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March 27, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:26
Ronna McDaniel AXED By NBC
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So, NBC News has decided that it was all too much.
Now, they've cut ties with Rana Romney McDaniel, the former RNC chair.
Now, listen, NBC News is a private organization.
They're obviously a publisher, not a platform.
They can decide who they wish to hire and who they wish to fire.
With that said, the fact that NBC News says that its line is Ronna Romney McDaniel is somewhat peculiar.
I think we can ask how objective this news outfit is given their current roster of talent.
I'm just going to go through the people who are currently on the NBC and MSNBC roster.
That would include Al Sharpton, a man who was literally involved in inciting an anti-Semitic riot in 1995 at Freddy's Fashion Mart.
Brian Williams.
You remember Brian Williams?
He is the guy who pretended that he had been engaged in combat in Iraq.
Joy Reid, who once claimed and still continues to claim that she was hacked because, long ago, she wrote a bunch of homophobic slurs on her webpage.
She said she was hacked by a time-traveling hacker who went back in time and then put all that stuff on her webpage.
She also continues to be one of the most immoral people in American public life.
Rachel Maddow, Who is one of the lead proponents of Russiagate, the idea that Donald Trump had been installed in the presidency through Russian machinations every single night on her MSNBC show.
She promoted that lie over and over and over again.
Jen Psaki, the former actual spokesperson for the current president of the United States, Jen Psaki has a show every night on MSNBC, a propagandistic show in which she repeats all of the talking points from the White House.
Simone Sanders is currently an MSNBC commentator and has a weekend show.
She is a former spokesperson for both Bernie Sanders and also Vice President Kamala Harris.
Boris O'Donnell is a former aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who describes himself as a European-style socialist.
None of these people are a bridge too far for MSNBC or NBC News.
All of them are perfectly within bounds.
And in fact, NBC News historically thought that it was totally imbalanced to hire Chelsea Clinton to a contract worth $600,000 a year for a person so non-camera ready that they literally tried to put her on TV multiple times and she was so bad that they ended up paying her just to keep her off the television set.
Hey, that's NBC News.
But Ronna Romney McDaniel, she's a bridge too far.
She's just too much.
Here was Ari Melber over at MSNBC announcing the firing yesterday.
I want to turn now to an update from NBC News.
NBC News leadership has announced that former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.
We have a new email and update that's come out just within this hour.
So this is sort of breaking news here within our organization on a story that has garnered significant attention and criticism.
It garnered significant attention and criticism from the Wokies inside NBC News.
And this is nothing new.
I remember when I wrote a newsletter for Politico a couple of years ago, there was such a hue and cry.
There was a near revolt inside the Politico newsroom.
They had to have an entire editorial call lamenting the fact that I had been allowed to touch the deeply sacred Politico morning newsletter.
No, that No, you can't have anybody who's not a far left winger writing that newsletter.
It's the same thing over at NBC News.
And you have to understand that for the left, this is how they treat the precincts of their supposed power.
This is why they were so angry, for example, at Elon Musk actually purchasing X, because they saw Twitter as their domain.
When Elon Musk bought it and then opened it up to people who actually were not of the left, this freaked them out beyond all measure.
It's the reason they fight tooth and nail any attempt at diversity of thought on college campuses, because these are pure, untouched, virgin left-wing spaces.
And those spaces must never, ever be sullied by the presence of anyone who has Actually, not only worked for Donald Trump, but not renounced him.
So you can be a Republican who goes and works in NBC News.
All you have to do is suggest that you will never, ever, ever vote for Donald Trump ever again.
And he's a super bad, terrible orange man.
And Joe Biden is the way forward.
But if you're a Republican who worked for Donald Trump, And then plans on voting for Donald Trump.
This is a bridge too far.
This must never be allowed.
If you work over at the dispatch, for example, or the bulwark, and you have declared openly that you will never vote for Donald Trump, then you're allowed inside those sacred, untouched halls.
But if you're Ronna Romney McDaniel, and you will presumably not only vote for the Former President of the United States.
But you worked at the RNC.
No matter how unsuccessfully, this means you must never be allowed inside the halls of power.
You are bad.
You are verboten.
This is why you had every major network anchor at NBC News and MSNBC publicly ripping into the management of NBC News.
And you had something similar at CNN a couple of years ago.
There was an attempt over at CNN to try and reestablish some semblance of balance.
And the anchors got so all fired angry that the management retreated in horror at its own anchors being mad at them.
First of all, once your employees are in control of your company, you are no longer in control of your company.
And that apparently is the story over at NBC News.
Here is a bevy of NBC News anchors freaking out, losing their mind at the prospect of Ronna Romney McDaniel being allowed inside these hallways to sit at a table and then say platitudes that pretty much any Republican commentator would say at this point.
