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Feb. 6, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

47:01

SHOCKER: Woke Kindergarten Fails

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	One of the beauties of life is the simple fact that no matter how stupid things get, reality always wins.
	And in fact, whether we're talking about your personal life or whether we're talking about politics writ broadly, the simple fact of the matter is eventually you are going to run up against reality and reality is going to win.
	So when it comes to bad political ideas, that doesn't mean they can't emerge victorious in the short or even the midterm.
	It does mean that the realities of human nature, the realities of the world surrounding you, Those don't just go away, and eventually those policies will fail dramatically.
	The dumber the policies, the faster they tend to fail.
	It doesn't mean people acknowledge the failure, but it does mean that they fail pretty quickly.
	One of those dumb ideas that has obviously taken center stage of late has been the dumb idea of woke.
	Woke is a foolish idea.
	Now, what exactly is wokeness?
	We've defined it before on the show.
	Wokeness is the basic idea that if there is any sort of disparity between group outcome in American life, that somehow that group disparity is due to discrimination.
	And the only corrective is therefore reverse discrimination, some form of discrimination that is going to equalize the outcomes of the various groups.
	And we have seen a wide variety of policies that have been implemented in order to close all of these gaps.
	The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell, the great thinker of our time, has put it,
	is a foolish quest.
	It is not something that can be solved because the reality is the vast majority of group gaps
	are either inborn or they are the result of culture and environment.
	Because those are all the factors that there are.
	That does not mean that every result is the result of inborn differences.
	For example, differences in outcome intellectually very often are about educational differences
	or cultural differences as opposed to say IQ.
	But, for example, height differentials between particular groups, those are about genetics.
	This sort of stuff happens throughout life.
	And looking at the rationales for why things are different in terms of outcomes between groups is a good way of crafting good policy.
	But we've basically thrown all of that out in favor of stupidity.
	And now we're going to educate our children in this stupidity.
	But the problem is, again, that stupidity does not reflect reality.
	And we are seeing the results of that.
	So, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, a Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression, and remove those barriers to learning.
	The Woke Kindergarten Sessions train teachers on concepts and curricula that are available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary's 474 students.
	Those sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country's lowest performing schools boost student achievement.
	And again, the basic theory behind this program is that if you just teach kids self-esteem, they will magically become smarter and better performing.
	If you teach them about the radical injustices of the life they lead in the freest country in the history of the world, then magically, they will perform better.
	Only one problem.
	It fails.
	Because reality always wins.
	According, again, to the San Francisco Chronicle, two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, a student achievement at Glassbrook has now fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent, given the needs of students who are predominantly low-income.
	Two-thirds of the students are English learners.
	More than 80% are Hispanic Latino.
	English and math scores hit new lows last spring.
	Less than 4% of students were proficient in math.
	Just under 12% were proficient at grade level in English.
	That is a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.
	Efforts to reach the organization Woke Kindergarten were not successful.
	Now, again, that is not a particular shock because, again, woke kindergarten is a stupid idea.
	Teaching kids terrible ideas is likely to make them perform worse, not better.
	District officials defended the program saying woke kindergarten did what it was hired to do.
	That's true.
	They made the scores lower.
	It made things worse.
	They did exactly what they were hired to do, which is to exacerbate the inequities Therefore, to claim that the system itself is broken.
	One of the most amazing things about the nonprofit world, and this is true virtually across the board, is that nonprofits are constantly exacerbating the problems they are supposed to fight so they can raise money to fight those problems.
	This happens all the time in nonprofit land.
	And when you talk about companies like Woke Kindergarten, if all of a sudden achievement rose, Based on, you know, actual metrics of performance, the need for kindergarten would disappear.
	So one of their actual jobs, one of the jobs of, for example, politically motivated people on the left, is to exacerbate inequalities so as to claim inequity.
	That is the goal.
	Because if at any point those inequalities actually narrowed as a result of freedom and good incentive structures, then what would they do for a living?
	The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates.
	They said the school is no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from The Chronicle the school was not only still on the list, but also had dropped to a lower level.
	The district official is like, we're doing even better.
	And the crown is like, no, you're not.
	We have a list right here.
	The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn't working for many disadvantaged children.
	The solution, say these advocates, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools and to talk about historic white supremacy so students feel safe and supported.
	There's only one problem, which again, is that this is a giant fail.
	So what exactly is in the woke kindergarten curriculum that is failing so dramatically?
	Well, the curriculum includes wonderings, which pose questions for students.
	Questions like, if the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?
	That's what you need to ask your first grader.
	I mean, implicit with all of its ridiculous, stupid, immoral assumptions.
