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Dec. 5, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:58
A SHOCKING Targeted Attack…And The Left Celebrates!
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Well, folks, there was a shocking assassination on Wednesday in New York City.
We're going to get into all the details and the left's bizarre response to this particular assassination.
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So on Wednesday, the chief executive of UnitedHealth's insurance arm, according to the Wall Street Journal, was fatally shot outside a hotel in New York City.
It was a targeted attack, according to the police.
There is, in fact, video of the attack.
We're not going to show it here on the show because it's fairly graphic.
This obviously appears to be a professional hit.
The person who was killed, again, his name was Brian Thompson, who's the CEO of UnitedHealth.
He is walking past the shooter.
The shooter seems to emerge from the shadows, shoots him, shoots him again calmly, walks by him and appears to shoot him a third time.
The suspect has not yet been identified, fled on foot after the shooting outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan around 6.45 a.m.
Apparently, the suspect rode an e-bike to Central Park, and that's the last place that the suspect was seen.
Police said that this was obviously a planned attack.
They don't actually know why.
Here is Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch explaining this was not, in fact, a random act of violence.
This does not appear to be a random act of violence.
The victim was in New York City to speak at an investor conference.
It appears the suspect was lying in wait for several minutes.
And as the victim was walking to the conference hotel, the suspect approached from behind and fired several rounds, striking the victim at least once in the back and at least once in the right calf.
I want to be clear.
At this time, every indication is that this was a premeditated, preplanned, targeted attack.
And clearly it wasn't a robbery because the guy didn't even rifle the body.
Apparently the gun jams.
You can actually see this happen in the video.
The gun jams during the attack.
And the shooter then proceeds to rack the slide in order to clear the jams.
This is somebody who knew what they were doing, at least on a very basic level.
And apparently if you can just get away with it, then, you know, this person had this planned out pretty well.
Apparently, Paulette Thompson, his wife, told NBC News there had been some threats against Brian Thompson.
She said, basically, I don't know, lack of coverage.
I don't know details.
I know that he said there were people that had been threatening him.
The United Health Group is one of the biggest companies in America.
It includes the biggest American health insurer as well as doctor groups and other assets as well.
And Thompson was the CEO of the insurance unit, which is called United Healthcare.
The company appeared to remove profiles of its executives from the website following the attack.
The United Health CEO of the overall company, not just the insurance branch, said in a video message to employees, Brian was a truly extraordinary person who touched the lives of countless people throughout our organization and far beyond.
It's a terrible tragedy.
Now, there are a number of things to be said about this.
Obviously, number one, New York City is governed horribly.
When you're having assassinations in public places in New York City, that goes to the way that law enforcement is deployed, what law enforcement is allowed to do.
When you have violence that has become commonplace on New York streets, that goes to governance.
And simultaneously, as this is happening, the jury is still out in the case of Daniel Penny.
Daniel Penny, of course, is the Marine veteran who took down a crazed drug abuser named Jordan Neely on the New York subway as Jordan Neely was threatening other members of the public in this subway car.
And you'll recall that Daniel Penny put Jordan Neely in a submission hold and Jordan Neely later died because of that.
Supposedly it was because of the submission hold.
It also could have been because of the drugs in his system or his reaction to the lack of error to the brain.
The bottom line is that that is clearly not a manslaughter or murder charge.
New York City is bringing that charge anyway because the city is governed horribly.
Here, for example, is the lead Daniel Penny prosecutor, a person named Daphna Yoran, who is such a left winger that while she is prosecuting Daniel Penny for the great crime of standing up to potential violence on the subway system, She is bragging about a light sentence that she went to pursue for a thug who killed an 87 year old.
I had a murder A case where the defendant did not intentionally kill the victim.
He went into an ATM on the Upper West Side and tried to rob an individual.
Unfortunately, it was an older individual.
He was 86. And in the course of the robbery, he fell to the ground.
And as a result, he died.
This is, under the law, a felony murder, which is akin to intentional murder.
However, when I first got the case, I took the time to learn about the defendant.
And it was a strong case.
So it wasn't about whodunit.
I knew immediately who did it.
I could prove it.
I could take it to trial that day and win it.
But it wasn't about that.
It was that the more I learned about the defendant and his life and the circumstances, the kinds of things that Jarrell was talking about, that one should take into account the trauma of that individual, I really felt incredibly sorry for him that he had gotten to that point in his life where he felt like there was no other choice but to commit this robbery.
So this, of course, is crazy, and it's precisely this kind of approach to law enforcement, in which a person who robs an 86-year-old, 87-year-old man, and the 86-year-old, 87-year-old man is knocked to the ground and dies.
