Ben Shapiro talks about the growing problem of mass shootings in California and Florida, and why the two states may be destined to be much worse off than they are now. He also points out that mass shootings have been on the rise among older people, and the media tends to focus on the more "senior" mass shooters, rather than the more random mass shootings involving people in their 60s and 70s. And he points to the fact that there have been nearly 40 mass shootings so far this year in the United States, and yet there are still more mass shootings than in any other January on the Gun Violence Archive's record dating back to 2014, where four or more people not including the shooter are killed, and more than one per day in 2014, there has been at least six mass shootings every week since January 1st, 2014, which means there have already been 39 mass shootings since then in the U.S. in the past decade. Ben Shapiro: California ratchets up the insanity, as Governor Gavin Newsom inches toward a presidential run, the media panic over Governor Ron DeSantis' conservative actions in Florida, the DOJ moves to break up Google's ad monopoly, and much, much more. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and it doesn t seem to be getting much better any time soon. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Podcoin, or wherever you get your epsiode, and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast listening to our newest episode on the show, The Dark Side Of... and subscribe on Podcoin Podcasts Subscribe in iTunes Learn about our new show recommendations and more about what else we're listening to on the podcast on the road and social media listening to us on your favorite podcasting platform, The FiveThirtyEight Podcasts on the Four Corners Podcasts, wherever you re listening to your favorite podcasters are listening to this podcast? Subscribe and reviewing our latest episode on all of your favorite streaming platforms? Leave us a review and sharing it on your thoughts on the FiveThirty-sixers podcast on social media platforms! Subscribe, rating and reviewing us on the podcoin or on your podcasting app on iTunes or your other social media platform? and we'll be listening to it on the next episode on your feed on the airwaves on Tuesday nights!
00:00:00.000California ratchets up the insanity as Governor Gavin Newsom inches toward a presidential run, the media panic over Governor Ron DeSantis' conservative actions in Florida, and the DOJ moves to break up Google's ad monopoly.
00:00:21.000Things don't seem to be getting much better any time soon.
00:00:25.000Now, one of the reasons I left California, many of the reasons I left California, are implicit in the news that comes out of the place absolutely daily.
00:00:32.000I left California for Florida, so I am biased in this matter, but it appears to me on a national level, one of the things that we are going to be deciding in the very near future is whether California is the future of the United States or whether Florida is the future of the United States.
00:00:44.000And these futures look unbelievably different.
00:00:46.000In California, the solution for every single problem is more government.
00:01:00.000And in Florida, the answer seems to be more local control.
00:01:04.000More leaving parents to their own devices.
00:01:06.000More of the state allowing you to bring up your children in the way that is traditionally fit in the United States.
00:01:14.000And this is the real gap that is emerging in American public life.
00:01:17.000This is why the solution in the end may be that California is going to get to be California and Florida is going to get to be Florida and federalism rules the day.
00:01:22.000But until that point, The incipient conflict that is building up at a national level is whether the entire nation is going to move more toward Florida or whether it is going to move more toward California.
00:01:33.000In California, there have been two mass shootings over the course of the last 72 hours.
00:01:36.000There's another mass shooting at In Half Moon Bay, apparently over the course of the last 48, the Washington Post reports the suspect accused of killing seven people at two farms was believed to be a co-worker of the victims, officials said on Tuesday, describing the attack as workplace violence.
00:01:51.000Details about what happened on Monday were slow to emerge as authorities worked to reach the victims' families and to further investigate ahead of a planned Wednesday arraignment for the suspect, who happens to be a 66-year-old who engaged in the shooting.
00:02:05.000Typically, mass shooters tend to be in the 17 to 22 range.
00:02:09.000They don't tend to be in the 60 plus range, but we have been seeing a rising number of bizarre mass shootings involving much older people ranging from the Las Vegas shooting to the shooting that happened a little bit earlier this week in California to this shooting in Half Moon Bay.
00:02:24.000Apparently, according to the Washington Post, there have been nearly 40 mass shootings so far this year.
00:02:28.000We only focus on a certain number of them, obviously.
00:02:31.000The media tend to focus on the more spectacular shootings, the ones that kill more people at one shot, and don't happen to be linked to gang violence.
00:02:37.000The reality is that shootings in the United States tend to be linked overwhelmingly to either interpersonal disputes or gang violence.
00:02:44.000Most of the most spectacular shootings that you see on the news are statistical anomalies.
00:02:48.000That doesn't mean that they're not acts of tremendous evil, doesn't mean they're not important, doesn't mean we shouldn't address them, but the media tend to focus in on these anomalous actions as opposed to the more run-of-the-mill shootings, because if you were to look at the run-of-the-mill shootings, it might represent a different set of policy prescriptions.
00:03:03.000According to the Washington Post, on January 21st, a shooter opened fire on the eve of Lunar New Year at a dance studio in Monterey Park, a majority Asian Los Angeles suburb, killing 11.
00:03:11.000Two days later, related shootings at two locations around Half Moon Bay near San Francisco killed seven people as well.
00:03:16.000There have been already 39 mass shootings in 2023 in the United States.
