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Sept. 26, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

58:39

Trump Jumps To Massive Poll Lead Over Biden

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	Well, the big argument against Donald Trump as the Republican nominee has historically been that he is unelectable.
	That's been the argument against him because, obviously, he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
	He didn't win the popular vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and squeaked out a win against her in that election cycle.
	And thus, going up against Joe Biden again, he is going to hit the same ceiling that he hit in 2016 and 2020, which was about 46% of the vote.
	But if the polls start to show that Donald Trump actually does not have a ceiling at 46%, instead his ceiling is 50 or 51, The electability argument against Donald Trump goes completely away.
	Well, now we have, for the first time, a poll showing Donald Trump breaking that glass ceiling.
	According to the Washington Post, over the weekend, this poll shows Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 10 points.
	That is an amazing poll.
	In fact, it's such an amazing poll that the Washington Post has already labeled its own poll an outlier, saying that you can take a poll, this is true, you can take a poll, and sometimes the selection of the people who are in the poll is a little bit weird, and so you get an outlier poll.
	But the problem is this, even if the poll is off by margin of error, five, six, seven points, that would demonstrate that Trump is still running dead even with Joe Biden, which again, undercuts the unelectability argument against Donald Trump.
	According to the Washington Post, Biden and former president Trump appear headed for a rematch of their 2020 contest, although more than three in five Democrats and Democratic leading independents say they would prefer a nominee other than the president.
	But Biden's advisors have argued he's still the strongest Democrat for 2024.
	It seems to me that there is the possibility that all this bad polling for Biden is leading up to an attempt to defenestrate Biden, to get rid of him, to toss him out a window, to find somebody else who can replace him.
	Presumably, that would not be one of the candidates we're currently talking about.
	You could see a situation in which Michelle Obama parachutes in from the rafters in order to sweep up the nomination by a claim.
	One thing is for certain, Joe Biden running this week against Donald Trump is horrible for the prospect of Joe Biden as the actual 2024 nominee.
	According to the Post ABC poll, it shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points.
	But then the Washington Post qualifies to say the sizable margin of Trump's lead in the survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat.
	The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump and Biden's coalitions in this survey, suggests it is probably an outlier.
	Again, this is the Washington Post undermining its own poll.
	Now, I'm not going to do the poll unskewing.
	What I will point out is that this is the second presidential poll in the last three that shows Donald Trump with an actual sizable lead against Joe Biden.
	The last poll before this was an NBC News poll that showed them tied at 46%.
	The poll before that was a poll from The Messenger-HarrisX, which showed Trump up 5%.
	In fact, there is no poll with Joe Biden up more than 1% in the last month and a half.
	Every poll has either Trump up 1% or Biden up 1% or they're tied.
	The Messenger-HarrisX poll has Trump up 5%.
	Now this would suggest there's still a sizable undivided, undecided population that is out there.
	I'm just going to read you the latest polls in this particular matchup.
	ABC News, Wash Post, Trump plus 10.
	NBC News, tie.
	The Messenger, Harris X, Trump plus 5.
	Emerson, Yahoo News, Morning Consult, tie, tie, tie.
	Harvard-Harris, Trump up one.
	Rasmussen Reports, Trump up four.
	Rasmussen Reports, Biden plus one.
	Economist YouGov, Biden up one.
	Fox News, Trump up two.
	So in other words, it's either margin of error or Trump up.
	That seems to be the polling trend.
	And that is different than it was just a few months ago.
	A few months ago, there was a suggestion that actually Biden had a pretty sizable lead.
	If you go all the way back to July, Quinnipiac had Biden up five.
	You had Yahoo News with Biden up four.
	If you go back a little further than that, Yahoo News had Biden up 7.
	But, bottom line is, this is a very competitive race.
	And the reason this is a competitive race is because Joe Biden is a terrible president.
	What you are seeing in this poll is horrific numbers for Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden's job approval rating right now, according to this post-ABC News poll, is 37%.
	56% disapprove.
	That's an amazing number.
	57% 56% disapprove.
	That is that's an amazing 37% approval rating for the sitting president of the United States.
	As far as the state of the nation's economy, 25% believe that it is excellent or good compared
	to 74% who believe that it is not so good or poor.
	35% believe that the unemployment rate is excellent or good compared to 57% who believe it is not so good or poor.
	On food prices, 91% of people believe it is not so good or poor.
	Biden has terrible ratings on the economy and immigration as well.
	On the economy, 30% approval rating.
	On immigration, 23% approval rating.
	Now again, there's some aspects of this poll that are, I would say, very dubious in terms of will they hold up for a general election just because they would be unprecedented.
	Now again, maybe they're real, but if they are not real, that would not be a shock either, because again, a lot of these numbers are quite shocking.
	For example, this poll suggests that Donald Trump only loses minority voters by nine points.
	Now to be fair, Biden won the non-white vote in 2020 by 45 points.
	So you'd have to assume a 36 point change in minority votes between 2020 and 2024.
	Three years ago, Biden won voters between 18 and 29 by 15 points.
	In this poll, Trump wins those voters by 16 points.
	That is a 31 point swing.
	I mean, these are massive, huge, enormous swings.
	That poll shows unbelievable swings toward Trump, as pointed out by Isaac Shore writing for Mediaite.
	It shows unbelievable swings toward Trump among independents, plus 26.
	Rural voters, plus 26.
	Moderates, plus 22.
	Urban voters, plus 14.
	But here's the thing, even if this poll is a really bad outlier, the polling for Joe Biden right now is just terrible across the board.
	It's terrible.
	Remember, Donald Trump is one of the single most unpopular politicians in modern American history, and he's running dead even with a guy the media chose and have touted as the next coming of FDR.
	That says something about how bad Joe Biden is as a president of the United States.
	And Democrats are getting ready to hit the panic button.
	Now, they can't say they're hitting the panic button.
	This is the weird part.
	The Democratic Party base does not want Joe Biden.
	Three in five Democratic voters do not want Joe Biden.
	But the Democratic elite understand that what comes next is an all-out war.
	Which is why you have the useless Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, who, again, went on paternity leave for two months and nobody noticed.
	Pete Buttigieg is now attempting to avoid the implications of the poll, which is that Joe Biden probably should step aside if he's competitive with Donald Trump.
	The poll, the vast majority of American people are not happy with President Biden's leadership on a range of topics and issues.
	So what do you say to the 44% of Americans who say they are worse off now than they were before Biden took office?