The person who does that is given a light sentence by a prosecutor, but a person who's defending the public from an actual criminal is charged with manslaughter in New York City.
That's just another reason why violence is being propagated to an extraordinary extent in New York City these days.
And not a shock, by the way, in terms of updates on the Daniel Penny case, jurors have been in deliberations for a couple of days.
At this point, they've asked to rehear a couple of pieces of evidence in that case, including testimony given by the medical examiner who suggested that no matter how much fentanyl had been found in Jordan Neely's system, she still would have blamed Daniel Penny for the death of Jordan Neely.
So, you know, we'll see how the jury comes down in that case.
But this is just another reason why, again, violence has become relatively commonplace in New York City.
But there's something else that's going on here, too.
And that is the left-wing reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson.
So, there's a person whose name is Anthony Zankas.
Anthony Zankas is apparently a professor at Columbia.
Anthony Zankas.
And this person, again, amazing, this person teaches at Columbia.
And calls himself a trauma expert, anti-violence, commie.
This is in his description.
A communist who's against violence.
He put out a tweet saying, quote, Today we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Gunned down.
Wait, I'm sorry.
Today we mourn the death of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company executives like Brian Thompson can become multi-millionaires.
So that would be, basically, he deserved to die because UnitedHealthcare is a mildly profitable company.
When I say they're a mildly profitable company, I mean that when it comes to the health insurance industry, the profit margin is generally below 2%.
You're not talking about industries where the profit margin is 10, 15, 20%.
You can have a lot of problems with American health insurance and how that is run.
That is because of the legal structure that has been set up for health insurance in America.
And we can talk about all the fixes that need to happen, how the truth is that health insurance should not be tied to employment, about the fact that you should be able to opt into various levels of health insurance rather than basically being shoveled into one of a few categories.
We could talk about the fact that an enormous amount of health care should actually be provided just on a pay for play basis as opposed to via insurance.
It's bizarre that in order to, for example, just go get a normal checkup, that should be covered by insurance.
What are you insuring against?
That's typically not what insurance is for.
Insurance is for an unexpected situation that you are betting might happen.
And the insurance company is making the bet that it probably won't happen.
Or at least not in the time frame that you're talking about.
That is why you have, for example, fire insurance.
It's not because you know tomorrow you're going to set your house on fire.
That'd be arson and it would violate your insurance policy.
It's bizarre that health insurance in the United States works such that it is called insurance when in reality it's just a kind of subsidized form of group coverage.
But in any case, you can have whatever arguments you want with the system.
The idea that because you don't like this system, the CEO of a private healthcare company deserves to die, or at least it is his fault if 68,000 Americans, quote-unquote, needlessly die each year so that he can become a multimillionaire.
That shows a dramatic lack of understanding of not only markets, but of morality.
Taylor Lorenz, who—it is unbelievable this person was once considered a well-respected reporter at the Washington Post.
She clearly has a mental illness.
I mean, there's something very, very wrong with Taylor Lorenz on a wide variety of levels.
Taylor Lorenz recently suggested, for example, that there was a major problem in the United States with people, quote-unquote, raw-dogging the air.
This person was a reporter for the Washington Post.
Just a couple of days ago, quote, Planning a COVID-safe book launch took months and thousands of my own dollars, ensuring testing, outdoor space, far-UV lights, and a litany of other precautions.
Meanwhile, you dumb Fs are out raw-dogging the air.
I'm pretty sure that's not what raw-dogging means.
And spewing your disease-laden breath all over your elderly neighbors.
We are not the same.
Okay, so this person, who again was a well-respected journalist, I'm just going to emphasize that again.
You wonder why the legacy media are a flaming dumpster fire?
This person was a well-respected journalist at the Washington Post who spent her days tracking down bad things on the internet and then going after people on the right.
So, this week, she has talked about the evils of raw-dogging the air and also the apparent good of murdering people in public because they work for companies that you don't like.
Quote, Now, that's not true.
You might not agree with how the insurance companies run their business.
You might think that the insurance companies go too far in attempting to restrict coverage or to find loopholes in their policies that prevent them from having to cover things.
That's what insurance does.
That's what insurance companies are.
Again, what you're really criticizing is the system.
Well, if you're a member of the far left, apparently you believe that somebody with the wrong political principles, maybe they should be murdered.
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been the system of private health insurance in the united states is a bizarre amalgam of government subsidies nearly all health care coverage in the united states is in some form or fashion government involved even private health care systems are heavily government regulated very very strongly okay but that is not united health care's fault
that is like suggesting that if ralph's prices bread at a particular level because the markets have determined that there's just that much bread available and then people can't afford that bread that That's somehow Ralph's fault.
