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March 20, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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The Case For Derek Chauvin | Episode 2: The Incident
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What if everything you were told about the trial of Derek Chauvin was a lie?
Today we're examining the terrible miscarriage of justice that took place in the case of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
This is a comprehensive multi-episode breakdown of the case.
All the facts, all the evidence, all the political context.
We're tearing this case apart piece by piece by the end.
I think you'll agree with me that President Trump should immediately pardon Derek Chauvin for his federal convictions.
New episodes of this series drop Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Watch them, share them, join discussion with Daily Wire members and Ben Shapiro Show producers inside the Daily Wire Plus app.
The truth matters, justice matters, and you won't hear this anywhere else.
This is The Case for Derek Chauvin.
Episode 2, The Incident.
So, folks, yesterday, Press Secretary Caroline Levitt explicitly said that President Trump is not considering a pardon for Derek Chauvin at this time, which, of course, is perfectly fine and frankly expected at this stage.
The clear pattern we've seen time and again is the grassroots movement build momentum first.
Concerned citizens speak out consistently.
Eventually, those voices permeate the administration's awareness and influence what makes it onto the president's agenda.
That's precisely what happened with the January 6th defendants and others who received pardons or commutations.
The administration initially distanced itself from those cases too, but then public pressure mounted.
This statement from Caroline Levitt isn't a reason to stop educating yourself on the issue or to remain silent if you believe a terrible injustice has occurred.
In fact, it is even a better reason for citizens to familiarize themselves with the facts, analyze the case objectively, and speak out if they believe our justice system has failed.
Now, let's dive into the incident.
Memorial Day 2020.
The country was nearly three months into the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Businesses were closed.
Millions were unemployed.
People were increasingly frustrated with government-imposed restrictions on their daily lives.
Minneapolis, like many urban centers across America, was experiencing this pressure cooker environment, along with pre-existing tensions between law enforcement and minority communities.
Minneapolis had been a laboratory for progressive criminal justice policies.
Racial tensions had been mounting for years.
Following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent Hands Up, Don't Shoot narrative, the Black Lives Matter movement had gained significant influence over police policy nationwide.
Minneapolis was at the forefront of implementing reforms that restricted officers' ability to effectively police high-crime areas.
To understand the full context, we actually need to go back to the 1990s when critical race theory began to migrate from the academic fringes into mainstream discourse.
Scholars like Derrick Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw pushed the idea that America is fundamentally racist at its core, that our entire system is designed to oppress minorities, that concepts like colorblindness, equal opportunity, meritocracy are themselves racist constructs.
This ideology, once confined to university grievance studies departments, increasingly began to influence Democratic Party politics and policy, particularly during Barack Obama's second term.
Barack Obama had initially presented himself as a post-racial candidate.
His 2008 A More Perfect Union speech promised a transcendence of racial division.
I chose to run for president at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together.
Unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.
That we may not look the same and may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction towards a better future.
But by his second term, his administration had embraced much more racially divisive rhetoric and policy.
The Department of Justice under Eric Holder and later Loretta Lynch pushed a narrative of systemic police racism, despite comprehensive studies contradicting this narrative.
Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who happens to be black, conducted the most extensive empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force and found no statistical connection linking police brutality and racism.
As he stated in his findings, when it comes to the most extreme use of force officer-involved shootings, quote, we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.
Fryer ultimately faced professional repercussions for publishing those findings, showing just how ideologically entrenched the narrative had become.
Minneapolis specifically.
Became a hotbed of far-left politics.
Keith Ellison, a progressive Democrat with past ties to radical organizations, had been elected as Minnesota's Attorney General in 2018.
The city council was dominated by progressives who had campaigned on transforming policing.
Mayor Jacob Fry was a progressive Democrat who had positioned himself as a champion of police reform.
Into this politically charged environment came a concerted effort by progressive billionaire George Soros and organizations like Color of Change.
to install progressive district attorneys nationwide through initiatives like Winning Justice, the Prosecutor Project.
A quick search on Open Secrets shows that Soros had donated $1 million to Color of Change, as well as another $12 million to the campaigns of progressive DAs like George Gaskin, Larry Krasner, and Alvin Bragg, according to a report from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
These progressive prosecutors openly advocated for reduced incarceration and more lenient treatment of criminals.
They created a perception among officers that proper enforcement of the law would not be supported by city leadership.
This toxic political climate directly impacted police morale and effectiveness.
Officers increasingly found themselves caught in an impossible situation, tasked with maintaining public safety while being told that traditional policing methods were inherently racist.
The so-called Ferguson effect was taking hold, a phenomenon where police withdraw from proactive enforcement due to fear of public criticism, all of which resulted in increased crime rates.
And as I mentioned earlier, let's not forget the unprecedented context of the COVID-19 lockdowns that served as the backdrop to this entire situation.
By May 25th, 2020, Americans had been subjected to nearly three months of draconian restrictions.
Businesses were shuttered, unemployment was skyrocketing, citizens were effectively imprisoned in their homes by government mandate.
