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May 20, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:17
IRANIAN PRESIDENT DEAD IN HELICOPTER CRASH
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Well, yesterday a great tragedy occurred when a helicopter dropped from the sky in Azerbaijan carrying the president of Iran as well as the foreign minister of Iran.
It's a tragedy that the helicopter was destroyed.
What happened to the people inside?
Different story entirely.
There's some of the worst people on the planet.
I feel bad for, obviously, all of the other people who are in the helicopter, but the president of Iran was a butcher.
His foreign minister was also a butcher.
They both died in this particular crash.
The media have a very difficult time with this sort of stuff because they're not sure whether they're supposed to call terror supporters austere religious scholars, as we saw with the former ISIS leader, al-Zarqawi.
So Reuters put out the following tweet.
Ibrahim Raisi, who died aged 63, Rose through Iran's theocracy from hardline prosecutor to uncompromising president as he burnished his credentials to position himself to become the next supreme leader.
Ugh!
The absolute dedication and heroism it must have taken for a man literally nicknamed the Butcher of Tehran to have risen inside a butchering, murderous Iranian terror regime.
Wow!
Excellent coverage, Reuters.
I mean, they're just doing the memes now.
Just to introduce you to the president, Ibrahim Raisi, who just died in this helicopter crash.
He became, according to Tablet Magazine, an Islamist ideologue to teens studying in seminary in Qom after the Islamic Revolution when he was 19 years old and lacking any university education.
He was then appointed as a prosecutor, rising over the following four decades to fill the positions of Attorney General, Deputy Chief Justice, and most recently, Chief Justice of Iran's theocratic dictatorship.
Most notably, Raisi was one of four members of a death committee responsible for the 1988 execution of thousands of Iranian prisoners of conscience in the space of a few months.
The ideologically motivated mass executions constituted both a crime against humanity as well as genocide, a cleansing of religious infidels, according to international human rights expert Jeffrey Robertson.
It was a massacre, he said, comparable to those at Srebrenica and the Caton Forest.
Raisi would spend a few minutes with each prisoner.
He would ask them questions to test their loyalty to the Ayatollahs.
And then the prisoners were mostly leftist revolutionaries who had actually helped to overthrow the Shah, were taken out and shot or hanged.
Apparently, as many as 30,000 people were processed by this supposed court.
According to Tablet, what is known is the speed and efficiency of killing, with hangings using forklifts every half hour, the dumping of dead bodies in piles on trucks, a method and pace that traumatized the executioners themselves.
Virgins were systematically raped before their execution to circumvent the Islamic prohibition on killing virgins and to prevent women and girls from reaching heaven.
The executor were ordered to write their own names on their hands before they went to their death.
At the time, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who had been designated to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, condemned the mass executions.
In response, Khomeini then rescinded Montazeri's clerical rank, canceling his selection as the heir.
And in his place, Raisi rose up.
Raisi is, of course, or was, thankfully, an evil human being presiding over the death of American soldiers all across the Middle East, presiding over the spread of the terror tentacles of the Islamic Republic, the Sharia law state of Iran.
So, his death, it's not going to change much in the Middle East because, of course, he was not the Ayatollah.
The Ayatollahs are simply going to appoint somebody else to fill his stead.
That person is likely Mohamed Mokhber, who was the vice president, who is now taking over another terrible human being.
According to the Washington Post, Mokhtar is 68.
He led an emergency meeting of the Iranian government's cabinet and was receiving calls from foreign officials as the death of Raisi was announced.
Again, what happened is that the helicopter took off in Azerbaijan.
They decided, like idiots, to fly through foggy areas near mountains, which as it turns out is a very bad idea in very old Iranian helicopters because it turns out that Iran ain't great at the technology.
Mokhber has close ties with Khamenei, that's Iran's supreme leader.
In 2007, Khamenei picked Mokhber to be the chief executive of Setad, which is a multi-billion dollar financial empire controlled exclusively by Khamenei.
Many of Setad's assets derive from property seized from Iranian citizens.
Under Mokhber, Setad developed Barkat, which is an Iranian COVID vaccine fast-tracked by Iranian officials.
It failed, shockingly.
So, Mokhber is, of course, an enemy of the United States, an enemy of the West.
He's been sanctioned by the United States.
He's been sanctioned by the EU.
Mokhber has been a lead player in bolstering the Iranian ties with Moscow.
In all likelihood, he is going to be the next person to succeed Khamenei if Khamenei dies.
Meanwhile, one of the other people who died in this crash was Hossein Amir Abdullahian, 60, who is the foreign minister who was aboard as well, which of course, once again, demonstrates the genius of Iran's establishment.
Flying the president of your country and the foreign minister of your country in a rickety old helicopter through a fog-laden area in the mountains.
Turns out that is a very bad idea.
He, of course, was a close ally of Qasem Soleimani, who you'll remember as being the senior IRGC commander killed in a United States airstrike in Baghdad in 2020.
He was a big ally.
He was also a person who the United States, under Joe Biden, allowed to travel to the United States and then make speeches and go in the media.
He is now dead in this plane crash.
Just a reminder, the death of Ibrahim Raisi will change virtually nothing in Iran.
That is because the president of Iran, While he has supposed power, he's removable at the discretion of the Ayatollahs.