00:03:20.000According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more shootings than any other January on the database's record, which go back to 2014.
00:03:27.000Mass shootings, where four or more people not including the shooter are injured or killed, have averaged more than one per day in 2023.
00:03:33.000Every week has had at least six mass shootings.
00:03:35.000Again, a lot of folks have been claiming that this has to do with the prevalence of guns in the United States, but it's hard to make that link considering what's happening in California.
00:03:46.000If there is a link, if there is a mass shooting that cannot be explained by white supremacy or right-wing rhetoric, it immediately turns into a gun control narrative.
00:03:53.000We don't bother to look into the motive.
00:03:54.000We don't bother to look into any other factor.
00:03:58.000That's because the media have a stake in the gun control narrative, which is why you have articles like the one from Eugene Robinson over at the Washington Post in response to shootings in California, one of the more gun-controlled states in America.
00:04:08.000Eugene Robinson says the only way to stop senseless mass shootings?
00:04:31.000People who are irresponsible with guns.
00:04:33.000If there were a way to weed them out, no one would want those people to own guns.
00:04:36.000If there were a way to weed out people who are mentally ill, it would be great to weed out people who are violently mentally ill from owning a gun.
00:04:42.000However, saying the gun is the major factor in violence is sort of like saying that money is the major factor in embezzlement.
00:04:49.000Yes, it is a vital tool for achieving the crime, but also it happens to be used for a lot of other things that are legal and necessary.
00:04:55.000But the left-wing view, always and forever, is that if there is an evil person who does something terrible with a gun, all the people who are law-abiding have to have their guns removed from them, which is exactly what Eugene Robinson writes, as mass killers have different profiles and different motives.
00:05:10.000By definition, virtually all are struggling with mental health issues of some kind.
00:05:13.000Happy, well-adjusted people do not kill innocents at random.
00:05:16.000In all cases, though, the assailants have been able to obtain guns and ammo, usually legally and with ease.
00:05:21.000California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, Eugene Robinson notes.
00:05:25.000The state makes it illegal to possess the kind of weapon used in Monterey Park, a semi-automatic assault pistol with an extended magazine.
00:05:31.000It is not yet known how the assailant obtained the outlawed gun.
00:05:34.000It would have been a simple matter to purchase the weapon in a state where it is allowed.
00:05:37.000Or, I mean, the guy broke a bunch of gun laws.
00:05:40.000Okay, so passing more gun laws ain't going to do it.
00:05:44.000But again, the idea from California is that we can always solve every single problem with more legislation.
00:05:50.000If you look at California's gun laws, they're very restrictive.
00:05:53.000California already has a so-called assault weapons ban.
00:05:57.000California already has a red flag law that was enacted in 2016.
00:06:01.000And that law allows law enforcement, family members, employers, co-workers, and school employees to file a gun violence restraining order against an individual suspected of being a danger to themselves or others.
00:06:10.000This is according to the California government website.
00:06:13.000California already has a waiting period of 10 days for all gun purchases.
00:06:32.000So basically, all of the national legislation that Democrats would pursue already is in place in California, and it is not stopping these sorts of mass shootings from happening.
00:06:40.000A huge number of them happen in California.
00:06:42.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:06:44.000First, I gotta tell you, very often when I'm traveling, I tend to come down with a sore throat.
00:06:47.000It's a source of great annoyance to me.
00:06:49.000And so what I try to do before I travel is I talk to an ear, nose, and throat person, and they will give me a prescription.
00:06:56.000I'll say, if you come down with something for throat, you need to go get yourself a steroids prescription.
00:06:59.000I'll write it up for you now in case I'm out of town.
00:07:01.000You can always fill the prescription afterward.
00:07:03.000Well, what if you could do that with antibiotics, right?
00:07:06.000Some of the most common medications that are out there, because God forbid there's some sort of natural emergency, you got to make sure that you have the medicines on hand that you need.
00:07:12.000I mean, very often we end up doing this ourselves anyway, right?
00:07:15.000You end up going, like, digging through your medicine cabinet in order to find the thing that you need from, like, two years ago.
00:07:19.000That's not the way this should be done.
00:07:22.000My new partners at Jace Medical help you get a long-term supply of prescription medication.
00:07:25.000Their mission is to empower you to be better medically prepared.
00:07:28.000A great way to start preparing is with the JACE case.
00:07:30.000It's a pack of five different courses of antibiotics you can use to treat a whole host of bacterial illnesses, including UTIs, respiratory infections, sinusitis, skin infections, and more.
00:07:38.000All you have to do is fill out a simple online form, and in some cases, jump on a quick call with one of their board-certified physicians.
00:07:43.000From there, you can ask your physician treatment-related questions on an ongoing basis.
00:07:47.000The JACE case, it gives me peace of mind because I've got the medicines that I need just in my house.
00:07:51.000And I've got them there waiting for me.
00:07:53.000I want you to be prepared for anything the same way I am.
00:08:13.000But again, the idea in California is that if the policy fails, you just do more of it, which presumably is why you have a Governor Gavin Newsom who obviously wants to run for President of the United States.
00:08:22.000That is the reason he has been running aggressive ads in Florida.
