The Ben Shapiro Show - Escape From New York | Ep. 1269

00:00:00.000 As violent crime continues its spike in New York, competing visions for the city battle it out.

00:00:04.000 President Biden gets concerned about the economy, and the COVID lab leak theory cover-up is exploding into public view.

00:00:10.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:10.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:11.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:00:22.000 Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.

00:00:24.000 Well, you may have noticed that in April alone, consumer prices increased by 4.2%.

00:00:29.000 That is the biggest bump since 2008.

00:00:31.000 There's higher fuel prices and higher food prices and higher construction costs and higher housing prices.

00:00:36.000 Inflation is here.

00:00:38.000 You may have noticed it in all of the prices of all of your goods, like all of them.

00:00:41.000 So here's the question.

00:00:42.000 Have you protected your savings and your investments because inflation eats away at savings?

00:00:46.000 What you ought to be doing is taking at least a little bit of your money and you ought to be diversifying into precious metals.

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00:01:43.000 Alrighty, so.

00:01:44.000 A couple of nights ago, there was a big debate in New York City between all the mayoral candidates, and there are a few aspects of this that are amusing.

00:01:51.000 Aspect number one, seven of the eight candidates said they actively did not want Bill de Blasio's endorsement for the mayoral seat, which is a hell of a referendum on the guy who is the sitting mayor of New York City.

00:02:02.000 That's how unpopular Bill de Blasio is inside his own city.

00:02:04.000 He has aspirations to run for governor or senator.

00:02:07.000 Dude couldn't win an election for dog catcher today in New York City because nobody likes him.

00:02:12.000 And the reason is because the ideas of leftism have run headlong into the brick wall of reality in New York City.

00:02:20.000 And so while the media continue to focus in on the inspirational wild left figures of New York, the people like Jamaal Bowman and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and Bill de Blasio, the reality says something different.

00:02:31.000 What the reality suggests is that when it comes to actual policy, New Yorkers are beginning to turn more toward the Rudy Giuliani sort of left-leaning social policy and right-leaning crime policy that characterized New York City throughout the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

00:02:46.000 Why?

00:02:46.000 Well, because it worked in New York.

00:02:48.000 You know what doesn't work in New York?

00:02:49.000 Anything that the Democrats have been doing there for the last 10 years.

00:02:53.000 What they've been doing there for the last decade has wrecked the city, particularly in the last five.

00:02:57.000 And everybody knows this.

00:02:59.000 So the media continued to trot around following around AOC.

00:03:02.000 I just want to point out the mentality of the Alexander Ocasio-Cortez left.

00:03:06.000 It is pretty astonishing.

00:03:06.000 So there are a couple of things that are worth noting about the Alexander Ocasio-Cortez left mentality.

00:03:11.000 Number one, they truly believe that your money is their money and that they have no obligation to do moral things with their money.

00:03:19.000 This was an undercover story in the major media, but Alexander Ocasio-Cortez She recently posted photographs of her grandmother's squalid living conditions in Puerto Rico and blamed President Trump for the situation.

00:03:31.000 She put on Twitter, just over a week ago, my grandmother fell ill.

00:03:35.000 I went to Puerto Rico to see her, my first time in a year because of COVID.

00:03:38.000 This is her home.

00:03:39.000 Hurricane Maria relief hasn't arrived.

00:03:41.000 Trump blocked relief dollars for Puerto Rico.

00:03:43.000 People are being forced to flee ancestral homes and developers are taking them.

00:03:46.000 And then she tweeted out a picture of her grandmother's roof, which appears to be collapsing in places.

00:03:52.000 Later, she amended the tone of her comments for 45 minutes later, her grandmother was doing okay. 0.98

00:03:57.000 Now, the reason that she said that is because everybody pointed out that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has an annual salary of $174,000. 1.00

00:04:04.000 She has no children.

00:04:06.000 She doesn't have tremendously high expenses, except for the Tesla that she recently leased.

00:04:11.000 And so everybody online was like, you know, Alexandria, before you blame Trump for your grandmother's squalid living conditions, your words, You might want to, like, check your wallet.

00:04:19.000 Like, check your pocketbook.

00:04:21.000 See, here's one of the things about conservatism.

00:04:23.000 Conservatism suggests that there are a series of overlapping circles in terms of responsibility.

00:04:29.000 Okay?

00:04:29.000 When it comes to people who are in your immediate family and people who you are close to, you have chief responsibility in taking care of them.

00:04:36.000 And if that doesn't work, you go to your local community.

00:04:39.000 And then if that doesn't work, you go to the larger community, to maybe an actual local government.

00:04:44.000 You go to your state community.

00:04:45.000 And then maybe at the very end, you get to the federal government.

00:04:46.000 But the first line of defense against difficulty in life is your immediate circle.

00:04:51.000 And so, if my grandmother is having financial trouble, Then I step in if I have the ability to do so.

00:04:57.000 And this is what most people do.

00:04:59.000 The fact that Alexandra, that it never even occurred to her.

00:05:02.000 My grandmother's roof is falling apart.

00:05:04.000 Maybe I should do something about that instead of leasing that Tesla.

00:05:08.000 Maybe I should instead lease, you know, an electric Honda or something for like one third of the cost and send the extra over to grandma. 0.72

00:05:13.000 The fact that apparently never occurred to her.

00:05:16.000 is just indicative of a particular mindset, which is, it is never my responsibility to do anything, it is everybody else's responsibility to do everything.

00:05:23.000 It's the government's responsibility to do everything.

00:05:25.000 I mean, it's kind of an incredible indicator of exactly where this mentality lies.

00:05:31.000 And it's true for national politics too.

00:05:33.000 If there's a problem in my immediate community, the problem must lie with a broader societal issue, as opposed to, what can I do about it today?

00:05:41.000 And what can people do?

00:05:42.000 What can people with agency do to fix their own problems?

00:05:44.000 Okay, so that is point number one.