	In addition, the woke word of the day includes strike, ceasefire, and protest, offering students, quote, language of the resistance to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way they can easily digest, understand, and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.
	Now, you have to understand that woke kindergarten is just the stupidest boiling down of what is, in fact, an extraordinary amount of educational theory.
	There is a theorist of education who is very often quoted In these terms, and Paulo Freire, Paulo Freire was talked about by James Lindsay, who we've had on the Sunday special before.
	He was a Brazilian educator who talked about what he called the pedagogy of the oppressed.
	And the basic idea was that you were supposed to inculcate in students, not knowledge or wisdom, or even ways of solving problems.
	You were supposed to impose in students a revolutionary ideology.
	That was the entire goal.
	And some of his students, like Jane Thompson, said, quote, there is no such thing as a neutral education process.
	Education either functions as an instrument, which is used to facilitate the integration
	of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it,
	or it becomes a practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality
	and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
	And this is the way that so much of our educational system has been taken over,
	is that it really isn't when we say they're achieving their goal.
	Their goal is not to increase the math scores.
	The goal is not to increase the English scores.
	The goal of these educators is to exacerbate, again, inequities.
	It is to present America as a terrible place that must be overthrown.
	That is the generalized goal of the system.
	So they're actually doing exactly what they were designed to do.
	But the reality is they lead to more failure.
	We'll get to more on this in one second.
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	And again, these are just politically motivated far-left activists who are trying to indoctrinate small kids in the belief that America is a terrible, terrible place with your taxpayer dollars.
	In fact, here is the woke kindergarten founder, a person named Akia Gross, awarded again a $250,000 grant by the federal government, apparently.
	And here is this human.
	Yes, everyone, the rumors are true.
	I am anti-Israel.
	I am pro-Palestine.
	And I am 100% 10 toes down anti-Israel.
	I believe Israel has no right to exist.
	This person would be tossed off a building in Gaza.
	I believe the United States has no right to exist.
	I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples against indigenous people has no right to exist.
	I believe in a free Palestine.
	From the river to the sea.
	I believe one day Palestine will be free!
	Is this news to anybody?
	By free just means kill all the Jews.
	By the way, this person would immediately be thrown off a building in the Gaza Strip.
	Also, by the way, if she does not believe in America as a country and believes that
	anyone who is not originally on this continent needs to be thrown off the continent, what
	the hell is she doing here?
	That's a weird thing.
	But again, the pedagogy of the oppressed is the way that kids are being taught in public
	Now, it runs up against reality, which is that this is a deeply unsuccessful way of thinking.
	It is a way that facilitates unsuccess, facilitates the suffering of children and their families, makes their lives materially worse.
	It is destined to fail.
	And eventually, parents might realize this, and they might think, hey, you know what would be great is if my kid actually knew how to do math.
	You know what would be awesome?
	Is if my kids actually knew how to read.
	That might be a more useful thing than being inculcated to be part of the woke revolution by morons like this.
	Reality always wins, and reality is going to win here as well.
	Maybe these folks win in the short term, but in the long term, they lead down a dark road of despair and depression and failure.
	And the people who are inculcated in the system will be failures, because they're trained to be failures.
	Meanwhile, reality setting in an enormous number of American institutions.
	Another one of the institutions where reality is now setting in is Dartmouth.
	So Dartmouth actually got rid of the SAT during COVID.
	And now they've decided to put it back in.
	Why are they using the SAT again?
	Because, originally, again, these equity fools have been suggesting that because there are disparate outcomes with regard to the SAT, that, for example, black students on average do less well on the SATs than, say, white students.
	And white students do less well on the SATs, by the way, than Asian students.
	But they don't mention that part.
	Whenever they say that there are group disparities in SAT outcomes, they claim the test itself is racist.
	Which is sort of like saying that just because Jews are, on average, a lot shorter than, say, natives of certain parts of Africa, that must mean that rulers are biased.
	Rulers are a problem.
	Clearly, we need different yardsticks or something.
	The SATs are just a test.
	That's all they are.
	And as it turns out, they are highly predictive of student performance.
	So Dartmouth got rid of it for a while, and it turned out that that was a giant fail.
	They were letting in a bunch of people who were not qualified to actually go through Dartmouth.
	So now they're bringing back the SAT and the ACT.
	The New Hampshire School, according to the Wall Street Journal, said it was making the move based on new research showing that at Ivy League and other highly selected schools, standardized test scores help predict first-year college performance even better than high school grades do, which of course makes perfect sense.
	Because there are a lot of high schools where you're grading on a curve.
	If you go into a crappy high school, it may turn out that an A student at a crappy high school is equivalent to a C student at a really, really good high school.
	But the SAT is the same test that everyone is taking.
