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Nov. 29, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:17
Stupid, Cowardly Happy Talk Isn’t The Answer
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Happy talk is dangerous in politics.
It's dangerous because it gets people killed.
It leads people to believe foolish things.
Out of idiotic hopes and fatuous dreams, leaders tend to believe what they want to believe.
That is precisely the opposite of their job, particularly when it comes to national security.
Foreign policy ought to be the preserve of cold-eyed men and women capable of making hard but correct decisions.
Unfortunately, politics tends to draw people with starry visions, or at least cowards who will mask their own cowardice with those starry visions.
It's hard to tell which one President Biden is becoming these days.
As Israel's war against Hamas continues, and make no mistake, that war will continue until Hamas is utterly destroyed, Biden seems to be starting to waver.
He's made many of the right sounds over the course of the war.
His expressed support for deposing Hamas is correctly stated that Israel has a difficult task in doing so while minimizing civilian casualties.
Yet now, prodded by a radical left-wing legacy media and young daft staffers, he seems to be wavering.
Thus, yesterday, Biden issued the following tweet, quote, Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace.
To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek.
We can't do that.
So what precisely did Biden mean by this tweet?
Well, the White House came out today and they said this was not a change in policy.
Biden still wants Hamas gone, but the tweet seems to create a catch-22.
You can't give Hamas what they want, says Joe Biden, which is supposedly more violent.
But to destroy Hamas requires violence.
So is Biden arguing for leaving Hamas in place in the name of defeating Hamas?
Or is he simply setting up a deeply unrealistic expectation for any military in the face of a terrorist group that purposefully embeds itself in civilian areas in order to prey on Western soft-heartedness with regard to civilian casualties?
Either way, Biden is harming Israel's war effort with such rhetoric.
And the West by proxy.
He is falling victim to the propagandistic efforts of the legacy media, which continue to promote four separate foolish claims.
First, that Hamas isn't quite as bad as it seems.
Second, that Israel is much, much worse than it seems.
Third, that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to defeat Hamas.
And fourth, that Biden's electoral prospects rely on believing the first three claims.
Let's go through these in order.
First, the claim that Hamas isn't all that bad.
Gotta say, it is astonishing and bewildering and disheartening to watch Holocaust denial form in real time, but we are watching it happen.
That is the only similar phenomenon to what I've seen to what's happening right now.
Holocaust denial.
We are watching an active attempt to rewrite Hamas into some sort of political protest group, just a little more passionate.
This has involved outright lies.
The lie, for example, that Hamas didn't kill people at the Nova music festival, it was Israeli helicopters.
Or obfuscation.
Do you have tape of Israeli women being raped?
Or merely medical reports of their broken pelvises?
More often, it's taken the form of downplaying Hamas' evil altogether.
Thus, we get Ayman Malik Yelden of MSNBC claiming that Hamas is actually a reasonable negotiating partner as shown by the fact that there are now hostage deals going on.
this diplomatic mechanism, this framework for dialogue that has allowed the last three days
to bear fruit, can actually be prolonged. Now, keep in mind, this was something that certainly
the Qataris believe could have been established much earlier on in this conflict when this war
broke out. They had actually shown to the Americans and the Israelis that Hamas, based on what they
were saying publicly and willing to do on the ground with the release of the two Americans and
the two Israelis early on, they were prepared to enter into this kind of framework. But here we are
almost seven and a half weeks later, and it has taken hold.
And I think now the focus is on how do they build on this momentum to prolong it so that
the suffering in Gaza comes to an end.
Hamas is a reasonable party.
How did those hostages end up in the Gaza Strip?
We don't know!
Who cares?
Hamas was always reasonable.
They were the ones who were willing to make a deal.
Because that's how it works.
When you kidnap other people's children, and then you are willing to make a deal to protect yourself, you're still the bad guy.
But not according to MSNBC's Mo Yeldon.
We get the legacy media claiming that Hamas's hostage release strategy spells the beginning of a broader round of negotiations with Israel's supposed new peace partner.
These would be the same people who just murdered 1,200 Israeli citizens six weeks ago and took 240 hostages.
Then there is claim number two, that Israel is morally equivalent in some way to Hamas.
We'll get to that claim in just one second.
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Okay, so claim number one, Is that Hamas isn't that bad?
Claim number two that the media are making and their allies in the radical Islamic world and their allies on the left is that Israel is somehow morally equivalent to Hamas.
This claim these days usually takes the form of suggesting that Israel is quote-unquote carpet bombing Gaza or indiscriminate in its use of firepower.
That's absurd on its face.
According to Hamas itself, Israel has dropped about 40,000 bombs on Gaza during this conflict.
Also, according to Hamas, Israel has killed about 15,000 people.
Normally, bombs kill more than 0.3 people, particularly if you were using targeted weaponry.
What's more, Israel is protecting civilian evacuation routes that Hamas is currently attacking.
Israel is giving weeks of warning before striking sites.
Israel is using Inak bombs to empty buildings.
Israel is allowing Hamas terrorists to merge into civilian populations rather than killing too many civilians.
