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March 29, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

47:45

The Biggest Conspiracy Theory Of All

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	So Donald Trump won a big PR victory yesterday.
	He won a big PR victory mainly because it seems like the Democrats at the upper echelons of the party, the people who are running Joe Biden's campaign, they don't seem to know even relatively recent history.
	The 2016 campaign that pitted Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump turned into a campaign about upper class elitism.
	That largely predominated in places like Washington, D.C.
	and New York City against Donald Trump's sort of blue-collar vibe.
	And yesterday that was on precisely the same sort of display in New York City.
	So you had four presidents who descended into New York City yesterday, but they went for very different purposes.
	Donald Trump went to New York City to attend the wake of a New York City police officer who was murdered in the line of duty.
	The visitation was for Officer Jonathan Diller, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop on Monday and was held in suburban Massapequa on Long Island.
	According to the Associated Press, police said the 31-year-old Diller was shot below his bulletproof vest while approaching an illegally parked car in Queens.
	Diller was married, had a one-year-old son, and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
	Here was Donald Trump talking about law and order and a crackdown on crime coming out of the memorial service for this dead young officer.
	This is such a sad occasion.
	The only thing we can say is maybe something is going to be learned.
	We've got to toughen it up.
	We've got to strengthen it up.
	This should never be allowed.
	Things like this shouldn't take place and to take place so often.
	We've got to toughen it up.
	We're going to have law and order.
	These things can't happen.
	We need law and order.
	This can't happen.
	We've got to toughen it up.
	We're going to have law and order.
	These things can't happen.
	We need law and order.
	This can't happen.
	Thank you very much.
	The same exact time that Donald Trump was visiting this memorial service, the Democrats
	were preparing for a ritzy fundraiser over Radio City Music Hall.
	President Biden went to Radio City Music Hall.
	He was joined there by Barack Obama, as well as Bill Clinton.
	They apparently raised more than $26 million, and they had a bevy of stars.
	It was a cavalcade of glitzy Hollywood celebrities, ranging from Lizzo, To Cynthia Erivo, to Lea Michele of Glee, and also who's now on Broadway, and all these stars just singing, dancing for the assembled crowd, many of whom I'm sure were paying tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege.
	And it's the glitz and the glamour that were at the center of all of this.
	There is video of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton literally rising from underneath the stage Like at some sort of bizarre rock concert.
	Here they come.
	The stage literally rises and it has these three presidents on it.
	First of all, you don't know how old Joe Biden is until you see him next to Barack Obama.
	It really is an astonishing thing.
	Barack Obama looks significantly younger because he is significantly younger.
	Joe Biden looks older than Bill Clinton, who stopped being President of the United States in January of 2001.
	Obama looks bewildered to even be there.
	He's getting these sorts of rounds of applause from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
	It's so clear, by the way, that Obama is such a celebrity.
	I mean, Obama obviously has charisma.
	He's loose out there.
	He's charming.
	And Joe Biden is staggering around on the stage.
	And then Stephen Colbert comes charging out to pay homage to Joe Biden.
	He interviews all three presidents.
	Now, this was closed to the press.
	The reason it was closed to the press, presumably, is because they knew that it was actually quite a bad look.
	That in a time when most Americans are deeply unhappy with the direction of the country, they're having this ritzy, glitzy, glamorous fundraiser in the center of New York City at Radio City Music Hall.
	According to NBC News, Mindy Kaling...
	from the office originally.
	Then she had her own show, obviously.
	She hosted the program.
	It was also hosted by Stephen Colbert, who is, in fact, just an apparatchik for the Democratic Party.
	He has been for a while.
	He moderated a conversation with Biden, Clinton, and Obama in which all of them ripped into Donald Trump, of course.
	And again, Donald Trump was busily going to, you know, a national memorial service for a fallen officer in a Democratic city.
	So let me ask you, which one is more sympathetic?
	Donald Trump going to visit with the family of a slain New York City police officer?
	Or Joe Biden, who still has not gone to, for example, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is an hour outside Washington DC, even just to stand there for the cameras.
	Instead, heading on over to Radio City Music Hall to hang out with uber-celeb Barack Obama and former uber-celeb Bill Clinton.
	Other special guests included Queen Latifah, Ben Platt, Apparently, according to NBC News, during the nearly hour-long moderated conversation, Colbert joked that the moment was historic because three presidents have come to New York and not one of them appear in court.
	So again, it's all these little jibes, these snide jibes of Trump.
	But Trump is busy doing the thing that blue-collar people do.
	And that kind of normies do.
	When a tragedy occurs, we visit the memorial services, we try to comfort the family.
	It's a bad look for the administration.
	It's a bad look for the White House.
	It's a bad look for Joe Biden.
	And it's very reminiscent, again, of 2016.
	You remember the 2016 Democratic National Convention?
	We had a bevy of celebrities, all involved in the filming of the most obnoxious music video of all time.