	Lee Coffin, the Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid said, quote, I've become less convinced that test-optional is working for us at Dartmouth, reanimating the policy based on evidence.
	He said there were many occasions since the school adopted its test-optional policy in 2020.
	Again, they adopted it in 2020, not as a result of COVID, but as a result of the, quote unquote, social justice protests surrounding the death of George Floyd.
	Because a lifelong criminal and drug addict died and this rejiggered all of American life up to and including whether you need to take an SAT in order to get into Dartmouth.
	He said that there were many occasions since the school adopted its test optional policy when he wished he had one more data point on a student to quote, confirm what we think is a high achieving profile.
	In other words, it turns out that good predictors remain good predictors.
	He said test scores will be especially useful as Dartmouth receives more applications from high schools that are unknown to the admissions office and schools where grade inflation is a concern.
	In fact, the simple fact of the matter is, an excellent way for people who are in bad neighborhoods to get ahead is testing.
	Testing is a pathway out.
	If you're a really smart kid, and you were stuck in a crappy public school, in a bad system, and you didn't perform in that crappy public school and bad system because you were surrounded by bad influences, but you score high on the SAT, that's a great way of overcoming that particular burden, actually.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	So test optional is going to go away at a lot of these schools because again, the lies of equity are lies and they're being shown to be lies.
	Reality always wins.
	Reality is also winning with regard to America's streets.
	So the simple fact of the matter is that eventually we are going to have to make a choice in this country between whether we actually want police officers to be able to do their job or whether we don't want police officers, period.
	There is no third option where police officers are magical dispensers of justice who never make mistakes and everything looks pretty on camera.
	That is not the job of cops.
	And yet, in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, we decided that basically, cops were the problem.
	And whenever we saw, as civilians, something we didn't like on tape, we were the best adjudicatory body for the behavior of police officers.
	Now, the reality is, the day-to-day life of a police officer is incredibly difficult.
	You wouldn't want to do that job, which is why you're not doing that job.
	All the people on the left who watch a police officer tackle somebody say, oh my gosh, that looks so rough.
	Oh my gosh, that looks so terrible.
	Are you the one policing for drugs?
	Like, what is it that you do?
	And the reason I ask that is not because cops don't do things wrong.
	There are certain times where cops absolutely do things wrong.
	And when they violate the rules, then obviously there should be punishments for that.
	But instead, what you have typically is people who don't like the fact that the police have to do rough things to rough people in order to maintain the peace.
	And so they yell at the cops every time they see a tape of something that doesn't look like what they would do.
	Because a normal civilian's de-escalation technique is to walk away from a conflict.
	That's normally what de-escalation looks like for those of us who are not members of the police, for example.
	Well, what that's resulting in is people simply walking away from the job of policing.
	The harder we've made it for our police officers, the fewer police officers there are.
	The fewer police officers there are, the more you have cities like Washington, D.C.
	that have been completely taken over by crime.
	And the generalized attitude toward cops, which moved from defund the police, which is way too out there, way too loud, even Democrats ran away from that slogan screaming by late 2020 because of the increase in crime rates, to demoralize the police.
	Demoralize the police remains the way that we now do policing in the United States.
	This is a point being made by Heather McDonald over at City Journal.
	She says on January 30th, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams.
	The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian.
	If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting, if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystanders' race, sex, and age.
	Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse?
	Too bad, identity-based paperwork comes first.
	But that act is innocuous compared with California's data collection requirements for police officers.
	New reporting obligations under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act now require California officers to fill out an eight-page form with nearly 200 fields when they make what is known as a custodial stop, meaning the civilian is not free to walk away.
	The form, generated by the California DOJ, comes straight from the Race and Gender Studies classroom.
	The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or non-binary person.
	To avoid placing a retrogressive gender straightjacket on the state's public servants, the form also allows an officer to check both non-binary person and cisgender woman, for example.
	The officer must list a sexual identity.
	There's also an extensive officer race or ethnicity section.
	Then, the officer has to document the civilian's perceived sexual orientation, LGB+, or straight heterosexual, and the civilian's perceived gender, cisgender, transgender, or non-binary.
	The discerning officer is allowed to surmise that the person they've stopped is more than one.
	California created this form, as Heather McDonald points out, to gin up anti-police narratives.
	Once an officer's identity profile is merged with that of the person stopped, the possibilities of finding some form of identity oppression are virtually endless.
	While the predictable result of all of this is why the hell would you join up as a cop?
	I've talked to cops all over this country.
	Very few of them.
	Have high morale right now.
	Every police officer that I know in LAPD, I know a bunch of them, is looking to get out as fast as humanly possible, and they are scared to death of being on the streets.