So it's a dictatorship.
It's run by Islamic clerics, the Ayatollahs, and they hold these kind of fake elections every so often.
The election results are tabulated by the government.
The government, of course, is run by the Ayatollahs.
So they basically decide who the leadership is.
They engage in massive amounts of fraud.
Doesn't really matter who they elect because in the end, the Ayatollahs in combination
with the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, run the country.
So Raisi being dead just means the Ayatollahs will replace him with somebody else.
It may screw up some of the succession lines because Raisi was supposed to take over for Khamenei,
who is the current leader of the Ayatollahs.
He's 85 years old.
If he dies, it was supposed to be Raisi, who was only 63.
But now that he's dead, that title will presumably be taken up
by the successor to Raisi.
But it's not going to change the orientation of the regime.
In order for the regime to totally be changed, you'd have to have like a full-scale coup from within the IRGC or a popular uprising that overthrew the government.
Hilariously, somebody online posted a joke about all of this being done by a Mossad agent named Elicopter.
Get it?
Like helicopter?
Hamas then posted on their own official Al-Qassam Brigade's website, on their Telegram account, that indeed a Mossad agent named Elicopter was responsible.
Now, of course, none of that happened.
Israel, of course, has denied involvement for this because why would Israel be interested in what happens to the Iranian president whose death will mean literally nothing?
It changes zero things.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Hilariously and disgustingly, the EU put out solidarity statements
suggesting that they were going to dedicate their own resources to helping to find
the helicopter that had been downed.
Apparently in the middle of all this, so the helicopter went down Sunday morning,
at least East Coast time, and then all day long,
there were reports from Iranian sources and Azerbaijani sources that there were rescue teams
that were looking in the mountains for these guys.
And honestly, Like maybe the more colorful ending to the story had been if they had survived the crash and then been eaten by the bears and wolves that were in the region.
But that's not actually what happened.
They died in the crash, presumably.
But the EU then announced that they were activating their rapid response mapping service in view of the helicopter accident reportedly carrying the president of Iran and its foreign minister.
Hashtag EU solidarity.
That's literally what they tweeted out.
Gerd Wilders, the new leader of the elected coalition in the Netherlands, immediately tweeted out EU solidarity with evil.
Which of course is exactly right.
In fact, the EU put out another statement from the President of the European Council, quote, the EU expresses its sincere condolences for the death of President Raisi and Foreign Minister Abdullahian, as well as other members of their delegation and crew in a helicopter accident.
Our thoughts go to the families.
Immediately tweeted, not in my name, which is the correct response for the West.
It's an absolute absurdity that there are so many members of the press, so many members of the EU, so many people inside the United States who will feel condolences and solidarity with legitimate monsters who have spread terror all over the region and keep tens of millions of their own citizens in abject poverty and under the boot of an evil tyranny that stuffs women into bags, forces them out of school, And prosecutes people who do not comply with Sharia law.
Honestly, it's a truly amazing thing there are so many Westerners who can't make basic moral distinctions.
But that, of course, is not a shock because the other foreign policy story yesterday is that the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which if the UN is the Mos Eisley of international politics, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, the ICC is even more wretched given the fact that the United States is not a member.
The International Criminal Court was established in 1998 by the so-called Rome Statute.
It is an agreement among maybe 124 member states, not including many major countries, including India, the United States, Russia, Israel, a bunch of countries don't make themselves subject to the International Criminal Court, mainly because it's crap.
Their International Criminal Court suggests that it has jurisdiction over all its member states.
It doesn't have the actual ability to arrest.
It has to rely on its member states to arrest people who are prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
Now, For the International Criminal Court to operate, they have to come to agreements, these broad-based agreements, with countries like, for example, Venezuela, which is run by a communist henchman who murders thousands of his own citizens, but has not been brought up for prosecution by the ICC.
Like the country of Niger, which is currently in the middle of a move to kick out American troops, seize an American airbase, and ally with Russia.
They are a member of the ICC.
The state of Palestine, which has no legitimate government, is a member of the ICC.
Presumably under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority in 2015.
The United States has not made itself subject to the ICC because currently the ICC is still attempting to investigate American soldiers for actions in Afghanistan with the goal of then arresting American soldiers and throwing them in prison.
The United States, as you might imagine, is not real fond of this.
So the United States is not interested in watching as Niger and Venezuela prosecute American soldiers.
The EU has signed on because the EU, again, in all of its historic moral glory, being responsible for not one but two world wars, and the entire essence of colonialism throughout its history, the EU has signed on to the ICC.
Now the difficulty arises when there are members of the ICC who have members of their population who are prosecuted.
So what the ICC has historically done is shy away from doing that.
So for example, they did an investigation into UK soldiers who are acting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They got right to the precipice of prosecuting and then they withdrew.
And the reason they withdrew is because they were afraid that they would have alienated the UK government and the UK government would have pulled away from the ICC.
Why is any of this relevant?
Because the ICC, in the most disgusting thing I can possibly imagine, actually, they put out joint arrest warrants.
For the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, who's an active war criminal, an evil, murderous, monstrous piece of human debris, who orchestrated the murder of 1,200 Israeli citizens, the kidnapping of 250 others, is currently hiding in holes with civilians surrounding him, including women and children.