	Look, we all know the economic pressure that Americans have felt when the president took office.
	The economy was flat on its back.
	But we're also getting extraordinary results.
	More than 13 million jobs created.
	That's more than any presidential term in American history.
	And yes, it takes a while for people to feel the full benefits of those results.
	Just like it's going to take a while to build all of the infrastructure that we're now underway on with the president's generational infrastructure bill.
	But he got the bill done.
	Keep happy talking that crap, dude.
	It is not going to work.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Well, one person is hitting the panic button on behalf of Joe Biden.
	That, of course, is Hillary Clinton.
	So Hillary Clinton, according to the UK Daily Mail, actually warned Joe Biden in a private meeting
	he needed to take the threat of a third-party challenger seriously
	as he faces all-time high disapproval ratings and sits behind former President Donald Trump in some
	surveys.
	NBC News reported Monday that Clinton gave the president the warning while she was at the White House for a ceremony alongside First Lady Jill Biden earlier this month.
	Clinton, of course, feels that she lost because Jill Stein was the spoiler.
	Well now, Biden is facing not just Cornel West, or the no-labels candidate, but he's facing down Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's not going to go away and probably runs as a third-party candidate.
	R.F.K.
	Jr.
	could easily win 7-8% of the vote, and that could mean the difference for Joe Biden, for sure.
	And this is all because Joe Biden is terrible at the job.
	You know, we've been assuming all along that 2024, if it's between Trump and Biden, it's going to be a referendum on one of the two.
	And the safe assumption is that it was going to be a referendum on Trump because Trump obviously sucks up the headlines.
	But maybe it's not.
	Maybe it's not.
	That's possible too.
	In 2016, it was a referendum on Hillary Clinton because people hated Hillary just that much.
	My assumption, I think the assumption of a lot of other people, is that the referendum in 2024 would be on Trump, not on Biden because Biden is dead.
	Now again, I may still be right on that.
	It may be that as the indictments come in, as the focus shifts back to Trump, as Trump becomes the formal nominee, that all the Democrats come home.
	Right now, what these polls are showing is marked unenthusiasm for Joe Biden.
	It may be that once Trump is the actual nominee, everybody snaps back into place and they say we have to stop Trump.
	That, of course, is what Joe Biden is betting on.
	What's amazing to me, though, is that the Democratic Party is willing to bet on Joe Biden in this race against Donald Trump.
	And there are a bunch of other candidates who are sitting on the sidelines.
	The problem is that that same Washington Post poll shows that there is no consensus backup to Joe Biden.
	If Joe Biden steps out, you got Kamala Harris at like 8%, you got Pete Buttigieg at like 7%.
	There's no one out there who consolidates the base.
	This is why I suggest that the kind of wild, wild card theory is Michelle Obama.
	Coming in from the wings riding a unicorn or something like that.
	That is what Democrats probably are hoping for at this point.
	But again, Joe Biden, he's a desperate candidate and he should be a desperate candidate because he's got problems.
	This is why he's now pulling out all the stops at this point on things like the economy.
	So Joe Biden is trying to shore up his union support.
	He's going to go to the picket lines apparently in Wayne County, Michigan.
	According to CNN, UAW Union President Sean Fain will join President Joe Biden on the picket line Tuesday in Wayne County, Michigan.
	According to a source familiar with the situation, the source provided no specifics about the exact location.
	The UAW, however, is not involved in former President Trump's planned visit on Wednesday, nor have they been in contact with his team.
	So Trump apparently is going to skip that second presidential primary debate in California, which is supposed to happen on Wednesday.
	And he's expected to also head to Michigan to address those union workers.
	Now, this is something that the Trump team worked hard on in 2016.
	They tried to make reach-outs to a lot of the Rust Belt workers, and that meant going and making overtures to many of the private sector unions.
	Not public sector unions, but private sector unions like the UAW.
	Now, to be completely fair to the automakers, what the UAW is asking for in these negotiations is totally wild.
	I mean, asking for a 32-hour work week and defined benefit plans, which is what basically bankrupted the car companies in the first place, is a non-starter.
	But in terms of the pure politics of the situation, Donald Trump, again, this is what makes Donald Trump a formidable candidate, is that Donald Trump is willing to take advantage of any opening, right?
	It does not matter from which direction.
	He will take you from the left, he will take you from the right.
	Because he does not actually have a set of core principles, Donald Trump, this means that President Trump will come at the Joe Biden from the left.
	He will try to edge him out of his union support with the UAW.
	This now has forced Joe Biden to go to the picket lines in Michigan to try and shore up that UAW support.
	That's what's happening right here.
	According to CNN, negotiations between the striking UAW and Ford remain very active over the weekend and on Monday, but there's still some distance on key issues.
	Meanwhile, the UAW says it's expanding its strike against GM and Stellantis, but said progress in negotiation with Ford means it won't expand the number of Ford workers on the picket lines.
	Now, again, the fact that Biden is headed to the picket lines is pretty shocking for the sitting president of the United States to actively take sides in a labor dispute that he himself has effectively created through his electric vehicle mandates, which is what all these car companies are looking at and freaking out about because they make all the money off gas powered engines.
	And now they're being told they need to go to significantly less economically efficient EVs.
	I mean, these companies are selling 3% of their total gross is EVs right now.
	They're being told they need to shift completely over to EVs in the next few years.
	And meanwhile, they've got the UAW that's pressuring them for a bigger share of the profits, which they're going to need in order to make that EV shift.
	They're stuck between a rock and a hard place created by Joe Biden.
	And now Joe Biden is taking sides with the UAW.
	The man is really a bad president.
	He's a truly terrible president.
	And the fact that he left the door open to Donald Trump to swoop in and try and grab some UAW support is pretty amazing.
	Now, what's even more amazing is how Joe Biden's economic policies have exacerbated already present serious problems in the American economy.
	The inflationary policy of Joe Biden has already exacerbated a labor shortage that has been generated by the demographic collapse of the West in general.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	The Joe Biden economic policy is creating serious problems that are already exacerbated by a demographic problem that undergirds the entire West's economic stagnation and has for the last several years.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
	economy has been running improbably with an unemployment rate under 4% for nearly two years.
	This isn't just a holdover from pandemic bottlenecks when employers let millions of people go and then struggle to find workers to come back.
	It's a storm that has been brewing for decades, flaring up most recently in the form of worker strikes at automakers and airlines.
	Labor shortages are turning into a long-term labor crisis that could push wages and turnover higher.
