Ben Shapiro talks about the $1 Trillion Government Shutdown Relief Package, and why the government should not have been shut down in the first place. He also talks about why the shutdown is a good thing and why California should get more money from the federal government to bail out their own people who are in need of it. Links From This Episode: All Previous Podcast Episodes Free Training From Drop Ship Lifestyle Leave Us a Review On Apple Podcasts Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. What's your favorite kind of coffee? What s your favorite type of cappuccino? What kind of soda do you like to drink most often and why does it taste good? Which one is your favorite and why is it good to drink it the most? And what s the worst thing you can do to support your favorite coffee shop or coffee shop? Subscribe to our new podcast, to get 10% off your first purchase when you shop at Caff in-store or online. Stop putting your online data at risk at Express VPN. Get protected at ExpressVpn. Get protected, get protected at Viptipto.co Stop that! Slash Slash on all the latest news and stuff on the internet on The Ben Shapiro Show This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Ben Shapiro's new show is a show all about privacy and personal safety and personal data protection and personal cybersecurity - watch it on the ExpressVPN Watch it here on the Anchor app on the latest weekdays on the Charts on Charts and Charts Protect your online privacy and viptips The Charts is all about that and much more! on the Viptips and vibes and vpns and vcs and vc . on Chads on The Chads Podcasts on The Hill and Chads and Chats on Chats and Chaps on Chaps and Chops on Chops and Chopes on Chopes and Chots and Chokes and Chicks on Chutes and Chucks and Chions on Chions and Chogs and Chigs and Choggans and Chans on Chains and Chins and Ch Cans and Cokes and Cans & Chions On The Chicks and Censys and Cots & Cokes on Chins
00:00:00.000A massive COVID relief bill includes billions in waste and nonsense.
00:00:03.000Attorney General Bill Barr says he's not going to appoint an election fraud special counsel.
00:00:07.000And Anthony Fauci says we should keep everything shut down, but also keep importing people from the UK, despite a possible new virus strain.
00:01:09.000Most of these other big cell phone companies, they are charging you for unlimited talk and text and unlimited data.
00:01:13.000You are not using unlimited data, so you are paying for stuff you are not using.
00:01:16.000If that makes you feel good, then I guess continue doing it.
00:01:18.000If you'd like to save money for a program that you will actually use, go to Pure Talk at USA, grab your mobile phone, dial pound 250, say Ben Shapiro when you do.
00:01:27.000Last night, the Congress passed overwhelmingly a $1 trillion COVID relief package.
00:01:29.000say keyword Ben Shapiro to get started.
00:01:34.000Again, grab that mobile phone, dial pound 250, say Ben Shapiro.
00:01:38.000Okay, so last night, the Congress passed overwhelmingly a $1 trillion COVID relief package.
00:01:44.000It actually passed by in the Senate a 92 to six vote.
00:01:48.000The six Republicans who voted against, and this should give you an idea of exactly what's wrong with the bill, are Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Ted Cruz of Texas, which is to say the most conservative members of the Senate voted against the bill, mainly because the bill is, as all giant bills are, a crap sandwich.
00:02:06.000And naturally, the media celebrate the crap sandwich.
00:02:08.000So first of all, a couple of things are worthy of note.
00:02:10.000A lot of the stuff that you're hearing about what the bill is for and how it doesn't provide enough relief to people, it's not actually true.
00:02:17.000Okay, so you're hearing right now, for example, that people only got $600 in relief.
00:02:34.000OK, first of all, before we even get to the problem with that argument, let us point out that there is a solid case to be made that the federal government should not even be providing relief at this point, considering how widely disparate various states are in their lockdown regiments.
00:02:47.000At the beginning, when everybody was locked down, When the federal government was encouraging all states to shut down, there was a good case to be made that maybe the federal government needed to bail everybody out.
00:02:55.000We are now nine months into this thing.
00:02:59.000Places like North Dakota are wide open.
00:03:02.000There are lots of places that have said, you can still do business, like North Dakota right now.
00:03:06.000Still has an unemployment rate of, I believe, well under 4%.
00:03:09.000Meanwhile, places like New York have like a 15% unemployment rate because they shut down and they never started not shutting down.
00:03:15.000The same thing happened in California.
00:03:17.000So having North Dakota bail out California and New York based on their different shutdown regimens doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
00:03:24.000The counter argument would be that the federal government is still encouraging place-by-place shutdowns, that this is based mostly on data, which I kind of don't believe, as opposed to politics.
00:03:33.000But there's a solid case to be made that really, if California wants to increase its unemployment benefits and take out more debt in order to do that, it should go ahead and do that, and New York should do the same.
00:03:41.000And that's a New York and a California problem that is not really like a Kansas problem.
00:03:45.000Okay, but putting that Complaints aside, which I think there's some truth to that, and also putting aside the fact that what you actually want to do is encourage people to get back to work if they are young and they are healthy, and it has been insipid from the very start to suggest that the work rules should be the same for a 65-year-old person with diabetes as they are for a 21-year-old fresh out of college.