The system works, how the system works.
And you can talk about changes to the system.
We should.
Obamacare has been a bad thing for the system, I believe, in general.
But the idea that if you work for a private healthcare insurance company, that you should be murdered is pretty astonishing.
She says, someone against death and suffering.
I think it's good to call out this broken system and the people in power who enable it.
I have a question.
Why is he the one who enables it?
Really, why is he the one who enables it?
I wasn't aware that Brian Thompson was a public policy professional working in an arena in which consent was not actually the keystone.
Meaning, if you don't want to buy healthcare insurance via United, don't do it or don't work for a company that does do it.
But you have to understand that for people on the left, this says something deeper about the left.
Okay, here's the deeper thing it says about the far left.
And it's a reason why there's a Venn diagram that looks like a circle between people who are fine with Brian Thompson getting murdered on the street and people who are pro-Khamas.
Like, it's an actual circle.
Why?
Because the baseline belief of the left's system these days, at least the far left, is that if you are working within a system that they have deemed morally inferior, you deserve to die.
You do.
And if someone kills you, well, you probably had it coming.
I can only imagine that's why Taylor Lorenz has spent the rest of the day putting out posts at Blue Sky, which is this dumb alternative to Twitter, in which she actually posts the pictures of other healthcare CEOs.
So again, the premise of the left is if you work within a system that they do not like, you deserve to die.
You're a Kulak and you deserve to die.
If you work within a system that they deem morally praiseworthy or you're a member of a quote-unquote morally praiseworthy group, you can literally do anything.
So if your grievance is, in the view of the left, in any way legitimate, then you can do anything.
This is the same group of people who will suggest, for example, that if you don't like the situation in the Gaza Strip, that now justifies you in women and murdering babies.
This is the left's full-scale belief system, at least on the far left.
And this is a perfect example of it playing out.
Now, what's amazing about this is that the way that the left adjudicates whether a system is morally praiseworthy or morally blameworthy is not, in fact, based on a utilitarian calculus.
So that professor from Colombia who suggested that the private health care system in the United States is responsible for 68,000 deaths or whatever is the number that he is spewing.
He doesn't actually believe that if you work for an alternative healthcare system that is government run and it kills more people that you then deserve to die.
He doesn't believe that.
Because it isn't actually about a utilitarian calculus for what's best for humanity.
For the left, it never is.
For the left, it is all about the central moral principle.
It is not about a utilitarian calculus.
They're not angry at private health insurance because private health insurance supposedly makes people worse off.
If we had a nationalized healthcare system in the United States that had severe shortages, that had healthcare rationing, that had major problems with taking people with severe illness, which all that I just said is all true of the National Health Service in Great Britain, for example.
It's wildly expensive.
It's bankrupting the country.
The quality of the healthcare is poor, particularly if you have significant health problems.
You have to wait online for basic health procedures.
But you never hear the left complaining about the utilitarian calculus there.
It's not about the human beings affected by the system.
That is a lie.
That is a facade.
The thing they actually care about is power and control.
If the left controls a system, the system is good.
If the left does not control a system, the system is bad.
And if you're a member of that system, then maybe, just maybe, you deserve to die.
It's all a power game.
If you're a prosecutor and you see a good Samaritan on the street trying to stop A violent act on a subway.
That person who tried to stop the violent act is bad because that person is not of your political ilk.
They're not part of the team.
And so that means that person ought to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Meanwhile, if a person actually commits a felony murder, if that person is a member of your team, well, then you do your best to let that person off the hook because it's all team sport.
It's all team sport.
And the subjugation of basic liberal principle by left-wing principle is perfectly obvious here.
It's the great untold story of the last several decades in American politics.
It used to be that liberals in this country were people that you or I as a conservative might disagree with on tax policy, on health care policy.
But as I've said literally my entire career, there's a difference between a liberal and a leftist.
A liberal would never argue that because you work for UnitedHealthcare, you ought to die.
Maybe you ought to be shot.
That's not something a traditional liberal would ever suggest.
They might say the system has problems.
They might say that this company needs to be run better.
They might object to that particular CEO. They would never argue that person ought to be morally dispensed with, just shot on the street, in the way that you're hearing from some of these members of the radical left.
They wouldn't say that.
That takes a left-wing point of view, because for the left-wing, for people who are truly on the left, not just liberals who disagree about the various uses of the government or what government can or should do, but who actually believe that all dynamics are power dynamics, and the only thing that matters is that your allies control the government gun, for those people, murder is one of the things that is just part and parcel of the system.
Sometimes, to cook the left-wing omelet, you have to break a few eggs.
