and analyst for ABC News?
Which just shows you the quality of legal analysis these days.
Donald Trump rightly was ranting about this yesterday on Truth Social.
says almost all legal scholars have voiced opinions that the 14th amendment has no legal
basis or standing relative to the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Like election interference.
He is not.
It doesn't matter.
We're going to see articles from now up until Election Day about why he should be removed from the ballot.
By the way, that's also going to be the predicate for why Joe Biden is not going to debate him.
Joe Biden will not debate Donald Trump.
Just wait for it.
It's going to happen.
capable of winning in a free and fair election, make America great again.
Now, he's not wrong about any of that.
He is not.
It doesn't matter.
We're gonna see articles from now up till election day about why he should be removed from the ballot.
By the way, that's also going to be the predicate for why Joe Biden is not going to debate him.
Joe Biden will not debate Donald Trump.
Just wait for it.
It's going to happen.
Bank on it.
Honestly, like take that bet, put it in the bank right now.
Lock it in.
Meanwhile, on the legal front, Donald Trump is facing some pretty dire legal peril.
Apparently, some of his co-defendants are starting to turn on him, according to Politico.
As his four criminal cases march toward trial, some of his aides, allies, and co-defendants are pointing at the former president.
In court documents and hearings, lawyers for people in Trump's orbit are starting to reveal glimmers of a tried-and-true strategy in cases with many defendants.
Portray yourself as a hapless pawn while piling blame on the apparent kingpin.
Then they go ahead and quote Michael Cohen, which again, not a misinformation when you quote Michael Cohen, but Michael Cohen is a convicted liar.
I should point out at this at this point.
But it does happen to be the case that there are a bunch of people surrounding Donald Trump who have started making motions like they might turn on Trump.
Last week, Trump's former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, signaled his defense is likely to include blaming the former president as the primary driver of the effort.
By the way, it would not be surprising to me if Walton Aouda did the same thing.
Walton Aouda is the aide in the classified documents case who was moving around giant boxes of classified documents at Donald Trump's behest, apparently.
Trump actually put it out on Truth Social that Walton Aouda never would have done that.
He never would have moved, like, if he had known there were classified documents in the boxes, he never would have moved them, which of course suggests that if there were classified documents in the boxes, Well, that is to blame.
Again, I'm not sure what Trump's strategy there is with regard to the people who actually have to stand up for him in order for him to escape criminal liability here.
During a hearing in Atlanta, a defense attorney for Meadows called attention to Trump's prominent role in what is certain to be a crucial element of the prosecutor's case there, that infamous January 2nd, 2021 phone call in which Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, find enough votes to declare Trump the winner.
It's a strategy that could sharpen as the Georgia case moves closer to a jury.
And, again, would it not be a giant shock?
This is one of the risks of Donald Trump not paying the legal bills for all of his aides.
If you are a Donald Trump aide, if you're somebody who worked with Donald Trump and he's not paying your legal bills, and you now face jail time while Trump is out there defending himself, I don't know, do you want to spend the next 10 years in jail while Donald Trump blames you for all of your problems?
John Lauer, Trump's attorney in the federal election case, signaled recently he intends to file a sweeping immunity claim to attempt to derail charges.
Many of the defendants in Georgia have already begun maneuvering for individual advantage.
Prosecutors are also raising questions about funding that Trump political committees are providing for defendants as well.
So, you know, again, things are going to get messy for Trump before they're not going to get messy for Trump.
But with all of that said, is Trump ineligible for the ballot?
Of course not.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to run an unbelievably weak race.
Basically, this entire 2024 race is the meme from Predator, you know, the bicep flexing, hand gripping meme.
Where the two arms gripping?
Where both sides are like, what do Democrats and Republicans agree on?
There's no way we're going to lose to that guy.
For Democrats, that guy is Trump.
No way we lose to him.
For Republicans, it's no way we're going to lose to Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's poll numbers continue to be absolutely crap.
CNN's Breonna Keillor, she says, you know, he keeps trying to say the economy's good and nobody actually believes him.
Yet not everybody is sold on Biden's plan.
In fact, he is struggling to convince voters that his administration has been good for the economy.
A new poll from the Wall Street Journal finds 58% of voters say the economy has gotten worse over the past two years.
Just 28% say it's gotten better, which is why today President Biden tried to hammer home the point that he is better for jobs than his predecessor and potential 2024 competitor.
You know what I will tell you is not a winning strategy in politics.
If everybody feels really bad about a thing, stop telling them that they're wrong to feel bad about the thing.
Now, that may be the truth.