00:04:04.000Putting all of those policies aside and talking about just what is in the relief bill and with the understanding that there are a ton of people who are out of work who should not be out of work and who do need the relief at least in this moment and this is sort of emergency spending.
00:04:15.000A lot of the lies that are being told about this bill are in fact lies.
00:04:18.000So for example, Again, people suggesting there's only $600 in COVID relief in this bill.
00:04:24.000Ernie Tedeschi says stimulus checks are only around one-fifth of the total bill.
00:04:28.000Unemployment insurance in America typically pays around 50% of pre-layoff wages, though it does vary state by state.
00:04:33.000With this extra $300 a week, that'll be about 85%.
00:04:35.000There's unemployment insurance in the bill as well.
00:04:38.000Okay, so you're mostly being filled in via your state unemployment as well as now the federal unemployment.
00:04:44.000If you're unemployed, you get an extra $1,300 per month through mid-March.
00:04:48.000If you're a gig worker or you've been out of work since early 2020, that's on top of having your unemployment insurance benefits extended.
00:04:54.000The bill includes another $300 billion in In paycheck protection program loans, the PPP loans, which are essentially payroll support for small business, right?
00:05:03.000In order for those loans to be forgiven, you have to just pass that money right through to employees, even if your business is not currently open.
00:05:09.000I've actually thought that that was a bad idea from the start because you're basically using these various businesses as pass-throughs for direct aid.
00:05:16.000Instead of just signing people checks, you're now telling a business that they have to keep on paying all of the expenses of employees who, when the economy recovers, may not be coming back at all.
00:05:26.000If a business wants all of these loans fully forgiven, they essentially have to maintain their employment and wages, which is effectively the equivalent 100% payroll support.
00:05:34.000So if you work at one of these places and you are getting money through PPP and you are also getting a check, then you're in many cases making more than you were when you were actually working at these places, according to Ernie Tedeschi.
00:05:45.000He points out the problem with the U.S.
00:05:46.000response originally was not its initial generosity.
00:05:49.000We actually did a hell of a lot more than just $1,200 checks back in March.
00:05:52.000Again, this is a very Twitter talking point, is the idea that over the course of the year, you only got $1,800 from the government since March.
00:05:57.000That is not true in any way, shape, or form.
00:06:00.000Unemployment insurance has been going for literally tens of millions of people in the United States since the beginning of the pandemic.
00:06:06.000He points out we probably did more than any other advanced economy besides Canada, even adjusting for the preexisting safety net.
00:06:13.000leaned heavily on that unemployment insurance system to deliver aid, and that it was inconsistent, it was cranky, some people didn't get the checks when they needed to, right?
00:06:19.000That is a problem with the general government aid system, but that is not a problem with what Congress did.
00:06:23.000Okay, so, this was an awful lot of aid, right?
00:06:26.000I mean, there was a lot of money in this particular bill.
00:06:29.000And so, people who are complaining that there was not very much money in the particular bill are just wrong about this.
00:06:33.000Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana points out correctly, he says, you know, you guys are complaining there wasn't enough money.
00:06:38.000We're spending a trillion dollars, for goodness sake, and we spent like seven trillion dollars earlier this year.
00:06:44.000Is this real help, or is this just optics for senators in Washington to make it look like they're bringing real help to the American people?
00:07:14.000I think it will be, but we're just going to have to wait and see.
00:07:17.000OK, so there are a couple of other things that were passed at the same time.
00:07:21.000The continuing resolution to fund the government was passed at the same time.
00:07:24.000There were also some defense bills that were passed at the same time as this giant bill.
00:07:28.000Basically, in a last minute of legislation, Congress just passed through.
00:07:33.000Thousands of pages of legislation, which is really the bigger issue with this particular passage.
00:07:39.000There are problems with the bill for sure, and we're going to go through all of them.
00:07:41.000The bigger problem is that there are problems now with every bill, because the only way legislation gets done is it basically gets done through a Congress that is generally constipated until there's a blowout.
00:07:53.000You reach a deadline, and then Congress just, bleh, out, like a 5,000-page bill, and then everybody is forced to vote on it within about 30 seconds.
00:08:01.000So they do nothing for six months, and then just, they have spastic colon, then bleh, out comes a giant, horrible bill that is filled with some good things, but a lot of crap, and then you are supposed to be like, oh, well, I'm so glad that Congress is here to save all of us.
00:08:15.000One, by the way, quick notion, When I say that they passed a bunch of bills, including the continuing resolution to fund the government, as well as this giant trillion dollar relief package.
00:08:25.000They also passed this defense bill, right?
00:08:27.000That defense bill is the one that actually includes the foreign aid for Israel.
00:08:30.000So you're seeing on Twitter this trending idea that $500 million in aid were contained in the COVID relief bill.
00:08:36.000Congress passed a suite of bills, including COVID relief and the bill funding the Defense Department for 2021, which also includes foreign aid, as Yair Rosenberg of Tablet Magazine points out.