And you're seeing that more and more from the traditional liberal wing of the Democratic Party is this sort of power dynamics are central to everything.
Perfect example of this comes today.
So Joe Biden and his team are now leaking that they are considering the possibility of preemptive pardons for pretty much everybody associated with the Biden administration.
Now, the way that they are painting this is in a quote-unquote principled liberal way.
What they're saying is they are afraid that the Trump administration is going to come in and politicize the Justice Department and go after Biden officials.
Therefore, they have to preemptively strike and pardon everybody.
Now, do you find that plausible?
I don't find that particularly plausible.
The reason I don't find that plausible is because it was the left wing of the Democratic Party that decided that now that they had power, they were going to initiate prosecutions of pretty much everybody they didn't like, ranging from Donald Trump directly to pro-lifers who are protesting in unapproved places.
To other members of conservative constituencies, like school board members, who they didn't particularly like, like parents.
They were going to target all these people using the positions of power, not because they believed in principled ways that certain people were guilty of crimes, but because they believed that certain people had to be got, and the law was as good a method of any...
I don't actually think this is a preemptive strike directed against the Trump administration coming in and politicizing law enforcement.
I think this is precisely what it appears to be, which is the left wing of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden now creating a new standard where if you are a friend of Joe, you get a blanket pardon.
That's what the Hunter Biden thing was.
Remember, he did not pardon Hunter Biden of the crimes for which Hunter Biden was charged.
He didn't commute the sentence, which he certainly could have done for Hunter Biden.
Instead, he gave him a blanket pardon for a full scale 10 year period for anything and everything.
He gave me a get out of jail free card that covered everything.
That's not a preemptive strike, folks.
That is just a you're my friend, you get special benefits thing.
That's what's happening right here.
Apparently, now Joe Biden wants to consider doing that for pretty much all of the people allied with him.
According to Politico, Joe Biden's senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions.
Biden's aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments, a sense of alarm which has only accelerated since Trump last weekend announced the appointment of Kash Patel to lead the FBI.
Those White House officials are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who've committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump's criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may in fact reject them.
So who exactly are they worried about?
Well...
They might give a preemptive blanket pardon for all possible crimes on the federal level to Senator-elect Adam Schiff from California as well as former GOP Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
Others mentioned include Anthony Fauci who almost certainly committed perjury with regard to gain-of-function research before the United States Senate.
Apparently, the West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel, but include a range of other aides, including Chief of Staff Jeff Zients.
The president himself has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions.
I love that Joe Biden is so out of it.
He is so not part of this conversation.
He's not even a part of the conversation about what kind of pardons he should be issuing.
But make no mistake, this is Democrats changing the rules of the game yet again.
They changed the rules of the game to let Hunter Biden off the hook for everything and anything.
And now, they want to change the rules of the game so as to issue preemptive blanket pardons to all of their friends and allies.
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So, I have a question.
Where are the members of the left standing up to this?
They certainly should.
They certainly should.
To their credit, some of them actually are.
Team Obama, actually.
Some members of Team Obama are upset about this.
That makes sense because Team Obama and Team Biden don't get along.
So, I don't know how much of this is principled and how much of this is the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of stuff.
But in any case, here, for example, was Tommy Veeder of Pod Save America ripping into Joe Biden for the Hunter Biden pardon.
Everyone looks stupid.
Everyone looks like they're full of sh**.
And Republicans are going to use this to argue that it was politics as usual when Democrats warned about Trump's corruption or threat to the rule of law or, you know, the threat to democracy.
And I think that's the piece of this I am most frustrated with, which is Joe Biden looking like a typical lying politician.
And I think that leads to a cynical feeling that all politicians are bad and they're all the same and that this is just par for the course.
Hunter's pardon is expansive here.
It goes back a decade.
So the right-wingers, I listened to Ben Shapiro this morning, they're all saying what this shows is that Joe Biden was in on the take the whole time.
That he was getting money from Hunter's business dealings because he pardoned this decade's worth of money.
And now I think Joe Biden damaged his own reputation in service of doing something understandable on a human level for his son.
And he also, you know, damaged the Democratic Party's reputation.
And the question I have is, is Hunter the only one getting saved here?
Okay, well, that last part there is the part that's amazing.
Is Hunter the only one getting saved here?
Is the implication that everybody should get saved?
From what?
For what crimes?
Again, the Democratic argument is going to be we have to use this nuclear option because otherwise Trump is going to use his nuclear option.
Or maybe there's something else going on here, which is if you've got the power and you're a Democrat, you wield it no matter what.
And that seems to be the order of the day.
That seems to be the rule of the day.
Again, Democrats were perfectly willing to kill the filibuster if they had won the Senate.
