Joe Biden is apparently mad because no one pays attention to him inside the White House, which is really kind of sad and also hilarious. According to NBC News, Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters' confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign. But is it possible that Biden is just not that bad at this? And if so, why is everyone else failing him? And what s going on with his chief of staff, Ronald Klain? And who s going to replace him? Is it Anita Dunn or James Clyburn? And is there a potential successor in store for Biden? And why is it that no one seems to care about him at all? Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Alex Blumberg, Senior Political Commentator, Senior Editor, Dailywire Senior Producer, Senior Media Reporter, Senior Social Media Specialist, Senior Communications Specialist, Sarah Abdurrahman, Senior Strategist, Senior Congressional Correspondent, Senior Digital Strategy Specialist, David Axelrod, Senior Strategy Consultant, Senior Staffer, Senior Finance Director, Senior Campaign Strategist Chief Strategist and Chief Strategy Director, Sarah Downey, Senior Public Relations Specialist, Patrick McElroy, Senior Fundraising Specialist, Rachel Maddow, Senior National Campaign Manager, Rachel Goodman, Senior Legislative Liaison, Senior Budget Officer, Senior Policy Director, Special Assistant to President Joe Biden, Senior Chief of Strategy and Chief Strategists, and Senior Communications Director, James C. Clyburn, Senior Director of Campaign Strategy, Patrick O'Donnell, Senior Manager of Campaign Fundraising and Strategy, and Campaign Strategy and Campaign Fund, Sr. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Please consider subscribing to Dailywire. Subscribe to the show! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices? Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on Podchaser Subscribe and Share on iTunes Subscribe on PODc Learn more on Social Media and become a Friend of the Show? Subscribe & Share the Podcast Connect with a Friend on Itunes Get exclusive merchandiser Become a Reviewer Rate and Share it on Podcoin Listen to the Podcasts? Get a Free Training Plan Share itunes Subscribe On Podchronicity Use the Podcast on iTunes Leave Us On Social Media? Learn More About Meghan McElory
00:00:00.000Well, I'm not live right now because it's the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, but here's the thing.
00:00:04.000When you subscribe at dailywire.com, you get an additional hour of content of my show every single day.
00:00:08.000Here's a bit of a taste of that right now.
00:00:09.000So, apparently Joe Biden is mostly mad at this point because no one pays attention to him inside the White House, which is really kind of sad and also hilarious.
00:00:20.000NBC News has a piece today titled, Inside a Biden White House Adrift.
00:00:28.000Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy, while bristling at how they've tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.
00:01:51.000According to NBC News, Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters' confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say.
00:02:02.000Well, here's the thing about sure-handed leadership.
00:02:04.000Typically, if I wouldn't want to put you behind the wheel of a car in a crowded area, I also don't think that you're going to be able to provide sure-handed leadership to the country.
00:02:13.000What about Joe Biden says sure-handed leadership at this point?
00:02:23.000He's slurring his words routinely and he's not drunk.
00:02:26.000Like, I don't... Good luck with this mission, AIDS.
00:02:31.000In other missions, if you can come with Cold Fusion, that'd help the administration.
00:02:35.000Like, as long as we're just, like, going from possible things that might help Biden, let's do that.
00:02:39.000Crises have piled up in ways that, at times, made the Biden White House look flat-footed.
00:02:44.000I love how the way the media always poses this is, you know, all these exogenous crises that just sort of randomly crop up while Joe Biden's president.
00:03:08.000Crises have piled up in ways that at times made the Biden White House look flat-footed.
00:03:12.000Record inflation, high gas prices, a rise in COVID case numbers, and now a Texas school massacre that is one more horrific reminder it has been unable to get Congress to pass legislation to curb gun violence.
00:03:21.000Democratic leaders are at a loss about how he can revive his prospects by November.
00:03:25.000I don't know what's required here, said James Clyburn, whose endorsement in the 2020 primaries helped rescue Biden's candidacy, but I do know the poll numbers have been stuck where they are for far too long.