	Not because they're scared of the bad guys, but because they're afraid that if they deal with the bad guys, and there's a bystander with a camera, and they're a bunch of morons watching NBC, that the officer will spend the rest of his life in jail.
	And so they've stopped policing.
	They don't want to be on the streets.
	The thing they signed up for is the thing they have been prohibited from doing by the woke.
	Which is why, as of August of last year, the number of officers employed by the LAPD dropped below 9,000.
	That was a staffing level unseen since the 1990s.
	The total number of officers is way too low.
	People are retiring as fast as humanly possible.
	People are taking like half pensions in order to get the hell out.
	The same thing is happening with the NYPD.
	In July 2023, the New York Post reported the number of people interested in taking the NYPD exam is cratering, likely hitting a new low as the city struggles to fill positions left vacant by senior officers leaving in droves.
	The NYPD last July expected 3,000 test takers for the winter exam and 1,300 people signed up.
	So people are not even signing, because why would you sign up for this?
	Again, this is reality.
	When you tell people they cannot do their jobs and they will be punished for doing their jobs.
	And that basically they are now going to be gender and diversity workers who don't have the ability to stop crime.
	Who would potentially sign up for any of that?
	And it's in every major city.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	How desperate are police departments for recruits?
	They're so desperate that I received, via a friend, this Instagram post.
	This is from Detroit Police.
	Telling recruits.
	They're so desperate for recruits at this point that they are literally telling people that they should sign up to join the cops, even if they have outstanding warrants for misdemeanors.
	If they have an ongoing warrant, like they haven't paid traffic tickets and they've been absconding from paying the traffic tickets, you can still apply.
	Not only that, if you are fat and out of shape and you have no shot at possibly being an effective cop, they still want you.
	Because, hey, we can make you skinny.
	That's how desperate they are for cops.
	Here are some of the tape.
	I'm Sgt.
	Wilson with the Detroit Police Recruiting Unit.
	Today we have this awesome program going on ran by our field recruiters.
	They saw a need as they went out and talked to people and they realized there were things that people were afraid to ask questions about and made them afraid to apply.
	Let's say you have warranted traffic tickets.
	Maybe you don't think you're physically able to complete the physical agility test.
	We have some resources available to you.
	We are partnering with 36th District, Secretary of State, Sir Metro, and our very own DPD FIT program.
	We're gonna clear up your warrants so you can be a cop.
	That's how desperate they are because there just aren't enough people who are willing to join the police force in Detroit and they can't find people to recruit.
	Same thing happening with Chicago.
	In 2023, there's a report out on Chicago PD and their troubles recruiting.
	Here it was.
	The Chicago Police Department attended a job fair on the city's southwest side today, hoping to combat a mass exodus of city police officers.
	The Chicago Police Department has a little over 1,600 fewer officers than it had in 2019, with 200 of them planning to retire in 2024.
	Sergeant of Community Policing in the 8th District, Matthew Malloy, attended the job fair at West Lawn Park and says the turnover is concerning, but there's many opportunities within the department.
	We do appreciate the veteran officers that have, you know, skills and experience.
	But this is a good opportunity for us to restack the ranks and, you know, the next generation of police can come through.
	Okay, I mean, you're not going to be able to recruit anybody.
	Let's just be clear about this.
	Especially when you're political officers, people like Brandon Johnson, the mayor, when hit with questions about, say, the border or crime, his excuse is, I don't have to do my job.
	I'm a black man with three kids.
	He literally was asked yesterday about border problems and the vast wave of migration from illegal immigrants into the city.
	And his answer was, stop bothering me.
	I'm a black guy with three kids.
	I'm not kidding.
	This is what he said.
	I have children who attend schools who have soccer games, y'all.
	You know, you all are asking me as if I'm not a parent in this city.
	I get it.
	I'm mayor.
	I get it.
	But you're asking me to give you a date and I have to court.
	Do you understand that you have not had a mayor like me?
	I get that.
	I have a wife.
	I have children.
	They have schedules.
	And plus, we still have public safety that we have to address.
	We still have the unhoused that we have to address.
	I still have a budget that I have to address.
	And I'm doing all of that with a black wife raising three black children on the west side of the city of Chicago.
	I am going to the border as soon as possible.
	So the excuse for being a garbage mayor of Chicago is you haven't had a mayor like me.
	Well, I mean, they did.
	Lori Lightfoot was a black lesbian who was the mayor.
	So actually, you're less historic than Lori Lightfoot.
	And I'm pretty sure that there have been mayors of Chicago who have kids before.
	But again, this is the excuse making for bad governance.
	This is what the predictable result of all this is lawless cities.
	The predictable result of all of this bad governance, bad equity standards leads to lawless cities.