If they had won the Senate and the presidency, they would have killed the filibuster.
They made no bones about this.
For them, power is merely a tool.
For people who are normal in politics, normal liberals, normal conservatives, The powers of the government don't change based on who's in power.
It is only for what purpose those powers are used.
One of the ways that you can tell whether somebody is a postmodernist in their politics is whether they believe that the powers delegated to the federal government expand based on who is in control of the government.
If it's us, I get to expand my power radically.
If it's them, I restrict the power radically.
That is a problem.
It is a real problem in American politics.
It's a real problem in global politics as well.
It turns out there's still a standard of right and wrong when it comes to this sort of stuff.
But increasingly, when it comes to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, that is no longer the case.
Liberals are being supplanted by the leftists.
In fact, Sean Penn, who is, as we all know, a fool, he praised Hunter Biden.
He called him one of the finest people I know.
and he urged joe biden to squeeze in more pardons he says quote it ain't january yet i hope that it is also in president biden's intentions to offer an ongoing concerted focus on people who have been wrongfully charged overcharged where the extenuating circumstances have not been fairly considered and that there will be many more pardons that are better for the world than leaving people to toil in prison it's all power politics all the way down Which brings us to the Supreme Court.
So, yesterday at the Supreme Court, there was a hearing in a case called U.S. v.
Scrametti.
This particular case is one the Daily Wire has a bit of a stake in because obviously Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire has done heavy lifting in what is a woman, particularly in the state of Tennessee, with regard to preventing the transing of the children in the state of Tennessee.
So Tennessee passed a state law that banned the transing of the kids.
And then a federal lawsuit was filed by the ACLU. In an attempt to suggest that there is, in fact, a 14th Amendment argument that small children must be given cross-sex hormones or this is sex discrimination.
That is the argument that was being made yesterday in U.S. v.
Scrimetti.
The U.S. Solicitor General under Joe Biden, who is trying to argue in favor of striking down the Tennessee law, they argued the Tennessee law discriminates by sex and transgender status, violating the equal protection of the laws.
The feds argue, That is a wild argument.
Again, that is sort of like suggesting that it is sex discrimination to suggest that if a male has cancer of the prostate, he can have his prostate removed, but a female who has anal cancer can't have her prostate removed because she doesn't have a prostate.
What are you talking about?
These are different diagnoses for different conditions.
It's an absurdity.
Now again, a lot of this confusion was created by the terrible ruling in Bostock in 2020, which suggested that the Civil Rights Act, when it banned employment discrimination by sex, that also included discrimination based on the idea that if a boy walks in and says he's a girl, that you could fire him based on that.
That somehow that's what the Civil Rights Act was meant to protect against.
That, of course, is incredibly silly.
But what is this in the end?
What is this entire argument about?
It's about a power game.
It's about a power game in a couple of ways.
One, the left doesn't believe that men can become women.
They don't.
They're lying if they say they do.
No one believes this.
No one.
Even the greatest advocates don't believe this.
Instead, it is a power game.
It is designed to get you to say the thing.
You will be made to care.
You will be made to repeat the phraseology.
This is not a right to privacy.
This is a right to publicity issue.
It's a right to be treated in a way that you believe everyone else should treat you, even if it violates those other people's rights.
That's what this is all about.
And even violating the rights of minors.
It's a power game.
Chase Strangio, that is the name of the transgender man, meaning a woman, who works for the ACLU and was the attorney on behalf of the ACLU before the Supreme Court, is making this argument.
Again, this is, man, it is amazing.
This is what we have come to in America.
We have to have Supreme Court arguments over whether the state should be able to prohibit the genital mutilation and hormonal destruction of children.
Here's Chase Strangio.
Again, this person is a lawyer before the Supreme Court.
Defending sex changes for two-year-olds Nobody has to provide this medication to adolescents.
These are not doctors being forced to provide this medication.
These are doctors who are wanting to treat their patients in the best way that they know how, based on the best available evidence to us.
And these are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly who they are, who suffered for six, seven years before they had any relief.
And what's happening here, it's not the kids who are consenting to this treatment, it's the parents who are consenting to the treatment.
And as a parent, I would say, when our children are suffering, we are suffering.
And these are parents who love their children, who are listening to the advice of their doctors, of the mainstream medical community, and doing what's right for their kids, and the state of Tennessee has displaced their judgment.
Some of the Supreme Court justices were having nothing to do with this yesterday.
The audio is available from Supreme Court hearings, but the video is not.
That's just the way that it works over there.
Justice Samuel Alito asked some pretty basic questions that destroyed the government's case.