A bunch of anchors.
Here we go.
I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.
And look, there's a reason why there's a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.
We weren't asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it.
NBC News, either wittingly or unwittingly, is teaching election deniers That what they can do stretches well beyond appearing on our air in interviews to peddle lies about the sanctity and integrity of our elections.
That they can do that as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News.
She literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.
That is the type of experience that Ronna McDaniel brings to the table.
And that experience does not get us to a deeper understanding of anything in the public debate.
So, as you can see, these folks are the ones in charge.
They are the captains now.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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As the Wall Street Journal points out, the move, which was announced Tuesday in a memo, kept a frantic four days for NBC News, which had looked to bring in a conservative voice to its political coverage ahead of the presidential election, but instead became the target of broad condemnations from observers and employees alike.
Cesar Conde, NBCUniversal's news group chairman, wrote in a memo, quote, First of all, that's not true.
Your literal job is to provide a variety of perspectives and to pretend that Rana Rami McDaniel is somehow, as the former head of the RNC, that she is somehow outside the Overton window of discussion inside NBC News' panels.
You're not making her an anchor, that she can't even be, like, on the other end of a Joy Reid monologue or something.
That's so absurd.
Condi said over the past few days, it has become clear this appointment undermines that particular goal.
On Monday, seemingly every major MSNB news anchor, including Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, and Joy Reid, used part of their programs to condemn McDaniel's hire, a sign the mutiny was gathering momentum.
Having McDaniel on would give airtime to someone who is, quote, about undermining elections and going after democracy, said Rachel Maddow.
Again, listening to Rachel Maddow jabber about undermining democracy after she spent all of the 2016 election suggesting that the election was being rigged and stolen by Russia is pathetic.
Joy Reid described McDaniel as, quote, a major peddler of the big lie.
Now, listen, I don't agree that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
For Democrats, however, to claim that anyone who claims that cannot be allowed on the airwaves?
The same exact people who peddled the lie for literally months that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation?
I don't believe that your standards are being equally applied in any way, shape, or form.
Others beyond on-air talent weighed in, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The union representing NBC Digital employees, NBC News Guild on Monday said on social media,
quote, Rana encouraged a lie that many of our own journalists have spent countless hours debunking.
Well, I mean, shiver my timbers.
I mean, you guys had to spend hours debunking something that Ron or Romney McDaniel suggested?
Oh, woe is me.
You probably can't have on anyone who has disagreed with your anchors in any way, shape, or form.
Apparently, the architects of the hire were NBC News editorial head, Rebecca Blumenstein, and political coverage chief, Kerry Badoff-Brown, with Condi signing off.
Condi wrote, I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down.
While this was a collective recommendation by some members of our leadership team, I approved it, and I take full responsibility for it.
NBC News executives grew close with McDaniel as part of its successful effort to carry a Republican debate on NBC last November, according to people familiar with the matter.
One of them said NBC was appealing to McDaniel as a destination because she has family members who watch the network.
I assume that would mean Mitt Romney watches the network.
Or something.
When she announced McDaniel's appointment, Brown had told staffers the former RNC chief would appear across all NBC News platforms, including MSNBC.
But then apparently MSNBC chief Rashida Jones reassured staff and on-air commentators there were no plans to have McDaniel on any of the network's shows.
Meanwhile, CAA, which represented McDaniel in her negotiations with NBC News, is now apparently going to cut ties with her.
Apparently, NBC News made a three-year deal with her, valued at nearly a million dollars in total.
The agency then decided to dump her on the side of the road.
Absolutely pathetic stuff from NBC News, but of course, you expected this.
And the major legacy news networks, they're happy.
ABC News is happy to have George Stephanopoulos, former Hillary Clinton staffer, as an actual on-air, quote, objective news anchor.
CNN commentators include people like David Axelrod, top advisor to Barack Obama, and Paul Begala, former top advisor to Bill Clinton.
All of that is perfectly fine with the members of the legacy media.
But Ronna McDaniel steps in, and now you got a real problem.
David Zuroik, professor of practice in media studies, writes for CNN, quote, as wrongheaded as it was on so many levels, NBC's decision to hire former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor might actually have done the nation a favor.
The highly controversial move has helped drive a crucial conversation about the role of media in our political life at this moment of democratic crisis.
In the end, the company took the only decision it could have on Tuesday when it reversed its decision.
Well, I mean, they could have taken another decision, and that could have been, okay, if you don't want to appear on air with Ronna McDaniel, then feel free to leave the building and not get paid today.
That's what they could have done, but they're not going to do that because NBC News has no commitment to any sort of serious diversity of thought over at NBC News.