	All these people singing fight song to Hillary Clinton because she was a fighter and everybody just recoiled in horror at the absolute stupidity of all of it.
	This felt a lot like that.
	So that was a very, very bad look.
	Democrats knew it was a bad look, by the way, because they immediately launched into Trump for visiting the memorial service.
	Here's former Representative Joe Crowley, the guy who was ousted by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in her district.
	Here he is just talking about Trump exploiting tragedy.
	Well, I mean, he's acknowledging a tragedy.
	Joe Biden is the one ignoring the tragedy.
	The notion or idea that Donald Trump cares at all for this officer or this officer's family is outrageous.
	He has not an ounce of sympathy in his body.
	It is hypocritical.
	I think people look at it as hypocritical that he's using this grieving family for political purposes, for a political rally.
	It's outrageous.
	Where was that same empathy?
	For the families of police officers and others who passed away as a result of the one six attack.
	It didn't exist.
	He doesn't care about anyone but himself.
	And New Yorkers are sophisticated to know that.
	I hope America is more sophisticated to understand he's exploiting a grieving family.
	OK, well, he's acknowledging the grieving family.
	Joe Biden is busily hanging out with Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert.
	That's what was going on in New York City last night.
	We'll get to more on all this in a moment.
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	Corinne Jean-Pierre was so puzzled by all of this that she tried to blame the crime surge that's been happening in some of America's major cities on Donald Trump.
	Surge under the previous administration, which repeatedly attempted to cut the COPS program, all of their budgets targeted that they, that key funding for the police and congressional Republicans just proposed doing it again.
	So this is a president, this is a Biden-Harris administration, have done the polar opposite, taking decisive action from the very beginning to fund the police and achieving a historic reduction in crime under his leadership.
	So that is not going to hunt.
	That dog is not going to hunt.
	Democrats, again, are disconnected from the vast majority of the American people
	on issues like, for example, crime.
	They also happen to have another problem, which is not the disconnection with the normal American.
	It is the connection with the radical progressive base.
	I've been talking about this.
	I'm not going to stop talking about it because it is going to lose Joe Biden in the election.
	His attempt to swivel all the way to the left to get low-propensity progressive young voters to the polls in outsized numbers, it is not going to be successful.
	The more he attempts to feed the alligator, the more the alligator demands of him.
	So last night, outside and apparently inside the event with Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, both outside and inside, pro-Chamas protesters descended upon the event.
	Here are some of the video of what was going on outside the event.
	See a fairly large crowd of protesters outside.
	My favorite is the trans flag right above the right below the Palestinian flag.
	That is definitely a coalition that is odd, as we pointed out elsewhere.
	But of course, that coalition is built on hatred for the West.
	It's built on anti-Americanism, which presumably is why Down With the USA was actively being chanted outside the event for Joe Biden yesterday.
	Down with the USA!
	Netanyahu, you will pay!
	Netanyahu, you will pay!
	Okay, so, again, these are the people that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, they're all pandering to these people.
	In fact, one of the protesters was questioned by Fox News what one of the protesters had to say.
	What are you here protesting about?
	I hate old white men.
	I'm protesting the American empire.
	The American government is funding a genocide with our tax money.
	I'm protesting the American government, so blow us up.
	Why are you mad at Joe Biden?
	Joe Biden is an old white man.
	He's a clown.
	He supported Israel against Palestine.
	That's what we're angry about.
	Okay, so, these are all crazy people.
	They are all crazy people with evil beliefs about the United States.
	They are.
	And Joe Biden is pandering to these people.
	Let's be clear, when it comes to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, we've said this over and over and over, and this is the fact of the matter.
	The Palestinians have failed to build a functional government or society for literally decades.
	Gaza was handed over to the Palestinians in 2005.
	They promptly elected Hamas.
	Hamas promptly turned it into the most large functioning terror base in the world, replete with hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, with tens of thousands of rockets.
	And then they proceeded to launch a would-be genocidal attack against every Jew across the Gaza border.
	And then they got their asses handed to them.
	That's effectively what is going on in the Middle East right now.
	How evil is Hamas?
	Well, yesterday, Israel released some tape.
	They're all these... The online space is truly toxic.
	But, Israel released, in the sense that they're constantly doubting obvious evils, like the fact that Hamas are a bunch of murderers and r*****s. Some of the worst people on Earth.
	Israel, yesterday, released some tape of one of the Hamas terrorists admitting that on October 7th, he participated in r*****.
	The interrogator says, so you entered the house, and then you saw her in the room, and what did you do?
	He says, the devil took me over, I laid her down, started undressing her, and did what I did.
	And the interrogator says, what did you do?
	He said, I had sex with her.
	He said, you didn't sleep with her.
	Sleep is to sleep.
	What did you do?
	He said, I **** her.