I mean, there are many cases in life where somebody feels bad about a thing and they really should not feel bad about the thing.
But as a political strategy, when, you know, 65% of the American people are like, the economy stinks for me.
And Trump is like, that's just because you don't understand the economy.
I'm a middle class Joe.
It turns out that people don't buy that line very much.
And yet, that's the line they're using.
Here's the White House's Jared Bernstein of the Council of Economic Advisers being like, People are wrong!
The economy's amazing!
It's your fault if you're mad!
Now look, my point is that you can barely get Americans, 80% of Americans, to agree on anything.
And here they are, line after line, agreeing about the importance of the components of Bidenomics.
So I think it's an inaccurate narrative to declare that somehow Bidenomics isn't working or that it's not favorably received by people when you drill down into what it actually is.
Well, no.
Actually, the stuff that you're polling is like, would you like if the government spent money on X?
It turns out that everybody likes when the government spends money on X. Because people think the government makes its own money.
But you know what people don't like?
Would you like the government to take money from you and spend it on X?
Then all the numbers go...
The same thing happens to be true when it comes to, you know, the life that people are living right now, where they've experienced wage to inflation actual declines over the course of the last couple of years in very significant ways.
Everyday things are costing much, much more money.
The Washington Post, in fact, has a piece today talking about auto insurance costs that have soared across the United States.
Like, these are real-world problems people are having, and a lot of it has to do with inflation.
Premiums, according to the Washington Post, have kept climbing even as other types of inflation have cooled.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, car insurance for U.S.
drivers in July was 16% more expensive than in July 2022.
more expensive than in July 2022. 70% more expensive than in 2013. Frank Palmer, the chief
insurance officer at Root Insurance says car repair costs, body shop wages, used car prices have all
had significant increases.
The entire industry has had to raise rates to keep up with these trends.
Motor vehicle maintenance costs are up 13% from July of last year alone.
If your car breaks down right now, it costs you an absolute freaking fortune to fix the thing.
David Woodall, a mechanic at Metro Motors says, it's more expensive to diagnose newer vehicles.
The parts aren't a whole lot more expensive, but the frequency of repair on them is more than it used to be.
If an airbag goes off, that's thousands of dollars.
A new car might have eight airbags in it.
This is also an attempt by insurers to make up for big payouts driven by floods and natural disasters, which insurers categorize as catastrophe losses as well.
And there's no escape from the higher premiums.
Because, again, when it comes to car insurance, you are mandated to get your car insurance or you cannot drive on the public roads.
All of this, people are attributing to Biden's economy.
Which makes sense.
Because even as all of this is going on, Joe Biden is spilling billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars, into green boondoggles.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, according to a report late last month by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, large offshore wind developers are asking for an average 48% price adjustment in their contracts to cover rising costs.
The Alliance for Clean Energy New York is requesting an average 64% price increase on 86 solar and wind projects.
The IRA, which is the Inflation Reduction Act, which has nothing to do with inflation reduction, includes federal tax credits that can offset 50% of a project's cost, but renewable developers say their costs are increasing faster than inflation.
And the projects won't be economically viable, and will be unable to proceed to construction and operation under their existing pricing.
So, again, the way that's going to be solved, you would imagine, is by the federal government coming in and spending an awful lot of money.
Or by energy production coming to a screeching halt.
Joe Biden, again, really a weak candidate, but there are a couple things that Biden has going in his favor.
Thing number one that Biden has going in his favor, he's absolutely stone dead boring.
He's absolutely boring.
Even, you know, I can tell.
I can look at our numbers.
Every time I mention Joe Biden, everybody who is watching or listening to this show immediately goes into a coma.
If you say Beetlejuice three times, then he appears, and if you say Biden three times, cars fly off freeways all over the United States as the drivers go comatose, their foot hits the gas, and the steering wheel careens to the right.
Mass carnage every time you've mentioned Joe Biden just because people go narcoleptic the minute you mention the guy.
He's old, he's boring, and that old and boring is a real asset for him.
I've been saying this since 2015, by the way.
That Joe Biden, if he had run in 2016, would have been a formidable candidate because he's boring.
The same thing is true in 2020.
He literally didn't run a campaign.
His campaign involves him being dead.
Now his campaign involves him being double dead.
How can you tell?
Because, again, all the metrics say so.
For example, no one wants to buy a book about Joe Biden.
According to Politico, NBC News' Jonathan Allen went on a multi-stop national tour when he co-wrote a book on how Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Shattered inside Hillary Clinton's doomed campaign sold more than 125,000 copies.