	In Washington DC, how much trouble are they having getting recruits?
	They've now lowered the physical standards for police officers.
	In fact, back in 2023, Reporters for one of the local outlets tried to take the physical test to become a D.C.
	police officer.
	These are just people who, like, no training, nothing.
	These are just people who, like, work for the local news network.
	And they passed with flying colors because it turns out that basically you just have to be able to stand upright.
	Here's what it sounded like.
	Lieutenant Patrick Loftus with MPD says although the need is large, we want quality officers, not just a quantity.
	He says those who apply to be officers need a baseline level of fitness.
	MPD invited 7 News to take the test.
	You start by running from a police car, then going through cones, running up and down steps, dragging 165 pounds of dead weight, Then crawling on your hands and knees.
	And then one of the hardest parts, the fence.
	And as I learned, don't relax too early, because you may not stick the landing.
	You also identify a mob suspect based on the color shirt.
	And you have to do it all in one minute, 28 seconds.
	There's also an untimed part where you rack and pull the trigger on an unloaded weapon.
	I know it can look a little intimidating with the fence behind me and some of these other steps, but it's totally doable.
	Loftus says most people pass and they give two chances on prospect day and you can come back again.
	Most people pass and you get two chances on prospect day.
	This is where you end up.
	It is incredibly difficult to recruit police officers when you are addicted to woke idiocy.
	It is incredibly difficult to police crime when you've told the police that they can't actually police crime.
	It's incredibly difficult to do education when your chief goal of education is inculcating revolution rather than teaching people how to read and write.
	Reality always wins.
	So what are you gonna end up with?
	Stupider students, more money spent, worse police forces, fewer recruits, and more crime.
	That's what you're gonna end up with.
	And the predictable result of that is political failure.
	And that's what you are seeing in terms of Democrats on a national level.
	Now in these cities, many of these cities have basically been cleansed of anything remotely resembling Republican governors.
	There's just not two parties in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C., New York.
	These are all one-party cities at this point.
	And so those cities are gonna meet with even more reality because if they can't get out of the mindset that has stuck them in this cycle of failure, they will continue to fail.
	There is no other choice.
	But on a national level, other choices can be made.
	And you can see that people increasingly in this country are deeply unhappy with the choices that have been made by their political class.
	That is true certainly for Joe Biden.
	It is true for Kamala Harris.
	There's a reason why Joe Biden is pulling lower than any incumbent in modern history right now.
	I mean, part of that is because he's no longer sentient.
	And again, the just sense that no one has control of this ship, that the navigational tools are spinning wildly over here.
	That is not a wrong impression.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Here was Joe Biden yesterday, suggesting that just a few years ago, he met with a person who died 20 years ago.
	He gets the country wrong.
	He gets the person wrong.
	He gets the year wrong.
	Here we go.
	Joe Biden, your president of the United States.
	Right, right, right after I was elected, I went to what they call a G7 meeting and all the NATO leaders.
	I was in I was in the south of England and I sat down and I said, America's back.
	I made Iran from Germany.
	I mean, from France looked at me.
	And said, you know, how long are you back for?
	And I looked at him, and the Chancellor of Germany said, what would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the paper tomorrow in the London Times?
	And the London Times said, A thousand people break through the House of Commons, break down the doors.
	Two bobbies are killed in order to stop the election of the Prime Minister.
	What would you say?
	I never thought about it from that perspective.
	What would we say if that happened in another democracy around the world?
	God, he is so out of it.
	Okay, so he's mentioning Francois Mitterrand.
	First, he calls him the leader of Germany.
	He was French.
	Second of all, Francois Mitterrand died in 1997.
	So that's not a person he talked to four years ago unless he is talking with ghosts again.
	Reality always wins.
	The reality is this is an 81-year-old senile man.
	That is the reality.
	Joe Biden is no longer with us.
	He has not been with us for quite some time.
	And meanwhile, his backup, another harsh reality for Democrats, is even less popular than Joe Biden is.
	So there's that latest NBC poll, and it showed that Joe Biden's favorability rating is 18 points underwater, 36% favorable, 54% unfavorable.
	There's only one politician in America who is less popular than Joe Biden, and it's his vice president, the person who will take over for him if he dies during his second term, Kamala Harris, who is at 28% favorable and 53% unfavorable.
	and 53% and 53% unfavorable.
	Those are truly garbage numbers.
	Here she was yesterday trying to rip on Donald Trump.
	This is not going to hunt, folks.
	For years, the former president has stoked the fires of hate and bigotry and racism and xenophobia for his own power and political gain.
	He accused immigrants of, quote, poisoning the blood of our country.
	And after Neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, he said there were, quote, very fine people on both sides.