00:03:35.000Speculation is churning Biden could shake up the West Wing staff, although that's not about to happen right away.
00:03:40.000Multiple people close to the White House said they've heard Chief of Staff Ronald Klain will depart at some point after the midterms.
00:03:46.000Should Klain go, a potential successor is Anita Dunn.
00:03:50.000Uh, yeah, man, that ain't gonna do it.
00:03:53.000Dunn began working at the White House at the start of the term, then left and returned in early May at Biden's specific request.
00:03:58.000No woman or person of color has ever been the White House Chief of Staff since the position was created after World War II.
00:04:04.000Well, I mean, Trump had a pretty close top political advisor named Kellyanne Conway, as you recall, but OK.
00:04:11.000Other and wasn't Valerie Jarrett like super tight with with Barack Obama?
00:04:14.000Anyway, other possible replacements include Steve Ruscetti, longtime Biden aide, who is counselor to the president, and Susan Rice, domestic policy chief.
00:04:22.000Terry McAuliffe is now speaking to the White House about taking a senior role as an advisor to the president.
00:04:28.000So your solution to giant failure is to take the former governor of Virginia, who is the head of the DNC, and somehow lost the governorship of Virginia to Glenn Youngkin, and make that guy the guy.
00:04:39.000Slow clap for the geniuses over at the Democratic Party in the White House.
00:07:59.000An assumption baked into Biden's candidacy was that he would preside over a smoothly running administration by dint of decades of experience in public office.
00:08:05.000But there are signs of managerial breakdowns that have angered both him and his party.
00:08:29.000Biden is annoyed he wasn't alerted sooner about the baby formula shortage and then he got his first briefing in the past month, even though the crisis has been long in the making.
00:08:36.000The White House did not specify when Biden got his first briefing on the formula shortage.
00:10:16.000Biden has vented to aides about not getting credit from Americans or the news media for actions he believes have helped the country, particularly on the economy.
00:10:24.000Unemployment rates have dropped to below 4%, but polling indicates most Americans believe the economy's in bad shape.
00:10:29.000Biden grouses Republicans aren't getting their share of the blame for legislative gridlock.
00:10:33.000Well, I mean, you do have a majority in both houses of Congress, dude.
00:10:36.000The president also says he doesn't think enough Democrats go on TV to defend him.
00:10:51.000That terrible bad man, Donald Trump, who spent all day just watching the TVs and then tweeting out policy ideas and having his aides walk it back and not getting things done.
00:11:31.000Okay, meanwhile, our neighbors to the north have decided on full-scale tyranny.
00:11:35.000So if you didn't, I guess Justin Trudeau's plan was, if you didn't like it when we froze your bank account because you didn't like our COVID lockdowns, you'll love it when we take away your guns.
00:11:44.000According to foxnews.com, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday, his government is introducing legislation to implement a national freeze on all handgun ownership throughout the country.
00:11:56.000On ownership, what this means, it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer, or import handguns anywhere in Canada.
00:12:03.000We recognize the vast majority of gun owners use them safely and in accordance with the law, but other than using firearms for sport shooting and hunting, there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday life.
00:12:13.000It is amazing how the left, internationally, has now decided that self-defense is not the reason to own a gun.
00:12:19.000Literally the only reason I own a gun.
00:12:42.000Canadian minister of public safety, Marcio Mendocino, Marco Mendocino said a mandatory buyback program for assault style weapons will go into effect later this year.
00:13:13.000I mean, and if you think this is what the left in America, they don't have designs on the same thing, you're wrong.
00:13:18.000This is why you have articles in the Washington Post saying, quote, the Evaldi shooting stirred something in him, so he gave up his gun.
00:13:26.000For years, even as mass shootings swept the country, Richard Small bristled in any talk of tighter gun restrictions.