But for the pandemic-era book that he wrote on Joe Biden, Allen didn't even get the satisfaction of seeing a copy in stores.
He didn't go on a tour.
Lucky, how Joe Biden barely won the presidency, never made the New York Times bestseller list, and has sold fewer than 10,000 copies.
That is not a lot of copies, folks.
The Biden era, according to Politico, has been a bust for the book market.
That's not just the case for mainstream journalists accustomed to chronicling the presidency in book form.
Conservative readers aren't all that interested in reading hundreds of pages about a president they think is senile.
Eric Nelson?
My former editor over at HarperCollins, really good editor, said Biden never does anything interesting.
The Hunter Biden stuff has done pretty well because he's appropriately interesting, but Hunter isn't the president.
If your nickname is Sleepy Joe, you have to kind of simultaneously say this person is ruining everything and also is supremely evil, but also he's inept.
And that's sort of a challenging combination, added one major conservative publisher.
And other books about the Bidens have been doing terrible business.
And some of these books, by the way, are very good.
I've mentioned before Politico's Ben Schreckinger and his book The Bidens Inside the First Family's 50-Year Rise to Power.
It sold less than 5,000 copies.
That's as opposed to Michael Wolff's garbage book about Donald Trump, Fire and Fury, which sold almost a million copies.
Or Woodward's book Peril about Trump that sold 400,000 copies.
And the great The great irony of Joe Biden is that his boredom and his senility is blocking out the fact that he's unbelievably radical and bad at his job.
His advantage continues to be that he is so much less interesting than Donald Trump.
In just one second, we'll get into what that's hiding, and it turns out it's hiding some really unbelievably bad policy.
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Early access to view the series is September 7th only on Daily Wire+.
If you remember Making a Murderer, that was a big Netflix documentary about Stephen Avery, which sort of portrayed him as a victim of corrupt law enforcement.
Candace blows that narrative wide open.
I mean, blows it wide open.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Coming up on Convicting a Murderer.
Part of me don't want to believe that he did this.
The blood that was on that back area was indicative of a head wound.
My brother likes to push a lot of people around.
I don't give a f*** about anything.
I don't listen to nobody.
How were these filmmakers able to convince so many people that a man like Stephen Avery is innocent?
How many times did he stab her?
Once.
And show me where.
Right here.
They gave him power.
They're trying to get everything out there that they can.
It's not good for an Avery to have power.
I told you all along, keep your f***ing mouth shut.
That can hurt, Steven.
I'm not gonna lie for him no more.
or I can't do it.
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Okay, meanwhile.
So because Joe Biden is so unbelievably boring, and also because he won't talk to the media, and also because he lies a lot, and also because the media have, you know, a full investment in pretending that he's not doing any of those things, they simply don't cover all that much when full-scale disasters happen on his watch.
How do you know a full-scale disaster is happening on his watch?
Because his own party is now attacking him on immigration.
According to Axios, tensions between the Biden administration and local Democrats are coming to a head as shelters around the country overflow and thousands of immigrants arrive in major cities.
President Biden is stuck between growing calls to help the Democratic-controlled cities, the politics of the vulnerable issue, and what the administration views as legal handcuffs prohibiting much action.
In cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, a humanitarian crisis for people hoping for new lives in the United States has become desperate.
Business leaders and lawmakers at various levels of government are demanding the administration do more to help accommodate migrants that are frustrated by what they say is Biden's lack of response.
Senator Dick Durbin, who's a very strong ally to Biden, says, quote, I wrote to him in May.
It's been four months.
I have to find out what's going on.
I mean, this is pretty amazing stuff.
You've seen Mayor Eric Adams of New York City and New York Governor Kathy Hochul publicly feuding with Adams demanding the rest of the state receive migrants and Hochul being like, nah, it's Biden's fault.
Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey shot down the Biden administration's reported idea of relocating migrants to Atlantic City International Airport.
As per Politico, Federal officials view many of the demands as political posturing, not realistic solutions, because they all face legal or practical challenges.
Now, here's the thing.
Nobody ever considers the possibility, maybe you should work on closing the border, because that would, you know, run up against all of the favored left-wing nostrums about, give me your tired, your poor, yearning masses, desiring freedom, and all of this.
Then the reality hits and they're like, oh my god, what do we do with all these people?
I'll tell you what Massachusetts is doing.
Massachusetts officials, overwhelmed by arriving migrants, have now activated the National Guard as they scramble for more housing.