00:08:47.000A lot of the people who aren't super friendly to Israel on Twitter started passing that around so naturally it trended on Twitter last night.
00:08:51.000It is worth debunking that notion thoroughly.
00:08:54.000We'll get to more of the debunking in just a second.
00:08:56.000We'll talk about what is in here and whether Republicans should vote for it.
00:08:59.000There are people who are urging Trump to veto it.
00:10:32.000Go to my link and pick out your favorite watch and get a great discount right now.
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00:10:39.000Okay, so what exactly is, let's start at the beginning.
00:10:41.000What exactly is in this COVID relief bill?
00:10:44.000According to Emily Zanotti writing for the Daily Wire, Congress is set to pass two major spending bills on Monday, a nearly $1 trillion coronavirus relief bill and a $1.4 trillion omnibus bill in a record-setting vote that will fund hundreds of government programs.
00:10:57.000And according to Lawmakers Assist, individual Americans struggling to make ends meet because of COVID-19 related restrictions.
00:11:04.000The bill does, in fact, contain some help for those facing economic struggles.
00:11:07.000In addition to providing a second round of direct stimulus checks to individual taxpayers, this time $600, the bill extends federal supplemental unemployment benefits, right?
00:11:16.000It is the extension of federal supplemental unemployment benefits.
00:11:19.000The jobless, as well as gig employees experiencing a slowdown in business, can now get an extra $300 per week through March, through mid-March.
00:11:26.000So if you are on unemployment insurance, You're really talking about like an $1,800 check every month.
00:11:33.000And that is on top of whatever state aid you are getting as well.
00:11:37.000The coronavirus relief package expands paycheck protection as well, opening up $248 billion in funding for loans to struggling businesses, even as evidence emerges that millions from the first round of PPP loans went to connected corporations.
00:11:48.000This is, of course, the great risk of all of these bills.
00:11:51.000I'm not sure it is worthwhile bailing out movie theaters, to be perfectly frank with you.
00:11:54.000And this comes from somebody who loves movie theaters.
00:11:56.000This time around, the COVID-19 bill contains special grants for specific industries, $20 billion for businesses in low-income communities, $15 billion for struggling live venues, movie theaters, and museums.
00:12:22.000I think it's a great tragedy that this may be a communal experience that goes the way of the dodo bird, but I don't know why we're spending $15 billion to bail out movie theaters.
00:12:30.000Not given the fact that you've got places like HBO Max that have already explained that they are going to simultaneously release things in theaters and at home, which means that people are just not going to go to theaters.
00:12:38.000I think that movie theaters are going to be the last thing to come back, and it's going to become more of a specialty thing.
00:12:42.000I don't think you're going to see movie theaters There are a number of breaks for businesses, according to Emily, some of which haven't gone over well on social media.
00:12:51.000The relief bill includes a two-year tax break for business meals.
00:12:54.000This is a priority for President Trump, apparently, and rolls over a variety of temporary tax breaks known as extenders, some for multiple years.
00:13:01.000The business meal deduction has been labeled the three-martini lunch deduction that very few people, aside from key Democratic legislators in major cities, are having many dine-in luncheons, as Emily Zanotti suggests.
00:13:12.000There's a $25 billion assistance program and a continued eviction moratorium.
00:13:16.000Under the COVID-19 relief deal, $13 billion will go to food benefits, $15 billion to a program for direct payments to farmers to assist in keeping American food production afloat.
00:13:25.000Well, I wasn't aware that we had a problem in keeping American food production afloat, considering that demand is still kind of the same in the American food markets.
00:13:33.000It's just going through different channels, just not going through restaurants.
00:14:07.000Higher education is wildly overpriced.
00:14:16.000It's been pushed up in the marketplace by federal loans in the first place.
00:14:20.000There's a good case to be made that huge swaths of higher education should be left on the cutting room floor, including...
00:14:26.000Many of the what we would call North Campus majors at UCLA, the liberal arts majors, should be left on the cutting room floor.
00:14:31.000I do not know why we are dumping out $82 billion to higher education, particularly at a time when you are looking at places like Harvard that have billion-dollar endowments.
00:15:04.000On the other hand, Republicans were pushing for a limit to legal liability for corporations based on COVID, right?
00:15:10.000If they said you need to come to work if you're not sick, and then people came to work and they were sick, people were going to sue these corporations.
00:15:15.000Apparently, they still can, theoretically.
00:15:17.000There are further expenditures that are now coming to light.
00:15:20.000Apparently, the final draft of the bill contains a number of handouts for Congress, including a provision paying for the additional pandemic expenditures incurred by the Congressional Day Care Center.
00:15:45.000Did I miss the part where the Washington, D.C.
00:15:47.000government did a fantastic job controlling protests and providing security when people were literally running through downtown Washington, D.C., just breaking store windows?
00:15:55.000That seems like a waste of money as well.
00:15:58.000We'll get to more of what is in the bill and Why it is that Congress, again, has spastic colon when it comes to these bills.
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00:17:40.000Which is probably why only a bare majority of Democratic voters actually want to see her continue as Speaker of the House.