00:05:46.000 Point number two is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's view of crime.

00:05:50.000 So yesterday, she did this presser, and it was kind of amazing.

00:05:53.000 She was standing directly next to Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, and she was calling for more funding for mental health, which Fine.

00:06:03.000 I'm on board with that.

00:06:04.000 I think one of the great tragedies of public policy in the last 60 years is the attempt to federalize all mental health and institutionalization issues.

00:06:12.000 It started under the JFK administration, then moved forward with states shirking their duties, and this has led to a tremendous rise in the homeless problem over the course of the last few decades.

00:06:19.000 Okay, but, Alejandro Ocasio-Cortez is talking about crime.

00:06:24.000 And here she is explaining that the real problem, the real reason why we have too much crime is because we are building too many jails.

00:06:33.000 Let's check out how this works.

00:06:35.000 If we want to reduce violent crime, if we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them.

00:06:42.000 The answer is to make sure that we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care, and overall health care, employment, et cetera.

00:06:51.000 It's to support communities, not throw them away.

00:06:53.000 Okay, look at the body language on Chuck Schumer there. 0.99

00:06:55.000 Chuck Schumer is like, I want to crawl in a hole and die. 0.96

00:06:58.000 He's standing right next to her, she says this.

00:07:00.000 Because here's the thing, she's in a city where crime is skyrocketing, and her solution is build fewer jails. 0.96

00:07:05.000 As someone on Twitter pointed out, this is akin to saying, if you want fewer sick people, build fewer hospitals.

00:07:11.000 You build the jails to hold the criminals.

00:07:13.000 You don't build the jails and then there's an upsurge in demand for criminality.

00:07:17.000 That's not how any of that works.

00:07:18.000 Okay, but this sort of perverse thinking that my problems are everybody else's problems and my immediate family's problems don't fall on me, they fall on the government more broadly.

00:07:26.000 And when it comes to criminality, that is a broader societal problem where the government is not supposed to step in and solve it.

00:07:32.000 Instead, it's a broader societal problem that we just blame on everything else.

00:07:35.000 That sort of mentality has crippled New York and continues to cripple New York.

00:07:39.000 And you can see it play out in the New York mayoral race.

00:07:41.000 Or if you look at the polls right now, the two people at the top of the heap, in terms of the candidates, are the two most conservative Democrats in the race.

00:07:48.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:09:05.000 All this sort of idiocy has had serious consequences for New York. 0.99

00:09:05.000 Okay, so. 0.99

00:09:08.000 According to Joel Siegel, who's the managing editor of Spectrum News DC, NYPD now says the number of shootings in May of 2021 jumped 73% compared to May 2020.

00:09:16.000 173 shootings in May versus 100 last May.

00:09:17.000 And that was on top of a 63% increase in May 2020 versus May of 2019.

00:09:20.000 There were 61 shootings in New York in May 2019.

00:09:21.000 versus 100 last May.

00:09:23.000 And that was on top of a 63% increase in May 2020 versus May of 2019.

00:09:28.000 There were 61 shootings in New York in May 2019.

00:09:32.000 Today, May 2021, 173 shootings in New York.

00:09:37.000 That is the result of an administration that has decided they are not going to police crime.

00:09:41.000 They're going to release criminals back onto the street.

00:09:44.000 It's an administration that has decided not to enforce the law that is going to allow Black Lives Matter rioters to run roughshod through the center of New York City. 0.97

00:09:50.000 This has downstream effect in terms of criminals believing they can get away with anything.

00:09:53.000 I'm fully convinced, by the way, that the uptick In hate crimes that you have seen against Jews is fully connected with law enforcement's inability or unwillingness in areas around the country to actually police.

00:10:04.000 When policing goes away, crime spikes.

00:10:06.000 And that is true with regard to all types of crime, including hate crimes.

00:10:10.000 That is a reversal of a trend, by the way.

00:10:12.000 It is incredible how there has been this secular trend, meaning a widespread trend, for the last two decades in terms of lowering crime rates.

00:10:21.000 Basically, from 1994 all the way until 2014, crime rates dropped precipitously like a stone.

00:10:26.000 The reason for that is because people in major cities started taking policing seriously.

00:10:30.000 Rudy Giuliani was elected in New York.

00:10:31.000 Richard Reardon was elected in Los Angeles.

00:10:33.000 You started to see All sorts of conservative policies attempted with regard to crime.

00:10:37.000 And shockingly, crime dropped.

00:10:39.000 This was the days when Joe Biden used to talk about super predators and he used to back crime bills.

00:10:44.000 And then, thanks to Barack Obama's administration and the rise of wild left crazy people like Bill de Blasio and Eric Garcetti in major cities around the country, Crime rates started to rise again because policy is indeed connected with human behavior.

00:10:58.000 And you know who's starting to realize this?

00:10:59.000 The people of New York.

00:11:00.000 Because as it turns out, what the polling data shows in New York right now, is that the people at the top of the heap, in polling, in New York, are the most conservative candidates.

00:11:09.000 There is no progressive near the top of the heap.

00:11:12.000 According to USA Today, in what could be the most consequential mayoral elections in the city's recent history, a host of Democratic candidates in a tightly contested race are vying to become the Big Apple's next mayor.

00:11:21.000 Eight major Democrats are making their final bids to New York City voters in a campaign that has touched on a variety of challenges facing the city, led to a diverse list of candidates, and featured plenty of Zoom calls.

00:11:31.000 The leading contenders are Andrew Yang, who is still seizing on the energy around his 2020 Democratic presidential run.

00:11:36.000 I know Andrew Yang because he was Generous enough to do an interview with the show.

00:11:40.000 I think he's a really good guy.

00:11:42.000 I disagree with him with regard to universal basic income, which has been part of his pitch.

00:11:46.000 But his main pitch has been, I am not an unreasonable, crazy person.