	It turns out that when you inflate the currency in the middle of a situation demographically, we're running out of young workers?
	Well, you know what that's going to do?
	It's going to create labor shortages.
	Work experts have warned for years the combination of baby boomer retirements, low birth rates, shifting immigration policies, and changing worker preferences is leaving U.S.
	employers with too few workers to fill job openings.
	While the labor market is softening, none of those factors are expected to change dramatically in the coming years.
	Total employment is going to grow about 0.3% a year until 2032, according to the Labor Department.
	That is much slower than the 1.2% rate over the past decade.
	That is largely because of population constraints, and that's going to lead to slower growth in GDP.
	So productivity is probably going to drop because, again, you don't have enough young workers who are coming into the workforce because baby boomers didn't have enough babies.
	The U.S.
	birth rate has been falling for decades, declining by about half since the 1960s.
	So, when you inflate the currency in the middle of a worker shortage, what you end up with is wage spirals, which means price spirals, which means wage spirals, which means economic stagnation.
	All of this has been exacerbated by, again, the garbage policies of the Biden administration.
	Everybody knows it.
	Everybody can feel the stagnation.
	As I've been saying for a while, I don't think that inflation is actually the long-term threat to the American economy.
	Stagnation is the long-term threat to the American economy.
	This, by the way, is one of the reasons you would imagine why Joe Biden is actually very Laissez-faire about our borders.
	Because when you realize America has a demographic problem, that we don't have enough young workers, and when you realize that the solution to that demographic problem would be to, for example, raise the retirement age, that the solution to that demographic problem would be to stop inflating the currency, that the actual solution to all these demographic problems is to increase productivity by allowing the innovative people in the United States to actually innovate and make money off of it, as opposed to regulating them out of existence on behalf of government redistributionism, When you realize that you wouldn't have to have an open border, but if you are going to keep all those bad policies in place, you need a fresh supply of workers.
	Where are you going to get that fresh supply of workers?
	Well, Joe Biden and company, they know where, and the answer is south of the border, which presumably is why the Customs and Border Patrol has told Fox News that there were approximately 11,000 migrant encounters at the southwestern border in the last 24 hours, marking the single highest day in recent memory.
	They're now pictures emerging from the southern border of small children crawling through barbed wire to get into the United States.
	I don't see Alexander Ocasio-Cortez down at the border protesting the border policies.
	Meanwhile, Jay Johnson, the former Homeland Security Secretary, no right winger, he's out there saying the numbers are going to get higher and higher.
	The administration got a break in May.
	Everyone was expecting large numbers after the end of Title 42, but they emphasized there was a right way and a wrong way to come to this country, have Venezuelans apply in a proper way, use the app, go to regional processing centers, and the migrants and the smugglers have now figured out that those things do not are not able to handle these numbers. And so they're
	working around this system again.
	And so I'm worried that these numbers are going to get higher and higher.
	March, April tend to be the peak months. If we're seeing these kinds of numbers in September,
	October, I think we're in for a real mess. There's a reason why Joe Biden's
	approval rating on the border is in the 20s.
	In the 20s.
	Which means a huge number of Democrats don't like how he's acting about the border either.
	And the media, Praetorian Guard, are not going to be able to protect him on this.
	Jim Acosta had on a Republican congressperson talking about the border.
	And this is Ralph Norman, Republican.
	And here is Jim Acosta trying to somehow defend Joe Biden's open border policies.
	And whether you agree with it or not, they're doing it for power.
	Why are they giving Social Security numbers?
	What do you mean by that?
	What is this saying?
	They're intentionally doing what?
	Where's your evidence of this?
	Where's your proof of this?
	It just sounds like you're throwing rhetoric around with no basis in fact.
	Have you been to the border?
	Of course I have.
	Have you seen what's going on?
	The rapes?
	It's open.
	I mean, nobody can deny that.
	It's a crisis.
	Where?
	I'll ask the question, sir.
	And the border is not open.
	That is something that is peddled as a talking point, but it's not true.
	There are fences, there are walls.
	There are border patrol agents who work on the border.
	Okay, meanwhile, we're having tens of thousands of encounters, like, pretty much every week.
	And when he says the border is not open, he doesn't mean there's no one actually patrolling the border.
	He means that even people at ports of entry are being given numbers and then released into the interior of the United States as fast as humanly possible.
	Why?
	Well, when Ralph Norman says it's for power, that's kind of true.
	It is also because, again, the economic policies of the Democratic Party require cheap labor.
	That cheap labor has to come from somewhere because it isn't going to come from American labor because they keep driving up the inflation.
	They keep driving up the wage price.
	And then they fill in the gap in terms of the labor shortage with, wait for it, illegal immigrants.
	By the way, this is how the entire state of California runs.
	If you've ever spent any time in California, what you know is that it's very rich people hiring illegal immigrants to raise their children.
	That is half of Los Angeles do their cleaning.
	That literally is what is happening.
	We were one of the few people when we were in LA who insisted on actually hiring people who had legal status in the United States.
	But Hollywood is entirely peopled by extraordinarily wealthy people who hire illegal immigrant nannies to watch their kids.
	Because that is the model society that the left is seeking to create.
	It's not redistributionist in the slightest.
	In the end, what it actually is, is finding a new labor base to support their way of life.
	To support the declining population of the United States, the idea is that you bring in cheap labor, and that's the deal.
	You leave the border open, and that's how you support your policies.
	So it's not that they're bringing all these people because they want them to vote.
	Eventually, they hope that they will vote, but they've not been amnestied yet.
	It's that in order to support their crap economic policies, they have to have a cheap labor base here in the United States.
	The easiest way to do that is to import cheap labor.
	That's it.
	And people know it, which is why, presumably, Joe Biden's economic policies and his immigration policies are wildly unpopular.
	In just a second, we're gonna get to the question of, if Joe Biden is so unpopular, why isn't Donald Trump beating him in all the polls?
	You know, we have this one outlier poll that shows Trump up 10.
	He really should be beating him by a lot in like all the polls because Joe Biden is super unpopular.
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	Okay, meanwhile, the question for Donald Trump is going to be, how do you keep the focus on Biden?
	That really should be the question.
	This is what I've been asking for a while.
	The two big questions for Trump are, you say the last election was stolen.
	So what exact measures are you going to take to prevent that from happening again?
	That's question number one.
	And yelling on Truth Social ain't gonna do it.
	And question number two is, how do you keep the focus on Biden?