So that's one warrant.
And the other warrant they issued on the same day was for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Yoav Galand, who's the Minister of Defense in Israel.
Which is insane.
Israel, as we've been explaining on the show, has fought the single cleanest urban war in the history of urban warfare, by the statistics.
And yet the ICC is now treating, jointly, Yair Sinwar, a terrorist leader, and a man who was, until very recently, the leader of an actual government in the Gaza Strip that presided over the robbery of his own citizens, and the murder of his own citizens, and the murder of members of, by the way, ICC states, like the PA.
They're equating that with Benjamin Netanyahu and the elected government of Israel acting in wartime in self-defense to extirpate the terrorist group.
Here's the statement that was put forward by the prosecutor, Karim A. A. Khan.
He announced application for arrest warrant in relation to Netanyahu and Yoav Galant.
This is not the final step.
Basically, they issue... I love this picture of these ridiculous-looking bureaucrats standing there looking very serious about their ICC, which has no actual enforcement power other than states, who willy-nilly decide whether to enforce or not.
They've tried this crap, by the way, against Vladimir Putin as well.
It has resulted in zero things.
The only people who have ever been successfully prosecuted in the 20 years that the ICC has been in existence, they prosecuted like 20 people.
And they're all basically warlords from Africa.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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In any case, here was this ridiculous human being declaring his issuance for arrest warrant.
I can also confirm today that I have reasonable grounds to believe on the basis of evidence collected and examined by my office that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Galant bear criminal responsibility for the following international crimes committed on the territory of the State of Palestine from at least the 8th of October 2023.
The crimes include starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, willfully causing great suffering, serious injury to body or health or cruel treatment, willful killing or murder, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.
As well as- Okay, pause there.
That is a- Every single one of those elements is a lie.
Every single one of those elements is a lie.
When he suggests deprivation of humanitarian assistance, Israel has been shipping in hundreds of trucks every single day for humanitarian assistance.
Understand, this guy is just a tool of the radical left in Europe, the international political community, which is dominated by Israel haters and anti-Semites.
I mean, that's what this guy is, obviously.
It's an absurdity on every possible level for it to be absurd.
Let me ask you two questions that make clear how absurd this is.
So, October 7th obviously happens.
It is now May 20th.
Why are they issuing the arrest warrants for Sinwar and Netanyahu on the same day?
They could have issued an arrest warrant for Sinwar literally the next day.
The State of Palestine is a signatory member of the ICC, even though it doesn't exist.
Why didn't they do that?
The reason is because they wanted to create a false narrative in which there is a quote-unquote cycle of violence between a legitimately elected democratic government fighting a self-defense war and a terrorist group.
That is point number one.
Point number two.
One of the things that I've said a couple of times, because it's true, is the state of Palestine, which again does not exist, is in some weird way Like the State of Unicorns, a member of the ICC.
What that means, theoretically, is that any state that is a member of the International Criminal Court has an obligation to arrest people who are issued warrants under the International Criminal Court.
What efforts have been made by the State of Palestine to arrest Yahya Sinwar, who is in the territory of Gaza that is under the jurisdiction of the ICC?
Any?
Bueller?
Bueller?
All of this is clearly an absurdity.
There again is a reason the United States is not a member of the ICC and it's because the United States does not make wish to make itself subject to the absolute moral imbecility of a bunch of international bureaucrats who have no connection with morality or decency.
What's weird about the ICC is that it sort of lives in this weird space between two theories of law.
So theory of law number one is a historically based theory called natural law.
Natural law theory is what undergirds the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Natural law theory is the idea that there is written into the code of humanity and into the code of nature certain laws like do not murder, thou shalt not murder, It's not merely a command from God, it is also written into the natural law in the sense that everyone can suss out what that law is.
And the typical idea of natural law has been that it trumps laws that violate the natural law.
This is the claim that is made in the Declaration of Independence, for example.
So when the Declaration of Independence says that there are laws that violate our natural rights, what it means that we then have the duty to actually rebel against those laws.
Okay, so natural law is the idea that, again, there is this broad-based law that is universal to humanity.
Then there's the theory called legal positivism.
Legal positivism is the theory that there is no law except what governments say there is.
And so if a government makes a law, it can be a justified law or an unjustified law, but the law is only, there is no natural law.
There is only law that is established by governments.
Thus, claiming that you are rebelling in the name of a natural law, a higher law, is a lie.
What's weird about the ICC is that it sort of lives in this netherworld between the two.
So it claims that it speaks in the name of a universal human rights law that does not exist according to the ICC.
Because if it did exist according to the ICC, Venezuela would be prosecuted, obviously.
The leaders of Niger would be prosecuted, obviously.
So obviously they don't believe in natural law, but they're also not really legal positivists because they have no power.
The ICC has no actual enforcement power.
The entire institution is a complete joke.
The United States, formed in the aftermath of World War II, was involved in forming a concept of the world that actually was false.
It was the concept that there was an international community that was going to punish wrongdoers.
This was tried by Woodrow Wilson, by the way, in the aftermath of World War I, under the auspices of the League of Nations.
And wiser politicians at the time in the United States said, we are not going to do this because it is a waste of time, it will bind us to a bunch of garbage that means nothing, so we're just not going to do it.
That was the correct move.