Israel is being more careful than any army in modern history, given the urban context of this war.
Again, it is dealing with a terrorist group that is predominantly hiding in urban areas.
That means civilian casualties will be high by necessity.
Again, that isn't uncommon in war.
According to one paper in the journal Frontiers of Public Health, here are the civilian death rates by modern war, meaning civilian deaths over total deaths.
74% in the Korean War, 46% in the Vietnam War, 88% in the Persian Gulf War, 56% in the
Balkan War, 28% in the Afghanistan War, 36% in Pakistan, and 67% in the Iraq War.
Yet the media are participating in Hamas' moral equivalent to the Hilt.
They are in fact acting as though Hamas ought to be granted immunity and permanence, specifically because they are hiding among civilians.
Again, their logic goes that if Hamas were out in the battlefield, Israel could kill them.
But if Hamas violates the laws of war, then Israel has to give them immunity.
Basically, grab a baby and it's like safe in tag.
This, of course, means that every terrorist group in the future is going to grab a baby and hide behind the baby.
Yesterday, Jake Tapper of CNN, who's been better than average in this conflict, actually asked former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett one of the media's typically silly questions.
Won't killing members of Hamas just create new members of Hamas?
Which is like saying, won't killing Nazis in World War II just create new Nazis?
As Bennett answers, if that's the case, it is not possible ever to win a war.
But don't you think the last six weeks have done a lot to incite and inspire a whole new generation of terrorists?
I mean, all the civilian deaths?
I mean, don't you worry that that in itself is going to raise and inspire a whole new generation of Palestinians who hate Israelis?
It depends what we do next.
I want to remind you that in Nazi Germany in the final months of the war there were many, many civilian casualties.
Yes, Germany was denazified after the war and we had a new Germany.
So obviously, as I said, we don't have a goal of killing civilians.
We have a goal of reducing the number of dead civilians.
But look, if anyone has a magic plan how to eradicate Hamas without any collateral damage, bring it on and we'll adopt it.
That, of course, is exactly right.
Again, if the logic is, if you kill bad guys, you want to create new bad guys, that means you have to leave the bad guys in place.
But, according to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
push to have Israel fight a more targeted war signals a shift away from President Biden's full-throated support at the outset for the campaign to oust Hamas, and is the focus of now-intensive consultations between Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how to handle the conflict.
Certainly, if the U.S.
has a magic wand it has been hiding, Israel will be all ears.
Until then, this is an empty verbiage that lends credibility to Hamas' lies about supposed Israeli evils.
Then there's claim number three, that Israel needs to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to somehow curb Hamas.
The two-state solution is the answer.
This is the claim of Simpleton and Dullard at Thomas Friedman, a gust foreign policy columnist for the exquirable New York Times who has literally never met an Israeli concession he didn't love.
Today he writes this, quote, a revamped Palestinian Authority is the keystone for the forces of
moderation, coexistence and decency triumphing in all wars.
It is the keystone for reviving a two state solution.
The Palestinian Authority since Oslo has been committed to reaching a two state solution
based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war.
To believe this?
One must truly be an imbecile.
The Palestinian Authority, from the outside of Oslo, saw the Oslo Accords as a Trojan horse.
Their leadership said as much.
Yasser Arafat said in 1994, quote, This Oslo agreement, I am not considering it more than the
agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammad and the
Quraysh.
That agreement, by the way, in the Quran was the prelude to the slaughter of the Quraysh
of Mecca a few years after Muhammad signed that false peace agreement.
This is why Arafat increased terrorist activity after Oslo.
It's why he walked away from the Camp David Accords in 2000 and instead launched the second Intifada.
It's why his successor, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, did the exact same thing with Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister of Israel, in 2008.
The PA has never wanted a two-state solution.
The PA is a terror group.
It remains a terror group.
That is why the PA has claimed that Israel fabricated evidence of October 7th and they have been soft-peddling Hamas's atrocities on October 7th.
Concessions to terrorists breed terrorism.
It is that simple.
But the Biden administration continues to pretend that a two-state solution led by the Palestinian Authority, which again is led by a Holocaust denier named Mahmoud Abbas, is somehow an answer to Islamic extremism.
Every day proves that this is totally wrong.
Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East right now is the radicalized Palestinian population.
And they have been radicalized over the course of generations by indoctrination from the leadership in the Arab world.
By polling data, the Palestinian population does not want peace with Israel.
They want it destroyed.
That is a, again, that is every piece of data that is coming from the population.
The population likes Hamas.
They like Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
I know that we're happy talking this thing and pretending that these terrorist groups are completely separate from the civilian population in the sense that the terrorists are widely despised by the population just to pose the terrorists then magically Paris is going to bloom in the Middle East or something?
It's a lie.
In fact, according to the most recent polling data from AWRAD, which is a Muslim polling outfit, the Palestinian Authority has the support of approximately 10% of Palestinians.
That is the same level of support among Palestinians as the Western media.
Here is some video of the Palestinian population that is supposedly so ready for peace.