00:08:25.000I noticed that California isn't in Florida.
00:08:27.000Many of us in Florida tried to flee California, but Governor Gavin Newsom seems to be following us there with his ridiculous ads.
00:08:32.000Well, now he is out there saying that the Second Amendment is a suicide pact.
00:08:59.000Now Gavin Newsom obviously wants to run for president.
00:09:01.000There only happens to be one problem for him, and that is that his policies are not working.
00:09:06.000They seem to be failing almost across the board.
00:09:07.000You have a mass homelessness crisis in California.
00:09:09.000The supposed budget surplus that was supposed to materialize has completely dissipated under Governor Gavin Newsom.
00:09:15.000By the way, it is amusing to watch as the Senator from California, not Gavin Newsom, Alex Padilla, he says, the solution here would be more background checks.
00:09:23.000Again, I noticed universal background checks are the law of the land in the state of California, Senator.
00:09:29.000How is it, Senator, that we can stop this from being normal?
00:09:38.000Well, there's clearly a lot that needs to happen.
00:09:41.000Is it broader education, embracing of diversity, and yes, including smarter gun control laws throughout the United States of America.
00:09:53.000We did make some progress last year in Congress in strengthening the background checks required for gun purchasers under the age of 21, but clearly more needs to be done for those that are older than 21. And that's just the purchasing of a gun.
00:10:08.000So Senator Padilla's solutions here involve more diversity training and gun control.
00:10:17.000It's working great in California, by the way.
00:10:18.000Both of the last two mass shooters in California are apparently of Asian extraction, which is a rarity and a weird oddity, but it makes it kind of odd to suggest that the solution to this is proper diversity training.
00:10:30.000Meanwhile, again, California is leading the nation in radical policy prescriptions.
00:10:35.000Abigail Schreier has a fascinating piece over at City Journal, super disturbing, talking about how California is now creating a predator's paradise, particularly for LGBTQ youth.
00:10:49.000In early January, I joined Erin Wilson and Stephanie Powell on a tour of the track on Figueroa, one of California's busiest prostitution areas.
00:10:55.000For decades, Wilson, who volunteers for the anti-trafficking organization Journey Out, and her mother, Powell, have worked to combat human trafficking in Los Angeles and to help women and child victims escape this brutal world.
00:11:05.000In our post-feminist era, prostitution is so often idealized, sex work is work, that it's easy to overlook the gruesome reality of what it means to have a pimp, an arrangement closer to slavery than to any legitimate job.
00:11:15.000Quote, the horror stories I could tell you about prostitutes being beaten and being choked and being burned and being gang raped, said Vanessa Russell of Love Never Fails, an anti-trafficking non-profit based near Oakland, and the PTSD and all the mental health and the trauma bonding and the psychotic breaks.
00:11:28.000Maybe you're somebody who likes to have sex more than once a day, but 9 to 21 times with different guys, some that are like 90 years old.
00:11:40.000While the past few decades have seen an increase in human trafficking, women in all three of the anti-trafficking groups I spoke to, says Abigail Schreier, across California agreed, nothing compares with the stunning rise in trafficking they've witnessed in recent months.
00:11:51.000Powell, formerly a sergeant in the LAPD, knows the city's streets intimately.
00:11:55.000Over the last six months, the number of prostitutes has doubled.
00:12:22.000The bill did not officially take effect until January 1st of this year, but from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed.
00:12:29.000The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets, said Powell.
00:12:32.000On social media, the pimps were saying, you better get out there and work, the streets are ours.
00:12:36.000Police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged.
00:12:39.000The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring.
00:12:45.000Powell said, as a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate.
00:12:49.000So if I have a law that says you can't loiter in this area with pasties and g-strings flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you're loitering.
00:12:55.000But if I say I'm stopping you because you look kind of young, that's a little weak, so it takes away a tool.
00:12:58.000Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied.
00:13:00.000Henceforth, questioning the girls came to seem a pyrrhic gamble, one that California's police officers would now avoid.
00:13:06.000Prostitution is still illegal in California, but police have lost significant ground in the effort to contain it.
00:13:10.000Women at anti-trafficking non-profits in the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles all emphasized.
00:13:15.000You might wonder who actually benefits from Senate Bill 357.
00:13:55.000Balance of Nature uses a cold vacuum process that preserves the natural phytonutrients in whole fruits and vegetables and encapsulates them for easy consumption.
00:14:02.000Balance of Nature sent a bunch of their product down to the studio for my team to try.
00:14:33.000So why exactly would anyone propose such a law?
00:14:36.000Why would the California State Legislature pass it?
00:14:38.000So Abigail, she actually asked the author, the San Francisco-based State Senator Scott Wiener.
00:14:44.000You've heard his name before because he has promoted a bevy of bizarre, odd, and perverse legislation aimed at opening up California wide to some of the worst perversions in America.
00:15:06.000This is why he's tried to make California into a trans haven.
00:15:09.000So now essentially, if you are a parent of a child, and let's say your wife decides that your boy is actually a girl and she flees to California, now California will provide a haven state for this.