00:17:44.000Here she was saying $600 in relief is significant.
00:17:47.000So she's trying to gloss over the fact that she completely blew this negotiation.
00:17:52.000We also have in the legislation direct payments, which were not in the Republican bill, to America's working families.
00:18:02.000I would like them to be bigger, but they are significant, and they will be going out soon.
00:18:08.000By the way, she was asked directly by the media this morning why exactly she didn't just go along with Mnuchin's $1.8 trillion bill, and she couldn't give a good answer.
00:18:16.000She was trying to hold up COVID relief until after the election.
00:18:19.000We all know why this bill got done now.
00:18:20.000The reason the bill got done now is because Democrats believed from election night on that they could now pass the COVID relief bill without doing any damage to Joe Biden or helping Donald Trump.
00:18:29.000They were afraid of passing the COVID relief bill before the election because it might alleviate people's financial fears and lead to more votes for Donald Trump.
00:18:36.000So instead, they held up the aid that you needed for political purposes.
00:20:21.000We're being told there will be no opportunity to amend or improve it.
00:20:23.000As a result, nearly every member of Congress, House and Senate, Democrat or Republican, will have been excluded from the process of developing this bill, which will cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars.
00:20:32.000This process, by which members of Congress are asked to defer blindly to legislation negotiated entirely in secret by four of their colleagues, must come to an end.
00:20:40.000It won't come to an end until it no longer works for those empowered by it.
00:20:43.000But only when most members of both houses and both political parties stop voting for bills they haven't read and, by design, cannot read until after it's too late.
00:20:53.000This is the way governance is done now.
00:20:54.000And the reason that governance is done this way now, there are a couple reasons for this.
00:20:57.000So, the more cynical have suggested that one of the reasons that you end up with these giant omnibus packages that nobody ever reads is because we got rid of what are called earmarks.
00:21:07.000So, earmarks were the Atrocious congressional behavior whereby a bill would basically be put forward and then a bunch of members would say, okay, you know what?
00:21:15.000I'm not voting for that bill unless you give me a little giveaway for my district, right?
00:21:18.000The Robert Byrd Memorial Bridge in West Virginia, right?
00:21:23.000This is how you get highways named after senators, right?
00:21:25.000The senator would say, I'm not going to pass this Defense Authorization Act unless we put in this $100,000 grant for my local post office with my name on it.
00:21:36.000The problem is you get rid of that practice, and what you end up with is those earmarks back in the bill, but not as earmarks.
00:21:41.000They used to be done as amendments, and the nice thing about doing it as amendments is that it would then be exposed to the light of day, is that you would have people offer an amendment saying, I want my $100,000 post office, and people are like, that's stupid.
00:21:52.000But now, it just gets done behind closed doors.
00:21:54.000So now, it's like they roll out a 6,000 page bill, And it has all the same pork, it's just not exposed to the light of day in quite the same way.
00:22:01.000So you're getting the same amount of pork, it's just not being done as quote-unquote earmarks.
00:22:06.000And so you don't get to see how the sausage is made.
00:22:09.000And one of the nice things about Congress is you're supposed to see how the sausage is made.
00:22:13.000It also happens to be the case that it's a long-standing congressional practice to now wrap everything up into a giant ball so that nobody is answerable for any specific piece of legislation.
00:22:21.000People have asked me what sort of constitutional amendment would I favor.
00:22:24.000I'm generally not in favor of giant wide-scale changes to the Constitution.
00:22:27.000One constitutional amendment that I would favor is that every bill has to be five pages and it has to come with a codicil in plain language.
00:22:34.000There actually has to be some sort of explanation of what exactly is going on.
00:22:37.000You cannot have 5,600 page bills where nobody knows what's in it because it creates a perverse incentive.
00:22:43.000So here is the perverse incentive number one.
00:22:45.000Perverse incentive number one is if you don't vote for this relief package, then you are labeled, as Twitter is currently doing, somebody awful.
00:22:51.000This is why AOC, you can tell the difference between those who are principled and those who are not on this particular issue.
00:22:56.000AOC said, I don't like that they presented this bill to me.
00:23:00.000Two hours before the vote, she then voted for the bill.
00:23:02.000Mike Lee said, I don't like how they presented this bill to me.
00:23:11.000Like, I can't believe I'm turning into a bit of an AOC defender here, but it actually is kind of true.
00:23:15.000The fact is, if you don't vote for the bill and the bill, quote unquote, does good things, they then use this in your future election as a way to browbeat you.
00:23:23.000So unless you are in a deep blue district or a deep red state, You have to vote for stuff that you think is going to overall be a good deal.
00:24:09.000Barry Goldwater was very much anti-racism.
00:24:11.000Barry Goldwater objected to the titles of the Civil Rights Act that specifically applied to private accommodations and to private businesses.
00:24:18.000And he said, overall, I have to vote against the bill because I don't like this provision.
00:24:21.000Instead, people say, oh, well, that means he doesn't like civil rights.
