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April 12, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

59:03

OJ Simpson Killed By Cancer

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	So, yesterday, O.J.
	Simpson died at the age of 76.
	And the media didn't quite know what to do with that.
	They didn't know what to do with that because, of course, O.J.
	Simpson was a murderer.
	And everyone knows that he was a murderer, but he spent the last half of his life being treated by some in the media as though he was instead a sort of controversial figure.
	A headline from the Washington Post sort of sums this up.
	How will O.J.
	Simpson be remembered?
	The answer, for everyone who remembers the O.J.
	Simpson murder trial, is he will be remembered as a person who very obviously murdered his ex-wife and a person named Ron Goldman, and then who proceeded to be alleviated of the criminal responsibility for that double murder by a jury of people who were politically motivated.
	To the celebration of a wide swath of the American population, he will be remembered as a person who really widened the gap between the races in the United States in a dramatic way, and in a way that, in some ways, has never truly closed.
	It seemed like between OJ Simpson and the election of Barack Obama, America was becoming more racially reconciliatory.
	And then Barack Obama opened those gaps wide again in 2010, 2011, 2012.
	But the OJ Simpson trial was the moment when Americans realized that the attempts of the 1960s and the 1970s to move beyond America's terrible history of racism That that had some pretty impactful consequences, and that there were two sides to the racial conflict in the United States.
	Because up until the Civil Rights Movement, there really was only one side.
	That side was American white supremacists treating black people as chattel, and then American white supremacists treating black people as trash.
	And then after the Civil Rights Movement, the idea was, okay, we're going to put all of that behind us.
	We're now going to move forward in a country that tries to actually meet the guarantees of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal.
	And then in the OJ Simpson trial, it became very clear to a lot of Americans that the standard of equal justice for all, it was not only a matter of, could that be reached?
	It was a matter of, did everyone want that standard to be reached?
	That's what the OJ Simpson trial meant for a lot of people.
	And that's what he will be remembered for as a double murderer who got away with it for racial political reasons.
	So as I say, he died yesterday at the age of 76.
	He left in his wake.
	Still, the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown, without obviously members of their families, who he had brutally slain.
	Not just that, he still owed more than $100 million to their families because they won civil trials against him after losing the criminal trial in favor of convicting him.
	The evidence against OJ, for those who weren't alive for this, was overwhelming.
	And if you weren't alive for the OJ Simpson trial, if you were born afterward, or if you don't remember it very well, it was one of the signal events in truly American history.
	Like, there are very few places in your memory that you can remember where you were when the thing happened.
	For people who are older than I, Pearl Harbor or the moon landing.
	For people of my age, the two events that come to mind, where you knew where you were when it happened, We're the O.J.
	Simpson verdict at 9-11.
	Those were the two events where you really know where I was in a classroom in Los Angeles, where the trial was taking place, and they actually wheeled a television into the classroom, the public school classroom I was attending.
	And I remember vividly that as they announced the verdict on the TV, in the public school classroom, where I was going to school, the racial breakdown in the class was perfectly obvious.
	Every kid who was not white was celebratory about the verdict, and every kid who was white was sort of shocked by the verdict.
	Because here's the thing.
	Everyone knew OJ was guilty.
	No one legitimately believed that OJ was innocent.
	It was just a question of whether you wanted to see him acquitted because of racial reasons and those racial reasons were explained at the time and even now by people who believe that somehow some sort of revenge was deserved for America's terrible racial history by allowing a black man who had largely traveled in white circles.
	OJ Simpson was seen as someone who did not want to be seen as a black person in the United States for large parts of his career.
	He wanted to be seen as just a famous person, as an athlete.
	He didn't live in the black areas of Los Angeles.
	He lived in Brentwood, which is a very white area of Los Angeles.
	And yet, after he killed two white people, suddenly his cause became a quote-unquote racial cause.
	And that racial logic has kept up even until today.
	I think the single best take on this In terms of clarifying where people stood on OJ, and still, in some sense, stand on racial politics, particularly on the left, was from Mark Lamont Hill.
	So Mark Lamont Hill, of course, a very radical person.
	Mark Lamont Hill is a true believer in the perverse ideology of diversity, equity, inclusion, critical race theory.
	He's a really true believer in the idea that if you are a member of a quote-unquote victimized group, that you are now absolved from all responsibility because of the evils of the society that surrounds you.
	And that evidence of your membership in a victimized group is the underperformance of that group.
	Underperformance equals victimhood.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	tweeted out yesterday, quote, OJ Simpson was an abusive liar who abandoned his community long
	before he killed two people in cold blood. His acquittal for murder was the correct and necessary
	result of a racist criminal legal system. But he's still a monster, not a martyr.
	Now, if you read the first sentence and the last sentence of that tweet, they go together, right?
	O.J.
	Simpson was an abusive liar, and also he was a monster, not a martyr.
	But the middle sentence, where he says that his acquittal was necessary, it was correct, it was the result of a racist criminal legal system, is the truly astonishing part.
	So he's acknowledging full-on O.J.
	Simpson murdered two people in cold blood, and that he was a monster, but he still deserved to be acquitted.
	No country, obviously, can survive for very long on the basis that as long as you are a member of a particular race, that you deserve to be acquitted for the murder of somebody else of another race.
	That sort of pure, unbridled hatred and racism wrecks societies.
	And it was made very clear that that was the case in 1995, when the verdict came down.
	And it was made very clear that that was, in fact, the case.
	Today, for a lot of people on the political left, unfortunately.
	I just want to go through this for a moment, because again, a lot of people don't remember.
	This is a long time ago.
	For people like me, it seems like it was fairly recent, but 1995, when the verdict actually came down, that was a, that's a lifetime ago.
	So, the evidence against O.J.
	Simpson was incredibly stacked.
	So, O.J.
	murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, June 12th, 1994.
	There's tremendous evidence that he did it.
	This is not a case where there's a lot of controversy about what happened.
	Everyone knows what happened.
	First of all, he had a history of allegedly abusing Nicole Brown Simpson.
	She'd called the cops on him before for having abused her.
	She actually told the cops at one point that he was going to kill her.
	But the actual crime scene was just a treasure trove for the police.