Again, name the right-wing commentators on NBC News.
Quick, go.
But according to this CNN commentator, reversing the decision to hire McDaniel is undoubtedly the right move.
The question now is how much lasting damage might have been done to NBC's storied news operation as a result of this debacle.
Again, she was not going to be a news anchor.
She was a commentator.
This is supremely reminiscent.
of the New York Times op-ed editor who ended up being fired for the great sin of allowing Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, to write a piece during 2020 talking about calling out the National Guard in the middle of riots.
And that meant that he had to be defenestrated.
They had to toss him a third story window.
It was deeply important that no such thing enter those untouched, hallowed precincts of the New York Times editorial page, which has been graced by, you know, actual terrorists and dictators.
But this is the way the legacy media work.
No one must touch the legacy media.
MSNBC host Nicole Wallace interviewed Yale University professor Timothy Snyder, author of the book On Tyranny, on his thoughts about NBC's hiring of McDaniel.
Wallace asked Snyder what makes this particular political operative different from other hirings of former politicos.
After all, there's a long line of former political operatives working as TV news analysts and show hosts.
Snyder said what NBC has done is invite into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn't believe that that framework should exist at all.
Well, that's confusing because I didn't realize that Rana McDaniel had called for, say, the disestablishment of NBC News entirely, or the prosecution of the people who work there.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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But again, there's a thing that's been going on, and it is a deeply problematic thing in America's political life, and that is that the left has closed the Overton window so far They've excised a huge percentage of the American population.
And in doing so, they've actually created a reactionary right that now believes there should be no Overton window at all.
So, there should be an Overton window.
There is such a thing as speech that, while protected legally, doesn't necessarily mean that you ought to be paid for it.
That sort of stuff is fairly regular.
If you're a person who, for example, walks around shouting the N-word, there is no obligation for anyone to hire you or to feature you or anything like that.
That's outside the Overton window.
But because what the left has done is they've not excised truly, egregiously, morally wrong speech.
They've just decided to excise the entire half of the political spectrum with which they disagree.
That half of the political spectrum has now been, in contrary fashion, also infused with an attempt to broaden the Overton window, not to reasonable limits, but to blow up all the walls.
And so what you end up with is the fringes on both sides that are actually the loudest.
It's destroying American discourse.
In an attempt to quote-unquote preserve American discourse, the left has achieved the signal feat of completely destroying it.
Because again, if the gatekeepers shut the gates so tight that no one can get in, then everyone is outside.
And there are still no gates.
The gates are completely ineffective.
Because literally everyone is outside the gates.
And that is where we currently stand.
And this, again, is how the left is treating everything related to Trump right now.
So, for example, on the legal level, the big story of the day is that former President Trump has been slapped with a gag order by a judge in his New York porn star hush money trial set to begin April 15th.
According to the New York Times, the gag order, quote, prohibits him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors, and jurors, the latest effort to rein in the former president's wrathful rhetoric about his legal opponents.
The judge, a guy named Juan Merchant, imposed the gag order at the request of the corrupt DA Alvin Bragg, and after Trump's repeated attacks on the judge and even his daughter.
Trump had written on his Truth Social platform earlier in the day, Judge Juan Merchant, a very distinguished looking man, is nevertheless a true and certified Trump-hater who suffers from a very serious case of Trump derangement syndrome.
In other words, he hates me.
His daughter is a senior executive at a super liberal Democrat firm that worked for Adam Shifty Schiff, the DNC, Senate Majority PAC, and even crooked Joe Biden.
He was recently the judge on an unrelated trial of a long-term employee, elderly and not in good health.
This judge treated him viciously, telling him, either you cooperate or I'm putting you in jail for 15 years.
He pled, went to jail for minor offenses, very unusual, served four months in Rikers, and now they're after him again, this time for allegedly lying, and they threaten him again with 15 years if he doesn't say something bad about Trump.
He is devastated and scared.
These country-destroying scoundrels and thugs have no case against me.
Witch hunt!
Okay, so you can think all of that is bad.
Also, is it a violation of a defendant's First Amendment rights to say, especially when that person is the Republican nominee for the President of the United States, that he can say nothing about the judge in his case?
It is one thing to suggest that the President should not incite violence against the judge.
That's illegal.
It's one thing to say the President should not threaten the judge with violence.
That would be illegal.
That's not what Trump is doing.
He's just saying he doesn't like the judge and he thinks that the judge is corrupt.
That is free speech.
The attempt to gag Trump, regardless of what you think of what he's actually saying, is an absurdity.
And again, falls into the category of a gigantic attempt to silence Trump.
Now, ironically, the attempt to silence Trump actually helps Trump.
It helps him in a couple ways.
One, it makes him appear as a victim because he actually is.