00:13:30.000But then the 68-year-old retired high school history teacher saw a photo of one of the young victims in Valdi, and they drove—he and his wife drove 90 minutes from their ranch.
00:13:41.000And then he decided that he was going to drive it to his local police department and turn in his gun.
00:13:46.000Which is weird because he's not the one who shot anybody or was going to shoot anybody.
00:13:49.000But folks, as I mentioned, it is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, so we're not live right now, but there's all sorts of content you've never heard because you're not behind the paywall.
00:13:56.000You should go to dailywire.com and subscribe right now.
00:13:58.000Here's some of the interview that I recently did with Douglas Murray.
00:14:00.000Joining us on the line is Douglas Murray, Associate Editor of The Spectator, based in Britain.
00:14:04.000His latest publication is The War on the West, in which Douglas talks about how the Western cultural elite have been undermining the traditions that made the West great in the first place.
00:14:30.000So why don't we start with where we stand?
00:14:32.000So, you know, I will say I have become a little bit more of an optimist about where the West is going over the course of the last year and a half because the left has lost its mind so much that it seems like a backlash is brewing.
00:14:44.000Are you more optimistic or pessimistic than you were, say, a year and a half ago?
00:14:48.000I'm definitely slightly more optimistic, as you are, Ben.
00:14:50.000I mean, the point I make in the War on the West is that there has been this insane attempt to war on all of our foundations in the Western democracies.
00:15:00.000A war on our religious traditions, our philosophical traditions, our historical traditions.
00:15:06.000An attempt to pull down every single one of our heroes in the West, and sometimes Quite literally.
00:15:11.000A war on our culture and, of course, crucially, and this is where we really get the overreach, a war on the peoples of the West.
00:15:19.000You see, my view is that if you tried to tell any group of people in a society that they are evil from birth, that they have nothing to be proud of, that they can never escape their birth and are just to be condemned for all eternity, it would be highly unlikely that you could persuade a minority population of that.
00:15:48.000So why would a majority agree to go along with that?
00:15:51.000Why would a majority agree to go along with what the Kendi's, D'Angelo's, and others of our age are telling them, which is, If you are born white, you're born evil, you're born uniquely guilty, everybody else is a kind of saint, you're a perpetual sinner, and the best thing you could do with your life is to kind of sidle through it without anyone noticing and atoning throughout it.
00:16:13.000Why would a majority population go along with that?
00:16:16.000And I think the answer to some critical point is they won't.
00:16:20.000They want a more reasonable estimation of their own past, their own present, and everybody else's.
00:16:26.000So why don't we start with, as you discussed, the backlash is beginning, but why did so many people go along with this for so long?
00:16:33.000Because, again, Ibram X. Kendi is a well-respected public intellectual in the United States, despite the fact that he is neither an intellectual nor should he be well-respected.
00:16:43.000People like Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 6019 project have been promoted to the tunes of literally tens of millions of dollars by the New York Times.
00:16:49.000She's still an employee of the New York Times.
00:16:50.000She apparently writes maybe one piece every couple of years for them.
00:17:20.000Well, this is one of the reasons why I'm spending my time in America at the moment, is because America is clearly now the net exporter of bad ideas around the world.
00:17:30.000And I'm very sorry to say that as a very pro-American figure.
00:17:33.000Some of you recognize that America has been a net importer of bad ideas from the old continent in the past.
00:17:39.000You mentioned people like Nicole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, one of the many people that I try to take apart piece by piece at the opening of this book.
00:17:55.000First of all, to be a public intellectual—apart from, I agree, they're not intellectuals, but that doesn't matter—to be a public intellectual, you would have to contest your ideas in the public sphere, as you do, as I do, as many other people do, of left and right and all sorts of people.
00:18:40.000through private corporations and often, sadly, public ones, but they are effectively creatures of a small type of advancement program.
00:18:51.000In the case of Kendi, for instance, he ends up holding a chair at Boston University, only previously held by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winning author of many great books like Knight.