00:11:49.000 His main pitch has been, we need to get corporations back into the city.

00:11:53.000 We need to get jobs back into the city.

00:11:54.000 And we need to give the police the resources necessary in order to shut down crime.

00:11:59.000 Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer, zeroed in on public safety.

00:12:03.000 That's been his main pitch.

00:12:04.000 And then trailing the pack is Catherine Garcia, who's received a bunch of big name endorsements from the New York Daily News, but continues to trail in the polling because she is just not far right enough. 0.94

00:12:14.000 The Republicans in the race are not competitive because one, they're Republican, and two, because they're not the sort of Rudy Giuliani, quote-unquote, moderate Republican that did well in New York for so long.

00:12:22.000 But Yang and Adams look a lot more like Ed Koch, who is the sort of gruff and avuncular mayor of New York starting in the late 1970s, who converted from being a radical left Bella Abzug progressive into being the sort of conservative-style Democrat who governed New York City for a while.

00:12:40.000 These are those type of Democrats.

00:12:42.000 This is leftism being rejected in places like New York City because leftism has failed in places like New York City.

00:12:49.000 So it was fascinating.

00:12:50.000 The other night they had this big debate and the people who came off the worst by far were the people who were the most wildly to the left.

00:12:57.000 And the people who came off the best were people like Adams and people like Andrew Yang.

00:13:01.000 Now the reason this makes a difference is because what happens in New York can happen nationally.

00:13:05.000 People like to say that the Democrats want to take California national.

00:13:08.000 That's true.

00:13:09.000 They also want to take New York national.

00:13:10.000 But they don't want to take the style of Democratic governance of Michael Bloomberg national.

00:13:15.000 Bloomberg ran for the presidency on the Democratic side of the aisle and received basically no support.

00:13:21.000 Joe Biden seemed to want to govern that way at times during his campaign, but then he's run to the radical left.

00:13:26.000 He looks a lot more like AOC or like Jamal Bowman or like Bernie Sanders than he does like the Joe Biden that people thought they were going to get when they elected him.

00:13:36.000 So what happens in New York is a good indicator as to what is going to happen nationally, meaning there will be a backlash.

00:13:41.000 There will be a conservative backlash.

00:13:43.000 If it's happening in New York, it can happen anywhere.

00:13:45.000 So Andrew Yang has been facing a lot of this stuff down.

00:13:47.000 So yesterday, for example, he was walking around at a Park Slope event, and he was shouted down by people screaming to defund the cops.

00:13:58.000 No more tax!

00:14:04.000 And you can see people trailing him, saying, hedge fund mayor.

00:14:07.000 Okay, this is why Yang is going to do well in New York.

00:14:11.000 And again, he has no history in elected politics, and if he doesn't win the mayoral race, he's gonna come in a close second.

00:14:16.000 They have ranked-choice voting in New York, which means that... I'm kind of a fan of ranked-choice voting, to be honest with you.

00:14:21.000 The way ranked-choice voting works is that if you vote for one of the lower-down candidates, number one on your ballot, and then you vote for Yang, too, if the lower-down candidate doesn't finish in the top couple of candidates, that person's votes are eliminated, and then your second choice becomes your first choice.

00:14:35.000 And they just keep doing this until somebody wins.

00:14:36.000 Okay, so, Yang, right now, is running in the top two with Eric Adams.

00:14:41.000 Eric Adams, of course, is a former cop.

00:14:44.000 So Yang and Adams went at each other, but the more telling attacks were the ones that were put out against Adams and Yang for being too conservative, which is why they're winning.

00:14:54.000 It's why they're doing well in New York.

00:14:55.000 This can't be overstated.

00:14:57.000 New Yorkers are seeing the results of the policies they chose, and they are not liking the results of the policies they chose, and they are reacting to the policies they chose by moving in a different direction.

00:15:07.000 Democrats had better be wary.

00:15:09.000 They'd better be wary.

00:15:11.000 New York is a one-party city, and they're still moving to the right wing of the Democratic Party.

00:15:15.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:16:26.000 Alrighty, so some examples from the mayoral debate the other night.

00:16:30.000 So Scott Stringer, who is one of these also-ran candidates, he was expected to be more of a competitor in this particular race.

00:16:37.000 He was the New York City comptroller, but then he was hit with a sort of sexual harassment accusation by a former political ally.

00:16:43.000 He denies the allegations, but he's been trailing in the polls.

00:16:47.000 He went after Andrew Yang, and he said, you know, it seems to me like you're a Republican.

00:16:52.000 That is not going to work.

00:16:54.000 I mean, really, this is not a... And Yang just kind of was like, okay.

00:16:57.000 It's kind of amazing.

00:16:59.000 As your consultants have told you time and time again, they admit you're an empty vessel.

00:17:04.000 And I actually don't think you're an empty vessel.

00:17:05.000 I think you're a Republican who continues to focus on the issues that will not bring back the economy.

00:17:12.000 In fact, what you're focusing on, things like casinos in Governor's Island, you're focusing on TikTok houses in the midst of a housing crisis.

00:17:19.000 And what I'm saying to you today is there is a budget crisis, but it's a budget crisis that with $6 billion in federal stimulus money, more money for the foundation aid coming from Albany, Okay, well, this is going nowhere for Stringer, because he attacks Yang as a TikTok influencer guy.

00:17:40.000 Okay, first of all, in New York, everybody's a TikTok influencer.

00:17:42.000 But second of all, attacking Yang as a Republican, it ain't gonna do much.

00:17:46.000 Okay, meanwhile, Maya Wiley, who is the most wild-eyed of the left candidates on the board, right? 1.00

00:17:53.000 She's a long time MSNBC contributor.

00:17:55.000 She worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as well as the ACLU and served as counsel to Bill de Blasio, which again, that's a resume that is not going to resonate in a time when Bill de Blasio is like the most hated person in New York.

00:18:06.000 She went after Eric Adams, right?