He asked, for example, about whether sex changes reduce suicide because the data showed that they do not, actually, which is the chief argument that has been used by the state as well as by trans advocates to argue for why children should be given these sorts of horrific, barbaric treatments.
He says, well, where's the data that shows that these treatments actually reduce suicidal ideation?
And the answer is there are none.
On page 195 of the Cass report, it says, there is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce suicide.
What I think that is referring to is there is no evidence in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide.
And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we're talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don't necessarily have completed suicides within them.
However, there are multiple studies, long-term longitudinal studies, that do show that there is a reduction in suicidality, which I don't I think is a positive outcome to this treatment.
Okay, so that would be a distinction without much of a difference there from Chase Estrangio trying to split hairs.
The reality is that the data don't exist on this point at all.
Alito then went further and fully destroyed the entire logic.
He pointed out that the 14th Amendment is meant to prevent discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristic.
Immutable characteristic would be like race.
If you're a black person, you can't become a white person.
You're still going to be black no matter how many times you say you're white.
He says, well, when it comes to gender, that's clearly not an immutable characteristic under the 14th Amendment.
Are there individuals who are born male, assigned male at birth?
Who at one point identify as female, but then later come to identify as male, and likewise for individuals who are assigned female at birth, at some point identify as female, I'm sorry, identify as male, but later come to identify as female?
Are there not such people?
There are such people.
I agree with that, Justice.
So it's not an immutable characteristic, is it?
Well, duh.
Of course, not an immutable characteristic, but this argument was never about the principle of the matter.
Ever.
It's all about a power game in which the entire body politic and, in fact, all of humanity is forced to abide by a false construction of reality because that's what the left wants.
The left wishes that humanity were all a bunch of interchangeable widgets that they could mold at will.
And if that's not true, we'll just pretend that it's true.
And we will mutilate kids in order to accomplish this.
That is the logic of the left on these issues.
I mean, Sonia Sotomayor, who is by far the dumbest person on the Supreme Court of the United States.
There are some other candidates, but Sonia Sotomayor is unique in her level of stupidity on the Supreme Court.
Yesterday, she compared the hormonal treatment of teenagers and pre-teenagers to them having aspirin.
They cannot eliminate the risk of detransitioners, so it becomes a pure exercise of weighing benefits versus risk.
And the question of how many minors have to have their bodies irreparably harmed for unproven benefits is one that is best left.
I'm sorry, Counselor.
Every medical treatment has a risk, even taking aspirin.
There's always going to be a percentage of the population under any medical treatment that's going to suffer a harm.
So you're now comparing, Sonia Sotomayor, taking aspirin to having your genitals chopped off as a 15-year-old, your breasts chopped off.
Well, she's neither a good doctor nor a good lawyer, as it turns out.
All right, in just a second, we'll bring you the updates on the possible nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.
I say possible because it seems to be a little bit fraught lately.
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Meanwhile, hot controversy over Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense.
Now, he is defending himself as well as he should.
An enormous amount of material that is now being submitted into the public spaces about Pete Hegseth, about alleged drunkenness or alleged improprieties with women, is being done anonymously.
Virtually no one is willing to go on the record about Pete Hegseth.
And this is supposed to scuttle him.
That's ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
You have to have a higher burden of proof than anonymous sources say.
Somebody needs to make the accusation so that the particulars can either be rebutted or not.
So, Pete Hegseth has now put out an op-ed over at the Wall Street Journal saying, quote, I faced fire before.
I won't back down now.
He says, quote, I've been through a lot.
Combat tours, job changes, divorces, and family challenges.
Yes, I love my mom very much, and she loves me.
I've always led with honesty, integrity, and passion.
Tragically, many veterans never find the purpose for their next chapter and succumb to the vile depression or, worst of all, suicide.
I understand what they're facing because I've lived it.
By the grace of God, I took another path.
My Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, has renewed and restored my life.
I am saved by His grace.
The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story all meant to smear me and take me down.
It's a textbook manufactured media takedown.
They provide no evidence, no names.
They ignore the legions of people who speak on my behalf.
They need to create a bogeyman, and because they believe, I threaten their institutional insanity.
That is the only thing they are right about.
He's right about that.
I mean, we've gone through the allegations.
The allegations are either scanty or anonymous or both.
Some of the allegations that have been trotted out are a letter that Pete Hegseth's mom sent him seven, eight years ago talking about how he needed to be better to the women in his life.
Which, by the way, that's pretty rough stuff to be dumping out there in public view.
You know, letters from mothers to sons and such?
I mean, seriously, people.
Well, Pete Hegseth's mom was out defending him in the media yesterday.
Here's what she had to say.