	Because Donald Trump likes the focus to be on Donald Trump.
	Biden likes the focus to be on Donald Trump.
	Right now, all the focus is on Biden because, frankly, it's been a few weeks since an indictment came down for Trump.
	Let's be real about this.
	Every time Trump is in the news, and the indictment is in the news, he tends to drop in the polls.
	And then every time the indictment is not in the news, people focus in on Joe Biden.
	So, in an election cycle in which he's going to be in court no less than four times on criminal charges, how does he keep the focus on Biden?
	This is the big doubt for Trump going forward, because again, he doesn't have a strong opponent, he has an incredibly weak opponent.
	In Joe Biden?
	Well, the answer to that question is going to be that he's going to have to get off Truth Social.
	I mean, that is one of the answers.
	I remember I visited the White House sometime in, I think it was early 2018, and I was being shown around the White House by a top official there.
	And this top official called me into his office and he said, how do you think we're doing?
	And I said, here's my honest answer.
	I think that on executive policy, you guys get an A minus.
	On legislative policy, because you haven't passed very much stuff, and what you have passed is big budget ticket items, C plus.
	And on rhetoric, F.
	And he said, what should I do?
	I said, you should go into the president's office right now.
	You should grab his cell phone and smash it with a bleeping hammer.
	That's what you should actually do.
	And he laughed because everybody knows this is true.
	Donald Trump policy without the crazy is still president of the United States.
	And Donald Trump policy without the crazy could be president of the United States
	again, because if you just look at how the country was running when Donald Trump
	was president versus how it is now running or not running under Joe Biden, that is a
	pretty clear and convincing case for reelecting Donald Trump.
	Again, Donald Trump's best election play is look at how things were 2017 to 2019.
	Then we got hit with a pandemic.
	But even with the pandemic, the economy was already skyrocketing out of the pandemic by the time I left office.
	That is his best case.
	His best case is things ran great until he got hit by an extraneous event.
	And Joe Biden hasn't had any of those.
	Joe Biden has had the benefit of basically global peace except for Ukraine, which we'll get to in a second.
	He's had the benefit of a vaccine plan and rollout that I created.
	He had the benefit of a recovering economy.
	He had the benefit of all these things and somehow he's run the economy directly into the ground and made us less safe globally.
	So vote for 2017 to 2019.
	That would be Donald Trump's case.
	That's a pretty good case.
	The problem for Trump, again, is going to be himself.
	The only person who can really defeat Trump is Trump, not Biden.
	It was true in 2020, it's true in 2024 as well.
	So, the left is going to try to find reasons to focus on Trump.
	Now, I will say that there is one other benefit that Trump has here, and it's the same benefit he's had since 2016.
	I said that in 2016, there was no way for Hillary Clinton to sully Donald Trump's skirt because he was made of mud.
	So, one of the things about politics is that what you try to do is you try to make your opponent look worse.
	Well, the problem is that That works if you're Hillary Clinton and you're trying to portray yourself as clean as the driven snow, and Donald Trump is throwing mud at you.
	It's all gonna stick and it's gonna show up really, really strongly against the all-white background that you've painted for yourself.
	But Donald Trump never had an all-white background.
	Donald Trump is a mud monster.
	He's made of mud.
	And so when you hit him with mud, it's just more mud on the mud monster, and he's just thicker.
	He's just more mud.
	And so it's possible that all this stuff is baked into the cake.
	It's also possible that it's not.
	And that as much as Republicans are not bothered by Donald Trump's outsized rhetoric, then moderate independent voters, they may well be.
	So over the weekend, Donald Trump went on Truth Social and he posted this quote.
	They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-sided and vicious coverage by NBC News, and in particular MSNBC, often incorrectly referred to as MSDNC, should be investigated for its country-threatening treason.
	Their endless coverage of the now fully debunked scam known as Russia, Russia, Russia, and much else is one big campaign contribution to the radical left Democrat Party.
	I say up front, openly and proudly, that when I win the presidency of the United States, they and others of the lamestream media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.
	Now, this is one of those aspects where I think this is baked into the cake.
	corrupt and dishonest media companies be entitled to use the very valuable airwaves of the USA Free.
	They're a true threat to democracy and are in fact the enemy of the people. The fake news media
	should pay a big price for what they've done to our once great country. Now this is one of those
	aspects where I think this is baked into the cake. I don't think that this sort of rhetoric
	changes things for Trump at all. There are certain things he can say that I think make it worse for
	I don't think this is one of them.
	I think that everybody understands courts in the United States are not going to allow Donald Trump to put Comcast out of business or anything remotely like that.
	I also think the vast majority of Americans don't trust the so-called legacy media further than they can throw them.
	They don't trust them at all.
	So when the White House tries to is sort of schoolmarm Trump on this.
	It doesn't work.
	So over the weekend, the White House put out a statement suggesting that Donald Trump was threatening democracy again.
	Quote, on the record from me, President Biden swore an oath to uphold our Constitution and protect American democracy.
	Freedom of the press is a fundamental constitutional right.
	To abuse presidential power and violate the constitutional rights of reporters would be an outrageous attack on our democracy and the rule of law.
	Presidents must always defend Americans' freedoms.
	Never trample on them for selfish, small, and dangerous political purposes.
	Now again, this school-murmuring approach to Trump ain't gonna work.
	This is not going to work.
	The reason this is not going to work is because there has been no president of my lifetime who's been less friendly to the press than Joe Biden.
	You know what else I'll tell you that?
	Members of the press.
	Dude doesn't do press conferences, he doesn't answer questions, Crenshaw and Pierre lies routinely.
	The notion that Donald Trump is somehow less friendly to the press than Joe Biden is just not true.
	He's had this enemy of the people stuff over and over and over while he was president.
	And then he treated the press, in terms of comment and content, much better than Joe Biden ever did.
	So that is simply not going to work.
	It's also not going to work, this particular attack on Trump, because again, when you look at how Americans feel about the First Amendment, The reality is that Democrats have a major problem with free speech.
	If you're talking about freedom of the press and free speech, it's Democrats who are consistently attempting censorship.
	It's Democrats who are trying to get shows like this one shut down.
	It's people like Dan Pfeiffer, who, again, was an Obama staffer, going on MSNBC suggesting that shows like this one should not get any listenership.
	They are the ones who do that sort of stuff.
	So the people who are truly threatening the press really aren't on the right, they're on the left.