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States again tried the Wilsonian attempt to craft an international community, including, by the way, its enemies like Russia, which suddenly sat on the UN Security Council.
It was a giant failure.
The UN has been a giant failure since inception because it turns out any organization is only going to be as virtuous as the collective of its constituent members.
If you have an election in the Gaza Strip, you will get Hamas.
If you have an election in Florida, you'll get Ron DeSantis.
That doesn't mean that all elections are equivalent, because they're not.
The same thing is true of bodies.
And when it comes to international bodies, NAFTA is not going to look the same as the ICC.
So this bizarre notion that the United States and the West had in the aftermath of World War II, that there was such a thing as a community of nations, has always been a lie.
International law has always been a lie.
International law, as the author Leon Yerus once suggested, Is the thing that is disobeyed by the cruel and ignored by the kind.
That is effectively what is happening here with the ICC.
So, what can the United States do?
Well, we don't pay for the ICC.
The ICC, again, we're not members of it.
India's not a member.
Russia's not a member.
Bunch of countries are not members of the ICC.
So, the United States can apply secondary pressure, as we should, because it's a joke.
Which means that China is not a member of the ICC.
So basically every major country is not a member of the ICC.
It's a bunch of Europeans and a bunch of African countries and some Middle Eastern countries, but not the ones that would actually really be important to prosecute.
So, really, well done.
So what is the ICC?
Well, it's basically just a left-wing narrative machine for a bunch of bureaucrats based in The Hague with no actual enforcement power other than the power of these nations.
Why does that matter?
Well, one, it creates all sorts of fun narratives for people who hate Jews.
Equating Hamas with the Israeli government is, in fact, an attempt to put the Jews in the dock alongside terrorists, which is insane.
And that's clearly what's happening here. That's number one.
Number two, it actually makes negotiations significantly more difficult because now every
ICC member, if indeed this prosecution moves forward, every ICC member state will have an
obligation under the Rome statute to arrest Yav Galant, for example, the Minister of Defense in Israel,
or Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. If Bibi, for example, goes to visit
Britain, the UK is a signatory to this.
The UK would then have an obligation, under the Rome Statute, to arrest the sitting Prime Minister of a democratically elected state.
Already, this has provided an impediment to any sort of negotiation or talk with, say, Vladimir Putin in Russia.
And of course, it's not really enforced as the truth, because thanks to Zoom, thanks to all of these other mechanisms, you can still have conversations.
But this is going to create a much more serious problem because the Israeli government has already said, we understand who's initiating all of this.
The people initiating all of this are the Palestinian Authority working through their man, who is this prosecutor, Karim Khan.
And so they're going to cut off the taxpayer funding to the Palestinian Authority, which theoretically could collapse the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority, which by the way is supposed to have jurisdiction over the state of Palestine, wherein they are arresting zero terrorists under the ICC's jurisdiction.
Beyond which, if the Palestinian Authority, let's say that Netanyahu travels to Ramallah to have some sort of peace conversation with the Palestinian Authority leadership, which is not in the cards anytime in the near future, but let's say it were to be, the Palestinian Authority would then have the legal impetus under the ICC to arrest Netanyahu.
You understand how insane all of this is?
So what the United States should probably do is impose secondary sanctions on the ICC.
If the ICC goes forward with this, like, we should not have allies of the United States as Americans prosecuted by the ICC.
There's a reason, again, we are not members of the ICC.
Frankly, shouldn't have taken this for us to destroy the ICC.
The ICC is a garbage institution that should have zero legal legitimacy.
The reason the ICC, by the way, has never prosecuted American soldiers is because they know the United States will actually do just this.
They're cowards in the end.
And so the fact is that the ICC should be deprived of all international legitimacy because, frankly, it is a giant, giant joke.
Okay, meanwhile, closer to home, When it comes to America, the election, of course, is quite fraught for Joe Biden.
And it's quite fraught for one reason and one reason only.
I don't take one reason only.
One reason mainly.
And that is this chart.
Let me show you a chart.
This is income adjusted for inflation over the prior two administrations.
The nominal value of income is up under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
And you can see that.
It was up through the first 36 months of their administration.
Close to equal.
Trump's change in household net worth was up about 25%.
Under Joe Biden, it's up about 20%.
Adjusted for inflation is the stat that matters.
Over the first 36 months of his administration, the change in household net worth for Donald Trump was somewhere on the order of 15%.
For Joe Biden, it is somewhere on the order of a little over 0%.
That is this election.
Inflation has eaten up Joe Biden's presidency.
Between that and his complete incompetence when it comes to foreign policy, there's a reason people are not interested in voting for Joe Biden.
And that is what the polls are showing.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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So in 2020, the question was asked, which candidate will you never vote for?
Ever, ever, under any circumstances?
For virtually all of 2020, about 50% of the American public said they would never vote for Donald Trump, which is a good indicator you're going to lose.
I mean, half the public says they are absolutely not going to vote for you.
Makes it very difficult for you to get above 50%.
You can squeeze it out maybe in the States, but it makes it very, very rough.
In that same election, only about 35 to 40% of voters said they would never vote for Joe Biden, which means that walking into the election, Joe Biden had about a 10 percentage point advantage.
That has now flipped, and this is a disaster area for Joe Biden.