00:24:23.000That's the way the game is played in Congress.
00:24:25.000You pass these giant bills that are called COVID relief.
00:24:27.000And then if it includes a bunch of crap, then you are castigated.
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00:26:22.000Okay, so as I say, because this is the way that bills get done.
00:26:26.000There is a sort of doubly edged bad incentive.
00:26:28.000One is to vote for bad bills because you don't want to be castigated for not voting for it.
00:26:32.000The other is to allow free riders to vote against the bill in order to uphold their purity of purpose to the rest of the Senate.
00:26:40.000Right now, the way the bills normally were supposed to work, and always did, historically, at least for the first hundred years of the country, is that there would be a single-issue bill, the single-issue bill would come up, people would vote on the single-issue bill, it would either go up or it would go down, and that would be it.
00:26:52.000And there was none of this, we're gonna package together 87,000 different topics, because, first of all, the executive branch was not capable of handling this stuff.
00:26:58.000The bigger the government gets, the bigger the executive branch gets, the more Congress is going to be incentivized to blow out the spending.
00:27:04.000And until the American people stand up and say, we don't like this, It's not going to happen.
00:27:08.000The American people, they kind of do like this, okay?
00:27:10.000The reality is, as much as Americans complain about Congress, as much as Americans bitch about how the sausage gets made, the reality is that when you ask Americans, would you like to see the American government spend less, they say yes.
00:27:21.000And then when you ask them, would you like to see them spend less on X, people say, no, no, no, I like X.
00:27:47.000I mean, nobody ever actually examines where all of this money goes in the end.
00:27:51.000There are a few members of Congress who like to point this sort of stuff out, but typically it sort of gets ignored.
00:27:55.000And the media, of course, cheer on all of this stuff.
00:27:58.000The New York Times has this sycophantic piece today titled, A Dinner, A Deal, and Moonshine, How the Stimulus Came Together.
00:28:06.000Top party leaders cinched a $900 billion relief deal after laying down their swords, but it took an empowered, bipartisan group of moderates to help bridge the divide.
00:28:14.000No, what actually happened here is the election ended, and then Joe Biden told the Democrats, I don't want to come into office without a COVID relief bill in place, so please just surrender.
00:28:31.000It is a negotiating win by Mitch McConnell.
00:28:33.000As much crap as in there, Again, I'm just being realistic.
00:28:36.000There is going to be an enormous amount of manure in every congressional bill from now until the end of time because the administrative state is too large, because the size of a government is too large, because the American people do not demand that their representatives only pass bills that they can understand.
00:28:50.000And so this is just going to be the new normal, and it's going to be the new normal until the end of time.
00:28:57.000The Democrats really don't get everything they are looking for here.
00:29:01.000Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent, according to the New York Times, had preemptively panned the emerging framework, in part because checks were not included.
00:29:07.000He locked arms in the Senate with Josh Howley of Missouri, a conservative Republican in the House.
00:29:11.000Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, made a similar stand.
00:29:14.000She had texted Pelosi in early December, threatening her group would oppose the stimulus package if it didn't contain some form of direct payment.
00:29:21.000Senator Pat Toomey had other ideas with less than 48 hours until the government was set to shut down.
00:29:27.000The stimulus measure must not only end an array of programs the Fed had created to help businesses and municipalities during the pandemic, it must also bar the central bank from creating anything like them in the future.
00:29:37.000But Republicans rallied around Toomey.
00:29:38.000Congressional leaders agreed they would need to extend government spending another day to buy time to resolve the impasse.
00:29:43.000They ultimately struck an agreement before midnight, haggling on the floor, and in Chuck Schumer's suite, it took 18 hours before McConnell walked down to the Senate floor and announced the deal.
00:29:51.000Okay, but, you know, everybody goes home happy because they can spend everybody else's money and money that has not yet been created.
00:29:58.000Now, I've talked about some of the good stuff that is in here and some of the stuff that, you know, sort of needed to happen, but I've also talked about the fact that there's an enormous amount of money that is just going to sort of random crap.
00:30:10.000So, again, it was drafted behind closed doors.
00:30:14.000Fraud and waste have not been meaningfully addressed, as Brad Palumbo writes at the Free Enterprise Institute.
00:30:20.000This is the first COVID-19 stimulus bill.
00:30:22.000The $2 trillion CARES Act was corrupted by waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:30:25.000The federal government sent more than a million stimulus checks to dead people and many more to random European citizens.
00:30:30.000The expanded unemployment system it created lost more to fraud alone than the entire system paid out in 2019.
00:30:35.000The Paycheck Protection Program was swamped with potential fraud as tens of thousands of ineligible companies received money and thousands more were overpaid.
00:30:44.000None of these problems have been meaningfully addressed by Congress, and the latest stimulus effort pours hundreds of billions of taxpayer money into fraud-rife programs without addressing the problem.
00:30:53.000And then there is the question as to whether any of this is going to actually be effective.
00:30:58.000The fact is that, unfortunately, the only thing that is going to solve this is getting out of lockdown in the end.