00:15:23.000Remove the kid from your home, put him in California, California's law can even be interpreted so that if a minor runs away from parents and ends up in California and says that they're a member of the quote-unquote transgender community, that the state of California will then not return the kid to the parents depending on the circumstances.
00:15:41.000So on this one, Weiner says, quote, If you're standing on the sidewalk with high heels and you wear your hair a certain way and you wear tight clothing, an officer can say, I think you're loitering with the intent to commit prostitution and arrest you.
00:15:51.000That is not how we should be doing things in the United States of America.
00:16:08.000Maybe some of those black trans women, meaning black young men, maybe they are victims of human trafficking.
00:16:14.000So maybe they are disproportionately helped by the law.
00:16:17.000But were the police indeed randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women, says Abigail Schreier?
00:16:21.000The anti-trafficking advocates I spoke with dispute this.
00:16:23.000For starters, Wilson, Powell, and Russell say the biological women and girls constitute the vast majority of people trafficked.
00:16:28.000Nearly every report on human trafficking by global human rights organizations confirms this observation.
00:16:34.000And if the women I saw on Figarous as Abigail are any indication, discerning which are involved in prostitution does not require sophisticated sartorial judgments, but only two eyes and a brain.
00:16:43.000If a woman is wearing a g-string bikini in the middle of the street and she is flagging down cars, while men in dark clothes stand watch as if holding an invisible leash, she is likely to be a modern-day sex slave.
00:16:54.000Apparently, she says, on my ride along with Pal and Wilson in L.A.
00:16:56.000just after 10 p.m., before the track really gets going, I saw several lines of vehicles stretching around the block, each manned by a prospective client, waiting for his chance with one of the girls.
00:17:03.000At least 35 females worked the line, most of them white or Latina.
00:17:33.000In the six years since the Harvard grad took office, he has managed to author and get past a series of radical gender and sex-related bills.
00:17:39.000The measures have allowed biological male felons to self-ID their way into women's prisons, assigning criminal penalties to healthcare workers who fail to provide gender-affirming care.
00:17:48.000That is supposedly a ban on conversion therapy.
00:17:49.000By this, Scott Wiener means that if a child comes in and expresses gender confusion and you don't immediately say that you're a member of the opposite sex, Then you might be violating the law.
00:17:58.000Made California a sanctuary state for LGBTQ youth, as we've already discussed.
00:18:02.000Expanded access to quote-unquote gender-affirming care for LGBTQ identified youth with and without parental approval.
00:18:08.000Proposed jail time for healthcare workers who willfully and repeatedly misgender a patient.
00:18:13.000So if you are a doctor and you repeatedly address a biological male as a biological male and diagnose them as such, you might end up in jail.
00:18:20.000Decriminalize the intentional exposure of a sexual partner to HIV.
00:18:38.000He also attempted to reduce criminal penalties for sex offenders.
00:18:41.000Another Wiener bill introduced in 2021 sought to decriminalize psilocybin and ketamine.
00:18:46.000It failed to pass, partly because of the vocal opposition of former state senator Melissa Melendez, a Republican who railed against easing restrictions on ketamine, which is a drug notorious for facilitating date rape.
00:18:57.000I'm like, do you guys not see the agenda here?
00:18:58.000I mean, honestly, in the legislature, I think people came to sort of accept these bills because he's from San Francisco.
00:19:04.000Undeterred, Wiener then tried to introduce a modified version of the bill again in December.
00:19:09.000As both a former Senate aide and a California Republican Party strategist told me, Wiener, one of the country's most prominent and outspoken defenders of LGBTQ rights, is uniquely difficult to oppose.
00:19:18.000The moment you speak out against one of his bills, just like he does with me, he turns around and says, you're homophobic or transphobic, you're this or you're that, I don't care, you can call me whatever name you want, I'm Melendez, that doesn't change the fact of what your bill does.
00:19:29.000If some of Wiener's bills seek to protect LGBTQ youth, they also represent a golden opportunity for adults who would groom them.
00:19:35.000Weiner is an extremely dangerous person.
00:19:37.000So extremely dangerous, I cannot believe people can't read between the lines, said Marissa Ugarte, who runs the anti-trafficking nonprofit Bilateral Safety Corridor Correlation.
00:19:45.000Weiner, she said, is turning California into a sex trafficking paradise.
00:20:00.000Defenders of the law have noted there's long been judicial latitude in California in whether to place perpetrators of statutory rape on the Sex Offender Registry if the crime involved was vaginal intercourse with a minor, the minor was at least 14 and the offender was within 10 years of her age.
00:20:11.000Wiener's bill, however, extended such potential leniency to statutory rape involving anal or oral sex.
00:20:17.000He has many times defended the bill as required to end blatant discrimination against LGBTQ young people regarding the Sex Offender Registry.
00:20:34.000But put Wiener's bizarre motives aside, the thing that really should be scaring the hell out of you is why in the world Gavin Newsom is signing this stuff into law.
00:20:44.000And the answer is the California model.
00:20:46.000Again, it combines the worst sort of government seizure of private property and intervention in the economy with the idea that every person's subjective sense of sexual identity must be not only greenlit but approved and sponsored by the state of California up to the point of decriminalization and possibly being given tax dollars.