	If you look at this poll from RealClearPolitics, brand new poll, it shows that nearly one-third of Democratic voters, 34%, more than one-third, say Americans have, quote, too much freedom, compared to only 15% of Republicans.
	Meanwhile, When read the statement, I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, only 31% of Democratic voters strongly agreed, compared to 51% of Republicans.
	Fully three quarters of Democrats believe government has a responsibility to limit hateful social media posts.
	Only 50% of Republicans feel the same.
	Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to favor stifling free speech rights of political extremists.
	Yeah, this is not a shock.
	So again, when they try to schoolmarm Trump on, oh my gosh, he's a threat to the press and democracy and free speech and all of this, the truth is that it's the left that is constantly a threat to this sort of stuff.
	That dog just ain't gonna hunt.
	We'll get to more on this in just a second.
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	Again, I don't think that this... Maybe the strength of Donald Trump in all of this is that it's not really possible, in the end, to sully him more than he has sullied himself.
	Which, again, is why only the criminal indictments, I think, can maybe knock him down in general.
	What polling data that I've seen, internal polls have shown, is that independents start to swivel away from Trump.
	If Trump gets actually convicted of anything, independents are going to swivel away from him en masse.
	That is the big danger for Trump.
	Now, as far as sort of, you know, other attacks on Trump, I don't think they're going to work inside the Republican Party either.
	So, for example, I think that Trump's language with regard to heartbeat bills lately has just been awful.
	He went on national TV and he suggested that Ron DeSantis did something terrible, horrible, by signing a heartbeat bill in Florida to protect the lives of the unborn.
	Now, that's ridiculous.
	On a state level, signing a heartbeat bill, if you can do it and you can protect the unborn, you do it.
	Well, what Trump could have said is that on a federal level, we don't have the necessary consensus to actually make that happen.
	And so I'll push for life as much as I can.
	That probably ends up the 15 week mark on the federal level.
	That's what Mike Pence has said.
	Instead, Trump, because again, he will attack from any angle because he has no core principles.
	He says, pro-lifers had absolutely zero status on the subject of abortion until I came along.
	Which is not correct.
	For 52 years, everyone talked but got nothing done.
	I got it done.
	There'd be no talk of a six-week ban or anything else without me.
	Roe vs Wade allowed the killing of a baby at any time, including the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th month, even after birth.
	They therefore are the radicals, not us.
	And now, because of our Supreme Court victory, the power has shifted.
	For the first time, those fighting for the pro-life movement have been given tremendous power on this issue.
	Before our victory, they had nothing.
	They will have nothing again if we don't win elections.
	Like Ronald Reagan, I believe in the three exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.
	You have to follow your heart, but without the exceptions, it will be very hard to win elections.
	The six-week ban on abortion, among other things, like his fight against Social Security and Medicare, killed the De Sanctis campaign.
	Well, I noticed that even his exceptions, rape, incest, and life of the mother, does not foreclose banning abortion at the sixth week.
	That's number one.
	Number two, I understand that he's already pivoting to the general.
	There are other Republican candidates who are attacking him over this position that he's taking.
	I think he's articulating it horribly.
	I think the idea that a six-week ban on abortion is morally wrong in some way is absurd.
	It's ridiculous.
	But the attacks by the right on him over the abortion issue are likely to fall on deaf ears because of what he does say at the beginning of this post, right?
	He says at the beginning, listen, I appointed three judges to the Supreme Court.
	If I hadn't won, they wouldn't have been conservatives.
	And then Roe versus Wade would not have been overturned.
	So, Mike Pence has been trying to make the principled, conservative argument against Trump on some of these policy matters.
	Here was Mike Pence over the weekend.
	When Donald Trump ran in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative, and he tapped me to be his running mate, and together we did govern as conservatives.
	We cut taxes, we rebuilt our military, we provided American leadership in the world, and of course we appointed three of the conservatives to the court.
	That overturned Roe vs. Wade and gave America a new beginning for life.
	What I want people to know is that while we governed as conservatives during our years in the White House, Donald Trump makes no such promise today.
	And he and many of his imitators in this race are actually walking away from America's commitment to fiscal responsibility and reform.
	Okay, the problem is that very well may be true.
	He also was completely confusing about abortion before the 2016 election, and then he ended up governing in Mike Pence fashion.
	So I don't think that dog is going to hunt in the Republican primaries either.
	And, you know, on a tactical level, you understand what Trump is doing on abortion.
	He's trying to take it off the table for a general election.
	It's an interestingly pragmatic tactic from Trump, even if I think he's articulating it in immoral fashion.
	In just a second, we'll get to General Mark Milley, who is finally stepping down first.
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	Meanwhile, General Mark Milley, the former Joint Chiefs Chairman, I say former, he is leaving.
	According to the Washington Post, as the warning crane approached its first anniversary, the Pentagon's top officer, General Mark Milley, assessed the carnage that had followed Russia's full-scale invasion.
	With more than 100,000 soldiers likely killed or wounded on each side, he said there was a window of opportunity for the combatants to hammer out a deal.
	Milley told an audience in New York that both parties must recognize victory may not be achievable through military means and compare it to World War I. The declaration was classic Milley, according to colleagues and observers who have worked with him.
	The general, immersed in military history, alarmed by the potential of escalation with Russia, the largest nuclear power in the world, was publicly advocating a position the Biden administration had eschewed as the president and other top advisors sought to project unqualified support for Ukraine's defense.
	So now they're gonna pretend that Milley did a great job.
	Milley did not do a great job.
	He presided over a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
	He openly suggested that after January 6th, he actually called the Chinese to inform them that we weren't going to fire nuclear weapons at them or some such nonsense.
	He suggested that we were in the midst of a fascist takeover on January 6th, which of course is incredibly silly.
	He waded over and over into sort of hot button issues.
	You'll remember that that Milley is the guy who talked about how we needed to look into white rage in the military.
	So good riddance to bad rubbish in terms of General Mark Milley's tenure at the at the Pentagon.
	Donald Trump put out a statement saying Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moments in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens handing over billions of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week.
	There will be a time for all citizens of the USA to celebrate.
	This guy turned out to be a woke train wreck who, if the fake news reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China.
	To give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States, this is an act so egregious that in times gone by the punishment would have been death.
	A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act to be continued.
	So everybody, of course, went totally nuts on Donald Trump's suggestion.
	How dare he suggest that death penalty... Donald Trump says a lot of stuff, as I've been saying for literally almost a decade at this point.
	Donald Trump is a man who says a lot of bleep.