This is footage of Palestinians mocking Israeli hostages being released over the past couple
of days, including children and old women.
Here you can see crowds of Palestinians jeering at, mocking women being released back into
Israel after being held hostage for a month and a half.
I'm gonna put you in here and record it.
And we keep hearing about how the Gazan civilians totally hate Hamas.
I would love to see like any evidence of that whatsoever on a statistical level, like at all.
And again, people keep saying, well, you can't really take a poll in the Gaza Strip.
Okay, how about a poll of the West Bank where Hamas supposedly is in control?
They are wildly popular in the West Bank.
So according to the West, clearly the answer is more Israeli concessions.
Like say they had turned over the entire Gaza Strip, like entirely to Hamas.
Well that obviously worked out amazingly well last time.
Then there is the fourth and final claim.
That Joe Biden is in electoral danger specifically because of Israel's war to exterminate Hamas.
That Biden needs to abandon Israel in order to win the election.
That too is ridiculous and it's a lie.
The data simply do not exist to suggest that Biden's electoral trouble is specifically because of Israel and the Gaza war.
On October 7th, Joe Biden was riding at 44% in the polls against Donald Trump, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Today, he is riding at 45% in those exact same polls.
On October 7th, he was at 40.5% in his approval rating.
Today, he is at 40.4%.
In other words, Nothing has changed since October 7th.
But the media are beating the drums.
If Biden doesn't cave to Hamas, he'll lose the youth vote!
And he needs citizens like these ones from Oakland, who went wild last night when the City Council considered condemning Hamas.
This is actual tape from the Oakland City Council.
These are people who live in your country.
These are people who you live next to.
And whose tax dollars?
You're spending your tax dollars, presumably to pay their welfare bills.
Here we go.
There's not been beheadings of babies and rapings.
Israel murdered their own people on October 7th.
Calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist, and plays into genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media and that we should be doing everything possible to combat.
I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance.
As an Arab, asking with this context to condemn Hamas is very anti-Arab racist.
The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative.
Many of those killed on October 7- Thank you ma'am, your time is up.
Including children were killed by the IDF.
An amendment condemning Hamas is bald propaganda meant to- Thank you, your time is up.
To hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wife beater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back.
These are the people that Joe Biden's required to listen to, according to the legacy media.
These are the core parts of Biden's supposed constituency.
According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly half of Americans 18 to 24 years old think Hamas's October attack was justified by grievances of the Palestinians, according to a Harvard-Harris poll.
Only 9% of people aged 65 and older feel the same.
This, according to the media, is the real danger to Joe Biden's re-elect efforts in 2024.
And this, again, is ridiculous.
Here's the deal.
Biden will either be running against Donald Trump, literally the most pro-Israel president in American history by far, or Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, the most pro-Israel candidates in American history by far.
Are all these Hamas lovers gonna stay home and watch one of those three be elected?
What's more, those aged 65 and older vote far more often than those aged 18 to 24.
This is true in every election cycle.
So an incremental gain among the crazed young voters would likely be outweighed by an incremental loss among older voters who don't particularly like Hamas.
Besides which, so many young people are just plain stupid.
Like, don't you have to draw the line somewhere?
Here for example, today's example of higher level stupidity.
This is Columbia University.
So there is a truck that is driving around and it has on it pictures of people who signed a statement in support effectively of Hamas.
And these are students from Columbia who apparently don't know how duct tape works.
I mean, honestly, this is the greatest example of what our universities are.
It's a bunch of absolutely over-educated, complete dolts who don't know how to use a roll of duct tape.
It's amazing.
Look at this, they literally- that's not how- that's not how duct tape works, guys.
Look at this, they put like a tiny little bit- tiny little bit of duct tape above the actual paper that they're trying to tape up, and it's not working.
Because, like, why are they- why are they putting the tape all the way across the cardboard?
Like... Honest to god, my seven year old son knows how to use duct tape better than this.
But probably they have their degree in Middle Eastern Studies.
They're doing an amazing job with this duct tape.
Like, just truly an incredible job.
Also, they don't even know how to rip duct tape.
They've got like a scissor.
Ugh, anyway.
But Biden needs the votes of these morons.
The media have their story and they are pushing it.
Like, here's the deal.
Israel's not going to stop in any case because they can't.
Here's the IDF spokesperson explaining.
And where this is going forward from here is that we are ready and as soon as we will get the green light from the government of the state of Israel to continue operations, we will do so because we understand that there is a direct link between ground operations and pressure on Hamas and their willingness to hand over the hostages.
And we are ready and equipped to do so, and I hope that that will commence as soon as possible.
Every day that Israeli hostages are returned is great, but we are preparing for the next stage of operations, and we have our sight firmly focused on the aim to dismantle Hamas to make sure that never again will any terrorist organization in Gaza have the ability to do what Hamas did on October the 7th.
That's exactly correct.
Israel can't stop.
They'll either end up doing it alone or they will do it with Western help.
So what does it actually matter if the West backs Israel in its battle?
Well, it certainly means one thing above all others.
A West perceived as weak, cowardly horse, is a West ripe for the taking.