00:18:09.000 Well, the way that she went after Eric Adams is quite amusing.

00:18:11.000 So Eric Adams is a former police officer and Eric Adams has talked about the fact that he wants to carry a gun and he also wants to make sure that off-duty police officers can carry a gun in order to crack down on crime.

00:18:20.000 This goes very poorly for Maya Wiley.

00:18:23.000 Mr. Adams has said he's carried a gun to church.

00:18:26.000 He's asked off-duty officers to carry guns to church.

00:18:29.000 He said he will carry a gun as mayor and maybe even ditch his detail.

00:18:33.000 Eric, isn't this the wrong message to send our kids?

00:18:37.000 We're telling not to pick up the guns.

00:18:39.000 Okay, and the way he responded was, I've used my gun in order to stop crime off-duty.

00:18:44.000 And he mentioned people who had been victimized by crime in the city, which is the reason why he's in really good shape, Eric Adams.

00:18:50.000 Again, he's a retired former captain in NYPD.

00:18:53.000 And he is running on a platform that includes stepped-up policing, not stepped-down policing. 0.98

00:18:58.000 The whole defund the police movement, the BLM, the police are the bad guys, all cops are bastards routine, that is not playing in New York City. 0.99

00:19:05.000 You guys, you're reaping the whirlwind. 0.98

00:19:07.000 And you're not feeling it because these people are registered Democrats.

00:19:10.000 When you elect Ed Koch Democrats, as opposed to Bill de Blasio Democrats, that indicates that EC change is happening in places like New York City.

00:19:18.000 Meanwhile, Yang himself slammed Eric Adams.

00:19:22.000 The battle in New York is also sort of internal.

00:19:24.000 So Yang is going after Eric Adams.

00:19:26.000 He says that Eric Adams has a corruption problem, which is kind of true.

00:19:29.000 He is under investigation.

00:19:30.000 I think three separate investigations actually for corruption issues.

00:19:34.000 Eric, we all know that you've been investigated for corruption everywhere you've gone.

00:19:39.000 City, state, even Barack Obama's Department of Justice investigated you.

00:19:43.000 You've achieved the rare trifecta of corruption investigations.

00:19:47.000 Is that really what we want in the next mayor?

00:19:49.000 You think you're going to enter City Hall and it's going to be different?

00:19:52.000 We all know it's going to be exactly the same.

00:19:54.000 That's why so many people on this stage don't want you to be mayor.

00:19:58.000 Okay, so here's the bottom line issue.

00:20:01.000 Putting aside all the sort of fireworks that happened on the stage the other night, Right now, Americans are going to have a choice.

00:20:06.000 Do they want the Bill de Blasio-ization of America?

00:20:09.000 Or do they want the Ron DeSantis-ization of America?

00:20:12.000 Do they want to make California more like New York?

00:20:14.000 Or make California more like Florida?

00:20:17.000 Or make America more like Florida?

00:20:19.000 The idea of making America more like New York is trying to be more like Florida now.

00:20:24.000 New York is picking up.

00:20:25.000 Why?

00:20:25.000 Because people are leaving New York for Florida.

00:20:28.000 The numbers are astonishing.

00:20:29.000 There are a huge number of people who are snowbirds who are now taking their part-time residency in New York and they're just moving it right down to Florida.

00:20:36.000 You're seeing an influx of people from the Northeast.

00:20:38.000 And that is because of the governing style in New York.

00:20:40.000 If they hope to keep people, they're going to have to stop raising taxes.

00:20:43.000 They're going to have to start backing cops.

00:20:45.000 They're going to have to start backing private property rights again.

00:20:47.000 They're going to have to start appealing to the business sensibilities of hedge funds that are in the city but can easily move.

00:20:53.000 I know several people who are working at hedge funds who have moved their entire businesses down to Florida.

00:20:57.000 I was meeting with the mayor of Miami yesterday.

00:20:59.000 He was talking about the huge number of businesses that have been moving from New York to Miami specifically because Miami is a friendly business climate and because they're not going to shun business down here in Florida.

00:21:11.000 Even New Yorkers are beginning to recognize this, and this bodes really, really poorly for Democrats going forward.

00:21:17.000 It's not going to bode well for them.

00:21:18.000 Especially because, again, Joe Biden is pursuing the New Yorkification of America, not the Floridization of America.

00:21:25.000 Speaking of which, look at the way that the Biden administration is approaching economics.

00:21:30.000 So yesterday, Jen Psaki, again, making the case we need to radically raise corporate tax rates.

00:21:33.000 New York has tried to do this kind of stuff.

00:21:35.000 You know what happens?

00:21:36.000 Businesses relocate.

00:21:37.000 How bad is the corporate tax rate proposal being put forward by the Biden administration?

00:21:41.000 It's so bad, they're trying to cudgel literally every Western country into imitating their tax proposals just so they can avoid the consequences of their own tax proposals.

00:21:49.000 Because if you force people into a choice between organizing in the United States and organizing abroad, And if they can save money organizing abroad, they'll organize abroad.

00:21:57.000 The United States knows this.

00:21:58.000 And so Joe Biden is trying to force all of these other countries into setting a baseline tax rate so that businesses don't move out of the United States. 0.96

00:22:06.000 If you have to do that, your economic policy sucks.

00:22:08.000 But here was Jen Psaki pushing that economic policy yesterday anyway. 1.00

00:22:12.000 He believes that we should continue to look at raising the corporate rate.

00:22:16.000 That is a way to pay for a range of ideas.

00:22:18.000 He's got a lot of ideas out there, a lot of bold proposals, including that aren't a part of this infrastructure negotiation.

00:22:24.000 And he continues to believe that corporations can pay more.

00:22:27.000 Unless you think corporations shouldn't pay any tax at all, and we'll leave that to others to speak to, then there should be a way to find a path to agreement.

00:22:37.000 Okay, well, I don't believe the corporations should pay any tax at all.