Governor Maura Healey mobilized 250 members of the Massachusetts National Guard to help transport the latest wave of asylum seekers.
Which is, again, astonishing.
Massachusetts has nowhere near enough housing or resources currently available to accommodate the influx.
So, um, bad policy running directly up against reality.
Remember that time when all the Democrats were shouting about, why is Texas whining so much?
They have hundreds of thousands of people arriving every month.
Why are they whining so much when a tiny town like Brownsville, Texas just gets overwhelmed?
How dare they?
Why are they so racist?
And that's getting shipped to Massachusetts.
They're like, call the National Guard!
We need to do something about this.
Protesters claim the state has prioritized the need of migrants over the need of its own homeless residents, including veterans.
Many at a rally were flashing signs that read Vets and Cape Homeless First.
Apparently, there are about 6,000 families, more than 20,000 people currently residing in Massachusetts state shelters, according to officials.
Amazing, amazing stuff.
All of this flying well under the... Remember, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the greatest and most wondrous, so fresh, so face, fresh-faced, McFace-fresh Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, congressperson from Twitch.
She does stuff with the Instant Pot and then she also does social media.
You remember, she went down to the border while Donald Trump was president and fake cried in an empty parking lot.
Directly to camera, you remember that.
Now, she's not doing any of those things, I noticed.
Which is weird, because I thought that she was truly committed to this bit.
I mean, it's a real bit, by the way.
But apparently the commitment ended when the stress began.
I love this, this is really funny.
She was she did an interview with the New York Times where the New York Times asked her speaking of our closest
neighbors I want to talk about immigration under Joe Biden more
asylum seekers are being held in private detention centers than under Trump
Families are still being separated the Biden administration kept Trump era policies that sped up deportations and made
it harder for legitimate claimants to come To the US. So what grades you give the administration on
immigration and she answered immigration is like arguably this administration's weakest issue
It's one area where our policy is dictated by politics arguably more so than any other
This is where she starts saying arguably a lot because she doesn't know what she's talking about
There are very clear like recommendations and suggestions.
We made to the administration to provide relief on this issue
It's my belief some of the hesitation around this has to do with the fear of just being seen as approving or providing
permission Structures or really just the Republican narratives that
have surrounded immigration. Okay, that is a lot of verbiage.
That means nothing the world.
Nothing.
What if I just throw in a phrase like permission structures?
Meh.
We also need to examine the root causes of migration and address this problem.
It doesn't start at our border.
It starts with our foreign policy.
And the New York Times reporter says, why haven't you used your considerable clout as a Latino leader to visit the border and highlight the ongoing issues there?
And she says, well, this is something we're like actively planning on.
I've done tours of our New York area facilities.
Like, well.
So I noticed where you weren't.
The border.
I noticed.
It's so funny.
This is so funny.
The New York Times reporter, to their credit, says, quote, under the Trump administration, you did make the southern border an issue.
He said, yes, and again, I will be visiting the border.
When?
Like Joe Biden is gonna be visiting East Palestine, Ohio?
Because I noticed that's a thing that you're not doing.
It's just something that I noticed.
Okay, meanwhile, China continues to be on the edge of an economic cataclysm.
According to the New York Times, China's biggest home builder is now reeling as the economy slows.
When Country Garden, the biggest developer in China's increasingly troubled real estate sector, published its annual report in April, the cover design exuded hope, a phoenix spreading its wings.
That was wishful thinking.
Shortly after the report's release, China's nascent economic recovery lost steam, and already sluggish real estate markets started to collapse.
At Country Garden, presales of unfinished apartments, a crucial indicator of future revenue, plunged more than 50% in June and July, twice the rate of decline in the preceding five months.
For the past three years, as dozens of major property developers defaulted after years of excessive borrowing, Country Garden was an outlier.
Last month, it missed two interest payments, signaling that it too was at risk of financial collapse with $187 billion in debt.
That is a lot of debt, folks.
That is a lot of debt.
Country Garden has staved off an immediate crash.
It told creditors it made the interest payment of $22.5 million within the grace period before default.
On Friday, the company won a last-minute approval from creditors to postpone repayment of $537 million.
It has been a dramatic fall for Country Garden.
The company's improbable rise from regional home builder to a nationwide behemoth tracked China's own meteoric ascent.
Now its collapse reflects the speed and severity of the country's real estate meltdown, which threatens to derail the broader economy.
By the way, you know why this happened?
The reason that this happened in China is because they have one metric for success, and that is GDP.
GDP is a measure of final end-use sales.
It can be jogged by borrowing and spending.