That's why the West has a stake here.
Because the weaker the West looks, the more radical Islamists are going to look at the West and they are going to salivate.
A happy-talking West is a weak West.
And that happy-talking West, unfortunately, is not relegated to the Israel-Hamas war.
And as we've seen, hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets in support and solidarity with Hamas.
As we have seen, governments tossing out members of their own government for pointing out that maybe pro-Hamas protests are actually kind of bad, that happened in the British government.
What we are watching is a West that seems ripe for the taking.
Remember this is something everyone's reading the Osama bin Laden letter from 2002, talking about all of his grievances.
But they're forgetting that the reason that Osama bin Laden decided that he was going to attack the United States is because he thought that the West was a weak horse.
He said it himself.
And that part is true.
In the Middle East, and truly in foreign policy generally, when people are perceived as ripe for the taking, people move to take.
That is how it works.
Foreign policy is a game of power perception.
It is not about moral suasion.
It is not about being right.
It is about being strong.
And if you are perceived as weak, if you are perceived as vacillating, You are opening yourself up wide for a hard right to the jaw.
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So, the perception of Western weakness can be manifested in many ways.
It can be manifested morally.
It can be manifested with regard to, for example, open immigration.
The open immigration debate that's been currently ongoing in the West is total insanity, of course.
It is one thing to suggest, as the United States did for much of its early life, that an open immigration stance with no welfare state is not a terrible idea.
Because you're going to get the hungriest people.
They're going to leave their welfare state where they were, and they're going to come to a place with no welfare state, and they're going to be forced by the market to integrate into the market, which means, for example, learning English.
It means, for example, adjusting to the business values of the community already in the United States.
That was true of the immigration policies of the United States basically between the Civil War and 1920.
And then in 1920, we started to restrict immigration.
A lot of that was sort of no-nothing-ism.
But by the 1930s and the rise of the welfare state, suddenly the math started to change.
Because again, if you have a bakery and you put a sign in the window that says free donuts, everyone welcome, a lot of people are going to come for the free donuts.
It's gonna drive a very different crowd than open for business.
Delicious donuts for sale.
It's a different thing.
Or help wanted, right?
All three of those signs are different messages.
Free donuts, everyone welcome, is a very different sign from help wanted, which means come here if you want a job and we'll pay you, or donuts for sale, which means come here and engage in our market.
And when the United States and when the West put out the welcome mat for people by saying, come on in, you don't have to assimilate.
You don't have to be engaged in the market at all.
You can basically come here and create your own enclaves in which you continue to despise Western values while taking welfare dollars.
Of course, that's going to change things.
And of course, it's going to lead to a massive backlash.
Well, that backlash is already materializing over in Ireland, where, as we discussed earlier this week, Conor McGregor is now under investigation by the Irish police for having the gall to suggest that perhaps immigration policy in Ireland is badly managed.
The Irish Prime Minister, who's just been a moral bleep show, he yesterday spent his day complaining that people were connecting crime with migration, which isn't it, though?
I mean, let's be real about this.
When virtually every country, when you have a lot of poverty stricken people coming to your country from foreign cultures, that's going to come with some additional crime.
And none of that crime has to be there because again, any country, the definition of a country is a country in control of its borders.
That is the definition.
And here's the Irish Prime Minister saying that it's insensitive to talk about these things.
Just finally in relation to the terrible events that occurred on Parnell Square on Thursday, I really would ask people to try and avoid connecting crime with migration.
It's not right.
Yes, of course, people who are migrants might commit crimes, just as people who aren't commit crimes.
In a country of 5.3 million people, if you have hundreds of thousands of migrants, there are going to be a few of them who commit terrible crimes, just as there are people born and bred in Ireland who commit terrible crimes every day, including murders.
Okay, but the difference is that if you're born and bred in Ireland, you're an Irish citizen.
Ireland has no obligation to import people who are criminals or who cannot be vetted.
The same thing is true of the entire West.
And yet the West has decided to blind itself to this fact.
And again, when the incentives change, you're going to get a different type of person who becomes an immigrant.
That just is what it is.
That's not a rip on people.
That's just a reality about people.
Again, change that sign in the bakery window, it's going to change the kinds of people who enter the bakery.
But we're doing the same thing here in the United States.
Alejandro Mayorkas, who should be impeached for failure to do his job.
I mean, he's just awful.
The Homeland Security Secretary, he's been garbage this whole way.
We've had a consistent, ongoing migration crisis at our southern border for years on end with extraordinarily generous asylum and refugee policies that basically allow anyone to come to the border, claim that they are a refugee, be ushered into the interior of the United States, and then be set free.
Here's Alejandro Mayorkas pretending that everybody who's coming illegally is an asset to the United States.
That's not true.
Some people who come to the United States may be assets to the United States.
Frankly, we don't know.
But the idea that everyone who crosses the southern border is magically an asset to the United States is clearly false.
It also doesn't address the other sort of elephant in the room, which is dealing with undocumented immigrants who are already here in the nation.