00:22:39.000 All that money gets passed on to employees or in prices.

00:22:43.000 That's all double tax money.

00:22:44.000 All of it.

00:22:45.000 Okay, in just one second, we'll get to more of the economic proposals of the Biden administration, which continue to quash economic growth.

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00:24:02.000 All right, so the Biden economic plans, they suck, and Joe Biden is beginning to realize they suck, and that the suckage of the economic plans has actual consequences for his political future right here. 0.74

00:24:12.000 So there's data that came out yesterday, and it showed that hourly compensation is soaring. 0.98

00:24:16.000 And the reason that it's soaring is because no one is going back to work.

00:24:19.000 It is almost impossible to get people to go back to their jobs.

00:24:21.000 Okay, when hourly compensation soars, you know what happens to prices?

00:24:24.000 Prices go up as well.

00:24:26.000 And when prices go up, your savings are worth less.

00:24:29.000 And when your savings are worth less, this makes you poorer.

00:24:32.000 Okay, so for the people who get those higher compensation jobs, not terrible.

00:24:37.000 For everybody who has savings, not great.

00:24:39.000 And for people who are not getting a raise, also not great.

00:24:44.000 All of this is because in the short term, the Biden administration is blowing money into the economy.

00:24:48.000 In the long term, what's going to happen is economic stagnation, as I talked about yesterday.

00:24:52.000 It's not just that you're going to get inflation, which is an ill, but even if the inflation levels off, you're going to get economic stagnation.

00:24:58.000 And Biden is admitting as much.

00:25:00.000 He's admitting that we're going to have like 1.8% growth for the next 10 years. 0.95

00:25:03.000 That sucks. 0.96

00:25:04.000 Those numbers are bad. 0.96

00:25:05.000 And the reason for that is because when you suck money out of the system with a vacuum, and then you blow it back into the system via a bunch of redistributionist programs that get eaten up by the bureaucracy, you're removing the productivity from the economy.

00:25:19.000 It is the reason you have not seen job growth recover at the pace that you would like to see.

00:25:23.000 There's also a reason why Joe Biden is calling Lawrence Summers the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.

00:25:28.000 According to the Washington Post, President Biden recently called former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a Democrat who's been openly critical of his economic agenda, to acknowledge Summers' concerns and ask him to explain his objections, according to three people with knowledge of the private exchange.

00:25:41.000 Biden made the call as the White House is weighing critical decisions on the economy, including how much and whether to trim a far-reaching infrastructure plan in response to Republican demands.

00:25:49.000 My conversation also unfolded against a backdrop of warnings from Summers and others that Biden's spending plans present a risk of inflation and an overheating economy.

00:25:57.000 The White House has downplayed the extent of the threat posed by inflation, arguing it will be transitory and manageable.

00:26:02.000 But in recent months, Summers has engaged in increasingly bitter disagreements with White House aides.

00:26:07.000 Summers has been warning that Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus package is way too big and will overheat the economy, spurring inflation that could prove hard for the Federal Reserve to control.

00:26:15.000 White House officials keep dismissing this.

00:26:17.000 They're frustrated that he keeps talking about it in the first place.

00:26:20.000 Apparently, the call occurred late last month, but that doesn't mean that Biden is taking his foot off the gas.

00:26:24.000 Of course not.

00:26:26.000 Keep on keeping on.

00:26:27.000 This is Popstar.

00:26:28.000 Never stop, never spending.

00:26:29.000 Okay, so Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, she came out yesterday. 0.87

00:26:33.000 She said, we're not going to negotiate forever on infrastructure.

00:26:34.000 We're just going to ram forward our program right here.

00:26:38.000 The president really does believe very strongly that the current tax structure is skewed, and he wants to rebalance it in favor of the middle class, the working class, and to close loopholes that allow corporations to offshore and to Get away in many cases with not paying any income taxes, and that's not fair either.

00:26:59.000 So there are other ways of skinning the cat, and that's part of this negotiation.

00:27:04.000 But ultimately, we cannot just sit and negotiate forever.

00:27:07.000 We have to get to an end.

00:27:10.000 Okay, what if your economic policies suck because the jobless numbers just came in?

00:27:14.000 Here are the jobless numbers in May. 0.72

00:27:15.000 The United States added 559,000 jobs in May.

00:27:18.000 Now, that would be good, except we missed by 750,000 jobs last month, and we missed by 100,000 jobs the month before.

00:27:25.000 The expectations going into this economic report, 671,000 jobs.

00:27:29.000 So they missed by, again, 100,000 jobs.

00:27:32.000 Again, 100,000 jobs.

00:27:35.000 These are not good economic numbers.

00:27:37.000 These are not the numbers that Joe Biden needs.

00:27:39.000 And they're not the numbers America needs coming out of an artificially induced economic coma.

00:27:45.000 The fact that they are trying to blow money into the economy and that it is not working is demonstrative of the reality, which is that when you threaten business, when you tell them you're gonna raise the corporate tax rates, when you talk about making that retroactive, which frankly, I don't even know how that's constitutional, retroactive taxation, they're talking about making the corporate tax increase retroactive so that you can't escape it.

00:28:05.000 Because they know that if they make it proactive, there'll be a stock market hit immediately.

00:28:09.000 But if you make it proactive that you're about to raise the corporate tax rate, And that it doesn't have retroactive effects, then people are gonna start shifting their money out of corporate stocks, for example, because they know the corporations are gonna get hit.

00:28:19.000 If you make it retroactive, then you say, okay, well, it's already priced in.

00:28:22.000 But the fact that the Biden administration keeps on missing is fairly incredible, because it's so hard.

00:28:30.000 I mean, it's the broad side of the barn here, guys. 0.65

00:28:32.000 All you have to do is get out of the damned way, but you can't get out of the damned way, because your policy prescriptions are not in line with reality, just like AOC's policy prescriptions in New York are not in line with reality. 0.75

00:28:43.000 And so New Yorkers are beginning to turn towards something that doesn't look like AOC. 0.98

00:28:47.000 They're moving away from Bill de Blasio.