	There were blood drops on a gate at the murder scene, near bloody shoe prints at the crime scene.
	All of those contained O.J.
	Simpson's genetic markings.
	When Simpson was interviewed by police, he had a cut on his finger that was presumably the source of the blood.
	There was a giant heiress leather glove found at the murder scene near the bodies.
	Its mate was found on Simpson's estate.
	Both gloves were covered in blood.
	And both gloves also had Simpson's genetic markers as well as markers from Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
	Hairs that were similar to OJ's hair were found in a knit cap at the crime scene.
	Strands of hair were covered from Ron Goldman's shirt.
	They were also identical to Simpson's head hair.
	There were bloody shoe prints found at the crime scene, matching, very famously, size 12 Bruno Magli shoes.
	That shoe is a unique Italian-made model, and they were Simpson's shoes.
	Bloody socks were found in Simpson's bedroom, and that blood had both his genetic markers and Nicole Brown Simpson's genetic markers on them.
	So, I mean, this was an open and shut criminal case.
	And everybody who has tried to make this into the failures of lawyering on the part of the prosecution, it's a whole series that was made on FX where it was all about the errors of lawyering.
	This case was lost, as it turns out, the minute that the jurisdiction over the case was transferred from Brentwood to downtown Los Angeles.
	Which was, in fact, the fault of Gil Garcetti, the father of the future mayor Eric Garcetti.
	Gil Garcetti was the DA at the time, and he moved the case from Brentwood, which was a largely white area where OJ undoubtedly would have been convicted, correctly, to downtown Los Angeles, where the jury pool was significantly more black.
	And the jury that ended up acquitting OJ Simpson was, in fact, majority-minority.
	The O.J.
	Simpson story is a reminder that criminal justice can be used as a piece of a movement.
	One of the things that's so obvious about O.J.' 's guilt, and we see this now, is that political movements, when they pick their victims, according to the political left, the true victim of the O.J.
	Simpson story was actually O.J.
	Simpson.
	Because O.J.
	had been wrongfully targeted by the police.
	We'll go through some of the evidence in a minute and what happened at trial and the attempts to basically say that because one police officer said racist things, therefore O.J.
	could be acquitted for murdering two people.
	But the reason that so many members of the political left and the racial left glommed on to the O.J.
	case is because he was a bad example.
	And sometimes it's hard to understand in American politics why it is that certain cases become national stories while other cases don't.
	There are undoubtedly cases that we never hear of, of actual crimes in which a racist police officer harms a black person.
	And then is convicted and then goes to jail.
	And we never hear those cases when the evidence is clearly against the officer.
	The cases we always hear are the cases of bad examples.
	Michael Brown, who tried to grab a gun off a police officer.
	Or Breonna Taylor, who was staying at her boyfriend's apartment when she was accidentally shot by police after they warned that they were coming in the door.
	Or George Floyd, who was high as a kite and saying he couldn't breathe before he was even taken out of the car and no allegations were even made at trial against Derek Chauvin.
	Suggesting that Chauvin was a racist.
	Bad examples must be picked and sides must be taken based on the bad examples.
	Because as in every political context, showing that you have political fealty to a particular position requires you to take positions that are untenable.
	The more faith you show in the political narrative, the more you're willing to pick a bad example and say, even this bad example applies to my narrative.
	And O.J.
	was the worst example of all.
	As we say, O.J.
	was not somebody who had historically associated himself with the race question in America.
	O.J., historically, was not somebody who had drawn particularly close to black activism, for example, so he wasn't targeted for his politics.
	O.J.
	happened to be unbelievably clearly guilty of a double murder.
	And it was precisely because of that that he became such a cause celeb, particularly in the black community.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	So here's the flashback.
	A little bit of a blast from the past here for those who remember.
	1994, Nicole Brown Simpson's body being removed from the Brentwood estate where she had been murdered along with Ron Goldman.
	Ron Goldman, of course, had just been a person working at a local restaurant, who kind of tangentially knew Nicole Brown Simpson, and was bringing her glasses that she had forgotten at the restaurant.
	O.J.
	came over to murder Nicole, and Ronald Goldman ended up being there.
	So here they were removing the body.
	Then, as you'll recall, O.J.
	was going to be arrested, and he decided that he was going to try to get away from the police in what is the most famous boring car chase of all time, the White Bronco chase.
	I remember it was during the 1994 NBA Finals, and they put this on full screen in the NBA Finals in the corner of the screen.
	I remember being pretty ticked because I used to watch the NBA Finals a lot more.
	And OJ was going down the highway and supposedly threatening to kill himself in the back of the Ford Bronco as a bunch of people stood on overpasses in Los Angeles with giant signs reading, Run OJ Run.
	So this was the beginning of celebrity, modern celebrity crime culture.
	And also, the beginning of this kind of perverse movement where ideology trumped fact to the extent that you could actually go out on an overpass with a sign encouraging a double homicide perpetrator to run from the police.
	When they got to the trial, all this broke out into the open.
	So Johnny Cochran put on a show.
	The defense team, this is all highly publicized obviously, the defense team was made up of the so-called dream team.
	They're like Robert Shapiro, Johnny Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz.
	Now all these people were incredibly well credentialed.
	Cochran is the person who took the lead.
	The reason that Cochran really took the lead is because he was perfectly willing to play racial politics with this particular case.
	This was a pure case of jury nullification.
	There's a pure case in which the jury just said, we know he's guilty.
	We don't care.
	We're doing it anyway.
	And he made a bunch of spurious arguments that of course then entered the lexicon.
	So, OJ was given the other glove to try on, the bloody gloves.
	You remember, as you mentioned in the evidence, there were two gloves.
	One was found at his Brentwood home.
	The other was in the courtroom.
	Now, something happens to leather when you make it wet.
	It shrinks, as everybody who has ever, for example, worn a golf glove in the rain knows.
	You put it in your bag, you take it out later, and it's all crinkled up, because that's what happens to leather.
	Also, O.J.
	at this time is wearing a surgical glove, which has another layer beneath the glove.
	And here was O.J.
	trying on the glove.
	And this was the main part of the argument, as we'll see in a moment.
	Here was O.J.
	trying on the glove, which was stained, by the way, with his blood.