00:19:09.000All these people get MacArthur awards, they all get university chairs, but none of them are willing to contest their ideas.
00:19:17.000So what's happened is effectively a small number of private non-intellectuals have been wafted up in America with ideas that have not been contested.
00:19:28.000They have a terrific cudgel in their hands, a bat to beat everybody with, the same remorseless weapon they consistently use, which is the charge of racism.
00:19:39.000If you don't like Nicole Hannah-Jones's work, it's not because it's sloppy, as it is.
00:19:44.000It's not because it's basically made up in parts, as it is.
00:19:47.000It's not that it's an attempt to completely rewrite the American story so that it's not a story of heroism, but one of unbelievable theft and guilt and awfulness.
00:19:57.000It's the fact that if you contest any of these things, they will say, you are a racist.
00:20:02.000And currently in American public life, quite understandably, nobody wants to be accused of racism.
00:20:07.000These people overuse the term and they use it against everyone and anyone who criticizes them.
00:20:12.000So they've got away with smuggling racism back into public life in the form of anti-white racism, which these people excel at.
00:20:21.000So, Douglas, you talk in the war in the West, on the West, about the institutions that have been attacked by these members of the radical left.
00:20:29.000And those institutions range from things like the ability to reason and have conversations to the church.
00:20:36.000What do you think holds all of that together?
00:20:38.000Because it really is sort of an incredible spectacle.
00:20:41.000At the same time that they are saying that we can't accept any of the traditional wisdom of the past, they're also saying we can't use reason as a guide.
00:20:50.000I mean, you can at least make the case that the sort of rationalists of the 19th century, who were anti-religion, they were anti-religion because they were rationalists.
00:20:57.000Now you have irrationalists of the 21st century who are arguing against both rationalism and also traditional religion.
00:21:04.000I mean, one of the things I try to demonstrate in the book is it's warred on absolutely everything.
00:21:10.000As you say, this is a war against our religious tradition and our secular tradition.
00:21:14.000So the Judeo-Christian religion comes in for assault, but so does the tradition of secularism and the Enlightenments and reason and much more.
00:21:22.000So that even, as you say, you say reason is said to be a white supremacist thing, so that mathematics is said to be a white supremacist thing. Correct answers are a white supremacist thing and much more. There are several answers to it though.
00:21:36.000The first is simply that the desire is there is nothing left in the in the public landscape except for this set of claims which they've smuggled in in recent years.
00:21:48.000There is nothing left to explain anything other than this new religion.
00:21:51.000As I say, the churches are basically going along with the new religion of equity, diversity, inclusion, equity.
00:22:00.000I give remorseless examples of them doing this in America and across the Western world.
00:22:05.000They've basically sold one religion to take up another.
00:22:11.000But another thing is, as you know, there's a section in the book on what is very revealing about the people they don't do this to.
00:22:19.000Currently, everybody in our past, particularly in America, has been subjected to the same attack because of living in a time when racism existed, living in a time where slavery or colonialism existed, and using words or playing with ideas that we would not use today.
00:22:35.000Well, here's the thing, as I say in one section of the book.
00:23:05.000Well, I think there's a very revealing truth here, which is that one of the things that's been going on is that people want to tear down every hero except, for instance, for Karl Marx, because they think he's going to be useful, as he would be, with them trying to smuggle back in the same reprehensible project they spent the last century and more trying to smuggle into American life.
00:23:24.000So they don't bring down Marx like they brought down Thomas Jefferson for the same reasons, because they say, oh no, well, we're not interested in it with him because he's a figure we admire.
00:23:40.000We don't look to these people for their views on race.
00:23:43.000We look to them and admire them because of their extraordinary foresight, their heroism, their ability to come up with the greatest country on earth.
00:23:50.000I mean, in the case of the founding fathers, you know, we don't look to them because we want to look at their private letters and see where they once referred to slaves.