00:28:48.000 Americans are going to look at the Biden economic agenda, the Biden crime agenda, the Biden racial agenda, the Biden foreign policy agenda.

00:28:55.000 They're going to start moving away from it.

00:28:57.000 I'm fairly confident.

00:28:59.000 I mean, I've said this before.

00:28:59.000 If Republicans don't win back the House in 2022, given what is on their side, honestly, every member of the Republican House should lose their job if the Republicans cannot win back the House in 2022.

00:29:14.000 This is, these are bad numbers, guys.

00:29:16.000 I'm sorry, but 559,000 jobs in May, with 650,000 jobs expected, those are bad, that's three straight months of missing on jobs.

00:29:26.000 Okay, again, what we are seeing also, average hourly earnings continue to surge 2%.

00:29:31.000 The reason for that?

00:29:32.000 Because people aren't re-entering the workforce.

00:29:34.000 There's high demand for labor and low supply of labor, so the prices are rising.

00:29:38.000 This could lead to increased price inflation at a time of economic stagnation.

00:29:42.000 Or it could just be economic stagnation for a long time.

00:29:44.000 Either way, ain't nothing good happening because of the Biden economic agenda.

00:29:48.000 Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get into all of the new information that is emerging regarding the cover-up of the COVID lab leak theory.

00:29:56.000 That should have been the main theory going forward since early last year.

00:29:59.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:31:11.000 Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the continuing implosion of the cover-up of the COVID lab leak theory.

00:31:19.000 Vanity Fair, believe it or not, has a great piece on this today.

00:31:21.000 First, there is no threat like that of a corrupt authoritarian government and a corrupt authoritarian institutional structure.

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00:32:13.000 Also, also, we have a brand new Debunked audio episode that is coming out tomorrow, so make sure to continue to tune in for that.

00:32:21.000 It's all about Joe Biden's COVID lies.

00:32:22.000 You've been told that Joe Biden was a truth teller on COVID?

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00:32:26.000 So make sure you check out Debunked this weekend, the audio version of our beautiful video podcast.

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00:32:45.000 By the way, quick note on this economic report.

00:32:53.000 The labor force participation rate went down this month.

00:32:55.000 Down.

00:32:56.000 Okay, it should be precisely the opposite, right?

00:32:58.000 The economy is getting back into full swing.

00:32:59.000 You should be going back to work.

00:33:00.000 But when you pay people to stay home, they don't go back to work.

00:33:06.000 People have a bunch of money that the government stuffed in their pockets.

00:33:08.000 They ain't going back to war.

00:33:09.000 They're trying to spend the money, but there ain't the supply to keep up with the demand.

00:33:13.000 That's how you get inflation.

00:33:14.000 More dollars chasing fewer goods.

00:33:16.000 But in the long run, is that price inflation going to last?

00:33:18.000 Well, it depends.

00:33:19.000 Are people going to continue to take out debt and blow it into the economy?

00:33:22.000 Probably not when the demand ain't there.

00:33:24.000 You're just gonna end up with prolonged stagnation.

00:33:26.000 Well done, once again, for the Team Biden, for Team Biden.

00:33:29.000 Just amazing stuff.

00:33:30.000 No matter how many times their economic theories prove fraudulent and complete failures, no matter how many times they suck money out of the American economy and then blow it back in in the wrong places, we're still gonna pretend like they know what they're doing.

00:33:41.000 It's fairly incredible that the geniuses who sit at the top of government, the people who can't tie their own shoelaces or properly eat soup, these people are going to run the economy better than you know how to run your own business.

00:33:51.000 All right, meanwhile, Fascinating new article by Catherine Eban in Vanity Fair titled, The Lab Leak Theory, Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins.

00:34:01.000 Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off limits.

00:34:04.000 Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

00:34:08.000 Yeah, no bleep.

00:34:10.000 Some of us have been saying this for quite a while.

00:34:12.000 I mean, Tom Cotton got beat around by the media.

00:34:15.000 I mean, they were just beaten, cuddling him around the ears.

00:34:17.000 How dare he point out that this thing probably leaked from a lab?

00:34:22.000 It was just terrible.

00:34:23.000 And it's amazing how they continue to downplay the lab leak theory, by the way.

00:34:26.000 I mean, Anthony Fauci is like the worst on this.

00:34:28.000 He's just terrible at this.

00:34:29.000 So Anthony Fauci yesterday, he was asked about how he even gets to the bottom of the lab leak theory.

00:34:34.000 And he was like, well, the key is, the key is, you gotta be really nice to China.

00:34:37.000 If you're really nice to China, that'll really, I think that'll really, don't be accusatory.

00:34:42.000 Be nice to them.

00:34:43.000 Here's Anthony Fauci saying things that make no sense as per his usual arrangement.

00:34:48.000 Obviously you want openness and cooperation.

00:34:52.000 One of the ways you can get it is don't be accusatory.

00:34:56.000 Try to get both a forensic, a scientific, and an investigational approach.

00:35:03.000 I think the accusatory part about it is only going to get them to pull back even more.

00:35:09.000 We've got to do it in a combination of diplomacy, scientific forensic investigation, and do it in a way that the people of good faith, not who want to do blame.

00:35:19.000 I love how he's like, we don't want people who want to do blame around here.

00:35:25.000 We can't have people who wanted to blame.

00:35:26.000 That would be terrible.

00:35:27.000 They might blame me.

00:35:29.000 You know where that's going, right?

00:35:31.000 I mean, the people who have been most accusatory are the ones who have been most accurate so far.

00:35:35.000 Dr. Fauci.

00:35:36.000 And then, watch, Fauci's like, trust people like me.