And I know it's been a political football as they're trying to figure out the best way to address that.
But I'm going to ask you, what is the best way to address that from your perspective?
The answer is quite clear and quite straightforward and we've been waiting for it for about 30 years and that is to fix a system that everyone agrees is fundamentally broken and we need congressional action both for the lawful pathways That really need to be more robust in statute and for the 12 million people who are here in the United States who have been contributing so fundamentally to our country's well-being.
They're our neighbors, our friends, our fellow congregants.
They provide our frontline workers.
We need to do something and I am hopeful.
I mean, some are assets and some really, really are not.
And your generalized open border policy, which is something been promoted by the Biden administration clearly, which is why we have a migration crisis.
Is a sign of weakness to the rest of the world, obviously.
It's why you have people marching to the border chanting Joe Biden's name right now.
Some Senate Democrats are beginning to see the light because they realize this is actually really bad policy.
They're going to see this happen in Europe as well, as right-wing parties start to make serious headway on the immigration issue.
According to Politico, a growing number of Senate Democrats appear open to making it harder for migrants to seek asylum in order to secure Republican support for aiding Ukraine and Israel.
They're motivated not just by concern for America's embattled allies.
They also believe changes are needed to help a migration crisis that is growing more dire and to potentially dull the sting of political border politics in battleground states before the 2024 elections.
John Tester, Democrat of Montana, who's a very vulnerable senator, he says, look, I think the border needs some attention.
I'm one that thinks it doesn't hurt.
Tester says he's eager to see if a bipartisan group of negotiators can come up with an agreement on a policy issue as elusive as immigration.
Senator Tammy Baldwin, another vulnerable Democrat, says I'm certainly okay with border policy being part of a national security supplemental.
On changes to asylum policy, she said, quote, I'd like to see us make some bipartisan progress, which has eluded us for years.
The system is broken.
That is exactly right.
And neither the left is gonna figure it out or the left is gonna suffer the political consequences.
And meanwhile, when we speak of weakness, the great institutions of the West deciding to abandon their most fundamental values and attack those within the institutions who still defend the fundamental values, that is another level of threat.
And we are seeing that materialize over the course of Pope Francis's reign in the Vatican.
Pope Francis is not Benedict.
He's not John Paul II.
Pope Francis is a liberation theologist.
There's no other way to read his activity inside the Vatican.
I know that for a lot of Catholics, that's a hard thing to recognize and think about.
But the reality is that he is predominantly an economic Marxist with serious liberal leanings on the social issue side.
Which is why he's put all of his focus on redistributionist politics, environmentalism, and ripping on supposed right-wing Catholics who are simply abiding by traditional doctrine with regard to social politics like LGBT issues.
The one, really the only social issue where he's been fully consistent with the church over the course of time has been abortion.
All the other issues he has shown wavering on.
Well now, he is militarizing his stance by going after cardinals who disagree with him.
According to the New York Times, almost as soon as Pope Francis became the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, Raymond Burke, an American cardinal, emerged as his leading critic from within the church, becoming a de facto anti-pope.
For frustrated traditionalists who believed Francis was diluting doctrine, Francis frequently demoted and stripped the American cleric of influence.
This month, the Pope apparently finally had enough, according to one high-ranking Vatican official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Francis told the meeting of high-ranking Vatican officials he intended to throw the cardinal out of his Vatican-subsidized apartment and deprive him of his salary as a retired cardinal.
The news of the possible eviction was first reported by the conservative Italian newspaper, La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana.
I'm going to screw this up.
It's close to Cardinal Burke and recently sponsored a conference featuring the prelate criticizing a major meeting of bishops convened by Francis.
That newspaper's report comes only a week after Francis removed another vocal conservative critic, Joseph Strickland, the Bishop of Tyler, Texas, after a Vatican investigation into the governance of his diocese.
Apparently, asked about the report, the Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, declined to confirm or deny it, telling reporters, quote, I don't have anything particular to say about that.
Well, Ross Duthat, who is a Catholic himself, he has a piece today in the New York Times titled, Pope Francis Tries to Settle Accounts, which is obviously a reference to the godfather there settling all family business today.
For years, Pope Francis' governance of the Roman Catholic Church has been seemingly destined to drive the church's conservative and liberal wings ever further apart.
Thus the persistent question hanging over his pontificate.
How will he hold this thing together?
By opening debate on a wide array of hot-button subjects without delivering explicit changes, he has encouraged the church's progressives to push the envelope as far as possible, even toward real doctrinal rebellion, in the hopes of dragging him along.
At the same time, by favoring the progressives in his personal decisions and making institutional war on the legacy of John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, he has pushed conservatives toward crisis, paranoia, and revolt.
On both fronts, it's unclear whether the papacy's weakening authority can pull either group of rebels back.
But in the last few weeks, we've seen a clear attempt to use that authority, a real test of the Pope's ability to keep the Church together.
He has moved against two of his sharpest critics on the right, that'd be Strickland and Burke, He has also tried to draw a bright line against the experiments of German bishops, the leading progressive faction, issuing a letter declaring any reforms the Germans contemplate cannot change the Church's teaching on the all-male priesthood and the immorality of homosexual relations.