In 2024, New Swing State Poll from New York Times-Siena shows that only about 46% of registered voters say they will never vote for Donald Trump, but 52% say they will never vote for Joe Biden.
That is a disaster area.
In three of four such polls since November, it's been a majority of voters who say they will never vote for Biden.
Some of this is voters warming to the idea of reinstalling Trump as president.
But again, the only question is the never Trump.
Because if never Trump is low, and never Biden is higher, those votes don't have to go to Trump.
Those votes can go to RFK.
And Joe Biden will still lose the election.
Americans remain down on the economy.
According to a brand new poll from the Washington Post, consumer sentiment, a gauge of Americans' economic perceptions, is at a six-month low, according to a closely watched index by the University of Michigan.
The measure notched its biggest drop since 2021, reflecting the persistent tug of inflation on household budgets and fueling fears that rising prices, unemployment, and interest rates could all worsen in coming months.
So people are cutting back on their spending.
Retail sales were flat in April after decent pickups in February and March.
Gas prices are up overall over the course of the year.
They're going to get worse, by the way, because the turmoil in the Middle East is not going to be particularly good for the gas prices.
Biden keeps trying to happy talk his way through it, but the reality is most Americans do not feel good about the economy.
And so we're going to get more of radical Joe Biden.
That is the end story here.
Joe Biden has given up on the moderates.
He's given up on them.
He's not interested in them anymore.
He is going to go with the Barack Obama 2012 strategy.
Double down, triple down, quadruple quintuple down on the base.
The base, the base, the base.
And the place where Joe Biden is bleeding the most is with black voters.
Joe Biden is losing black voters in extraordinary ways.
I mean, it's truly an incredible thing.
That is one area where you thought that Joe Biden would be absolutely durable, but the reality is that most of the polls right now are showing that Donald Trump could win up to 20% of the black vote, which means that Joe Biden loses the election.
It really is that simple.
And this has been true for months and months and months.
As early as November, there was a consistent trend across multiple polls that Biden was bleeding support from both Hispanic and black voters.
With Trump basically running even with Biden among Hispanics and Trump running over 20% among black voters.
That's a disaster for Biden, which means that Biden has to go on his 2012 tour.
You remember in 2012, he went out and he declared that Mitt Romney was a vicious racist.
He did a speech where he said, he's going to put you all back in trains.
You remember this?
It was the most racist thing ever.
He suggested that Mitt Romney The most milquetoast human being ever was going to literally re-enslave black Americans.
Well now, Joe Biden is going to just double down on trying to appease his base.
So he spoke at Morehouse College.
Morehouse College, of course, is a historically black college in Atlanta.
And there, he basically decided that he was going to try to appeal to a base that he was losing.
So the first thing that happened is that a bunch of Morehouse students turned their back on Biden as he was speaking.
Not because of the economy, but because they're radicals who are in favor of Hamas.
There are a small percentage of people at Morehouse who apparently, like most major universities, agree with the goal of Hamas in extirpating Israel.
So here's some of the video of that.
In our lives, in the lives of the nation, we have those Saturdays to bear witness.
Now you can see there are just a couple of people who decided to turn their backs on him.
But again, what this is really mostly about was Joe Biden trying to appease those people.
So, here was Joe Biden.
One of the other speakers gets up and calls for an immediate ceasefire, leaving Hamas holding hostages and in power in the Gaza Strip.
And Joe Biden confusedly, or maybe not so confusedly, starts to applaud.
It is my stance as a Morehouse man, nay as a human being, to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the
Gaza Strip.
Thank you.
An immediate permanent ceasefire.
That is the President of the United States clapping for leaving Hamas in power.
An immediate permanent ceasefire means that all conflict ends and Hamas is left in power.
That is what that means.
But that was all the predicate to Biden's actual speech.
So his speech was about how you need to vote for Joe Biden or democracy would be totally threatened.
Also, look at how much Joe Biden panders to black people.
That was legitimately what his speech was about yesterday.
Pretty ridiculous display, of course, by Joe Biden.
But that man is a desperate, desperate man.
So, he began by doing what he usually does.
He started pulling out dead family members.
Now again, I'd have a lot more sympathy for this if Joe Biden didn't do it every five minutes.
It is one of the worst things that he does as a human being.
I really believe this.
This is a terrible thing to do.
When people suffer personal tragedies, you know what they don't tend to do?
Pull it out at every public event and use it as a two-by-four to wield against political opponents.
Or to wield in your own political favor.
When something tragic happens to you in your personal life, That should not be the basis for all political conversation as President of the United States.
It's actually kind of sick.
Whether he was doing that in the interview with Robert Herr, or whether he pulls out Bo Biden every time a member of the military dies and he pretends that Bo was killed in Iraq, he was doing that again at Morehouse.
Again, this is always his play for sympathy, and it really... It's pretty yucky.
They put a young woman first responder on the line to say there's an automobile accident.
A tractor trailer hit your wife's car while she was Christmas shopping with your three children.
And she, poor woman, she just blurted out, she said, your wife and daughter are killed.
My 13-year-old daughter, they're dead.
And your almost three-year-old and four-year-old sons are badly injured.
We're not sure they're going to make it either.
I had the same pain 43 years later when that four-year-old boy who survived was a grown man and a father himself.