00:35:39.000 But then, he's asked about the lab leak theory, and he's like, what if I just completely mischaracterize the lab leak theory entirely so I can dismiss it?

00:35:46.000 Here he was on CNN yesterday.

00:35:47.000 He's just, this guy needed to be fired months ago.

00:35:51.000 I don't remember what's in that redacted, but there, I mean, the idea I think is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people.

00:36:06.000 I think that's a bit far out, John.

00:36:09.000 Okay, no one was making the argument, as far as I'm aware, that China militarized the virus just to release it on an unsuspecting world.

00:36:17.000 It's called a leak.

00:36:18.000 Lab leak theory.

00:36:20.000 It leaked from a lab.

00:36:21.000 Yeah, but this is the one you should trust.

00:36:24.000 I mean, Captain Science over here.

00:36:26.000 Meanwhile, the NIH director was doing the same thing yesterday.

00:36:29.000 Downplaying the investigate- It's not important.

00:36:30.000 Why do we even need to know how this thing originated?

00:36:33.000 We have to have a full-scale congressional investigation into why 300 droogs invaded the Capitol building and then were immediately removed, 400 people were arrested, and the process of government went on.

00:36:44.000 We need to have a full-scale investigation.

00:36:46.000 But the release of a virus that's killed 3 million people worldwide, including 600,000 Americans, why do we need to know where that came from, says the head of the NIH.

00:36:55.000 I agree we need to get to the bottom of this but gosh you and I just spent a whole bunch of minutes here talking about some issue that we need to get an answer to and meanwhile people are still dying from COVID-19 and we didn't even talk about the ways to get to an end to this with vaccines.

00:37:09.000 So please could we have a bit more of the focus on how we're going to save lives while we're talking about how this all started.

00:37:16.000 Amazing, amazing.

00:37:17.000 Okay, so what actually happened here in terms of silencing the COVID lab leak theory?

00:37:21.000 According to this Vanity Fair piece, Gilles Demeneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland.

00:37:27.000 He was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome 10 years ago and believes it gives him a professional advantage.

00:37:31.000 I'm very good at finding patterns in data when other people see nothing, he says.

00:37:34.000 Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demeneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease.

00:37:43.000 The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019.

00:37:52.000 The Huanan Wholesale Market in the city of Wuhan is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables.

00:37:58.000 A handful of vendors sold live wild animals a possible source of the virus.

00:38:01.000 That wasn't the only theory, though.

00:38:03.000 Wuhan is also home to China's foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world's largest collections of bat samples and bat virus strains. 0.55

00:38:10.000 The Wuhan Institute of Virology's lead coronavirus researcher, Shaixing Li, was among the first to identify horseshoe bats as natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally.

00:38:23.000 After SARS, bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and she became known in China as Batwoman for her fearless exploration of their caves to collect samples.

00:38:32.000 More recently, she and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious.

00:38:37.000 Such research, known as gain-of-function, has generated heated controversy among virologists.

00:38:42.000 To some people, it seems natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV's labs, a possibility she has strenuously denied.

00:38:51.000 On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism.

00:39:04.000 Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed, quote, solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China and asserted, we stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.

00:39:16.000 The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19's origins before it began.

00:39:20.000 To Gilles Dimunov, following along from the sidelines, it was as if everything had been nailed to the church, as if it had been nailed to the church doors, establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy.

00:39:30.000 Everyone had to follow it.

00:39:31.000 Everyone was intimidated.

00:39:32.000 That set the tone.

00:39:34.000 That statement struck Dovonov as totally non-scientific.

00:39:37.000 He began searching for patterns in the available data.

00:39:39.000 It wasn't long before he spotted one.

00:39:41.000 China's laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S.

00:39:45.000 and other developed countries.

00:39:46.000 But Dovonov soon discovered there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occurring at a top lab in Beijing.

00:39:54.000 Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor.

00:40:00.000 A grad student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

00:40:04.000 Dumb Enough published his findings in a Medium post, titled The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, a review of SARS Lab Escapes.

00:40:10.000 By then, he'd begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre.

00:40:14.000 A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busily debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a laboratory at all.

00:40:23.000 In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses.

00:40:27.000 Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol, BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen.

00:40:35.000 Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist's office.

00:40:40.000 Having connected online, Semenov and Demystra began assembling a comprehensive list of research labs in China.

00:40:46.000 As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world.

00:40:50.000 Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes, others were science enthusiasts.

00:40:55.000 At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China.

00:41:03.000 President Trump's former political advisor Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Gao Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and unleashed it on the world.

00:41:14.000 With disreputable right-wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other, the researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the wilderness working on the world's most urgent mystery.

00:41:22.000 They weren't alone.

00:41:25.000 That is the question.

00:41:26.000 The question isn't what Trump was saying.

00:41:27.000 The question is, what was the scientific community doing for a full year?

00:41:29.000 less challenging for those seeking the truth.

00:41:32.000 The researchers are doing better research than the U.S.

00:41:33.000 government, says David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State Department.

00:41:37.000 The question is why.

00:41:39.000 That is the question.

00:41:40.000 The question isn't what Trump was saying.

00:41:41.000 The question is what was the scientific community doing for a full year?

00:41:45.000 For a full year.

00:41:46.000 According to Vanity Fair, it's all about Trump.

00:41:48.000 In the wake of the Lancet statement, under the cloud of Donald Trump's toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

00:42:01.000 Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in a high-stakes battle over what could and couldn't be investigated and made public, according to Vanity Fair.

00:42:13.000 A month's long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, a review of hundreds of pages of U.S.

00:42:18.000 government documents including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S.

00:42:29.000 investigation into COVID-19's origin at every step.

00:42:32.000 In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology's gain-of-function research because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S.

00:42:45.000 government funding of it.

00:42:48.000 I mean, this is bombshell kind of stuff, right?

00:42:50.000 The State Department was actively telling people, do not investigate where this came from, because it might expose the fact that the U.S.