	The former president openly talks about his admiration for dictators and has vowed that he will be a dictator on day one.
	As opposed to Joe Biden, who literally said yesterday that the Supreme Court may have blocked him from alleviating student loan aid, but did not stop him.
	But don't worry, the dictator is on the other side again.
	Reality is, these people are unpopular.
	They're unpopular because their governance is bad.
	And reality is starting to set in on pretty much all sides.
	When it comes to illegal immigration, for example.
	Just a few years ago, it was considered totally insane to suggest invasion was happening at our southern border.
	Now, of course, the position of the Democratic Party has shifted because the American people totally understand that there is an invasion at the southern border.
	When I say invasion, I don't mean that the people who are crossing the southern border as illegal immigrants are all seeking to do Americans harm, because that isn't true.
	Many of them are coming here in order to either work or be on welfare or whatever it is.
	That's not the same thing as, say, an invading army.
	But Mexican drug cartels are in control of America's southern border.
	They are facilitating A vast migration wave that constitutes an invasion.
	Again, I've sat on the border.
	I have watched Mexican drug cartel drones in American territory.
	I'm not sure what you would call that other than an invasion.
	Even Al Sharpton is now calling it an invasion.
	That's how badly things are going for the Democrats.
	Here's Al Sharpton on MSNBC last night using language direct from Donald Trump.
	You're seeing an influx of migrants all over the country that frankly have people outraged.
	And couldn't there be some kind of public pressure put in the next couple of days in some of these senator states saying, why are you allowing this to continue?
	Because at the end of the day, senators have to deal with their voters and at the same time, In the bill, you give money to Gaza, to civilians in Gaza and Israel.
	But the border, I mean, we're looking every day at the invasion of migrants and they're playing a time game with politics on this?
	What's amazing here is Sharpton admits that there's effectively an invasion at the southern border.
	And you can almost see the Senator Chris Murphy wincing when he says that.
	But he's blaming Republicans for that.
	And that's not going to hunt either, because the reality is Joe Biden could stop this today.
	He could literally stop this today.
	We'll get to the latest on the border bill in just one second.
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	Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling with regard to this immigration issue.
	They've tried to split Republicans over a border bill.
	The border bill has a bunch of flaws.
	We went through it in detail yesterday.
	Andy McCarthy also goes through it in detail over at National Review.
	And as he points out, there are some things about the bill that are better than current law.
	So standards for asylum, for example, have changed.
	They've been a bit strengthened in some areas, including the fact that you now are supposed to show that you don't have the ability to stay at home in your own country and just move areas or live in a country that you pass through in order to come to the United States.
	But again, All of this law depends upon implementation, and that, in the end, is the real problem.
	Joe Biden has demonstrated zero capacity to actually implement the law as written.
	He has plenty of law on the books that would allow him to enforce the law right now.
	And Anne McCarthy says Congress should pressure Biden to use his existing authority to secure the border and end the crisis.
	The most notable thing about the current senatorial proposal is that it would undermine the existing presumptions in the law that illegal aliens should be apprehended, detained, and rapidly removed, and that the United States is not required to provide asylum.
	In other words, the baseline assumption of the bill is that a certain number of people will get asylum, that a certain number of people will be imported into the center of the country, and all the rest.
	The House GOP also issued a statement ripping into the border bill.
	This thing is basically DOA.
	Even Mitch McConnell in the Senate, who originally backed the bill, is now saying he's not going to bring it up for a vote if he has anything to say about it because he doesn't have the votes on the Republican side of the Senate in order to effectuate its passage.
	But the House majority in the House, they say, quote, House Republicans oppose the Senate immigration bill because it fails in every policy area needed to secure our border and would actually incentivize more illegal immigration.
	Among its many flaws, the bill expands work authorizations for illegal aliens while failing to include critical asylum reforms.
	Even worse, its language allows illegals to be released from physical custody, and that would effectively endorse the Biden catch and release policy.
	The so-called shutdown authority in the bill is anything but, riddled with loopholes that grant far too much discretionary authority to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
	The bill also fails to adequately stop the president's abuse of parole authority and provides for taxpayer funds to fly in house illegal immigrants in hotels through the FEMA Shelter and Services Program.
	In other words, why doesn't Joe Biden just do his job?
	That is essentially what the House GOP is saying.
	And the protestations by Democrats that Joe Biden needs more authority, those are falling on deaf ears because they aren't true.
	Here's Chris Murphy trying to do that routine, the senator from Connecticut.
	Do you think that President Biden should just try to take this issue away from the Republicans, who seem to be playing politics with it, and use every bit of his executive authority to address the border crisis on his own?
	Say, basically, won't pass the legislation?
	Okay, I'm gonna do it myself.