	You have a problem putting a piece of the glove on his hand?
	Okay, first of all, that glove clearly fits.
	All he has to do is pull it a little bit.
	Yep.
	Right, now he's gonna pretend that he can't get the glove on.
	Oh, it's so hard for him.
	It's so hard for him to get the glove on.
	I know that we were supposed to pretend in the moment that the glove did not fit.
	That was clearly the other glove.
	Obviously.
	Oh my gosh, wow.
	And then the idea is it doesn't fit.
	The gloves don't fit.
	This became the centerpiece of the Johnny Cochran argument.
	Here is Johnny Cochran doing some good old time lawyering here.
	I'm gonna show you something.
	This is a knit cap.
	I'm gonna put this knit cap on.
	You've been seeing me for a year.
	If I put this knit cap on, who am I?
	I'm still Johnny Cochran with a knit cap.
	And if you look at O.J.
	Simpson over there, and he has a rather large head, OJ Simpson in a knit cap from two blocks away is still OJ Simpson.
	It's no disguise.
	It's no disguise.
	It makes no sense.
	It doesn't fit.
	If it doesn't fit, You must acquit.
	This was the argument, and it was a stupid argument at the time, but it was turned into a supposedly interesting argument, specifically because of all the racial connotations around the case.
	And those racial connotations came to a head over the testimony of Mark Fuhrman.
	Mark Fuhrman was an evidentiary expert for the LAPD.
	He had handled evidence.
	He was brought up to discuss the evidence.
	And he had denied, in court, racist remarks regarding O.J.
	Simpson, But it turns out there was tape of him saying racist things on the stand.
	For the first time, excerpts from the Furman tapes you've never heard.
	Vulgar.
	Sexist.
	Steve said, oh, fight for you.
	Hold up one.
	Thank you.
	The plot works.
	Big nose.
	Sexist.
	How do you arrest a violent suspect?
	I yell out, have a man do it.
	Disturbing.
	You've got to be a borderline socialist.
	You've got to be violent.
	You gotta be violent.
	Okay.
	And then, it turns out that on the stand, he was asked about whether he had ever used racist language.
	Here he was on the stands denying racist remarks with regard to O.J., particularly.
	I want you to assume that perhaps at some time, since 1985 or 6, you addressed a member of the African-American race as a n*****.
	Is it possible that you have forgotten that act on your part?
	No, it's not possible.
	Are you therefore saying that you have not used that word in the past ten years, Detective Furman?
	Yes, that's what I'm saying.
	And you say on your oath that you have not addressed any black person as a s* or spoken about black people as s* in the past ten years, Detective Furman?
	That's what I'm saying, sir.
	So that anyone who comes to this court and quotes you as using that word in dealing with African Americans would be a liar, would they not, Detective Furman?
	Yes, they would.
	All of them, correct?
	All of them.
	Okay, so there were some tapes of Furman and an aspiring screenwriter named Laura Hart McKinney covering 12 hours on tape over many years.
	And in those tapes, he had used some 41 racial epithets and made statements about police being above the law.
	And apparently, he used the N-word in those tapes two times.
	And that was then heard in the courtroom.
	And so the idea was if he's lying about using the N-word on the stand, Then he must be lying about the evidence.
	An absurd contention.
	The reason he was lying about using the N-word on the stand is because it was embarrassing.
	You can't lie about something like planting OJ's blood all over everything, everywhere.
	And so, in any case, the verdict gets read, and you can see the reactions as the OJ Simpson verdict was read in court.
	Here is a flashback to the reactions as the OJ verdict was read.
	We, the jury, in the above entitled action, find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code section 187A, a felony upon Ronald Lyle Goldman, a human being, as charged in count two of the information.
	We, the jury in the above entitled action, further find the special circumstance that the defendant, Orethal James Simpson, has in this case been convicted of at least one crime of murder of the first degree and one or more crimes of murder of the first or second degree to be not true.
	Signed this second day of October 1995, juror 230.
	Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this your verdict?
	So say you won, so say you all.
	Yes.
	All right, counsel.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	Same exact time period.
	Here's the report on the difference between how Black Americans and White Americans responded to the very obviously wrong verdict of O.J.
	Simpson, not guilty.
	Here's a poll.
	Okay, so these are the polling data.
	In 1994, when the murders first happened, 63% of White Americans thought that O.J.
	Simpson was guilty.
	22% of Black Americans thought that he was guilty.
	22%.
	So 8 in 10 Black Americans said he was not guilty.
	Which is ridiculous.
	By any stretch of the imagination, it's ridiculous.
	By 1997, those numbers had changed just slightly.
	Now 82% of white Americans said O.J.
	Simpson was guilty.
	Only 31% of black Americans said O.J.
	Simpson was guilty.
	Even as of 2015, only 57% of black Americans said O.J.
	was guilty.
	Now, that is a big difference, obviously.
	As I said, as time went on, as this became not the center of racial focus in the United States, more black Americans were willing to admit that he was guilty, because the reality, of course, is that he was totally guilty.
	So by 2015, a majority of both whites and blacks said O.J.
	Simpson was guilty.
	But the point is, why should there be a racial differential when it comes to the guilt of a person who is very, very obviously guilty?
	And if you go back to the time, again, you can see how black people and white people responded incredibly differently to the verdict, acquitting a double murderer.
	Oh, the jury's all coming out!
	A long 10 minutes passed and then...
	Oh, my God, Jason. I'm not guilty of...
	Oh, my God! I'm not guilty!
	Here the crowd is mostly jubilant.
	Not guilty!
	LAPD guilty!
	We brought a TV to the Juice Club where patrons began watching the verdict with a poker face only to be shattered.
	We the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant, Orinzal James Simpson, not guilty of a crime of murder in
	violation of penal code section 187A, a felony upon Nicole Brown Simpson.
	Granted, they were sequestered for a long time and they haven't been exposed to what we have, but God.
	So that you can afford a big shot lawyer and they'll have a lot of money for the case, you can get off with anything.
	You know what? Johnny Cochran will be a rich guy. He will make a fortune. He will get lots of clients now.
	And I hope that he can sleep at night because he got a double, a double murder off the case.
	He's going to go home and feel happy. And what about his kids? How can he even look at his kids?