	And that is a lot of stuff that he says.
	And, um, and so does anyone take seriously his threat to, you know, put Millie up on charges of treason?
	No.
	He literally gave him a presidential medal right before he left office.
	He gave it.
	So along with Anthony Fauci, by the way, like same day, January 19, 2021.
	You'll recall.
	With that said, is it good that Millie is out?
	Absolutely.
	He was constantly straying into political territory.
	Millie is an excellent example of something a lot of my soldier friends talk about, which is that the top levels of the Pentagon brass are political actors.
	The American public sees them as predominantly soldiers, but that's not true.
	You become a political general very often by being a good politician.
	That is how you rise through the ranks in pretty much any army.
	Because again, any bureaucracy incentivizes particular behavior to get to the top of the bureaucracy.
	And that is particularly true with regard to Milley, who very often did shift with whichever way the winds were blowing.
	And meanwhile, The United States Senate just continues to be Mos Eisley.
	I said before the United Nations is Mos Eisley, but apparently the U.S.
	Senate also is Mos Eisley.
	I mean, we really have just a stellar group of people over in the U.S.
	Senate.
	We have John Fetterman, who is not functional.
	We have Dianne Feinstein, who is dead at this point.
	We have Bob Menendez, who apparently was taking bribery in the form of gold bars.
	That is actually beyond parody at this point.
	According to the Associated Press, Bob Menendez of New Jersey was charged on Friday with secretly aiding the authoritarian government of Egypt and trying to thwart the criminal prosecution of a friend in exchange for gold bars and cash under a corruption indictment that accuses him of using his foreign affairs influence for personal gain.
	Menendez was forced to relinquish his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
	He said he is not going to resign from Congress.
	The indictment is the second in eight years against the 69-year-old senator, and it alleges an illegal commingling of Menendez's obligations to advance U.S.
	priorities and his private interest in cultivating relationships with wealthy businessmen.
	It also includes his charges against his wife and three New Jersey businessmen, who authorities say showered the couple with money, gold, and a luxury car in exchange for official favors.
	Wow, I mean, like, imagine if the President of the United States had a son who was trafficking with Ukraine, China, Romania, and other countries, picking up sacks of cash, and his father was Vice President of the United States presiding over policy in many of these... that would be truly bad.
	I'm glad it's just a senator.
	A previous indictment of Menendez stemming from different allegations ended in 2017 with a deadlock jury.
	Now again, this is the second attempt to get Bob Menendez on similar charges.
	According to this indictment, from at least 2018 to about 2022, Menendez and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes ranging from gold bars to a Mercedes-Benz from three businessmen to protect and enrich them and benefit the government of Egypt.
	The last time Menendez was indicted in 2015, he was charged with receiving gifts and $660,000 in campaign contributions from a Florida eye doctor, Salomon Melgen, that helped him get re-elected to the Senate in 2012.
	Menendez was accused of using his office to promote Melgen's business and personal interests with officials of President Barack Obama's administration.
	Menendez said that the money and the gifts, like luxury travel, stem from their friendship rather than a criminal relationship.
	That ended in a mistrial.
	So, jurors are going to have to decide whether Menendez, according to USA Today, can separate the gifts and payments from any actions he took, according to legal experts.
	So, the argument is going to be that he was just taking gifts from friends and had nothing to do with his actual policy.
	However, the timing of the gifts are pretty conspicuous in this case, apparently.
	They're going to have to prove that all these payments basically were in return for things or promises to do things.
	Menendez, for his part, is saying he is not going to go.
	And by the way, why would he?
	I mean, what is the point of him resigning?
	He's saying he's not going to resign.
	I'm just wondering why anyone would think he's going to resign.
	In past times, in better times, American politicians would resign when faced with scandal.
	That's not how it goes now.
	Nobody leaves office at this point.
	Why should they?
	If you live long enough, then everybody just forgets about all this.
	So here's Menendez claiming the prosecutors get it wrong and this is one of those cases.
	The court of public opinion is no substitute for our revered justice system.
	We cannot set aside the presumption of innocence for political expediency when the harm is irrevocable.
	To those who have rushed to judgment, you have done so based on a limited set of facts framed by the prosecution to be as salacious as possible.
	Remember, prosecutors get it wrong sometimes.
	Sadly, I know that.
	Well, I mean, it's not clear that they actually got it wrong in 2017.
	I will point out that in 2017, the prosecution that came down on Menendez started in 2015.
	That was largely because of pressure brought by the Obama administration against Menendez to try to get him to sign on to the Iran deal.
	There was obvious political maneuvering with regard to Menendez in 2015, hanging that threat over his head.
	He ended up caving on the Iran deal, by the way.
	Now, many Democratic senators are calling for him to step down.
	that includes Fetterman, includes Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Senator Peter Welch of Vermont,
	who nobody's ever heard of.
	Nancy Pelosi actually said that she thought that Menendez should probably step aside at this point.
	Menendez's excuse, by the way, for having gold bars like stashed under his bed is pretty amazing.
	I will admit that this is kind of hilariously awesome.
	For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account,
	which I have kept for emergencies.
	and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.
	Now, this may seem old-fashioned, but these were monies drawn from my personal savings account based on the income that I have lawfully derived over those 30 years.
	Oh, so, by the way, that doesn't speak as highly of governance in New Jersey as you would think it would.
	He's literally saying that he hid bars of gold in his house because he was afraid that the authorities were going to come bursting into his room in the middle of the night to take away his money like they would in Cuba.
	You sound, honestly, a lot like Cuban Republicans, actually, at this point.
	That's why you would vote for a smaller and less intrusive government.
	It's not why you would be a New Jersey Democrat who allegedly took bribes.
	This sort of stuff, by the way, has pretty significant ramifications for 2024.
	Because I remember 2006, and I remember there was a Republican named Mark Foley, and Mark Foley was messing around with some of the mail pages, and it ended up having significant ramifications.
	For Democrats' electoral victory in the 2006 congressional elections, a generalized perception of corruption inside the Democratic Party ranging from the Hunter Biden scandal to Bob Menendez is going to have severe ramifications for Democrats across the scale, which is probably why Democrats are starting to say that Menendez has to go.
	Also, it's a safe place.
	Phil Murphy is the governor of New Jersey.
	He's a Democrat.
	If that were a Republican governor, which it almost was, I assume many fewer of them would be calling for him to go.
	Meanwhile, a humiliating visit to Canada by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
	Zelensky has been stepping on a lot of toes.