The psychological and economic strain on Americans was immense.
People couldn't work, they couldn't socialize, they couldn't go to church.
Basic freedoms were suspended indefinitely, with constantly shifting justifications from health authorities.
All of which created a pressure cooker of social tension waiting to explode.
The lockdowns had particularly devastating effects on low-income communities where people couldn't simply work from home on their laptops.
Jobs were lost, savings were depleted, futures were uncertain.
The media stoked fears about the virus while simultaneously downplaying the devastating consequences of lockdown itself.
It was in this powder keg environment, with people frustrated, economically stressed, socially isolated, already primed to see everything through a racial lens after years of media conditioning, that the incomplete video of Floyd's arrest went viral.
On the evening of the arrest, Eric Chauvin was working as a field training officer in the Minneapolis Police Department's 3rd Precinct.
He was partnered with Officer Tao Tao, patrolling one of the higher crime areas of Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, George Floyd spent part of his day with friends.
At approximately 8 p.m., Floyd walked into the Cup Foods grocery store at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park neighborhood.
Surveillance footage from inside the store shows Floyd moving around.
According to Christopher Martin, the 19-year-old cashier who testified at Chauvin's trial, Floyd appeared to be high, but was very friendly, approachable, and talkative.
Floyd purchased cigarettes with a $20 bill that Martin believed to be counterfeit because of its blue color and texture.
After Floyd left the store, Martin and other employees at their manager's direction went outside to ask Floyd to return to address the issue of the potentially counterfeit bill.
When Floyd refused, the manager instructed an employee to call the police.
This single phone call set in motion in the chain of events that would end with Floyd's death approximately one hour later.
At 8.08 p.m., officers J. Alexander Kung and Thomas Lane arrived on the scene, responding to a call about a man who'd allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill.
They briefly entered Cup Foods before crossing the streets of Floyd's SUV, which was parked in front of a restaurant called Dragon Walk.
Floyd was in the car, along with his alleged drug dealer, Maurice Hall.
Hall would later invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during the trial.
The body cam footage from Officer Lane.
Shows him approaching the driver's side of Floyd's vehicle while Officer Kung approached the passenger side.
Lane tapped his flashlight on Floyd's window, startling Floyd inside.
When Lane instructed Floyd to show his hands and Floyd did not immediately comply, Lane drew his weapon and pointed it at Floyd.
When Floyd placed his hands on the steering wheel, Lane holstered his gun.
That initial interaction is critically important to understand.
Within seconds of approaching Floyd's vehicle, an officer had drawn his weapon because Floyd had immediately failed to comply with command.
That escalation set the tone for the entire encounter.
Lane ordered Floyd out of the vehicle.
Floyd apologized repeatedly while explaining that he had been shot before.
After Lane ordered Floyd to step out and face away, Floyd remained in the car for about 13 seconds.
So Lane used both hands to grab Floyd's left hand and right arm and partly pulled Floyd out of the car.
Lane continued pulling Floyd from the vehicle and handcuffed him.
The body camera footage shows Floyd did not physically resist being pulled out in handcuffs, though he did appear distressed.
At 8.12 p.m., Lane sat Floyd on the sidewalk against the wall in front of the restaurant and began to question him.
Floyd explained that he wasn't on something right now when Lane asked, although he appeared agitated.
Kung mentioned to Floyd that he was acting real erratic, to which Floyd responded that he was scared.
When questioned about the foam around his mouth, Floyd said he had been hooping earlier, a slang term that could refer to playing basketball, or in some context, apparently using drugs rectally.
At 8.13 p.m., Kung and Lane informed Floyd that he was under arrest for passing counterfeit currency and walked him across the street to their police vehicle.
This is where the situation began to escalate significantly.
As the body cam footage shows, Floyd told the officers repeatedly he was not resisting, but that he was claustrophobic and anxious about getting into the backseat of the police car.
Take a seat.
Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.
Why are you having trouble walking?
Be careful, be careful.
My hands are the worst.
We won't leave, man.
Take a seat.
Take a seat.
Grab a seat.
I'm not the kind of guy.
I'm not that kind of guy, man.
Take a seat.
I'm a die here.
Take a seat.
I'm a die, man.
You need to take a seat right now.
And I just had COVID, man.
I don't want to go back to that.
Take a seat.
Hey, I'll roll the windows down.
Hey, listen.
Dang, man.
Listen.
I'm not that kind of guy.
I'll roll the windows down as you put your legs in, all right?
I'll put the air on.
Look at that.
Look at that.
You're not even listening.
Look at it.
Look at it.
We can fix it, but not while you're standing out.
Hey, man.
God, that'll do me bad, man.
man. I don't want to try to win.
I don't want to win.
I'm trying to fool me.
I'm trying to fool me.
I got anxiety.
I don't want to do nothing to me.
Man, I'm
The footage shows Floyd becoming increasingly distressed as the officers attempted to place him in the vehicle.