00:23:57.000So, I think we reveal an enormous amount in the fact that this unbelievable, remorseless exercise is done on everyone, except for a few far-leftist heroes.
00:24:08.000Well, I think we should play it at them as well.
00:24:11.000If you want to play the context of your time thing, sure.
00:24:35.000And it seems like that is now taking a backseat to an almost more traditionally conservative, European conservative feel, which is you guys are not going to go weapons down.
00:24:43.000We don't trust you to go weapons down.
00:24:45.000And so we are going to start using some of your own methods against you until you either surrender or in the case of some, I would say, more passionate advocates of this position, they say that even in a vacuum, we would use these sort of arguments.
00:24:57.000So to take sort of a fixed point, what's happening in Florida right now with regard to Disney?
00:25:02.000There are a few arguments, really interesting arguments, I think, happening on the right over this.
00:25:05.000There's some classical liberals who say, no, no, no, Disney should be able to say what it wants to say, and Ron DeSantis should basically leave them alone.
00:25:11.000Then there are people like me, and I've taken the position this is mutually assured destruction.
00:25:14.000The left has basically weaponized corporate America against All of these traditional institutions and they've done so through government regulations and government laws and they've done so over the course of decades and so I'm not happy with going after corporations for speech but the speech that Disney had wrung out of it by the Democrat media complex was not speech that Disney even wanted to do in the first place and so if there's no incentive structure created on the other side then there must be an incentive structure on the other side so we can go back to status quo ante and then there are the people who are sort of
00:25:41.000The more passionate European style conservatives who say, well, even if the left weren't pushing this, we should basically punish corporations for types of speech that we don't like because they're tearing away at the social fabric.
00:25:50.000What form of backlash do you think is going to be most likely here?
00:25:54.000I think, to take the case of Florida, it's a very useful example.
00:25:58.000I don't actually think that what the Sanders has done is in any way wrong, because the fact is, as you know, Ben, that Disney was enjoying advantages in Florida already.
00:26:07.000So if a particular corporation enjoys tax and other advantages in a state, and then uses its position to level political allegations that are flat-out false, against that state.
00:26:18.000I think that the state has the right to take away the advantages that Disney owns.
00:26:23.000If there were any other company that did it, you'd say the same, I think.
00:26:27.000I don't see why a bakery or anything else that enjoyed a particular status advantage and then decided to become a political activist and war against the government of a state should, in any way, be allowed to retain an advantage because of it.
00:26:43.000As you mentioned, these entities have become political actors.
00:26:46.000So it's perfectly reasonable to say, you know, we would like to have a public square where large entertainment corporations and so on did not become political actors.
00:26:56.000But if you do, there's a price to pay for it.
00:26:58.000Now, I would prefer it if that was a reputational price that was basically ground up.
00:27:03.000But, you know, as I have done, you know, if I see a, and it happened to me the other day with a streaming service, they said, if you want to upgrade to Disney, it's only five bucks a month, click here.
00:27:12.000I said, it's the easiest damn decision of the year for me.
00:27:35.000But that's where I'd prefer it to come.
00:27:39.000I prefer it to be a bottom-up approach and just the market expresses itself.
00:27:44.000But where there are, as I say with Disney, unfair market advantages already, I see no reason why government shouldn't take advantage of them.
00:27:52.000It goes back to where we started from in a way, this thing of private individuals who get wafted up.
00:27:58.000I don't know why the New York Times thinks it has the right to rewrite the date of America's founding, but it thinks it does.
00:28:07.000I'm very happy to have that debate out in the public square.
00:28:10.000As I say, the authors of that are not.
00:29:05.000And most of all, I would like to see it as a backlash not of one side trying to kill and hurt the other, but a recognition that we all have to live in the same country.
00:29:16.000We all have to be able to get along at some level.
00:29:19.000And the best level to get along at is to have some common understanding about our past.
00:29:26.000And in the case of America, it is, you know, if you decide to fundamentally rewrite our past, we will not go along with that.