	And because he thinks that he has the moral high ground with regard to Russia, and I think that he does, but because of that he thinks he apparently has unlimited ability to say pretty much anything about anybody.
	Remember, A year ago, he was ripping on the Israelis and suggesting they were not doing their moral duty by not shipping Iron Dome to Ukraine as though it was Israel's duty to defend Ukraine.
	And he was ripping on America for not providing enough support in the Republican Party because, obviously, it's America's duty to defend Ukraine.
	Well, here's the deal.
	I agree that the world should mobilize on behalf of Ukraine in the initial term in order to protect the territory that they already had.
	I don't understand why it is the duty of the world to continue to fund a World War I stalemate that does not seem to have any solution and then to basically suggest that Zelensky can negotiate his own ticket here.
	I don't understand that logic at all.
	I've been saying the same thing for a year on this war.
	The thing that I've been saying for well over a year on this war, like a year and a half at this point on this war, is that there is no reason Why exactly Zelensky should be the one making the negotiation here?
	We're the ones signing the check.
	There should be a back channel that's happening between the United States and Russia.
	And basically what it should be saying is you guys get part of the Donbass, you get to keep Crimea.
	The Ukrainians are not going to enter NATO, but they are going to have security guarantees from the West in case of a future invasion.
	And that's the deal.
	And then cram it down on Zelensky.
	Tell Zelensky that that's the deal.
	And then he can go back to his own people and he can say what he has to say, which is, I didn't want that deal.
	They made me take that deal.
	So it wasn't my responsibility.
	I wanted to go all the way.
	They wouldn't let me go all the way.
	He gets to retain his popularity with his own people.
	The war ends and everybody goes home.
	That's the only way this is going to end anyway.
	And yet Zelensky is, you know, again, my sympathy for Zelensky on a personal level is starting to wane as he becomes more and more brazen about his willingness to simply randomly call out countries as though they owe him something.
	So he got himself in all sorts of hot water in Poland recently.
	Zelensky had offered a veiled criticism of Poland at the UN General Assembly saying that the dispute was political theater between Poland and Ukraine and some of our friends in Europe have made a thriller from the grain.
	Well, why was this?
	Apparently, it's because there was a ban on Ukrainian grain that was put in place by several EU nations to protect the livelihood of local farmers.
	They were worried about being undercut on the economy by the low price of Ukrainian grain.
	The EU announced plans to suspend the ban last week, but Poland, alongside Hungary and Slovakia, said it would stick with the ban, sparking protests from Ukraine.
	They filed lawsuits against the three countries, and then Zelensky spoke about it at the UN.
	Poland immediately condemned Zelensky's comments at the UN, and its foreign ministry summoned the Ukrainian ambassador to convey its strong protest.
	Hours later, the Polish Prime Minister said in a blunt social media statement, the country, quote, would no longer transfer weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland.
	Then he sort of walked that back.
	He said, we just mean we're not going to give like the brand new weapons to Ukraine.
	We'll still give them our old weapons.
	Meanwhile, Hungary is warning that new sanctions against Russia are not needed.
	He's saying they're causing more harm to Europe than Russia at this point.
	So there are a bunch of Eastern European countries who are deeply worried about the continuation of this war.
	There's been a pretty disastrous trip, honestly, West for Vladimir Zelensky.
	He went to Ottawa, Ontario, and during a speech at the House of Commons in Canada, apparently the Speaker of the House of Commons stood up, his name is Anthony Rota, and he introduced a person named Yaroslav Hanka.
	He's from the public gallery.
	He introduced him as a Canadian-Ukrainian war hero from his political district.
	And he said, quote, we have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.
	Even at his age of 98, he's a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero.
	We thank him for his service.
	Thank you.
	Here's some video of that happening.
	We have here in the chamber today Ukrainian-Canadians, Ukrainian-Canadian world veteran from the Second World War who fought the Ukrainian independence against the Russians.
	And continues to support the troops today, even at his age of 98.
	He's a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.
	Thank you.
	So, uh, there's only one problem.
	This guy was a member of the Waffen-SS.
	If you know your history, you know the people who were fighting against the Soviet invasion of Ukraine in World War II?
	Those would have been the Nazis.
	Because the Nazis had occupied Ukraine.
	So, that's awkward.
	Again, apparently, he was served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, which served under the command of the Nazis.
	So, oops!
	Oops!
	That's not ideal.
	So that's an embarrassing gaffe at the very, very least here.
	And of course ties into a lot of the Russian talk about how the Ukrainians are dominated by Nazis.
	That of course ties into a lot of Russian propaganda about how it was the Russians who are responsible for the end of World War II because they are the ones who truly defeated Hitler, ignoring the fact that it was the Russians who actually allowed Hitler to begin his invasion of Poland in the first place by essentially guaranteeing his eastern flank.
	In any case, the support for the war in Ukraine is fading and that is Not a shock.
	Again, I've been saying for a long time, the war in Ukraine, you weren't going to keep up this level of interest or this level of funding indefinitely.
	It wasn't going to happen because people get tired of it.
	That's going to be exacerbated by a new report from 60 Minutes showing that it's not just military support going to Ukraine.
	We're funding pretty much everything else as well.
	American taxpayers are financing more than just weapons.
	We discovered the U.S.
	government's buying seeds and fertilizer for Ukrainian farmers.
	And covering the salaries of Ukraine's first responders, all 57,000 of them.
	That includes the team that trains this rescue dog, named Joy, to comb through the wreckage of Russian strikes looking for survivors.
	And the US also funds the divers, who we saw clearing unexploded ammunition from the country's rivers to make them safe again for swimming and fishing.
	Russia's invasion shrank Ukraine's economy by about a third.
	We were surprised to find that to keep it afloat, the U.S.
	government is subsidizing small businesses.
	Okay, so again, there's a case to be made that in the middle of an invasion you have to keep the economy running, you don't want it to go completely defunct.
	I get all of that.
	But the American public should be made aware of that sort of stuff by its own politicians.
	If the case for Ukraine is we need to keep this war going indefinitely, even though we have no prospect of actual long-term battlefield victory in Donbass or Crimea, Then you have to wonder, like, why are we paying all their bills?
	It's one thing to say we have to pay for the reconstruction because we want to help prop them up against further Russian invasion or all the rest, but in the absence of an endgame here, what exactly is the endgame?
	Joe Biden has never spelled out the endgame.
	In fact, he has studiously avoided spelling out the endgame.