00:21:05.000Speaking of which, all of this stuff costs a lot of money.
00:21:07.000It turns out that it is very expensive to run your state like an idiot.
00:21:11.000And so now California Democrats are considering something new.
00:21:14.000According to Fox News, Assemblyman Alex Lee, a progressive Democrat, last week introduced a bill in the California state legislature that would impose an extra annual 1.5% tax on those with a worldwide net worth above $1 billion starting as early as January 2024.
00:21:29.000As early as 2026, the threshold for being taxed would drop.
00:21:32.000Those with a worldwide net worth exceeding $50 million would be hit with a 1% annual tax on wealth.
00:21:38.000Billionaires would still be taxed 1.5%.
00:21:40.000Just to keep this straight, folks, what that means is that if you have a worldwide net worth exceeding $50 million, they're going to tax you annually 1% on your wealth.
00:21:49.000Well, 1% of $50 million is about $500,000 annually.
00:21:56.000The problem is, how do you actually assess what somebody's wealth is worth?
00:21:58.000Let's say they are an owner in a privately held company that is not publicly traded on the stock market.
00:22:03.000There's no way to actually know what your market capitalization is because your stock is not actually tradable.
00:22:08.000So theoretically, you could actually be hit with a 1% tax, a $500,000 tax, without even necessarily earning that much money in a given year because you can't actually liquidate your wealth.
00:22:18.000Alright, I'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:22:20.000First, I've been telling you, I'm not getting enough sleep.
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00:23:26.000The current version introduces a measure to allow California to introduce wealth taxes on residents years after they left the state and moved elsewhere.
00:23:34.000This bill includes provisions to create contractual claims tied to the assets of a wealthy taxpayer who doesn't have the cash to pay their annual wealth tax bill because most of their assets aren't easily turned into cash.
00:23:44.000This claim would now require the taxpayer to make annual filings with the California Franchise Tax Board and eventually pay the wealth taxes owed, even if they have moved to another state.
00:23:53.000So, by the way, this just means people are going to leave faster.
00:23:57.000I remember having this conversation before we moved our company and before we left for Florida.
00:24:00.000I remember talking to my wife and saying, we need to get out before they do something like this, because then they'll just try to lock you in financial prison, essentially, by forcing you to pay back taxes to the state of California, even though you've left.
00:24:14.000They're apparently trying to now tax people even after they leave the state, which is just insane.
00:24:18.000So, you know, the reason they're doing this, by the way, is because somebody's got to pay the taxes.
00:24:24.000According to Fox News, past studies show that the top 1% of taxpayers pay about 50% of all state income taxes in New York, California, and elsewhere.
00:24:32.000Watch as everybody who has the ability leaves the state of California as soon as humanly possible.
00:24:37.000That will be the precise outcome that California wishes to avoid, but that's what they're going to achieve.
00:24:42.000Okay, so you have one model of governance, that is the California model of governance.
00:24:45.000Meanwhile, there's a separate model of governance and it is taking place over in Florida.
00:24:49.000That model of governance is turning a purple state red, bright red.
00:24:52.000So much so that the Washington Post now has a piece titled, There is no plan, there is nothing.
00:24:57.000Florida Democrats in despair over future.
00:25:00.000To which all I can say is, uh, Emperor Palpatine, good, good.
00:25:06.000I only hope that you are in despair over my new state turning bright red thanks to people like me leaving California and coming to places like Florida.
00:25:14.000According to the Washington Post, More than two months after enduring humbling midterm losses, Democrats in Florida are in a state of disorder.
00:25:20.000They have no clear leader, infrastructure, or consensus for rebuilding, according to interviews with more than a dozen organizers, former lawmakers, donors, and other leaders.
00:25:27.000These factors have compounded their worries about Democrats outside Florida all but writing off the nation's third most populous state, which was once seen as a marquee battleground.
00:25:35.000Democrats have struggled there in recent elections, hitting a new low last fall when Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won a second term by nearly 20 points and carried the majority Hispanic Miami-Dade County.
00:25:43.000That's something a GOP gubernatorial candidate has not done in two decades.
00:25:47.000Republicans also secured a supermajority in the state legislature.
00:25:50.000Now, as Democrats look to 2024, there are a few early signs that Florida will be a top priority for Joe Biden, who said he intends to run for re-election.
00:25:57.000A Biden advisor who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe strategy said decisions about whether a re-election campaign would even invest in Florida would be based in part on the Republican nominee.
00:26:05.000Some Democrats see little hope in contesting Florida's 30 electoral votes.
00:26:09.000Only Texas and California have more, if DeSantis is the nominee.
00:26:14.000Fernanda Amandia, federal Democratic operative said, The thing about Florida Democrats is we keep learning with every passing year.
00:26:19.000Just when you thought you had hit bottom, you discover there are new abysses to fall deeper and deeper into.
00:26:35.000And that is because the governance in Florida, which has been largely Republican for quite a while here, has been excellent.
00:26:42.000And it's turned a bunch of Democrats into Republicans, at least in the state of Florida.