	And there's widespread evidence of sexual abuse that happened during October 7th, putting aside the murder of everybody up to and including small children.
	Deliberate murder, not collateral damage that happens in war, deliberate murder.
	And yet somehow this is considered an issue that is worthy of massive protest by the far left.
	And Joe Biden and company are still catering to these people.
	Get to more on this in just a moment.
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	So apparently the discussion last night with Biden and Clinton and Obama was interrupted at least five times by protesters, according to NBC News.
	Colbert acknowledged one protester and asked Biden about the U.S.
	role in ensuring a peaceful and prosperous future for both Israelis and Palestinians.
	Biden said more needed to be done to get relief into Gaza, but added that Israel's very existence was at stake.
	And then he said there has to be a train for a two-state solution.
	It doesn't have to carry today.
	There has to be a progression.
	I think we can do that.
	Again, this is the only time I can imagine a mass terror attack met with a massive hegemonic world power suggesting that those who favor the terrorists ought to be given a fully functioning state.
	That's an amazing statement.
	That response was met with a standing ovation.
	Then there was another protester.
	And then Barack Obama jumped in.
	And he said, part of democracy is not just talking, it's listening.
	That's what the other side does.
	And it's important for us to understand it's possible to have moral clarity and have deeply held beliefs, but still recognize the world is complicated and it's hard to solve these problems.
	Now the real question is, why Democrats keep catering to these people?
	Why do Democrats keep catering to the most radical conspiracy theorists on their side?
	And that's what this is.
	If you wonder why the elevation of this particular theory about Palestinians and Gaza and Hamas, above all else, why is it that this has become the point of the spear for the progressive movement?
	We talked about this a little bit yesterday.
	It's a weird thing.
	There are lots of issues that you would imagine progressives on campus would be very exercised about.
	You know, three, four years ago, it was systemic racism and policing, supposedly.
	And before that, it was gay rights.
	But right now, it's the Gaza Strip.
	Why?
	Why is it Hamas that they're attempting to save?
	And the answer is because the victimhood mentality has pervaded the society so widely that the best way that you can show your fealty to a basic belief system, which is that the failures of individual human beings and groups are related to their victimhood at the hands of another group, the best way that you can show fealty to that perverse idea And it's a conspiracy theory, is to find literally the worst people on earth, who are the most unsuccessful, and who are claiming victimhood, and then say they're right.
	That is the way that you can show fealty to the idea, just like any cult.
	Any cult requires you to go through a series of steps to show what they call skin in the game.
	This is why, if you're joining a sex cult, they make you get a tattoo, for example.
	You have to do the most extreme thing in order to show that you have fealty to the idea.
	So if you want to show fealty to a basic political idea, which is that individuals and groups fail not because they are failures, not because they have made terrible, terrible decisions, not because they are Betraying their own sense of aspirational purpose, but instead they are failing because of the evil system that surrounds them.
	In order for you to show your fealty to that idea, you have to find the most obvious case of a group of people who have blown every opportunity and acted in the most evil ways and still claim that even those people are victims of the society around them.
	You have to find Hamas, ****, and murderers, and their sympathizers in the civilian population, who spent 20 years allowing Hamas to run roughshod through their area and govern them, and who still, by polling data, favor October 7th and Hamas.
	You have to find those people, and you have to say, those people too are victims.
	And I will show you how strongly I believe they're victims.
	Why?
	Why does that matter?
	Because again, that is the tattoo.
	It's the NXM tattoo.
	It is the way of demonstrating fealty to the victimhood cult.
	And that victimhood cult is deeply involved.
	This is a conspiracy theory.
	Understand, this is a broad writ conspiracy theory.
	Now I want to talk about the rise of conspiracy theories on all sides.
	I talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I want to talk about this more at length because the conspiratorial victimhood cult now infuses pretty much every side of the political aisle.
	I wish it were restricted to the far progressive left.
	It is not.
	It has now pervaded pretty much every area of American political life.
	Every politician declares that you, everyone, is a member of a victim group.
	Victimhood politics all the way down.
	The only question is, who is the conspiratorial force and who is the victim?
	But everyone is under the bizarre belief that they are being victimized in the freest society in human history.
	Now, that doesn't mean that conspiracies don't exist.
	It doesn't mean that there aren't people who do victimize other people.
	All of that's true.
	But when I talk about the conspiracy theory of society, I'm referring to the idea that without any real specification as to who comprises the conspiracy, how it works, what are the actual evidentiary proofs that it's happening, You can simply suggest that your own victimhood, your own failures are the result of you being a victim.
	And again, this is a pervasive sense that has encroached upon the entire body of politics.
	It is enervating and it's un-American.
	The American dream is the idea that you are not a victim.
	In fact, no matter how terrible your history, no matter how much you were a victim, you can still rise.
	That's the American dream.
	The American Dream is formerly enslaved people in the United States rising into the middle class and then into wealth, building families, building churches.