And two, the attempt to silence Trump means that they're focusing on the wrong stuff.
So the reality is that the kind of stuff that Trump says that gets him into trouble with the American public, I'm proud to be partnering with my very good friend, Lee Greenwood.
appear unserious. So, for example, yesterday Donald Trump released a video in which he was
hawking not on behalf of his campaign, on behalf of, I guess, a contractor. He was hawking a copy,
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Here is Donald Trump doing that. I'm proud to be partnering with my very good friend Lee Greenwood,
who doesn't love his song, God Bless the USA, in connection with promoting the God Bless
the USA Bible.
This Bible is the King James Version and also includes our Founding Father documents.
Yes, the Constitution, which I'm fighting for every single day very hard to keep Americans protected.
Also, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance are all part of this.
God bless the USA Bible and it's very important and very important to me.
I want to have a lot of people have it.
You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.
Okay.
Agree on the presence of a Bible in your home.
This Bible is selling for $60.
Hey, so, you know, that sort of thing is that does that make Trump appear to be a super presidential guy?
Is that going to damage him very seriously in a campaign?
No.
But if the case that Joe Biden is making is that he's the adult in the room and Trump is not the adult in the room, that's the sort of stuff you would imagine the media would focus on.
Instead, they're literally trying to gag him in a trial in which he is, in fact, being unfairly prosecuted.
No prosecution like the one Alvin Bragg is currently bringing against Trump on this hush money case has remotely been brought in the state of New York.
It is unprecedented.
Sort of like the civil fraud trial that Letitia James brought against Donald Trump.
How many times can you hit the guy unfairly before people react in Donald Trump's favor?
But there's this view on the left that if you silence people, that if you shut people up, then this will magically be successful in allowing you to win a victory.
It's truly insane.
And it's leading a lot of people to walk away from the Democratic Party.
Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that RFK Jr.
continues to poll shockingly well for a third-party candidate.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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When you take a look at the current polls, the current polls show that RFK Jr.
is currently polling in the high single digits, low double digits.
Those are really good numbers for a third party candidate at this point in time.
And the question is, who's he pulling from?
Is he pulling from Trump or is he pulling from Biden?
Well, the assumption was that he's pulling from both in equal measure, but he has now picked A vice-presidential candidate in Nicole Shanahan, who is a person of the left.
How much is Nicole Shanahan a person of the left?
Well, RFK's vice-presidential announcement event opened with a land acknowledgement of the Muwekma Ohlone Indian tribe.
In other words, this is a person very much to the left.
And so that means that RFK Jr.
is going to be running directly into the Biden campaign apparatus.
He's going to be drawing democratic votes to himself.
This is the way they let off the introduction of RFK juniors.
's VP candidate, Nicole Shanahan.
California, Northern California, can I hear an O?
Okay, RFK Jr.
is pretty hippy-dippy, and he's obviously tending toward that side of his campaign.
That is the actual threat to Joe Biden right now.
There are a lot of people who are looking at Joe Biden and saying, I don't like what I'm seeing here.
Maybe RFK Jr.
is the moderate.
Maybe he's the not-Biden vote.
According to the Washington Post, in choosing Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy said he was looking for someone who shared his, quote, passion for wholesome healthy foods, chemical-free for regenerative agriculture, for good soils, also, quote, a deep inside knowledge of how big tech uses AI to manipulate the public, and someone with strong ideas about how to reverse dire threats to democracy and our freedoms.
He says that Shanahan, like him, grew a disillusion with the government and the Democratic Party.
He said our values didn't change, but the Democratic Party did.
She also happens to be a big donor to Kennedy's campaign.
She gave him about $4 million to pay for that commercial that American Values 2024 ran from during the Super Bowl, which was actually quite a clever commercial calling on the legacy of JFK in order to promote RFK Jr.
She said that it was RFK Jr.' 's commitment to peace and to the welfare of the hardworking people in America that drew me as a person of compassion to his candidacy.
She's pretty hippy-dippy.
But again, that's going to carve into Joe Biden.
In fact, here's RFK Jr.' 's sister worrying openly that RFK Jr.
is going to take votes away from Joe Biden and lead to Donald Trump winning the election.
I feel strongly that this is the most important election of our lifetime and there's so much at stake and I do think it's going to come down to a handful of votes in a handful of states.
And I do worry that Bobby just taking some percentage of votes from Biden could shift the election and lead to Trump's election.
Whichever candidate is complaining about the third party candidate is losing.
General rule of politics, if you're the one complaining about the third party candidate, it means that you are losing.
And again, what's amazing about all this for Joe Biden is that it is perfectly preventable if he had not steered directly toward his hard left.