	Now in subsequent years, it became even more obvious, of course, that OJ was guilty and OJ would joke about the
	murders.
	In fact, there's tape of a person named Ruby Wax talking about being accosted by O.J.
	Simpson on April Fool's, where he shouted her, I did it, April Fool's.
	Just what a delightful human being O.J.
	must have been.
	I did a piece to camera saying, I've been fixed up and I don't know who my date is going to be.
	And we put him in the hallway and then I opened the door and it would be him.
	But when he was out there, all the trays were out there and he was looking for a knife.
	To fool me when the door was open.
	But there was no knife, so he grabbed a banana.
	And then OJ called me up on April Fool's Day in London and said, I killed her.
	And then went, April Fool's.
	What a delightful person.
	And in a 2006 Fox interview, OJ went even further.
	He gave a hypothetical account of how he would have, in fact, killed his ex-wife, as well as Ronald Goldman.
	Here is that 2006 Fox interview.
	Here's how he describes the crucial moments of June 12, 1994, an account which he repeatedly insists is hypothetical.
	As things got heated, I just remember Nicole fell and hurt herself.
	And this guy kind of got into a karate thing.
	And I said, well, you think you can kick my ass?
	And I remember I grabbed a knife.
	I do remember that portion, taking a knife from Charlie.
	And to be honest, after that, I don't remember, except I'm standing there.
	Simpson infers he blacked out and laughs bizarrely.
	I hate to say this.
	I know we gotta back up again.
	And he says he was standing in blood.
	I don't think any two people could be murdered the way they were without everybody being covered in blood.
	Okay.
	So.
	He obviously did it.
	Obviously.
	But even today, there are people who are trying to make excuses for why O.J.
	was acquitted.
	Because the real question isn't really why O.J.
	did what he did.
	The answer is that he was a sociopathic murderer.
	And he murdered two people.
	In cold blood.
	The real question is why the legal system did what it did and why Americans reacted the way that they did.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	Eugene Robinson has a piece.
	In the Washington Post, of course, Eugene Robinson is a black columnist for the Washington Post.
	And here's what he writes, quote, Has theater and his legal circus, Simpson's murder trial has never been surpassed or even equaled.
	Its characters were vivid to the point of being indelible.
	Eager to please Judge Lance Ito, dutiful but overmatched prosecutors, Marsha Clark and Chris Darden, slick and razor sharp defense lawyers, Johnny Cochran and Effley Bailey, house guests, Brian Kato Kaelin, Simpson's friend and counselor, Robert Kardashian, progenitor of all things Kardashian, racist detective Mark Furman, in a non-speaking role, the bloody glove.
	Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, OJ embraced his blackness.
	His professed new racial consciousness allowed some black Americans to at least consider the possibility that he was yet another black man being brutalized by a racist justice system.
	After all, the trial was taking place just three years after the LA riots sparked when the police officers who savagely beat Rodney King were judged to have done nothing wrong.
	The evidence against Simpson was overwhelming, even though the murder weapon and knife was never found.
	The trial took 11 months.
	It took the jury less than four hours to reach its shocking verdict, not guilty.
	And then Eugene Robinson writes this, and it's fascinating.
	He says, I have not a scintilla of doubt that he committed the murders.
	In 2007, Simpson even had the gall to write a book, If I Did It, which he said was a hypothetical narrative of how he would have committed the crime, wink, but of course he didn't.
	He often blathered on about how police should be out there looking for the real killer who was supposedly still out there somewhere.
	In 2008, Simpson was convicted in Las Vegas of armed robbery and other charges and given a harsh 33-year prison sentence.
	But he was released on parole in 2017 and he spent the rest of his healthy years playing golf.
	It was a diminished life to be sure.
	He had just a fraction of his one-time wealth and status.
	His celebrity was of the most tarnished kind.
	His need for adulation would never again be requited.
	He was a pariah.
	But O.J.
	Simpson died a free man.
	He zigged and zagged all his life and never quite got caught.
	That's a rather ambivalent ending for a person who is a double murderer who got off.
	And the basic idea that there is some underlying question of justice with regard to O.J.
	Simpson that would have allowed for the moral imprimatur to be placed upon his acquittal is foolishness.
	And it's not just foolishness.
	It is morally It is morally unrighteous foolishness.
	O.J.
	Simpson was a double murderer.
	He should have gone to jail.
	And if you believe that questions of race should have taken precedence over questions of actual blood guilt, this makes you a bad person.
	That is not how justice works.
	When social justice, which is what we're talking about here, trumps individual justice, when the idea is that a racial narrative about, a true racial narrative about black victimhood in America is supposed to trump the fact that a black man killed two white people, you have lost the threat of decency and morality.
	Justice cannot work under these circumstances.
	It is a perfect encapsulation, the O.J.
	Simpson case, of why social justice is a lie and individual justice is true, and why it was so wildly unjust for O.J.
	Simpson to be let off the hook for the murder.
	It's, again, incredible that this was controversial at the time.
	Do you think that there are members of the jury that voted to acquit O.J.
	because of Rodney King?
	Yes.
	You do?
	Yes.
	How many of you think felt that way?
	was one of the jurors in the OJ Simpson case explaining exactly why OJ Simpson was let
	off.
	Do you think that they're members of the jury that voted to acquit OJ because of Rodney
	King?
	Yes.
	You do?
	Yes.
	How many of you think felt that way?
	Oh, probably 90 percent.
	Ninety percent.
	Bye.
	Did you feel that way?
	Yes.
	That was payback?
	Uh-huh.
	You think that's right?
	Okay, if your answer to is it right to acquit a double murderer because a few years earlier there was a controversial case in which white police officers beat a black man and then ended up being acquitted of particular charges.
	If your answer to is that morally right is That makes you the villain in this story.
	If you were the juror who let off O.J.
	Simpson, you're the villain in this story.
	The proper answer comes courtesy of all people, from Stephen A. Smith.
	Stephen A. Smith had this exactly right.
	Yesterday, he was covering the O.J.
	Simpson death, and here's what he had to say.
	But in the end, speaking directly about OJ Simpson, again, this is what it comes down to.
	Most people believe that he committed those murders.