	That's the American Dream.
	The American Dream is poor commoners in Europe coming to the United States, forging and surging forth across the continent and building themselves up into successful people.
	That's the American dream, not them sitting around and talking about how societal forces are so militarized against them.
	The American dream is people like my great-great-grandparents coming in 1907 and showing up with nothing, not knowing the language, and not considering themselves victims of the government or of the surrounding society, but treating all obstacles As barriers to be overcome rather than insuperable obstacles that bar them from success.
	That's the American dream.
	When we say the American dream is dead, I think that what most people mean is that there are now obstacles to the American dream that prevent them from achieving their aspirations.
	But if the American dream is dying, it's because we have ceased to dream.
	It's because people have decided that the dream itself is stupid.
	That the reason that they are failing is not because of their own failures.
	They're failing because the society around them is failing.
	That's incredibly dangerous.
	It's an incredibly dangerous idea.
	And it does, in fact, kill the American dream.
	There's nothing new particularly about these sorts of conspiracy theories.
	There's a famous philosopher named Karl Popper.
	He wrote an amazing book called The Open Society and Its Enemies, big bestseller back in the 1940s.
	He's most famous as an empiricist.
	His basic theory is that you can't prove theories true as much as you can falsify them.
	Right, that through falsification we can sort of by process of alienation tell what's false and then what remains is what's true.
	That was Karl Popper's basic theory when it came to scientific knowledge.
	He opposed what he called inductive reasoning.
	That you reason to a point from the prior evidence?
	Instead, he said, you have tests and you test the theory over and over and over.
	Empirical testing of theories.
	Okay, but he wrote in this book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, about what he called the conspiracy theory of society.
	And here's what he wrote.
	He said the conspiracy theory of society is quote, the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.
	Sometimes it's a hidden interest which has to first be revealed and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.
	So what he says is most of the societal forces that are around us are evolutionarily created.
	That when there's a problem in society, usually that has been built up over the course of generations gradually and very often not on purpose.
	That the unintended consequences of human action typically are the things that build up systems.
	It's usually not some group of men in a room somewhere who are figuring out how all the levers of society work.
	Why does that make a difference?
	Because once you start attributing everything around you to a conspiratorial group of people in the back room who are trying to figure out how to screw you, things get very ugly very quickly.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	He says this view, this conspiratorial view of society, arises, quote, From the mistaken theory that whatever happens in society, especially happening such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike, is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups.
	This theory is widely held.
	In its modern forms, it is a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition.
	The belief in the Homeric gods, whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War, is gone.
	The gods are abandoned, but their place is filled by powerful men or groups, sinister pressure groups, whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from, such as the learned elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.
	And so what he's pointing out here is that if you go back to pagan cultures, pagan cultures basically suggested that all the ills that you were suffering were the result of a series of gods who were conspiring against you.
	And when you read the Iliad, this is what you see.
	You see people who are making independent human decisions, but those decisions are constantly thwarted by a group of people in the sky, and I call it a conspiracy theory, who are figuring out how your life actually is supposed to work.
	Monotheistic religion, on the other hand, actually fights against conspiracy theories.
	Why?
	Because monotheistic religion says there is one god, And that one God is in charge of the universe.
	And that one God created a good universe.
	That God is good.
	His universe is good.
	And that means that if you are suffering a problem, the first place you should look is not to the gods or to the universe.
	The first place you should look is to you.
	That's what the Bible is predominantly about.
	Adam is placed in the Garden of Eden.
	It is a Garden of Eden.
	It is an amazing place.
	And he is placed there to cultivate the Garden.
	And it is his failures that lead to his banishment from the Garden of Eden.
	Not God's evil.
	Not the gods conspiring against Adam.
	Adam's own failures lead to him being expelled from the Garden of Eden.
	It's why the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel are literally the most important stories in human history.
	Because those particular stories explain all of human history.
	Because what do human beings do once they are expelled from the Garden of Eden?
	They start blaming conspiracy theories.
	Cain looks at Abel, and he says, it's not fair that Abel's sacrifice was accepted by God, but mine was not.
	Must be some sort of unfair thing happening, and he kills Abel.
	Even though God explicitly warns him, maybe you should look at your own actions.
	Sin crouches at your door.
	Instead, you might want to look internally and try to figure it out.
	And actually, the lesson of Cain enables that Cain eventually does that.
	He repents and then he goes and builds cities.
	But, that is what monotheistic religion did.
	Monotheistic religion said, God is good.
	The universe he created is good.
	If there is a problem in your life, there's like a 98% shot that you should do something about it.
	Doesn't mean there aren't problems that are created by other people.
	And we should all find those problems created by other people.
	And we should fight those problems created by people.
	But there has to be evidence.
	We have to find pathways of fixing those problems.
	But if there's something going wrong in your life, the first place you should look before you look to quote-unquote vague systems, before you go ghost hunting, you should look at you.