But the reality is that, again, the Pope keeps handing signals to the progressives that he basically agrees with them, he just doesn't want to move too fast.
The reality is that liberal Catholicism is failing.
It is failing.
Russ Douthat says, Catholicism does not have a large number of conservatives or progressive priests coming along in Germany.
In fact, they have almost no younger priests at all.
There are only 48 new seminarians in Germany in 2022 for a church that still serves 21 million self-identified Catholics.
The existential crisis helps explain the intensity of pressure for liberalization and Protestantization, because to many German Catholic leaders, this feels like the only way for their church to survive.
But the reality is that the only growing segment of any churches, synagogues too, in the United States, are the ones that actually abide by traditional diktats.
Traditionalist churches, traditionalist synagogues, those are the ones that are growing.
Progressive churches, progressive synagogues are dying out because it turns out if you just want to go to a Democratic Party rally, you can go to a Democratic Party rally and it doesn't take all that kneeling and saying stuff in Latin and eating foods.
You just go get some pizza at a Democratic Party rally and dye your hair blue and you've basically achieved the same goal.
If you want to join a cult, the cult of left-wingism is much more fun than the cult of progressive Christianity.
Which still bears that weird tinge of bizarre guilt and obligation.
The fact that Pope Francis has been actively going after his conservative opponents, and if you want to sink the future of the Catholic Church, this would be the way to do it.
This would be the way to do it.
And again, that happens to be true of virtually everyone else in religious life these days.
The single worst thing that has happened to the West over the course of the last 70, 80 years, really since the end of World War II, has been the decline of religion in the West.
The decline of religion in the West has led to a wide rise in radical theologies masquerading as politics.
It's been really, really bad.
The answer to that is not a church that abandons its central principles in favor of trying to cater to people who hate those principles and hate the church.
The answer to that is a more muscular response on behalf of eternal truths, if you believe those eternal truths.
And if you don't, not sure what you're doing in a church.
In just one second, you'll get to the latest media self-be-clowning because it really is an amazing story.
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Remember that time, you know, wasn't that long ago, when you were allowed to laugh at things that were stupid and ridiculous, instead of having to say that, in fact, they're not stupid and ridiculous, they're actually great, and that if you disagree, you're a bad person?
You know, back when Hollywood could make comedies like Dodgeball or Wedding Crashers or Tropic Thunder without having to worry that they would have protesters outside with the blue hair screaming at them?
Well, we here at The Daily Wire, we are tired of not laughing.
So this Friday, we are dropping the most triggering movie of the decade.
Here's a look at the official trailer for Lady Ballers.
In a world where women's sports is being transformed, The Daily Wire calls foul with the most triggering comedy
of the year.
Guys, this is serious.
Sports can be your pathway to a better life.
What, like yours?
Please don't steal my catalytic converter again.
Winning matters.
It's the key ingredient in becoming a winner.
Maybe you should try it sometime.
Are you gonna move?
I am not.
Let's cut to the chase.
I know you're not a woman.
You don't know how he identifies.
What do you know about the US Opens for the Global Games?
You want us to compete as winners.
$5,000 prizes.
My lover says you were a great coach back in the day.
Join.
This is the way the world is now.
My eight-year-old daughter told me all about it.
So a guy can become a girl with no physical changes at all.
Oh, that's called gender fluid.
So I can be a woman on the court and a man in the bedroom.
I can't believe it.
Nice!
You mean when you're sleeping?
Yes.
Coach.
Alice.
We could play basketball.
We'd have to get the whole team back together.
It's time.
We're in.
I'm in.
I'm in!
To play.
Lady Ballers.
Line up.
You ain't good girl.
That's why I'm with her.
This is my troop!
Believe in monsters! This is monsters!
Day one of being a girl athlete.
Ha ha ha!
I love being a girl!
We could dominate every woman's sport.
Running.
Swimming.
Soccer.
I said sport, Felix!
It's ladies basketball, boys.
Nobody watches.
Excuse me.
Are these seats open?
Never mind.
Getting dunks.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
And tucking trunks.
You know she did it.
That's the biggest d*** I've ever seen on a lady.
I don't care.
One can even be trans aged now, which provides Shelix with a wonderful opportunity to relive all the experiences that she missed out on in school.
Streaming exclusively on Daily Wire Plus December 1st.
It's hysterical, you're gonna love it, but you can only watch Ladyballers with a Daily Wire Plus membership.
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Eastern.
Speaking of the media, but clowning themselves.
So I have to say, as we've talked about before, the media supply of racism The supply of racism does not meet demands.
The media are desperately, desperately in need of a supply of racism because they write about it like full-time.
And so they've decided that they're just going to make up stories now about racism.
The latest is a story about a young Kansas City Chiefs fan who wore face paint The face paint is half black and half red.
The kid is wearing Kansas City Chiefs colors, like his face is painted half black and half red, and he's wearing a headdress, you know, like the Kansas City Chiefs mascot.