He told them multiple times, I can't breathe.
Well before he was on the ground.
That critical fact has been largely overlooked in public discussions of the case.
Floyd was claiming breathing problems while he was still standing before any significant restraint was applied, suggesting that any breathing issues may have been related to his anxiety, his medical conditions, and or the drugs in his system.
you
At 8.17 p.m., officers Derek Chauvin and Tao Tao arrived on the scene in a third police car.
This is key, because Chauvin was not involved in the initial interaction with Floyd.
He arrived after Floyd was already handcuffed and refusing to get into the police vehicle.
When Chauvin arrived, he asked if Floyd was going to jail, and Kung replied that Floyd had been arrested for forgery.
At 8.18pm, body cam footage and security video from Cup Foods shows Kung struggling with Floyd for at least a minute in the driver's side backseat of the police vehicle.
Faust stood watching as this occurred.
At 8.19pm, Chauvin pulled Floyd across the backseat from the driver's side to the passenger's side as Floyd is heard asking to lay on the ground.
Floyd then exited the vehicle while being pulled out by police.
Again, Floyd asked to be withdrawn from the vehicle.
What happened next has been viewed by millions around the world.
At approximately 8.20 p.m., Chauvin placed Floyd in the ground in a prone position.
Kung applied pressure to Floyd's torso.
Lane applied pressure to Floyd's legs.
Thao stood nearby, managing the growing crowd of bystanders.
Multiple witnesses began recording videos of the incident from different angles.
The footage shows Floyd repeatedly saying, I can't breathe, please, and mama.
What the mainstream media deliberately omits from their coverage is that Chauvin was using a departmentally approved restraint technique that was explicitly taught to Minneapolis police officers.
Court documents filed in the state of Minnesota v.
Derek Chauvin show the Minneapolis Police Department's official training materials, which specifically instructed officers on the neck restraint as a non-deadly force option.
These training materials explicitly define this technique as compressing one or both sides of a person's neck with an arm or leg without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airway, front of the neck.
When you actually watch that complete unedited body cam footage, which, by the way, the legacy media rarely showed you in their entirety, what becomes clear is that for portions of the nine minutes and 29 seconds, Chauvin's knee is on Floyd's shoulder blade or upper back.
The autopsy report from Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker explicitly states there was, quote, no life-threatening injuries identified, no bruising on the neck, no damage to the trachea, no evidence of asphyxiation.
We also know from officers laying in Kung's body cam footage that Floyd was saying, I can't breathe at least six times while still upright in the police vehicle before any restraint was applied.
The video further shows Floyd exhibiting what the American College of Emergency Physicians documented in their 2009 white paper as excited delirium syndrome, characterized by strange behavior, dilated pupils, superhuman strength, imperviousness to pain, and hyperthermia, a condition explicitly taught to Minneapolis officers as part of their use of force training.
At approximately 8.22pm, the officers called for an ambulance on a non-emergency basis, upgrading the call to emergency status one minute later.
At approximately 8.25pm, Floyd appeared to lose consciousness.
Bystanders can be heard in the videos urging the officers to check his pulse.
Officer Kung checked Floyd's wrist but reported he couldn't find one.
According to Dr. Martin Tobin's testimony, that's the prosecution's star witness, there were approximately 50 seconds between Floyd's last words and the moment he died.
The prosecution wanted the jury to believe that these 50 seconds represent the smoking gun of Chauvin's alleged murderous intent, that any reasonable officer would have immediately recognized that Floyd was in distress and removed his knee.
The body cam footage tells a completely different story.
At precisely 8.25 p.m. and 20 seconds, just as Floyd loses consciousness, Chauvin's attention is suddenly drawn away from Floyd to a hostile crowd member wearing a boxing hoodie who aggressively threatens him, shouting, I'm not scared of you, bro.
You're a f***ing ass dude, bro.
These aren't the words of a concerned bystander.
These are the words of someone potentially preparing to attack officers.
Jovan immediately responds, don't come over here, don't come over here.
Stop and he's breathing right now.
You fucking go out now, bro.
Okay. Bro.
Okay. You just gonna choke him like that?
No, that's what you wanna do.
I'm not scared of you, bro.
You're a fucking ass dude.
What? Get off the air.
I'm a firefighter from Minneapolis.
Bro, look, you should check on him.
He's not responsive right now.
This critical moment is captured clearly on both Officer Thao's and Officer Lane's body cams, but was conveniently downplayed during the trial, which we'll get to in Episode 4. Here's what's absolutely critical.
MPD officers were explicitly trained they could maintain a prone position with the body weight until the scene is a code 4, meaning until everything is under control and the scene is safe.
The prosecution's own witness, Lieutenant Johnny Mersel, confirmed this under oath.
What's particularly telling?
is that when paramedics arrived two minutes later, even they did not consider the scene code 4 due to the increasingly hostile crowd.
That's why they performed what's called a load-and-go, quickly loading Floyd into the ambulance and immediately moving to a safer location before attempting treatment.