00:29:33.000And I think there are plenty of moderate Democrats who would agree with that position.
00:29:36.000We can agree to litigate, re-litigate slavery as if the United States has never done this before.
00:29:42.000We can agree to that and have a reasonable discussion about what was known and what wasn't.
00:29:47.000What is not tolerable is to lie about the country.
00:29:51.000Lie about the founding figures of the country.
00:29:53.000In the war in the West, I keep catching out these figures doing this.
00:29:58.000Nicole Hannah-Jones and her colleagues lie about the founders of this country.
00:30:03.000Ibraham X. Kendi, as he calls himself, I catch him out in his book.
00:30:09.000He doesn't know this because he hasn't even read the letter that he refers to, clearly, as he shows from his sourcing.
00:30:14.000But I don't think these people should be allowed to get away with lying about this country, because that's what causes the division.
00:30:21.000As surely as it would if the right invented a new form of history about America, or pretended that slavery had never existed, or something like that.
00:30:28.000You know, the reasonable position of a country is to be able to look at itself in the round.
00:30:33.000The radical left wants to push a view on America, of America, that is not a view of American history in the round.
00:30:40.000It says only America did slavery, flat out false.
00:30:44.000Everybody in the world was doing slavery.
00:30:45.000You know, the biggest slave trade, as I say in the book, the biggest slave trade was not the transatlantic slave trade.
00:30:50.000It was a slave trade of people being taken east from Africa, the Arab slave trade.
00:30:55.000You know why nobody knows about the Arab slaves, among other things?
00:30:58.000Because the 18 million people taken to the Arab countries, the males were all castrated.
00:31:06.000That was going on whilst America and European countries were involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
00:31:11.000So these people who try to force a false narrative on America of America's own alleged sins are pushing a story that is unfair, uneven, unequal, totally unrepresentative, totally lacking in context.
00:31:26.000And they are telling the American people that America is not uniquely good, but uniquely evil.
00:31:30.000That is flat out false, and it's high time these people were pushed back against.
00:31:34.000the book again is in the war on the west Douglas Murray is the author.
00:31:39.000You know, you look at the way that the left has been reacting to the backlash against it, and they seem like they are just really walled off in their echo chamber.
00:31:49.000They seem completely unable to grasp the fact that a lot of Americans just are not into this.
00:31:53.000I mean, Joe Biden entered office with a 60-some percent approval rating.
00:31:56.000He's down to the low 30s now, and yet he can't seem to shift course.
00:31:59.000And it seems like the left—this is true nearly across the board—the left seems unable, I think they hoped that they wouldn't have to go to the public with their ideas.
00:32:18.000I actually think this was the crucial flaw in their plan.
00:32:22.000I say this about the critical race theory, Hucksters.
00:32:25.000They generated this idea, as you well know, Ben.
00:32:28.000They generated this idea in universities.
00:32:30.000They came up with these ludicrous, unworkable claims.
00:32:33.000They're not theories, they're just claims.
00:32:35.000And the fantastic thing about it is it didn't outlive its first meeting with the public.
00:32:43.000American parents found out that their children were being told that if you're white, you're evil.
00:32:48.000Well, that theory may have worked when Kimberley Crenshaw and co.
00:32:51.000were working it out on American campuses.
00:32:54.000Didn't work when you tried to shove it onto school children and kindergartners.
00:32:58.000Didn't work on its first meeting with the American public.
00:33:03.000The radical left works on all of these theories, including the equity stuff.
00:33:07.000It doesn't work whenever it actually meets the general public.
00:33:12.000That is a fantastic sign for optimism.
00:33:14.000They are going to continue to try to maintain this cathedral of holy ideas that they have erected and they're going to try to keep pushing it and they will try to find ways that circumvent the public so that they will have commissions on equity.
00:33:30.000They will try to, as the Biden administration has, look at things like reparations without having to go to the public with the actual horrible monstrous idea they're trying to trying to impose on us.