And Deadspin reporter Karen Phillips, who apparently spends all day just looking desperately for some sort of racism to report on, accused this kid named Holden Armenta of mocking black people after seeing a picture in profile which didn't show that half of his face painted red.
There is only one problem.
This is one of the great cell phones of all time.
It's fan-freaking-tastic.
So it turns out that the kid actually has Native American heritage.
His grandfather serves on the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.
The team's multi-ethnic squad had enthusiastically joined in with Holden's Indian-chopping gesture.
The kid is technically Native American, but is also apparently racist.
He says it takes a lot of disrespect to disrespect two groups of people at once.
So first, again, the kid's putting on Kansas City Chiefs colors, black and red.
He's not mocking black people and he's not mocking red people.
Those are the colors of the team.
In the same way that if you were, for example, an L.A.
Lakers fan, yellow and gold.
I mean, gold and purple, right?
That would be the colors.
But that's like, so he said that he's racist against black people and also racist against Native American people, and the kid is Native American.
And then he added, quote, this is what happens when you ban books, stand against critical race theory, and try to erase centuries of hate.
You give future generations the ammo they need to evolve and recreate racism better than before.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
First of all, that's a great case for banning critical race theory because critical race theory makes you a moron.
It makes you a dummy.
It makes you the kind of person who believes that a kid painting his face in the team colors is racist for doing so.
Elon Musk then congratulated his team for spotting the error in this because there was a community notes that got attached pointing out how stupid this is.
The Pulitzer-nominated reporter was unabashed.
This guy was nominated for a Pulitzer?
Um, what?
That just shows what the poet's are as these days.
For the idiots in my mention, who are treating this as some harmless act
because the other side of his face was painted red.
I could make the argument, it is even worse.
Y'all are the ones who hate Mexicans, but wear sombreros on Cinco.
What?
Seems like a complete non sequitur.
So again, just amazing work there.
Super amazing work there from Deadspin for making this kid rich, because this kid is going to file a lawsuit like you wouldn't believe, and it's going to be great, and I am here for it.
Joining in the clown show was, of course, clown Dan Lebitard, who is a supposed sports commentator who spends his day doing progressive politics most of the time.
Or at least more than he should.
And he defended the Deadspin piece.
He said, no matter what, you should never put black and red combination on your face.
Ever.
It's racist.
Don't do it.
Ever.
Here is a picture of Dan Lebithard last year, dressed up as a member of a rock band.
He is wearing black and red on his face.
Oh no.
It must be a racist.
Must be a racist.
Again, the supply of racism in the United States is just not keeping up with demand, and so the price is rising.
That's what's happening here.
Okay, meanwhile, the 2024 race continues apace.
Donald Trump way out in front, obviously, of the rest of the field.
But the Koch network has now announced that they are going to back Nikki Haley.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative group led and partly financed by Charles Koch, said Tuesday it would support the former South Carolina governor and U.N.
ambassador.
The organization's support is a boost to Haley as the campaign enters the final seven weeks before Iowa.
AFP said she has what it takes to lead a policy agenda to take on our nation's biggest challenges and help ensure our country's best days are ahead.
With the grassroots and data capability we bring to bear in this race, no other organization is better equipped to help her do it.
So the question is whether she has grassroots momentum, whether she has infrastructure in order to take advantage.
The biggest question in this race is what is the dynamic that allows any candidate who is not Donald Trump to defeat Donald Trump if you want Trump defeated in the primaries?
The problem with Haley is that if DeSantis drops out, his support does not go to Haley.
If DeSantis drops out, his support will largely go, by polling data, to Trump.
And then the race is over.
That's the math.
Again, I really like Ambassador Haley.
I like Nikki a lot.
She's a wonderful person.
She's done a lot of good things, particularly as an ambassador.
She's done a good job in this race.
If Nikki knocks DeSantis out, DeSantis is going to, his votes will go to Trump.
That's where they're going.
By contrast, if Haley were to drop out, her votes would largely go to DeSantis.
Now, does that mean any of them have a chance of stopping Trump?
I mean, right now, again, he's a formidable favorite.
If DeSantis doesn't win Iowa, he's out of the race.
I mean, it's really that simple.
If DeSantis does win Iowa, and Haley wins New Hampshire, they go to South Carolina.
Haley may win South Carolina.
And at that point, Trump probably runs the table, if you look at the rest of the race, unless there is this sort of God-bleeds mentality in which Trump has been wounded, and now people don't vote for him.
But again, I don't see the dynamics of the race radically shifting in favor of Nikki Haley if Ron DeSantis drops out of the race.
That is inherently the problem.
In just a second, we'll get to Ron DeSantis trying to recapture some magic leading up to Iowa by debating Gavin Newsom.
That's the thing that's going to be happening tomorrow night first.
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And meanwhile, Ron DeSantis trying to recapture some magic going into the Iowa caucuses.
Again, looking at the polls right now, Donald Trump does have a very wide lead still in Iowa.
The latest poll from Iowa State Civics Has Trump up 54 to DeSantis' 18 to Nikki Haley's 12.