	I know that if I was on the jury, he would have been under the damn jail.
	I know that much.
	I believe he was guilty, but I don't know.
	I'm talking about based on the evidence that was placed before us.
	During the trial, overseen by Judge Lanzito, this is what we saw on national television, and by most accounts, you found yourself believing he was guilty as hell.
	And in the end, that's what this comes down to.
	That's what it should come down to.
	Unfortunately, that is not what it came down to.
	The question is, if you're going to have a good and righteous America, questions of individual justice must take precedent over foolish narratives about the evils of one group or the evils of another group.
	If anything else is the prevailing moral standard, society will break apart.
	That's what the O.J.
	Simpson trial should have taught us, and we should have remembered it.
	Alrighty, in just one second we'll talk about Joe Biden's flagging campaign.
	First, ladies and gentlemen, the verdict is in.
	The new courtroom comedy series Judge by Matt Walsh on Daily Wire Plus is in fact a hit.
	If you missed the Tuesday night premiere, now is the time to catch up on all the laughter and the legal antics.
	Watch and witness Matt Walsh in the role he was born to play as the judge who's here to settle real grievances from real litigants.
	And believe it or not, his decisions are actually legally binding.
	I know, it's like an actual thing that happened.
	From the bizarre case of exploding lips to the outrageous story of a stolen car, Judged by Matt Walsh delivers a weekly dose of really petty court that'll have you laughing out loud.
	Episodes 1 and 2 are now streaming at DailyWirePlus with new episodes released every Tuesday featuring new cases, plaintiffs, and of course, Matt Walsh with Robe and Gabble.
	This is the Can't Miss series of 2024.
	If you're not a DailyWirePlus member yet, join now.
	Use code JUDGE to check out for 35% off your membership at DailyWirePlus.com.
	Also, We had the opportunity this week to sit down with the brand new president of Argentina, Javier Mille.
	He's a transformative figure, a fascinating figure.
	Faced with a country on the verge of fiscal collapse, he took over and actually fulfilled his campaign pledge to take a chainsaw to the size and scope of government and get that country's fiscal house back in order.
	Fascinating interview.
	Here's a little bit of a taste.
	How come My approval ratings have gone up, and the intention of people to vote for me has also increased.
	It means that the culture battle is bearing fruit, and the Argentine people have decided to mature, put on long pants, do things right, once and for all.
	It goes well beyond the individual Javier Millet.
	This means that the Argentine people have decided to espouse freedom and that is the best message.
	That is some of our Sunday special that is coming out on Sunday.
	Make sure you check it out.
	One of the most important people on the planet right now, not just because he's the leader of a relatively large country, but also because he happens to be an example that the West is going to follow to success or ignore to its own perils.
	Also, by the way, if you want to watch that a day early, head on over to DailyWirePlus and become a member.
	You should've gotten your membership already, so just go do it.
	Go to DailyWirePlus, get a membership.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to lag in the polls.
	He has had a little bit of a momentum builder with regard to the national polling data.
	In fact, five out of the last Eight polls have Joe Biden either tied or ahead in the polling data.
	Reuters Ipsos now has him up 41-37 over Donald Trump.
	INI and TIPP has Biden up 43-40 over Trump.
	Morning Consult has Trump up 1-44-43.
	So whatever you say, this is a very, very close election by every shape or measure.
	That in and of itself is a referendum on how bad a president Joe Biden is.
	And the economy now seems to be going the wrong way on him again because inflation is in fact an embedded fact of life under Joe Biden.
	Mortgage rates, according to the Wall Street Journal, Again, rose to nearly 7%, which is incredibly high for most of my lifetime.
	Mortgage rates you could get at like 3, 4%.
	Now you're talking about mortgage rates at 7%, which is a giant chunk of your money over a long period of time.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the average rate on the standard 30-year fixed mortgage rose to 6.88% according to a survey of lenders released on Thursday by Freddie Mac.
	That's up from 6.82% a week earlier.
	So, once again, those rates are really, really high.
	It makes it very difficult not only for somebody to get a new loan, but also makes it very difficult for somebody to sell their current house and get a loan to buy another house, which means that the stock of housing on the market is peculiarly sticky.
	There's not enough housing on the market because I'm not going to sell my house to get a new one when my 30-year Fixed rate is at three and a half percent.
	And in order for me to sell and get a new house, I'm going to have to jump to a seven percent rate.
	Now, Fed rate cuts are being called into question.
	So all this year, we've been told by the Biden administration and by the press that the rate cuts are coming because inflation will be tamed.
	And then finally, the money will flow freely, loosely, easily again.
	IPOs will start to be successful again.
	New investments will be made possible and all the rest.
	And it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime in the very near future, according to The Wall Street Journal.
	Another firmer-than-anticipated inflation report delivered a meaningful setback Wednesday to the Federal Reserve's hope that it could buoy prospects of a so-called soft landing by dialing back on some of the past year's interest rate increases.
	Solid hiring and the prospect that inflation might settle out closer to 3% than 2% could call into question whether the central bank will be able to cut rates until much later in the year without evidence of a sharper slowdown in the economy.
	This is the third straight month in which prices were hotter than expected.
	And it sends officials back to an uneasy holding pattern, where they wait several more months for either better inflation data or the type of evident economic weakness that they were hoping to avoid.
	So Joe Biden's economy continues to superheat.
	That is because, again, he tossed too much money into an already overheated economy that was already plagued by supply chain problems.
	Too much money following too few goods equals inflation.
	And this is having significant dire ramification for his polling.
	So Roy Tishera, who is the most prescient commentator on the left when it comes to elections, Reuters shares most famous for his theory back in 2004 that Democrats would be able to build a majority-minority coalition and then lead that coalition to victory.
	And then it turns out he had to dissociate himself from his own theory because it turns out it wasn't true in 2016 or even in 2020.
	He doesn't think it'll be true in 2024 either.
	So now he is saying to Democrats, you guys are way too far out on the left on pretty much every issue.
	He says, if you want to win, you have to do three things.
	One, you have to move to the center on culture issues.
	Two, you have to promote what he calls an abundance agenda.
	And three, you have to embrace patriotism and liberal nationalism.
	But the second one is the one that really Joe Biden was supposed to be able to do well with, and he's just not.