	Then monotheistic religion declines.
	And in its place, you don't get pagan gods.
	You get a new form of paganism, which is the conspiracy theory.
	So here's what Popper writes, is, I do not wish to imply that conspiracies never happen.
	On the contrary, they are typical social phenomena.
	They become important, for example, whenever people who believe in the conspiracy theory get into power.
	People who sincerely believe that they know how to make heaven on earth are most likely to adopt the conspiracy theory and to get involved in a counter conspiracy against non-existing conspirators.
	For the only explanation of their failure to produce their heaven is the evil intention of the devil, who has a vested interest in hell.
	You see this on all sides of the political aisle.
	The only thing that stands between us and a greater world is if I can just get those group of people and I can, I need the power in order to do that.
	And the reason I need the power is because they are involved in a conspiracy against me.
	Give me the power and I will fix this thing.
	When the reality is that the vast majority of problems are solvable in a free country like the United States, the freest country in the history of the world.
	The most prosperous country in the history of the world because it is the freest country.
	Those problems are mostly solvable at a personal level.
	Again, politics, instead of finding discreet problems and solving discreet problems, has become about how do we blame the society around us for our own personal failings.
	By the way, when it comes to monotheistic religion, the reason Marxists hate monotheistic religion is because it debunks the conspiracy theory.
	Marxists hate monotheistic religion.
	This is the reason why the communists tried to kill the church, because the idea was that a monotheistic religion says God is good, the universe is good.
	If you're failing, you might want to look at you.
	Marxism says if you're failing it's because society created a system that makes you fail and we need to rip down that system.
	This is why Marx suggested that religion was the opiate of the masses.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	So, Popper writes even further.
	He says, what was one of the chief factors leading to the exacerbation of conspiracy theory of society?
	Why has this become so prevalent?
	He's writing this in the 40s.
	He says, the big problem is what he called discretionary powers designed to empower organs of the state to act within certain limits as they consider necessary for achieving the ends laid down by the rulers for the time being.
	So centralization of power turns into, we need to act against the conspiracy.
	And we can't go through any sort of predictable process.
	We can't go through any legalistic process because it might get thwarted.
	We need to solve the problem fast.
	And the best way to do that?
	More centralized power in the hands of an unanswerable few.
	He writes, the use of discretionary powers is liable to grow quickly once it has become an accepted method, since adjustments to discretionary short-term decisions can hardly be carried out by institutional means.
	You're gonna have to move too fast.
	You can't go through, like, a legislature.
	You can't go through a budgetary process.
	You need to have an administrative state that can move quickly and needs to be able to do things at a moment's notice.
	And it doesn't have to make its excuses to you, because after all, there's a conspiracy afoot, and that conspiracy can only be thwarted by centralized collective power through discretionary means.
	He says this tendency must greatly increase the irrationality of the system, creating in many the impression that there are actually hidden powers behind the scenes, making them susceptible to the conspiracy theory of society with all of its consequences, heresy hunts, national, social, and class hostility.
	So, you give the government a lot of power?
	You centralize power?
	And then you use that centralized power in order to push discretionary power and then discretionary power because it doesn't look predictable, because it doesn't look rational.
	That breeds more conspiracy theories because now you actually do have small groups of people in shady rooms making decisions for all of society.
	And so now we are in a death spiral, a conspiracy theory death spiral that ends with the belief by the vast majority of Americans that they are now victims in the society.
	And once Americans believe that they are victims of societal institutions around them, And that freedom is not the answer.
	Individual freedom is not the answer.
	Collective power is the answer.
	That's the end of the American dream.
	It's totally dead.
	You can draw this out on a flow chart.
	I want to do this just for one second because it's actually a pretty simple way to see exactly where the country is going if this doesn't stop right now.
	Okay, so everything starts with a problem.
	Hey, so the problem is real, okay?
	The question is, is it an individual problem or a collective problem?
	Is this a problem that you could solve on an individual level, or is this a problem that has to be solved by the mass power of the collective?
	The vast majority of problems in your life are solvable on an individual or local community level.
	That has been true for a very long time in the United States.
	It doesn't mean there aren't big collective problems that we need to solve together.
	It means that those are pretty few in number.
	In a free country like the United States, we are not living in Tsarist Russia.
	Okay, so the next move that people make, a problem really is a claim of victimhood.
	You're being victimized by something.
	Sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not.
	The next thing that happens is that you blame that on society.
	Right, so instead of you internalizing the problem, trying to fix the problem, instead, you blame the society.
	And once you blame the society, you very quickly end up, if you do not have evidence, at a conspiracy theory.
	Okay, now you have a conspiracy theory.
	There's a group of people who are stopping you from solving your problem.
	You blame society.
	You don't have an answer.
	So it must be a conspiracy.
	There must be some sort.
	And you're just asking questions.
	You don't know.
	Right?