	Would that be a good strategy for him?
	Well, here's the problem, David.
	The president can't do this by himself.
	The president doesn't have the legal authority without additional legislation to control the border and fix the broken asylum system in the way that needs to be done.
	And this is part of the fiction that gets perpetuated on the American public by Republicans.
	Now, they wanted to pass border legislation last year.
	In fact, It was so important to them in the House of Representatives that they named it H.R.
	2.
	It was the second bill they introduced.
	But as soon as it became clear that bipartisan border reform legislation might pass, Republicans in the House started screaming, no, the president doesn't need any new laws.
	He has all the authority he needs.
	That's just not true.
	Okay, it is true.
	On the laws, not only does he have the authority, he is required, for example, to have ICE deport people who are in the country illegally, and he's not doing any of that.
	He's not interested in doing any of that.
	The American public knows this, and the reality is going to be very harsh for Joe Biden on that issue.
	Speaking of which, eventually reality is going to set in with regard to the economy as well.
	So right now, we've sort of been floating above the economic repercussions for having spent more money than God has ever seen.
	Jerome Powell, the Fed Chair, he says that they have to be careful about rate cuts at this point, considering that the economy continues to truly chug.
	We have good employment right now, very, very good employment numbers.
	Wages are finally starting to rise, as opposed to inflation.
	And so one of the things he's worried about is injecting more money into the system.
	But one of the things he's pointing out is that the future obstacle to growth is not going to be How do you assess the national debt?
	rates right now. The biggest obstacle to growth is going to be the fact that government is going to
	eat up more and more of the private sector earnings in the United States, and that's going to have to
	be made up somewhere. Here was Fed Chair Powell saying the United States is on an unsustainable
	fiscal path. So for all the happy talk that we've been hearing about the economy, the reality is the
	long-term fiscal future of the United States eventually will hit reality as well. How do you
	assess the national debt? We mostly try very hard not to comment on fiscal policy and, you know,
	know instruct Congress on how to do their job when actually they have
	oversight over us.
	But is the national debt a danger to the economy, in your view?
	In the long run, the U.S.
	is on an unsustainable fiscal path.
	The U.S.
	federal government's on an unsustainable fiscal path.
	And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy.
	Well, that is not curable.
	If you think that you can outgrow the debt, not at the rates that we are racking up debt.
	But meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to dare reality to clock him.
	So yesterday, for example, he was bragging about his attempts to go around a Supreme Court order telling him he cannot unilaterally relieve student loan debt.
	And he says, the Supreme Court blocked me, but didn't stop me.
	The Supreme Court announced it has blocked me, but they didn't stop me.
	Again, we used to call that dictatorial type language.
	They blocked me, but they didn't stop me.
	They literally told you not to do the thing and then you went and you did the thing.
	That's an amazing statement by Joe Biden.
	He's unilaterally raising the debt at this point.
	Eventually there will be consequences because eventually there are always consequences.
	The same holds true in the Middle East as well.
	Joe Biden has sent an extraordinary level of mixed signals.
	On the one hand, he will unleash American strikes on 80 separate targets simultaneously hit.
	On the other hand, he will then tell Israel that Israel has to stop With regard to what it's doing with Hezbollah in the north, that Israel has to be kinder to Hamas, that what we really need to pursue as the United States is that we really need to pursue a two-state solution that incentivizes Islamic terrorism.
	Those mixed signals are being taken as weakness by all of the parties that hate the United States.
	Right now, if Joe Biden actively wanted to stop potential conflict from broadening in the Middle East, what he needs to do is say that America is a wall.
	That America is not going to allow this to broaden into a larger conflict in the Middle East.
	That if Hezbollah does not, for example, move north of a river that they are bound by international law to move north of, That if that zone in the south of Lebanon is not demilitarized, the United States is going to fund Israel to the extent that Israel will be able to basically destroy Hezbollah where it stands.
	That's what the United States should be doing if they want to prevent further war.
	Right now, the biggest problem the United States has is it is not a credible actor in the Middle East.
	There's no credible threat from the United States.
	Calling up America's enemies and warning them about potential strikes is not exactly set to create a deep quaking and trembling in the Iranian regime.
	Now the White House is realizing that they're trying to walk it back.
	So there were reports before a set of strikes about a week ago that the U.S.
	had warned the Iraqi government, which is effectively run by Iran, that American strikes were forthcoming.
	Now, according to Politico, the U.S.
	is saying that it did not directly notify the Iraqi government American forces would strike inside the country on Friday, contrary to an earlier White House statement.
	U.S.
	forces conducted airstrikes against Iranian militants in Iraq and Syria on Friday as retaliation for the killing of three U.S.
	soldiers in Jordan by Iranian proxy groups.