	Everybody knows he's too radical for the American public on social issues, like way too radical, and particularly for minorities, who are not actually socially radical on a lot of these issues.
	But the bigger problem for Joe Biden is that a stagnating economy is going to sink him.
	A really burning great economy under Joe Biden, where people felt great about the economy, might make up for his cultural shortcomings.
	But if the economy is stagnating and He is way out of touch with the American public, particularly minorities, Hispanic, black minorities, with regards to social issues.
	He's got a real problem on his hands.
	As Roy Teshara points out, the left has been talking about the economy as though the American people are just nuts, that they've made some sort of huge mistake, the American people.
	But the reality is that there is something else going on here.
	Roy Tishera says, Given all this, why do voters still believe the economy is so bad?
	to the bleak record on the abundance front.
	The first is what I call the deluded ungrateful wretches theory.
	The idea here is that the economy's recent record has been stellar.
	Low unemployment, strong job creation, smartly rising wages and inflation
	that has declined sharply from recent highs.
	Given all this, why do voters still believe the economy is so bad?
	They're deluded.
	But, he says, there's quite a strong case that in terms of the lived experience
	of voters, particularly working class voters, things have not, in fact, been great.
	The primary suspect, of course, is inflation, which is still relatively high, and in June of 2022 reached 9%, the highest inflation rate the country had experienced since 1981.
	People absolutely hate inflation, since it directly undercuts living standards, and they're reminded of this fact every time they go to the grocery store.
	Heather Long of the Washington Post recently collected data on changes in inflation, hourly earnings, and household purchases since Joe Biden took office.
	What she found is that cumulative inflation has outpaced average hourly earning growth, and the rise in many consumer prices has been even larger than overall inflation.
	Rent and meat are up 20%.
	Restaurants and groceries are up 21%.
	Electricity is up 28%.
	Gas, 35%.
	Eggs, 37%.
	Meanwhile, average hourly wages are up only 15%.
	So if inflation outpaces all of those things, then you feel like the economy is getting worse for you.
	Roger Lowenstein, an economics commentator, points out that the median household income went up 10.5% under Donald Trump before the pandemic.
	However, under Biden, inflation has snatched away the gains from even a very strong labor market over his first two years, as price hikes outran wages.
	Real median household income actually fell 2.7%.
	The census hasn't reported median income for 2023, but given that real wages were up about 1% through November, the cumulative change in household median income adjusted for inflation over Biden's first three years is likely to be in the range of mildly negative to very mildly positive.
	In other words, the country did not make progress in improving living standards under Joe Biden.
	And that's what's happening here.
	Even CNN is pointing this out.
	Here is CNN explaining that Americans are not buying what Joe Biden is trying to sell here.
	Now out on the road, President Biden has tried to point to some of those positive indicators over the past few months.
	The fact that unemployment is down, the fact that wages are rising, and that the overall inflation trend is also lowering.
	But even as he's trying to highlight those positive aspects of the economy, what Americans are feeling is completely different.
	Okay, that is right, because Donald Trump was better on economic issues than Joe Biden.
	recent national polls from Marquette, it found that the majority of voters believed that
	the economy is either not so good or poor.
	And then when you stack up President Biden against former President Donald Trump, more
	believe that Trump is better on economic issues than President Biden.
	OK, that is right, because Donald Trump was better on economic issues than Joe Biden.
	So Democrats, faced with the prospect of having to admit that their programs are a failure
	when they spend too much money, that a huge percentage of the job creation right now is
	in government sector jobs.
	Instead, they're going to go with the first theory that Tishera mentioned, the ungrateful wretches theory.
	Here's Whoopi Goldberg doing that routine saying, guys, inflation is not Joe Biden's fault.
	You guys just don't understand economics like Whoopi Goldberg does.
	What I hear when I talk to undecideds is the grocery bills are- But if people knew civics, they would know that that's not- Listen, he doesn't- There are absolutely things that Biden can do to address it, and grocery prices have jumped 25% over four years.
	What can he do?
	Hang on one real quick.
	This is the reality.
	It's the most immediate and repetitive thing.
	You have to buy groceries every week.
	We get that.
	We get all of that.
	But the question is, what do you want him to do?
	Because what can he do?
	He can challenge the major grocery chains if he wants to.
	Here's the thing, you know, people are ** if he does stuff, they're ** if he doesn't do stuff.
	Listen, he's doing what he's supposed to be doing.
	He's doing what he's supposed to be doing.
	But I'm pissed off.
	Americans are spending 11% of their income on food.
	I'm an American.
	I'm a little pissed off about having overpriced stuff, but I'll tell you what I'm really pissed off about.
	I'm really pissed off that people seem to think that the American citizen is a wallet where you can just dip your hand in it.
	Wait, hold up.
	So you're pissed off that your taxes are too high?
	Because you should vote for Trump then.
	Whoopee.
	And yes, the president has something to do with this.
	The president is the one who is generating massive outsized spending along with his Senate majority.
	Corine Jean-Pierre, for her part, she's out there trying to attribute inflation to Russia still.
	Again, this is not going to work for them.
	When the president took office, and you know this, there was a pandemic.
	It was closing down businesses, closing down schools.
	And so it was drastically disrupting the supply chain.
	Let's not forget about that.
	And so that's what was going on.
	And that caused inflation around the world to increase.
	We know that.
	And then further increasing inflation was the Russia's war, Russia's war in Ukraine.
	And in fact, many other countries are even worse off because of that, because of what we've seen with Russia's war.
	Okay, that is not because of Russia's war, and everybody knows that.
	But again, this is Joe Biden's presidency, and Joe Biden's presidency is a failure on pretty much all fronts.
	It's bad domestically.
	It is far worse on the foreign front.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	Joe Biden has a stated policy now of not allowing American allies to win wars, to not even define victory in a way that would allow for the winning of wars.
	So Joe Biden has put forward a completely discombobulated policy with regard to Ukraine.
	He slow-walked weapons in the early days when, actually, Ukraine had the opportunity to push back against Russian aggression far more aggressively before they could become totally entrenched, building World War I lines in Donbass and Crimea, for example.