00:26:46.000And that includes Governor DeSantis' supposed culture wars.
00:26:50.000So the left keeps declaring that Ron DeSantis' culture wars are somehow damaging him, that they're really, really bad, and how could he possibly do this?
00:26:56.000They keep saying that he's such a radical.
00:26:57.000The problem is that the culture wars that he is picking are not radical.
00:27:01.000So you'll recall that they suggested that when he passed a bill saying that you should not sexually indoctrinate children under the age of eight, the entire media labeled this the Don't Say Gay Bill.
00:27:09.000And then polls showed that over 50% of Democrats in Florida approved the bill.
00:27:13.000You'll recall that Ron DeSantis said he didn't want Disney getting involved in the politics of the state on behalf of the Democrats.
00:27:21.000And he said, you don't get special benefits from the state if you choose to play sides.
00:27:26.000And people outside the state were like, how dare he do this?
00:27:34.000Well now, Ron DeSantis is making a couple of other moves.
00:27:36.000And they have to do largely with the school system.
00:27:38.000It's such smart politics, it also happens to be good.
00:27:42.000So the chief issue that is facing parents right now in the United States is the attempted indoctrination of their children by major teachers unions like the AFT and the NEA.
00:27:50.000The fact of the matter is that there are a bunch of very motivated political partisan hacks who are in the classroom.
00:27:57.000It happens to be true at a bevy of public schools all around the nation.
00:28:00.000The selection of teachers is not coming from the community very often.
00:28:04.000Now at public schools, it's coming from teachers union members who have gone to the ed school at the state college or out of state and they are coming back and they are taking all of their left-wing values and they're now implanting those in their kids.
00:28:16.000Well, Ron DeSantis is doing the right thing.
00:28:18.000He's attempting to break the teachers unions in the state of Florida.
00:28:21.000According to the Orlando Sentinel, Governor DeSantis unveiled a series of proposals on Monday aimed at school boards and teachers unions.
00:28:29.000The latest salvo in his battles over education policy in the state.
00:28:32.000Again, education policy is a very good thing for Republicans to go after because Democrats for some reason have decided to simply surrender parents as an actual block.
00:28:39.000Now they want to defeat parental rights.
00:28:41.000If you're a parent and you say, my boy is a boy, my girl is a girl, the Democrats now say that you may be an abusive parent on that basis alone.
00:28:48.000They want this stuff instead mainstreamed into the classroom, and they want to make sure that you're never told about this stuff.
00:28:54.000If your kid goes to school, expresses gender confusion, and everybody at the school starts calling your kid by a dumb alternative name and pretending they're a member of the opposite sex, they don't even want to tell you about it.
00:29:03.000DeSantis has now unveiled what he calls a Teacher's Bill of Rights.
00:29:06.000At an event in Jacksonville, it would give teachers the go-ahead to oppose their school boards if they believed their policies were against state law.
00:29:12.000He also proposes banning teachers' unions from automatically deducting dues from paychecks, imposing stricter term limits on school board members, and changing the state constitution to allow school board candidates to reveal their political parties in what are now nonpartisan races.
00:29:24.000That'd be a good thing also, because you don't know who to vote for in your school board race.
00:29:27.000Now, if they identify as a Republican, presumably, they're not going to be sexually indoctrinating your children or attempting to do so.
00:29:33.000Also, his attempt to stop teachers' unions from automatically deducting dues from paychecks.
00:29:37.000This is one of the scummiest things in American politics.
00:29:39.000It's been happening for a very long time.
00:29:40.000Public sector unions, believe it or not, actually have the right that if the state sends your paycheck, they don't send it to you, they send it to the union.
00:29:50.000The union then removes your dues and passes along the check to you.
00:30:16.000Andrew Speier, the head of the Florida Education Association, called DeSantis' proposals an attempt to punish and divide.
00:30:21.000Well, I mean, I hope it's an attempt to punish some of the worst teachers unions in America.
00:30:24.000DeSantis said he wants an additional $200 million to be added to the special fund created to raise teacher pay, bringing the total to $1 billion for teacher pay in his recommended budget for the next year.
00:30:33.000So, at the same time he is saying they should break the unions, he's saying we should pay teachers more.
00:30:37.000I mean, that seems like a pretty good policy.
00:30:41.000In a statement, FEA spokeswoman Joanie Branch said, due to a tangled web of laws and rules governing pay, teachers with years in the classroom continue to face an experience penalty that can leave them at making little more than new hires.
00:30:53.000The reality is seniority should not be the point of teaching.
00:30:56.000Quality should be the point of teaching.
00:30:57.000You've seen all over the country bizarre situations in which the teacher of the year will get fired because the teacher of the year is like two years in.
00:31:03.000And some schlub with 20 years on the job who's been rubber-roomed, meaning you can't fire him for legal reasons, but actually that person can't be in the classroom because they've been sexually harassing the students or something.
00:31:12.000Instead they just literally put them in a room and they leave them there and they pay them.
00:31:15.000It's been a major issue in New York for literally years.
00:31:20.000DeSantis' proposals on school boards came after he inserted himself into local board races to an unprecedented degree for a governor, boosting conservative candidates across the state.