Lying in another hospital bed at Walter Reed Hospital, having contracted stage four glioblastoma because he was a year in Iraq as a major, won the bronze star, living next to a burn pit.
Cancer took his last breath.
Okay, again, like this is his opener.
I mean, if you are relegated to re-elect me because bad things happened in my life that are terrible and tragic, That not a good look.
And that was just the foreplay.
Wait until we get to Joe Biden's actual pandering because, man, this was...
He was a pander bear.
I mean, he went hard with the pandering.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Okay, meanwhile, So, Joe Biden was at Morehouse College trying to pander to black voters because he realizes, like Barack Obama circa 2012, he's going to lose votes from the last time around.
So, he needs the base to turn out.
The problem is, he ain't Barack Obama and he ain't good at this.
So, that wasn't gonna stop him.
I mean, this was pander hard to pander harder.
So, here he was pandering to the men of Morehouse, talking like he has so many Morehouse men in the White House.
People aren't gonna vote for you because of this, Joe.
No one cares.
I got more Morehouse men in the White House telling me what to do than I know what to do.
You all think I'm kidding, don't you?
You know I'm not.
The best thing that's happened.
That's the very best thing that has happened to you?
Really?
I thought the best thing was when the night nurse comes in and cleans you up in the morning.
Or maybe it's the fact that every morning someone wakes you up and reminds you you're president.
That must be pretty nice.
So, Joe Biden says there that there are tons and tons of Morehouse men working in his administration.
According to multiple reports, there are zero people or graduates of Morehouse working at any sort of high level inside his administration.
Count them zero.
Apparently, the last serious Morehouse grad was a person named Jamal Simmons, who is the former communications director for Kamala Harris.
Former, as in no longer works there.
In any case, he didn't stop there.
He talked about George Floyd.
Because if there's one thing that Joe Biden knows, it's that when a black person I stood up for George with George Floyd's family to create a country.
career, and then ends up claiming he can't breathe before he's ever taken out of a car.
And then a cop is convicted for his murder. And then Joe Biden goes out and says that
it was a racist murder, despite the fact that no racial implications were ever made during
the trial. That's something black people love to hear about.
Here's Joe Biden.
I stood up for George with George Floyd's family to create a country. We don't need
to have that talk with your son or grandson as they get pulled over.
you Don't worry, he also lied about voting procedure in Georgia.
So, there's been this lie that Democrats have been promoting that Georgia is attempting to ban black voters from voting.
This is a, it's a full-scale lie.
It's been promulgated ever since Stacey Abrams lost her gubernatorial election, and then denied she'd lost her gubernatorial election by saying there was voter suppression.
There is no voter suppression in Georgia.
There is certainly not voter suppression of a black vote in Georgia, which is always disproportionate to the black population of Georgia, at least in the last few election cycles.
and was in 2020 for Joe Biden.
But he's trying to claim that in Georgia, they tried to keep people from getting water
in voting lines in order to somehow get black people not to vote.
This is a lie.
It just says that if you're a person wearing a Joe Biden shirt, you can't go and supply water
to people in line as a form of bribery.
That's what the law is about.
They can set up water stations all throughout the line.
In any case, here is Joe Biden fibbing, but of course that's what he does.
He's a liar.
Today in Georgia, they won't allow water to be available to you while you wait in line
to vote in an election.
What in the hell is that all about?
What in the hell is that?
Well, it's about you lying because that's not true.
Don't worry.
The pandering didn't stop there.
He then suggested that he had found ways around the Supreme Court.
So he says that he tried to relieve all student loan debt and the Supreme Court said no.
So Captain Democracy over here said, I just ignored the Supreme Court and I found ways around it.
Now, if Donald Trump said, I found ways around the Supreme Court to do what I want, all we would get is people screaming about tyranny, nonstop.
But here's Joe Biden just saying the thing.
The Supreme Court told me I couldn't.
I found two other ways to do it.
He found two other ways to do it, around the Supreme Court.
Then he lied again about how there was a national effort to ban books across the country, when the books that are being quote-unquote banned mean that books in, for example, kindergarten libraries should not include genderqueer.
But Joe Biden's very opposed to that.
He's going to try again to pretend that basically Republicans are a bunch of people who don't want anyone to ever read Toni Morrison again or something.
I never thought when I was graduating in 1968, as your honoree just was, we talked about I never thought I'd be a president of a time when there's a national effort to ban books.
Not to write history, but to erase history.
They don't see you in the future of America, but they're wrong.
To me, we make history, not erase it.
That is so unbelievable coming from a man whose entire party is dedicated to ripping down statues at this point and replacing them with statues of George Floyd.
It's an unbelievable statement from a man whose entire party right now is backing people who on college camps are spray-painting and kathieing statues of George Washington.
But, again, the pander is very strong with him.
He didn't stop there, by the way.
He then, after the Morehouse College speech, proceeded to go to a Detroit NAACP dinner.
Look, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are the core strength of America.
around DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which of course is the Ibram X. Kendi theory
that all disparities in life are the fault of America's discriminatory white supremacist system.
Look, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are the core strength of America.
That's why I'm proud to have the most diverse administration
in history, to tap into the full talents of our country.
I promised you when I was president, I would have an administration that looked like America.
We have more African Americans.