If he had not moved toward Bernie Sanders' position on nearly everything, Joe Biden would not be in nearly as bad a political shape as he is currently in.
And yet he continues to steer to his left.
His advisors seem to believe that if he doesn't steer to his left, he's going to lose the election.
And again, I've spelled out this math before.
What happened here is very simple.
Joe Biden, like the rest of the Democratic Party, has bought into the 2012 Barack Obama myth that you can steer directly to your left, cobble together a coalition of dispossessed minorities and white college-educated liberal women, and win an overwhelming victory despite losing independence.
It didn't work for Democrats in 2016.
It only worked in 2020 because they changed all the voting rules, and two-thirds of Democrats voted by mail early.
It ain't gonna work in 2024, but Democrats continue to steer in that direction.
And that's obviously particularly true on Israel, where the Biden administration continues to try to draw daylight in order to win over some 200,000 potential Arab votes in the state of Michigan.
Now, there's still about 100,000 Jewish votes in the state of Michigan, and it turns out that even in Michigan, The vast majority of the population has more sympathy for Israel than Hamas, but Biden believes that if he somehow kind of plays the middle between Israel and Hamas, that he's going to win over Muslim voters in Michigan.
That's not going to happen because you know what they don't care about?
Joe Biden abstaining from a UN resolution.
That's not enough for them.
Many of the Muslim voters in Michigan who are deeply upset with Joe Biden are openly sympathetic to Hamas.
49% of Muslim Americans, by Gallup polling, 49% of Muslim Americans overall agree that Hamas had a reason to do what they did on October 7th, and 21% of Muslim Americans overall actually agree with October 7th itself.
If you think that Joe Biden is going to be able to win over moderate Muslim voters by somehow saying mean things to Bibi Netanyahu, you got another thing coming.
It doesn't matter.
The Biden administration continues to make foolish political moves.
So, the Israelis have said they are not going to send a delegation to hear the Americans lecture them about military plans to go into Rafah.
Ron Zermer, who is an Israeli ambassador and spokesperson for the Israeli government, he says, listen, we have a military necessity as the state of Israel to go into Rafah, so we're going in.
That's what Ron Zermer says.
I understand that's the position of the Vice President and the U.S.
administration when it comes to a major military operation in Rafah.
But when it comes to consequences, Bill, let me tell you the consequences of us not going into Rafah.
And not getting rid of these four remaining battalions of Hamas.
Essentially, we have dismantled the terrorist army of Hamas.
We've got five battalions left.
Four of them are in Rafah.
They have somewhere maybe seven, eight thousand terrorists there.
We cannot afford to not go into Rafah and finish the job because then what they'll do is October 7th again and again and again.
So there's no chance that Israel is not going to go and finish the job in Rafah.
Dermer also made the pretty obvious point that a Security Council resolution that the United States abstains on and then was celebrated by Hamas and Iran.
Well, if Hamas and Iran are celebrating what the United States just did, that's bad.
But the resolution says As it says, there should be a ceasefire.
And also, you should have the release of hostages.
There's just no linkage between the two.
And that linkage was there as late as five days ago, when the US put forward a proposal that was actually vetoed by the Russians and the Chinese because they want to delink these two things.
So here's bottom line for your viewers, Bill.
Iran and Hamas have welcomed this U.N.
Security Council decision.
I guarantee you that any Security Council decision welcomed by Iran and Hamas is not good for the state of Israel, and it's not good for the United States of America.
Well, I mean, he's obviously right about that.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Meanwhile, Joe Biden is confused about everything.
Because again, he's taking a stupid position.
Here was Joe Biden yesterday.
What did you make of Israel's decision not to attend this meeting this week?
Oh, I don't want to get ahead of myself.
Again, he has no idea what the hell he is talking about because, frankly, he is a fool.
By the way, the New York Times reporting on Amit Sussan, an Israeli lawyer who's abducted by Hamas, dragged into Gaza, and then sexually assaulted in Gaza.
So for all of those morons on Axe who are claiming that sexual assault by Hamas, they would only murder people, they would never rape them, obviously.
That obviously is untrue.
And yet the Biden administration seems to have trouble picking sides.
What's truly amazing about what the Biden administration is doing, frankly, with regard to Israel and the Palestinians, is that it is not as though geopolitics dictates that America play a middle role in order to curry favor with, say, the Saudis.
You know what the Saudis would like?
Israel to finish off Hamas.
Hamas is an Iranian proxy.
You know who the Saudis hate?
Iran.
Saudi is fully on board with Israel going into Gaza and cleaning out Hamas.
Everyone knows it, including the Americans.
And yet the Biden administration is still willing to try to win over apparently Michigan Muslim voters by creating breathing space with Israel.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration failing on every front.