	Now he sent out his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, to try the Ukrainians for hitting Russian oil refineries in the middle of a war because apparently that's going to impact world oil prices.
	So he'd really prefer that they hit military targets.
	When you're fighting a war, you have to hit the targets that are available, including, for example, the source of Russia's actual wealth, its oil refineries.
	But meanwhile, the Biden administration is chiding the Ukrainians about all of that.
	So completely discombobulated policy when it comes to Ukraine.
	Even more discombobulated policy when it comes to Israel defeating the terrorist group Hamas.
	Iran, for its part, is feeling its oats at this moment.
	Iran is now suggesting that they are going to attack Israel, perhaps directly,
	over the course of the next couple of days, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	Israel is preparing for a direct attack from Iran on southern or northern Israel as soon as Friday or Saturday, according to a person familiar with the matter.
	A person briefed by Iranian leadership said, while attack plans are being discussed, no final decision has been made, but Americans in Israel are now being restricted from any personal travel outside of central Israel, which is like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Beersheba.
	Which means that the Americans think that Iran is going to, perhaps, directly strike Israel.
	Now, if that happens, then Israel will directly strike Iran.
	And that will have been brought about by a policy of weakness by the United States.
	Again, when you draw lines, and those lines are perfectly obvious to everyone, third-rate nations like Iran, in terms of military power, do not violate those lines.
	But the Biden administration is much more focused on limiting Israel and trying to create daylight between Israel and itself, for the voters in Dearborn, Michigan, than they are in actually allowing Israel to win its war.
	In any war, you want your allied forces to defeat and destroy the enemy as fast as humanly possible because that sends the message to all of the enemy nations that if they mess with you or your allies, they will lose.
	But when you create all this vast daylight over supposed lack of humanitarian aid in an area that is currently a war zone, then what you are doing is you're saying to Iran, you can basically do what you want and you can count on those voters in Dearborn, Michigan to pressure Joe Biden to do nothing.
	Meanwhile, you have members of the Democratic coalition like Nancy Pelosi out there still talking about conditioning aid to Israel as Iran threatens direct strikes on Israel.
	Well, I think that is a very contained requirement until you have an investigation of how this happened with cars that are marked very clearly.
	Marked very clearly to be humanitarian assistance.
	So, Israel says that they are going to have an investigation.
	They've begun such a thing, fired a couple of people.
	But I think we have to have also an independent commission.
	That's not required by the letter.
	The letter is simple.
	Until you have an investigation, we should withhold.
	They are having an investigation.
	I think it was a very contained letter.
	So she's trying to walk back now, what she was actually saying, but it's a little bit too late because Iran already took the message.
	Meanwhile, Karine Jean-Pierre was asked whether the Biden administration actually directly warned Iran, like, don't do this.
	Because remember, Joe Biden keeps saying things like don't, and then Iran does.
	So Karine Jean-Pierre has no idea.
	She has no clue.
	I just want to clarify one of your earlier answers.
	Did the administration send a direct warning to Iran not to attack Israel?
	We've been very clear.
	I mean, you heard from the president, right?
	And laid out our commitment to Israel and make sure Israel's security, that continues.
	And so we've had those conversations.
	I'm just not going to go into back and forth.
	Okay, well, you're not going to because the answer is that Joe Biden does not have credible threats in his arsenal.
	He is the most uncredible president on American foreign policy.
	I would say in my lifetime, Barack Obama was in my lifetime as well, and so was Bill Clinton.
	So he's just as non-credible on foreign policy threats as other Democratic presidents, it turns out.
	Meanwhile, the Biden administration putting pressure on Israel to somehow come to a deal with Hamas, despite the fact that Hamas doesn't even tell Israel how many live hostages it currently has, has demonstrated no willingness to come to the table on anything remotely resembling a reasonable proposal.
	Israel is about to give up Or would give up.
	Literally hundreds of murderers in favor of whatever remaining women, children, and men are alive under Hamas hostage negotiations.
	And Hamas is doing nothing.
	And the Biden administration is putting pressure on Israel.
	Here, even Bernie Sanders, the most anti-Israel member of the Senate caucus, even Bernie is admitting that Hamas isn't releasing hostages.
	Senior Hamas officials said on Wednesday they don't have the 40 living hostages in Gaza who meet the criteria for an exchange.
	You know, obviously any deal has to have some reciprocity and hostage release is one of them.
	And now you've got Hamas saying we don't have them.
	Look, this is a nightmare on top of a nightmare.
	I mean, I read that.
	Who knows?
	Who knows how they died, why they died?
	But obviously, you're absolutely right.
	Our hostage exchange people now have been held under terrible conditions for months, and Israel has a right to demand their release.
	And that has got to be part of any package.
	Israel has a right to demand their release, but Bernie will then call on Israel's aid to be cut off in its attempt to extirpate the group that took the hostages in the first place.
	No wonder Iran feels that it can get away with pretty much anything.
	Meanwhile, the Republican caucus continues to descend into further chaos, this time over a FISA renewal bill.
	So the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as we discussed yesterday on the program, Section 702, allows for the surveillance of foreign intelligence data.
	So a foreigner is using his phone and you can now use surveillance methods
	from the intelligence community to look at things like phone calls and metadata,
	not the actual content of the phone calls, for example, but where the phone calls are being made to,
	where they're being made from and all the rest.
	Well, there's been a lot of Republican angst over section 702 because there were not protections in
	place that prevented the abuse of the FISA process
	with regard to Carter Page.
	Carter Page was a low-level foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign in 2015-2016, who was then targeted with a false FISA warrant and wiretapped.
	And that became a cause celeb on the right for good reason because the warrant that was originally given was predicated on nothing.
	It was predicated basically on a bunch of false statements by the Hillary Clinton campaign that was then laundered via the CIA and FBI into a FISA warrant that led to a wiretapping of Carter Page.
	So the question is, how do you stop all of that?
	Well, the Republican proposal in the House that they want is a warrant for every search of American data inside that FISA surveillance network.
	So you have a low-level guy, he wants to type in an American name, and now they need a warrant in order to type in the American name.
	That would be the change that Republicans are seeking.
	Which is fine, except for the fact that apparently Getting a warrant in the FISA process via FISA court is really, really easy.