00:31:06.000And the Paycheck Protection Program, as I say, is not really directed at preserving businesses.
00:31:09.000It's more being done as a pass-through.
00:31:11.000But when we talk about just the pure amount of garbage in here, there are certain things that I think should be legislated on.
00:31:17.000I just don't know why they aren't in a COVID relief bill.
00:31:19.000So, for example, there's an entire section in this COVID relief bill detailing the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
00:31:28.000Now, I actually agree with the policy here, because the policy here basically says that China should have no role in picking the next Dalai Lama, and also suggests that we should set up an embassy in Tibet.
00:31:45.000I kind of like all of those anti-Chinese measures, anti-Chinese government measures.
00:31:48.000I'm not sure what they have to do with COVID relief.
00:31:50.000Also, according to Reason Magazine, The bill also instructs the Smithsonian Institution to create two new identity-based museums, one for women and one for Latinos.
00:32:01.000The bill also takes a position on the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
00:32:04.000By the way, I don't know why we need a women museum and a Latino museum.
00:32:07.000I understand we have a National African American History Museum, which was rife with critical race theory to the point where they actually released An exhibit a little earlier this year that was full of gems like the suggestion that merit-based systems and individualism and coming to work on time were white systems of privilege and power.
00:32:28.000I'm not sure why we need more racially segregated museums.
00:32:31.000I'm not sure why that's an important thing to be done at the federal level.
00:32:35.000relations with Sudan, criminalizes illegal streaming, and creates a plan for building a Teddy Roosevelt presidential library in North Dakota, all of which I think is vital for people who are out of a job.
00:32:45.000The bill actually needed to be brought into the chamber on wheels because, again, it is some 6,000 pages long.
00:32:52.000The COVID relief bill lays the groundwork for a quote-unquote climate security advisory council, which is exciting stuff.
00:32:58.000It also includes $10 million for gender programs in Pakistan.
00:33:02.000It also makes it illegal to give racehorses painkillers before training or racing, which is exciting stuff.
00:33:08.000It provides $40 million to the Kennedy Center.
00:33:11.000Tom Elliott from Grabian Media has compiled this list.
00:33:13.000The COVID relief bill creates a commission tasked with educating consumers about the dangers associated with using or storing portable fuel containers for flammable liquids near an open flame.
00:33:22.000I mean, I wasn't aware that this was a problem that required a government solution.
00:33:27.000It seems like if you don't know not to put, you know, like an open gas canister next to an open flame, then kind of you deserve what you get a little bit.
00:33:34.000I'm not sure that an awareness program is going to be all that helpful, but I suppose you could put that in a COVID.
00:33:43.000Also, the COVID relief bill includes $1.5 million for the Appropriation Committee's Office of Diversity and Inclusion, as well as a bunch of money for reception.
00:33:53.000Also, the COVID relief bill mandates hiring measures to ensure diversity in the intelligence community, because I deeply care whether an analyst is gay, bisexual, transgender, little person.
00:34:04.000When they are analyzing incoming Arabic threats.
00:34:07.000I definitely need to know the identity of the person who's actually doing all of that.
00:34:11.000By the way, the COVID relief package also includes $8 million to support the Biden presidential transition as well.
00:34:16.000So lots and lots of stuff in that COVID relief bill and in the COVID package.
00:34:21.000Generally, the media are cheering this.
00:34:23.000They wouldn't have been cheering if it had been passed under Trump because that is the rule.
00:34:26.000We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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00:37:06.000Meanwhile, obviously, the New York Times is chalking up the deal to, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, Joe Biden.
00:37:17.000Now, you gotta be asking yourself, what the hell does Joe Biden have to do with anything?
00:37:42.000The man pretty much was comatose, and then the Electoral College elected him, and he won the popular vote by 7 million votes, and he's gonna...
00:37:50.000I guess, wake up in the Oval Office on January 21st, and he'll already have been given massive credit for everything that went on.
00:37:57.000The media's desire to give credit to Joe Biden for things he has not done, it is matched only by their desire to give Barack Obama credit for a bunch of things that he never did either.
00:38:05.000It must be wonderful to be a Democrat.
00:38:07.000It's like, what did you do today, random Democrat?
00:38:28.000And now they're immediately attributing to him godlike powers to get done a COVID relief bill, even though he literally has nothing to do with it because he has no power because there's only one president at a time in the United States.
00:38:38.000But according to the New York Times, Carl Pulse reporting, What do you mean, validated his belief?
00:39:06.000Along with struggling Americans and businesses, the new president was a major beneficiary of the $900 billion pandemic stimulus measure that Congress haltingly but finally produced on Sunday and was on track to approve late Monday, which will give him some breathing room when he enters the White House next month.
00:39:19.000Rather than face an immediate and dire need to act on an emergency economic aid package, Biden and his team can instead take a moment to try to fashion a more far-reaching recovery program and begin to tackle other issues.
00:39:28.000I do love how every... Here's the way it works.