Vivek is coming in at 6% in that particular poll.
Again, on average, Trump's at 47 and DeSantis is at 17.
Now, it's a caucus state, so you can see big moves in places like Iowa.
In New Hampshire, Trump, again, still has a big lead.
In second place this time is Haley.
She sort of flip-flops with DeSantis.
Actually, Christie is still polling in the low double digits, 11% in the latest Washington Post Monmouth poll.
Out of New Hampshire, but Trump's at 46, Haley at 18, Christie at 11, and DeSantis at 7.
Even Vivek is actually pulling ahead of DeSantis.
So DeSantis is looking to recapture some magic.
One of the ways he wants to do that is he's having a debate with Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who's running a shadow campaign in case Joe Biden should keel over, which is not an insignificant possibility before the election.
Newsom's entire shtick is to pretend that every other state is worse than his own.
There's only one problem with that.
As a former resident of California, like a lifelong resident of California, it is not true.
The reality is that, again, Gavin Newsom has governed the state like garbage.
California is in serious trouble.
If you look at the rundown of Florida versus California, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has a good rundown today.
Employment.
Since January 2019, employment has increased by 1,031,000 in Florida, while declining by 85,000 in California.
Unemployment.
Despite a shrinking labor force, California's 4.8% jobless rate is the second highest in the country, nearly twice as high as Florida's 2.8%.
Business formation.
Florida has received 2.7 million new business applications since January 2019, one for every eight residents, compared to one for every 18 residents of California.
Personal income.
Business and worker earnings have increased by an annual compound at 7.7% in Florida since the first quarter of 2019 compared to 5% in California.
Population migration.
Between July 2019 and July 2022, over a million Californians left for other states.
That'd include most of my family.
Well, 737,000 people on net moved to Florida.
That means, according to the latest IRS data, California lost $55.7 billion in adjusted gross income between 2019 and 2021.
Energy prices are twice as high in California as in Florida.
State and local taxes in California add up to $10,167 per capita versus $5,406 in Florida.
$1,167 per capita versus $5,406 in Florida.
Pensions were $51.2 billion in California last year versus $7.3 billion in Florida.
Medicaid, California spends $129.2 billion annually on Medicare, more than four times as much as Florida.
I Homelessness, California has 171,000 homeless people versus 26,000 in Florida.
Again, bottom line here is that California is a bleep show and Florida is doing pretty well.
Now that's a pretty good basis for a presidential campaign, you would think.
But again, politics is so performative these days.
I think DeSantis will do well in the debate against Newsom.
But until somebody shows a real challenge to either Biden or to Trump, they are the foregone nominees at this point.
I mean, they are obviously the front runners very, very clearly.
Meanwhile, Republicans running into a bit of an interesting pickle, they've subpoenaed Hunter Biden to talk about his dad and his business deals.
Well, now his lawyers are saying that he is going to come testify, but only publicly.
According to Politico, As Hunter Biden faced a protracted criminal probe for years, he was told to cooperate with prosecutors and wait quietly for exoneration.
That strategy failed.
Well, now he's taking his adversaries on directly.
Over the past three months, Hunter Biden has filed a barrage of lawsuits and has challenged his indictment on gun charges by attacking the prosecution, as stated.
He's even trying to subpoena Trump.
The counteroffensive will play out in courtrooms and in public justice as his father ramps up his re-elect campaign.
Some of Joe Biden's aides are worried that this is going to elevate Biden in the public eye.
Hunter Biden, that is.
And that the more you see of Hunter Biden, the less you're going to like Joe.
That, of course, is certainly quite possible.
However, it is also true that Hunter Biden is trying right now to respond publicly to Republican attempts to subpoena him by saying that they want him to testify not behind closed doors.
In a letter Tuesday to the House Oversight Chair James Comer, Hunter Biden's lawyer suggested
that instead of Hunter testifying behind closed doors, he wants a public hearing on December 13th,
arguing, quote, prevent selective leaks, manipulated transcripts, doctored exhibits,
or one-sided press statements. Of course, that will be largely performative, but
am I in favor of open hearings as opposed to closed hearings?
Depends how substantive the hearings are gonna be.
How about both?
How about I get an open hearing with Hunter, and you get a closed hearing?
In the open hearing, he can jabber about how he's being mistreated, unfairly, and how he's just a child.
Leave the children alone.
And in the closed-door hearing, maybe he can get some substantive answers out of him.
But, you know, not a dumb political strategy.
The bottom line, though, is that, again, Joe Biden is facing an uphill battle for re-election.
Let's be real about this.
The polls are not in Joe Biden's favor right now.
And again, the best argument that any of the other candidates originally had against Trump, which is that Trump can't beat Biden, that's not what the polls are suggesting right now.
So that's a very hard argument to make just on the data points.
And that's coming from somebody who's likely not to vote for Trump in the primaries if DeSantis or Haley is on the ballot.
In just one second, we have to get to the weirdest story of the day, courtesy of the Washington Post.
You're not going to believe this one.
But in order for you to access that, you actually have to become a member.
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