Again, they did not attempt treatment on the ground because they did not deem the situation safe.
The entire prosecution narrative collapses under this evidence.
They need you to believe Chauvin acted with conscious indifference to loss of life while performing an act that was highly likely to cause death.
But the evidence shows an officer following his training while simultaneously dealing with a potentially violent crowd during those final 50 seconds.
That is not murder.
That is clearly, clearly reasonable doubt.
Floyd was loaded into the ambulance unresponsive.
Officer Lane actually joined the paramedics in the ambulance and assisted with CPR efforts.
This fact has received very little attention in media coverage, but it's important to note that one of the officers on scene did attempt to help with resuscitation efforts.
Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful.
George Floyd was pronounced dead at Hennepin County Medical Center at 925 p.m.
Within 24 hours of the incident, before any thorough investigation could be completed, all four officers involved were fired from the Minneapolis Police Department.
On May 26th, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry publicly stated, quote, being black in America should not be a death sentence, effectively prejudging the case.
The following day, Mayor Fry explicitly called for criminal charges, asking, why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?
On May 29th, Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
Later, those charges would be upgraded to include second-degree unintentional murder.
Viewing these videos, we need to ask ourselves, does this constitute murder?
The prosecution argued, and the jury ultimately agreed, that Chauvin's actions directly caused Floyd's death and that his use of force was excessive and unreasonable.
However, there are several problems with this conclusion.
First, as we'll discuss in our next episode, the autopsy findings revealed that Floyd had a potentially lethal level of fentanyl in his system, along with methamphetamine, had significant heart disease as well that put him at risk for sudden cardiac death.
Second, Chauvin was using a restraint technique that was part of his departmental training.
Third, the body cam footage shows none of the officers on scene believed they were witnessing a murder.
Lane's assistance with CPR efforts indicates that the officers were not acting with malicious intent.
What we are left with is a tragic situation where an officer used a department-approved restraint technique on a resistant suspect who is experiencing a medical emergency related to drug intoxication and pre-existing health conditions.
Then, on May 31, 2020, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced that Attorney General Keith Ellison would lead the prosecution of Floyd's death.
Taking the case away from the Hennepin County District Attorney's Office.
This was a purely political decision designed to ensure conviction regardless of the evidence.
The media abans in any pretense of objectivity.
They repeatedly showed the edited bystander video while ignoring body camera footage that provided crucial context.
They highlighted Floyd saying, I can't breathe while on the ground, while failing to mention he was saying this before Chauvin ever restrained him.
They portrayed the knee on the neck as the obvious cause of death while ignoring the medical examiner's findings about Floyd's heart condition and drug use.
Coleman Hughes, a writer and commentator who also happens to be black, analyzed the case in depth and concluded the media narrative was fundamentally flawed.
As he noted in his piece what really happened to George Floyd, Chauvin did not improvise the restraint position.
He was utilizing the maximum restraint technique, again, part of the MPD training manual.
But the photo on the training slide demonstrating this technique was redacted at trial.
In the documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, six current and former MPD police officers affirm the MRT was indeed standard training, training they themselves had received.
When asked if he was trained on MRT, Rich Walker, an African-American MPD sergeant with 19 years on the force, replied, Yes, all the police officers were trained in MRT.
Politicians, celebrities, corporations all rushed to signal their virtue.
Companies pledged millions to Black Lives Matter organizations.
Sports teams knelt during the national anthem.
Social media profiles posted little black squares.
Anyone who dared to suggest we should wait for the legal process to unfold was immediately branded a racist.
As Hughes noted in a subsequent piece on Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, and Reasonable Doubt, there are two different theories of what caused Floyd's death.
The positional asphyxia theory, put forth by medical examiner Dr. Michael Bodden, hired by Floyd's family, and the adrenaline surge theory, a term coined by Hughes and presented by the county medical examiner Dr. Baker.
As Hughes correctly points out, as a juror, if you have two reasonable explanations for cause of death, one of which implicates the defendant and one of which does not, you are supposed to acquit.
But that's not what happened.
In our next episode, we'll examine the autopsy findings in detail and explore how the prosecution's narrative required jurors to disregard key medical evidence.
Stand up for the rule of law.
Go to PardonDerek.com today and sign our petition.
We'll also put the website to donate to Derek Chauvin's Legal Defense Fund in the description.
And join us right here on The Ben Shapiro Show on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next few weeks for future episodes in this series.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Meanwhile, the big news of the day was that President Trump released the JFK files.
And oh my goodness, the secrets that were buried within so many nothing burgers.
Just gigantic piles of nothing burgers everywhere.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration released more than 30,000 pages of previously classified or censored documents related to the death of former President John F. Kennedy.
Potentially providing answers to decades-old questions that helped make the 1963 assassination an emblem of distrust in government.
But what was in it?
The answer was pretty much absolutely nothing.
And you could see that there was nothing by the way that people treated it.