00:39:30.000Whenever Congress passes a bill, And Mitch McConnell is the driving force behind the bill.
00:39:38.000And then when it turns out that this bill was a wildly scaled down version from what Democrats were actually proposing, the media immediately say, well, this will provide a model for Democrats going forward because it's just the beginning of the ambition.
00:39:59.000If Republicans hold the Senate, if they win those two Georgia Senate seats, they will be stifling Joe Biden's agenda as well they should.
00:40:05.000And yet the media are like, oh my God, look, they made a deal.
00:40:07.000That means that they're going to be able to pass climate change legislation.
00:40:12.000In media land, in the land of the New York Times, it is always heads, Democrats win, tails, Republicans lose.
00:40:18.000According to the New York Times, the group of moderates was essential to the outcome, pushing Senate and House leaders of both parties into direct personal negotiations they'd avoided for months, demonstrating how crucial they are likely to be to Biden.
00:40:28.000Again, this has nothing to do with Biden.
00:40:30.000And Mitch McConnell all the way through was like, I'll negotiate with Pelosi.
00:40:32.000And Pelosi was like, I'm eating ice cream.
00:40:36.000I'm glad we forced the issue, said Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who, along with Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, were leaders of a months-long effort to break the impasse over pandemic aid, even as the virus exacted a growing economic and health toll on the country.
00:40:49.000Given the slender partisan divides that will exist in both the Senate and House next year, the approach could provide a roadmap for the Biden administration.
00:40:55.000If it hopes to break through congressional paralysis, especially in the Senate, and pass additional legislation, Biden has said another economic relief plan will be an early priority.
00:41:14.000There will be no more support from the conservative base for any more of these relief plans.
00:41:18.000We understand a relief plan is necessary right now in many ways because of the COVID shutdown and because of the federal government's Unwillingness to actually open up particular areas because it is a state-based issue.
00:41:29.000And we get that there are times and emergencies when people just need the support and this is sort of last-ditch effort.
00:41:35.000Although again, I would have preferred if Congress had simply said to the states, this is on you guys.
00:41:38.000You need to handle your own business here.
00:41:41.000We're handling the vaccines because that's a national-level issue.
00:41:43.000When it comes to unemployment insurance, really that should be a state-level issue.
00:41:46.000Like, I wish that Congress had said that.
00:41:47.000They didn't and they were never going to.
00:41:50.000Which means that they were going to pass something here.
00:41:51.000But if we get to March, right, and we have had hundreds of millions of people who have been vaccinated, and that has really started with the most vulnerable in our population, and we're still talking about COVID relief, that is not correct.
00:42:02.000OK, so if The New York Times thinks the Republican Senate is going to go along with that, I think they have another thing coming.
00:42:08.000Nonetheless, the New York Times using this as a basis to push further and further and further.
00:42:12.000Mr. Biden on Sunday applauded the willingness of lawmakers to quote, reach across the aisle and call the effort a model for the challenging work ahead for our nation. He was also not an idle bystander in the negotiations. Yeah, he kind of was.
00:42:24.000Mr. Biden on December 2nd threw his support behind the $900 billion plan being pushed by the centrist group.
00:42:30.000The total was less than half of the $2 trillion that Pelosi and Schumer had been insisting on.
00:42:35.000Yeah, I'm sure that Biden did throw his support behind that group, but what difference did that make?
00:42:39.000I mean, as soon as the election was over, they were going to pass something, and Republicans had all the leverage because Republicans basically have nothing to lose at this point.
00:42:46.000It wasn't like Republicans were going to lose the presidential election.
00:42:53.000Mr. Biden's move was not without risks.
00:42:55.000If it had failed to affect the discussions, the president-elect risked looking powerless to move Congress before he had taken the oath of office.
00:43:00.000But members of both parties said his intervention was constructive and gave Democrats the confidence to pull back on their demands.
00:43:07.000So in other words, they're now suggesting that Joe Biden stepped in.
00:44:07.000Now, the reason that people have been talking about this is because apparently a new COVID-19 mutation has been spreading in the U.K.
00:44:13.000It is apparently up to 70% more transmissible than the original version.
00:44:18.000Which is, I mean, this thing is pretty damn transmissible.
00:44:21.000Right, so if you're talking 70% more transmissible, that basically means that you walk into a room with somebody, they breathe, and you get it.
00:44:27.000And we know that it's broken out in the UK.
00:44:29.000And already Fauci's like, we don't want internal Americans flying, like, from New York to LA or something.
00:44:43.000I've talked to many people in the private sector, epidemiologists in the private sector, and many of them have said they do not get the worship for Fauci.
00:44:52.000In fact, some of them were rather dismissive in the sense they said, well, he works for the public sector, which automatically means he's not as good as somebody who works in the private sector.
00:44:58.000Like, if he were really good, he would be working for Pfizer.
00:45:10.000He was saying that maybe it's because this strain is not more deadly than the strain that is currently in existence, or that the vaccinations are already rolling out.
00:45:18.000Yes, but if everybody gets infected too fast for the vaccines, that's sort of the problem, right?