I gotta say, they don't even know how to do basic PR.
It's pretty incredible.
So, obviously, there's this horrific situation with the Francis Scott Key Bridge that collapsed.
Six are now presumed dead.
The bridge, of course, was hit by this massive cargo ship.
There was a mechanical failure on the cargo ship.
It lost propulsion as it was leaving a nearby port.
They actually called the people in charge of the bridge.
They cleared most of the bridge, which is why the death toll is apparently not higher.
According to Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilraeth, at this point we don't believe we're going to find any of these individuals alive at this point.
So six people dead, maybe more.
Well, the Maryland Governor, Wes Morey, says there's no evidence of a terror attack, so all the conspiratorialism is misplaced.
I recognize that many of us are hurting right now.
I recognize that many of us are scared right now.
And so I want to be very clear about where everything stands.
We are still investigating what happened, but we are quickly gathering details.
The preliminary investigation points to an accident.
We haven't seen any credible evidence of a terrorist attack.
Okay, well, that at least is good to know, but here's what's amazing.
So Joe Biden, this would be a moment when, just for optic reasons, Joe Biden should theoretically travel directly to the bridge and speak about the need for federal funding for infrastructure, and this is why we passed our giant Infrastructure Act The green boondoggle that was supposed to go for rebuilding bridges.
We've got the funding.
Let's go.
Let's do this thing.
This would be the moment.
But Joe Biden cannot be bothered to move five minutes outside of the White House.
It really is incredible.
So here he was yesterday saying he plans to go to Baltimore as quickly as he can.
Well, dude.
I'm a dude.
It is a one hour ride to the Francis Scott Key Bridge from the White House.
One hour in a car.
We are not talking about Alaska here.
We're not even talking about East Palestine, Ohio, which still nobody's visited.
We're talking about you getting in a car and driving one hour.
And your mind's like, I don't know.
Here we go.
Are you glad to go to Baltimore, sir?
And if so, how quickly?
I do it as quickly as I can.
Well, I mean, you could have already done it, so there's that.
Meanwhile, he also told some fascinating stories about his experiences with the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
At about 1.30, a container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which I've been over many, many times commuting from the state of Delaware in a train or by car.
There's only one problem.
There is no commuter train over the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
So as per our usual arrangement, the president has literally no idea what he is talking about right now.
Again, we're pretty used to that at this point.
Okay, meanwhile, big case over at the Supreme Court.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, the Supreme Court held a big hearing yesterday on access to the abortion pill.
So this case isn't actually about states trying to ban the abortion pill from being distributed within states.
That presumably will be brought up in a later Supreme Court case.
This is a different case.
This is a case about whether the abortion pill, Mifepristone, can actually be approved by the FDA on an expedited schedule.
That is what this particular case is about.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court appears likely to preserve access to the abortion pill following arguments on Tuesday in which justices suggested protecting doctors who oppose abortion was not enough justification to roll back access to the drug.
So the question here was a question of standing.
Can doctors actually sue on their own behalf in order to reverse the decision-making process of the FDA?
That's the real question here.
Several justices focused their questioning on whether doctors and medical associations that actually have standing.
These doctors and groups don't actually prescribe the abortion pill.
They don't perform abortions.
They have no legal obligation to help women actually perform abortions.
So Brett Kavanaugh, who, of course, was on the correct side of overruling Roe v. Wade, he said, just to confirm, under federal law, no doctors can be forced against their consciences to perform or assist in an abortion, correct?
And the Solicitor General for the government, Elizabeth Klobuchar, She said, yes, we think the federal conscience protections provide broad coverage here.
So again, these doctors were suing, saying that there might be an emergency that arises from the FDA's decision to green light the abortion pill on an expedited schedule that might lead to further emergency situations in which doctors, because of emergency law, are forced to actually deal with the aftermath of the abortion pill gone wrong.
And the justices are saying, well, that's a bit of a stretch.
You're not talking about a contingency based on a contingency.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which is an excellent group, they brought this case on behalf of doctors and medical associations that oppose abortion.
Because these pills can be sent through the mail and then self-administered, anti-abortion groups fear that Mephiprostone can help women flout abortion laws in various states.
Aaron Hawley, who's Josh Hawley's wife, the senator, She's a lawyer for the ADF.
She won a lower court ruling reimposing restrictions on mifepristone that had been in place from 2000 when the FDA first approved the drug to 2016.
That is when the agency said that research said that the rules could safely be relaxed.
And so the question was whether this was a violation of the FDA rule, whether a court could review that based on a lawsuit brought by doctors and medical associations.
This case is really more about legal standing to sue.
As opposed to whether, say, a state could ban the importation of mifepristone into the actual state.
Justice Gorsuch questioned why the case should affect anyone other than the doctors involved.