So there were people online who immediately started trafficking around one page that was essentially just a recapitulation of a story from Ramparts magazine, which was essentially a Communist Front magazine in the 1960s, suggesting that the CIA had done it.
And people traffic this around, like, look what I've discovered.
This is amazing.
Okay, that actual Ramparts magazine piece has been part of the JFK lexicon for a very long time.
Nonetheless, people were trafficking it around, like there was something brand new.
As the blaze points out, the contents of the document, a July 19th, 1967 CIA memo marked secret, consists of excerpts from a June 1967 article in Ramparts, and now it's a funked leftist magazine that was deeply antagonistic to the CIA.
Actually, David Horowitz, who became a very prominent conservative voice, started off at Ramparts Magazine.
And people online started treating this as though it were absolutely shocking news.
My goodness, this was finally the smoking gun that the CIA killed.
JFK.
That Rampart article had noted that a person named John Garrett Underhill Jr., known as Gary Underhill, left Washington in a hurry following the assassination and then showed up to a friend's house in New Jersey in an agitated state.
Supposedly, Underhill, who served with the military intelligence service during World War II and then worked on special projects for the CIA, told his friends that a cabal of CIA agents was responsible for the assassination.
Six months later, he was found dead of a gunshot wound in his Washington apartment, which was ruled a suicide.
Now, again, This is nothing new.
This person, for example, had met with Jim Garrison.
You remember Jim Garrison, the district attorney from Louisiana, who is the subject of the Oliver Stone gigantic movie?
Again, none of this is anything new, but it was treated by people who really know nothing about the JFK assassination as though this was magical, new, important news.
Senior reporter at the Epoch Times wrote, quote, this seems to be the biggest doc so far from the JFK files.
A popular ex-account concluded the CIA assassinated JFK, the sitting president of the United States.
And the answer is no.
The answer is no.
Here is the reality about the JFK assassination.
It was performed by a man named Lee Harvey Oswald.
Lee Harvey Oswald happened to have many screws loose.
In fact, just a few weeks earlier, he attempted to shoot a general in Texas and missed.
He happened to be a full-on Soviet sympathizer.
He'd actually gone over to the Soviet Union.
And he lived in the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union realized that he was a complete useless turd bucket of a human.
And then he ended up exported back to the United States.
And he showed up in Mexico at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico.
And so there was suspicion that maybe the Cubans had something to do with it.
And it turns out, nothing there either.
Nonetheless, did any of this evidence put any of the conspiracy theories to bed?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Because that's the whole point about conspiracy theories like the ones about JFK.
They do not require evidence.
The way that you can tell there's an actual conspiracy is evidence.
I know this is something that seems to have fallen out of fashion across a wide spectrum of our political conversation.
But evidence is generally required for outsized claims.
If you are going to claim, for example, that Donald Trump was a frontman for the Russians, you need some outsized evidence to demonstrate that that is a fact before it becomes the narrative that drives your entire political party and legacy media for four long years.
You're going to claim that the CIA murdered JFK?
Well, and you need more than some suppositions that you personally stitch together in your basement like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind with some string, like Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
You actually need evidence because I've noticed that these conspiracy theories are becoming quite prominent on the right.
People just throw things out there and then they stitch together a pastiche of nonsense.
They'll take one fact, they'll take something that is utterly untrue, they'll stitch them together and then they'll pretend that this constitutes Hard evidence that the conspiracy is real.
Why does any of this matter?
Why do we care?
Well, the reason that this matters is because there is such a thing as what Karl Popper, the philosopher, called the great conspiracy theory of life.
And that is that if you fail in your own life, it is because there is a conspiracy that is out to get you.
And you see this great conspiracy theory of life pop up in politics all the time because demagogues can take advantage of it.
If you are on the left, you are told that you are a failure.
Because, not because of your own decision making, but because the American system is deeply and systemically racist, or sexist, or capitalistically evil.
And if you're on the right, you're told that perhaps you're a failure because of a secret cadre of the Jews!
Or maybe you're a secret failure because the industrialists all got together in the backroom to screw you.
Now, if you want to make a case that bad policy has led to your current life outcome, you can provide evidence.
Of that bad policy.
If you want to show that there's a conspiracy, typically some evidence should be required.
This is how we distinguish fact from fiction here in the real world, not on X, where it just becomes viral in a hot second.
But like in the real world, where you live in your house with your family, if your child came home and said to you, Mommy and Daddy, the aliens controlled my grade, you would say that's psychotic unless you have evidence of aliens.
And yet we constantly do this in the political sphere.
We just suggest that unnamed, unknowable forces are responsible for really weird things happening in the world.
And again, it turns out that many of the conspiracy theories that are not conspiracy theories are backed by, say, some evidence, and generally tend to be kind of plausible from the get-go.
So, for example, the left labeled it a conspiracy theory when Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, suggested that perhaps a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for, you know, a virus in Wuhan arising.
From bats.
And it wasn't a wet market.
That was a pretty plausible theory because, you know, it was the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan that, you know, was where the pandemic started, was in Wuhan.