00:45:22.000I thought that was the whole purpose of pushing these sort of time and place lockdowns.
00:45:25.000In any case, here's Fauci saying something that is completely incoherent.
00:45:30.000As researchers across the globe scramble to study the new variant, a growing number of countries have halted travel from the UK.
00:45:35.000San Francisco and Santa Clara counties now require a 10-day quarantine upon arrival.
00:46:16.000I am extremely, extremely confused by Anthony Fauci's view on this thing.
00:46:22.000Meanwhile, to his credit, Joe Biden got the vaccine and he at least gave some credit to the Trump administration, which it seems like he should, considering that Operation Warp Speed is a Trump administration development.
00:46:32.000I wish we had time to take you through the whole hospital when you see how busy and incredible you all are.
00:46:50.000And, uh, one of the things is that I think that, uh, the administration deserves some credit getting us off the ground with Operation Warp Speed.
00:47:00.000Okay, so, you know, at least he's doing that.
00:47:01.000Like, seriously, you give credit where credit is due.
00:47:03.000I will give credit to Joe Biden for giving credit to Trump.
00:47:20.000Yes, those people should be taking the vaccine.
00:47:21.000I'm far more skeptical that people like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez should be taking the vaccine.
00:47:26.000Here's McConnell talking about receiving the COVID vaccine yesterday.
00:47:30.000I think it's important for the leaders in the country to step up, take the vaccine and help reassure the American public because polls indicate about half the public is either skeptical about taking the vaccine or doesn't want to take it at all.
00:47:44.000That has to change because we can't solve this problem until large numbers of Americans are vaccinated.
00:47:51.000As a polio victim myself, I fully understand the significance of vaccines.
00:47:57.000It took decades to develop the polio vaccine.
00:48:01.000This vaccine was developed in under a year.
00:49:33.000She happens to be absolutely correct about all this.
00:49:36.000Okay, final piece of news before we break for the day.
00:49:38.000So, Bill Barr, the Attorney General, he did say yesterday that he's not going to appoint an election special counsel to investigate voter fraud because he's not seen any credible allegations of widespread voter fraud.
00:49:47.000Now, for all the crap that Bill Barr has taken from the left, this guy has at least tried to be honest.
00:49:54.000If there had been widespread allegations of voter fraud in these states, it all would have been adjudicated in the court.
00:49:59.000You know, again, there were cases brought.
00:50:01.000The only one that I'm aware of that made serious allegations of voter fraud, it's still being adjudicated right now, are the ones in Georgia.
00:50:06.000In many of these states, the Trump campaign did not even claim there was massive voter fraud.
00:50:11.000The Pennsylvania cases did not allege massive voter fraud.
00:50:13.000Here's Bill Barr saying there won't be a special counsel to investigate the election.
00:50:17.000In other words, we're done here legally.
00:50:20.000I think to the extent that there's an investigation, I think that it's being handled responsibly and professionally currently within the department.
00:50:31.000And to this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave.
00:50:39.000OK, and not only that, this, I think, is worthy of note.
00:50:42.000So Newsmax, which had really been pushing very hard a lot of these allegations of voter fraud and voter irregularities, Sidney Powell unleashed the Kraken on Newsmax when she was talking.
00:50:49.000The former Trump lawyer and maybe future Trump lawyer had been talking about releasing the Kraken and all of this kind of stuff.
00:50:55.000Well, now she said all that on Newsmax.
00:50:58.000Newsmax kind of went along with it, particularly when it came to Dominion, because her Kraken was the Dominion, these voting machines that were hackable and all of this.
00:51:05.000Well, Dominion sent a legal notice to Newsmax, and they said, we are going to sue you out of existence.
00:51:11.000There are no serious allegations we were hacked.
00:51:13.000Smartmatic software is not even on our machines.
00:51:15.000We don't know what the hell you're talking about.
00:51:16.000So you're going to have to retract that.
00:51:18.000This led to this huge walkback by Newsmax yesterday.
00:51:22.000Newsmax has found no evidence that either Dominion or Smartmatic owns the other or has any business association with each other.
00:51:31.000We have no evidence that Dominion uses Smartmatic software or vice versa.
00:51:36.000No evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic use software or reprogram software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.
00:51:45.000Smartmatic has stated that its software was only used in the 2020 election in Los Angeles, was not used in any battleground state contested by the Trump campaign.
00:51:54.000Newsmax has no evidence to the contrary.
00:52:03.000And again, Newsmax ain't in the business of prosecutions.
00:52:06.000Then, you know, take Bill Barr and his comments somewhat seriously.
00:52:10.000All righty, right after the show today, head on over to Michael Knowles.
00:52:12.000He'll be discussing the COVID relief bill in more detail as well as actor George Takei suggesting that Republicans shouldn't receive the vaccine.
00:52:19.000Later today, Matt Walsh, host of The Matt Walsh Show, he will be guest hosting this show's two additional hours of content.
00:52:23.000Make sure to come tune in for that as well.