00:33:42.000So I think their hope is they don't have to confront the public.
00:33:46.000My great hope and I think our great hope is that the public does feel confronted and that the public has a much bigger voice than this minority of radical activists.
00:33:55.000The crucial thing is that the majority, that the public need to be armed with the facts when they meet these hucksters and these extremists and that's one of the things I try to do in my book.
00:34:07.000Got to arm the public with the facts That's Douglas Murray.
00:34:16.000His book is The War on the West Douglas.
00:34:31.000But the whole abortion debate raging across the country, I was wondering what your position is on IVF, in vitro fertilization on a strictly secular pro-life position.
00:34:39.000I know some sects of Orthodox Judaism allow for the procedure.
00:34:42.000I mean, so in vitro fertilization is pretty controversial in the pro-life community, because of course, if you're creating embryos only to discard the embryos, then that is a serious pro-life breach.
00:34:52.000I mean, you're creating an independent human life with potential, and then you're just discarding it.
00:35:30.000I think that's generally a fair pro-life perspective as well.
00:35:32.000As long as you aren't creating embryos, Knowing you're going to destroy them, or destroying embryos that have been created for no purpose other than you don't have anything to do with them, then you haven't violated pro-life precepts.
00:35:44.000Evan says, In light of the leaked Supreme Court decision, I've been trying to wrestle with the often-used exceptions to abortion, like rape, incest, and health of the mother.
00:35:50.000I'm a cradle Catholic and a firm pro-life believer.
00:35:52.000However, the exception people cite of the health of the mother has me struggling with this idea.
00:35:56.000To be clear, I'm not struggling with the idea of being pro-life, but if there should be any exceptions to the pro-life stance at all, I think I've worked my way through why rape and incest should not matter and abortion should still be prohibited in those circumstances no matter how terrible the underlying facts may be.
00:36:07.000However, if the choice is between the mother not having a high chance of survival or carrying the baby to term, I feel like that is a valid exception to the rule.
00:36:13.000I wanted to know your thoughts about if there should be any exceptions to the pro-life stance.
00:36:16.000So pretty much all pro-lifers believe that if the mother's life is in danger, not health, life is endangered, then you should be able to, you should be able to abort.
00:36:26.000If you have a case, and this is a vanishingly small number of cases that happen worldwide where this is the case.
00:36:34.000I've talked to many OBs at this point about this particular topic.
00:36:37.000They say this is almost never the case.
00:36:39.000Basically, there's no reason why you'd have to abort in order to preserve the life of the mother.
00:36:43.000Barring some sort of extraordinarily rare circumstance.
00:36:45.000But, assuming that that were the case, assuming that, for example, you know, you're living in the olden days, and a baby gets stuck on the way out.
00:36:53.000And so, either mom is going to die, or baby is going to die, or mom and baby are going to die.
00:36:57.000The general pro-life position has always been that you preserve the life of the mother.
00:37:00.000If you have to preserve the life of the mother by killing the baby, right?
00:37:04.000That has been the position of, I would say, most major religions as well.
00:37:08.000So that's not really a pro-life exception.
00:37:10.000That's an understanding that if only one person is going to emerge from this, and one is the baby and one is the mom, then typically under pro-life circumstances, the idea is that you can perform an abortion there.
00:37:22.000But that's widely accepted in pro-life circles.
00:37:23.000That's not controversial in any real way.
00:37:25.000Isabel says, hey, Mr. Shapiro, my name is Isabel.
00:37:34.000I was wondering what would you like those with a disability or with a neurological disorder to know?
00:37:38.000Personally, thanks to my Christian faith, I don't allow my disability to stop me from getting an education, from getting a job and from living a full and happy life.
00:37:44.000Thank you, Mr. Shapiro, for teaching me not to be defined by my circumstances and to rise above adversity.
00:37:48.000You know, honestly, that's heroic stuff right there.