	This is the game that is played by so many corrupt commentators.
	Just asking questions.
	I don't have to show you evidence that something terrible is happening.
	I don't have to actually demonstrate how the thing is happening.
	I don't have to tell you who the problem is.
	Wink wink.
	But!
	I can just tell you right now that there is, but even if I'm asked about it, hey, I'm just asking questions.
	Now, let me tell you something about just asking questions for a second.
	Just asking questions is a game for children.
	My son is seven.
	He can just ask questions.
	My daughter is 10.
	She can just ask questions.
	If you are 50 and you are just asking questions, I don't think you're just asking questions.
	I think that your level of curiosity is actually quite low.
	I think that you don't care enough to know or know enough to care.
	I think that the vast majority of people who are in the just asking questions business have an answer that they want to suggest, but they know there's no evidence for it, so instead they hide behind just asking questions.
	In other words, they're completely full of s***.
	So, you get to the conspiracy theory.
	Now, in order to solve the conspiracy theory, you need to mobilize collective power.
	Because you have a conspiracy.
	The conspiracy can only be fought, it can't be fought by an individual.
	It has to be fought by centralization of collective power.
	It's the only way to do it.
	And then you have a problem, as Popper says.
	Collective power tends to be pretty slow-moving and large and unwieldy.
	So then what you have to do is you have to delegate that.
	You have to delegate that collective power to some sort of discretionary power.
	You have to delegate it to the discretionary power, right?
	Because once you delegate it to the discretionary power, then they can handle the problem.
	The problem is that the discretionary power actually does look a lot like a conspiracy because now you actually have a small group of people who have been allocated outsized power without answerability or accountability.
	And that group of people can now be blamed for other failings because they, in fact, will be involved in those failings.
	And so what you end up with is, wait for it, You've shortcutted the first couple of steps, you end up back at the conspiracy theory, and now you're in a spiral.
	Now you're in a never-ending spiral.
	More conspiracy theories requires more collective power, requires more discretionary power, which leads to more conspiracy theories, more collective power, more discretionary power, and so on.
	And that's how freedom dies, through the power of collective conspiracy theories.
	And that is where we are.
	There's only one way to break that chain.
	The one way to break that chain is to say to yourself, And say to the society, stop being whiny.
	Stop pretending that every problem is a collective problem.
	If you have a problem, show the evidence of the problem so we can all solve it together.
	Ghost hunting is not meant to actually find the ghost.
	It is meant to mobilize the collective in pursuit of power.
	That's what's going on, politically, on pretty much all sides of the aisle right now.
	We have to break that chain.
	We have to go back to the individual American dream.
	Again, it doesn't mean there aren't conspiracies, doesn't mean there aren't bad people trying to do bad things, but we have to be very specific about what we are targeting, and very meticulous in our use of power in order to target it, or we end up in a very, very bad position.
	Now, in the end, who are the greatest enemies of the conspiracy theorists?
	The greatest enemies.
	The greatest enemies of the conspiracy theorists are people who actually are victimized.
	Who actually are victimized, and who refuse victimhood status.
	Those are the people that conspiracy theories cannot take.
	They cannot take it.
	Because if you actually are victimized, and what you say is, I am not a victim.
	I, in fact, can overcome whatever obstacles are put in my way.
	Because this is a free society.
	You become the enemy.
	You become the enemy.
	This is why anti-Semitism very often ends up connected with conspiracy theory.
	Because, unfortunately, it is just a reality of the world that Jews have been disproportionately victimized by surrounding groups.
	And it is also true that Jews have been disproportionately successful.
	But it's not unique to Jews.
	It's true for middlemen Chinese in various countries in Asia.
	It's true right now of Southeast Asians in many areas of the United States, in impoverished areas of the United States.
	It's not unique to Jews, but any group or person who is disproportionately victimized and also disproportionately successful explodes the entire victimhood conspiracy theory mentality.
	And those people must be destroyed.
	And this is how you end up with supposedly tolerant and diverse people in Berkeley, California, mocking Holocaust survivors.
	That's how you end up with this.
	Here's some tape.
	Hi!
	surge in anti-semitism. Jews are now under existential threat. The invasion by
	Hamas which broke a ceasefire...
	Time! Time!
	Okay, Mr. Witt, ladies and gentlemen, if you can please let me facilitate the meeting.
	Led to the murder of 1,200 Israelis and the brutal torture and rape of women, the destruction of property...
	of course they have to heckle the holocaust survivor Of course they do.
	And of course they have to stand up in favor of Hamas.
	And of course this room is replete with signs for Black Lives Matter and gay pride.
	Of course.
	Because the conspiracy theories that believe that the West is the obstacle to your success, those conspiracy theories always end with going after people who have experienced victimhood and refuse to be the victims.
	Because it explodes the entire basis for their attempt at collective power.
	Okay, in just one second, we'll bring you all the updates on Sam Bankman-Free and everything else.