That was pretty plausible just on its face.
And then, of course, evidence started to be produced for the fact that there was gain-of-function research that actually was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And that there had been, in fact, prior problems with leaks from the lab.
And so that starts to look like a theory that has evidence to support it.
But when you are doing a conspiracy theory for, at this point, 62 years, and evidence has not yet emerged to back your conspiracy theory, and you just keep saying, as soon as evidence emerges that doesn't back it, well, that's irrelevant.
You know, you're just part of the conspiracy.
This is, if people do this to you, the first thing you should do is wonder whether they are trustworthy on any issue.
Seriously, if people lie to you by promoting conspiracy theories that have no evidence long past the sell-by date, Then you should start wondering whether or not they are telling you the truth on many other issues, it seems to me.
Because there are a lot of people who have spent the last two days continuing to promote completely specious, evidence-free conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination because it matches their priors politically.
It was the American, secretly was the American government.
It had to be the American government.
Why?
Because the American government is bad.
And because the CIA is evil.
And because the CIA is responsible for all the world's ills.
Or maybe, maybe the assassination was the fault of the evil industrialists who didn't like JFK.
The military-industrial complex that wanted to get us into war in Vietnam, even though it was JFK who got us into war in Vietnam and had no intention of withdrawing us.
Or maybe it was Mossad.
I mean, there's no evidence of it, but sure, maybe.
Now, I'm noticing that if your priors line up really, really well with your conspiracy theory, and then evidence of your conspiracy theory never emerges.
And your first move is to suggest that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Okay, that there being no evidence for your conspiracy theory means that it's only not there because of the conspiracy.
I think you're lying.
I think you know you're lying.
And if you don't know you're lying, you probably should give a rethink to how you do the logicking in the real world.
And if you are a fan of people who do this sort of thing, I would suggest that perhaps you think twice about whether they are credible on many other issues.
Are they willing to spin out full-scale theories that have no support for them?
For years on end, long after they have been effectively debunked by all available evidence.
In other words, if you were surprised by anything in the JFK files, like namely the fact that there's nothing new there, I don't know what to tell you.
Also, if the evidence had been different, then the theory would change.
But if your theory is precisely the same before and after the release of the evidence, and there's no new evidence to adduce to your theory, and your theory never had a lot of evidence, Then I just think you're being kind of dishonest for the clicks.
That's my take.
All right, meanwhile, Tesla has been victimized by wild, crazy people on the left.
Apparently, a wide variety of attacks on Tesla dealerships across the country because of Elon Musk's association with President Trump.
Now, the violent left is quite a real thing, as it turns out.
Chuck Schumer, the absolutely god-awful Senate minority leader from New York, he has a new book out about antisemitism, which, again, is an absurdity considering how...
Much anti-Semitism he himself has fostered within his party.
And he has not been going on his book tour because he's afraid that somebody's going to take a swipe at him or something.
Not from the right, from the left.
Well, the celebration of anti-Tesla violence also continues on the left.
According to the Associated Press, cyber trucks set ablaze.
Bullets and Molotov cocktails aimed at Tesla showrooms.
Attacks on property carrying the logo of Elon Musk's electric car company are cropping up across the United States and overseas.
While no injuries have been reported, Tesla showrooms, vehicle lots, charging stations, and privately owned cars have been targeted.
There's been a clear uptick since President Trump took office and empowered Musk to oversee a new Department of Governmental Efficiency that has been slashing government spending.
And some members of the left are absolutely fine with all of this.
Rick Wilson of the Exegrable Lincoln Project, he put out a full article about how tearing down Tesla is great for the country.
Tesla failing would be great for the country, which is...
Weird, because it's one of the most highly valued companies in the American market.
If the Tesla stock goes completely south, it's going to hurt a lot of people.
Not just people who own the Tesla stock, but people who work for Tesla.
It's going to hurt the market more generally.
President Trump, for his part, says these attacks on Tesla are obviously domestic terrorism, which they are.
But do you consider this an act of domestic terrorism?
Sure, I think so.
Why?
I think that if and when they catch the people, and I hope they do, the good thing is they have a lot of cameras in those places.
And they've caught some already having to do with that.
I think that you will find out that they're paid by people that are very highly political on the left.
And he is right about that.
Meanwhile, Tim Walz, and thank God Tim Walz never became the vice president of the United States, because this guy, what an unbelievable schmuck he is.
Tim Walz, this goofball weirdo with all the wrong political principles, he was celebrating the decline in Tesla's stock price.
Because after all, when a great American company starts to fail...
Then probably you should celebrate it, according to Tim Walls, a man who literally has never produced a job, has never actually had to pay anybody, who's like an employee, he's never had to make payroll, who brags that he owns no stock and no real estate.
This person was almost vice president of the United States.
I'm saying on my phone, I don't know, some of you know this on the iPhone, they've got that little stock app.
I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day.
2.25 and dropping.
So, go ahead.