	So easy that one could be gotten on Carter Page on the basis of nothing.
	The alternative proposal is that any such search has to be elevated up the chain of command up to the deputy FBI director.
	And basically you have to have eyes on and explicit approval of any search for an American name in the FISA intelligence database.
	That's the debate right now happening between some Republicans and other Republicans.
	The stakes are that FISA as a whole expires.
	If FISA as a whole expires, America will no longer have eyes on foreigners with terror connections.
	It will just disappear.
	This is why Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, has been pushing for what he calls a compromise proposal until Republicans actually have control of, you know, the other two elected parts of the government, the Senate and the presidency.
	What he keeps saying is, listen, you keep telling me you want to go for broke on this bill and you're willing to let FISA expire in order to do that.
	Well, I'm just telling you, if you do that, it will expire because the Senate will not approve any such bill and the president will not approve any such bill and FISA will expire.
	And then, God forbid, there's a terror attack and Americans get killed.
	Guess who's going to get blamed?
	The Republicans for letting FISA expire.
	So here is Mike Johnson explaining why he used to be for stricter requirements on FISA warrants, for example, and why he has flipped on this.
	I saw the abuses of the FBI, the terrible abuses over and over and over, the hundreds of thousands of abuses.
	And then when I became Speaker, I went to the SCF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security.
	And it gave me a different perspective.
	So I encourage all the members to go to the classified briefing and hear all that and see it so they can evaluate the situation for themselves.
	Some opinions have changed both ways, but that's part of the process.
	You've got to be fully informed.
	Former Attorney General Bill Barr spoke about what exactly these FISA surveillance processes look like, how they're used, why they're important.
	Here he was explaining.
	We're faced with probably the greatest threat to the homeland from terrorist attack, and our primary means of defending against that is FISA.
	And to take that tool away, I think, is going to result in a successful terrorist attack and a loss of life.
	Well, Johnson took a while in negotiating this.
	He was trying to push it forward.
	He didn't have the votes inside the Republican caucus because Marjorie Taylor Greene has been threatening that she's going to push forward a motion to vacate and try to actually push that to its conclusion if he were to push forward a bill on the FISA surveillance.
	Again, he's being held hostage by a very small minority of his coalition.
	But because those negotiations were taking place, that gave President Trump a chance to sign into the chat.
	President Trump then did, and he put out on Truth Social, quote, kill FISA.
	It was illegally used against me and many others.
	They spied on my campaign.
	OK, well, that is not an actual proper solution.
	Killing FISA altogether is something that pretty much no Republicans are in favor of, because killing FISA altogether means that if you have Al Qaeda members or ISIS members in the United States, you can't actively use electronic measures of surveillance like their metadata.
	in order to track who they are talking to, which is a major problem.
	Instead, Johnson is now proposing a compromise solution, which would allow the extension of FISA 702 to be reauthorized
	for two years, rather than for five. And then he's saying when Trump gets
	elected, and when we have a larger House majority and a Senate
	majority, then we can make exactly the kind of changes that we want.
	In the meantime, we can't let FISA expire.
	So let's make the changes that we can make for the moment.
	Now again, this goes to the job of what the Speaker is supposed to do.
	The Speaker is supposed to cobble together the best deal possible, not the magical utopian deal that doesn't exist in reality where, you know, Chuck Schumer is the Senate Majority Leader, thanks in part to the intervention of Donald Trump in two Georgia Senate races that should have been Republican.
	Not to mention the fact that the President of the United States is currently a Democrat.
	Johnson is faced with the unenviable task of trying to explain reality to a fringe group of Republicans who actually do not seem to care about reality and are posturing for, what, limelight and glory?
	You get the best deal you can.
	There are certain practical Republicans who disagree with Mike Johnson on a lot of matters.
	People like Chip Roy from Texas.
	I really like Chip.
	I think he's a really good principled conservative.
	Chip Roy spends his political capital trying to make specific changes to bills as a general rule.
	And he may disagree with Johnson on where the leverage points are, or disagree with McCarthy on where the leverage points are, but he's trying to make specific changes to specific things.
	That is not the case with part of the Republican caucus, which is why the place is so damned unworkable.
	Here are a bunch of Republicans in the House lamenting the unworkability of the current very, very slim Republican majority.
	Bitter GOP infighting derailing the GOP agenda and now threatening Speaker Mike Johnson's job as he weighs major decisions over the FBI spying power and providing billions in aid to Ukraine, all as the threat to oust him continues to loom as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene escalates her attacks.
	The motion to vacate is real.
	We can't continue to be led by our elected Speaker of the House that's passing the Democrat agenda.
	Our voters will not tolerate that.
	All of it enraging fellow Republicans.
	This is incredibly reckless.
	This is nothing more than just, look at me, no one else is paying attention, so here's my motion to vacate.
	Now it's my time.
	I think it's an absurdity that's unnecessary.
	And frankly, it was a mistake when this Congress allowed it to happen to Kevin McCarthy.
	It's an impossible job.
	The Lord Jesus himself could not manage this conference.
	this country, you just can't do it.
	And by the way, that group of Republicans, that spans from very moderate Republicans
	in New York, if you couldn't recognize their voices, because they're not particularly famous.
	One is from New York, one is from Ohio, one is from Texas.
	That spans the entire Republican caucus.
	Everybody believes the conference is unworkable, which is why, presumably, Senators are not
	Speaker Johnson is meeting with President Trump.
	He wants to do an appearance with Trump because that shows the fellow Republicans that he is not anti-Trump and that Trump is in fact on his side.
	And then he needs to kill the motion to vacate.
	He needs to kill it dead.
	And if that requires Democratic votes, he should do it.
	And he should do it forthwith.
	Because otherwise, he's not going to have anything remotely resembling a Republican House majority.
	Speaker Johnson, I've been encouraging him for two weeks to do this because it is time to marginalize the marginal.
	Enough of this.
	You cannot govern a coalition when it is being held up by people who have no interest in governance or in the coalition itself.
	They're more interested in shooting within the tent than they are in actually directing the fire outward.
	It's absolute ridiculousness.
	And it only helps Democrats.
	Alrighty.
	Coming up, we'll jump into the radicalism of the Democrats' environmental pitch.
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