00:31:28.000Another area where DeSantis has gotten active is the Florida Department of Education has now rejected an AP African American Studies course because it was, effectively speaking, critical race theory.
00:31:38.000The state of Florida bans critical race theory under the so-called WOCA Act.
00:31:42.000It essentially says that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution and the Florida State Constitution.
00:31:49.000That it treats students disparately by race, it creates hierarchies of race in the classroom, and that is barred by Florida law.
00:31:55.000So they said we are not going to have an AP class approved for use in the classroom that includes these sorts of elements.
00:32:00.000And this, of course, set the world on fire.
00:32:02.000The entire left began lying about this quite quickly.
00:32:05.000According to Fox News, Florida rejected an Advanced Placement African American Studies course because it contained elements of critical race theory and black queer studies, according to a document shared with Fox News Digital detailing the concerns identified by the Florida DOE, the Department of Education.
00:32:19.000Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz also tweeted a graphic that detailed six particular lessons outlined in the syllabus that didn't comply with Florida law.
00:32:25.000So it wasn't just they rejected the whole thing, they said, here are the things you have to fix.
00:32:31.000Well, one of the topics from the AP course was intersectionality and activism.
00:32:35.000Which is not education, that's indoctrination.
00:32:37.000There was one titled Black Queer Studies, which included readings from people like Rodney, Roderick Ferguson, who said, quote, we have to encourage and develop practices whereby queerness isn't a surrender to the status quo of race, class, gender, and sexuality. It means building forms of queerness that reject the given realities of the government and market.
00:32:57.000That's just left-wing activism in the name of LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign stuff.
00:33:05.000It includes topics like black feminist literary thought, including Bell Hooks, who is the author of many intersectionality texts, who says in the recommended reading, quote, I began to use the phrase in my work, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and this indoctrination of students, not into a theory, but into the praxis of the notion that America is systemically racist, capitalism is inherently evil, and all of the the rest. So Florida rejected all of this.
00:33:51.000from use in the state of Florida, according to News Channel 8, the college board, the nonprofit organization that designs and maintains AP courses, announced the rejected pilot program of their AP African-American Studies course would now be updated.
00:34:02.000Good, that's the way it's supposed to work.
00:34:05.000You reject the indoctrination, and then you get something better.
00:34:08.000The left is running scared of all of this sort of stuff.
00:34:27.000We have a lot of open jobs in the United States right now and not enough good people to fill them.
00:34:30.000This is why, if you are hiring right now, you can't afford to ignore ZipRecruiter.
00:34:34.000If you need to hire for your business and you want an easier way to find qualified candidates, head on over to ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
00:35:19.000Also, this month, we're celebrating the anniversary of one of the biggest moments in DailyWire history.
00:35:23.000After months of us leading the legal battle against the federal government and a national Do Not Comply campaign, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor and blocked the Biden administration's outrageous VAX mandate.
00:35:31.000That mandate would have set a dangerous precedent, giving the unelected OSHA power over the personal medical decisions of American citizens.
00:35:37.000The Supreme Court recognized this gross power grab for what it was, and they made the right decision.
00:35:41.000We are so proud to have led the charge in this fight.
00:36:18.000Okay, so, Ron DeSantis, he is winning, and he is winning big in the state of Florida.
00:36:23.000And this is scaring the living hell out of the left, so they have to lie about it.
00:36:25.000Whoopi Goldberg, over on The View, which is the repository of all knowledge and wisdom in the universe, she suggested that no one is actually teaching critical race theory.
00:36:32.000Again, this is part of the ongoing left-wing series.
00:36:34.000It's not happening, and it's good that it is.
00:37:49.000Martin Luther King, obviously, as Republicans love to talk about, you know, every January, this was a political movement, and no one wanted to learn about that then either.
00:37:58.000If that's the kind of lineage he wants to join, you know, people who are saying don't talk about the political thinking of marginalized groups, he's welcome to do it.
00:38:37.000The problem is that most Americans can see through these lies, so the left are having a real tough time.
00:38:41.000Which is why, again, they just have to keep exaggerating and exaggerating and exaggerating.
00:38:44.000MSNBC's Michael Beschloss says, Okay guys, you can get any book you want in Florida.
00:38:49.000You just can't mainstream it to the kiddies.
00:38:51.000I don't understand why this is so tough to accept.
00:38:53.000You can go down to your local porn shop and you can buy a copy of Playboy.
00:38:57.000That doesn't mean it should be taught in third grade.
00:38:59.000I don't understand why you guys can't seem to understand that free speech is not the chief issue in the classroom.
00:39:06.000In the classroom, the chief issue is what gets taught to our small people.
00:39:12.000But I guess this all comes down to this notion that children are basically just small adults who are vested with full autonomy, up to and including deciding their own sex and the ability of whether they ought to, you know, mutilate their own genitals and such.
00:39:22.000Anyway, here's MSNBC's Michael Beschloss.
00:39:24.000This genius, by the way, writes speeches for Joe Biden.
00:39:28.000If you quizzed public school, elementary school kids, high school kids today about John F. Kennedy administration, what would they know?