And if you own one, if you own one, we're not blaming you.
You can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know, and take out, just telling you.
Unreal.
Just, what a gross human.
Seriously.
I don't like the politics of the owners of a lot of companies.
If they don't make that the politics of the company itself, I'm willing to buy from the company.
If we were all going to cut ourselves off from the economy based on the political viewpoint of the person who owns the company or founded the company, that's a lot of products that go right off the shelves immediately and go bankrupt.
The real reason, of course, that the left is angry at Elon and angry at Tesla, again, they're now boycotting the world's leading electric vehicle company because they don't like Elon Musk.
It's kind of amazing.
Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, who's doing an excellent job, he says that the real reason that...
They're mad at Elon Musk is because Elon has been moving their cheese, which of course is true.
I said to Elon, we're in a meeting, and I said, you know, people are mad at you because you're moving their cheese.
And he goes, it's not their cheese, it's the American people's cheese.
100%.
Every dollar spent goes into someone's pocket, and that person's going to fight tooth and nail to get that dollar to keep flowing into their pocket.
That is absolutely right.
Speaking of fighting tooth and nail, insane story that apparently the...
Top members of the U.S. Institute of Peace actually refused to leave their jobs when DOGE took over.
Not only did they sue to block the DOGE takeover, but apparently they literally barricaded themselves inside the headquarters as though this was the French Revolution or something rather than administrators from the federal government coming to fire them or audit their books.
This was spelled out by Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday.
So on the United States Institute of Peace, this is a little bit wild.
I understand the old president refused to leave.
After he was removed from his position, he barricaded himself in his offices, had to be escorted out by police, left the building without Wi-Fi, telephones, elevators, and more, and is now telling media that Doe's broken and illegally removed him.
It became very clear that there was a concerted effort amongst the rogue bureaucrats at the United States Institute of Peace to actually physically barricade themselves essentially inside of the building to prevent political appointees of this administration who work at the direction of the President of the United States to get into the building.
Peace in the Daily Caller, thank you for sharing the truth on this, about what happened.
Staff contacted the MPD in an attempt to prevent DOGE personnel from entering.
They barricaded the doors.
They also disabled telephone lines, internet connections, and other IT infrastructure within the building.
They distributed flyers internally, encouraging each other to basically prevent these individuals from accessing the building.
I use this to say this is what Doge and this administration is facing.
It's a resistance from bureaucrats who don't want to see change in this city.
She's right about that.
The U.S. Institute of Peace, again, those employees are suing, which they have every right to do, but the idea that they barricaded themselves inside as though they were resisting a riot or something is indeed insane.
Meanwhile, the left-wing resistance continues to extend to the courts.
So a district court judge, again, it's district court judges all over the United States, who are now acting outside of their jurisdiction and striking down nationwide action by the White House on the basis of temporary restraining orders.
This stuff was never a part of the American legal landscape until about 1960.
There is still no clear Supreme Court precedent as to whether a district court judge can enjoin entire national policies based on a local case that's being brought in some far-flung federal jurisdiction.
Apparently, one of these district court judges has now barred the Trump administration from ousting Transgendered people from the military.
I was unaware that there is a federal right to serve in the military.
There is not, in fact, a federal right to serve in the military.
There's a whole range of conditions that people have that bar them from serving in the military, ranging from depression to obesity.
The court's opinion is long, but the premise is simple.
According to this court, in the self-evident truth that all people are created equal, all means all, nothing more, and certainly...
Nothing less.
Well, I mean, hold up just a second there, Bobo.
It seems that all people being created equal, but that means that people have equal rights.
Doesn't mean they're equal in all of their capabilities.
Whether you serve in the military is a question of capability.
That is like suggesting that if you are a legless person, you can't serve in the police is some form of discrimination.
I mean, it's going to make it real hard for you to chase the criminals.
And it turns out that one of the things that makes you less militarily ready is thinking you're a member of the opposite sex and then requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars of hormone treatments and facial surgeries and reconstructive genital surgeries in order to make you feel better about yourself.
Like, that seems like that's not a great contributor to military readiness, actually.
Stephen Miller, policy advisor to the president, put out a statement, quote, Currently, district court judges have assumed the mantle of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Commander-in-Chief.
Each day they change the foreign policy, economic staffing, and national security policies of the administration.
Each day the nation arises to see what the craziest unelected local federal judge has decided the policies of the government of the United States shall be.
It is madness.
It is lunacy.
It is pure lawlessness.
It is the gravest assault on democracy.
It must and will end.
Which is exactly why, by the way, the Supreme Court needs to take up these cases immediately.
Just to elevate it to the Supreme Court already.
What are they doing?
This is the fault, in fact, of Chief Justice John Roberts.
There was a case that was elevated to the Supreme Court asking whether district court judges had the ability to issue nationwide injunctions, temporary restraining orders, and it was turned down by a majority of the court.
And that's why you are seeing this sort of chaos emerging in the court.