00:37:51.000I mean, listen, I think everybody has challenges.
00:37:54.000A lot of those challenges are biological or genetic in origin.
00:37:58.000And understanding that the challenge exists does not relieve you of the burden of having to face down the challenge.
00:38:04.000But life is filled with those sorts of challenges.
00:38:30.000And how you reacted to that still provided a measure of freedom, according to Viktor Frankl.
00:38:34.000That is true even if the limitation on your freedom is coming from inside the house and coming from your own biology, rather than coming from some sort of external force.
00:38:44.000Jonathan says, I have a constitutional law question for you and a related opinion question.
00:38:47.000First, is our current fiat money system unconstitutional based on Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1 of the Constitution?
00:38:53.000No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, grant letters of marque and reprisal, coin money, emit bills of credit, make anything but gold and silver, coin a tender in payment of debts, pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
00:39:07.000No, because it says no state shall do it.
00:39:09.000So the idea here is that you wouldn't have a separate California currency.
00:39:12.000But that doesn't mean that the federal government can't issue currency.
00:39:16.000Again, that sort of restriction is placed on the states.
00:39:20.000It is not placed on the federal government.
00:39:22.000The goal there was to prevent states from coining their own currency and undercutting the U.S.
00:39:28.000Second question, do you think it would be a good thing if we got back to a gold standard and how as a country could we do this?
00:39:32.000So the idea of sort of a soft gold standard where the dollar is actually tied to the value of gold, that makes a lot of sense to me.
00:39:37.000Going back to something like Bretton Woods, makes some sense to me.
00:39:39.000The hard gold standard is a little bit different.
00:39:41.000The hard gold standard was the idea that you could literally take your money and go up to the counter and trade in your dollar for an ounce of gold or whatever.
00:39:47.000That's been basically outlawed in the United States since FDR.
00:39:50.000It seems to me that we don't have enough gold on hand to actually make that happen anymore, but pegging the value of the dollar to some sort of hard asset as opposed to the fiat currency where we gradually inflate the dollar to the point where over the course of 50 years you've lost nearly all of the value of the dollar you put in the bank, that seems More solid to me.
00:40:11.000If there's an economic shock, it means that the government can't inflate its way out of the problem, or it can't manipulate interest rates so as to cool down or heat up the economy.
00:40:19.000But it also means that if you're a business person, you have a lot of predictability in the markets, which was the case in favor of the gold standard.
00:40:25.000William says, With Roe presumably being overturned soon, what is the next battleground in the fight for life?
00:40:29.000Do we have to mobilize movements in each state, or is there still a federal argument to be had?
00:40:33.000For example, the 14th Amendment and equal protection.
00:40:35.000Roe v. Casey being overturned is a great victory.
00:40:38.000So, on a judicial level, you could theoretically move toward a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause, saying unborn people are protected under the Equal Protection Clause.
00:40:47.000That's the judicial movement that would have to take place?
00:40:49.000That's the move that you'd like to see from Robert George from Princeton, for example, is a big advocate of this sort of thinking.
00:40:56.000The extension of the 14th Amendment to cover the unborn.
00:41:01.000As far as, you know, the most immediate possible action, that's all going to happen at the state level.
00:41:05.000So you're going to see movements inside states to push for more restrictive abortion laws.
00:41:09.000That's largely going to have to take place in purple states.
00:41:12.000So states that are more evenly divided, states like Florida, it's unlikely you're going to get a full-scale abortion ban in the state of Florida.
00:41:18.000Instead, you're going to see a gradual paring back of abortion in the state of Florida, and that's where pro-lifers are going to have to put most of their effort.
00:41:24.000In states like Mississippi, it's a foregone conclusion that they're just going to go pro-life.
00:41:27.000In Illinois, it's a foregone conclusion they're just going to go completely pro-abortion.
00:41:31.000But a lot of the purple states, it's very unclear which direction they are going to go.
00:41:36.000All right, we've reached the end of today's show.