If the government borrows and spends on empty apartment buildings to developers like Country Garden, Well, that is counted as GDP growth.
It doesn't matter that nobody's actually buying those apartments.
You can just continue to jack up the GDP statistics by borrowing and spending and borrowing and spending.
There's only one problem.
At a certain point, the carousel stopped.
The same thing is true in the United States, which is why it is so puzzling and stupid that the United States continues to follow China down the primrose path on this one.
It really is kind of an amazing thing.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, Bill Maher was on with Joe Rogan.
And again, I'm friendly with Bill, friendly with Joe.
Bill used to be a mainstream left-winger.
He was a mainstream liberal, mainstream democrat.
And now, as people on the Twitters are saying, he sounds like me.
And that's not because I have moved.
I really think it's because Amar has moved.
It's because everybody else who used to consider themselves on the left has moved so radically to the left that Amar got left behind.
So here, for example, is Bill Maher, speaking about woke culture, got ripped up for this.
But of course, he's exactly right.
Here he was.
You can be woke.
With all the nonsense that that now implies.
But don't say that somehow it's an extension of liberalism.
Right.
Because it's most often actually an undoing of liberalism.
I have always believed, as liberals do for example, in a colorblind society.
That the goal is to not see race at all anywhere for any reason.
Yes.
That's what liberals always believed all the way through Obama, going back, Kennedy, everybody, Martin Luther King.
That's not what the woke believe.
They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which
I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan, that we
see race first and foremost everywhere.
So again, you can have that position, but don't say that's a liberal position.
You're doing something very different.
Correct.
He got ripped up for this.
How dare he?
Now, of course, he wasn't saying the BLM is doing the same sort of stuff as the Ku Klux Klan.
He was saying the ideology that race is the great differentiator and that's the first thing you should notice about a person.
He's saying that's bad.
Which, again, I thought, like, when I grew up, that was just what everybody got taught.
I'm confused.
Like, I grew up in the 90s.
Isn't that long ago?
And I remember I went public school and this was what you were taught.
And it was considered a good thing. And now all of a sudden it's the reverse.
Mar also slammed Black Lives Matter pointing out, it's only certain black lives that matter to BLM.
In Minnesota, for example, I think it was Minneapolis.
After the George Floyd murder and the riots, I think there was
a movement to disband a lot of the police and they did.
I think a lot of the police were let go or somehow the police force was was a lesser force than it was.
And what happened was, of course, crime went up in certain areas.
And a lot of the officers who had been Fired, or let go, or quit, or for whatever reason they weren't on the force anymore, they were hired as private security.
By who?
The rich people, who could afford to do it.
So their neighborhood stayed safe.
So that wasn't exactly, I thought, a victory for liberalism.
Murders have been happening way out of control in Chicago among the African-American community for far too long, and not really reported in the way that they should be.
It's amazing how black lives don't seem to matter when they're taken by
black lives.
But, I mean, now Chicago, my friends who live there say it's not safe anywhere.
Yeah, it's very sketchy.
Very sketchy.
And that's Chicago.
Okay, um, see, he's saying reasonable things.
The left is not.
This is why, again, the first party that shows that it can be sane and rational is going to win broad swaths of the electorate.
Like, Maher's speaking for pretty much everyone at this point on this.
Like, left, right.
Like, if you're in reasonable categories, you agree with Bill Maher on this stuff.
The left is ignoring it and the right is too busy playing with itself over here on other issues.
These are like right there for the picking.
Just say the thing.
But apparently that would be too good for the United States right now.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so apparently Austin police are now urging robbery victims not to call 9-1-1.
That seems bad.
According to Fox News, Austin police in Texas are asking residents to call 3-1-1 if they get robbed near an ATM, as the department struggles amid an increase in urban crime.
3-1-1 is a number usually used for non-emergency requests.
9-1-1 is like, I'm being robbed.
3-1-1 is like, yeah, somebody robbed me three hours ago.
What can I do about that?
So, um, apparently they now don't want you to call 911 even if you're being robbed, like, right this second because they're just overwhelmed.
Austin Police Department wrote, quote, Even if you are cautious and follow all safety advice, you may still become the unfortunate victim of a robbery.
Do you know what your next steps should be?
Make a police report.
Provide as much information as possible so we can recover your property quickly and safely.
Compared to 2020, Austin has now had a 77% increase in auto thefts, an 18% increase in aggravated assault, and a 30% increase in murder.
So yeah, it turns out that left-wing governance, it has some serious bad cause.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We're going to be deconstructing a little bit of culture with Miley Cyrus.
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