	First, I recently went to Kensington, Pennsylvania.
	It's a neighborhood of Philadelphia.
	What I witnessed was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen in this country.
	Streets plagued by people shooting up, a homeless population spiraling out of control, and the most tragic aspect, of course, is the heartbreak of moms losing their kids to fentanyl overdose.
	I talked with many of those moms.
	The fentanyl crisis has engulfed the country, has become the deadliest drug epidemic in American history in 2023 alone.
	The total fentanyl related deaths soared to a staggering 112,000 lives lost.
	Behind those numbers are actual real heartbreaking tales of loss and despair, a growing sense of abandonment.
	Joe Biden is doing nothing.
	Join me on the ground as we look into the consequences of Joe Biden's policy failures and how they are contributing to the gravest drug crisis in the history of the United States.
	Watch episode two of my new series, The Divided States of Biden, streaming exclusively at Daily Wire+.
	Meanwhile, Sam Bankman Freed.
	You remember that guy?
	He defrauded people out of literally billions of dollars.
	He is now going to go to jail for the next 25 years, according to The Wall Street Journal.
	Inmates can make ceramics or crochet at a federal prison in Lompoc, California.
	At a federal prison in Mendota, a few hours away, inmates have a harmonica or play basketball on one of five facility courts.
	Those prisons represent possible landing places for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who will, in coming months, report to begin serving his 25-year sentence imposed Thursday by U.S.
	District Judge Louis Kaplan in Manhattan.
	Kaplan recommended the one-time entrepreneur be assigned to either a low- or medium-security prison near where his parents live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
	They suggested, the judge did, that he has autism and his association with wealth that make him a target for other prisoners, so they're going to put him in a minimum or moderate security prison.
	He is going to stay there for the next 25 years of his life.
	He'll probably be 50 by the time he gets out.
	And of course, a well-deserved sentence for a fraudster.
	This is the second biggest sentence that we have seen for this kind of fraud since Bernie Madoff
	got 150 years in prison and then died in prison.
	Benjamin Fried's sentence, of course, was based on the fact that he essentially told people
	to invest in FTX and then took the money from FTX and poured it into a fake Bitcoin scam
	while simultaneously skimming off the top.
	He got away with it because for a very long time, he was pretending that he was a charitable entrepreneur.
	He had this whole theory about how if you made more money, this meant you could give more charity,
	which of course is true, but it also meant that since he was passing that money
	around to politically connected people,
	he could get away with it for a very, very long time, which apparently he did.
	Bankman Freed's sentence is good evidence that you should really check the financial bona fides of the places you invest rather than simply trusting people based on their virtue signaling.
	That is the short story of Sam Bankman Freed.
	And meanwhile, The Democrats are starting to get very nervous about RFK Jr.
	RFK Jr.
	in current polling is somewhere between 6 and 10 percent.
	The question is where those polling numbers are coming from.
	Are those coming from Republicans who are dissatisfied with Donald Trump?
	Or are they coming from Democrats dissatisfied with Joe Biden?
	James Carville believes that maybe he's drawing from Trump.
	That's not really what the evidence suggests at this point.
	So the Bobby Kennedy thing.
	I actually think Bobby Kennedy might hurt Trump more than he hurts It's funny you say that.
	We have one headline, Politico said, RFK is a spoiler, but for who?
	Yeah.
	And you can't, you take a poll now, but I think there's a certain percent of people in the country that they're just like, just F the whole thing.
	F it all.
	I can't take it.
	F it all.
	Yeah.
	And Biden is not going to get any of the F it all vote.
	Now, the reality is that RFK Jr., because of Nicole Shanahan, the person he just brought on as VP, who actually has been bankrolling a lot of his campaign, he's going to be on a lot of state ballots.
	And if he's on state ballots in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania?
	That's gonna hurt Biden.
	According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump leads Biden by a little bit under two points in a two-candidate race, but in a three-candidate race, with Kennedy earning somewhere around 12% nationally, he is beating Joe Biden by five points, 41 to 35.
	He's actually leading by almost six.
	Not a lot of battleground polling on the three-candidate race, but The reality is that Kennedy is going to do better in a three-candidate race than, say, Jill Stein did in 2016, when her voters provided a margin of error large enough to hand the election to Trump in many of the swing states.
	In the RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump's lead, for example, grows from 5.2% to 6% in Arizona in a three-way,
	5.2% to 7.4% in Georgia, 3 to 6 in Nevada, 4.4 to 6.7 in North Carolina.
	Only in Michigan does it seem like the addition of these other third-party candidates actually hurts Trump a little
	bit.
	This is according to Ed Kilgore, writing for the New York Intelligencer.
	So this is not somebody who is on the right.
	This is why Joy Behar is freaking out about RFK Jr.
	Here she was yesterday.
	Why do you want to destroy the election and hand it to Trump, if possible?