We have more women.
We have more minorities in our administration than any other administration in all of history.
That's why we're doing so damn well.
Folks, I never imagined that in 2024, There'd be folks waiting to ban books in America.
What in God's name is that about?
Not only that, they're trying to erase black history.
Literally.
They're wrong.
They don't understand.
Black history is American history.
Not a joke.
Not a joke?
God, he's a joke.
How many times can you say not a joke after something that's not a joke?
Like, we all know it's not a joke.
The only joke on stage is you, sir.
erase black history.
Even members of the left are tired of this.
There's MSNBC's Charles Coleman, basically saying, yeah, no, we understand.
He's just pandering at this point.
There's also a part where he talked about creating an America where referencing
police reform and George Floyd, which I don't know was the appropriate tender
in terms of to invoke the notion of George Floyd at that point in this conversation on their commencement.
I understand it.
Again, I don't know that that was the right move.
He talked about creating an America where black parents don't have to have the talk with their children.
Right.
As a black man, I have mixed feelings about that, and the usage of that, because the question becomes, I appreciate the policy, I appreciate the reference and the nod to Justice Brown Jackson, but when you start campaigning on that stage in this moment, and using this type of language, the question for me becomes, alright, so what are you going to do?
Well, the answer is he's not going to do anything, but he's going to pander an awful, awful lot.
And that basically is Joe Biden's plan for this campaign.
Pander to the radical base.
There ain't enough of them who love Joe Biden to get out.
He's got a serious structural problem this election cycle.
He has a serious structural problem that Donald Trump has every capacity and ability to take advantage of if he acts with alacrity and if he acts with some level of acuity.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Meanwhile, Joe Biden is quickly attempting to get these debates with Donald Trump off the table, and he's going to do no more debates.
He has made this absolutely clear.
According to Politico, the Biden campaign is shutting down the possibility of a third debate with Trump.
Trump had said that he was going to agree to some sort of third debate hosted by NBC News and Telemundo.
That was after he'd accepted one from Fox News.
And at that point, the Biden campaign's like, no, no, no, no.
The debate about debates is over.
No more games.
What do you mean, no more games?
You literally just declared you would do two debates.
Trump accepted within like five seconds.
And then he said, well, let's do a third one.
You're like, no, we're not debating over this.
No more debates.
We're not going to do it.
Camp Trump was like, okay, fine.
Then you're ignoring all the Hispanic voters.
Which is, which is true.
Again, Joe Biden trying to avoid the limelight here.
It's not going to work.
Donald Trump says he wants a drug test before the debate, which frankly seems pretty justified given the fact that the variable performance of Joe Biden is noticeable to literally everyone.
On any random day, he stumbles out to the helicopter, barely avoiding, you know, small bumps so that he doesn't fall down while wearing horseshoes.
And then sometimes during the State of the Union, he's hyperactively attacking people in the audience like an old man short on his gruel.
So, you know, when Trump says maybe a drug test, maybe a drug test.
I just want to debate this guy.
But, you know, and I'm going to I'm going to demand a drug test, too, by the way.
I am.
No, I really am.
I don't want him coming in like the State of the Union.
He was high as a kite.
I said, is that Joe up there?
A beautiful rope.
And by the end of the evening, he's like, well, it was exhausted, right?
Now we're going to demand a drug test.
Makes sense to me.
As far as why Trump accepted the debate, he said, I accept it because they thought I wouldn't do it, but I'm willing to do it.
Good for Trump.
They said to me the other day, sir, CNN with fake tap.
And he is a fake, but let's see how he does.
I think he's under a lot of pressure to be fair, but Fake Tapper is going to be heading up the team that interrogates you.
I said, that's OK.
I accept the debate.
I accept it.
You know why?
Because nobody thought he was going to debate.
They didn't think I'd accept it.
I accept.
What he's saying is that he thought that Biden there was issuing the challenge that Trump wouldn't accept it.
So Trump accepted it so he could slap Biden around.
Now again, the obvious essence of the Trump campaign is so different from Joe Biden's.
So it turns out the modern American likes the cops.
Joe Biden is going to Morehouse College and declaring that the cops are systemically racist.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is going out and meeting and shaking hands with cops.
Who, by the way, are cops of all races.
This is the Dallas PD.
The answer is, not often.
And if he does, it looks really, really staged.
It is true that Donald Trump does have a sort of natural draw toward cops, toward members of the military.
That is, in fact, a reality of his personality.
Now, meanwhile, RFK Jr.
is providing a real threat to Joe Biden on his left.
In the swing states, according to the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Siena College Poll, that came out last week, RFK Jr.
is earning at least 10% of the vote in virtually all of the swing states.
Those are all swing states where Joe Biden is losing.
When you include RFK Jr.
in the poll, then Biden tends to lose a point or two of support.
And a lot of his support is coming from people who just don't like either of the other two candidates.
Again, he entered the race as a Democrat running against Biden.
The idea that he's siphoning a bunch of support away from Trump, I don't think that's true.
He's drawing from both candidates, but he's drawing more from Biden than he is from Trump.
And that is a real problem for Joe Biden.
I mean, I know this anecdotally.
I talk to liberal Jews who go to my synagogue, for example, and they'll say, I just can't stand Trump.
And I'll try to make the case for Trump.