He said this case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule.
Hawley said it would be impracticable to limit a court order to protecting the individual plaintiffs.
The unpredictable nature of emergency room work meant the doctors would still risk encouraging, encountering rather, a mifepristone patient.
So, again, this happens to be a fairly weak case.
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the original opinion, obviously, in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade, questioned whether the FDA deserved the kind of deference it was being granted.
He asked if the FDA had ever approved a drug and then pulled it after discovering safety problems.
Lawyers for the agency said that both the agency and the manufacturer monitored the drug use and would take action if risks emerged.
And then Justice Katonji Brown-Jackson said you asked if the agency is infallible.
I'm wondering about the flip side, which is do you think courts have specialized scientific knowledge with respect to pharmaceuticals?
Again, there are kind of two issues.
One is if the FDA explicitly for political reasons fast-tracks a drug like an abortion pill, can that be sued upon?
Or is the FDA basically ironclad?
Alito is right on that particular issue.
The FDA's decisions should not be ironclad, and it should be subject to questions as to whether the FDA actually went through its properly prescribed process, where they can shortcut their own process.
The standing question is a different issue.
And the standing question, it seems like these doctors have a fairly weak case.
And so, in all likelihood, the current FDA regulations will be upheld not on the grounds that the FDA regulations are particularly good, but on the grounds of standing.
I understand that's a little bit legally specific, but that is, in fact, what the case is.
It is not about broadening, quote-unquote, abortion rights, which is the way the media are going to treat it.
Meanwhile, the city of New York continues to grapple with massive crime.
According to the New York Times, in one evening barely an hour apart, Mayor Eric Adams has been confronted with two tragic events that crystallized some people's persistent fears about New York City.
Shortly before the mayor announced the shooting death of police officer Jonathan Diller from a hospital in Queens, the police confirmed a man had been fatally pushed into the path of a subway train in an unprovoked attack in Manhattan.
The two episodes underscored the defining challenge of Mr. Adams' mayoralty as he has tried to improve public safety and boost the city's recovery from COVID.
In recent months, he has said crime is down, jobs are up to drive his point home, but violence on Monday undercut that argument that the city is becoming less dangerous.
Adams Found himself in a familiar place on Monday night, grieving with New Yorkers over another senseless act of violence.
And again, the reality is, if you don't want this to happen, you need more police officers on the street and you need to unshackle those police officers to actually deal with criminals.
You need to bring back things like, yes, stop and frisk and broken windows theory.
The fact that New York got away from this after two decades of tamping down its crime problem is an absolutely astonishing lesson in the fact that humanity has a short-term memory of a guppy.
It really is an incredible thing.
All of humanity apparently has the memory span of Dory from Finding Nemo.
So you'll have a complete destruction of a major American city like New York City from the 1960s all the way until the early 90s.
And then you will see all of that reversed by Rudy Giuliani's hard-on-crime policies and Michael Bloomberg's hard-on-crime policies.
And then Bill de Blasio will step in and re-implement all of the failed policies and crime will go up and everybody will act as though they don't know how to fix this.
Everyone knows how to fix this.
It's a very fixable problem.
When your political priors are so important to you that you refuse to look at what actually works, you are no longer a person who is fit for public office.
Eric Adams was expected to put a lid back on crime.
Everyone knew how to do it.
And the answer was, let the cops do their job.
The fact that Democrats all over America have failed to understand this simple truth is the reason why so many people are fleeing their cities.
Recidivism is a massive problem.
And by the way, Adam says so.
He said the city is currently facing three major issues, recidivism, severe mental illness, and quote, random acts of violence.
But he said the city was not out of control.
Well, I mean, it is a little bit.
You know how you solve all those things, by the way.
It turns out recidivism can be cured by keeping people who are bad in jail, because then they're not out on the streets committing crimes.
Severe mental illness can actually be dealt with by involuntary commitment for people who are severely mentally ill and should not be out on the street.
Random acts of violence are definitely involved in both of those things.
And this is true in so many major American cities right now.
Even in nicer areas of major American cities, suburbs of American cities, those places are being invaded by crime at this point.
I know because when I was in Los Angeles, I lived in a fairly nice suburb.
I watched as the area that I lived over the course of my life completely degraded.
There's a person who lives in my community, who was living in a fairly nice area of Baltimore, sent me a video earlier today of a person literally being carjacked in his neighborhood, his old neighborhood in Baltimore.
Now he lives in Florida.
Ain't nobody getting carjacked where I live.
They try that, they're getting shot.
This is why people are fleeing to red states.
And people ask sometimes, you know, how can Donald Trump win an election against Joe Biden?
How can Republicans win against Democrats?