	He's a Kennedy.
	His forefathers are rolling over in their graves with this.
	His own family is telling people.
	We already have one clown in the race.
	Do we need two of them?
	Now, weirdly enough, Donald Trump is attacking RFK Jr.
	as a candidate.
	Earlier this week, he attacked him, casting him as a liberal Democrat in disguise, but he also was backing him as a spoiler against Joe Biden.
	He did say, I love that he is running.
	And he should.
	I mean, RFK Jr.
	is basically a stand-in for people who are dissatisfied with Biden but can't bring themselves to pull the trigger for Trump.
	And that's going to be a lot of people.
	Joe Biden has disappointed an enormous number of people, particularly moderates.
	Everybody's talking about the progressive disaffection with Joe Biden.
	Moderate disaffection with Joe Biden is going to be just as high, if not higher.
	Progressive voters are louder about it, but moderate voters are the ones who are going to make a difference in this year's election.
	And as I've said over and over and over and over, Joe Biden has steered away from the voters that brung him, which is usually a very bad strategy in a national election.
	We'll get some more on this in just one moment.
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	Meanwhile, there is more information on the death of Next Benedict.
	So you remember, Next Benedict's death was exploited by the media to pretend that it was anti-trans bigotry that led Next Benedict to die.
	Originally, they suggested that Next Benedict, who was a 16-year-old girl who claimed that she was gender non-binary, they claimed that she was abused by other students at her high school, beat up in a bathroom, and then died because of being beaten up.
	And it turns out not one element of that was true.
	It turns out that Next Benedict started the fight in the bathroom, It turns out that next Benedict was actually in full decent health after that fight?
	It turns out that NextBenedict committed suicide.
	So literally every element of that was false.
	And now we are getting new details into the life of NextBenedict, which demonstrate once and again, again, again, again.
	When you are talking about young people committing suicide, it is not because society is mean to them for their gender non-binary status.
	According to RedState, now that we have the full autopsy report for NextBenedict, many of the questions surrounding her overdose have been answered.
	The full report released by the Chief Medical Officer and Board of Medicological Investigations confirms what the earlier Medical Examiner's Office reported.
	There were massive amounts of diphenhydramine, more commonly known as Benadryl, in Nex Benedict's Dagny, was her actual name, in her blood.
	Dr. Paul Wax, the Executive Director of the American College of Toxicology, reviewed the results, confirmed she could have consumed 50 to 100 pills to reach that toxicity level.
	Her death was intentionally self-inflicted.
	While advocacy groups remain insistent her distress sourced from bullying at school, Dagny did not indicate this in her last notes.
	The Owasso Police Department released a statement saying, quote, although the notes do not make any reference to the earlier fight or difficulties at school, the parents indicated that Benedict reported being picked upon for various reasons while at school.
	As is usual in these cases, there's much more to the story, says Red State.
	A hint was provided by the Washington Post on February 21st, 2024 that never made it beyond that report.
	Describing Dagny's funeral, the article states that Dagny's cousin spoke along with her mother and Benedict.
	Next, his biological mother was among the mourners.
	Their father, who was in prison for abuse, was not.
	So what exactly?
	Where was dad?
	What happened to the father?
	Well, on July 17th, 2019, when Dagny was 11 years old, an arrest warrant was issued for James Everett Hughes, Dagny's father.
	He was arrested on July 31st, 2019, in Sebastian County, Arkansas.
	The charge was for rape of a minor, under the age of 14, during the time period between May 2017 and August 2017, when Dagny was 9 years old.
	Among many witnesses was Sue Benedict, the grandmother who had adopted Dagny in 2019.
	Hughes would accept a plea deal to sexual assault in the second degree, November 27, 2019.
	He was sentenced to 5 years in prison with 10 years suspended.
	He would be placed on the sex offender list and have no contact with his daughter.
	He was then arrested again January 25th, 2024 by Little Rock Police Department for failing to comply with reporting as a sex offender two weeks before Dagny's suicide.
	Hughes' new case was filed March 5th, 2024 for the offense of failing to register as a sex offender or report the address change.
	Case details are difficult to read.
	The following information is graphic.
	In the report, Dagny, age 11, would tell investigators her father anally raped her when she was nine years old and that he had molested her for years prior.
	So in other words, this is obviously a story of horrific physical sexual abuse of a child by her own father, and that resulted in problems that deserve nothing but sympathy.
	But the media treated this as a case of conservative anti-trans bigotry, which is insane and sick and wrong.
	Just terrible stuff.
	Will the media walk any of what they did back here?
	Of course not, because it backs their particular narrative, and that particular narrative is that America is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place, and their proof of that is that, next Benedict, a young girl committed suicide, and that she must have done so because society was too mean to her, as opposed to because of the very specific circumstances of what appears to be a deeply tragic life.
	Are you coming up?
	Vladimir Putin is again warning of the broadening of his war.
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