	On Monday, State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters that there was not pre-notification and that the U.S.
	informed the Iraqis immediately after the strikes.
	The Iraqi government, quote, understood there would be a response after the deaths of our soldiers, but that contradicted what the National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby said in a call on Friday, where he said, quote, we did inform the Iraqi government prior to the strikes occurring.
	Kirby then walked it back.
	He said, well, I responded with information I'd been provided at the time.
	So who do you believe?
	The Biden administration or the Biden administration?
	I'll tell you what I believe.
	I believe that the Biden administration is basically warning the Iranians to get their people out of harm's way, which is leading the Iranians to think, OK, we can push Joe Biden pretty much as far as we want to push.
	And in fact, the strikes against American targets have not ceased at any point.
	Here's the Pentagon press secretary, Major General Patrick Ryder, confirming yesterday that there have been continued drone attacks on American targets.
	In terms of attacks in Iraq and Syria since we took these strikes on Friday, I'm actually only tracking two incidents.
	There was one attack on Saturday, February the 3rd.
	That was two rockets that were fired at MSS Euphrates in Syria with no injuries or damage reported.
	And then I'm aware of one yesterday, February 4th.
	This was a one-way attack drone that landed several kilometers from MSS Green Village.
	Also, in Syria, again, no reported U.S.
	injuries or damage to those facilities.
	Hey, so again, it turns out the reality exists in the Middle East and
	weakness will be met with aggression from the Iranians.
	This is not a shock.
	And every time Joe Biden and his team say two state solution.
	The devil smiles because the reality is that a two state solution is not a
	real possibility, given the situation on the ground in the Middle East right now.
	The Palestinian Authority is a terror-fomenting group.
	Gaza Strip is run by Hamas, which is a terror group that just committed the worst atrocity against Jews since World War II.
	The Palestinian Authority does not even have control over the West Bank.
	They can't take control over the Gaza Strip.
	They're not trustworthy partners, even if they could.
	No other state will facilitate the rebuilding of Gaza.
	And meanwhile, the Biden administration, all they are doing by playing this game is signaling weakness to the broader Middle East.
	It's absolutely foolhardy.
	Reality is going to set in the Middle East too, because again, the attempts to pick away at American might in the Middle East, to pick away at freedom of trade in the Red Sea, those will continue.
	Those are not going to stop so long as Joe Biden continues to show the American neck.
	Now, meanwhile, Secretary of State Tony Blinken arrived in the Middle East on Monday in the hopes of preventing escalating tit-for-tat attacks with Iran-backed militias from spiraling into a broader regional war.
	Now, again, you know what's the way to do that?
	When tit-for-tat should be tit-for-hellfire missile.
	They hit America with a drone and we blow away Qasem Soleimani.
	That should be the way that America deals with threats because Iran does not want war more than the United States.
	Again, this is how deterrence works.
	This is a baseline foreign policy 101 in the Middle East.
	Do not show your neck to your enemies.
	If you do, it will be bad.
	Trying to wrap all of this into a ball and then claim that if Israel makes concessions to the Palestinians, magically everything is going to fix itself is absurd.
	Hamas literally rejected another ceasefire yesterday.
	Hamas is currently holding over a hundred hostages still and they're using those hostages as bait to get Israel to leave Hamas in place to the delight of Iran.
	In his conversation with Mohammed bin Salman, Blinken stressed the importance of addressing the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
	More than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 7th, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.
	Nearly 2 million people have been displaced by the fighting.
	But the reality is, do you think the Saudis care deeply about what's going on in the Gaza Strip?
	The only thing the Saudis care about, actually, is the destruction of Hamas.
	The Saudis have very little... If the Saudis cared deeply about what was going on in Gaza, don't you think they'd be offering a little more humanitarian aid?
	Don't you think that they would be offering, say, exit visas to anyone who wants to leave the Gaza Strip in the middle of this war?
	They're not doing any of those things.
	The Saudis were perfectly willing to sign on the dotted line with Israel the day Biden took office, and then he proceeded to alienate the Saudis in favor of trying to bring the Iranians into the fold.
	Foolishness has consequences, always and forever.
	Now, I've said before that not only does reality always win, but I root for reality, and that's true.
	I do root for reality because the faster people see reality, the faster we can get to actual policy-based solutions to the problems we face.
	When it comes to crime, it turns out that yelling at the cops is not going to fix crime.
	When it comes to education, it turns out that teaching students idiocy about equity is not going to fix the problem.
	When it comes to immigration, it turns out That political machinations in which you leave the border open while claiming the other side somehow doesn't care enough?
	That is not going to fix the problem.
	And when it comes to Middle East, weakness isn't going to fix the problem either.

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