You say it's important that people know the truth.
Is there some part of that story that has been depicted in the media that is not true?
Oh, of course.
Which part?
You know, I don't want to use the words, but he doesn't misuse women.
No.
And I want people to look at Pete and judge people or understand him for who he is today and to disregard the media.
That was seven years ago.
And most of it is misinformation.
But Pete is a new person.
He's redeemed, forgiven, changed.
I think we all are after seven years.
Again, the fact that—so there's a game that's played here.
Anonymous accusation.
Accusations that bring forward something that his mom said about him.
His mom comes forward to rebut, and then it was like, hey, you had to call your mom.
Well, you made his mom the issue.
While Pete went on with Megyn Kelly yesterday to defend himself.
She asked him about the accusations.
Here's what he had to say.
First of all, I've never had a drinking problem.
No one's ever approached me and said, oh, you should really look at getting help for a drink.
Never.
I've never sought counseling, never sought help.
I respect and appreciate people who do.
But, you know, what do guys do when they come back from war oftentimes?
Have some beers.
Thank God, by the grace of God, I found my chapters of purpose that pulled me out of that.
Now, good for him for saying that sort of stuff.
He says also, listen, I don't owe the media answers.
I owe senators answers.
Presumably they're the ones who are going to be doing the advice and consent process.
Here he was with Megan.
I don't answer these questions to the hyenas in the hallway trying to chirp at my wife and I as we walk down the hallway.
I don't owe them an answer.
I owe an answer to the members of the United States Senate who are going to vote for a confirmation here.
So, we'll see how this all plays out.
There have been rumors that Trump is considering some other possibilities.
People like Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa or Governor Ron DeSantis from Florida.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe that's not.
But the bottom line is, at this point, I have not seen sufficient evidence for why Pete Hegseth should not be Secretary of Defense.
I think he would completely revitalize the Department of Defense.
I think he would come in and he would clean house, which is, as he says, probably the thing that they are most afraid of.
And we are now living in a post-Kavanaugh era where simply accusing people of impropriety anonymously isn't going to do it anymore.
You actually have to show proof.
You have to show why Pete Hegseth should not be Secretary of Defense.
Now, maybe he can't get there with the votes.
That's possible.
We'll find out.
But from the reports that are being made publicly that are all anonymous in nature and that very often contradict some of the public record, I'm not seeing it, certainly as of yet.
Obviously, the wide level of support that Pete has in the commentariat, I think, speaks to what many of us think of Pete, which is quite highly.
GOP Senator Bill Hagerty, who's one of the people who's been considered as a possible replacement, supposedly, he says that House members gave Pete Hegseth a standing ovation when he visited the Hill.
Well, I'd say this.
I was just with Pete meeting with a large group of House members, and he had an ovation that was resounding.
I think that Pete, as people get to know him again, as people get to see his deliberation, his deliberate stance on trying to repair the Pentagon, trying to fix our recruiting crisis, our retention crisis, I think people are overwhelmingly supportive of him, and I think that's going to continue to move in the right direction.
The momentum is with Pete right now.
I think that that is correct.
I think that's correct.
So again, we'll see how the math plays out.
But the sort of strategy of dump the kitchen sink on whomever the nominee is and don't provide any specific credible evidence of accusations that would bring him down, I think that that is not a winning strategy for the media anymore.
I think that era is now over.
Now, with all of that said, one of the things that I think has been a mistake by President Trump in nominating a variety of these people is not the nominees themselves.
It's the problem that he's actually wiped out several House members from the House Republican Caucus.
And this is something that Republicans are going to have to keep in mind.
President Trump right now might have a House majority of one, which would be the smallest House majority in decades.
It's either going to be one or two seats.
So, again, 220 seats.
That means no one can get sick.
It means no one can be out of town for a vote.
And it means nobody can dissent.
Historically small House majority.
It wouldn't have been that small if not for the fact that there are now several vacancies.
Those vacancies were created by President Trump picking a bunch of House members out of the House and trying to bring them into the administration.
That's kind of a problem.
Practically speaking, the GOP majority could be as thin as 217 to 215. That would be the same as the smallest ever 1917 to 1919 Congress.
And a lot of members of the House team were pretty upset at the reduction in the House majority.
We'll see how that plays in terms of actually being able to negotiate the kinds of major legislation that President Trump needs to push forward.
Meanwhile, chaos has broken out in France.
Another French government has now fallen after the National Assembly approved a no-confidence vote.
And this is not a giant shock.
The French National Assembly has been split among a wide variety of parties for a while now.
Emmanuel Macron's party, he's the president of France, the prime minister, his role is a lot more ceremonial than the president.
The president has a longer term and has more power.