And the answer is point at them.
That is the answer.
The answer is not that you have to make an affirmative case for your own governing ability.
When Democrats run things, they run them directly into the ground.
And also, meanwhile, Democrats are distracted with the latest culture war issues.
So, stupid comment of the day goes to Jill Biden, the greatest doctor of all time.
She, of course, is an incredible doctor.
If you have some sort of gunshot wound or perhaps a heart attack, she can heal you with recommendation for an education degree.
So she was speaking the other night at the Human Rights Campaign.
Well, she went to the HRC, where she immediately compared people who are trying to ban pornographic books for children to Nazis.
And this is the game that Democrats constantly play.
It is going to backfire on them.
It really is.
History teaches us that democracies don't disappear overnight.
They disappear slowly.
Subtly.
Silently.
A book ban.
A court decision.
A don't-say-gay law.
Before World War II, I'm told, Berlin was the center of LGBTQ culture in Europe.
One group of people loses their rights, and then another, and then another, until one morning you wake up and you no longer live in a democracy.
Oh, so the Nazis are coming.
So first of all, there is no don't say gay law in Florida.
I know, because I'm in Florida.
Watch this.
Gay.
Where are the stormtroopers coming to take me away?
They're nowhere, because that's stupid.
It's nonsense.
And as far as her lie, that books are being banned in the state of Florida, I can get any book I want in the state of Florida, because the First Amendment still applies here.
All that Ron DeSantis and the legislature here did is said that you can't put pornography in front of children in school libraries.
But that's too much for Joe Biden.
In this sort of language, they're busily telling people that they have to have pornography in school for their kids, but they won't fix the crime problems.
Yeah, good luck in the election come November.
Well, well, well.
It appears that everybody understands the thing that I said a couple of weeks ago and then pretended not to understand.
Left, right, and center.
Everybody understands the social security system of the United States is utterly unsustainable.
Totally unsustainable.
So Larry Fink of BlackRock.
So I disagree with Larry Fink of BlackRock on nearly everything, but even he understands that there is a global retirement crisis brewing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, he says an aging population is stressing retirement safety nets such as social security, an issue that is set to worsen as medical breakthroughs like weight loss drugs extend people's lives.
He says in an annual letter to shareholders, quote, as a society, we focus a tremendous amount of energy on helping people live longer lives, but not even a fraction of that effort is spent helping people afford those extra years.
He said getting more people investing more of their assets in capital markets is key to securing comfortable retirements.
No bleep.
No bleep.
I've suggested this for literally my entire time in politics, that you actually need to stop taking money away from people in a giant pyramid scheme, pretending they're going to get it back, and then robbing the next generation that apparently does not exist in order to pay the new elderly.
He says no other force can lift more people from poverty or improve quality of life quite like capitalism.
That, of course, is true.
By the way, If you had had your money quote-unquote taken away from you by the government in 2006 when George W. Bush suggested semi-privatization of Social Security and put it in the stock market in 2006, you would have made a lot of money.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the average closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2006 was $11,409.
11409.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday closed at almost $40,000.
You would have 4X'd your money if you just put in an index fund for the DJIA in 2006 when George W. Bush was proposing all of this.
And yet, apparently, That would have been foolish according to some idiots who continue to suggest that entitlement programs must be the third rail of American politics.
So instead, we're just going to go careening right over that cliff.
Everybody knows what I was saying about Social Security is absolutely true.
And when it came to my comments, for example, My point is that when people retire in the sense that they are no longer socially involved, economically involved, when they lose a sense of purpose, that is bad for them.
of retirement, I fully suggested, of course, that if you have some sort of physical problem,
physical ailment, of course you wanna retire.
You don't wanna be bricklaying when you're 73 years old up on top of a roof.
My point is that when people retire in the sense that they are no longer socially involved,
economically involved, when they lose a sense of purpose, that is bad for them.
And one aspect of that for a lot of people is in fact having a job.
In any case, the simple fact of the matter is that again, there is a massive problem looming
on the horizon.
There will be no secure retirements if we continue along the financial lines that we are currently pursuing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, over 4 million Americans will reach traditional retirement age in 2024.
That is more than literally any time in history.
And that is going to destroy social security.
There are fewer taxable workers now than any time in modern American history by percentage.
Apparently, Fink is getting all sorts of flack for the same reason that I am.
Because, again, the suggestion is that you are not allowed to talk about the big untold secret of the American economy, which is that we are engaged in a massive pyramid scheme that is going to go bust pretty soon.
But it doesn't make it any less true.
We are engaged in a massive pyramid scheme that is likely to go bust sometime in the very, very near future.
Alrighty, in just one second we'll jump into the vaunted Ben Shapiro Show Mailbag.
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