And they'll say, no, no, no, but I can't.
And I say, okay, fine.
So just don't vote for Joe Biden or vote for RFK.
And this they are warm to.
And this is a real problem for Joe Biden.
Okay, meanwhile, Pope Francis went on 60 Minutes last night.
There've been a few clips that had emerged early of him on 60 Minutes, but he was on 60 Minutes.
And I gotta say, my Catholic friends are pretty unhappy with Pope Francis as a generality.
I think that that is not unsurprising given his political stances.
He is in fact a liberation theologist, meaning that he is a Marxist with Catholic overtones.
And I can say that as much as I want, because again, I owe no fealty to the Pope.
So it makes no difference to me what his religious stances are, other than I think that a vital Catholic Church that stands on eternal principle is deeply important to Western civilization, given that it is a foundational institution of Western civilization.
This Pope has made it his mission to slap right.
This is what this Pope is about, publicly speaking.
Now, that doesn't mean he can abandon every single edict or every single moral stance that the church has ever taken, of course, because then he wouldn't be the Pope.
And it's always amusing to me when the media are shocked that the Pope is still against, say, same-sex marriage.
But his main ire is always directed at people who are more conservative than he is, particularly on matters economic, but also with regard to things like sexual morality.
In other words, if you spend a lot of time talking about abortion and same-sex marriage and gender in an era where those things are under threat, Pope Francis is not on your side.
He does not believe that you should be putting your main focus there.
He believes your main focus as a Catholic should be on liberation theology to redistributionism.
So here was the Pope yesterday going after conservative critics, which again is amazing because most of the attacks on the church are not coming from the right.
The vast majority of attacks on the Catholic Church are coming from the left.
But he seems to reserve his greatest anger for people who are to his right.
There are conservative bishops in the United States that oppose your new efforts to revisit teachings and traditions.
How do you address their criticism?
You used an adjective, conservative.
That is, conservative is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that.
It is a suicidal attitude.
Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box.
Okay, can I just point out at this point, the Catholic Church is literally established in order to maintain the dogma.
That is what it is for.
Again, I'm not a Catholic, so I'm not going to speak for Catholics.
What I am going to say is that from the outside, the Vitality of Catholicism lies in its adherence to tradition.
And when you stray too far from tradition, what you end up with is a breakdown in Catholic theology, just like any church.
It's not just true for Catholics, it's true for Protestants, it's true for Jews, it's true for everyone.
And for the Pope to be so all-fired angry at the conservatives inside the Catholic Church while simultaneously attempting to make overtures to transgender adherence to Catholicism is very clearly directed against the traditions inside his own church.
I don't see a way that the Catholic Church grows in these areas.
Again, this is not unique to the Pope.
This is true in every single major mainstream religion right now.
Evangelical Protestantism.
You get away from your roots, you're gonna fall apart.
There is no reason to go to church if all church is gonna be is pizza parties, guitar, and secular left-wing dogma.
There is no reason for it.
Same thing is true in Judaism.
There's a reason Reform and Conservative Judaism are falling away, and what's being left is modern Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy.
It's true in Protestantism.
It's true in Catholicism, too.
The Catholic churches that continue to grow are the more traditional Catholic churches.
The ones that attempt to compromise on presentation or principle are the ones where no one is bothering to go anymore.
And no matter how many times the Pope talks about liberalization of the open heart, that is not what's going to drive people toward the church.
It is a mistake and it undermines, frankly, adherence to not only eternal principle, but Catholicism particularly.
Here's the Pope, for example, on migration.
This is an insane perspective that most Americans are going to reject.
And I don't know if you've heard, but the state of Texas is attempting to shut down a Catholic charity on the border with Mexico that offers undocumented migrants humanitarian assistance.
What do you think of that?
That is madness.
Sheer madness.
To close the border and leave them there?
That is madness.
The migrant has to be received.
Thereafter, you see how you're going to deal with them.
Maybe you have to send them back.
I don't know.
But each case ought to be considered humanely.
Okay, so it's the responsibility of the United States to open the border and facilitate charities that facilitate illegal entry into the United States.
Good luck with that particular argument.
And then of course there was the Pope on gay unions trying to explain that while he's still against homosexual marriage, he's perfectly fine with gay couples basically coming as a couple and receiving blessings individually.
Which again is a very weird take that is in fact a change.
To pretend it's not a change is to end around the issue.
Last year you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples.
That's a big change.
Why?
No, what I allowed was not to bless the union, That cannot be done, because that is not the sacrament.
I cannot.
The Lord made it that way.
But to bless each person?
Yes.
The blessing is for everyone.
For everyone.
To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church.
But to bless each person?
Why not?
The blessing is for all.
Some people were scandalized by this, but why?
Everyone.
Everyone.
You have said, who am I to judge?
Homosexuality is not a crime.
No, it's a human fact.
Okay, and also homosexual activity by Catholic Church doctrine, like pretty much every other major religion, is a sin.
Who's talking about criminal law here?
No one's talking about criminal law.
And the orientation of this pope, I will say, not good for the growth of the church, and we'll find out whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong in the stats on Catholicism across the world.
Alrighty, folks, coming up, we'll jump into the latest on the Battle of Congressional Titans, Jasmine Crockett versus MTG.
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