His government, meaning his workable majority in the National Assembly, Macron's, has now broken down.
And that, of course, is because Macron had effectively sided against Marine Le Pen's national rally and instead had decided to side with the actual far-left socialist led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who's an insane person, like a total rabid crazy person, a Bernie Sanders-style, Jeremy Corbyn-style nutjob.
And so because of that, when the left turned against him in the National Assembly, he couldn't count on the right to back his play.
And so now the government has fallen apart.
Because it turns out that the quote-unquote moderate right in France, which the Macron regime was supposed to represent, would rather side with the socialists than side with the actual right in France.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Michel Barnier had proposed 60 billion euros,
equivalent to about $63.1 billion in spending cuts and tax increases.
That budget was attempting to narrow the French deficit.
The left opposed it.
So did the far right.
And when I say far right, I just mean the right.
National Rally is not really a far right party anymore.
Every time there's a right-wing party, it's now labeled far right, despite whatever the actual positions of the party are.
This is true everywhere in Europe.
Anytime you have a party like the Maloney's party in Italy and it wins, it's a far-right party.
Gerd Wilders is now far-right.
Viktor Orban is far-right.
The Vox party in Spain is far-right.
UKIP, the independent party in the UK, is far-right.
Far-right just means not a sort of moderately, squishily, slightly right-of-center European party.
Anything to the right of that is now the far-right party.
Barnier said, listen to me, this reality is here to stay and won't disappear by the magic of emotion of censure.
Macron's options for resolving the deadlock are narrowing.
The president can't dissolve the National Assembly and call for new elections until July.
Instead, he can allow Barnier to remain in office in a caretaker capacity to pass measures that would effectively extend this year's budget into the early months of 2025, which would avoid a government shutdown.
He can also appoint a new prime minister who could either pass the extension or scramble to pass a full budget by the end of the year.
French stocks are falling.
Marine Le Pen said she was prepared to vote in favor of a budget extension.
But, she said, quote, So again,
he's trying to paper over the fact that the right in France is picking up steam.
He desperately tried to avoid allying himself with Le Pen, which he certainly could have done.
And instead, he allied himself with the far left.
And it turns out the alligator always eats you, if not last, maybe first in this particular case.
Le Pen has issued a number of red lines for the budget, including ditching plans to increase electricity taxes, lowering drug reimbursements, and delaying inflation-linked pension hikes.
Now again, one of the things that is strange about European politics is that many of the so-called far-right parties are actually big government spending subsidy parties.
They're not necessarily free marketeers.
With that said, Macron has been unable to cobble together a coalition to support him.
For years, at this point.
And Marine Le Pen is the big winner in all of this.
As the Wall Street Journal's opinion page points out, Andrew Hammond writing, he says, the country's economic outlook is ugly.
France's borrowing costs hit an approximately 12-year high against those of Germany.
But the current chaos has more to do with the political weakness of Macron.
The trigger for the removal was the budget proposals to try to reduce France's huge fiscal deficit, which has grown under Macron.
Attempts to address this, however, have met with huge political opposition from both the left and the right.
There's no immediate solution.
The European Union is going to face a rough year in 2025.
And again, those political problems are stemming from Macron's weakness.
It is increasingly Marine Le Pen an ally of President-elect Trump who is calling the political shots.
It was Le Pen who decided to pull the plug on Barnier's government.
One reason she may have decided to roll the political dice is that she faces judgment this spring in another corruption trial.
Again, the use of law enforcement all over the world to target people on the right is really an amazing thing.
I mean, truly, it's Marine Le Pen in France.
It's happening in South Korea, maybe, maybe not.
It is happening, certainly, in Hungary.
It is happening in Brazil.
It is happening in the United States.
It is happening in Israel.
If Le Pen were to be found guilty, she could be barred from elected office for up to five years, which would thwart a 2027 election bid.
So Le Pen might be trying to force an early presidential poll.
But right now, the most likely scenario in France remains that Macron will limp along until 2027, possibly in a period of so-called cohabitation with the government, not of his political colors.
But maybe he'll resign the same way that Charles de Gaulle did back in 1969. Bottom line is Macron does not represent the French people.
That is being made clear each and every day in France.
Folks, we'll get to more in a second.
First, I want to remind you, I was actually in Argentina in Buenos Aires yesterday talking about free markets versus socialism.
You can view the whole speech from CPAC Argentina.
I think it's a pretty solid disquisition on why free markets matter, why socialism is evil.
You can view that over at my Twitter account.
All right, guys, coming up, we'll bring you the updates from South Korea, where after the South Korean president tried to declare martial law, it now appears he's likely to be impeached.
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