	He never talks about the endgame.
	Instead, he says we're going to do it as long as it takes with as much as it takes.
	That's not an endgame.
	What exactly is your goal?
	Is your goal to actually push Russia out of Crimea and Donbass?
	If so, then say that that's your goal, and then provide the level of support necessary to do that, including the F-16s.
	But that's not your goal.
	Your goal is presumably to just drag this thing out.
	No wonder even independents are turning against the American funding, because when you don't have an end goal, Americans get real tired of it real fast.
	Alright, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	I'll talk a little bit about Yom Kippur.
	So, Yom Kippur... Moment for Jewish break.
	Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year in Judaism.
	We celebrated it on Monday.
	I'm over here in Israel, as you can see from my backdrop, for the high holidays.
	And it's amazing here.
	I will say that there is something to the idea of a religious backdrop to any country that I think is good.
	This is why I've suggested for a long time that everybody in America should go back to church, synagogue, mosque.
	America ought to re-root itself in Judeo-Christian values, particularly Christian values in America.
	Because there can be no country without a social fabric.
	And the social fabric in Israel and Yom Kippur is obvious.
	The synagogue that I went to, actually the president of the country, Isaac Herzog, was at that particular synagogue, showed up with his security, and then he stayed literally all day praying.
	Not like a grip and grin that you normally see by politicians in the United States where they show up to church for like 7 minutes and then they say a couple prayers and then they leave.
	He was there literally from 8.30 in the morning until 12.30 in the afternoon and then he came back for Mincha Ne'ilah Marev, which is like the late afternoon services, evening service.
	He was there from like 4.30 in the afternoon until 7.00.
	And the entire country basically shuts down, including many of the secular areas in Israel.
	If you go to Tel Aviv, which is a very secular area in Israel, everybody is still riding bicycles.
	Social fabric is really, really important.
	That's one thing to note.
	It's something we ought to rebuild in the United States.
	Thing number two is that Yom Kippur is a reminder that repentance is a core value.
	So, Yom Kippur is the day in which you repent of your sins before God.
	God knows that you're going to sin again, but you rededicate yourself to Him and His values.
	And the idea is that you are saying to God that you are not going to do this thing anymore.
	Left-wing theology relies on the idea that you are not wrong, God is wrong.
	That you will not only sin, God will forgive you your sins even if you have no intent of stopping the sin.
	And not only that, if you ever repent of your sin and move away from your sin, this makes you a hypocrite.
	Because we can always cite something you did 10 years ago to suggest that you held something different 10 years ago.
	Hypocrisy is the worst argument in politics.
	Perhaps you have just repented.
	Repentance is a good thing.
	It is a valuable thing.
	It is a necessary thing.
	In fact, repentance, as the word suggests, even in English, repent, right?
	You're going back to a thing.
	Repent.
	In Hebrew, it is tishuvah, which means to return.
	So what are you returning to?
	You're returning to virtue.
	The natural inclination of man is bad, but man also has good aspects to him.
	And the thing that man is seeking is what the state should be with regard to God, which is allegiance to God.
	And so when you return to that, it is not that you're embracing something fully new, it's that you're embracing something fully old.
	And when you make that repentance, then you merit life.
	That is essentially the argument of Yom Kippur.
	It's quite a beautiful day.
	It's hard.
	I mean, it's a fast day.
	In Judaism, the way we fast is a 25 hour fast.
	And fasting in Judaism is no food, no water.
	So it can get, you know, relatively difficult in terms of, you know, sort of what for particularly older people and very very young
	people like if you're a boy you're supposed to start fasting when you're 13 if you're a girl at 12 and
	so it can be pretty hard on people but it is an amazing experience and a reminder that it's never
	too late to to do repentance.
	Okay time for a quick thing I hate.
	Now speaking of a culture that is completely unrepentant of its sin,
	so good news HBO Max now called Max has a full frontal nude dating show.
	well.
	Is gonna be a thing now.
	So according to the Hollywood Reporter, it's like being on Tinder, but so much worse.
	One of the UK's most infamous dating shows was quietly added to the max streaming service last week.
	It's already causing quite a stir.
	The streamer has imported six seasons of Naked Attraction, a game show that promises you start where a good date often ends, naked.
	In each episode, a single chooser critiques and eliminates six potential dates standing on stage by scrutinizing their fully nude bodies, which are gradually revealed one part at a time, faces revealed last.
	When only two potential dates remain, the chooser strips out of their own clothes too, giving the remaining two contestants the opportunity to critique them.
	The final couple then go out on a date with their clothes on.
	So it includes full frontal nudity.
	It can come across as jaw-droppingly brutal in the contestant's graphic analysis, I don't like her feet, this member is too small.
	At the same time, each episode contains interstitials of informative sex education.
	The show clearly tries to promote body confidence and positivity.
	Amid all the hot or not judgments.
	The show also includes contestants of diverse sexual orientations.
	How delightful.
	How delightful.
	So, we are now supposed to judge people not as fully fledged human beings?
	We are not supposed to judge each other?
	I mean, this is the natural outcome of a hedonistic society in which the only thing that matters is sex.
	The sex instinct is the only thing that matters.
	It turns out that the way we used to date, it honestly is an amazing thing.
	The way that we used to date is that you didn't take your clothes off until you were married.
	That's the way we used to date in society.
	Some of us still still date that way.
	When that was the case, you had to fully appreciate the person sitting across the table from you as a fully-fledged human being with thoughts and values and ideas.
	And then later, you got to the sex.
	Now, you get to the sex first, and everything else is kind of by the wayside.
	There's been this big argument going on online, this really weird argument that's been going on, including some sort of anti-feminist on the right, suggesting marriage is bad because no-fault divorce has led to most divorces being initiated by women, which means it's risky for men to get into a marriage.
	My answer to that is, not if you marry the right woman.
	And the way that you know that you're marrying the right woman, or at least have pretty good security, is if you date in the right way.
	Not all marriages are created equal in terms of their quality.
	And not all partners are created equal in terms of their quality.
	This is why it's very important when you are dating to not do the naked attraction version.
	The first date, get in the sack, see how it goes from there.
	That is not how dating should go.
	It should be precisely as it was in terms of actually appreciating the other human being as a potential life partner.
	Because guess what?
	Everything's going to droop and bag as you get older anyway.
	So you may as well marry somebody who shares your values.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be getting into a fascinating article from the New York Times talking about a woman who knows how to fix modern masculinity.
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