If Roberts wants to reestablish some form of actual credibility in the courts, the Supreme Court needs to rule on this matter.
Apparently, this is precisely what President Trump is actually planning, is to get this to the Supreme Court so he can have some clarity.
According to Axios, Or, for example,
The president's ruling on whether people who suffer from gender dysphoria have a right to serve in the military.
Can that judge's order extend to international waters and demand that a plane full of deportees turn around mid-flight?
Does a green card holder have speech rights that protect him from deportation?
Or can the secretary of state declare his speech adverse to U.S. foreign policy interests?
Because the government alleges that it aligns with the terror group Hamas.
It doesn't just allege, it does.
Can the Secretary of State's power to deport immigrants based on foreign policy concerns extend to so many visa student holders?
That some colleges won't be able to admit foreign exchange students at all.
Well, I mean, seeking clarity from the Supreme Court is how the system works.
That is not, in fact, a corrupt move by Trump.
That is, in fact, working well within the system.
Getting the Supreme Court to rule on things is quite an important aspect of the system, actually.
Again, important things are happening.
That is why, as I've said a thousand times, very important not to sink the economy.
The tariff uneasiness continues.
The markets have been quite a ride over the course.
Of the last couple of weeks.
The markets are down about 6% over the course of the last month.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday did rise.
It has not yet reached where it was last week or the week before.
With that said, news that White House aides are preparing to impose new tariffs on most imports on April 2nd, laying the groundwork for an escalation in global economic hostilities that President Trump has called Liberation Day that is going to roil the markets.
Perhaps people are betting that President Trump pre-negotiates something that's not as bad as expected.
I certainly would hope so.
Through his first two months in office, the president has raised tariffs on roughly $800 billion in imports from China, Mexico, and Canada.
Those tariffs have harmed the stock market generally.
Despite the blowback, senior Trump advisors are now publicly pledging to create a new tariff regime that would impose new duties on trade with most countries that actually do trade with the United States.
Laura Ingram asked President Trump the relevant question last night.
She said to President Trump, you know, you seem very tough on a lot of countries on trade.
Why so tough on Canada?
Like, what's the deal?
You're tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries.
Only because it's meant to be our 51st trade.
Okay, but listen to this for a second.
They have territorial advantage.
We're not going to let them get close to China.
Okay, so again, that would be the relevant question.
And if the market goes down, that is going to be the question that a lot of people are asking.
Scott Besson, again, doing a great job as Treasury Secretary.
He says the underlying numbers in the economy remain healthy.
There is a strange pattern that seems to be happening with regards to this administration.
When the tariff hawks go on TV, the markets drop.
When the Treasury Secretary appears on TV, the markets quiet.
That is not a coincidence.
questions.
What I can guarantee you is that there is no reason we need to have a recession.
I think that there's the economy in the first quarter is doing better than The media is reporting.
I think we're seeing some very good underlying data from credit card companies, from banks.
I think that the airlines, which reported some bad passenger numbers, a big amount of that is from federal employees who are not flying right now.
Again, Besson is not wrong.
Focus on deregulation and tax cuts, and the rest will heal itself.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to struggle for a way forward.
They're all attacking each other.
It's a circular firing squad over there.
Chuck Schumer continues to defend his actions in maintaining the continuing resolution to the great consternation of members of the left-wing media.
Here he was on MSNBC yesterday attempting this.
One of the Republican senators told us that if there's a shutdown, they're going to keep the government shut down for six months, nine months, a year, till they decimate the federal government.
The two trillion dollars that Musk and Doge and this horrible guy Vogt, who's the head of OMB, which controls all this, wanted a cut from the government, they could do easily and no recourse.
People forget it's the executive.
There have been court decisions that say only the executive determines what's essential.
So unlike a CR where you can at least go to court and challenge the executive orders, you can't do it here.
So I knew it would be a disaster.
Sure, he's not wrong on this, by the way.
But that's not stopping the left from sniping at him.
So here is Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, sniping at Schumer.
It is about what comes next.
I myself don't give away anything for nothing.
And I think that's what happened the other day.
We could have, in my view, perhaps gotten them to agree to a third way, which was a bipartisan CR for four weeks in which we could have had bipartisan legislation to
Okay, meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is noting that amidst all the chaos among Democrats, there is no grassroots support for the Democratic Party.
And again, Bernie is not wrong about all this.
In the Democratic Party, you've got a party that is heavily dominated by the billionaire class, run by consultants who are way out of touch with reality.
The Democratic Party has virtually no grassroots support.
So what we are trying to do is, in one way or another, maybe create a party within the party of bringing millions of young people, working class people, people of color, to demand that the Democratic Party start standing with the working class.
I'm just going to note here that Bernie's pitch here is actually better than the pitch of many other people in the Democratic Party, which is why the economy needs to stay on good footing, because if it does not, it's going to be the Bernie bros who actually rise.
All right, coming up, we're going to get to Hillary Clinton.
Who is still out there littering the international landscape for some reason?
We get to that, plus the mailbag.
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