00:42:55.000 State Department has been providing support via channels to WIV's gain-of-function research, and WIV may have released this thing accidentally. 0.79

00:43:04.000 So instead, it was important to cover up China's involvement, and also, you can always just blame it on Trump's toxic racism, absolutely.

00:43:10.000 In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNano, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation, warned leaders within his bureau not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19 because it would open a can of worms if it continued.

00:43:31.000 So don't investigate?

00:43:34.000 Apparently, according to Vanity Fair, in late March, former CDC Director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab.

00:43:43.000 I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis, Redfield told Vanity Fair.

00:43:48.000 I expected it from politicians.

00:43:50.000 I didn't expect it from science.

00:43:51.000 I mean, it's amazing.

00:43:55.000 Dr. Richard Ebright, Board of Governors, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took them a nanosecond, or a picosecond, to consider a link to the WIV.

00:44:07.000 Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research.

00:44:11.000 It's not a dozen cities.

00:44:12.000 He said it's three places.

00:44:14.000 Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak.

00:44:20.000 You may remember Peter Daszak from our episode a couple of days ago about Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails.

00:44:24.000 Daszak sent Fauci an email thanking him for killing the rumors of gain-of-function research being responsible for this.

00:44:31.000 So apparently that Lancet statement, rejecting the COVID lab leak theory as racist, was organized by Daszak, who has repackaged U.S.

00:44:39.000 government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research, among them the WIV itself.

00:44:45.000 David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department's day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry.

00:44:51.000 He said it soon became clear there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy inside the federal government.

00:44:58.000 On May 26th, the steady crescendo of questions led President Biden to release a statement acknowledging the intelligence community had coalesced around two likely scenarios and announced he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days.

00:45:10.000 In the words of David Feith, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the East Asia Bureau, the story of why parts of the U.S.

00:45:14.000 government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.

00:45:20.000 So again, there was consistent pressure inside the U.S.

00:45:23.000 government not to investigate this stuff.

00:45:27.000 According to Vanity Fair, on December 9, 2020, roughly a dozen State Department employees from four different bureaus gathered in a conference room in Foggy Bottom to discuss an upcoming fact-finding mission to Wuhan organized in part by the WHO.

00:45:39.000 The group agreed on the need to press China to allow a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation.

00:45:43.000 The conversation then turned to a more sensitive question.

00:45:46.000 What should the U.S.

00:45:47.000 government say publicly about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

00:45:50.000 A small group within the State Department's Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance Bureau had been studying the WIV for months.

00:45:56.000 They had acquired a classified intelligence suggesting three WIV researchers conducted gain-of-function experiments and then fell ill in autumn 2019.

00:46:04.000 As officials at the meeting discussed what they should share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, Director of the State Department's Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S.

00:46:16.000 government's own role in gain-of-function research.

00:46:19.000 Some of the attendees were absolutely floored, said an official familiar with the proceedings, that someone in the U.S.

00:46:23.000 government could make an argument that was so nakedly against transparency in light of the unfolding catastrophe was shocking and disturbing.

00:46:31.000 Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S.

00:46:33.000 government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places.

00:46:41.000 As the group probed the lab leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a Pandora's box, said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair.

00:46:50.000 The admonitions smelled like a cover-up, said Tenano, and I wasn't going to be a part of it.

00:46:54.000 Park said, I'm skeptical that people genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.

00:46:59.000 He added that he was simply arguing it's making an enormous and unjustifiable leap to suggest that research of that kind meant something untoward is going on.

00:47:07.000 Again, this looks very much like a cover-up.

00:47:10.000 And it looks like a cover-up that was politically motivated by bureaucrats inside the government and media outside the government.

00:47:15.000 Bureaucrats inside protecting their own asses because they were involved in funding of gain-of-function research in China that could have led to the creation and then leaking of COVID-19.

00:47:23.000 And a media willing to not investigate, not cover this stuff, Because the reality is, all of this information was available at the earliest date, and the media were complicit in covering it up. 0.92

00:47:34.000 The media were too busy asking Joe Biden about his cat.

00:47:38.000 By the way, they continue to be too busy, generally, asking Joe.

00:47:41.000 You know the Biden administration still has not been asked serious questions by anyone other than Peter Doocy about the Wuhan lab leak theory and the cover-up?

00:47:49.000 I mean, it's fairly impressive, I will admit, the media's performance on all of this.

00:47:53.000 Instead, they're like, the right wing is focused on the COVID, why aren't they focused on their own performance?

00:47:57.000 Well, because if you cover up the greatest biological scandal in modern history, and you do so for political purposes, and you have no curiosity about it, that's kind of damning of you as an institution in the media, and certainly damning of our public health bureaucracy, the experts who are too busy covering their own asses to be truthful about where COVID-19 came from, even though it killed 600,000 Americans.

00:48:20.000 Pretty incredible stuff, and good for the folks at Vanity Fair for Late, but late is better than never.

00:48:25.000 It's an incredible story.

00:48:26.000 You should go check it out over at Vanity Fair because it really is telling what it means when bureaucrats run the systems.

00:48:33.000 Bureaucrats should not be running America's systems. 0.99

00:48:36.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.

00:48:39.000 First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out the Andrew Klavan Show.

00:48:42.000 Drew's show is every Friday.

00:48:43.000 He's got an exciting evening planned for you.

00:48:45.000 Head on over to dailywire.com this evening at 7 p.m.

00:48:47.000 Eastern, 6 p.m.

00:48:48.000 Central.

00:48:48.000 Tune in.

00:48:49.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:48:49.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:49:05.000 Editing is by Adam Sajewicz.

00:49:06.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

00:49:08.000 Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Christina.

00:49:10.000 Production Assistant is Jessica Kranz.

00:49:12.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:49:14.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:49:18.000 Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:49:21.000 You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.

00:49:28.000 But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 04, 2021

Escape From New York | Ep. 1269

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