00:39:40.000Or they might say, is that the guy who's coming back to run with Donald Trump next year?
00:39:45.000And they also might say, you know, was it the idea of our founders, as we're now seeing in Joe and Mika's home state of Florida, was it their idea that books would be banned and taken out of classrooms?
00:39:59.000And you'd have lists saying, these books are okay, these books are not.
00:40:04.000Yes, the founders would have been fine with that.
00:40:08.000Yes, the founders would have been fine with the notion that there are certain books that do not belong in the classrooms of small children.
00:40:12.000I mean, honest to God, Michael Beschloss is supposed to be a historian.
00:40:37.000But you're cruisin' for a bruisin', so if this is the way you want to play it, then I guess this is how it's going to go.
00:40:41.000And meanwhile, in other news, the Department of Justice is now suing Google, apparently seeking to break up Google's business brokering digital advertising across much of the internet.
00:40:49.000It's kind of a fascinating thing, because there is in fact a bipartisan consensus that Google has effectively a monopoly in the ad business.
00:40:56.000Filed in federal court in Virginia, according to the Wall Street Journal, the case alleges that Google abuses monopoly power in the ad tech industry, hurting web publishers and advertisers that try to use competing products.
00:41:05.000Eight states, including California and New York, have joined the DOJ lawsuit.
00:41:09.000The lawsuit asks the court to unwind Google's anti-competitive acquisitions, such as its 2008 purchase of ad-serving company DoubleClick, and call for a divestiture of its ad exchange.
00:41:18.000AG Merrick Garland said at a press conference, for 15 years Google has pursued a course of anti-competitive conduct that has allowed it to halt the rise of rival technologies, manipulate auction mechanics, insulate itself from competition, and force advertisers and publishers to use its tools.
00:41:30.000By calling for specific divestitures from Google's ad tech business, the Justice Department went further in seeking a breakup than some antitrust experts had expected.
00:41:40.000This is why Alphabet shares fell by about 2% in trading on Tuesday.
00:41:44.000The ad tech tools controlled by Google facilitate much of the buying and selling of digital ads that helps fund online publishers.
00:41:49.000Google's businesses include tool publishers can use to offer ad space, a product for advertisers to buy those slots, and an exchange that links the bidders with the web pages.
00:41:58.000But there are a lot of people who are deeply worried that Google has been basically manipulating all of this to their own ends.
00:42:07.000Alphabet gets about 80% of its business from advertising.
00:42:10.000The Justice Department's new suit targets the subset of that ad business that brokers the buying and selling of ads on the other websites and apps as well.
00:42:16.000The idea is that they are privileging their own above other people's.
00:42:20.000Last year, Google offered to split off parts of its ad tech business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella.
00:42:26.000Well, one of the things that's sort of fascinating here is just how wide the bipartisan acceptance of the attack on Google is.
00:42:34.000So, you know, there are always a couple of sort of theories when it comes to monopoly power. One is that monopoly power should be broken if it harms the consumer. The other is monopoly power should be broken if it represents too heavy a percentage of the market. I tended toward the first theory, if it harms consumers. I certainly can say that Google's monopoly on ads has harmed consumers for sure.
00:42:53.000That is a very real thing. And so the possibility that the DOJ is moving to break up the ad business probably is not necessarily a bad thing. Now I will say that the same people who are looking to crack down on Google's ad business from from the Biden administration are also looking to crack down on free speech over at Twitter.
00:43:10.000Yet again, there's another study out, so many studies out, every single day, a study out showing violence is increasing.
00:43:25.000Jews and gays are accelerating, not because of Twitter, per se, but because you took the cops off the streets and told them not to police anymore.
00:43:32.000I've noticed that they are accelerating, particularly in areas where you've been weak when it comes to policing crime.
00:43:39.000But you gotta find some way to crack down on the only possible free speech mechanism on the internet these days.
00:43:46.000New research to be released later this month by the misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute suggests a connection between real-world incidents and variations of the word groomer, often aimed at gays and suggesting they are adults bent on seducing children.
00:43:59.000Although polls indicate a significant minority of the population believes otherwise, gay people are not more likely to be predators than straight people.
00:44:05.000So now they are trying to claim that the rise of the use of the term groomer on Twitter is leading to attacks on gay people.
00:44:12.000I'm gonna have to see the evidence on that.
00:44:15.000The answer is they actually have none.
00:44:17.000At the beginning of this Washington Post story, they begin with the FBI charging a Florida man with making a detailed online threat to murder 100 gay people.
00:44:24.000He had also threatened to kill black people and tear gas the synagogue.
00:44:29.000Apparently, he liked 11 tweets before his arrest.
00:44:32.000Quote, there is no evidence that what Albert saw on Twitter inspired him to make his own posts.
00:44:40.000I'm perfectly fine with the DOJ actually showing, with 149 pages of supporting evidence, that the internet is being skewed by Google.
00:44:47.000I do have a fairly significant problem with the notion that the same people who are complaining about Google are also complaining that Twitter's free speech mechanisms are damaging to the United States to the extent that they're actually facilitating violence.
00:45:01.000Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.